Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

“Why don’t you ask for a morning shift?”

“There are no shifts here. I work all day.”

“Oh. You’re the boss.”

“The bosses live in Aywaille,” she said.

She turned around and took the aluminum mesh basket out of the hot oil.

“Thank goodness it’s time to close. I’m not in the mood to stay here tonight.”

“I can give you a lift, if you want,” I said. “As long as you don’t live too far away, of course.”

“Don’t worry. I live right here.”

“Here?”

“A couple of houses down the street. Very close by.”

“Just as well,” I said. “Is there a phone?”

The woman moved her hand in the air. I walked toward the back of the place. On an old pedestal table, in a little back room, was a black telephone with several automatic dialing keys. It wasn’t a public phone: the woman was doing me a favor.

Michelle’s voice sounded alert.

“I thought you’d be asleep.”

“Where are you?”

“In Saint-Roch. I wanted to let you know.”

“I want you to come back. I didn’t mean to say what I said. This isn’t going to end, is it?”

I’d heard that question a thousand times. In those moments I felt that Michelle, by forcing me to be optimistic, was also forcing me to lie. I reproached her in silence. I know you’re going to leave. That’s what was waiting for me: a woman who tells me she’s leaving. I was glad not to be able to see her now, and that she couldn’t see me. I felt hypocritical when I said:

“Of course not. We’re going to see this through.”

When I hung up, I stood by the little table for a few seconds. I’d wanted to hear Michelle’s voice, but now the conversation was ringing in my head like a rising bruise after being punched. The silence of the place bothered me. I went back out into the restaurant and again the air filled with the smoke of burned oil. The men in the checked shirts had left. Without bothering anybody, without putting anybody in danger.

The woman had taken off her red uniform. She was wearing a long black skirt and a windbreaker for the cold. “I changed my mind,” she said. Under the neon lights, the diamond in her nose looked like a drop of mercury.

“It’s so cold out,” she said. “Can you give me a lift?”

—

THE WOMAN LIVED up Rue Saint-Roch toward Rue sur-les-Houx, about five hundred meters from the friterie . I imagined her repeating the route every night, at this time or later, and in the image I conjured up, I don’t know why, it was snowing. I didn’t believe for a second that her name was Zoé, but I didn’t tell her that. We pulled into a small cluster of three identical houses, with smooth mown lawns as if nobody had ever stepped on them. When I stopped the pickup, I saw a silhouette spying on us from the house opposite.

“Don’t pay any attention,” said Zoé. “That’s Madame Videau. She’s very old and very nosy.”

In the redbrick walls, not a single light was visible.

“Nobody’s waiting for you?”

But Zoé had already gotten out. I watched her walk toward the door, red like the door of a doll’s house, with her hands clasped behind her back. She stopped as if gazing at the façade. She turned around and her mouth moved soundlessly. I rolled down the window on the passenger side.

“I asked if you’d like to have something to drink,” she said.

I caught a whiff of Michelle’s perfume from the back of the seat, where her red hair had rested. No more than twenty kilometers separated me from where she was sleeping, or not sleeping, alone and without me. I looked at the clock: it was still early. I’d never made love with a woman who had jewelry in her nose.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m still freezing to death.”

I followed her inside. The living room was an enormous exercise in mimesis: nothing in it proved that Zoé had any taste of her own, much less decorative fancies. There was barely room for the two floral-print sofas and glass table, on which sat a box of cigars and a paperback copy of The Little Prince in English. I looked for the room where things would happen that night. The hallway Zoé was walking back up, with a lacquered tray in her hands, led to two closed doors. Zoé put the tray down on the table. “I don’t have any alcohol,” she said in a slightly apologetic tone, as if she were embarrassed. I asked her if we could light a fire and she nodded. I pointed to the cigars, asked if I could have one, and Zoé stammered, she said of course, said I don’t know where the matches are, sorry, I’m a terrible hostess. It was suddenly obvious they didn’t belong to her. I left my cap on the back of the sofa and asked:

“Is the book his?”

Her eyes rested on the mantel of the fireplace.

“Is your husband away on a trip?”

“My husband died three years ago,” said Zoé. “He was a test pilot for new planes.”

She fell silent for a second. Then she added, as if this would rescue the balance of the conversation:

“But he didn’t read that book, either. He wanted us to read it together to help me learn English, but he died before we did.”

The revelation shocked me. Not so much what I’d heard, because cuckolding a dead Englishman didn’t trouble me, but rather the color of those words, the melancholy, the unexpected innocence. I put the cigar back in the box. A bit of leaf came loose and fell onto the glass of the table.

“His name was Graham. His plane crashed just before he reached Dover.”

“We don’t have to do this, if you don’t want to.”

“Right in the English Channel, imagine. No survivors.”

“I can leave right now and nothing will happen.”

“The sea is icy cold there. I’ve been told there are sharks, but I think it’s a lie.”

“Listen. Maybe it would be better if we saw each other some other day.”

“Stay there,” she said. “Please don’t leave.”

She straightened up the box of cigars, which I’d moved, to restore the symmetry of the table. The tray troubled her, and she ended up putting it on the floor. Zoé moved around her house as if it were a museum, and I realized she tried at all costs to keep it as it had been when Graham was alive. But she kept talking.

“Have you ever met anyone like this before?”

“Like what?”

“A woman like me. A young woman whose husband has died.”

I imagined the effort it was costing her to call herself a widow. I pronounced the word in my head. Widow . Its sound and the image of Zoé did not correspond to each other.

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“Ah. Well, now you see. We’re an interesting race. The first days, you worry a little when the person doesn’t arrive at the usual time. And then you remember, see? That’s the first days, and it hurts. Later, you start waking up at night, very late or very early. You think someone’s holding you, and then you start to cry and you don’t know whether out of love or out of fear. That always happens. To everyone.”

“It always happens like that?”

“I’ve read a lot. It’s the same for everyone. Sometimes the stupidest thing occurs to me: I think if only I’d been prepared, everything would be easier now. But I wasn’t prepared.”

“You weren’t prepared.”

“No. How were we going to imagine?”

“What?”

“That we wouldn’t have time. Why didn’t anyone tell us how everything worked?”

I wanted to touch her. I felt that would help. Then she said:

“Can I ask you to spend the night with me? Just to stay here, not to do anything, I’m not asking for anything and I don’t want anything more. Can I ask you that and for you to respect it?”

Her blouse was missing a button. I hadn’t noticed before. Behind the material, her collarbone was rising and falling like that of a cornered animal.