•
A few days later he took a short trip to Lima to attend a performance of Aida by an Italian opera company. Then he tried to have some fun, but it was winter on the coast, it was drizzling, people walked around wearing scarves and coughing, the city seemed to have closed its doors against intruders; so he grew bored, missed his hermetic life at the hacienda, and abruptly returned to El Rosedal.
Upon entering the courtyard, he was disturbed by the presence of the turret rising from the main wing, having suddenly become fully aware of the aberrant nature of this minaret, to which he had never ascended due to its rotten staircase. It was clearly out of place, fulfilled no function, and at the slightest tremor would collapse, even if perhaps at one time it served to scan the horizon in search of an invisible enemy. But maybe it had another purpose; whoever ordered its construction must have had a specific goal. And, of course—how could he not have thought of this sooner?—it could serve as a privileged vantage point to contemplate one very particular thing: the rose garden.
He immediately instructed one of Pumari’s sons to repair the staircase and do whatever else was necessary to make it possible to reach the observatory. As it was already late in the day, Calixto had to work half the night replacing stairs, tying rope, hammering in hooks, so that the next morning the way would be clear, and Silvio could climb to the top.
He had eyes for nothing but the rose garden, nothing existed for him but to confirm what he had seen partially from the mountain: the rose beds, which seemed to be arbitrarily placed when viewed from the ground, actually composed a series of shapes. Silvio could clearly make out a circle, a rectangle, two more circles, another rectangle, and two final circles. What could this mean? Who had decided that the roses should be planted in these patterns? He retained the drawing in his head, and as soon as he descended, he reproduced it on paper. For long hours he studied this simple and asymmetrical drawing without understanding anything. Until finally he realized that he was not looking at an ornamental drawing but rather a code, one sign that pointed to another sign: the Morse code. The circles were dots and the rectangles were dashes. In vain he searched for a dictionary or other book that could confirm this. The old man, Paternoster, had left only treatises on veterinary science and growing fruit trees.
The following morning he rode on the milk cart to town and searched futilely through Tarma’s only bookstore for the illuminating text. The only thing left to do was go to the post office and consult the telegraph operator. He was very busy—it was the busiest time of day—and he promised to send a copy of the Morse code alphabet with the milkman the following day.
Silvio had never waited so anxiously for anything. The milk cart usually returned around noon, but Silvio was already standing at the gateway to the hacienda much earlier, watching the road. He had only just barely heard the wheels creaking around the curve when he rushed to grab the piece of paper out of Esteban Pumari’s hand. It was in an envelope, and as soon as he got to his bedroom, he tore it open. He picked up paper and pencil and turned the dots and dashes into letters to find the word RES.
A small word that left him confused. What was res? In Spanish, it was a beast, a head of cattle, like those that abounded on the hacienda. Of course. The original owner, a fanatic rancher, had undoubtedly wanted to represent in the garden the name of the animal species that he raised on his land and upon which his fortune depended: res, either a cow, a bull, or a calf.
Disappointed, Silvio threw the piece of paper on the table. He really felt like laughing. And he did laugh, but without joy, noticing that the wallpaper in his bedroom depicted flower arrangements in addition to still lifes. RES. The word had to mean something else. In Latin, of course, according to what he remembered, res meant “thing.” But, what was a thing? A thing was everything. Silvio tried to dig deeper, to wriggle his way into the depths of this word, but he saw nothing and everything, from a jellyfish to the towers of the cathedral in Lima. Everything was a thing, but it didn’t do him any good to know that. Wherever he looked, this word led him to the infinite sum of all things contained in the universe. He pondered it for a few more minutes, then, sick of the futility of his investigations, he decided to forget about it. Surely he had started down the wrong path.
