I believe at one point I said words are a clumsy medium, and here I am saying they’re supple. Both things are true. It all depends whether they feel like being clumsy or deign to be supple.
Sara was waiting for me at the apartment door. I looked into her eyes to see whether there was any word from Portland. Cristóbal twined around my legs. Sara shook her head, welcoming Ámbar with a hug and complimenting her on her outfit. Old beanpole Arturo slunk out of his room and hugged her too. Ámbar’s eyelids, made up in olive green with a black border, hit the kid at his sternum.
Twenty-Nine
This morning I stayed under the electric blanket the boys brought me longer than usual. I’m not depressed – quite the opposite: everything felt so good there in bed, I was so centered in the world, so at peace, that getting up would have been ridiculous. I recalled the serenity of one of my maternal great-aunts who died at ninety-five (like Ellen Louise Wallace) when she’d stay in bed till nine in the morning or even later, looking at the world with her liquid, blue, tranquil eyes. As a boy I was always amazed by the old woman’s peacefulness; as an adult I forgot about it entirely; and now, suddenly, I don’t just remember that peace and stillness, I understand it – and I don’t just understand it, I share it.
And – words are amazing things – through a bit of sorcery Ellen Louise Wallace turned into my great-aunt Antonia Latorre Estrada, my grandmother Natalia’s spinster sister who always lived with her, and who crocheted and read books and smoked Pielrojas, and who loved us.
I had two great-aunts who were the yin and yang of great-aunts: Antonia, on my mother’s side, and cruel Pepa, on my father’s side, who called her blind nieces “squinty.” Sheer coincidence. Nothing to do with the character of the two sides of the family.
“Is everything okay, Don David?” asked Ángela when she came in at nine thirty to retrieve the mug of coffee she’d placed on my nightstand at seven, and brought me another.
“Yes, Ángela. Leave it on the desk, all right? I’m heading there in a minute.”
“All right. The blankets had you pinned down or something?”
“Sure did.”
“How many spoonfuls of sugar?”
“One. Same as always.”
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine, Ángela. Don’t be a nag.”
“Mr. Persnickety.”
I stayed in bed a while longer and finally got up so the coffee wouldn’t get cold. I turned on the desk lamp, adjusted the magnifying glass, straightened my papers, dipped my pen in the inkpot, and filled the reservoir with blackberry-colored ink. Nineteen years earlier, in 1999, I’d come back from talking with Anthony Stravinsky on Astor Place, entered the apartment, and gone to the bathroom to take a crap and another half-tablet of clonazepam. Everybody had apparently gotten worried when I took so long out on the street, and now they were all gathered in the dining room again.
I came back from the bathroom and encountered the kind of silence that falls when people have been talking about you. I’d glanced in the mirror, and I was definitely looking haggard, but I had no intention of shaving at five thirty in the morning, nor was anyone asking me to. Arturo and Ámbar were playing some complicated game with their hands that had to do with guessing which finger was going to move the other; it might have been of their own invention, and even they didn’t seem to understand the rules very well. Several times he put his hands on the table with his palms facing up, and she’d rest her fingertips on his. When the turn was over, they’d switch positions. They played in silence, listlessly. Ámbar, who had long, slender hands, called him a cheater and suddenly quit playing. Debrah, Venus, and James had been intrigued, of course, as had Sara and I, though only idly, and not enough to ask the kids for any sort of explanation.
Arturo was twenty-four now, and Ámbar was eighteen, and they seemed to be tarrying a bit in adolescence still. In a way, I was happy about that, as I’d never seen the appeal – still don’t, in fact – of becoming serious and responsible. Nor did Sara. After finishing high school at nineteen, Arturo took a year off and traveled to Machu Picchu, Thailand, and other places. He came back and took another year off to tour the United States with a rock band. He came back again and went to college to study art, and that’s what he was doing when he started dating Ámbar. She had a vague plan to study in one of New York’s many design schools.
