“Be brave,” she said. “In life, in love and in sex. People forget that they should ask for caresses and kisses. Never think that it is up to your partner. If only you could understand that the actions related to sex have to be decriminalized.
“A caress, a kiss, asking for the warmth of a hand on your belly button shouldn’t be linked to the feeling that they will provoke or result in sex.
“A hug shouldn’t last ten seconds, or thirty, it can last eight minutes if need be. Stroking a body doesn’t have to always mean sex. You have to appreciate the caress as part of your life. Decriminalize it within your life.
“Just like you laugh at somebody’s joke and you accept that their words make you happy, you shouldn’t fear telling someone that their skin, their eyes, their mouth make you feel something else. We have to decriminalize sexual acts, bring them into real life, everyday life, and tie them to life instead of sex. Do you understand, Marcos?”
After that long monologue I continued with my hand on her belly button for a good while. I felt the plaza’s bravery in me and I kissed her neck with my lips.
I didn’t feel sex, I felt life.
Then I asked her: “Who is my father?”
She had never spoken to me about him, it was her Achilles’ heel. I think it made her sad.
The stranger headed over to the bench in the center of the plaza. The only one there. He sat down and invited us to do the same.
“Do you want to know who I am?” he asked.
We both nodded. The sun still hadn’t come up yet. It was very, very close, though. The plaza was losing people, since at that time there was another work shift change.
I felt nervous. In that plaza my mother made me feel special yet again, and I knew that after the conversation with the stranger something would change in my life.
And, she –the girl from the Teatro Español who knew all my secrets—was there. I don’t really know what she felt about me, or what I felt for her, but the fact that she was there made me feel lucky.
And, beside me were my mother’s suitcase and the blank canvas. I felt as if my life was slowly completing. Pieces of my life were coming together.
The stranger started to speak. I knew that that was the moment I had been waiting for since I met him.
“I know that what I am going to tell you might sound strange and I can’t really give you any reliable evidence that it is true, but it is the reality,” he began saying. “I am a stranger, I like the name they gave me, but I won’t be stranger than you in a short while.”
He was silent during a long pause.
“Life... where I come from, the concept of time, our time, our life, is very different than yours. But this life here isn’t strange to me, because I’ve already experienced it.”
We both absorbed every sentence he said. The girl from the Teatro Español, suddenly, drew her hand near to me. I took it in mine and instinctively brought it to my belly button, like my mother had done with mine years earlier.
I think that the girl from the Teatro Español was afraid. I, honestly, felt the bravery of the plaza in my veins.
“I was born here, in Salamanca, quite a few years ago. I ran through this plaza as a boy, I played here with my brothers. I was a happy child, very happy; I remember that, even though it was many years ago. As an adult, I went to work in a nearby town, Peñaranda de Bracamonte, and I settled there. One July 9th, when the Spanish Civil War had already ended, a train came into the station loaded with gunpowder and because of a wheel that was red hot, the entire town almost blew up. They called this tragedy The Powder Keg and I lost a leg and an arm.”
He paused. I think we all needed it. Even though something didn’t fit, because that man wasn’t missing any of his legs or arms.
Suddenly, he sent an image to my gift. I felt it arrive; I hesitate before accepting it, because I didn’t have the gift connected, but he introduced it.
I saw, in images, everything he had told us. I saw the sequence of The Powder Keg that he had mentioned. I saw him, that hot July Sunday, going to mass, the train arriving in the station and the large explosion that took so many lives. I squeezed the girl from the theater’s hand against my chest. The images I was seeing were painful: thousands of legs hanging from trees and arms scattered over kilometers. So much pain... And I saw him, missing one leg and one arm, just as he had said...
But the person who was speaking to us in that plaza had both arms and legs; I didn’t understand anything. Was he manipulating my images?
“You saw it, right?” he asked. “Well, living it was more horrible than remembering it. My life changed; I thought life as I knew it was over, until the army sent prisoners of war to rebuild the town. And I met her. Look at her, look closely,” he said.
I saw his first encounter with a lovely girl with chestnut brown hair. She was much younger than him; I think by ten or fifteen years. It was incredible how she looked at him, how she saw his stumps without feeling pity, as if between them something intense was building. It was such an intense, beautiful memory that I had no doubt that that was the most thrilling moment in the stranger’s life.
“We were married for fifty years. My death...” He paused. “My death was very peaceful, I barely remember it, I can’t send it to you,” he said to me.
His death. He talked about his death as if it were real. But he wasn’t dead. I think the girl from the Teatro Español wanted to ask as badly as I did. But we didn’t dare, we knew that it was beyond our intelligence and that our questions would only reflect our ignorance.
“I suppose that you are wondering what there is after death, right?” he said without changing his tone even slightly.
We nodded, even though we knew it was a rhetorical question.
“There is... more life.”
