“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Annabel,” I answered.
He wrote, “To Annabel, from her admirer Octavio.”
The carriage was waiting for him at the door.
The owner of the house dashed off to retrieve something and returned with an envelope and a miniature piano and pianist.
“For our little Octavio,” he said bitterly, as if repeating a lesson he had learned by heart.
“No,” whispered Mrs. Griber, holding him back. “You might offend him. He doesn’t like to be called ‘little.’ ”
“The Japanese give toys to adults. Besides, he’s not of an age where he should be easily offended,” said the owner of the house, stroking his beard, rough as a piece of felt.
“Some of us were born to be offended,” exclaimed Mrs. Griber.
“But how old is your son, ma’am?”
“That’s a secret. He says he’s younger than he is, even young as he is. He has never looked at himself in a mirror; maybe that illusion preserves his youth. Once at age five he told me, when I insisted that he look at himself, ‘Music isn’t visible in the mirror.’ Does he look old to you?”
“Not at all. He plays the piano like a five-year-old.”
The owner of the house gave the envelope to Mrs. Griber, who was getting into the carriage, and the little piano to Octavio, who was standing by the door in the rain. Octavio looked at the toy, wound it up, and placed it on the ground. The tin pianist started to move and the little music box played the opening of a waltz. Octavio picked up the toy, wanting or not wanting to hear the music, wanting or not wanting to look at the tin pianist. Then, suddenly, he threw the toy away and climbed into the carriage. When the carriage turned a curve in the road, Octavio looked out from behind a black rubber curtain and stared outside—the rain and the trees were listening to the Brahms waltz interpreted by the toy pianist.
SHEETS OF EARTH
“GARDENER. Arborist. Landscaper. Available. Besares 451.” She smiled. For more than a year this ad had been buried in mothballs in her sweater pocket. She crumpled the paper in her hands and threw it on the floor. Resting her head on the back of the rattan chair, she gave a sigh of relief and told her husband, “How lucky we are to have a good gardener.” Her husband looked at her over the top of his newspaper. “A real gardener,” she went on, “who treats plants with tenderness and who truly loves them as if they were his little children,” and when she said these words, she felt the fullness of her joy: her children were healthy, it was a beautiful day, she had found a good gardener. Sitting on the terrace, wrapped in the whiteness of her dress, she felt what all women dressed in white must feel on a beautiful day—she felt transparent and impersonal like the day itself, surrounded by crowds of flowers awaiting her. She put on her gloves, retrieved the shears to cut some flowers, and went down to the garden, protecting herself from the sun with an umbrella. The image she saw in the mirror was very attractive.
The smoke of the trash fires filled the back of the garden and dyed the sunlight a milky blue; it clung to the gaps among the vines, clouding the sky of foliage. It was the most beautiful time of day, which I can say without fear of being contradicted because during the daytime in a garden, each moment can be the most beautiful, something we don’t notice when we are inside and always surprises us as if we were never aware of it.
The mower caused the birds to sing louder. The gardener moved as if he were inside a sort of great parade, moving ceremoniously from plant to plant, picking off insects. His arms, even at moments of rest, remained in a steady curve, weighed down by invisible hoses, scythes, hoes, and rakes. He smelled intensely of dry leaves and wet earth.
In the course of his life, the gardener had planted millions of trees for different families. He had worked on islands in the Paraná River, in the area near Tandil, in the province of La Pampa; he had even worked in the southern regions of Río Negro, and in the north to Iguazú, always with the same bundle of clothes and the same wife with indistinct features. The same hardworking wife and no children. Smelling of dry leaves and sweaty earth, he wiped his perspiration with a large silk handkerchief that had purple and green stripes. He lived at the back of the garden in a little one-room house.