Pablo, on the other hand, who had decided to take care of Jacobo from the beginning, had always been more serious and responsible, and he hadn’t seen much of the world. He found freedom in his beautiful tattoos and his camera lens out on the streets. He’d had a lot of girlfriends, or none, and sometimes he brought them home and introduced them to us, but none of them had lasted, for no particular reason. Pablo, as was often the case with the protagonists of the romance novels that my Great-Aunt Antonia so loved reading – and which I read too, as a boy, because she lent them to me – still hadn’t found the person who was meant for him, his soul mate, the love of his life.
Thirty
“Lunch is ready, Mr. Persnickety. Don’t ignore it too,” Ángela said from the doorway, and I turned off the light and closed my eyes to rest them a few seconds. I opened them and looked out the window at the blurry purple of the flowers on the bougainvillea vine that frames it. Everything shimmered, went hazy or liquid. “It’s going to get cold,” Ángela said.
Lunch, nap, coffee. I accompanied Ángela to a bakery where they sell the best caramel jam in the country, ten blocks from here. We passed the church, with its oddly wide-spaced spires, and Ángela went in to pray for a minute while I waited on a bench outside, my chin resting on the knob of my cane. Ángela returned. We walked down a narrow street undulating with vans and cars, the world liquid, like a tank of clear oil. Home. I rested in bed a few minutes. I can’t go out for even a short walk without needing a nap afterward.
Magnifying glass.
Then Michael O’Neal called and talked to Sara. I was making myself some coffee. My eyelids were heavy and my eyes were burning. “Yes, sweetie,” she was saying. Sara’s English was heavily accented with the Cauca Valley, the way mine is accented with Medellín, but hers, while it might have been less correct than my own, was much more fluid, effective, and expressive. Here is what she said to Michael: “Six their time, nine here. Yes, sweetie. Of course, yes. I think calm, I think. What did you say? Yes, yes, yes, yes. He is coming, yes, at six their time, that seems definite. Oh, Michael, sweetie,” said Sara, and her voice cracked. “Yes, yes, yes. Hugs to you too. We’ll call you. Yes.”
Not the burning bush, which burned without being consumed. And I was being consumed. I drank the coffee and went to fetch the other half-tablet of clonazepam, as confinement and suffocation were bearing down on me again. Sara asked me if I was okay and I said I was okay. She asked again if I was sure I was okay, but I didn’t tell her not to be a nag the way I did Ángela this morning, though I came close. Instead I told her I was okay, and she sensed the hint of impatience in my voice and left me alone.
“Bring Mr. Persnickety another cup of coffee, would you?” I said to Ángela a little while ago, by way of apology for my grumpy mood this morning, and she pretended not to forgive me, her expression stern. A moment later she reappeared with the coffee, smiling.
There have been some major developments on that front. Just as I predicted, Ángela’s husband ran off with the fern girl. Ángela doesn’t know where the two of them are living, and she doesn’t much care. But that’s not the news. The news is that he keeps coming to work in the garden and she keeps serving him breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as a worker now, but they don’t speak to each other. At first they tried to use me as a go-between and I flatly refused. Leave notes for each other, work it out however you wish, but don’t stick me in the middle of this, I said. Just picture an elderly gentleman of seventy-eight like me telling another woman’s ex-husband, “See here, José Luis, Ángela wa
nts to tell you breakfast is ready.”
And the ex-husband replying, “It’s Juan Pablo, Don David. José Luis is my son. Thank you very much. Please tell her I’m on my way.”
“Ángela, Juan Luis is on his way.”
“Thank you, Don David. Who?”
That bit was pretty funny, Sara would have said. Not sidesplitting, mind you. But amusing.
