“This from the guy who always pretended to be so aloof,” I can hear Sara comment. “And now we’ve got his-and-hers gravesites?”
Seventeen
Why bother going to bed if you won’t be able to sleep? And yet at about eleven I went – what else could I do? From the bed I could see Sara at the bathroom mirror, rubbing almond-scented lotion on her legs, and once more I admired the beauty of her dark skin, the loveliness of her back. Her body hadn’t changed much with age. The telephone, which she’d carried into the bathroom, rang, and she put on her robe, answered it, and spoke for a long time in a very low voice with the boys. She had a deep voice, the same color as her skin, and it could take on many shades of tenderness. I shut my eyes and thought about the pain that was living inside me at that moment and surrounding me like the flames in paintings of purgatory. I kept them shut a long time, observing the intense grief that engulfed me, and what I saw in my head was a fifty-nine-year-old man, intelligent-looking and polite, though somewhat distant – me, walking slowly at night, as if nothing were going on, engulfed in flames, down an empty street on the Lower East Side; and that same man, also engulfed in flames, in East River Park at six on a summer evening, perhaps smoking, leaning on the railing to look down at the river, amid pigeons pecking at the ground around him and seagulls and clouds floating in the air.
Affliction is not motionless; it is fluid and unstable, and its flames, which are not orange and red but blue, and sometimes a horrible pale green, torment you sometimes on one side of the body and sometimes the other, sometimes forcefully gripping your whole body until you find yourself silently screaming like that Munch painting where a person is wailing on a bridge. Physical pain is no more stable, according to the descriptions I’ve read and heard from Jacobo and poor Michael O’Neal. The metaphors they use are intense. “It’s as if they were taking a saw and slowly sawing at my pelvis, Mr. David,” Michael would say. “And sometimes it’s like my legs are frozen and at the same time covered in burning coals. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s really worth being alive if it’s going to hurt this bad. What do you think?” And our poor Jacobo talked about how sometimes it was as if somebody were crushing his toes in a vise. Or punching him endlessly in the stomach. In their descriptions, the two of them almost inevitably reached the very limits of language itself and arrived at the sort of pain for which “indescribable” is the last word uttered before all words have been exhausted and there remains only the mute brutality of reality.
And yet I have known – all of us have known – joy, even happiness. The harmony of the world is not smudged or sullied even in moments of the most awful horror. Goya knew that, and Bosch. When Sara died I wanted to die too, of course, and contemplated suicide. During the weeks that followed I often imagined going to one of the beautiful misty cliffs in this area and tossing myself off it. Two bounces on two boulders, and someone my age would have shattered to bits. Like the romantic old fool I am, I would have put on my good suit, the one I wear for awards ceremonies, and I would have waited, neatly dressed, and dead, and dirty, and sprawling, for the vultures to begin to trace their graceful halo above me.
Fifty years of sensual delight and spiritual joy – here I am forced by language, which is inherently clunky, to describe as two separate things something that in its simplest, purest form is only one – with a woman who could as easily live in tenderness and pleasure as she could create gardens of heliconias and ferns and palms and little groves of flowering sietecueros trees, and pools and lily pads.
There was a reason I wanted to jump.
Eighteen
When Sara came to bed, it was ten past eleven. I had spent a long time, my eyes firmly shut, studying the flames that inhabited me and seemed, or perhaps were, eternal. Time is elastic stuff governed by joy or suffering. Sara lay down naked, her back turned but pressed against me, and lowered her hand to caress me. I did not penetrate her: Sara opened herself and put me inside her and pulled my buttocks with her hands to drive me deeper into her and thus console me, console herself, and take comfort in our love amid the pain.
We slid toward sleep.