The gardener turned over the earth with a large shovel; then he broke up the clumps of earth until it was silky and pliable. His hands were so connected to the earth that he had trouble pulling out the weeds. Every time he touched the earth it was as if he was slowly and repeatedly planting his hands; they were covered by now in a kind of dark bark like that of tuberoses, capable only of growing in earth or in a glass of water. For that reason he avoided washing them in water, and instead cleaned them on the grass; he also tried to avoid plunging them too deeply into the earth, and used a long thin trowel to pull out the weeds. But that day, in a moment of carelessness or hurry, he dropped the trowel off to one side and stuck his hand deep into the earth to pull out some unwanted plant. Kneeling at the bottom of the garden he made desperate attempts to pull out first the plant and then his hand. But footsteps drew near, making the pebbles sing. His hand didn’t want to come out of the earth. He raised his eyes and encountered that special smile the woman displayed when cutting flowers, and heard her say, “I am delighted. I have never had so many flowers.” She took off her cap with her left hand and said thank you three times, with a feeling of respect that could be seen in the movement of her head. She went on, “I would like to plant some bushes, some decorative plants near the gate. Which ones would you recommend?” “There are so many varieties,” said the gardener, feeling his hand growing inside the earth, “there’s Euonymus japonicus, Euonymus microphylla or pulchellus, Photina serrulata or Japanese laurel; all of those bushes are evergreen and resistant. There’s also Philadelphus coronarius or archangel angelica, commonly known as angelica; it is covered with white flowers in the springtime.” “Yes, yes, angelica is one of the plants that I like best; it has dark leaves, and its flowers grow in neat fragrant clumps.” She went on walking, spinning the handle of her umbrella. Her children ran around her, round and round. They stopped for a moment to look for pebbles on the path; then they came running back to where the gardener was. “What are you doing?” they asked, sitting down on their haunches. The man answered them patiently, “I am pulling out weeds.” The children wouldn’t leave; they had lost a coin or a pencil that they kept looking for until they got tired, then they went galloping off making noises like a locomotive.
The night was quietly falling, unfolding the usual sounds. The gardener heard the woman calling him; she was walking along the path from the house to the gate. He didn’t move. In the darkness he could only see the light-colored benches; he knew that the woman wouldn’t be able to see him. He sat down on the ground, took the striped handkerchief out of his pocket, always using his left hand, and wiped his brow. He was starting to feel hungry. Cooking smells came from the kitchen and an equally delicious sound of plates and silverware. He called his wife, first with a weak voice, then louder, until finally he made himself heard. His wife came running and asked him if he had hurt himself. “No, I’m not hurt. I’m hungry,” the gardener answered. “Then why don’t you stop working? It’s time for dinner.” “I can’t,” and he pointed to his hand. “But why don’t you pull on it harder?” “I’ve tried as hard as I can.” “So,” said the woman, “will you have to spend the night here?” “Yes,” the man answered; then, after a pause, “Bring me my dinner. Be careful that they don’t see you.” The woman hurried off and returned a little while later with a bowl of soup, a salad, and a piece of bread. She had forgotten to bring him a glass of wine. The man ate eagerly. The woman looked at him in the darkness, guessing at his expression. “Should I bring you a blanket?” “No,” the man said, “it’s not cold.” He finished eating and lay down on the ground. The woman wished him a good night.
After being there alone for a while, he remembered that he hadn’t had anything to drink. He wanted to call his wife, but his
voice trembled in the wind like a very thin piece of onionskin paper. Also the door of the little house was closed, the lights were off, everything indicated that his wife had was already asleep.
Thirst grew like huge expanses of sand; the gardener crossed them in his memory until he reached a pine forest in Patagonia. He was walking, carrying an ax and a saw. The trunks were thick and covered with moss. They were very tall but it was necessary to prune them to keep them under control. The pruning was hard; it lasted for days and days. The branches stuck out like unexpected snakes. The forest sighed amidst the liquid sounds of the saws. The sudden expulsion of birds and animals that lived in the branches made the night wake up completely. The trees were bleeding with a wonderful smell—their wounds open, striped with red and blue. The forest became a huge hospital of wounded trees, without arms and without legs. He felt thirsty that day, the same thirst he felt now, a thirst mixed with the smell of resin.
