“As I see it, Don David,” she answered, “a towel is still a towel, with or without an e.”
I moved closer so I could look into her eyes and patted her cheek.
“Don’t worry, Ángela, I’ll put you to work writing again when I go totally blind.”
I put on one of Bach’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord, but played on the piano by Glenn Gould. I play the music on my computer, which my children set up for people with vision problems, so everything on the screen is huge and very high-contrast. Five in the afternoon. In an hour or so the bats will show up to flit around the edge of the eternal light. Let’s leave the gathering in the dining room of the apartment on Second Street, which is hard to write, for tomorrow. Ángela wasn’t offended in the least and went to fetch me a strong coffee, which I requested so I could listen to the music better. Ángela is sturdy and short, not flabby, solid, strong, with large breasts and a beautiful face. Large, bright, black eyes. Very white skin, straight black hair. Very white teeth and an easy smile. Nude, she must look like a sort of Venus. I would have loved to do some charcoal sketches of her, even if she weren’t nude.
Twenty-One
I talked to the boys last, but not in the dining room: instead, I went to the studio. And this time I was able to talk to Jacobo for a long time. He told me he was in a lot of pain but that at least he was feeling calmer. No, he couldn’t sleep. This fucking pain won’t let me get a wink. And now I’m constipated. I’m tired of needing help to take a shit, Dad. (My sons curse way more than I do.) Are you scared? I asked him baldly, and he said of course he was scared, David, do I look like Superman or something? I chuckled a bit, as if to comfort him. There was a long silence. It’s okay if you change your mind, I said. I know, Dad, I know. It’s okay if I change my mind. I said, you don’t have to be strong or brave or anything, okay? Yes, David, I know, he said, seeming to grow impatient. How’s Pablo? I asked. Good, he said. He’s so huge he can carry the whole world and still have strength left over. Did you like the orchids he got done? he asked me. I did, I did, I said, but do you think he’s going to get more tattoos? I think so, Dad, be prepared. Once they get started, they don’t stop. But they look good, don’t they? he asked. Beautiful, I told him. Hey, he said, and how do you think Mom’s doing? I told him the truth: I think she’d rather you change your mind and come home, but I’m not positive about that either. Yeah, he said, we don’t know anything. And how’s it going with the ferry painting? he asked. It’s right here in front of me. I haven’t gotten it right yet, but I’m a little closer. Then I told him that Arturo had fought with his girlfriend and was very tense. Of course, David, no real surprise, with everything that’s going on with me, right? Those last prints you did of Ámbar were fantastic, he said, quickly changing the subject. Yes, they turned out well, I told him, she’s gorgeous. I hope they haven’t broken up for good so I can do some more. Love you, Dad, he said in English, we’ll talk soon. Love you too, Jacobo. Have Pablo give you a massage if it starts hurting a lot. And we’ll be here. Take a couple of pain relievers, if only for the placebo effect, since I know they don’t do anything for you, I said. Okay, David. Love you. Bye. Bye.
I remained with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands, staring at the floor, sitting on the chair I used to study my paintings, in front of the light on the water that I still hadn’t managed to capture. Sara came in and kissed the top of my head, my eyes, my nose, my mouth, and the top of my head again. It’s a good thing it was only her, because in my fragile state I couldn’t have endured another collective exhibition of grief à la USA.
And here the sentimental old man had to stop once more. Prostate. As if the world, thanks to my macular issues, hadn’t become liquid enough already. I smoked a Pielroja, sitting on the edge of the bed, and lay down to sleep a while. I’ve never had prostate trouble, by the way. At my age I am proud that I still piss like a racehorse. I woke up maybe half an hour later feeling quite weak. Low blood pressure, maybe. Ángela brought me a large aguardiente, and the anise-flavored liquor revived me. I put on some Villa-Lobos, the same recording that helped me finally figure out the painting of the Staten Island ferry back then. And I sat down to my pages again with the magnifying glass, while the woman with a luminous voice sang a melody that I find funereal – Bachiana Brasileira No. 5, it’s called, and I have no idea what the lyrics say because it’s in Portuguese.
