The Word of the Speechless

by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

  •

  Yolanda.

  Madrid, twenty years earlier. Fabricio had been awarded a scholarship to do postgraduate work in international law after completing his studies at the university in Lima. One afternoon, while smoking a cigarette at the door of his boardinghouse, he saw two women walk by with linked arms and engaged in an animated conversation. One of them—why her? what was so special about her? what distinguished her from so many others?—instantly attracted him, and much against his wont, for he wasn’t one to approach women on the street, he started to follow them. With no training or experience, he had no idea what to do next. But fate came to his rescue. A little before reaching Argüelles, the woman he was attracted to tripped on a cobblestone, twisted her foot, and ended up on her knees, clutching her ankle. Fabricio rushed to her side and grabbed her arm.

  “Are you hurt? May I?”

  The woman allowed him to help her up, then turned on him a beaming, spontaneous smile, as if he were an old friend.

  “It’s nothing, thank you . . . It’s Milagros’s fault, she was talking all kinds of nonsense.”

  That was all it took; contact was made. Fabricio accompanied them on their walk through Parque del Oeste. They were classmates and had just that year finished high school. They must have been between sixteen and seventeen years old. Milagros was more inquisitive, more gregarious, but she was rather homely: dirty blond hair, small blue eyes, a long nose, buzzard-like, that kind of thing. Yolanda, on the other hand, had an understated beauty without a touch of stridency: a delicate oval face framed by thick chestnut locks, almond-colored eyes, full lips ornamented by a mole in the left corner (an identical mole, Fabricio noted, to that of a cousin he visited frequently throughout his childhood), but above all, indecisive features, features with great mobility, which allowed her to alternatively express the most natural joviality and the most impenetrable reserve.

  For four or five days Fabricio ventured out with the two friends. They seemed delighted to spend time with this South American man, some ten years older than they, discreet and well-educated, who didn’t court them openly and was always willing to invite them to the movies, or to cafés, without ever counting his duros. But Fabricio was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the situation, for Milagros’s presence prevented him from establishing a more intimate relationship with Yolanda. And even more so when he noticed, through glances and half-spoken words, her interest, one could even say, her attraction to him. Finally, one afternoon, while they were saying goodbye, Fabricio broke the established formula of: “We’ll get together tomorrow,” and replaced it with, “Yolanda, I’ll be waiting for you to go dancing at Pasapoga tomorrow.” That “Yolanda,” antecedent to the “you,” which replaced the “we,” was followed by a brief silence. Yolanda broke it with an “of course,” while Milagros held out her arms as if she were dancing a waltz, pretending not to have heard.

  From then on, Fabricio and Yolanda met alone almost every afternoon and between them there developed, rather than a friendship, a true love affair. In addition to the cafés and the movies, they took walks through Parque del Retiro, through the old Madrid of Franco’s Spain, with its sirens, its censored press, its war casualties selling single cigarettes out of baskets on the streets. Yolanda was still a minor, and she was the daughter of an army colonel, so Fabricio, no matter how tempted he was, never dared go beyond caresses or furtive kisses in parks and movie houses. Once, however, when they found themselves near his residence, Fabricio suggested she see his room, and Yolanda accepted with the greatest of ease. For a long time they talked in his small room, where the only window opened onto a dark interior courtyard, then suddenly, without knowing how, they were lying on the bed, wrapped around each other. Fabricio was fully aware of all the risks he was taking, but his desire was so strong that he didn’t hesitate to take off her blouse and bra, in spite of Yolanda’s resistance. The sight of those virgin breasts, those erect nipples surrounded by their pink aureoles, reminded him immediately of his cousin Leticia, with whom he was in love as a teenager, of the time he saw her naked, half her body sunk in the water tank at the hacienda, breasts he could never touch, a scene that years later would come to his mind when in Paris he read Apollinaire’s line: Je rougirais le bout de tes jolis seins roses. Fabricio was stunned for an instant, then fell upon those delicious breasts with the voracity of a hungry child. Yolanda, breathless, stopped him, stood up, and started getting dressed.