A fine drizzle was falling; there were no pines, not a single pine tree. How strange it was that the garden didn’t have sugar pines or other conifers. The lights in the big house were still on. There were visitors and after eating they strolled in the garden with the lady of the house.
He knelt down on the ground again. She saw him in the darkness. Somebody cried from far away, “Still working!” The cry sounded like that of a grateful swimmer, diving back into the water.
The gardener felt his hand opening inside the earth, drinking water. The water rose slowly through his arm to his heart. Then he lay down among endless sheets of earth. He felt how he was growing long hair and green arms.
The night was long, very long. At the surface, various animals brushed against his buried arm; it felt like the light contact of indifferent worms. A caterpillar slowly climbed up his back just before dawn. Never before was dawn so slow, struggling to make its way through the branches, setting out the morning. The gardener heard them calling him. He wanted to bend down and pick up the trowel from the ground but his waist lacked elasticity. From that day forward he lived according to the laws of Pythagoras; the wind and the rain busied themselves with erasing the traces of his body from the bed of earth.
AND SO FORTH
LOVING someone isn’t enough. Perhaps out of fear of losing the one you love, you learn to love everything that surrounds him. The scarf he wore, his shirt, his handkerchief, the pillow with its faux vanilla beans where you both lay your heads, the torn flower bud in a vase, the window curtain always half open, the carpet beneath your bare feet, the bathroom, a mirror that should be thrown out but never is, there on the street by the house where we stopped and heard the strident chords of a piano, or where we took in a lost dog, or the little abandoned garden with a stucco statue representing Bacchus, or a battered mermaid that sprays not water but mud out of its tiny serpent mouth, or the sky that is never the same forest of buildings and inscrutable faces. This whole world is a monument to our fidelity, because what is ours will never be found elsewhere without all the visions I have listed, symbols of the love that enslaves us. And if you go in search of a world without memories in order to forget, there is nothing that will block our eyes or our ears. Our skin is wide awake and covered with eyes, although others think that we only have two eyes, and ears, although others think we only have two ears. Certain key places in our bodies connect us to those aspects of spirituality, of sex, that cannot be confessed, like the palm of the woman’s hand, the inside of her elbow, or the vulnerable flesh of his ear and the curve of his foot.
If you seek a world without memories, often it’s abandoned to snow and snowy peaks, so out of reach, listening for a nightingale in your dreams to announce spring, or for the bells of a sleigh—happiness. You go searching, and after taking many shortcuts, come to the sea, to the sea’s edge, because sand is the place of sacrifice and of the finest games. There are tamarinds on the coast. God doesn’t want any memory of their fragrance or form to survive, those poor plants by the sea. They’re good for hanging clothes on, offering shade to the water that moistens hair, eyes, feet, bent knees, as we pray not to feel the water’s form, trembling, trying to forget! Later, searching for the hot sand, closing your eyes, showering in the droplets that mark the edges of the picture of the clouds above the beach, a lighthearted custom in fathomless air. Sleep doesn’t come to you there because the sand burns as if it were proclaiming a swift act of retribution. Then the one who wants to sleep kneels down shouting, gathering sand with two hands, to shape something yet unknown, wanting to make an absolute void with something unknown. She caresses and molds the sand with a chef’s art, an art learned in childhood, while speaking to someone who is standing next to her, more indifferent than the rocks and even less attractive, and the sand becomes a mysterious mouth, linked to the first lava tubes of the volcano.
The sun is dropping. The sea grows calm, but when it is at its calmest it comes back with force, colder than ever. “Where are you, oblivion? Where could your form have gone, a form that escapes mine? Where could you be, you who makes nothing resemble itself? What sort of Eumenides are you, shaping the sand?”
