by Anthology
“This was found in a ship sleeping at the bottom of the sea, off the island of Siqui’jor. The vessel sank fleeing pirates—it is a story old but true.” Mr. Henares said in a soft tone. “Sometimes, one cannot run away.”
“I am aware of that story,” Miguel sighed as he looked closely at the thimble for the inscription.
“Of course. Of course, you are,” Mr. Henares nodded, scratching at a sore on his left arm. He left Miguel alone to read.
Around the rim of the thimble, almost worn away, were the words
There is a reason why past is past.
That night at his home, Miguel Lopez Vicente dismissed his maidservant early, mixed water with his last supper’s vino, a simple claret from the vineyards of Sevilla in Ispancio, undressed himself, taking care to empty his bowels beforehand to maintain a semblance of dignity for the benefit of those who would find him, and stretched out on his lonely bed built for two.
His final thoughts, as he slipped into a dreamless sleep, were how he wished he were a man half his age again, at the height of his powers. That bittersweet conceit kept him occupied as cold seawater rushed to submerge his bed.
And so his story ended.
-terminó-
“Cumpleaños felices,” the dark-skinned Katao boy from Cabarroquis whispered, his eyes soft and liquid brown. “I am your birthday present.”
Miguel Lopez Vicente fought his almost overwhelming excitement and sought his voice. “You— you are?”
“Yes,” the boy smiled, trailing a slender finger down his bare chest, stopping short at a point past his hairless navel. “Your uncle engaged me for tonight. For you.”
“Oh,” Miguel managed, “I see.”
“Do you like what you see?”
Whatever words Miguel had suddenly dried on his tongue as he watched the boy disrobe.
“There is no need to feel anxious.”
“No, no, I am— not anxious.”
“You only turn sixteen once. It should be special. It will be special.” The boy had crossed the distance between them in the span of a thunderous heartbeat and Miguel shuddered when he felt the intense heat the boy seemed to radiate. He did not know if it was the result of his imagination or barely controlled desire but he feared that he would burn.
“You cannot possibly be older than me,” Miguel said, casting his gaze to the side, suddenly conscious of the boy’s nearness.
“I am fifteen. Or thirteen. Unless you prefer me to be older,” the boy spoke as he began unbuttoning Miguel’s shirt. “I can be eighteen. Or twenty. Just let me know.”
“I—” Miguel began, but as the boy’s fingers found his skin he lost all words, the language abandoning him to the trails of heat left by the boy’s explorations. When their tongues met, he was certain he would be consumed by fire, losing himself in the intense moment of unadulterated sunlight that reduced everything that he was into a throbbing cinder, wanting only the explosive release that was as inevitable as life and death.
“Never leave me,” he told the boy.
“Everyone loves me,” the boy answered. “You must live only for the moment.”
“Then I’ll never be old.”
Later, after his birthday gift had left, he lay trembling in a bed built for one, his body weak with the demarcation of new frontiers, while his soul, not quite anywhere, exulted in the epiphany that he was his own boundary and that it was as wide or as narrow as he wanted.
What Miguel Lopez Vicente did not know, what he could not know, was that his heart was ill-suited for single nights’ passion. It was fragile and tender and rare, wanting only true love, and collapsed upon itself, heavy with imagined loss in the small hours before dawn, feeling lost, betrayed and old before its time.
And so his story ended.
-terminó-
When Miguel Lopez Vicente turned eight, his father brought him to see the End of the World.
The spectacle, held only once every generation and lasting for fourteen nights, was staged on a massive series of sculpted sets within the Baluarte of the Plaza Miranda. Ciudad Manila spared no expense—the costumed cast numbered in the hundreds and great machines, made invisible by cloth and convention, spewed fire, blew wind and rained artificial hailstones the size of macopas but with the consistency of cotton. The Beast of the Apocalypse (a magnificent contraption maneuvered by three alternating shifts of eighteen people) towered over the amazed audience, clawing its way out of a bottomless pit; its words and imprecations resounded with the voice of the Most Excellent Primo Orador herself.
Much of the performance went over Miguel Lopez Vicente’s head; instead he was terrified by the sights and sounds of the Apocalypse, much to his father’s regret.
“Did you not enjoy the show?” Antonio Manuel Vicente asked him afterwards, visibly irritated at his son’s obvious pallor.
“Yes, Papa,” Miguel lied with little difficulty.