My heart, my breathing and my esophagus throbbed. That stranger was telling us the secret that everyone wanted to know. Knowing what there is after life, knowing what death holds for us.
“When you die on this planet, you go to another one... Earth is known, where I come from, as Planet 2.” He smiled when he saw the fascination in our faces. “Yes, as you’re imagining there is a Planet 1, so that this is your second life.”
I took a deep breath and she did as well. He continued relentlessly.
“On Planet 3 life is more pleasurable than on number 2, and on 2 more than on 1. Each death provides you with a planet where everything is more enjoyable, it doesn’t matter what life you have here, it doesn’t have anything to do with your previous life, only with a circle you must complete. You could be a thief on 2 and a prince on 3. But the life on the next planet is always more filled with happiness, love and fulfillment.”
Just at that moment I thought he was lying, he had to be lying. Planets you go to when you die; that made no sense, that was crazy.
“There are six planets,” he added. “Six lives. After the fourth planet they give you “gifts.” On the fourth they give you a strange gift that allows you to know how someone is emotionally just by looking at them. It’s like seeing their most pleasurable and most horrible memories instantly. You also see twelve intermediary feelings.
“On the fifth planet they give you the “gift” of knowing that you have lived four other lives and you know what your life was like on each one of those planets. So you can choose if you want to continue living on the fifth one or go straight to the sixth. It’s important to be able to choose. There are people who know that the sixth will be better so they commit suicide right away; others want to live their fifth life fully.”
He stopped again. He moved his neck several times. I couldn’t even move. From what I understood, I had the gift they gave you on the fourth planet, but according to what he was saying I lived on the second. I didn’t understand anything. I think that he knew what I was feeling; he smiled at me.
“Sometimes, nature fails and someone on the second, or the first or the third, is given the wrong gift. Someone on Earth can get the gift of knowing people. O
r like what happened to me: when I got to the third planet I knew that I had already lived two lives and that I had three more.” He inhaled and exhaled. “Sometimes it’s complicated to have a gift in the wrong life.”
He looked at me and I observed him as well.
“I have missed my wife since the time I died many years ago, for the second time. When I woke up on that third strange planet, where there were pentagonal planets and red rain, I knew that she existed, because they had mistakenly given me the gift of remembering my previous lives. I went through lives quickly because I wanted to come back here. I wanted to go back to my second life, although I don’t know how I knew that that possibility existed if I reached the sixth planet... But it did. On the sixth you can choose between the unknown or return to any of the previous planets. No one ever goes back, they all leap into the unknown, except me, who knew that she lived here, that she would be almost 109 years old and that she still came every day to the plaza she loved most in this world.”
I realized that while he was speaking he kept glancing around the plaza and searching for his beloved. He hadn’t stopped looking for her the whole time. I realized that he was scrutinizing every older person, every little old lady who moved slowly, walking with difficulty. He was searching for her, yearning to find her.
The girl from the Teatro Español and I looked at each other. We didn’t know what to tell him.
I swear that I believed him. I don’t know what she was thinking.
“What is there after the sixth planet?” she finally asked.
He smiled.
“Nobody knows, just like you now wonder what there is after this life.” He smiled. “The lives pass and we go from planet to planet, but in the end there is the same uncertainty.”
I didn’t believe him. That was the only part I didn’t believe. I had the feeling that he had lied to us and that he did know what there was after the sixth planet.
I thought that if the rest was true, he and I had both received the wrong gifts. That linked us. He was searching for a girl; I had just found one. That also linked us. I had lost my mother and the pain of thinking that I would never see her again was unbearable. He lost someone special and spent many lives trying to find her. Suddenly I was struck by a doubt.
“Why didn’t you wait for her die to meet up with her again? If she died, she would go to your life, right?”
He didn’t even look at me.
“Wish for her death to be with her again in life? Never.” He looked at me. “Would you commit suicide today to be with your mother?” I took a deep breath. “Do you know that it’s possible? And we have the same face on each planet, the same features, but we spend a couple of lives without knowing that that person was fundamental to our previous life.”
Suddenly he offered me many memories at once. Memories of life on the six planets he had been on. It was incredible; his face, his appearance, his features didn’t change, he looked young, they were always memories up to the age of twelve, thirteen at the most. Memories of happiness and sadness in incomparable settings. Planets filled with beauty. I received hundreds of images, randomly, in no particular order. It was amazing, I didn’t know what memory belonged to which planet, what emotion trumped another. It was ecstasy.
“Impressive, huh? Well, living it is better.”
All of a sudden the image came back to me that I had of the girl from the Teatro Español, the one in which she was playing with a dog as a child, which hadn’t matched with anything in her current life. Was it possible that I had seen her life on another planet where she had previously lived? Was that her first planet?
I asked the stranger that question without beating around the bush. He was slow to respond, it was the first time that he didn’t answer right away. That made me afraid.
