The Word of the Speechless

by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

  At long last, one hot afternoon, we set out on the trip. It had been postponed several times, I assumed because there had been one obstacle or another to us being alone at her house. I had left the strategy around this country tryst totally in Barbara’s hands, but I feared that the festival would end before we managed to carry it out.

  But on that hot afternoon, Barbara led me to believe that the moment had come, and we started to walk far away from Lenin Square till we reached a train station. There were just three train cars that ran regularly between one of Warsaw’s ports and the suburbs to the south, and they were crammed with proletarians. When I boarded I realized that I was probably the only foreigner who dared depart from the more or less official itinerary to which we were restricted. The trip therefore became, in addition to a love escapade, a forbidden act.

  The train rode through suburbs, then through farm fields, and twenty minutes later it stopped in a village, where Barbara had me get off. We picked up two communally owned bicycles from a depot at the station and continued on our way, in what became for me, from that point on, a trip tinged with unreality. We rode along dirt paths lined with trees and garden walls; we rode past old and ancestral homes surrounded by gardens and orchards; we passed peasants who stopped to watch us go by; we roused rural dogs who barked wildly behind fences; and we rode fast, Barbara in front of me, pedaling furiously, and I behind her, fascinated by her round head and her golden ponytail.

  Finally, she stopped in front of a rather small house with a wooden gate that opened onto the road. I followed her, and together—laughing, happy, sweaty, and pushing our bicycles—we entered the front garden. Barbara took my hand and we ran up the wood stairs that led to the front door. She pulled a key out of her purse and opened it. We entered a dark foyer, then a living room, which I quickly examined—old, country furniture—looking for which sofa we would rest on for a moment, to prepare the mood, to speak however we could, words no longer mattered to me, my hands would be eloquent, and I felt so confident that I didn’t give a damn about the man with a big mustache who was watching me from a carved wooden doorframe, and Barbara saying boom-boom, cutting her leg with her hand, then doing tac-tac-tac-tac, explaining that this was her father, a disabled war veteran and railroad employee.

  But we didn’t stop in the living room. Barbara was in a headlong rush, for once again she dragged me by the hand down the hallway, pushed open a door, and we found ourselves in a bedroom, where the first thing I saw was a rather narrow bed covered with a flowery cretonne bedspread. A bed. How long the road had been from our first meeting to this small space, as plain as a tomb, but so perfectly adequate, where our bodies would finally be able to speak a common language!

  Barbara took off her dress and approached the bed, but instead of lying down on it she walked around it, in quite a hurry to get to an enormous wardrobe, all the time speaking to me in Polish without caring if I understood, then abruptly opened its doors.

  Inside were half a dozen skirts on hangers. Barbara took them out and tried them on one by one, pointing to their printed designs, their clasps and zippers, explaining something about their cut and style, speaking that demonic language that I now understood without comprehending, full of excitement, until finally, not taking off the last one, she grew quiet in front of the garments piled on the bed and stared at me eagerly.

  “Many skirts,” I said, finally.

  But she seemed to be waiting for something else and continued to interrogate me with her gaze.

  “Pretty skirts,” I added, “bonitas, molto bellas, beautiful, many skirts, pretty skirts.”

  She understood and smiled. Sighing, she took a moment to look at her garments and then, slowly, she placed them back on their hangers and hung them up in the wardrobe. She took out a blouse and put it on. As she closed the wardrobe doors, she kept smiling and indicated that it was time to leave. We didn’t stop in the living room this time, either—out of the corner of my eye, I saw the mustachioed man’s gaze, surly, fierce—and found ourselves in the garden picking up our bicycles. I was woozy, addled, dragging along behind her like a rag doll; I got on the bike and again found myself pedaling down the flowery lane on the way back to the station, behind the round head and the flamboyant ponytail.