“It is important that you know about things like this,” Antonio continued, not hearing him. “The world ends in horror if the will of the Three Sisters is not followed.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“That is why you must pray every day, every night, before you eat, before you sleep. Pray for their mercy.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“When you grow older, you’ll understand that we are all servants of the Three.”
“Yes, Papa,” Miguel replied, but in his heart he had decided never to grow old.
When they returned home, Miguel rushed to his room and trembled in a corner, his thoughts ablaze with images of endings and destruction. He cried for over an hour, caught off-guard by the tears his fear provoked, feeling helpless, alone and destined to die in the Apocalypse that could occur tomorrow or the day after that.
The young boy turned his back on the faith of his father that day, with the fierce determination of the very young, and resolved that he would rather die than live to see the End of the World.
Before he went to sleep, he deliberately did not say his bedtime prayers and turned the statue of the Three Sisters away from his bed. He did not want them watching him.
The Apocalypse arrived that night, triggered by the loss of one little boy’s faith. In their fury, radiant devas came to Miguel’s room on shimmering wings, shattering the walls of the house. “So this is the one who brought about the End of Things,” the fiercest among them said, pointing to the sleeping boy with a sword that burned with a flame unseen since the Beginning of All Things. With a soundless cry she struck down the remnants of the house then flew with her legion into the sky that wept stars.
And so his story ended.
-terminó-
Miguel Lopez Vicente’s mother, dead just a week, came to him on the eve of his fourth birthday, saying something her son could not quite hear.
He sat up, straining to listen to her words, having no fear of the woman who had shown him only love.
“Miguel.”
“Mama?”
“I am lonely here. Will you come with me?”
“Yes, Mama.”
When his mother kissed him on the forehead, Miguel felt suddenly cold and embraced her, his heavy heart, lately engorged by sorrow, shrinking to the size of a child’s perfect love.
“You are the only one I have ever loved, my Miguel,” she told him as they stepped into the shadows.
“Yes, Mama.”
“You will always be my little boy.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Do not forget to take your smile with you.”
Miguel set his face into a smile of unconditional trust and walked forward.
And so his story ended.
-terminó-
Antonio Manuel Vicente, the rising dramatist, stood at the balcony of his tower residence and contemplated his life, like pages in a chapbook he felt he had only partially authored.
A soft wind, heavy with the suggestion of salt, blew in from the nearby harbor, carrying muted voices that sang, argued, lied or whispered promises. He pulled his d
ressing robe closer to his body, thinking about the sad and strange paths his life had taken, the people he had loved and left behind, and how the simplicity of a change of perspective—the height of a balcony—could provoke thoughts of drastic action.
In his arms he carried his sleeping son, Miguel; a two-year-old result of a dalliance with a woman he could honestly not remember. He had found the boy sitting alone, silent and stone-faced, on the stairs of his residence, with a brief letter that held even briefer introductions. That was a week ago.
Antonio had his entire life before him and felt that the unwelcome weight in his arms was an unfair burden. When he felt his son stir in his arms, he summoned up all the paternal inclinations in his heart and came up with an absolute emptiness.
He looked at the son he had never wanted, never even dreamed of, and without a single other thought, hurled him off the balcony. He felt no remorse, prepared to act the distraught parent when tomorrow brought news of the horrible accident to his ears, already composing the lines of dialogue that he, grief-stricken, would speak.
Miguel Lopez Vicente watched the ground rush up to welcome him with the same stoicism he had when he was abandoned by his mother.
And so his story ended.
-terminó-
Mr. Henares looks at his inventory
In the storeroom of his shop along the Encanto lu Caminata, Mr. Henares looked at the eighty four vials he had distilled from the future days of his largest customer of the year.
He gently swirled the closest one between thumb and forefinger and watched the marvelous stories of Miguel Lopez Vicente unfold in a glimmer of effervescent, liquid tales brimming with potential. He paused and thought about the nature of stories, the vagaries of time and the single, long road of desire and shook his head, resigned to the fact that for as long as people were people, his business would continue.
Mr. Henares replaced the vial of Miguel Lopez Vicente among the eighty-three others, put off for the next day the task of determining their relative prices (perhaps he would bundle two or three—one of his regulars, a famous astronomer when he was young, wanted some more time for stargazing), and went about closing the shop.
“We all burn sunlight,” he muttered to no one in particular, scratching an arm with a motion that could almost be mistaken as a caress.