“I prefer not to answer,” he said. “Unless you both ask me.” I looked at the girl. “But I don’t think you should know about the relationship you had in the other life on that first planet.”
We didn’t know what to say. I already knew the girl from the Teatro Español? Was that why I had a memory of her other life? What was her relationship to me? Maybe that was why I had such an intense feeling when I saw her. And maybe the stranger knew it when he saw me.
“In the interrogation room you said that she was important in my life,” I said. “You saw my memories of that life and the one before it and you knew that she was in both of my lives, right?”
He nodded.
“Who am I to him?” she asked.
The stranger smiled.
“In this life or in the previous one? Which one are you living now? Why do you want to interfere in it? The life you are living is this one.”
She wasn’t intimidated.
“You lived for your second life in all the others, right?”
“Because I had that information. You are lucky to not have it, enjoy this life with him, not with who he was on the first planet.”
She didn’t say anything more. Neither did I. We remained in silence almost twenty minutes without knowing what to ask or what to believe.
A gentle rain began to fall. It wasn’t red. I was debating between fear and passion.
Thinking that simply killing myself would allow me to be with my mother again... That was very tempting for a grieving soul. Knowing that that girl had maybe been close to me in another life was something that overwhelmed me and made me very, very curious.
But I had to be brave, as my mother always said, in life, in love and in sex.
In minute number twenty-one, both of us, the girl from the theater and I, couldn’t hold it back any longer.
“Who are we to each other?” we asked in unison.
The stranger looked at us as if he knew that question was a big mistake and that we would regret having asked it forever.
18
UNEXHALING AND UNINHALING
The stranger knew what answering that question meant. That was why it was so hard for him to reply.
When he was just about to, he suddenly felt a terrible stabbing pain in his chest. And I felt it too.
“She’s gone,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“My wife, she just died.”
His face was pure sadness, absolute desperation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone’s features disappear in that way. He had lost his direction, his life, his “everything.”
“Are you sure?” asked the girl from the theater.
He nodded. Suddenly he was paralyzed; I sensed that he had no energy. It wasn’t surprising, if he had really lived or taken five lives to get here and now, he had lost the reason behind his entire existence because of being held captive for three months.
“And can’t you go to the third planet with her?” the girl from the theater asked again.
“Yes, but...” He was having trouble speaking. “I won’t remember anything, I won’t have these gifts and I won’t know who she is. I will have to start from zero, I will begin the cycle again.”
I didn’t know what to tell him to make him feel better. He was completely destroyed. I understood him; I felt the same way over my mother.
I thought that maybe on that third planet my mother and his wife would be close friends. They had been born two days apart and maybe, without knowing it, they would share something from being related to people who had been given the wrong gifts in different lives.
“I want to see her,” said the stranger. “They are going to bury her in Peñaranda, I’m sure of it.”
He got up and went toward one of the plaza’s exits. The rain was soaking us, but the incredible heat made it dry instantly.
I overtook him. I directed him toward the car. The Peruvian was already waiting for us.
We headed to Peñaranda. We were only forty kilometers from that town.
We didn’t speak on the way there. I didn’t dare ask him about my relationship to the girl from the Teatro Español; it wasn’t the moment and now it seemed unimportant.
I th
ought about the big question of my life. Who was my father? My mother never wanted to tell me, and I never coerced her into revealing it. Although I knew that she carried a diary where she wrote down everything, and I was sure that the diary was in the suitcase. Although maybe there were two questions in my life: who was my father in the first life and who was my father in the second life?
I also reflected on what would happen if this whole story were exposed to the general public. I was sure that many people wouldn’t believe it, but also many others would blindly follow the idea that this life is just one of the lives we have.
What would happen to the people who aren’t happy in this life? People who feel unlucky, who haven’t met their goals or who are living the torment of poor health or depression. Would they commit suicide for the possibility of a better life on a third planet?
I also didn’t know if the human beings on the second planet were prepared to know all that information. I appreciated the fact that the stranger hadn’t said anything in the interrogations and that day became a hot pink day.
I don’t know what the girl from the Teatro Español was thinking, since her eyes were almost closed. She was ruminating, no doubt.
When we reached Peñaranda, the stranger directed the Peruvian through the narrow streets as if he had lived there all his life.
We ended up in the Nueva Plaza, the third plaza we had visited. Of course his beloved lived—or died—in a plaza. An enormous sign over it indicated that prisoners from the civil war had reconstructed it.
We stopped at number 65 in that plaza. There were people in the doorway, neighbors with sad faces. She must have been ill for some time.
He got out and we followed behind him.
He went into the house and headed to the second apartment on the mezzanine floor, which was open. Inside there were more neighbors. The news of her death was recent.
He headed to the master bedroom; there was a very old woman in the bed. She seemed to be asleep. Around her there were quite a few people.
Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I Page 10