At six in the evening Ángela brought me my beer and said goodbye. It seemed like she wanted to say something else but couldn’t work up the nerve. It’s happened before, and I know she always ends up telling me about one of her family problems and asking my advice. I am quite fond of her and always resign myself to considering the problem and trying to suggest some reasonable solution, or at least one that seems reasonable to me. So I’ll hear about it tomorrow or the day after at the latest.
I stayed on the porch in my sunflower-colored director’s chair. Immense solitude is like a seemingly blank canvas, deceptively blank. At seven in the evening I went inside and shut the doors and windows, fumbling a little with the bolts and latches since my eyesight gets worse at night. I sat down in the leather armchair. Feeling a chill, I went to fetch the thick alpaca sweater that Sara gave me shortly before we left New York (comfortable, expensive, and beautiful, like all of her gifts). I sat down in the armchair again and remained motionless there for perhaps half an hour. Then a cricket began to sing beautifully, as if it were the presence of the Presence somewhere in the living room. These crickets are dark, nocturnal, ugly, vaguely reminiscent of cockroaches, and they have a powerful voice that not everyone enjoys. And my immense solitude was suddenly filled with the whole universe.
Twenty-Two
When Sara finished kissing my eyes and comforting me, it must have been two in the morning. That night nobody in the apartment would sleep, and only she and I would at some point make another attempt. I turned on the light above the painting and got to work; the others lingered around the kitchen table, chatting and drinking tea or black coffee. The telephone rang. I already knew who it was. I answered it.
“Good evening, Mr. David,” said Michael O’Neal.
He apologized for calling so late and asked me if Venus was there. I told him she was. He asked to speak to her, if it wasn’t too much trouble, and I called her. Venus thanked me, smiled, and went to Jacobo’s room to talk to Michael O’Neal where I couldn’t hear her. For a long time Venus had called me Mr. David, like Michael, until I finally persuaded her to call me by my first name pronounced in Spanish and without the “Mister.” She was looking weary too.
“Do you want coffee?” asked Sara, who had come from the kitchen and was looking at the painting.
“I can’t get the vertigo into it,” I said.
She studied the painting a while longer.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said at last. “So do you want coffee or not?”
“Coffee, coffee, coffee,” I said hastily to mask the intense rush of joy that must have shone in my eyes at her comment about the painting. It seemed absurd, almost obscene, to feel rushes of joy in our situation, but Sara wouldn’t see it anyway, as she’d turned away and gone to get the coffee. When she brought it, she continued what she had been saying:
“And the foam is really looking beautiful now.”
The foam had looked good from the beginning – I hadn’t touched it again – but there was more contrast with the water now and it glowed more intensely. I have always put a lot of effort, a certain vehemence, into my work (though there has been no shortage of critics who call my art cold), but I was working away at this ferry painting as if all our lives depended on it. It was a battle against annihilation in which, to defeat chaos, I had to capture it in paint, like grabbing the devil by the tail and hurling him against a wall. And here the religious images from my childhood in the ultra-Catholic town of Envigado reappear, somewhat transformed, and absurdly associated with a nearly abstract painti
ng that only a moron could find cold.
Venus came and told me that Michael knew about Jacobo and was very interested, as he intended to go the same route if everything went well today. Jacobo was ten years older than Michael, and Michael idolized him. My son loved him dearly and sincerely praised him for his extensive medical knowledge – specializing, of course, in his own condition – which was unusual in someone so young and self-taught. The thing is, he literally learned it in the flesh, poor boy, and that helped.
Venus looked beautiful in the lamplight that illuminated the painting, with the sober but not tearful expression of sadness that you see on people who are used to facing pain daily and deeply. Once more I thought of the funeral portraits of the women in the Roman colonies in Egypt and of the melancholy of death that appears in some of them.
“It is fucking hard,” she said in English.
“Sí. Fucking hard,” I said, though I never curse.
Without my asking, Venus went to the kitchen, brought me a coffee, and set it on the little table beside the painting, which she eyed with evident admiration and without saying anything. Two thirty in the morning. It is amazing how a painting can change so much with just a few brushstrokes, in less than five minutes. The struggle is not so much with the paintbrush as with the eye, with the doors of perception, which resist opening even a crack.
