Difficult Light
Page 10
I could dictate to a recorder and listen to what I’ve said, but I’ve grown tired of words. I’m going to write down the lines I wrote after a walk I took with Ángela along the colonial-era road near her house a year and a half ago. In them, I’m describing what I saw from when we set out to when we reached the banks of the Apulo River, which rushes tumbling down enormous rocks. I will write it in the form of a poem, more akin to a painting, as these were notes for a canvas that my eyes will no longer allow me to paint.
…On the left is a house where they’ve got macaws.
Everywhere is the sound of the river.
You reach a cobblestone road and go up it.
In the valleys there are ferns;
beyond the valleys, coffee plantations,
and sometimes large boulders
overgrown with pitayas.
The wide road ends
and the narrow one continues,
skirting, to the right, bouldered meadows and,
to the left,
steep fields of coffee that sometimes look like thickets,
dense brush.
The sound of the river gets louder and louder.
The road dips and reaches the wooden bridge,
which, above the torrent, unites the green between the two slopes.
This is the bottom. Each stone that hits the water,
and each of them, stone and water, flows together and forms that form that has no name,
as it is there that words run out.
Last night I sat for a long time in my chair on the porch. I went to fetch a bottle of rum I keep in the kitchen and had a few swigs, not too many, slowly, as I felt the darkness enter me, full of invisible stars. I am not sad in my old age – quite the contrary – though it makes me melancholy to think about Jacobo, to think about Sara. “When I’m hungry I eat, when I’m thirsty I drink,” say the Taoists. And I would say, “When I’m hungry I eat, when I’m thirsty I drink, and when I’m sad I get melancholy.”
My life up to now has been a good one. I experienced the other side of pain, its opposite shore, and with oils and pigments I sometimes thought I touched infinity. What more could a human being hope for? It is possible that I have many years ahead of me yet and will live as long as Antonia Latorre Estrada or Ellen Louise Wallace, but I will do that without too many words, and it is possible that in that way I will come to know new territories, other spheres.
I will always still have the big light, the light that has no boundaries, that has no forms.
Breaking news: we’ve just learned that Ángela’s ex-husband beat the fern girl half to death. Ángela’s son said he beat her so hard he split her frenulum. I didn’t even know she had a frenulum. He’s in jail, of course, charged with attempted homicide, and her brothers have threatened to kill him. Nobody believes they’ll actually carry out their threat: they have a reputation for being all talk and no action. I’ll have to look for a temporary gardener while we hire a lawyer and get him released. Assuming they don’t kill him.
I asked Ángela to write the last of these pages. At first she refused because of her spelling. I remembered something she’d said once about towels and towls.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Honey is sweet whether it’s spelled with an o or a u. Besides, I’m only going to dictate one word.”
A word that has been handled too much, like love and so many others, and has lost its power.
“Well, sure, okay,” Ángela said. “So which way do you spell honey, then?”
“You’re awfully astute, aren’t you? No matter what I say, you stay right on track.”
“Awfully what?”
“Sharp, bright. Go on, then, go ahead and bring me the coffee, and then I’ll dictate to you.”
She came back. She picked up the pen. I dictated. She looked at me gravely.
“Here?” she asked. I had left a space amid what I am writing right at this moment, and I’d already inserted the punctuation.
“Here, where I put the exclamation point.”
“Same size of handwriting?”
“What?”
“Same size of handwriting?”
“Yes, so I can see it.”
“All right,” she said, and wrote without hesitating:
Wunderful!
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