Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

“How stupid you can be sometimes,” he said.

And he climbed into the ambulance.

Now, Catherine walked between the swinging kitchen door and the table where the spout of the coffeepot had stopped steaming. She poured herself a glass of port and went to sit under the floor lamp, closer to Charlotte than to Georges. She looked pale, and her voice was laden with sadness.

“What did they do with Stalky?” she asked.

“Respin,” said Georges, “and some others. They buried him right there, in the forest. They’d already seen some vultures circling.”

“You should have gone with him, dear,” said Charlotte.

“With whom?”

“Jean,” said Charlotte.

“No, he shouldn’t,” said Catherine. “There are lots of people with him, people who know about these procedures. I need company, too, Madame Lemoine. I think I’m more bewildered than my husband.”

She took a sip from her glass. An imprint of her lip remained on the edge, because Catherine used a moisturizing balm before going out hunting to keep from getting chapped lips. Then they heard the noise of a car’s engine, and the sound of gravel displaced by tires. Catherine stood slowly, went out to the porch, and returned and sat down. “It wasn’t him,” she said. It was Respin, coming back.

“What will it be like now? Madame, what was it like when your father died?”

“You’d better ask him,” she said, gesturing toward Georges. “I barely remember.”

Georges kept his face blank. He preferred to avoid the subject.

“He was with me,” said Charlotte. “It was the beginning of the war. I saw it all from the window. My father ran, it was stupid to run when we hadn’t done anything, the soldiers fired and he slipped and when he fell to the ground some crows were startled.”

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen.”

They looked at the pale rectangle of the window. Respin walked past in the direction of the stables, his hands holding up the lapels of his coat, his hair blown about by the wind. “He can’t keep still,” said Catherine. “When he’s nervous, he’ll invent any excuse not to sit down. There are times when Jean can’t stand it.” The novice followed him with a shovel over his shoulder. Georges thought he saw a trace of blood on the edge of the aluminum, but then he thought that shovel had been used to bury the dead dog, and maybe knowing that detail was manipulating his imagination. Away from the hunt, an animal’s death always shakes us up, thought Georges, perhaps because it seems not to have any justification.

“One of the crows had a blue ribbon tied to its leg,” said Charlotte. “I guess it must have escaped from somewhere.”

“They weren’t getting along,” said Catherine. “Now it’s going to stay like that. That’s what I don’t like.”

Catherine had changed into a more comfortable outfit — now she was wearing a green sweater with a roe deer embroidered across the left-hand side of the chest — and, after unplugging the phone from the front hall and plugging it in behind the reading chair, brought a chair from the dining room, placed it beside Charlotte, and began to make calls with an address book open on her lap. The pages were thick embossed paper, and the panels of her small and full address book looked hand-drawn. While she spoke, Catherine ran her index finger down the black lines. Georges listened to her dictate the details of a notice for Le Wallon . Xavier Moré. M-O-R-E. Comblain-la-Tour, 1917. “He just died,” she said, and hearing the deliberate imprecision of her phrase seemed to surprise her. Charlotte, meanwhile, distracted herself with the illustrations that appeared in the notebook, on the facing pages of the directory. She lit a cigarette. Georges watched her inhale deeply; the straight line of the smoke, bathed in yellow light, was like the trail of one of those planes Georges hated, because they brought back memories of the war, and flew over the Ardennes frequently these days, toward the NATO military base.

Catherine covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

“They’re maps of places that don’t exist,” she said. “Chinese, Armenian, things like that.”

“Maps of paradise,” said Charlotte.

“Yes. Some of them. But they’re not all religious, look. This is a map of the center of the earth.”

“Are they not helping you?”

“They asked me to hold. This is the first time I’ve done this. You two don’t have to stay until Jean arrives, Monsieur Lemoine. You look tired.”

“I am a bit.”

“We can stay a little longer,” said Charlotte. “It’s no trouble, is it, dear? Besides, I want to see more of these maps, they’re fascinating.”

“I don’t know. It’s almost dark.”

“It’s barely five,” said Charlotte.

“Seriously? And night’s almost fallen, how incredible.”

“They’ve got this little tune playing,” said Catherine. “Funeral parlors are so funny…”

Charlotte put a hand on the book. Her skin was dry and blue veins mingled with wrinkles. Beneath her long, marmoreal fingers were the phone numbers for the letter H and a sort of aerial view (as might have been produced by one of the MiGs that flew over them) of the Labyrinth with Happiness in the Center. ENGLAND, 1941, was printed in the margin.

“Xavier gave it to you, didn’t he?”

“To both of us. Before we were married. One day he showed up with it as a present, just like that, for no special reason.”

“No reason,” Charlotte repeated.

“I mean, it wasn’t Christmas, or either of our birthdays.”

“Yes,” said Charlotte. “I knew what you meant.”

Then someone came back on the line, and Catherine held the receiver between her shoulder and head to take down the details of the ceremony. Tomorrow, 2 pm. Burial 3 pm . Charlotte took the pencil from her hand, crossed out tomorrow and wrote Friday .

“For later,” she said. “One likes to remember what day it was.”

She smiled a sad smile and added:

“Who knows why.”

Catherine looked at her. Then she lowered her head.

“Is it going to be really horrible? For Jean, I mean.”

“Make love,” said Charlotte. “That helps, I think.”

—

IT WAS COMPLETELY DARK when Georges pulled up to the junction of the road to Hamoir and the road to Marches. He turned right where Catherine’s pickup truck once ran out of gas, several years ago, and Georges and Charlotte tossed a coin to see which of them had to go collect her. The twenty-franc coin had landed with the king faceup, so Georges had to put on his white dressing gown and siphon some fuel out of the smallest tractor with a piece of hose, sensing at each suck the imminent taste of gasoline and feeling sick from the vapors. Now — it seemed implausible to him — that ingenuous memory didn’t end with early-morning laughter, with Charlotte’s refusal to kiss him or even get close to him because his breath stank of gasoline, but in a question: Had they spoken in his absence? That night, while he was rescuing Catherine, had Charlotte phoned Xavier? Georges feared that the past was beginning to transform. He slowed down as they passed the gypsies’ place, a mobile home embedded on the edge of the access road for so long that the lawn had devoured the tires and struts. On the aluminum steps leading to the little door slept a white rabbit, luminous in the night and puffed up with cold.

The house was getting to the stage when it seemed to be shrinking, because fewer rooms got used with the passing years, until some were opened only to dust them. It wasn’t a spacious place, but they’d been able to build two stories and an attic in spite of the restrictions in force at the time. The front hall smelled of leather and furniture polish. As they went inside, Charlotte and Georges knew that falling asleep would be impossible. That fixed and invariable routine a couple of their age gets into was in their case one of fascinating symmetry: Georges took off his shoes and put on his slippers while Charlotte got the coffeepot and filter ready for morning; Georges went up to their bedroom while Charlotte took her arthritis medication, in the kitchen and almost behind his back, as they both maintained the fiction that she wasn’t old enough to need it yet. But that night, none of that happened: they walked into the dining room listening to the wooden floorboards creaking under their steps, and while Georges sat down in his green velvet chair, Charlotte dug out the Stéphane Grappelli record. It was Xavier’s favorite. After the concert in Liège in 1969, Georges had gone up to Grappelli and asked for an autograph. “For Xavier Moré,” he’d said. Grappelli had signed the cover with a black felt marker.