The Word of the Speechless

by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

  They had only just sat down on the small terrace with their respective glasses of champagne—Yolanda was recounting to him in detail her exhausting excursion to Anacapri—when there was a flash behind Monte Solaro and an instant later came the first roll of thunder. A gust of wind shook the palm trees, and heavy rain began to fall. They dashed into the living room, glasses in hand. Yolanda pulled off her beret then cheerfully began to examine the room’s décor. Fabricio, for his part, didn’t take his eyes off her, still unable to calm his emotions, asking himself how she, Yolanda, could be there, with her youthful figure, her schoolgirl charm, her luminous smile, but also her brusque and impenetrable reserve . . . And he recalled that painful moment of their failed encounter in the Vallecas neighborhood.

  Yolanda opened her mouth as if to make a comment, but Fabricio interrupted her.

  “I never understood, Yolanda, I never understood why that night in Vallecas, that Christmas Eve, when I’d come from Paris specifically to see you, you didn’t show up, and instead you sent Milagros to say . . .”

  Another peal of thunder, this time even stronger, deafened them. The walls of the house shook and the lights flickered.

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that,” Yolanda said. “You’re the one who didn’t show up.”

  This time the boom was closer and suddenly the lights went out.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Fabricio said. “These blackouts last only a short while. I’ll get some candles.”

  His prudent wife always had a package of candles stashed away somewhere. Fabricio stood up and tripped over the furniture as he dug into his pockets for his lighter so he could see through the darkness, but then he remembered that he had left it on the terrace and went out through the living room to face the storm. He flicked it on when he returned: Yolanda’s place was empty.

  “But . . . but, where the hell have you gone?” he exclaimed, lifting his hand that was holding the lighter to check the room. Nobody responded. Fabricio was confused, entered the kitchen, and was about to look for her in the bedroom when he heard some noise from the bathroom, and in an instant, Yolanda appeared.

  “What?” Fabricio asked. “How did you get there?”

  “I can see in the dark,” Yolanda said, smiling.

  “Sit down and don’t move, please. I’m going to look for some candles.

  Fortunately, he found the package in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. Since there weren’t any candlesticks, he put them in empty bottles and on saucers and distributed them around the living room.

  “I’m not afraid of the dark but it would have been sad to be with you and not be able to see you,” Fabricio said. “Anyway, dinner is going to be a disaster. How am I going to heat up the raviolis? And the ice cream is going to melt!”

  “Do you care?” Yolanda said and, after a short silence, she added, “Nuit caprense cirius illuminata.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I don’t know. Something that just popped into my head. But relax, you’re a bundle of nerves. Come on, let’s make a toast.”

  “You’re right,” Fabricio said, sitting next to Yolanda and picking up his champagne glass. “Chin-chin!”

  They clinked glasses and drank down their champagne.

  “But back to what we were saying,” Fabricio said. “Christmas Eve in Vallecas, one of the blackest nights of my life. What happened? You said I didn’t show up, but I swear to you I was there, I met Milagros, and she told me that—”

  “I know, she probably told you that I hadn’t shown up for dinner at her grandparents. It was all a lie. It took me a long time to realize it. Milagros was jealous, envious, she couldn’t stand that I—”

  “Damn harpy!” Fabricio exclaimed, pouring himself another glass of champagne. “I’d wring her neck in an instant!”

  “I was at her grandparents’ house, and I asked her to go meet you. We agreed that she would come get me when you arrived, and I’d find some excuse to leave so I could be with you. But she returned and told me that you hadn’t shown up. It seemed very odd to me, I didn’t believe her, and on my way home I called your inn. They told me that you’d left at midnight, gone back to Paris.”

  Fabricio sat for a minute, thinking.

  “You mean, because of that harpy, my life, our life, perhaps . . .”

  “Some people are like that. And it wasn’t the only time. A year after you left I met a very intelligent Colombian poet, and she played the same trick on me again. Since then, I haven’t seen her. They assigned my father to Barcelona, we moved, and that was the last I saw of her.”

