Venus was a little darker than Sara and they resembled each other. People on the street would ask them if they were mother and daughter. Once, the Met had an exhibition of portraits found in the sarcophagi of the Roman colonies of ancient Egypt, and I thought I was looking at the two of them, their hair very healthy, black, and curly and their eyes very large, black, and slightly almond-shaped. I painted a retable of the two of them as mother and child, an imitation of those paintings, which had been painted on wood, and I gave it to Venus. At first she didn’t want to accept it, and she almost cried with happiness.
Sometimes I almost forget she isn’t my daughter.
Seven
“Did you call them?” Sara asked.
I hadn’t heard her come in, and I jumped. I was embarrassed that she’d found me working so intently on the water in the ferry painting, as if nothing else were happening. But she too studied it a while. She had been crying, and her eyes were red and swollen. I felt compassion for all of us; my Adam’s apple turned to iron and my heart weighed heavy in my chest. Our sorrow was like a dark cloud that endlessly expanded and now blanketed heaven and earth.
“You’re not there yet,” said Sara, referring to the painting.
“No, not yet,” I told her. “It’s only four-thirty in the morning in Portland.”
They’d made their second stop on the way to Chicago in Sandusky, Ohio, on Lake Erie, the roller coaster capital of the world. The amusement park has seventeen roller coasters, Pablo told me, and apart from that, or because of that, it was a terrible place. As world capitals go, he said, I much prefer the town with the burgers. I think he, too, was beginning to feel the burden of what was about to happen, and he was having a hard time staying cheerful. Realizing that he didn’t want to talk much, I passed the phone to Sara. I don’t know what the boys were saying to her, because she hardly said a word, only “yes, yes, of course,” and continued listening. “Pass me to Jacobo a minute,” Sara said, and then she kept listening and saying “yes, of course, yes.” And after a long time the phone went back to Pablo again and the conversation proceeded as before. Or maybe I do know, or can guess, anyway: they told her that the thing they were going to do was best for Jacobo, because he couldn’t take it anymore; that it was a crime to remain in such agony and that we should think of it not as an ending but as the doors of his liberation, his redemption. That must be it.
Sara had a powerful spirit. When we arrived in New York, we spoke very little English, as we hadn’t needed it in Miami. But within a couple of weeks she had finagled an interview with a medical company that had a contract with the city government to serve women who were at high risk of contracting HIV. Their offices were at Bellevue Hospital. Sara went through the interview – in English – with a doctor who later would become her friend and confess that she hadn’t understood hardly anything that Sara had said. She’d hired her because of her friendliness, her easy smile, because many of her patients were Spanish speakers, and above all for having had the cojones (the doctor said it in Spanish, one of the two or three words she knew) to show up at that interview without knowing English. People with fortitude – that was definitely what was needed back then to combat what had become the most terrifying plague since the Middle Ages and that had people dropping like flies all around us. Sara was completely self-directed and steadfast. Her strength did not depend on the admiration or applause of others. It came from her very neurons, from her genes, from a childhood free of shadows – despite the hair-raising violence she’d witnessed in her hometown growing up – and from the unconditional love and affection she’d always had the good fortune to receive and always knew how to offer to those she cared about. And now this is starting to sound like an obituary…
Anyway. Here in La Mesa she took care of the trees and the gardens, garbed in gloves, tall rubber boots, and a straw hat, while I took care of the potted plants inside and in the courtyard. I filled the house with double-bloom azaleas, ferns, heliconias, bromeliads, and begonias, plus some climbing plants for a few walls that got enough light, along with the paintings and sculptures my friends have given me and a few works of my own that I’ve never wanted to sell, the furniture we’d brought from New York, and furniture and lamps I bought in antique shops in Bogotá. I’ve always enjoyed trying to find the equilibrium of objects, and it never ceases to amaze me the way they come to life if you understand the light in a space. In their relationship to light, so-called inanimate objects are as alive as plants, as alive as you or I.
I was about to dial Jacobo and Pablo in Portland when the house phone rang and Sara answered. A Belgian critic was preparing to write a book about my life and work and wanted to know if he could come by the following afternoon to talk to me and perhaps stay with us a couple of days. Sara hesitated only a moment; she told him I was in Colombia and would be back in a month. Without consulting me, she and the Belgian worked out an arrival date for him on the second Saturday of the following month at three in the afternoon, while I, who a few days earlier had called to cancel all my professional engagements and now wanted nothing to do with that sort of thing, gestured wildly at her that I didn’t want to talk with anybody, no Belgian on any second Saturday of any following month.
“It’ll offer a distraction and help us think about something else for a bit, which we’ll need by that point,” she said after she hung up, and I no longer had the energy to remind her that I’d never liked for other people to make decisions about my affairs. “Plus he sounded nice,” Sara added.