In the middle of the night, however, he woke up and realized that he had been dreaming about climbing up to the tower, about the rose garden, about the drawing. His mind had not stopped working on it. There it was, in his mind’s eye, written in the garden and on that piece of paper, the word RES. And what if he turned it around? By reversing the letters it spelled ser. Silvio lit a lamp, ran to the table, and wrote SER in big letters. This discovery filled him with jubilation, but he soon realized that ser was as vague and broad a word as “thing” and much more so than res. Ser, in Spanish, meant “being” or “to be.” But what? Ser was everything, too. Should he understand this word, moreover, as the noun or as the infinitive? He racked his brains for a while. If it was the noun, it had the same infinite meaning and was therefore just as useless as “thing.” If it was the infinitive, it lacked an object, not indicating what it was necessary to be. This time, he sank deep into a disillusioned slumber.
In the following days, he went into Tarma quite frequently in the afternoons and without any precise purpose, to take a stroll around the plaza, wander into a store, or see a movie. The residents, surprised by his reappearance after his many months of reclusion, greeted him warmly. They noticed that he was more sociable and seemed to be wanting diversion. He even accepted an invitation to a ball that Don Armando Santa Lucía was giving at his home to celebrate having won the prize as the region’s best potato grower. As always at such gatherings, Silvio found the best of Tarma society and the most select visitors to the region, as well as the single women from years past who, now more dried-up and wrinkled, had reached that twilight stage of maturity that foreshadowed a prompt descent into despair. Silvio enjoyed chatting with the landowners, listening to their advice about renewing his herds and improving the distribution of his milk, but just as the dancing began, a cunning idea came to mind, an idea that burst forth like a firecracker from the depth of his being and blinded him: it wasn’t a word that was hidden in the garden, they were initials.
Without anybody understanding why, he abruptly left the gathering and took the last bus up the mountain, which could drop him off at his hacienda on the way. Upon arrival, he sat down at his desk and once more wrote out the word RES. As nothing came to mind, he reversed it and wrote SER. Immediately he thought of the sentence Soy Excesivamente Rico, I am exceedingly wealthy. But this was obviously a false lead. He was not a wealthy man, much less exceedingly so. The hacienda gave him enough to live on but only because he was single and frugal. He went back and studied the letters and came up with Serás Enterrado Rápido, you will be buried quickly, which gave him a start, despite it seeming like an unfounded prediction. He kept coming up with other sentences, fleshing them out. Sábado Entrante Reparar, to take notice next Saturday. Of what? Sólo Ensayando Regresarás, only rehearsing will you return. Where to? Sócrates Envejeciendo Rejuveneció, Socrates rejuvenated as he aged, which was a stupid and contradictory phrase. Sirio Engendró Rocío, a doubtfully poetic phrase as well as being ambiguous, for he didn’t know if it meant that the star Sirius or an inhabitant of Syria engendered dew. There were an infinite number of sentences one could compose out of words beginning with these three letters. Silvio filled several pages of his notebook with sentences, including some as enigmatic and nonsensical as Sálvate Enfrentando Rio, save yourself facing river, Sucedióle Encontrar Rupia, he happened to find a rupee, or Sóbate Encarnizadamente Rodilla, fiercely rub knee, all of which meant simply replacing one code for another.
Without a doubt he had embarked on a futile journey. Out of sheer doggedness, he continued to try other sentences. All of them led to the ludicrous.
•
For months he buried himself in routine, that simulacrum of happiness. He slept late, drank s
everal cups of coffee accompanied by their respective cigarettes, took a turn under the arcade, gave instructions to the Pumaris, went down to Tarma from time to time on futile errands, and when he grew truly bored, he traveled to Lima, where he became even more bored. As he still didn’t know anybody in the capital, he’d wander through the downtown streets among the thousands of rushing pedestrians, buy trifles in the shops, treat himself to a good meal, sometimes even pluck up the courage to go to a cabaret, and on very rare occasions fornicate with a lady of the night, from which he always departed unsatisfied and dejected. And he’d return to Tarma with a vacuum in his soul, only to roam around his land, smell a rose, taste a peach, leaf through old newspapers, and wait anxiously for the shadows to arrive and carry away forever the debris of the wasted day.