  “Let’s return to the present,” Fabricio said. “The fact is, we’re here, together again, or near each other, to be more exact, in spite of her manipulations . . . I’m so happy, Yolanda, let me pour you another glass of champagne . . . But the lights, when will they go on again? At least we can eat the Parma ham and the melon. Come on, tell me more about yourself as I prepare something to eat.”

  The kitchen was next to the living room, connected by a window without glass, whose wood sill doubled as a bar. While Fabricio busied himself in the kitchen, Yolanda sipped her champagne and spoke intermittently.

  “Well, in Barcelona I studied literature at the university. Then I met Miguel, my husband, who’s about ten years older than me, like you—and now I see that he does have something of you, something secretive, I don’t know. He’d finished medical school, and we got married . . . have you ever heard of Miguel Sender? He’s the top cardiologist in Spain, well, one of the top, I don’t want you to think I’m pretentious, and then . . .”

  Fabricio had stopped what he was doing to observe Yolanda through the window. He saw her in profile, sitting on the sofa and talking about her life, and in the uncertain light of the candle he saw her as almost ghostly, her voice like a recitation from another world, to the point that he asked himself if she was there or if this was a new hallucination.

  “When was the accident?” he asked unexpectedly.

  “What accident?” Yolanda asked.

  “That scar on your temple, I can just barely see it under your hair.”

  “Oh, a car accident we had on the way to Valencia. It was nothing. But, as I was saying, Miguel is an important cardiologist. Just so you know. If you ever have any heart problems, don’t hesitate to be in touch.”

  “Unfortunately,” Fabricio said, “the problems I have with my heart aren’t treatable by a cardiologist.”

  “That’s a platitude,” Yolanda said. “I knew you’d say something like that.”

  Fabricio came into the living room carrying a tray with the ham, the melon, and some cutlery.

  “I have no pretensions of being original. Shall we keep drinking champagne or should I open a bottle of Bordeaux?”

  “I don’t care. But come on, I’m the only one doing the talking here. Now it’s your turn. You’re an important lawyer, I presume.”

  “No, no, much worse than that! I’m an international bureaucrat. I’ve been working for UNESCO for almost twenty years. I manage a department that deals with . . . But why talk about that? Let’s just say I form commissions that produce reports that are sent to other commissions that write other reports and so on and so forth . . .”

  There was another peal of thunder, and the walls shook so strongly that the candles almost went out, while outside, on the patio and the terrace, the rain was coming down more heavily.

  “The storm is saying goodbye,” Fabricio said. “I know these. In five minutes . . .”

  Suddenly he stopped. He noticed that Yolanda had not taken a bite and was sitting there absentmindedly, looking into the void. In the candlelight, her chestnut hair seemed to shimmer, releasing sparks as if it were a faggot of burning hay. And next to her lips, that mole.

  “It’s curious,” Fabricio said, “did I ever tell you? When I was fifteen I fell in love with my cousin, who had a mole exactly in the same place you have one. It was a crazy love, stupid, but I could never even kiss her. What’s up? Are yo
u listening to me?”

  “Yes,” said Yolanda, startled. “Your cousin Leticia, the mole . . . and then?”

  “And then nothing,” Fabricio mumbled. He had the impression that at some point the thread connecting him and Yolanda had broken and he immediately felt profoundly despondent. He took a sip of wine and placed his head between his hands.

  “Come here,” he heard Yolanda say.

  As he lifted his head he saw her lying on the sofa, her arms stretched out and her palms open to the ceiling.

  “Come, Fabricio, come . . . Don’t make that face of a scolded child. Forget about your cousin and her mole. Am I not here now?”

  Fabricio went to her and took her hands. This touch was enough to feel a rush of warm vitality throughout his body, one that expelled his despondency and filled him with passion. Yolanda was breathing deeply, her eyes half closed, and with each inhalation her chest swelled, overflowing the neckline of her dress. Her chest, that chest he contemplated in that rooming house on Argüellos so many years before in all its youthful splendor, that chest like a double herald that opened the gates of the virginal palace, but that he could only just barely graze . . .

