Lovers on All Saints' Day

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  What he’d seen in Charlotte’s eyes was not nostalgia: it was nothing immediate, nothing present; it was barely a memory of an infatuation. But it bothered him, perhaps because of what that memory might illuminate. In the pocket of his shirt, folded in four, was the map of the Islands of Pleasure. Charlotte had handed him the page, saying:

  “The original is from an eighteenth-century watercolor. It’s from Rajasthan.”

  And she’d quickly added:

  “That’s in India.”

  Georges was shocked by so much precision. The conferring of a date and a geographical location didn’t prove anything, didn’t make the map more credible; pretending to give reasons for which those islands might have been able to exist although in reality they didn’t exist, the date and place achieved, for Georges, the opposite effect. But it would be different, of course, if another person were the origin of that page. Twenty years earlier, it was his wife’s lover who’d handed her what she’d just handed to him. Against his chest, against his left nipple, the page burned; on his tongue, the word Pleasure had a bitter taste, like an unripe blackberry. That was probably not the only thing his wife had sought from Xavier, but he felt that resolving this doubt would console him.

  The night smelled of dry grass despite the imminence of winter, which kills fragrance. Georges looked in the direction of the house. An eye of yellow light floated in the air, the tiny bathroom window. He knew what that meant: the door between the bedroom and bathroom was open. Charlotte was reading, or pretending to read, in bed and getting ready to sleep. But she wouldn’t sleep tonight. At that moment, the tractor turned the corner of the pasture and Georges had his back to the light. The noise of the engine and the pinion and the roller isolated him, and behind the tractor he was leaving a corridor of a trail. Any hunter, he thought, could track and shoot him. He was lost in these absurd ruminations, thinking of how he could outwit the hunters coming after him, when the tractor turned to face the yellow window again, and in it was a silhouette. Charlotte’s arms moved in the air, as if she were a shipwrecked woman who had glimpsed a rescue ship. Although he could not hear her, although focusing on the expression on her backlit face was impossible, Georges understood there was some news about Xavier. He left the tractor by the wire fence and walked toward the garden. On the sandstone patio, the chairs leaning up against the table suggested a restaurant that had just closed. Only when he was a few meters from the wall did he look up. Charlotte was a bodiless face disfigured by perspective, a statue on a church’s domed ceiling.

  “He’s ready,” she said. “We can go to the wake.”

  “You want to go?”

  “Of course. I don’t know. I hadn’t considered not going. I feel bad, dear.”

  Georges looked down. Dry leaves were piling up beside the stone wall. He tried to exaggerate an impatient face so it would be visible in the half-light.

  “And why you? What do you have to do with this?”

  “You told me yourself that he talked about me on the way to the hunt. He’s been in a bad way for a long time, everybody told us. And it’s as if what happened before banned us from worrying, you know?”

  “No,” said Georges. “What you’re saying is absurd.”

  “He was our friend. And we haven’t allowed ourselves to take him seriously, to lend him a hand. As if what happened before would come back, what a couple of idiots. Jean wants to talk to me, but I’m not going alone. Will you come with me?”

  Georges did not cushion the harshness of his words. He felt contemptible and, without knowing why, also felt that he didn’t deserve Charlotte. But that didn’t stop him from saying what he was going to say.

  “No. It’s late. I’m tired and we’ll have more than enough tomorrow.”

  Charlotte looked distressed. She spoke to him of the man who had wanted to escape this life, of the terrible confirmation that it was another life he would have liked to live and hadn’t. Charlotte accepted that it was stupid, but in the past few years she had wondered what fault any of this was of hers; she had asked herself so often that now she couldn’t help devoting all her attention to him: to try to accompany Xavier, even if only in spirit. Georges turned away as if to cut off his wife’s words, because the mention of the spirit invoked for him, through some sort of piercing contradiction or terrible irony, the map of the Islands of Pleasure. On the lawn a rectangle of a more lively green was projected. Georges felt something fuzzy rising in his throat. He held his breath, and the nausea descended. He spoke to the silhouette’s shadow.

  “I’m going to be on the tractor for a while longer.”

  “I’m not going to go alone, dear. Won’t you come with me?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s your affair.”

  —

  INSTEAD OF WALKING toward the orange shape of the tractor, he went around the house by the shed side and found, in the middle of the rough carpet of stable sawdust, Xavier’s Porsche. For a moment, he wanted to sit inside it, but then the idea struck him as macabre. He leaned on the boot; the darkness was total. “Do you know what that means?” Charlotte had said to him. “Regretting now, at the age of seventy, the life one’s chosen?” Of course, she’d said, it was hard for him to see all that: for him things had come out well, like for a poker player. A few years or months or days ago, even just yesterday, Georges would have said: This is what all past life is, the results of an ongoing strategy.