One morning, while strolling through the rose garden, he ran into Felícito Pumari, who took care of the garden, and he asked him what he did to keep it so flourishing, how he watered, where he planted, how he chose which roses to plant, when and why. The lad told him only that he replaced and replanted the bushes that died. And it had always been like that. That’s what his father had taught him, and his father, and his father before him.
Silvio thought he had heard something encouraging in this response: there was an order that had always been respected, a message had been transmitted, nobody dared transgress, tradition was perpetuated. This sent him back to his decoding, back to the beginning, and he made a great effort to find, if not an explanation, at least a purpose.
Res was a very unambiguous word and did not require any explanation. Motivated by the characteristics of his property and the advice of the landowners, he decided to increase his herd; he obtained expensive studs and quality cows, and after some wise crossbreeding, his herd’s productivity improved considerably. Milk production increased by one hundred percent, he had to buy new carts to keep up with distribution, and his herd’s renown spread throughout the region. After a while, however, the hacienda had reached its limit, and stagnated. As did Silvio’s mood, for he derived no particular pleasure from having achieved a model dairy operation. His efforts had brought him a bit more profit and prestige, but that was all. He was still an obsolete bachelor who had buried his musical vocation early on and was still asking himself why the hell he had come into this world. So he abandoned his livestock breeding operation and stopped micromanaging his herd. Out of pure idleness he had let grow a scraggly and reddish beard. Also out of idleness, he returned with renewed interest to his clues, which remained undeciphered on his desk. RES = THING.
THING. Good. Maybe it meant he should acquire many things. So he made a list of everything he didn’t have, and he realized he had nothing. An airplane, for example, a racehorse, a Hindu butler, a tie with red polka dots, a magnifying glass, and so on indefinitely. Once again he found himself face-to-face with infinity. He then decided that he should make a list of the things he had and began in his bedroom: a bed, a nightstand, two sheets, two blankets, three lamps, a wardrobe, but he had filled just two sheets in his notebook when he encountered unsolvable problems: the figures in his wallpaper, for example, were they one or several things? Did he have to write down and describe each one? And when he went into the orchard, did he have to count the trees, and worse, the peaches, and even worse, the leaves? It was nonsensical, but from that angle he could also approach the infinite. He even had the thought that if the only thing he possessed was his own body, he would have spent years counting each pore, each hair, and cataloging these things, for they belonged to him. He therefore threw his inventory up in the air and looked again at his formula, reversed it, then leaned his elbows on the table in front of the word SER.
This time, he found it luminous. Ser was not only the infinitive of the verb and a noun, but was also an imperative, an order: Be! That’s precisely what he should do. Then he asked himself what he should be and discovered that what he never should have been was what he was being at that moment: a pathetic fool surrounded by cows and eucalyptus trees who spent whole days shut away in a barren house playing with letter combinations in a notebook. A few ideas of what he should be passed through his head. “To be” one of those dandies strolling down the Jirón de la Unión, tossing out compliments to the lovely ladies. “To be” an excellent javelin thrower and surpass even by a few centimeters that horse-faced kid at school who would throw any object whatsoever whether round, short, or sharp, farther than anybody else. Or “to be”—why not?—what he had always wanted to be: a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, for example, whose photo he saw many times as a child in Life magazine, dressed in an impeccable tuxedo playing his instrument with his eyes closed in front of an orchestra to a rapturous audience.
The idea didn’t sound so bad, so he dug out his instrument, removed it from its case, and began to do the exercises from his childhood. He applied himself to this task with a discipline that surprised him. Within a few months, practicing five or six hours a day, his fingering became quite skillful, and months later he could play solos and sonatas with unusual virtuosity. But he had reached a plateau and needed a teacher. The idea of traveling to Lima for lessons disheartened him. Fortunately, as was not uncommon in the provinces, there was a little-known violinist who played at church, burials, and weddings, who was a brilliant musician and performer but had failed to attract universal admiration because he was only 1.3 meters tall and had always lived in an Andean town. Rómulo Cárdenas was thrilled at the prospect of giving him lessons, and he saw therein the possibility of fulfilling his own lifelong dream, impossible until that moment because he was the only violinist in Tarma: to one day perform the Concerto for Two Violins, by Johann Sebastian Bach.