Nothing answered, not even the sand, which opened its lips when the water arrived to kiss it. The sun was dropping, lighting the waves and the seaweed, each curve illuminated from a low angle. Something was moving with humanlike energy. Why human? If what you were looking for is what is not human, the beach was empty. Two boys passed by and stopped to look at the mountain of sand that resembled a mountain, making your soul feel the size of a fly. It seemed as if they didn’t see him. One of them knelt down and rummaged around for something in his pocket.
“Is there a piece of paper?” he asked, looking around. “A little piece of paper.”
In one of the tamarinds two pieces of paper attached to the branches were trembling. The taller boy pulled the pieces down and scrunched the paper into a ball, carefully sticking it into the hole that tunneled through the mountain. He took a box of matches out of his pocket and stooped down to light the paper, using several matches. It took a while for smoke to rise out of the hole. The smell of fire mixed with the smell of the sea impresses you, pushing away the supposed forgetfulness. He asked the boy, “What are you doing?”
The boy didn’t answer or look at him.
“How can you know if you’re dreaming when everything seems so real?” he asked. “By waking up,” he said, answering his own question. “And how can I know, when I wake up, that I am truly awake?” And so forth. Talking to yourself is the last subterfuge. The smoke was making a picture. He covered his eyes so as not to see what that picture was, just as he covers them now so as not to see what he has written. A man’s lust is infinite. Nothing can hold him back from desiring to be what he wants or doesn’t want to be. But if he writes his name on the sand, if he shapes a statue or a volcano on the beach, he can’t let go of them and must carry on with them. Proud sand, how many buildings did you erect, as if the last were first and the first last? How many masks did you make? It isn’t possible to sweep them away with shovels or rakes from the edge of the sea.
Boredom afflicts those who are the saddest, and this man, who was the saddest of all, ran toward the sea without anything in mind, not even intending to dive into the water, water that was turning opalescent. He had left his clothes hanging on a tamarind branch but was still wearing his sandals, and around his neck hung a towel displaying the head of a tiger. When he walked against the wind the tiger’s jaws moved as if it were devouring something. Ignoring the bizarre impression that he was making, he ran along the beach brimming with joy. The tide was coming in. Sometimes the waves carried pieces of wood, sometimes floating debris, the strange forms of which attracted attention, like omens of storms. The promontory of sand in the shape of a volcano was no longer visible, and neither were the boys, who had hidden themselves, nor the tamarinds. Why worry about lost footprints if what you really want is to lose them, and thus construct your identity? He plunged into the water the way seabirds do, following the line of the breaking
wave. Suddenly he saw something that he couldn’t believe: a body half submerged in the sand at the very spot where the last wave receded. There, submerged in water up to its waist when the waves crashed, he could see part of a torso and a headful of hair as messy as a mass of seaweed. This secret being, neither human nor animal, triggered a sense of fear, and yet it seemed an animal beyond any doubt. By what certainty was this thing that so resembled an animal not an animal? He remembered when he was a boy and asking his mother where he could find a mermaid. His mother had answered, “Mermaids don’t exist, my child. They exist in fables, in stories, in poetry, but they don’t exist in reality.” The boy had answered, “I know they exist.” “How can you be so sure?” asked his mother. “Because they are in the dictionary.” This statement brought no answer. The boy found an engraving of a mermaid in an enormous encyclopedia. It was the same image that was lying there on the sand. Approaching it was imprudent, because fear of unknown creatures is so powerful. Drawing near, with a hesitation that gave him courage, he knelt down next to the unknown being, unsure at first if it was male or female.
“Hello. Who are you?”
Not being able to say anything is very sad for someone who takes an interest in someone else.
“Are you cold? The sun has set.”
The head nodded slightly. No words were spoken, but they understood each other.
The being had two eyes, one green and one blue. This was the only difference between the being’s eyes and those he was used to dealing with. As for the curly hair, its bright color perhaps due to the light of the sunset, it wasn’t braided or gathered together, but it wasn’t completely loose either.
He whispered, “What beautiful hair. Doesn’t the seawater spoil it?”
Instead of answering, the being’s eyes grew bigger.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 30