I’m a serious person but, as I understand it – and I hope I’m not mistaken – I have a sense of humor. I know this because at one point I used to write letters, many letters, to anyone who would read them. People said they were funny, and it must be true, because I had fun writing them. That’s why I wrote them, really. Sara received a lot of my correspondence, poor thing. Sometimes I’d leave the letter on her desk and wait in my studio with my ears pricked to hear if she laughed. And she said they were lovely, my letters, despite my tendency to get deep sometimes, or to complain about being down in the dumps.
At the moment, despite the events I’m describing, or perhaps because of them, I see that on the whole I’m enjoying myself. The truth is that it’s been a long time since all that – nineteen years – and only in certain instants does the pain in my heart stab me as it did back then; only occasionally do I feel the flames and the devastation as acutely as I did in those days. I am still crushed by what happened, of course, and it makes me smoke cigarettes and take naps, because it was tough, but joy always, or almost always, sprouts like a piece of wood in water, no matter the depth of the horror a person has experienced.
And the whole Ángela situation made me realize that, at my age, when you’re hungry you don’t need to be called. When the hour approaches, the ex-husband gradually moves to a strategic distance from the table on the back porch where she serves him his meals, diligently weeding or hoeing while keeping a constant eye on the table. Ángela could torture him and dawdle ten or fifteen minutes till Juan Pablo’s stomach is growling, or serve him half an hour early, when he’s not paying attention, so the soup goes cold and bugs fly into it, but she doesn’t. She’s too professional to stoop to such manipulations. She serves right on time and leaves, and he slinks over to the table. We humans are monkeys with a million little tricks.
Thirty-One
Sara finished talking to Michael and remained there a while, sitting across from me in the living room, without saying anything. The Earth’s gravitational pull had increased.
“I met a former Russian who makes his living selling records to customers on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue,” I told her to distract her. “They call him the Stravinsky of Vinyl.”
I told her about his travels.
“Do you think it’s true?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know, I think so. It’s too complicated to have made it all up, don’t you think?”
“Do you think he’ll change his mind?”
I didn’t know whether she wanted Jacobo to change his mind or not.
“I don’t think so,” I told her, though I did know what I wanted.
At daybreak, fatigue overwhelmed me. I lay down on the bed for a moment and woke up at ten. The sun was pouring through the windows that looked out on cemetery. Cristóbal, stretched out on the sill, was glowing.
It had been a long time since I’d seen sunlight.
In life, major events mix together with minor ones, and after a long time has passed, perspectives are lost. Nobody knows what is minor, what is major. Nobody knows if there are things that are less important than others. Nobody knows if things have some kind of order or if they are arbitrary. Right now, for example, the most important thing is that the fern girl is making Ángela’s ex-husband’s life miserable. She just told me about it. His suffering began practically the next day after they started living together. She’s cheating on him, she’s taking his money, she mocks him in public, she makes him do the housekeeping, she doesn’t feed him, and she won’t sleep with him.
Ángela and I smile at each other.
We went to Bogotá again on Saturday, to the eye doctor. There’s nothing to be done. The doctor doesn’t know anything about anything. Hardly any patients with macular degeneration end up blind. Except me. I won’t go totally blind, as I think I already said: I’ll still see light and some shadows and forms. But anyway. We went to lunch. There downtown I felt the movement of the city, the pulse, as they call it. We went to the Parque Nacional to be around people and eat roasted corn on the cob, which I have a hard time chewing these days but have loved as long as I can remember. We sat on a sunny bench and Ángela’s son told me the story of the time he was going along a dirt road and came across a man carrying a large quantity of weapons. “He had pistols, revolvers, even submachine guns, Don David.” Ángela’s son said he kept going and five minutes later came across another man carrying even more weapons than the first. Ángela’s son has a knack for the absurd, that’s what he likes, and he lets images hang in the air a while, like a vision or the tolling of a bell. Ten minutes later he came upon people taking apart the filming gear for a gunfight scene for the soap opera The Chestnut Filly, which takes place in a pasture. Ángela’s son always pays close attention to things, so he must have stopped to ask the production crew the name of the soap opera, and he may have even asked them to describe the episode, but if that’s how it happened, he didn’t tell me that part.