  “Come Fabricio,” Yolanda repeated. “Remember what you said to me in your room? Je rougirais le bout de tes jolis seins roses.”

  Immediately Fabricio slid Yolanda’s dress off her shoulders to reveal her breasts, the same as then: white, round, firm, with their pink aureoles and erect nipples. But a strange thought passed through his head.

  “I didn’t say that, I swear I didn’t. How could I have? I didn’t know French and I hadn’t yet read Apollinaire.”

  “Are you sure? Wait. Maybe, maybe . . . maybe it was that Columbian poet I mentioned. He used to read me poems. We were—”

  “To hell with your Columbian poet!” Fabricio shouted, and, unable to control himself, he fell on Yolanda’s chest. Silence reigned outside. The rain had ceased to pound on the rooftop, the patio, and the palm trees on the terrace. The candles sputtered and went out in their improvised candlesticks. “La seconde chance,” Fabricio thought, biting Yolanda’s lips with fury.

  •

  He woke at dawn, naked and shivering on the sofa in the living room. The lights were on, the electricity at some point having returned. But Yolanda wasn’t there. He looked for her in vain throughout the house, but found not a single trace of her—no object, no message. The table was a mess—the empty bottles of Bordeaux—but the dishes were clean and stacked in the drying rack next to the kitchen sink. Wrapping a towel around himself, he went out onto the terrace in the hope that . . . But all he saw was the small table and the empty chairs and a glimmer behind Monte Tuoro and a blue sky that was getting lighter and lighter, announcing a splendid day.

  Returning to the living room, he tried to recall in order the events of that senseless night. At some moment, he had lost consciousness. He remembered his clothes strewn on the floor, the sound of a bottle opening, a candle going out. And then fatigue, shadows, oblivion, and sleep. He took a few more turns wrapped in the towel, and suddenly had thoughts about the emperor Tiberius, who, twenty centuries before, must have wandered at dawn through the corridors of his palace wrapped in his tunic after a diabolical night, looking for himself among the rubble of his memories. But his legs buckled from tiredness and, without the strength to interrogate himself further, he collapsed on the sofa and fell back asleep.

  He awoke refreshed and lucid late in the morning. On other occasions, other holidays, he would have remained loyal to his routine and made coffee and toast, then gone out to take some sun on the terrace, waiting for noon to go to the Piazzetta to buy the newspapers and leaf through them at the Gran Caffè, while drinking his aranciata. But now that was impossible. His routine had been blown to pieces. It was urgent for him to see Yolanda again. He was still infused with her scent, surrounded by her invisible presence. He remembered that at some point she told him that on Monday at noon she was returning to Naples to meet her husband and return to Barcelona. Immediately he got dressed and rushed to Hotel Quisisana. That chance, belated meeting could not have been a dream or the product of his imagination. He went straight to the reception desk and when the clerk asked him whom he was looking for, Fabricio hesitated.

  “Yolanda Gálvez,” he said, finally.

  The clerk looked at the register.

  “There’s nobody here by that name.”

  Fabricio figured she must have registered under her married name and for a moment he racked his brains to remember her husband’s name.

  “Yolanda Sender,” he said, finally.

  The clerk looked again in the register.

  “There’s no Sender here.”

  “I came here with her yesterday,” Fabricio insisted. “I left her at the door to the hotel. She had an excursion to Anacapri in the afternoon.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s not registered. Many people come into the hotel who aren’t staying here.”

  “And the women with her? The wives of the doctors? There’s a conference of cardiologists in Naples. Please check.”

  The clerk turned to a colleague.

  “Do you know of a cardiology conference in Naples?”

  “No conferences that I know of. As far as I know, they start in October.”