Eight
I went to feed Cristóbal, who had been twining around my legs for a while. He was white with yellow eyes, he had two black spots on his back and one black ear, and he was big and plush, as if he were stuffed with cotton. He was a happy cat. We got him when he was a newborn kitten, he lived fourteen years, and he experienced pain only three times in his life: when the anesthesia wore off after he was neutered, once when I stepped on his paw, and when he suffered the pangs – sadly inevitable – of death. It’s strange, though, because I feel like he’s still around, even here in La Mesa.
The smell of the cat food – a wet paste of fish and flour – made me sick. I felt sorry for Cristóbal for having to eat it. I went back to the kitchen and we called Portland.
Conversation was difficult. I asked Jacobo what time it was there, he told me it was eight twenty, and we fell silent. How’s the hotel? I asked, and he told me it was fine. Same as any other, you know? I asked him how he was and he told me he was fine, and again we fell silent. I asked him about the pain, and he told me it was really intense at the moment but that Pablo was going to give him a massage. A long silence. I’m going to pass you to Pablo, he told me, and then pass me to Mom, okay? Love you, Dad, talk to you soon.
It wasn’t any easier to talk to Pablo. I asked him when the doctor was coming and he told me seven at night – which I already knew but hadn’t been able to think of anything else to ask. We had less and less to talk about. Silence began to coil implacably around us. I asked if they’d had any trouble when they turned in the van, and he said no. I’ll pass you to your mother, I said, and their conversation was as fluid, and as mysterious to me, as it had been on other occasions. Though her voice remained steady, I saw Sara’s eyes shining with impending tears. I decided to go out for a while.
Despite the large magnifying glass I use, I had to stop writing for more than an hour because I could no longer see the words clearly. And I write large, too, with letters about the size of a blackberry. When I can’t see anymore, which happens more and more often now, I go lie down, ask Ángela, the woman who comes to help me around the house, to please put a damp compress on my eyes and forehead, and focus on listening to the sound of the birds or put on music. Of all the birds, I am fondest of the song of the ones we call azulejos – blue-and-gray tanagers. Though they have the same name in Spanish, the Colombian bird is not the same as the American blue jay: it is much smaller, though just as sprightl
y and aggressive. It has a shrill call, precise and somewhat elaborate, like piccolo music, and so high in pitch that it almost seems like some of the notes are inaudible to the human ear. It is complex, but not beautiful. And because it is so high-pitched, we don’t pay much attention to it and instead notice birds with more earthly songs, especially sparrows, the most talkative species on earth: the chirping plague, you might say, the way pigeons are the flying plague. When I listen to music – which I do a lot – it’s often guitar music: Albéniz, Rodrigo, Tárrega, Barrios, things like that, or also The Magic Flute, pieces by Grieg, or parts of the Ninth Symphony, which I still find dazzling after more than sixty years. In any case, in the future that looms before me I will be able to enjoy only the light of sounds, the light of memory, and light without forms, as my eyesight is in irremediable decline. I do have a future, I think: my family tends to live a long time, with many of my relatives having lived into their nineties.
I have no idea whether putting a cold compress on my eyes and forehead does any good, but you have to do something, I guess, and maybe it helps me rest. I’ve got what old people get: macular degeneration. Though it supposedly rarely leads to complete blindness, the rapid deterioration of my vision indicates that such will be my fate. A magnifying glass becomes necessary when a person loses sight at the center of the eye. The macula comprises about 5 percent of the retina and is responsible for some 35 percent of the visual field. The remaining 65 percent – that is, the peripheral area – is not affected by the disease. The magnifying glass helps compensate to a degree for the damage to the macula, as it allows you to rely more on the healthy retina surrounding the injured area to create visual images. When I get up, and before I sit down to work again, I go out onto the patio to look at the plants and trees.
The rear patio of my house is about six hundred meters square and – while we’re on the subject – contains infinite visual images. The garden Sara created is spectacular. It is full of all kinds of palm, banana, and citrus trees, and all the varieties of heliconias, ferns, and orchids you could imagine. She became a real landscape artist, Sara did, here in La Mesa de Juan Díaz, and for more than ten years I was her only audience and the dazzled painter of her living paintings. Now Angela’s husband takes care of the garden, and from what I can tell he does a good job, but it no longer evolves or changes; no longer do mossy stones appear, or ponds with lily pads and other plants already intact, or exotic plants that she obtained and that seemed to have flowered all of a sudden, in an instant, like fireworks…
When I think about all that and feel Sara’s absence, feel the chill of the inescapable solitude of old age, I have to go lie down, shut off my soul for a few minutes as if blowing out a candle, and sleep.
Nine
I interrupted Sara a moment to tell her I was going out and would be back in a couple of hours, and to call me if she needed anything. She said that was fine, that I should go out, it would do me good, but not to take too long. I kissed her and she kept talking with the boys. Who weren’t boys anymore.
I got off at Houston and took the train to Coney Island. I found the darkness of the tunnel horrifying; the train car was horrible; the people who got off and on were horrible. I stared at the floor so as not to look at anybody, until after an hour or so we’d arrived in Brighton Beach and I got off the train. I walked without looking at anything or anybody in Little Russia, and without looking at anybody I reached the boardwalk. When I lifted my eyes, there was the sea.