  “Not now,” she said. “Not now, please. There will be a next time.”

  There was no next time. Fabricio received news that he had been awarded a different scholarship to continue his studies in Paris, and it was imperative for him to be there at the beginning of September. It was the middle of August. During those final two weeks they went out repeatedly, but rarely alone, for Milagros resurfaced and accompanied them on their outings without there being any way—and Yolanda didn’t make much effort—to get rid of her. At the beginning of September, Fabricio left Madrid. Yolanda and Milagros went to see him off at the Estación del Norte. They agreed to write to each other. As a precaution (the colonel father), they agreed that Fabricio should send his letters to Milagros’s address.

  It was a consistent and warm correspondence. They both wrote about their daily lives, recalled their best moments in Madrid, made plans for the future—plans that did not exclude an eventual marriage. In the middle of December, Fabricio finished the first stage of his training and announced to Yolanda that he would travel to Madrid for Christmas so they could spend a few days together. They agreed to meet at seven in the evening of December 23 at La Cachimba Café.

  Fabricio would never forget that meeting. It was raining, and Yolanda was wearing a beige raincoat and an unexpectedly bright green beret, from which her chestnut hair escaped in billows. Fabricio had rented a room in an elegant and discreet inn near the Plaza Mayor. That night in the café, they only talked, their hands intertwined on the table, but they made plans to see each other the following day, on Christmas Eve. They were to meet on a street corner in the Vallecas neighborhood, where Milagros’s grandparents lived, for Milagros was spending Christmas Eve with her family, and Yolanda would go by there after having dinner with hers. It was, in reality, an excuse, agreed among the three of them, so that Yolanda and Fabricio could be alone at midnight.

  They arranged to meet in Vallecas at eleven. Fabricio was dressed by nine and was impatiently pacing around his comfortable room at the inn, examining every detail of the space where he would greet Christmas with Yolanda: the gift he had brought her from Paris (a Christian Dior scarf), the bottle of champagne in its bucket of ice, a plate with snacks, the bouquet of red roses in the vase. His heart kept beating rapidly, and he smoked one cigarette after another. At ten thirty he went out and caught a taxi to the spot in Vallecas where they were supposed to meet.

  He never imagined that Christmas would be so boisterously celebrated in the streets in that working-class neighborhood. The sidewalks were teeming with people who talked and greeted each other from the doors of their houses, young men in groups were singing as they strolled by, and bands roamed the streets and played tambourines. Fabricio found the corner where they were supposed to meet and waited. He was five minutes early. At the appointed time he heard somebody call his name and, when he turned to look, he saw Milagros rather than Yolanda. She grabbed him by the arm and, without uttering a word, pulled him through the crowd.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said finally. “From Yolanda. She says not to try to see her, not to look for her, not to write to her, ever again.”

  Fabricio stopped, in shock. For a moment he thought he was going to collapse. His expression of disbelief, surprise, and defeat must have been such that Milagros put her arms around him.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered in his ear, “so sorry for the bad news. That’s just the way things are. Yolanda didn’t give me any explanation. I’m just telling you what she told me.”

  They pulled apart, b
ut remained holding hands. Fabricio looked into Milagros’s tiny blue eyes, waiting for something more, a reason, a ray of hope. All he saw was pity, and at the same time something more ambiguous, secretive, which he could not, at that moment, decipher.

  He let go of Milagros’s hand and walked away without a word, walked away through the jubilant streets of Vallecas, slicing through the feverish throng, through the deafening music, set upon by gangs of young men urging him to drink from red wineskins. Finally he found a taxi. In half an hour he was at his inn. It was already midnight. The other residents were celebrating Christmas in the dining room, and they invited him to join their revels. But Fabricio continued along his way, driven by one fixed idea: to leave as soon as possible, to get far away from the center of the pain. A night train was leaving for Paris at one in the morning. He threw his things into his suitcase and, leaving behind his gift and the bottle of champagne, took a taxi to the Estación del Norte; an hour later he was on his way to Paris.