I dreamed it was one in the morning and the boys had called. Jacobo had eight hours left, if he didn’t get scared and change his mind. Jacobo wasn’t the sort to get scared or second-guess himself, but life has a power that resembles madness. Two thousand feet below the earth’s surface, I’ve read, there are living bacteria. I answered the telephone and talked to Jacobo, who seemed to be making an effort not to cry, or maybe he was crying. He didn’t ask me to pass him to Sara. He seemed to want to say something just to me and didn’t know how to go about it. I suddenly saw myself engulfed in flames again. This time the image was of the fifty-nine-year-old man at noon, running – on fire and in silence – along the East River. A garbage barge moved past, the trash held down by a net. It was surrounded by wheeling seagulls, and it left a sour odor trailing behind it. I woke up and it was only ten to midnight and the boys hadn’t called.
James and Debrah were lying on the mattress in the living room. Venus was in Jacobo’s room. Ámbar had stayed with Arturo, and I thought I could hear the guitar and the sound of the computer keyboard. No Hells Angels motorcycles rumbled past that night. Sara was lying on her back with her eyes closed and her hands folded on her chest. I prized them apart to slip mine between hers, and the three hands slid down to rest on her belly, which rose and fell with her breathing under the fabric. At some point she had put on her pajamas. She wasn’t sleeping. I always sleep naked, even now that I’m an old man, despite the cold, because pajamas always get twisted around me and keep me awake. Sara squeezed my hand without opening her eyes. I sat up a little to look at the clock on her nightstand: midnight. Now it really was midnight.
Here in La Mesa it’s cold at times. My kids brought me an electric blanket that has become one of my most cherished possessions. At first I was bothered by the umbilical cord that connected me to the wall plug every night. That was after Sara died, of course, and the world went cold. They say it’s slowing circulation that makes the elderly feel cold. But I got over that after a while and mused ironically that old people become children again, and that the electric blanket was the first sign of childhood circling back, the return to the most fertile womb, the womb that has no name. And now it occurs to me that if by some miracle I could ever paint again, the first thing I’d do would be to seek the absolute resonance of the circle of Zen calligraphy, but via the subject of the water and light and stones I once saw in the Apulo River, near Ángela’s house. Words are so clumsy, as I think I said already. I have a crystal-clear idea in my head, even took some notes for the painting, thinking I would still be able to do it. Except that I needed my eyes to capture it, and I can barely produce these purple scribbles with the fountain pen Sara gave me.
The last time I tried to prepare a bottle of ink, I screwed it all up and had to ask Ángela to help me. I told her the proportions of the colors and it came out beautifully.
The boys also brought me a Basque beret that I’ve been wearing more and more because of the cold. Ángela tells me it makes me look dapper. Sometimes I sense in her that affectionate condescension that people often show to the elderly, though I could be imagining things, defensive. Anyway. What are you going to do? There are two famous paintings – I can’t remember the painter’s name right now, I think he’s French – that are called Portrait of an Old Man, Portrait of an Old Woman, and what struck me, apart from the high quality of the painting, is that in old age we lose our names. It’s not Portrait of Monsieur Armand, Portrait of Madame Armand, or whatever. “Old man” and “old woman” are enough, at a certain point, to explain everything about a human being. Geezer, codger, coot, graybeard, old duffer. Here in Colombia, “prostate.” Insulting terms abound. The human ape is a mocking and merciless one. A great aunt of mine, Pepa, the cruelest ape I ever knew, had two nieces who were born blind, her sister Concha’s daughters, and she call
ed them “Concha’s squinties.”
The English nickname “old fart” is my favorite, though “coot” isn’t so bad, either. And “squinty” is how I’m going to end up pretty soon.
Nineteen
At five past midnight, Sara got up to call Jacobo and Pablo, and Cristóbal came to bed. The cat almost always slept in Arturo’s room because he loved the epic chaos in there, which offered him an assortment of odd places to curl up in. But when Ámbar was there, he was afraid of the kids’ roughhousing, or just didn’t like their bouncing and shaking, which didn’t agree with his temperament, and he’d come sleep with us instead. He came up onto the bed, rumbling like a tractor, and curled up on my legs, as heavy as a bale of cotton.
