Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

Then Viviane reappears.

“Okay, that’s better.”

“Are you still dizzy?”

“I had a lot to drink, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“Yes,” says Viviane. “Tomorrow I’ll be better, but I did drink a lot. I still feel a little drunk.”

We could make love, and we both know it. There is a sort of impunity in the air, as if the whiskey we drank and the visit with my father — in which no one embarrassed the other, nor have there been insults or old reproaches — might allow us this small luxury. I sense our fear, and remember having once thought that our love was a shared fear of being alone. Now, the exaltation we feel needs, like any crime, a barely perceptible push. Somehow, I know that Viviane hasn’t slept with anyone since we split up. We could make love and tomorrow we could pretend it had been an accident. I could even stay the night here; it would be, for a few hours, as if nothing had changed in our lives.

“I told you not to get in touch again,” says Viviane. “But I want you to call me when you get the test results.”

“All right.”

“Only if you want to, of course.”

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

Then it happens. I’ve seen it coming from a long way off, like a crash of locomotives. Viviane’s face has crumbled meticulously; the precision of her successive sorrows has been a painful spectacle. She starts to cry, and when I hug her and ask her what’s wrong, she keeps crying, as if the distress were a tangle of wool caught in her throat.

“Calm down,” I say. “What’s the matter, calm down.”

“I came with you today.”

“Yes.” I stroke her hair. “Thank you, Viviane.”

She pulls away from me.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“You know full well, don’t play the fool. I would rather not have spied on you, but now I’m glad.”

While she was talking about my childhood in the Café de la République, I called Dr. Fauchey from the pay phone. I heard the irritation in his voice, asking how I got his cell phone number, cursing his patients in general for the habit of interrupting his days off. After all that, he said tubercular infection and he said triple treatment, nine months . And I repeated each of these words as if they were a mantra against the evil eye. The infection was severe, the treatment was going to be expensive and serious; but it wasn’t what we’d feared. Fauchey asked: Had I undergone any abrupt changes in environment or diet? Had I been emotionally off balance, depressed? I answered no, none of that. The side of the phone was decorated with propaganda for the ’98 World Cup and the national lottery. My fingers scratched at the stickers, and shreds of blue, white, and red plastic like fish guts got lodged under my nails.

“I don’t really know why I didn’t tell you straightaway. Everything was fine without talking about that, we were happy.” I pause and say: “I can’t believe you followed me like that, secretly.”

“If we were still living together, I wouldn’t have done it. That’s the most ironic thing. All those stupid ideas about respecting the other person, not listening to each other’s conversations, not opening each other’s mail, it’s pure bullshit, you know?”

“The day was going well, Viviane. I forgot that I’m not with you and I got some good news. And I was able to be with my father.”

Then Viviane’s eyes opened wide. She’d found the magic formula, the alchemist’s secret.

“Don’t tell me…”

“What?”

“Were you saying good-bye?”

“Not at all.” I tried to smile. “Medical science has come a long way.”

“Don’t give me that. Were you? Did you think—”

“Let’s make love.”

“And what about me? Settle outstanding scores? Oh, please, how tacky. And you thought I wasn’t going to notice, you’d have to be pretty naive.”

“Let’s make love, Viviane.”

“Why can’t we be together?”

The sound of footsteps reaches us from the stairs.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we were together?”

“Don’t start,” I say. “It’s not that simple.”

“Wouldn’t you like me to come with you to your appointments, open the envelopes and read you the results? Wouldn’t you like me to be by your side when they tell you on the phone that you’re not going to die?”

Odile, the next-door neighbor, arrives every Sunday at the same time. I know (because she told me herself once in the elevator) that she’s coming back from Compiègne, where she visits her boyfriend who’s been trying to earn a transfer to Paris for years. We both hear her huffing, getting out her keys, turning locks. Viviane turns on the light over the sink, lets the water run, and rinses her eyelids with delicate little pools that collect in her palms. She stays standing there, her back to me. She starts to speak. She doesn’t look at me but she starts speaking to me.

“What shoes do you have on?”

It takes me a second or two to catch on. I feel awkward as I look down at my feet, realizing I don’t remember having chosen what to wear this morning. Viviane repeats the question:

“Tell me. What shoes did you put on this morning?”

“The red ones. Why do you ask?”

“You bought those shoes on a Sunday. Your book had just come out, I think it was that same week, and the publisher hadn’t even paid you the advance. But that morning, while we had breakfast, we made plans to go bowling on Rue Mouffetard. And then you said: I like bowling, but I like bowling shoes even more. I said you should buy some. I told you I’d seen secondhand shoes in Porte de la Chapelle market, and that some of them were colored, like bowling shoes. What did you say to me?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You said that was all very well, but you didn’t have money to spend on colored shoes. What did I say? Do you remember?”

“You said…”

“I said you should give yourself an advance on your advance. That you’d earned it for working so hard on your book. That I loved you, and I was proud of you.”

She says all this without looking at me, with her voice echoing off the tiled wall. Then she turns around.

“I saw an interview with you. Before Christmas, I think. Do you know the one?”

I know exactly which one. It’s the kind of interview I detest: the journalist peppers me with a list of prepared questions, and I have to answer each with one sentence, as if it were a test of mental agility. But Viviane doesn’t wait for me to reply.

“They asked you what your happiest memory was. You talked about the day we went up to Lake Yamdrok, said the sky was the same color as the water and that made you feel free. Right?”

She was right.

“Well, that’s a lie. Your happiest memory is from when you were a child. You were about ten, maybe. It was New Year’s Eve, and one of the neighborhood drunks went out to fire shots in the air just for the hell of it. Your father went out, took the pistol, and knocked him to the ground with one punch. You didn’t see him do it, but your friends told you the next day. They seemed to respect you more. But that wasn’t the important thing, it was the fact of feeling invulnerable if you were at home and your father was with you. That night you asked him to let you sleep with him. It was the only time he said yes.”

Viviane takes a deep breath. She suddenly looks tired. It’s not immediate, but an accumulated weariness, as if she hadn’t slept for a week. I take a step toward her. I touch her hair.

“I know you inside out,” she says. “It’s as if I’d lived inside you. I know why you do everything you do. But when you left I felt lost, I didn’t know what was happening, I had no one to explain it to me.”