Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

What he did not tell the interviewers, what he never told any other human being, he recounted in detail to the woman he was to save, the woman who was described or prefigured in every movement of his life: his decision not to go to Louvain but to stay in Liège, the idea of putting his name on the municipal youth employment register, accepting the first offer he received after doing so, from an industrial cleaning company. Could anyone think his meeting with the woman feeding horses was not written? Was it possible, if not for the intervention of the good offices of a higher destiny, that a socially inept man like him, with mediocre aspirations and hardly any talent for life, might be allowed to enter the life of such a creature, not to mention be loved by her, touched by her? If anyone had ever told him that one day he would know this kind of lightness in his own body (a cold wind inside his head, behind his eyes), this momentary oblivion of the leaden mass of skull on neck, he would have refused to believe it. That was denied him, had to be denied him; if not, why had he so feared that he would never find her, why had he cried in the mornings, while the kettle boiled, and why had he enjoyed punishing himself by placing the childish whimpering of his eyelids in the path of the steam when he opened the teapot? This woman had arrived so that would no longer happen. He knew it from the first time he heard her speak — it was a question about the cards, but he had never thought the cards and their movements could interest anyone — because her voice was nothing like his mother’s and yet also seemed to have been speaking to him in secret or by stealth since he was a boy. That night, returning to Liège in his van, twice he thought he saw her driving the cars that overtook him, thought he saw her long, black hair like a Bedouin’s djellaba, saw on a finger of the hands on the steering wheel of each car a ring identical to the one he’d used to perform in public the oldest trick in the world. And the next morning, while reading in bed after breakfast the last pages of David Copperfield , he realized that Mrs. Micawber was no longer gray-haired and fifty, but appeared suddenly young again, carrying a riding whip all the time and keeping her throat wrapped up in a scarf with two embroidered stirrups. The exchange was like an order: Chopin knew that he had to go and see her. Distracted by the emotion of the image, he put the book down on top of the plate stained with egg yolk and began to practice in front of the mirror, as the only way to kill time, the way to make a queen of hearts be replaced by the king in spite of the entire deck separating them. It was a trick he’d been practicing for thirteen days and which would spring to mind a few months later, at the very moment of the accident, as if it were also written that he’d never iron out the final details and that Selma would never be allowed to see it executed perfectly. But he knew none of this that morning, nor the following Thursday, when he went home after making love for the first time with a real woman (so real that she was expecting another man’s child), a woman he would protect forever, a woman different from those prostitutes on Rue des Guillemins he’d unburdened himself with before and who now, according to a decision by the municipality of Liège, had begun to pose in illuminated display windows instead of putting on their coats and strolling around the neighborhood, so the puritanical or timid pedestrian who passed by without looking at them, the hand shielding the eyes like a horse’s blinders, was forced to step on these suggestive shadows: a torso and a pair of shoulders and the line of a garter belt projected onto the paving stones of the sidewalk, or in the case of a woman as tall as Selma, as far as the curb.

IV

Caroline meant strong and brave, and was also the feminine version of Charles, Selma’s father’s name; and for a combination of both reasons she insisted on this name, in spite of its vaguely Germanic sounds not being much to her husband’s taste. The baby girl was born near the beginning of February, on the tenth, which that year fell on a Sunday and immediately after a heavy snowfall. On the way home, Selma tilted her seat back until all she could see were the electricity cables (at first), the crowns of the oak trees (later), and the woven new wool that was the winter sky (always), and she was grateful that her eyelids closed on their own from the exhaustion of giving birth in spite of three whole days of doing nothing but sleeping and swallowing salted biscuits, a total of four bottles of milk with honey, and all the green apples from the fruit baskets that kept arriving in the room, with bows and cards, while her little girl recovered in a glass case, not crying very much according to the nurse — who did like the name because it was also that of the princess of Monaco — crying nonstop according to that nervous husband who paced back and forth in front of the cribs like a hungry vulture. When she was little, Selma had played a game of lying down on the backseat of her parents’ old Studebaker and guessing, from glimpses of treetops or chimney features, which part of the journey they were on, how much longer until they’d be home. This time, however, her fingers were moving, counting: a closed fist and her fingers coming up in turn, one, two, three, because Selma was trying to figure out how long it had been since she’d seen Chopin, how many days it would be prudent to let pass before going to find him. Something palpitated in her womb, and between her legs was a disarray of muscles, a sort of phantom contraction, like the way soldiers (her husband had told her) felt pain in a leg after it had been amputated. But it must be an effect of the delivery, not desire, never of headstrong desire.