-terminó-
THE ALTERNATIVE
Maurice Baring
I was reading history, and not for fun. I was reading for my schools. My third year at Balliol was drawing to an end, and I was expected to do well, and at the back of my dreams there was a vision of a fellowship and a quiet life in the security of Oxford.
I had been reading until late in the night. I was tired. I had been reading about Napoleon and the Russian Campaign of 1812. And now I had stopped reading and had fallen into an abstraction. I noticed that the time by the clock was 1.15.1 was thinking of great men and the part they played in history, and to what extent events were modified by phenomena, such as Caesar or Napoleon; as to whether they made a difference, or whether writers such as Tolstoi were right, who maintained that they made no difference. I thought of many things: of William James’s Essay on Great Men, of Carlyle’s Heroes, of Ferrerio, of Mr. Wells’s Outline of History. What would have happened, I said to myself, if Napoleon’s father had sent his son into the British Navy, as he wanted to do at one moment, instead of into the French Army? Would everything have been different, or would everything have been exactly the same?
“Everything would have been different, but the result would have been just the same,” said a voice at my elbow.
I looked up and saw sitting in the armchair which stood on the left of my writing table a little old man. He was old and yet he did not look old. He was ageless. He had a thick head of hair, and you could not tell whether it was white or grey. His eyes were clear and luminous. There were no lines on his face. There were none of the usual signs of old age about him, and yet he gave the impression of immense old age, and of an almost infinite experience.
I did not feel in the least surprised at this sudden apparition. It seemed to me quite natural that this strange unaged old man should be sitting in my armchair. I did not even interrupt; I merely waited for the old man to go on.
“Everything would have been different, but the result would have been the same,” the stranger repeated. “You know how to play chess?” he asked.
I said I was an enthusiastic but unskilful chess player.
“Very well,” said the stranger. “Supposing you play a game with a professional, you make certain mistakes, and you lose the game. Let us assume you keep a record of the moves, and that when the game is over your adversary allows you to play it over again. Say you rectify an initial blunder; you use different openings, different gambits; you have a new scheme, an improved strategical plan. Every move you make in this second game is different from those you made in the first game. But do you win? No. Because your adversary, the professional, changes his game in such a manner as to meet and answer the changed nature of your game. He replies to your new strategy with a new counter-strategy; his counter-moves lead you to move as he wishes, and in the end he checkmates you.
“So it is with men in history. Supposing you were to eliminate the great men of history, and substitute for them men of a different nature; or supposing you left them as they were, but changed the quality of the moves and shortened or lengthened their careers inversely to what happened in history, as you know it, then every move in the game would be different; but, in spite of that, the march of history and the fate of mankind would be the same.”
“I understand that’s quite possible,” I said, “but forgive the question, how do you know?”
“Because,” said the stranger, “I am the historiographer of the Kingdom of Limbo. I teach the ghosts history—alternative history, in case they should be conceited.” 436
“Yes,” I said, “but how I don’t quite see. Films? A cinematograph?”
“Oh, no,” said the stranger. “We do better than that; we plunge the student into the life of an alternative world; alternative to the period in which he lived on earth; and we let him learn from experience, as an eyewitness, what that epoch would have been like had his part been either nonexistent or different.”
“Very interesting,” I said. “I should like a glimpse of an alternative world of that kind.”
“Nothing is easier,” said the stranger. “Choose any epoch you like and I will take you there.”
“Well,” I said, “I should like to see what would have happened in the period I am reading about, supposing Napoleon had entered the British Navy instead of the French Army.”
“Nothing is easier,” said the stranger. “You shall have two peeps into that world between 1800 and 1850. Come along.”
I felt dazed for a moment, but only for a moment, and when I recovered from this fleeting flash of unconsciousness I found myself wide awake. I was sitting on a verandah; in front of me was a seacoast, against which large grey breakers were rolling; behind me sashed windows which reached to the ground opened on to a parlour; and something touched a cell or struck a note in my memory which made me think of Miss Austen’s novels, of Cranford, and of the breakfast room in a country house where I had once stayed in my childhood. Was it a faint smell of lavender that came from indoors, or the taste of the saffron bun I had just eaten, for I had just taken a bite from a saffron bun, or the elder-flower wine that I was sipping, or the picture of King George on the wall I could see over the chimney piece of the room beyond the verandah? I don’t know.
