* * *
Roberto was dismayed by the extent of the publicity, but Ana reminded him of what had happened with the first book and convinced him it was only a question of waiting awhile until the hubbub subsided. Which it did. The Blaums, however, were out of the city when the clamor finally died down. Roberto had already retired from his work at the hospital and university, using the excuse that he was tired and at an age when he wanted to live a more tranquil life. He had not, however, been able to escape his own celebrity; his house was invaded at all hours by potential patients, newspaper reporters, students, professors, and curiosity seekers. Roberto told me he needed quiet to work on another book, and I said I would help him find a peaceful refuge. We found a small house in La Colonia, a strange village set into the side of a tropical mountain, a replica of a nineteenth-century Bavarian village, an architectural oddity of painted wood houses, cuckoo clocks, window boxes filled with geraniums, and Gothic-lettered signs; it was inhabited by a race of blonds with the same Tyrolean clothing and rosy cheeks their great-grandparents had brought with them from the Black Forest. Although La Colonia was already the tourist attraction we know today, Roberto was able to rent a cottage far from the weekend traffic. He and Ana asked me to look after things in the capital: I collected his retirement check, their bills, and the mail. At first I visited them fairly often, but soon I realized they were feigning a rather forced cordiality very different from the warmth of my usual welcome. I knew it was nothing personal; I had no doubts about the trust and affection they felt for me. I simply came to the conclusion they wanted to be alone, and found it easier to communicate with them by letter and telephone.
When Roberto Blaum last called me, I had not seen them for a year. Although I often had long conversations with Ana, I had spoken very little with him. I would tell Ana the latest news, and she would tell me stories from their past, which seemed increasingly vivid for her, as if all those distant memories had become part of the present in the silence that now surrounded her. From time to time she sent me the oatmeal cookies she had always baked for me, and sachets of lavender to perfume my closets. Recently she had sent me tender little gifts: a handkerchief her husband had given her years before, photographs of herself as a girl, an antique brooch. I suppose that the gifts, more than their strange remoteness and the fact that Roberto had avoided speaking of the progress of his book, should have been my clue, but in fact I never suspected what was happening in that little house in the mountains. Later, when I read Ana’s diary, I learned that Roberto had not written a single line. All that time he had devoted himself solely to loving his wife, but his love had not been able to alter the course of events.
On weekends, the trip to La Colonia becomes a pilgrimage of overheated cars creeping along with wheels barely turning. On weekdays, however, especially during the rainy season, it is a solitary drive along a route of hairpin curves that knife through peaks between surprising ravines and forests of sugar cane and palm trees. That afternoon, clouds trapped among the hills cloaked the landscape in cotton. The weather had stilled the birds, and the only sound was the slap of the rain against the windshield. As I ascended, the air grew cool, and the storm suspended in the fog felt more like the climate of a different latitude. Suddenly, at a bend in the road, I saw that Germanic-looking village with roofs pitched to support a snow that would never fall. To reach the Blaums’ house I had to drive through town, which was apparently deserted at that hour. Their cottage was similar to all the others: dark wood with carved eaves and lace-curtained windows. There was a well-tended flower garden in front of the house, and a small plot of strawberries in the rear. A cold wind was whistling through the trees, but I saw no smoke rising from the chimney. The Blaums’ old dog did not move when I called; he raised his head and looked at me without wagging his tail, as if he did not recognize me, but followed when I opened the unlocked door and went inside. It was dark. I felt along the wall for the light switch and turned on the lights. Everything was in order. Fresh eucalyptus branches filled the vases, saturating the air with a sharp, clean scent. I walked through the living room of this rented house in which nothing betrayed the Blaums’ presence except the stacks of books and Ana’s violin, and I was puzzled that in a year and a half my friends had left no trace of their presence.
I climbed the stairs to the main bedroom, a large room with high ceilings and rustic beams, stained wallpaper, and inexpensive furniture in a vaguely provincial style. A lamp on the night table lighted the bed where Ana lay in a blue silk dress and the coral necklace I so often saw her wear. In death she had the same expression of innocence as in the wedding photograph taken long ago, the day the ship’s captain had married them seventy miles off the coast, that splendid afternoon when flying fish announced to the refugees that the promised land was near. The dog, who had followed me, curled up in a corner, moaning softly.