But there he was, Silvio Lombardi. For weeks Rómulo came every day to El Rosedal and the two shut themselves up in the old chapel, worked with dogged determination, and managed to perfect the dreamed-of concerto. The Pumaris could not understand how these two gentlemen could forget even to eat in order to rub a bow against a few strings and produce a sound that, for them, didn’t resonate in their souls anywhere nearly as deeply as did a good huayno.
Silvio thought that it was time to move from secrecy to severity, and he made a decision: to give a concert with Cárdenas and invite all of Tarma’s notables to El Rosedal as a way of repaying them for all their attentions. He had invitations printed fifteen days ahead of time and passed them out to landowners, government officials, and visitors of quality. Paulo Pumari repainted the old chapel, set up benches and chairs, and converted the ancient chamber into an ideal concert hall.
The landowners of Tarma were puzzled when they received the invitations. Lombardi hosting at El Rosedal? And to listen to him play a violin duo with that midget, Cárdenas! The invitation didn’t say if there would be food or dancing. Many tossed the invitation into the trash, thinking they’d tell him later that they hadn’t received it, but others decided to attend the Saturday event at Silvio’s hacienda. It was an opportunity to take a look at that elusive property and see how the Italian lived.
Silvio had prepared a meal for a hundred people, but only twelve showed up. The huge table he had had set up under the arcade had to be disassembled, and everybody ended up in the dining room on the second floor. After coffee, they moved to the chapel for the concert. While playing the concerto, Silvio saw out of the corner of his eye that there were only eleven people, and he was never able to figure out who the twelfth one was who had escaped or remained in the dining room having another drink or a second helping of dessert. But the concert was unforgettable. Without the help of an orchestra, Silvio and Rómulo outdid themselves; each bent over his instrument, they created a sonorous structure that the wind carried away forever, lost in infinite galaxies. At the end, the guests applauded without much enthusiasm. It was obvious that an artistic event of universal value had gone right past them without them even realizing it. Later, over drinks, they congratulated the musicians with hyperbolic phrases, but they hadn’t heard a thing. Johann Sebastian Bach had walked
right by them and they hadn’t seen the smallest of his ringlets.
Silvio kept seeing Cárdenas and playing with him in the chapel, under the arcade, and in the middle of the rose garden, solitary concerts, true incunabula of the musical arts, with no audience other than the pigeons and the stars. But he slowly distanced himself from his colleague, finally stopped inviting him, and buried his violin at the bottom of his wardrobe. He did it without joy but also without bitterness, knowing that for those few days of inspired creativity he had been something, perhaps only fleetingly, a voice lost in sidereal space and sunk, like light, into the realm of shadows. Around that same time, he lost a tooth and, a short time later, another one, and out of laziness, or apathy, he didn’t have them replaced. One morning he realized that the hair on the right side of his head had gone almost totally gray. Most of the windows enclosing the veranda were broken. Under the arcades he came across two basins full of spoiled milk. Why, dear God, wherever he looked, did he see signs of decomposition, decrepitude, and ruin?
A package from Lima shook him momentarily out of his musings. During his period of frenzied cryptography he had ordered several books, and now they had finally arrived: dictionaries, grammars, language teaching manuals. He looked through them cursorily and discovered something that amazed him: RES in Catalan meant “nothing.” He spent days commandeered by this word. His interior life was spent scrutinizing it from all angles, but he failed to find anything more than the obvious: the negation of being, emptiness, absence. A sad harvest after so much effort, for he already knew that nothing was he, nothing was the rose garden, nothing was his property, nothing was the world. In spite of this certainty, he continued to throw himself into his daily chores, to which he devoted heroic resolve: to eat, dress, sleep, wash, go into town, in short, to endure, and it was like being forced every day to read the same page of a book that was poorly written, lacking in any and all charm.
The Word of the Speechless Page 14