This is the last time I’ll be coming to the eye doctor. It’s the last time I’ll eat roasted corn and sit in the sun in the Parque Nacional. Many things will forever be illuminated in my heart: this park; Central Park; the Botanical Garden in Brooklyn; the sea at Coney Island; the light in La Guajira on the Caribbean coast; the light in Islamorada, in the Keys; the light in Medellín during my boyhood; the mountains east of Bogotá; the sea by the Cape Florida Lighthouse in Miami, before the hurricane uprooted the lovely Australian pines that grew there; the cormorants that perched in those pines; Sara’s smile; Venus’s smile and the smiles of her children; the schools of green fish in the East River; Jacobo’s shining, intelligent eyes; James’s musical voice; all of Debrah (she’s small); the tattoos of Pablo, our illustrated giant, stable as a rock; and Arturo’s long fingers, so similar to mine.
All of that, in minute detail, here with me.
Thirty-Two
Cristóbal glowed in the sun on the windowsill as if he were being stroked by the hand of God. I went to the living room and knew just from looking at Sara that Jacobo had died. I felt a sharp pain in the pit of my stomach, a rush of nausea, and saw a reddish shimmer. When I regained consciousness a few minutes later, I was sitting on the sofa with Sara beside me. Cristóbal had moved to the living room window and was still there, full of light.
Just then I realized that everyone was there. I looked at the line that sun was tracing, sharp as a knife, across the floorboards.
“What about Pablo?”
“He’s already on the plane,” Sara told me.
Now we had to wait for them to call us and go to retrieve Jacobo. The four of us would go to Portland. Pablo would have to make the trip again. The blade of sun on the floor was moving imperceptibly, and the luminous rectangle was shrinking on the hardwood. Cristóbal jumped down from the window to the floor and walked with his light toward Arturo’s room, like a beacon.
We talked in the living room, and then in the dining room, about practical, specific things. We talked about how there was the remote possibility that we would get into legal trouble and what the best thing to do would be in that case. We talked about the logistics of death: the cremation process, the cost. We would use Díaz Funeral Home on Second Street, and the ceremony would be small and quick, just as Jacobo had wanted it.
Luckily nobody said his death had been for the best. It was a nasty cliché, and anyway nobody knew for sure whether it was true. We had lunch. The sun shone on the trees in the cemetery and lit up the Virgins and crosses, but it no longer came into the house. The authorities called from Po
rtland. Sara took the call and handled it well. We would head out there tonight, she told them in the end. Pablo called at about four to say he’d landed in La Guardia, and we told him not to bother coming home since all of us would be flying out from there at six thirty.
Sara told me that Michael O’Neal had called at about nine thirty in the morning and that when she’d told him the news he’d exclaimed “Yes! Yes!” twice, the way sports fans do when their team wins.
“Poor Michael,” Sara remarked, and I didn’t know whether she’d said because the boy was in so much pain or because she thought he was a little naïve.
We did everything. We even threw his ashes in the East River one sunny afternoon. When I was able to return to my work and looked at the painting again, I retouched the foam – which had been good, very good, too good – and today it’s hanging up somewhere in Boston.
Time passed. The rest has not been silence, no. The silence will be here any minute now.
Thirty-Three
I asked Ángela to read me the last ten pages of these writings, and she had a hard time deciphering my handwriting. At this point I’m just guessing as I write, as my eyesight fades, so I’ve decided to stop and focus on looking at the world with the eyes of the spirit – to listen to music, which Ángela is going to have to learn to play on my computer, and listen to the tanagers. I think a lot about Jacobo, I think about Sara, I think about the two children I have left who come to spend time with me for a few days every year, about Venus, who comes with them too and reminds me so much of Sara at her age, and I feel warmth in my heart. Venus has two ten-year-old boys, identical twins, black, the best-behaved, gentlest, gangliest boys you can imagine.
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