When Cristóbal died, Sara framed a photo of him sitting in all his white elegance beside a vase of freesias, and she kept it on her desk. It’s still here, in our house in La Mesa now, Cristóbal beside his freesias, on one of the bookshelves in the library. When we first got here we had a black cat called Espartaco, the most brilliant black I’ve ever seen on an animal, but he didn’t last long. We had him neutered, of course, but here the cats wander around on the rooftops and through the streets, and they often vanish without a trace, like he did, because they eat poisoned rats or get hit by cars or are killed by dogs or people. “It’s like the Wild West for cats,” Arturo once remarked.
I’ve never been much interested in painting animals, except for things like crabs, seashells, and snails, which are almost minerals – and almost flowers, too, or at least snails are.
I carefully shifted the cat a bit so he wasn’t crushing me quite as much. Twelve past midnight. I couldn’t stop looking at the clock. Time was screeching and tearing into us with its gears and barbs. Sara was talking on the phone in the bathroom in her velvety lullaby voice. Twelve fourteen. Out on the street someone shattered a bottle against a wall or against the ground. When we first got to the apartment, there had been a lot more noise on the street, more bottles broken against walls and pavement, more insults and shouting, but the neighborhood was gradually changing, becoming trendy, and there were art galleries and fancy restaurants. People called it the East Village now, not the Lower East Side. The streets smelled less like urine, and there were fewer people sleeping on the sidewalks. You rarely saw human excrement. “It’s both good and bad,” said Pablo, who feared the neighborhood would all get pretentious and expensive and kind of fake, like the West Village or Soho, which was in fact what eventually happened.
Cristóbal left the apartment only twice in all his fourteen years: once when we took him to be neutered as a kitten, and again when I, wanting him to experience the Big Wide World, took him up on the building’s roof one morning. The poor animal was so panicked at seeing the blue sky above him, the dizzying scale of the universe, that he flattened himself against the floor until he looked like a swatch of fur, as if the sky itself were crushing him. I quickly carried him back down to the apartment, and he hid as far back as he could in Arturo’s messy closet and stayed there for two hours in the dark, his pupils dilated.
Sara came out of the bathroom.
Twelve eighteen. The second hand was over the six.
“What happened?” I took a moment to ask, and she also took a moment to answer.
“I’m not really sure,” she said at last. “I think they’re scared.”
“Oh. Yes,” I said, and the flames – blue, yellow, red, horrible green – leaped up within me, torturing what felt like the walls of my soul, and seemed to lap at my spinal cord and brainstem and cerebellum and cortex. We turned off the lamps on our nightstands and went to bed hand in hand. I was uncomfortable because of the cat, who was crushing my legs again, but that discomfort also seemed to offer some consolation and companionship. I pressed my face into Sara’s hair and breathed in the clean scent of her, her warm coolness, if you can put it that way, as if I hoped she could calm the blaze.
I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes and was awakened by the apartment door slamming shut. I got up to see what was going on and found lanky Arturo heading back to his room in boxer shorts. He and Ámbar had fought, and she’d left.
“She says I’m a real pain in the ass sometimes,” said Arturo, who seemed very tense. “It’s better that she’s gone, Dad. I can’t deal with any bullshit right now. I’ll call her later to patch things up.”
Twelve thirty-three.
I lay down next to Sara and heard Arturo, James, and Debrah talking quietly in the living room. Then they clattered in the kitchen as if they were making tea or coffee. The smell of tea wafted in. Then the smell of toast. I heard the noise of a knife scraping jam onto a piece of toast.
I placed my arm gently across Sara’s breasts and squeezed her shoulder with my hand.
Caressing her, yes, and also seeking protection.
Twenty
I woke up in the grip of an attack of claustrophobia and had to struggle to bring it under control so I wouldn’t start shrieking or who knows what. I sat up in bed, practically throwing off the blanket, and rushed to the window, where I breathed in deeply and looked out at the starry sky, the graves, and the trees. At about one in the morning, then, we had a skinny, naked man of almost sixty leaning out the window above a cemetery. But at least he wasn’t shrieking.