  Now he wasn’t so sure. But he had a hunch: the past would become imagining Xavier wearing his father’s hunting jacket, a Frenchman who’d belonged to the louveterie and devoted his life to hunting wolves. Because that was a man, the clothes of those who’d gone before, and Xavier’s were heroic clothes: imagining him like that, romantically dressed up as a gentleman of bygone days, could justify Charlotte’s feeling attracted to him. But that tranquillity was artificial. Meanwhile, neither they nor anybody else could guess what had gone through Xavier’s mind. Maybe it was absurd to think he’d killed himself over her, but everything in Charlotte’s words seemed to suggest that. Now, it seemed obvious to Georges that only her sense of decency had prevented his wife from confessing that certainty. One doesn’t reach such decisions by chance, that was true. But to think of such a long-ago cause . . . Did that really happen? Did men really kill themselves for love, and for long-past love affairs? What surprised him most was how Xavier’s image began to change: he could no longer remember him as he was, those memories were already contaminated by his suicide. Georges admired the courage: not just of putting the barrel of a gun beneath one’s face (just one traditional barrel; Xavier had not succumbed to the fashion for double-barreled shotguns), but seeing himself reflected, a second before, in the death of a dog, and carrying on with the process of one’s own death. It was incredible what frustrated love could do to a man. It could track him, the way dogs tracked the trail of the scent of prey (a wolf, for example), and hold him at bay. Georges, too, standing on the sawdust-covered floor, was a man at bay. He imagined Jean’s phone call, the questions he would have asked Charlotte, that woman his father had loved. Georges hated him: he hated him for involving his wife in all that. Then he retched again, and this time, without kneeling, Georges threw up watery bile smelling of wine and stale bread.

  —

  WHEN HE WENT BACK to the house, it was after eleven, and Charlotte, perhaps, would be asleep. Georges preferred to stay downstairs. A long time had passed since the last time he hadn’t said good night to his wife—both beneath the covers, he overcome by weariness and she trying to read a couple more pages of some Montherlant novel—in the way routine prescribed. He imagined Charlotte was still dressed. Ready to go out, he thought, ready to go and see Xavier no matter how late.

  He knew he loved her. He had always loved her, even when he found out about the deception. Now those episodes came back as if fresh, with that terrible attribute the past has of never passing, of staying here, and keeping us com
pany. How could he have prevented it? How comfortable the future was, that future people so feared. Of course, they ignored how difficult the pain of the past was and the memory of that pain, because it was like clothes that have fallen in the hay in summer and keep scratching your neck and back all day long.

  The previous night, after Xavier had left, Georges had spent a couple of lazy hours cleaning his Browning, using silicone to repair a frayed strap, brushing the buttons on his hunting jacket. The implements hadn’t been put away, and were still there, looking at him as if they’d warned him that today would be special and it would be better to stay home, that he should have made up some excuse to not go out boar hunting. He looked for the biscuit tin that he’d used to store ammunition as long as he could remember and took it into the kitchen. He put the kettle on, and the air smelled of gas and then burned match. While he was waiting, Georges began to organize the cartridges and bullets that got mixed up over time or just stayed there, on the windowsill and in the cutlery drawer, making the reality that no children lived in this house unmistakable. When he had all the 8x57s in a single pile, the kettle began to fret on the stove. Georges put a lemon tea bag in a thick glass, striped from use, and let two sugar cubes dissolve in the boiling water. With the biscuit tin in one hand and the glass of tea in the other, he went to sit beside the telephone. He took out the map of the Islands of Pleasure; for the first time he looked at it closely. Water flowed around a circle, and in the water two fish swam, one coming and one going, one trying endlessly to catch up to the other, but it was impossible to tell from the drawing which one was chasing and which escaping its pursuer. Georges turned the photocopy over and wrote on the back in pencil:

  Charlotte Lemoine

  Xavier Moré

  Georges Lemoine (me)

  Charlotte

  Georges

  Xavier (him)

  To have lost her forever

  Never to have been with her

  He heard dogs barking, far away and distorted by the echo. Their house seemed different at night, and this silence, through which he usually slept, now stimulated him, made him tense and alert, aware of the whole world. He saw his reflection in the windowpane, translucent like a negative; he saw the shadow of the guns in their rack, like billiard cues, steady and disciplined. Perhaps overwhelmed by detail, in a mental atmosphere too similar to that of an opium addict, Georges did not pick up the phone at the first ring—he might have confused it with the barking, or he might not have heard it—and when he did, the black receiver fell asleep in his hand. Jean’s voice called from the other end of the line, serious, electronic, disconsolate.

  “Allô? Allô? Madame Lemoine, are you there? Madame, I need to know, I need to speak with you. You’re the only one who might know.”