  He never saw Yolanda again or heard any news from her. From Paris, after a few days of reflection and suffering, he wrote her several letters, begging for an explanation, letters he always sent to Milagros’s house (Yolanda never gave him her address), but he never received an answer. The years passed, he had new loves and new affairs, he got married, his old Madrid romance remained buried in his memory until there was nothing left of it, except in disturbing dreams from which he always awoke with the disappointment of unfulfilled pleasure. Yolanda no longer existed. Not until that morning when he saw her walk through the Piazzetta de Capri and followed her desperately until he lost all trace of her at the beach of the Faraglioni.

  •

  After that failed search, exhausted by the climb back up to the belvedere (one thousand steps, according to the tourist brochures), Fabricio lay down on the living room sofa and chain smoked, disheartened, as evening fell. He didn’t even feel like going through his routine of taking a bit of sun on his adorable little terraza, where he could enjoy the splendid view of Marina Piccola and Monte Solaro. Only after nightfall did he get up and uncork one of the still untouched bottles of Chateau Pavie 1965. With his third glass, his optimism was returning, and he decided he would scour Capri from top to bottom and inside out in his search for his lost vision. He walked along well-known streets and ventured into undiscovered alleyways; he entered bars, restaurants, and shops (in some bars he took the opportunity to have a glass of sherry), ventured into hidden courtyards and peered into the lighted windows of pensiones. For moments he had the impression he was striding through an invented, mythological city, where he crossed paths with Dianas and Aphrodites in miniskirts, with the robust bastard sons of Zeus dressed by Cerruti, but also with monsters risen from Lake Avernus, wrinkled and potbellied tourists who came to breathe their last summer, or local valetudinarians, who could barely drag themselves up the steep Via Sopramonte, weighed down as they were by the burden of death. Late at night, he was drunk, exhausted, confused, and defeated. He stumbled home along Via Tragara, stopped for a moment to contemplate a brick archway that he seemed to be seeing for the first time—and he had walked by there so many times!—and when he arrived he had just enough energy to reach his bed and fall asleep, without getting undressed.

  In the morning he woke up exhausted but possessed with an idea that had taken root while he slept: in order to find someone, he didn’t need to race through the streets of Capri but should instead settle into a café on the Piazzetta. This was the neurological center of town, the obligatory place through which all the inhabitants necessarily passed at some moment of their day. By noon he was already sitting on the terrace of the Gran Caffè sipping a Negroni. It was Sunday and the five small streets that converged on the Piazzetta were packed with dense throngs of holidaymakers and casual tourists, who mingled there then dispersed down the evacuation routes. Fabricio once again verified that at this time of year most of the holidaymakers were senior citizens, and this thought, as it applied to himself, caused sharp unease, even though he considered that at the age of fifty he still hadn’t earned the distinctions required to belong to that club.

  At three in the afternoon, Fabricio gave up. He had a horrible headache, not only from the Negronis he had drunk but from the attention he had paid to every woman who walked by (some of them startled him when he noticed that they shared some particular with his model). Resigned, he told himself that the previous day he had been the victim of a mistaken perception or an hallucination. All he could do now was forget the incident and resume his calm if tedious island sojourn. He called over the waiter, and just as he was paying, a woman walked hastily across the Piazzetta. At first he didn’t recognize her, for she was wearing blue jeans (he had never seen Yolanda in pants), tight blue jeans that clung to her very youthful body, and a straw hat with a blue ribbon. But just as she was exiting his field of vision, he saw the mole. Without picking up his change, he stood up and took off after her, for she had already turned down Via le Botteghe. It was one of the narrowest and busiest streets in Capri because of all the small shops selling clothing and handicrafts, and all the bars and grocery stores. Fabricio feared losing her again among the throng, but at last he saw her standing in front of the window of a pharmacy. He stopped behind her, his heart pounding.

  “Yolanda,” he whispered, and immediately the woman turned around.

  She stood there staring at him for a long time without showing any sign of recognition. Fabricio noticed that she was younger than he had expected, and he wondered once again if he had not been the victim of confusion.

