Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Lovers on All Saints' Day

“I’d need a blanket,” I said. “It’s horrible to sleep with your jacket on.”

—

I LOOKED AT MYSELF in the bathroom mirror. It was true that the pajamas fit me, and curiously, I didn’t feel too out of place. I’d only asked for a blanket, but Zoé led me to the bedroom and opened a drawer with a geometric design etched into the wood.

“They were Graham’s.” She handed me a shirt and pair of pants the color of smoke. “I’m sure they’ll fit, you’re the same size. If you don’t want to wear them, it doesn’t matter. I’m just giving them to you so you can be more comfortable.”

“I want to be more comfortable.”

“Oh, good. Then you can change in the bathroom.”

And again I saw her smile. But this time she bit the tip of her tongue, and I could almost recognize that texture and felt a breath of tea and fresh water. Absurdly, her smile became a sort of prize or offering.

Now, from outside I could hear minimal noises from Zoé, who moved around the house like a little mouse, collecting the drinks, rinsing the glasses in the sink. I heard her come into the bedroom, open and close a closet. She knocked three times on the bathroom door.

“Yes?”

“Don’t come out. I’m changing.”

“Okay. Let me know,” I said.

I kept myself busy by snooping around the bathroom, the details of someone else’s bathroom. Since I was little, a locked door has always given me a sensation of absolute impunity. There was a cheap tape recorder in Zoé’s bathroom, sitting on a small enameled glass shelf. Beside it, a disorderly pile of three cassettes without cases. All the labels said the same thing: RADIO MUSIC. I imagined this woman recording songs from a radio station without bothering to edit out the commercials, and listening to the recordings until she knew both sides of the tape by heart, and then repeating the whole operation. I had never looked at solitude so closely. It was as if at that instant someone revealed the rules of the game.

When I came out wearing the pajamas, smelling of wood and mothballs and dotted with flecks, Zoé was already waiting for me between the sheets. I was cold, the skin prickled on the back of my neck. I wasn’t obliged to make conversation: my script only called for my staying in the bed until dawn, filling a form whose emptiness was painful for Zoé. But I wanted to know what Graham was like, put a face to that name, and Zoé took out a spiral notebook with black pages, opened it to the first one, and showed me a dark photograph. I recognized the bed where I was now lying, the lamp on the bedside table to my left that in the photo appeared beside a crystal glass and a pair of sunglasses barely visible in the shadowy image, and I thought that Graham must have had a headache that night and the water was to take a pill with, if indeed it was water, and the headache might have been due to the strong summer sun during some maneuvers. However, in the photo only Zoé appeared, seated in the lotus position on her pillow. Her body was the only luminous point in the frame. The rest were vague suggestions of objects or profiles that were lost entirely in the uniform black of the edges.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Almost everywhere. We were studying photography, going together to a studio here in Ferrières.”

I brought the paper close to my face. I examined it.

“He’s here?”

“Yes, he’s walking. If I look illuminated it’s because he’s standing beside me shining a light, first on one side of my face, then my body and knees. Then he walked around the bed and in front of the camera, and he lit me from the other side.”

“He’s walking past here. He’s in front of the camera?”

“But we’d turned off all the lights. The room was in complete darkness. He was explaining what the teacher had explained to him. He was saying: “Now I’ll open the diaphragm as wide as it goes, and take the photo over the course of fifteen minutes. You have to stay still the whole time, try not to blink.”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said.

“In those conditions, the camera only captures what is very still and illuminated from up close. Nothing is shining on him and he’s also moving. That’s why he can’t be seen.”

Zoé passed her hand over the image, as if she were performing a magic trick.

“But he’s there,” she said. “Even though we can’t see him.”

Zoé put the notebook back in the drawer. “Can you hold me?” she asked, and I stretched out my arm and she took refuge in my embrace. Her head smelled slightly of sweat. I thought that she would be taking in the familiar scent of Graham’s clothes. Before starting to feel sleepy, I heard her speak, almost to herself.

“When I feel very lonely, I turn off the lights. I pretend that this is the room in the photo and I am the one in the photo, and Graham is here running back and forth. There’s nothing odd about my not being able to see him. It’s just a question of optics.”

—

I WOKE UP SHORTLY before first light. Zoé was sleeping with her back to me, breathing through her mouth and with her arms relaxed. As I was getting dressed, I thought Saturday, November the first , and then I thought All Saints’ Day and then I thought of Michelle. I left the pajamas neatly folded beside the headboard of the bed. I left without saying good-bye, so as not to remind Zoé that she’d slept beside another man, to let her live for a few minutes more inside the spell she’d woven.

The house had been devoured by a bank of damp fog. The pickup’s fan was on, and what the night before had been heating was now a blast of ice-cold air. I didn’t turn on the radio. I wanted, without knowing why, to preserve the predawn silence, the gentle repose of the mountain, the pleasure of not seeing anyone in the sleeping streets: all that filled me with the sensation of testing out a new pair of eyes. In a short while, the men who had survived the night of the dead would begin to come out of their homes. All those who had worn disguises — as had I, who spent the night in a dead man’s clothes — to survive this night, would soon be emerging, and all those who had bribed the spirits with offerings. I counted myself among them. I was alive, in spite of having been chased by souls of sinners trapped in animal bodies. Because I knew that the night that had just passed was the last of the old calendar, the moment when debts are paid, revenge is taken, and the dead are buried so their bodies will rest during the winter. But on this night, the curtain that separated this world from the other was torn: souls were freed from their captivity and some walked the earth, divesting men of their brief pleasures, sowing discord, broken hearts, and terrifying solitude among them.

It amused me to think of all that. It was Michelle who first told me about the superstitions of Halloween. She told me it was a shame that children here didn’t dress up and go out and ask for candy. She told me about Celtic legends, drew their symbols, wrote out for me the names of some of their goblins. Pinch. Grogan. Jack-in-Irons.

Michelle, the woman who was still my wife. Who had been far from me for so long, too long.

—

WHEN I GOT HOME, the fog had not yet cleared. I opened the gate and the iron stuck to my fingers like dry ice. Before I got to the stone steps, I saw Michelle standing in front of me in underwear and a T-shirt, a paper tissue clutched in her right hand. Her eyes were the color of her hair and the tip of her nose looked irritated.

“Go inside,” I said. “You’re going to catch cold.”

“You told me,” she responded.

“Calm down, nothing happened.”

“You told me you were coming back. I fell asleep, but I was waiting for you until half an hour ago. I was waiting for you, I fell asleep, you didn’t come back.”