Sara asked me what was going on, and I said, “Claustrophobia, but it’s gone now. Lucky we’ve got these trees.”
I smoked as I gazed down at the dark tombstones below. I went to the bathroom cabinet and took an extra antianxiety pill, clonazepam, which a doctor had prescribed a couple of months earlier.
“Should we call?”
“Let’s let them rest.”
Everybody was still in the kitchen. I went to get some tea, and as soon as Sara came in she asked Arturo about Ámbar. He said again that she’d left saying he was unbearable, but she was the one who was unbearable. Venus said it was better that way, that they’d get a break from each other, and Ámbar would be back. “I don’t give a damn, as far as I’m concerned,” Arturo said, too rudely and intensely for it to be true. I repeated, in English and because I didn’t know what else to say, an old joke from Cali, “A woman who doesn’t drive you crazy is a man,” but only James found it funny.
The six of us sat down at the table to drink tea in silence. The atmosphere reminded me of a wake in Medellín fifty years ago. Through the window came an unpleasant squeal, maybe a squirrel being attacked by a rat or a rat being attacked by a squirrel down on the cemetery lawn. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Men with rat tails, marsupials with human legs. From the street also came the sound of a man and woman arguing, like a bundle of barbed wire. They were drunk, probably standing by the cemetery fence and very near one of the Virgins or the little bones of Ellen Louise Wallace, buried in 1975. We decided to call the boys.
Little bones.
To my surprise and perhaps to Ángela’s, last week I asked her to buy me a bouquet of roses in the market square and go with me to visit Sara’s grave. Old age astonishes me sometimes. I don’t believe in the afterlife at all, nor that a corpse is anything but a muddle of calcium and tatters and disgusting but harmless insects, and look at me now with my silver-knobbed cane, a little pretentious, that I bought in an antique shop in New York just because it was pretty, back when I didn’t need it yet; the Basque beret the boys brought me; a black cotton blazer; dark-gray Levi’s; brown suede shoes; a black leather belt with a simple silver buckle; my best shirt, buttoned up to the neck – that is, my full uniform for tossing myself off cliffs or receiving awards – standing before Sara’s grave, where I just knelt to leave her a dozen yellow rose, their petals tipped with crimson. “I is someone else,” a poet once said; he was French, but he said it as if he were Li Po. I didn’t put on a tie because I didn’t have one.
Later I’m going to try dictating to Ángela because my eyes are worn out again.
I had to go lie down a wile again
because I couldn’t sea anymore. I put a damp towl over my eyes to rest them. I was saying that at one in the morning we’d all gathered in the dinning room. We sat there mostly in silence, and evenchally decided to call the boys and all talk to them. First Debrah spoke, then James, cheering them up…
I loved Ángela’s spelling. We can, when we least expect it, be so deeply moved by beauty! Of course at this point everything seems to move me, and I see (or sea) beauty everywhere I look. My older sister, who wrote like a dream, spelled badly too, garbling almost every word she set down. I think it’s dyslexia. Ángela has nice handwriting too, but when I go back over the text to see where I am, little gems like evenchally, dinning, towl – and I don’t call them gems sarcastically – inevitably distract me and make me lose the thread of my story. It’s also complicated, for example, when she asks, “Dee what?” and I have to spell it out for her.
“D-e-b-r-a-h. Debrah. Capital d, b as in ’boy.’ It’s a name.”
“With an h at the end?”
“Yes, Ángela.”
“It’s not Débora?”
I could dictate to her son, of course, who almost certainly spells better, but I don’t want these, my personal matters, which are sometimes so difficult or intimate, to pass through the hairy hands of a male Monkey sapiens, especially not one as garrulous and chatty as him. To keep Ángela from being offended when I ceased to use her services, I explained to her as best I could that e-less towels made it hard for me to concentrate.
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