  We left the bicycles in the same room at the station, and minutes later we were on the suburban train back to Warsaw. Barbara wasn’t talking, but I sensed neither boredom nor sadness in her silence, but rather something more akin to relief, satisfaction, and delightful serenity. Every time she looked at me, she smiled as if at her dearest pal, one who shared all her secrets and who had earned the right to contemplate, rather than her nakedness, her belongings.

  The next day we left for Paris. The train cars were packed to the brim with young people drinking, singing, and bidding farewell through the windows to their ephemeral lovers. In vain I looked for Barbara among the people on the platform.

  It was months later when I received her letter.

  Paris, 1972

  RIDDER AND THE PAPERWEIGHT

  TO VISIT Charles Ridder I had to travel across the width of Belgium by train. Considering the size of that country, it was like traveling from a city center to a more or less distant suburb. Madame Ana and I took the express from Antwerp at eleven in the morning, and a little before noon, after making one connection, we found ourselves on the platform in Blankenberge, a remote town on a graceless plain near the French border.

  “We walk from here,” Madame Ana said.

  And off we went across the flat terrain, recalling that moment in Madame Ana’s library when I randomly picked up one of Ridder’s books and didn’t put it down until I’d finished reading it.

  “Then you didn’t want to read anything but Ridder.”

  That was true. I spent a month reading his books. Timeless, they took place in a country with no name and no borders, and were as likely to feature a flamenco carnival as a Spanish jamboree or a Bavarian beer festival. Through their pages strode burly men, charlatans, and heavy drinkers who laid maidens low in meadows and challenged each other to single combat, in which strength usually triumphed over skill. His books were devoid of elegance, but they were colorful, violent, and lewd, and had the strength of a peasant’s hand crushing a clod of clay soil.

  Noting my enthusiasm, Madame Ana told me that Ridder was her godfather, hence our stroll through a field on our way to his home in the countryside to pay a prearranged visit. Not far away I caught sight of the gray, turbulent sea, which looked to me at that moment as if it had been excerpted from my country’s landscape and inserted here. It was rather strange; maybe it was the sand dunes, the grass smothered by the sand, and the tenacity with which the waves crashed against the arid coastline.

  When we turned onto another path, we caught sight of the house, a banal house like many local farmhouses, built behind a corral and surrounded by a stone wall. We reached the door, preceded by an entourage of dogs and chickens.

  “I haven’t seen him for at least ten years,” Madame Ana said. “He lives in complete isolation.”

  We were greeted by an old woman, who could have been his housekeeper or his nursemaid.

  “The gentleman is expecting you.”

  Ridder was sitting in an armchair in his living room/study, a blanket draped over his legs, and when he saw us he didn’t move a muscle. Based on the size of the armchair and the shape of his boots, I could see that he was an extremely burly man, and I immediately understood that there was not so much as a crack between him and his work, that this old corpulent man—ruddy, gray, his mustache yellowed by tobacco—was the model, now probably broken-down, for his collection of colossi.

  Madame Ana explained to him that I was a friend from South America and that I had wanted to meet him. Ridder indicated that I should sit down facing him while his goddaughter gave him news of the family, of everything that had happened during the long years they had gone without seeing each other. Ridder listened to her, bored, without offering a single wor
d in response, staring at his own two enormous weather-beaten and freckled hands. Only every once in a while did he lift an eye to look at me from under his gray eyebrows, a quick blue glance, which only at those moments seemed to take on an irresistible sharpness. He would then fall back into his absentmindedness, his lethargy.

  The housekeeper had brought a bottle of wine with two glasses and tea for her employer. Our offer of a toast found no response in Ridder, who was now playing with his thumb and not touching his tea. Madame Ana kept talking, and Ridder seemed, if not pleased, at least accustomed to this chatter that furnished the silence and kept all possible interrogation under wraps.

  Taking advantage of a pause in Madame Ana’s account, I finally managed to slip in a sentence.

  “I’ve read all your books, Mr. Ridder, and have truly enjoyed them. I think you are a great writer. I don’t think I exaggerate: a great writer.”