  Fabricio left, confused and discouraged, and started on his way home. The Negroni, the champagne, the Bordeaux he’d drunk the day before, had they unhinged him to such a degree that he imagined everything that had happened? He rejected that idea, but another occurred to him. Yolanda had been in Capri, he had no doubt, but not at Hotel Quisisana. She simply pretended to be staying there because it was the most expensive and elegant hotel on the island, and she had wanted to impress him. Maybe she had stayed in a modest pensione on Via Sopramonte and maybe even her famous cardiologist husband had been a fabrication.

  He was on Via Tragara, the long street he walked down every summer and that always produced in him an inexplicable emotion, evoked not only by the beauty of its mansions—many of which had been converted into hotels—and the magnificent view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. When he reached the brick archway, he stopped. And his memory glowed: yes, that simple archway, crowned with bright red bougainvillea, was the one he had seen as a child in an album of postcards and prints at home. His father loved the picture of that archway, which he’d found in an old tourism magazine, so much that he decided to build one the same but smaller over a path in the garden. The work began, but his father took ill right in the middle of it; he died shortly thereafter, and the archway was left unfinished forever. But the real one was there, the one he had never been able to pass under at home. And under that archway, what could not be had come to life, and that’s why—now he understood—every time he passed under it he felt something like a breath of springtime excitement, as if he had returned to the most beautiful days of his childhood. Passing under the arch was a way of returning to the past to relive what had taken place or remake what had not.

  Exalted by this discovery, which was also a foreboding, Fabricio kept walking, ever more quickly, looking nervously in his pocket for his keys, eager to arrive home as soon as possible. He stopped for a moment at the gate, then trembled when he saw that the door to the living room was ajar and heard the sound of footsteps from inside. He pushed open the gate and quickly walked across the patio, just when the door to the living room opened and Mina, his housekeeper, appeared, a bag of garbage in hand. Mina! He had forgotten that she came just before noon to do the cleaning.

  “Everything in order, Signore Fabricio. Domani at eleven, as usual. Bon giorno.”

  Fabricio leaned against the doorway of the living room, once again disappointed. Finally, he took a step inside just as Mina called to him from the gate.

  “I found something under the sofa, Signore Fabricio. I left it on the tavola. Arrivederci.”

  When he entered the living room, Fabricio saw on the coffee table an object that glowed among the magazines and the tile ashtrays: the g
reen beret. He took it in his hands, squeezed it, breathed in its scent, Yolanda’s scent, and another scent, much more subtle, that seemed to come from much farther away. A small piece of paper fell out of it. Picking it up, he read:

  “Tu as rougi le bout de mes jolis seins roses.”

  And below, a scribbled initial that could have been a Y or an L.

  Capri

  September 17, 1993

  from

  TALES OF SANTA CRUZ

  MUSIC, MAESTRO BERENSON, AND YOURS TRULY

  FATHER cultivated in us from an early age an appreciation for classical music; he played Bach fugues, Mozart sonatas, and Chopin nocturnes on his old wind-up Victrola with a steel needle, and hummed arias from Italian operas in his weak but melodious tenor voice. But Father died quite young, taking to his grave his love of music and putting an end to our musical education, which would have faded away and possibly been extinguished altogether had it not been for Teodorito and, above all, the appearance in Lima of Maestro Hans Marius Berenson.

  Teodorito was my classmate and notorious not only for his short stature but for the slow and long-winded way he told every story, no matter how simple, such that by his second or third digression his audience had already vanished. Teodorito, however, had a secret characteristic: he was an ardent aficionado of highly select music. I discovered this one afternoon as we were leaving school, a little apart from the rest, and I overheard him whistling Liszt’s “Liebestraum” with the brio of a goldfinch and the virtuosity of a soloist.

  This discovery was enough to make him my best friend and, from that day forward, I visited him two or three times a week at his house on Avenida Pardo, where an elderly and childless aunt and uncle—Teodorito was an orphan—gave him lodgings in a large room in the backyard. There Teodorito had erected a temple devoted to music: a Victrola like mine, though larger and more modern; shelves filled with dozens of record albums; portraits and busts of his favorite composers; and an open dance floor, for at moments of particular enthusiasm Teodorito could not resist the temptation to corporeally expressed his musical delight.