On the night table, beside an unfinished embroidery and the diary of Ana’s life, I found a note to me from Roberto in which he asked me to look after the dog and to bury his wife and himself in one coffin in the cemetery of that fairy-tale village. They had decided to die together; Ana was terminally ill with cancer and they preferred to travel to the next stage of their lives hand in hand, as they had always done, so that at the fleeting instant in which the spirit disengages, they would not run the risk of losing each other in some warp in the vast universe.
I ran through the house, looking for Roberto. I found him behind the kitchen in the small room he used for a study, seated at a wooden desk, his head in his hands, sobbing. On the desk lay the syringe he had used to inject his wife, now filled with the dose intended for him. I rubbed the nape of his neck; he looked up and stared into my eyes for an endless moment. It seemed clear that he had wanted to prevent Ana’s terminal suffering and had prepared their farewell so that nothing would alter the serenity of the moment; he had cleaned the house, cut fresh branches for the vases, dressed his wife and combed her hair, and when everything was ready he had given her the injection. Consoling her with the promise that a few minutes later he would be joining her, he had lain beside her and held her until he was certain she was no longer alive. He had refilled the syringe, pushed up his shirtsleeve, and located the vein, but then things had not gone as he planned. That was when he had called me.
“I can’t do it, Eva. You’re the only one I can ask. Please . . . Help me die.”
A DISCREET MIRACLE
The Boulton family was descended from a Liverpool businessman who had emigrated in the mid-nineteenth century with enormous ambition as his only fortune but had amassed great wealth from a fleet of cargo ships in the most distant and southernmost country in the world. The Boultons were prominent members of the British colony and, like so many English away from their island, had preserved their traditions and language with absurd tenacity until a commingling with local blood had diluted their arrogance and substituted for Anglo-Saxon names others more typical of their adopted land.
Gilberto, Filomena, and Miguel had been born during the height of the Boulton family fortunes, but their lifetimes witnessed the decline of maritime traffic, along with a substantial part of their incomes. Although they were no longer truly wealthy, they were able to maintain their style of life. It would be difficult to find three persons of more widely divergent appearance and character than these three Boultons. In their old age the idiosyncrasies of each were exaggerated, but despite their obvious disparities their souls were basically in harmony.
Gilberto was over seventy, a poet with delicate features and the carriage of a dancer who had lived amid art books and antiques, indifferent to the necessities of life. He was the only one of the three who had been educated in England, an experience that had marked him deeply. He retained for a lifetime, for example, the vice of tea. He had never married, in part because he did not find soon enough the pale young girl who so often moved through his youthful verses, and by the time he had renounced that illusion it was already too
late, his bachelor habits were too deeply rooted. He ridiculed his blue eyes, his blond hair, and his ancestry, saying that most of the Boultons had been common merchants who from having pretended so long to be aristocrats ended by believing they in fact were. Nevertheless, he always wore tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, he played bridge, read the Times—three weeks late—and cultivated the irony and phlegm attributed to British intellectuals.
Filomena was as plump and uncomplicated as a farm girl, a widow with a number of grandchildren. She was endowed with a great tolerance that allowed her to accept, on the one hand, Gilberto’s Anglophile whims and, on the other, Miguel’s having holes in his shoes and his shirt collars in shreds. She always found energy to minister to Gilberto’s indispositions or to listen to him recite his strange verses, and to collaborate in Miguel’s innumerable projects. She tirelessly knit warm sweaters for her younger brother, which he wore once or twice and then gave to someone more needy. Her knitting needles were an extension of her hands; they moved with a sprightly rhythm, an uninterrupted ticktack that announced her presence and accompanied her always, like the scent of her jasmine cologne.