  Georges realized that revealing his presence would be like surrendering. Accepting that Charlotte formed part of that small tragedy, that she’d had power over the life of a man who was not her husband, would be to discover that he and his wife had not lived alone all these years, that there had always been a specter between them. Then he also realized that all those precautions were futile. It was naive or ingenuous to believe that the past was capable of burying its dead. From this night on, Moré would appropriate part of the house: he would be a permanent lodger, someone Georges would see by just turning his head while smoking a cigar or brushing his teeth, someone who would watch him and his wife sleep, standing next to their bed wrapped up in his father’s green hunting jacket, until the end of time. Georges hung up the phone; he immediately unplugged it, yanking with such force that he broke the socket, leaving blue and red wires sticking out of the wall. He didn’t stand up; his legs would not have done his bidding. He thought he was unable to go upstairs, to confront Charlotte’s sadness, her silent tears, her likely guilt and perhaps her accusations. So he would stay faintheartedly downstairs, as he’d read about wolf hunters doing centuries ago in the Black Forest: parties of armed men who would allow night to overtake them among the trees, unable to return to the village without the body of the beast that had stolen their hens, dismembered their goats, and disturbed the slumber of their defenseless wives.

  The Return

  THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED when Madame Michaud got out of prison. It happened at Les Houx, the Michaud family estate, and was not written up in a single Belgian newspaper. The oldest episodes of the story occurred thirty-nine years earlier, and were much commented on at the time, but now there is probably nobody outside the family who remembers. I’ll tell the story as it was told to me.

  Les Houx is a piece of land of about three hectares, acquired by Madame Michaud’s great-grandfather toward the end of 1860, when the country was young and, in the principality of Liège, property changed hands without any formalities. Madame Michaud’s grandfather grew up and lived his whole life there, and so did her father. Madame Michaud and her younger sister, Sara, were born and raised there, and both lived there until, shortly after turning forty, in September 1960—a century had passed since the family took ownership of the property, which was their emblem and their pride—Madame Michaud was tried for the murder of Sara’s fiancé. She was found guilty of having fed the man rat poison used in the stables of Les Houx, and given a long prison sentence.

  Madame Michaud’s first name does not matter, but a clarification regarding her surname and civil status is in order. Michaud was her family name and the one on the sign at the entrance to the property: LES HOUX, PROPRIÉTÉ PRIVÉE. FAMILLE MICHAUD, 1860. Until that September, Madame Michaud was still Mademoiselle Michaud; she’d never been known to have a beau, and very few men visited her more than once, but no one ruled out the possibility that, even at forty, she might marry, for a piece of land like Les Houx was worth as much as the richest dowry and made either of the daughters a good catch. But when it emerged that Mademoiselle Michaud had been sentenced to forty-five years in prison, the Madame started to slip into people’s conversations. There was in the title a mixture of respect and pity toward a person who could not now marry, and whom it was going to be impossible to carry on calling Mademoiselle while she grew old in prison. Madame Michaud was released six years before the end of her sentence, and the first thing she’d do, as everyone surely knew, was to visit the house at Les Houx.

  Her love since childhood for the house and stables, the crops and woods, and even the bare fields that led out to the road, that boundless love, would be her undoing. Since she learned to walk, her favorite pastime was wandering through all the nooks and crannies of the house on her own. There was not a single corner of the immense building she did not know or would not have been able to find with her eyes closed. This might not seem such a great feat to those who don’t know Les Houx. So I should say that the three-story house has two stairways that lead to the first floor (one from the kitchen and one from the front hall) and one more that goes directly to the attic. Its perimeter was regular, a perfect closed rectangle like a safe; but the design inside was not at all symmetrical, full of unpredictable niches and alcoves. There was a doorless room entered by sliding the false back of a wardrobe: their grandfather had hidden potatoes and cabbages there from his harvest to induce a rise in prices at the turn of the century, and their father had hidden a Jewish couple there during the war. Between the two events, the room had belonged to the girl. She was solitary by nature, and not even her sister knew where to look for her when it was time to sit down at the table or when she needed her for something. They’d know she’d been in the stables because she’d show up smelling of hay and manure; they’d know she’d spent the morning in the woods because her dresses would be torn by twigs and pinecones and completely ruined by sap from the trunks. When she grew up, her parents got worried: Mademoiselle Michaud saw doctors and the odd apprentice psychoanalyst, because it was incomprehensible to people that a nineteen-year-old girl would spend the whole day by herself instead of seeing her friends. No one understood why she could never be found in the same room
of the spacious house; no one understood why she would squander her summers wandering around the three hectares like a cat marking her territory. The war broke out, and Mademoiselle Michaud gained sudden importance in the functioning of Les Houx: during the nightly bombing raids, when the whole country’s electricity was cut so the planes could not locate their targets, she was the only one who could find things lost in the darkness, or cross the property from one end to the other if the horses needed feeding or a message needed to be taken to the steward. All this determined that, in 1949, when the girls’ father died, their mother, who until then had taken little interest in such matters, entrusted the administration of the estate to the only person who could obtain satisfactory results; and Mademoiselle Michaud had the perfect excuse to forget or overlook the eagerness for marriage of the young men of Ferrières or Liège or even Louvain. In that state, which for her approached paradise, she was able to remain for several years. The house had never known—nor would it know—such splendor.