Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

“Is that a good volume?”

—

O kay, now a few little things I want you to do for me.

Give my clothes to Father Michel. He knows a Red Cross center nearby that’ll take them for sure, and I imagine they’ll be useful to some immigrants. I don’t know why I didn’t ask you this before. Tell him that I looked for the place once to give them the clothes personally, but couldn’t find it and ended up lost in Marines. I know you argued with him recently, he told me because I sometimes ask him for advice, and our conversations are long and focused. But don’t turn him away, Mama, for your own good. He’s not hounding you, like you said, it’s not that he wants to force you into anything, he’s worried about your soul. He didn’t even tell me you don’t go to church anymore. I figured it out myself from the things you’ve told me on the phone.

Everything to do with school you can give to Madame Mabilat, I don’t know if some of it might be useful to younger students. Ask her if she remembers the time, when I was in troisième, that she punished me for spraying yogurt around her desk and crumbling a slice of orange cake on it. Tell her that I dreamed of her furious face recently, but in the dream there was a chicken coop behind the school and I was going to break freshly laid eggs as revenge for the punishment. Ask her if she knows what that means.

We eat well here, Mama, so don’t worry about that. You ask me to tell you how things are, but what you want are material details and I find it very hard to talk about that. I’ve tried to explain and it’s as if you don’t hear me, here one distances oneself from all of that, other things matter more. I’m very glad to hear your work with horses is going so well, don’t get me wrong. The last time we spoke you told me about the things you’d done, you said the previous Sunday you’d been to a Lusitanian horse fair in Brussels and had a lovely time and forgot for at least a day that I was not at home anymore. And that’s when I realized you didn’t go to church. I don’t have any proof or anything, because I wasn’t with you, but I’m still sure you didn’t go to church that Sunday. Now do you understand why I chose to be here, with my brothers? Not that I think your influence was negative, of course. I know you’re still a good Christian, but I was afraid of straying from our Lord and from the truth in which you educated me. The Lord knows I love you and I admire you, and He has put this congregation in my path so my faith won’t be weakened. Always remember it’s you who I owe for the discovery of faith.

Last of all: don’t keep asking me where we are, understand that our life is now far from our families. Master Albert wants us to gradually detach ourselves from our mortal and earthly pasts, and in a little while I won’t be able to send you any more recordings, because we are going on a journey. It has to be enough for you to know there is a light guiding us, and that Christ has died so that light won’t go out, so we all have the chance to be born again.

If you see Tempo, give him something to eat from me. He likes raisins and to have his back legs stroked. But don’t let him come in ’cause the baker has spoiled him. He gets scared when he’s in other people’s houses and he might pee, it happened to me once, on the stairs, almost at the top. But I cleaned it up before you got back, and I bet you never even noticed.

—

OLIVEIRA LOOKED UP and found Agatha sitting on the edge of the bed, naked. She’d opened the heavy curtains, and the vague hint of dawn bathed her flesh in blue, turned her into a specter. Oliveira knew: something was expected of him. But he was as afraid of his reaction fulfilling the woman’s expectations as of getting it completely wrong. The world seemed like an impenetrable space at that moment, a room without doors where the luckiest ones walked around wearing blindfolds. He didn’t know what to do. He had one certainty: his presence was enough to tow Agatha and bring her to safety, to get her as far as the edge of the night, and that thought touched him with strange pride. Suddenly, nothing was more important. He lay down on his side, his face a few inches away from the buttocks of the seated woman, and he saw how in that position the shadows of cellulite were accentuated. He took her by the shoulder and pulled her toward the pillow, and saw her disappear into the hollow of his underarm like a bird. He felt his fatigue closing his eyelids; he thought if he closed his eyes he’d sleep for three days and not even the outbreak of war would wake him.

“All the parents are wondering the same thing,” he heard himself say. “What did they do and what could they have done differently. And this would have happened anyway.”

Agatha didn’t move. From some point lost in Oliveira’s side came a tiny voice in which there was no complaint or grievance, just a terrible emptiness, the exhaustion of a defeated person and the notion that this defeat would be repeated until infinity.

“Before, I needed that, Oliveira. I wanted people to tell me it wasn’t my fault. Now all I want is not to be alone at night. And in this house I am always alone and now there’s no way to change that.”

“That’s not true. Everything changes, you just have to know how to look at it.”

“I hate that wardrobe. I hate the deacon, whoever he was, I hate this house. I hate God, Oliveira.”

Oliveira looked up. The ceiling was white plaster; in the center, an eighteenth-century design had been sculpted without too much talent in bas-relief, unevenly and asymmetrically. “If only I could at least have chosen so many things,” said Agatha. The hanging lamp seemed to have sickened with pallor; just as happened at dusk, this moment when the electric light got confused with the gray of the sky was, absurdly, the darkest of all.

“Dawn is breaking,” said Oliveira. “Now you can forget about Iceland.”

“Now I can forget,” Agatha echoed.

“At least for tonight,” said Oliveira.

He smiled, but she didn’t look at him. Without even looking at him once, she found his flaccid organ in the folds of his trousers and made it grow, and Oliveira closed his eyes, felt the head moving and the woman’s lips confining it. The important thing was Agatha, to keep her company, be with her. This trip south, disguised in the cheap magic of a return to the land of his parents, was not actually anything more than a small private desertion, the act — some would say the cowardice — of a man incapable of living in the place life had assigned him. But now, suddenly, it was taking on a new transcendence. Oliveira had a role in the world and an important position, although momentary, in the life of Agatha, the woman whose tongue he could feel. Here he was safe and the night was safe, too. Here, Oliveira was no longer a threat to himself. He let himself go then and enjoyed doing so, and when he felt himself coming it was as if the night behind him was releasing all its weight, as if the road from Beauvais was repeating over his shoulders in a single instant. Before falling into a deep sleep, he thought of the van and the things inside, and imagined himself emptying his boxes of records on this very bed and organizing them alphabetically in the wardrobe of a long-dead deacon.

—

HE WOKE UP DISORIENTED. He was surrounded by unfamiliar details, and took a while to remember where he was; he was covered by a virgin-wool blanket that made him itch and that he didn’t think he’d ever seen before. How long had he been asleep? Long enough, at least, for crusts of sleep to have accumulated in the corners of his eyes, for the weight of his body on top of his arm to have cut off the circulation and a seemingly permanent cramp to appear in his muscles. He held his breath: nothing broke the silence. A warm fresh smell came in from the hallway, a mixture of soap and steam. Only when he stood up did he realize he was barefoot, and in the soles of his feet he felt the creaking of the wooden floors, each uneven board. He found his shoes. His tired feet were swollen, and his shoes were hard to get on. The tape recorder wasn’t there.