Laughter came from the living room. Arturo was probably clowning around. That weedy kid did a perfect impression of Preet talking with me, and he played both roles: when he was Preet, Arturo went to the taxi driver’s favorite armchair, moving quickly to my chair when it came time to play my part.
“Sikhism has its origins in the fifteenth century,” Arturo lilted in an exaggerated Punjabi accent, and then flew to sit in my chair, one leg draped over the other. He is already tall and skinny to start with, but somehow he seemed to become even more tall and skinny, and above all more stoic.
“Is that so? How remarkable.”
Arturo knew how to create the extended pause that always followed. Then he rushed to Preet’s chair.
“The term sikh comes from the Sanskrit word sișya, which means ‘disciple, student,’ or from śikșa, which means ‘teaching.’ We Sikhs are disciples of the guru.”
Another dash to my seat.
“Incredible. Incredible. Isn’t it, Sara?” said Arturo in my precise but heavily accented English. My desperate attempts to make Preet leave me alone and talk to her instead were quite comical.
When Arturo was finished goofing around, we drank more tea and more coffee and sat in silence. A shadow suddenly came over Sara’s face, and she hastily went to our room, where we wouldn’t see her. No one went to comfort her. We knew full well that it wasn’t possible, and that she wanted to be alone.
Twenty-Three
Last night before I fell asleep I was thinking that I’d like to experience some real hot weather and decided we should go to Girardot today, the city I mentioned earlier that is dilapidated, sweltering, and still lovely on the banks of the Magdalena River. And here I am in the hotel room at six thirty in the afternoon on July 6, 2018, writing a few lines at the desk, to which I’ve clamped my jointed-arm magnifying glass. I have the window open, the lowland crickets are chirping, and I can smell the thick scent of vegetation, which always makes me happy. I feel so happy sometimes! Now I’m going to stop writing and go out to smoke a Pielroja at one of the tables beside that gorgeous swimming pool, and drink a cold beer, or maybe two.
Ten in the morning. I had my cold beer last night, two of them, and two glasses of aguardiente and a glass of wine, and today I’m feeling the hangover even though I ate grilled pork loin, which they do well here at the hotel, before I went to bed. But no sadness. I didn’t manage to persuade Ángela to get in the pool. I never have, but this time she decided to buy a bathing suit in one of the local department stores. And her embarrassment, I think, is not at revealing her body but at getting into a pool for rich people. I wanted to see her in a bathing suit in the sun. I am still perhaps too eager to admire all the world’s forms, even though they look wavering and rather liquid to me. When we were driving down, crossing the bridge we saw that the Magdalena was almost dry, and the wide, deep riverbed, with rowboats and ships stranded in the sand, though I had difficulty seeing it, reminded me of those paintings from the whatever-teenth century in which the landscape of a river or bay, sometimes with buildings or ruins of buildings, looks like something out of a dream or a nightmare. But because my eyesight is so bad, the images I form now seem to come as much from within me as from without, and sometimes I can’t tell if I’m seeing what I see, or creating it, or remembering it, or imagining it…
Sara had gone to the bedroom to be alone in her sadness. I too, sitting in front of the painting again but not looking at it, looking at the floor, had been gripped powerfully by sorrow again, and the flames licked at me from within, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, nearly suffocating me. With all my soul I wanted Jacobo to come home, even if only years of suffering awaited him. I went to the bedroom and lay down on Sara’s side of the bed. She was in the bathroom washing her face. I closed my eyes to contemplate the flames. Sara came out not long after and lay down behind me, gently pressing against my body, almost floating like a cloud. She put her hand on mine, and the two of them formed a snail shell on my leg.