  “Yolanda Gálvez, or am I mistaken?”

  And a few second later, that cold, suspicious face opened into a luminous smile (the same one, Fabricio discovered, that had caught him off guard twenty years before when he helped her get to her feet on the Paseo de Argüelles).

  “But I can’t . . . I can’t believe it . . . Fabricio? What are you doing here?”

  “The same question I can ask you.”

  “Let me . . . let me recover . . . I never thought . . .”

  Fabricio took her hand.

  “Let’s go have a drink. We have so much to talk about.”

  Yolanda looked at her watch.

  “I can’t now. I’m in a rush. I have to get back to the hotel to wait for a call from Naples, from my husband, and then I’m going to Anacapri. I just stepped out for a minute because I needed to buy something at the pharmacy . . . some nail scissors. I always forget something when I travel. But let me look at you for a moment. No, you haven’t changed. Maybe . . . I don’t know, something in the eyes. But, you stink! Have you been drinking?”

  “Yolanda, please, let’s go have a coffee, you’re not going to stand me up, after so many years.”

  “Wait for me for a minute. I’ll buy what I need and then you can come with me to my hotel. We’ll talk along the way.”

  Yolanda entered the pharmacy and came out smiling a few minutes later.

  “Let’s go,” she said, taking his arm. “I’m at the Hotel Quisisana. But hurry. I don’t have much time.”

  Fabricio let himself be carried along while Yolanda told him all about how she had accompanied her husband to an international cardiology conference in Naples and had taken the opportunity to hop over to Capri for the weekend. It was the first time she’d been on the island. She loved it. The day before she’d gone down to the beach of the Faraglioni—

  “I followed you there,” Fabricio interrupted her. “I followed you to the end of Via Tragara. But when I got to the beach, you weren’t anywhere.”

  Yolanda looked at him incredulously. They had reached the door to the hotel.

  “I’m going to Anacapri this afternoon with some of the other wives of the cardiologists. But I’m free after six.”

  “I was waiting for you to say that!” Fabricio sighed. “Come to the house for dinner, a small house I rent on Via Tragara. Number 115. Remember: 115 Via Tragara.”

  “I’ll be there at seven,” Yolanda said, a
nd, brushing her lips across his cheek, she disappeared behind the door of the hotel.

  Fabricio returned elated, almost at a run, to prepare the stage for the unexpected reencounter. As he walked under the small archway on the Via Tragara, he stopped, without knowing why, and looked closely at the fine brick structure and the bright red bougainvillea crowning it. At home, he had to tidy things up, for it was Sunday and Mina wouldn’t be coming. Then he returned to Via le Botteghe to do the required shopping: Parma ham, melon, Capri raviolis, cheeses, ice cream, and champagne. His only problem was figuring out where they would eat: on the jasmine-perfumed patio, on the small terrace shaded by palm trees and lined with flower pots overflowing with geraniums and greenery, or in the living room, which had the advantage of being next to the kitchen. He opted for the small terrace, for the splendid day promised a warm and clear night.

  A little before seven everything was ready, and Fabricio was smoking on the terrace, sipping a glass of sherry and watching the sun set behind Monte Solaro. How many times, during his previous holidays, had he sat right there, looking at the same spectacle, but then he wasn’t waiting for anybody! Due to random good luck, his gray and monotonous life in Capri had been turned on its head.

  A small gray cloud appeared behind Monte Solaro, followed by another larger one. The sirocco began to blow. At seven, high dark clouds sped faster and faster across the sky. Fabricio, who had already experienced some of those terrible island storms that drenched the streets and shut the natives away in their homes, was wondering if the weather was going to play a lousy trick on him when the doorbell rang. He ran to the gate and upon opening it he found Yolanda wearing a very low-cut gray dress, and with no relationship to it, a green beret from which her abundant chestnut hair escaped in billows.

  “Madrid, 1953,” Fabricio muttered, as if to himself.

  “Indeed,” Yolanda said. “But, come on, let me in and offer me something, I’m exhausted.”