  Far from thanking me, Ridder merely riveted his blue eyes on me, this time with a certain degree of astonishment, then pointed vaguely to the library in his living room, which took up an entire wall from floor to ceiling. In his gesture I thought I understood his response: So much has been written.

  “But tell me, Mr. Ridder,” I continued, “what world do your characters live in? What era, what place?”

  “Era? Place?” he asked and, turning to Madame Ana, he asked her about a dog who had apparently belonged to someone in the family.

  Madame Ana told him the story of the dog, dead now many years, and Ridder seemed to derive a special pleasure from the story, for he tasted his tea and lit a cigarette.

  At that point the housekeeper entered with a small rolling table, lunch was served, and we would eat in the living room so the gentleman would not have to get out of his chair.

  Lunch was painfully boring. Madame Ana, having exhausted her repertoire of news items, didn’t know what to say. Ridder opened his mouth only to guzzle his food, with a voracity that stunned me. I was thinking about the disappointment, about the ferocity with which life destroys the most beautiful images we can make of it. Ridder possessed the size of his characters, but not the voice, not the inspiration. Ridder was, I now saw, a hollow statue.

  Only when we came to dessert, and after drinking half a glass of wine, did he feel like talking a little. He told a story of a hunt, though the telling was convoluted, incomprehensible, for it took place in Old Castile as well as on the plains of Flanders, and the protagonist was alternately Phillip II and Ridder himself. In the end, a completely idiotic tale.

  Then came the coffee and the boredom grew denser. I looked at Madame Ana out of the corner of my eye, almost begging that we leave already, that she find an excuse to get us out of there. Ridder, moreover, addled by the food, was nodding off in his armchair, paying absolutely no attention to either of us.

  Just to do something, anything, I stood up, lit a cigarette, and took a few steps around the living room/study. It was only then that I saw it: cube-shaped, blue, transparent, with beveled edges, it was on Ridder’s desk behind a bronze inkwell. It was the same exact paperweight that had accompanied me from my earliest childhood until I was twenty years old, its exact replica. It had belonged to my grandfather, who had brought it from Europe at the end of the last century; he had left it to my father, and I had inherited it along with his books and papers. I could never find another one like it in Lima. It was heavy, but at the same time diaphanous, truly useful. One night in Miraflores, I was awoken by a concert of cats who were prowling on the rooftop. I went out into the garden and shouted at them threateningly. But when they continued to make a racket, I returned to my room and looked for something to throw at them, and the first thing I saw was the paperweight. I picked it up, went back out to the garden, and threw it against the bougainvillea, where the cats were yowling. They ran off, and I was able to sleep peacefully.

  The first thing I did the next day when I rose was to go to the roof to retrieve my paperweight. Impossible to find. I searched the rooftop inch by inch, pushing aside the branches of the bougainvillea one by one, but there was no trace of it. It was lost, gone forever.

  But now I was looking at it again, shining in the semidarkness of this Belgian interior. I walked over and picked it up, weighed it in my hands, examined its scratched edges, held it up to the light of the window, discovered its tiny air bubbles captured in the crystal. When I turned to Ridder to ask him about it, I saw that he had woken up from his nap and was staring at me anxiously.

  “This is odd,” I said, showing him the paperweight. “Where did you get it?”

  Ridder rubbed his thumb for a moment.

  “I was in the corral, about ten years ago,” he said. “It was night, there was a moon, a marvelous summer moon. The chickens were making a racket. I thought it was the neighbor’s dog prowling around the house. Suddenly, an object flew over the fence and landed at my feet. I picked it up. It was this paperweight.

  “But, how did it get here?”

  This time Ridder smiled. “You threw it.”