As the seconds passed, reality became more intense. Sara’s hand was a little cold but grew gradually warmer. I felt irregularities in my heart, little skips and murmurs and also oddly powerful heartbeats that shook my body imperceptibly. “I can’t die right now,” I thought. “What would happen to them?” I started to breathe more deeply and regularly, until the murmuring and hammering stopped. But not the flames. “I can’t go falling apart all the time like a crazy person, especially not right now,” I thought, and managed to pull myself together. I thought about the Irishman who painted screaming popes. Time was passing very slowly, almost turning back on itself, but only to crush us more thoroughly and lick us better with its flames. The insidious silence settled back over the apartment even though Debrah and James were talking in the kitchen and Arturo was playing his guitar in his bedroom, and despite the usual sounds of breaking bottles of the Lower East Side and the shouts that occasionally drifted in, as if from very far away…
“Hey! Fucking bitch!” they shouted.
Last week I talked to Debrah and James. They got spots in an old folks’ home on Long Island that has a golf course, pool, and bowling alley. They described it to me as if they considered it heaven on earth, and the more facilities they mentioned, the more on-call nurses and doctors twenty-four hours a day they mentioned, the more appalling it seemed to me. Of course I congratulated them, though I couldn’t help saying it wasn’t my sort of thing. James went quiet for a moment, and I was sorry I’d said it. I asked when they were moving, and he said they’d move out of one of the studios in a month and a half. James’s voice is rich and warm, and it has gotten even richer and warmer with age. More musical, if you like, as if it hadn’t been musical enough already. Debrah’s voice, on the other hand, has become slightly high-pitched and impertinent – that is, she has a fitting voice for the brilliant, tiny, inquisitive woman she still is today.
Twenty-Four
In the afternoon Ángela decided to get in the pool. Though I couldn’t see her well, I knew she was striding toward the water with her gleaming white teeth, short, broad, sturdy, perfectly proportioned for her personality. I didn’t want to ask her to come closer so I could see her better because I thought she might think I was being a dirty old man. The bathing suit was a black one-piece with orange polka dots about two centimeters in diameter. Her beautiful white-and-coral skin glowed with health in the sun. Her skin had that touch of blue that sclerotic infants have. The “squintier” I get, the more detail-oriented I become. Because Sara wasn’t there to warn her to put on sunblock, I had to do it.
And, to
my surprise, she knew how to swim. I went to the edge of the pool, with my cane, with my shorts, with my bare saggy chest, with my flip-flops, my straw hat, my long, skinny legs, and I saw her swimming, and again I was moved. She swam beautifully. Not a crawl but a breaststroke, hardly moving the water at all, like an aquatic animal.
“Where did you learn to swim, Ángela?” I asked her when she emerged from the pool and came to sit across from me at the table.
A waiter approached and asked us if we wanted anything (“desire,” he said). I ordered a Coke.
“And for you, madam?”
You could see Ángela was pleased by the waiter’s deference, and she ordered a Coke too.
I’m going to forget about the whole Jacobo business while we’re here. Tomorrow, when we go back home, I’ll keep going with it, which demands all five of my senses and occasionally overwhelms me entirely.
Ángela said she’d learned to swim in the Cauca River, since she’d grown up in Cártago. “Big and ugly, like Cártago” is what we Colombians say to describe things that are…big and ugly – a car, say, or a horse – but I don’t know if it’s accurate with regard to Cártago itself, as I have only a vague recollection of the city. I do recall that it’s large in comparison with the neighboring villages, but I don’t remember it as being particularly ugly.
“My dad would take us to the river, tie a rope around our waist, and toss us into the water.”
“That’s why you swim with your head up out of the water, to keep an eye out for tree trunks coming downstream.”
“Is that why?”
Ángela was quiet a while, idly watching people go in and out of the pool but with her mind on other things. I realized what was coming. And sure enough, a little later she asked me whether she could consult me about a personal matter. Boom, boom, one surprise after another. It turns out her husband is having an affair with a young woman who works on a fern plantation near Ángela’s house. “A trifer farm,” she called it, using the local term for a feathery variety of fern, apparently a close relative of the asparagus, known in English as a trifern. And Ángela, who isn’t exactly in love with her husband from what I can tell, doesn’t know what to do. Really, she’s more confused than angry about the whole thing. She told me the other little details of the situation, and I told her I’d think about it and offer my advice.
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