Since that autumnal Thursday that Selma had received the magician and taken him to bed, until the day her contractions started, she and Chopin had met every Saturday at nine in the morning, taking advantage of the hunting season and the invitations Léopold received (to Modave, to somewhere near Spa, some farther afield, almost to the French border) to go and kill boars or small deer that would sometimes be cooked in the host’s kitchen and served at his house the same night, events Selma would attend with good spirits and better appetite, letting her husband make her comfortable in a nice wicker chair, put his hand on her hair as if she were a sick child, and bring her plates of food and glasses of lemonade, without her having to move even to clean off a little cherry sauce she’d dripped onto her dress. They had decided, as coldly as if it were a judicial concession or a signature on a mortgage, that Chopin would continue coming to see her, he would be the one to drive the twenty minutes (a bit less on empty Saturday roads) from Liège to Ferrières, because the full moon of flesh and skin prevented Selma from getting into a driver’s seat without her belly button coming into contact with the padded steering wheel. So it was the magician, whose supernatural sense of time enabled him to do without watches without ever being late, who arrived at the house in the Ardennes when barely forty minutes had passed since Léopold’s departure, parked on the other side of the road — in front of the abandoned caravan where a family of Albanian gypsies had lived for a few months — came through the gate looking straight at the dry rectangle left on the gravel, the white space the husband’s four-by-four had occupied during the rainy night, and entered the house through the French doors of the kitchen, which Selma unlocked when she came down, just after dawn to put the coffee on the stove. The smell of fresh coffee in the air worked as a secret code on Chopin and at the same time as an arousing drug, and so he climbed the stairs, hands in his pockets (a key ring, a deck of cards), his gaze fixed on the last step like that of a missing person returning, but without hunger or shock, simply wanting to slip into a warm bed and feel protected. Selma, for her part, knew that she had time for a shower after seeing Léopold off, but instead of taking one she undressed under the covers, opened her legs as if she were already in labor, and began to touch herself, her fingers barely caressing her pubic hair and then her inflamed vulva, fondling with fascination all the changes in her vagina. Chopin rapped twice on the door frame before going into the bedroom and immediately hung his jacket on the doorknob, and when he got into bed with Selma he had a curious impression of the fluidity of his body, as if the lover didn’t even have to lift the bedclothes to find himself beside her, nuzzling her underarm with his head like a newly hatched baby bird and searching out her lips, the earthen rings of her nipples. Unlike Léopold, he did not fall asleep after ejaculating inside her with his mouth open on her back, salivating, his hips shaking; instead he lay on his side, his head resting on his right hand, and looked at her, but in his gaze there was no realization but a sort of diaphanous blank, as if the orgasm had emptied him also of the ability to identify where he was, the name of the woman whose bed he was sharing. After sex, she filled her bathtub with hot water and delighted in entering that rudimentary void; it was a pleasure to lose the sensation of weight, feel light although round as a bottle, free of the unfriendly gravity that made her ankles ache all day long. Then she called Chopin and asked him to sit on the lid of the toilet and explain how he did one of his tricks, and thus, floating in bathwater up to her neck, breathing in the steam and the delicate scent of the oatmeal soap, facing a magician doing what magicians never do (facing a telltale magician, a traitor to his breed), she felt full and contented, thought there would never be any reason to modify this routine.