  Paris, 1971

  NOTHING TO BE DONE, MONSIEUR BARUCH

  MONSIEUR Baruch was wholly unaware that the postman kept pushing advertising circulars under the door. In the last three days, one had come from the Electrotherapy Society, and on the first page was a photograph of a man with the face of an imbecile under a headline that read: “Thanks to Dr. Klein’s method, I am now a happy man”; there was also a flyer for Ajax detergent, offering a discount of five cents per family-size package if bought in the next ten days; finally, there came illustrated circulars offering the memoirs of Sir Winston Churchill, payable in fourteen monthly payments; a complete tool kit for home carpentry, whose pièce de résistance was an electric carpenter’s brace; and finally a flyer in particularly bright colors on The Art of Writing and Composition, which the mailman pushed in with such prowess that it was on the verge of falling directly into Monsieur Baruch’s hand. But he, in spite of being close to the door and with his eyes facing it, found little interest in any of these subjects, as he had been dead for three days.

  Precisely three days earlier, Monsieur Baruch had woken up in the middle of the afternoon, after a night of total insomnia during which he had tried to remember in order all the beds he had slept in over the last twenty years and all the songs that had been popular in his youth. The first thing he did when he got up was go to the sink in the kitchen to check if it was still clogged, and if—as on the previous few days—in order to wash, he would need to fill a pot with water and rinse his fingers and the tip of his nose.

  Then, without going to the trouble of changing out of his pajamas, he threw himself, out of habit, into a problem that had preoccupied him ever since Simón had let him live in that house one year earlier, and that he had never managed to solve: which of the two rooms in the apartment would be the dining room/living room and which the bedroom/office? Since his arrival, he had weighed the pros and cons of both options, and every day new objections arose that prevented him from settling on one. His puzzlement arose from the fact that both rooms were absolutely symmetrical with relation to the front door—which opened onto a tiny entryway only large enough for a coat rack—and both were furnished in similar fashion, with a sofa bed, a table, a wardrobe, two chairs, and a nonworking fireplace. The only difference was that the room on the right led into the kitchen and the one on the left into the lavatory. To have his bedroom on the right meant that the lavatory would be beyond his immediate reach, and an old problem with his bladder forced him there with unusual frequency; having it on the left implied more distance from the kitchen and his nocturnal cups of coffee, which had become a necessity of an almost spiritual order.

  For all those reasons, Monsieur Baruch had slept alternatively in one or the other room and eaten at one or the other table ever since he first arrived in that house, depending on the successive and always provisional solutions he found to his dilemma. This kind of nomadic lifestyle that he led in his own home had produced a paradoxical feelin
g: on the one hand, he had the impression that he lived in a much bigger house, for he could imagine that he had two dining rooms and two bedroom/offices; but at the same time he realized that the similarities between the two rooms actually reduced the size of his house, for it meant the useless duplication of space, as can be derived from a mirror, for in the second room he could find nothing that wasn’t in the first, and to try to add one to the other would be cheating, like someone who, while counting the books in his library, counts separately two exact editions of the same text.

  Monsieur Baruch was unable to resolve the problem that day, either, and leaving it up in the air once more, he returned to the kitchen to prepare his breakfast. With his steaming cup of coffee in one hand and his dry toast in the other, he sat down at the nearest table, took meticulous stock of his frugal meal, then moved to the table in the contiguous room, where a folder with writing paper awaited him. He picked up a single sheet and wrote a few brief lines, then placed this in an envelope. On it he wrote: Madame Renée Baruch, 17 rue de la Joie, Lyon. Underneath, with a fountain pen and red ink, he added: Personal and Urgent.

  Leaving the envelope in a place on the table where it could be seen, Monsieur Baruch mentally surveyed the rest of his day and chose two actions that he customarily carried out before he had to once again confront the night: buy a newspaper and make another cup of coffee and dry toast. While waiting for night to fall, he wandered from one room to the other, looking out their respective windows. The one on the right gave onto the hallway of a factory, where he never knew what they fabricated, but it must have been a place of penitence for it was only ever frequented by black, Algerian, and Iberian workers. The one of the left looked out on the roof of a garage, behind which, if he made an effort, he could glimpse a sliver of the street down which cars always drove with their lights already on. A fire truck also went by with its siren blaring. Far away, a house was on fire.