That parlour was bare, and might have belonged to almost any epoch. It was slightly damp. I knew that I was not in Europe, although there was nothing extra-European either behind or before me. I was talking to a man, who, although he was dressed in nankeen, had something indefinably maritime about him. He was middle-aged, with a tawny beard streaked with grey hairs, and his face was tanned and worn by exposure; there was nothing rough, bluff, or hearty about him,
but, on the contrary, an air of gentle and slightly melancholy refinement. He was smoking a pipe, and after taking a puff or two in silence, he took up the thread of his discourse again. I was certain that the conversation was being continued and not being begun, and I felt quite satisfied when my quiet interlocutor said:
“Yes, that was her first cruise.” It seemed the natural, inevitable thing for him to say.
At that moment a fat, sallow, dark-haired man, dressed in nankeen and wearing a broad panama hat, strolled along the beach in front of us, whistling to himself a tune which I seemed to have heard before.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“That’s the Captain,” said my host. “He’s . . .” He touched his forehead meaningly.
“Mad?” asked I.
“No, not mad, but queer,” said my host. “Has illusions—thinks he’s King of England one day and Emperor of India the next. A curious career his as ever man had. His real name is Bonnypart, though he now goes by the name of Jackson, and his father, so they say, was an Italian skipper in one of the French colonial islands. He was anxious for his son to have a good education, so he sent him to England to be naturalized as an Englishman and to serve King George in the British Navy. The lad was partial to learning and took to the sea like a duck takes to water, and all went well till the French Jacobites declared war on us a second time in 1805. He was already a Captain then, promotion in those times being speedy. He disobeyed orders when the fleet was pursuing Admiral Villeneuve, and some say it was thanks to his breach of discipline that the fleet was not destroyed at Trafalgar. Be that as it may, the Admiralty had a black mark against his name from that moment, and he was warned that he had got off lightly the first time, owing to the victory and to Admiral Nelson’s intercession; Admiral Nelson saying that he had no use for the man who did not know how to obey orders at the right moment (but that did not please their Lordships). But shortly after the battle he was accused of cheating at cards, whether rightly or wrongly I don’t know, but I have seen men who have been shipmates with him who said that never had they seen a man with a quicker brain for business and a slower head for cards; that there was no game he could master, and he cheated for very weariness, and neither for love of gain nor gambling. This time he was court-martialed, found guilty and dismissed from the service. Admiral Nelson could no longer intercede for him, for the Admiral himself had been superseded owing to the newspaper clamour which arose over his handling of the fleet at Trafalgar. Bonnypart changed his name to Jackson, and enlisted as a soldier in Wellesley’s Army. He fought against the French Republic in Germany, and on the Eastern frontier against the Russians, and after a year or two he was given a commission. After the French Jacobites were defeated by the Germans and the Russians in 1814, he was once more promoted to the rank of Captain. This time he came into collision with Wellesley, now Lord Wellington. When the Allies occupied Paris, the Duke declared he would go out fox-hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and Captain Jackson, being a poor rider, and having foreign blood in him and consequently no feeling for the sport, jeered openly at Wellington’s intention. News of this got round to the General, who ordered Jackson to go out hunting with him the next day. Jackson did; but he shot the fox dead in the middle of a spanking run, and all but hit the General into the bargain. When he was had up before his Commanding Officer he answered with great insolence, and he was cashiered for insubordination. Being a restless fellow, he thought he would take service with the French or the Italians, and went to his old home, Sardinia or Elba. In 1815, when General Murat turned out the French King, Jackson enlisted in the French Navy, and the vessel he was in was captured not far from this island of St. Helena by a British frigate just before peace was made in 1815. He was imprisoned here as a deserter, and would have been tried for his life, but by this time the illusions which some say had been simmering in him for a long time, aggravated by a blow on the head which he had received in the scrap at sea, got the better of him, and the doctors said he was not responsible for his actions. They kept him shut up in the hospital here at Longwood, but after a while the doctor, finding he was harmless, let him have the run of the island. Harmless he is, too, although there is a warder called Hudson who has an eye on him. You can see him now, behind that tree, some thirty yards behind the Captain. The Captain often stops to spin a yam with me, and he is pleasant spoken and knowledgeable too about seamanship and the weather, and he has only one or two delusions. One is that he is King of England, and the other that he can play cribbage, which he cannot do without cheating, but we keep cards out of his way lest they should upset him.