I’ve never been one to cry easily, and this moment was no exception. Two little sailboats, white like seagulls, were crossing the tranquil water, which was dark blue farther out and dark green where the waves rolled up and then unfurled their silks and brocades across the sand. There were people on the beach, jogging, sunbathing. A young couple, probably about twenty years old, was throwing a ball for their black Lab, which hurtled into the water, swam like a seal to retrieve the ball, and then brought it back to them. Though I don’t like paintings of animals, or rather of mammals, I imagined a painting in which the dog, plunging into the emerald-green water, would be only a stroke of black ink, like in Japanese calligraphy. There is no animal happier than a Lab at the beach. And I could no longer stifle my sobs, which erupted from me as if from the earth itself and forced me to sit down, still unable to stop the cold tears, hard as splinters, that were streaming down my face.
I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs, and walked for about ten minutes along the hard-packed sand, my feet in the water, until I reached one of the reefs below the Ferris wheel at Coney Island. I walked carefully along the sharp stones to where the water and crabs began. The crabs were rock-colored, and their movement made it seem as if the rocks were alive. I had been observing them for a long time, planning to do some oil paintings or maybe some etchings, studies of light and life commingling there among the brown and green rocks. I looked at my watch. It was after twelve thirty already. Time was barreling toward us as if it were about to dump a load of stones or bricks on us.
When I got back to the apartment, I found everyone visiting with Preet, who had come, as he did every Friday, to see Jacobo. Preet was the Sikh taxi driver from Jacobo’s accident, and he’d come to visit him every single Friday since. He had a very long gray beard; an indigo turban, the same color as his shirt and pants; large, shining eyes; and an incredibly gentle gaze. When Preet came, we had to sit down and visit with him, offer him tea, and remain there, in near-silence, for exactly an hour. From time to time he’d ask, “And how are you doing, folks?” in that singsong Indian English that I so enjoyed hearing but found so difficult to understand, and we’d answer that we were fine, thank you, and you? and Preet would say fine, thank you, and then there’d follow a long, long pause that would stretch out until he’d ask once more, “And how are you doing, folks?”
Two days after the accident, he’d showed up at Jacobo’s room in the hospital and said to us, “Hello, I am Preet.”
“Sorry. Who?” Sara had asked.
“I was the taxi driver, ma’am. I am very sorry. Truly, truly sorry.”
Strange things happen in car crashes. When Preet’s taxi was hit by the drunk junkie’s pickup, it was totaled in an instant. It was a miracle Jacobo survived, but even more surprisingly, Preet came out of it all utterly unscathed, not even a scratch. I bet he didn’t even have his beautiful turban knocked askew, and that may very well be precisely why he felt so guilty, though it’s hard to be sure since I found exchanging words with him as difficult as his smiles and friendly glances came easily.
“Preet means ’love’ in Punjabi,” he added.
“Oh,” said Sara. “And it also sounds like ’pretty.’ ”
The taxi driver smiled, flattered. “Exactly, ma’am. Exactly.”
We sat down and experienced the first of those long silences that we never got used to over the years. During the pauses, we’d watch him contemplating, perhaps somewhat anxiously, what he’d say next.
“Sikhs are monotheistic,” he might say then, and not even Sara was able to come up with an appropriate response.
“How about that!” she’d say.
With Jacobo, Preet was significantly more outgoing. He’d grown quite fond of him – which wasn’t difficult, given the boy’s personality – and sometimes he patted his back and even said “son of a gun” and similar expressions, which for Preet were the height of comradery and informality. That was when he went into Jacobo’s room to visit with him alone, of course. If Sara or I came in unexpectedly, the taxi driver would immediately return to his extreme politeness and geniality.
“Hello, Mr. David. Hello, Mrs. Sara,” he would almost sing in his beautiful Punjabi accent.
When I came in after my trip to Coney Island, Debrah, James, Venus, Arturo, Sara, and Preet were in the living room. The taxi driver, of course, had no idea what was going to happen in Portland. Sara had told him that Jacobo and Pablo had gone away for a few d
ays to visit some friends in Miami. Everyone but Preet looked a bit pale from lack of sleep. James, who was normally chatty, was silent, as was Debrah, who isn’t the quiet type either. Debrah and James had been our best friends since we first got to New York. They didn’t have children and had practically adopted ours as their own.
I shook Preet’s hand and sat down to look at him along with everyone else. He looked like a god in that armchair: indigo turban, knee-length beard, and eyes so bright they were almost demented.
“Punjab is the land of the five rivers,” he said after a while.
Sara gestured to me that we needed to talk. We excused ourselves and went to the kitchen, where she told me that the boys had just called to say that the doctor couldn’t come to the hotel at seven p.m. and would try to make it at eleven. Everything had been pushed back at least four hours.
We fell silent. I embraced her.
“I don’t even know whether that’s good or bad anymore, David,” she said and sobbed three times without making a sound. “Oh, God,” she added, shaken, “and what if he doesn’t come?”
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