Miguel Boulton was a priest. Unlike his brother and sister, he was dark skinned, short, with hair so thick over all his body that he would have seemed bearlike had he not had such a gentle face. He had abandoned the advantages of the family hearth at sixteen, and returned only to eat Sunday dinners with his parents or to be cared for by Filomena on the rare occasions he was seriously ill. He was not at all nostalgic for the comforts of his youth, and although he had fits of bad humor, he considered himself a fortunate man and was content with his life. He lived near the city dump, in a miserable district on the outskirts of the capital where the streets were unpaved and there were no sidewalks or trees. His shack was constructed of boards and sheets of zinc. Sometimes in summer the fetid gases that filtered underground from the dump issued up through the floor. His furniture consisted of a cot, a table, two chairs, and planks for books, and the walls displayed revolutionary posters, tin crucifixes crafted by political prisoners, modest hangings embroidered by the mothers of the desaparecidos, and pennants with the name of his favorite soccer team. A red flag hung beside the crucifix where every morning he took solitary communion and every night thanked God for the good fortune of being alive. Padre Miguel was one of those beings set apart by a terrible passion for justice. Throughout a long life he had accumulated so much vicarious suffering that he was incapable of thinking of his own, a quality which when added to the certainty he was acting in the name of God made him a man to be reckoned with. Every time the military searched his house and arrested him for subversive activities, they had to gag him, because not even beatings could muzzle the flow of insults interlarded with his quotations from the gospel. He had been arrested so often, had joined in so many hunger strikes in solidarity with the prisoners, had sheltered so many persecuted, that according to the law of probabilities he should have died many times over. His photograph, seated before a local police station and holding a placard announcing that people were tortured there, had been published around the world. There was no punishment capable of intimidating him, and the authorities did not dare “disappear” him as they had so many others, because he was too well known. At night, when he knelt before his small altar to converse with God, he agonized over whether he was motivated solely by love for his fellow man and thirst for justice, or whether there might not also be an element of satanic pride in his actions. This man who was capable of singing a baby to sleep with boleros, or of sitting up all night with the sick, had no faith in the gentleness of his own heart. All his life he had combated a rage that thickened his blood and erupted in ungovernable outbursts. Secretly, he wondered what would have become of him if circumstances had not offered him such ready pretexts for releasing his anger. Filomena hovered over him, but Gilberto was of the opinion that if nothing too serious had happened to Miguel in his almost seventy years of walking a tightrope, there was little reason to worry, since his brother’s guardian angel had proved to be very efficient.
“Angels don’t exist. They are an error of semantics,” Miguel would argue.
“Don’t be a heretic, Miguel.”
“They were just ordinary messengers until Saint Thomas Aquinas came up with all that humbug.”
“Do you mean to tell me that the feather of the Archangel Saint Gabriel they venerate in Rome was plucked from the tail of a buzzard?” laughed Gilberto.
“If you don’t believe in angels you don’t believe in anything. You should be in a different profession,” Filomena chimed in.
“Several centuries have been lost in arguing how many of those creatures can dance on the head of a pin. Who cares? A man shouldn’t waste his energy on angels, he should help people!”
Miguel had been gradually losing his vision and now was nearly blind. He saw nothing with his right eye and very little with his left; he could not read, and he had great difficulty outside his neighborhood, because he lost his way. He depended more and more on Filomena to get around. She either went with him or sent the car and chauffeur, Sebastián Canuto, alias El Cuchillo, an ex-convict for whom Miguel had obtained a parole, then rehabilitated, and who now had worked for the family twenty years. During the recent political turbulence El Cuchillo had become the priest’s discreet bodyguard. Whenever she heard a rumor about an upcoming protest march, Filomena gave the chauffeur the day off and he went straight to Miguel’s district, equipped with a bludgeon and a pair of brass knuckles hidden up his sleeves—having abandoned the knife that had earned him his nickname. He would post himself in the street to wait for the priest to leave and then follow at a distance, ready to rush to his defense or to drag him to safety if the situation demanded. It was just as well that the nebula in which Miguel lived prevented his being too aware of these lifesaving measures; they would have infuriated him. He would have thought it unjust that he received protection while his fellow protesters bore the brunt of the beatings and water cannon and tear gas.
As the date of his seventieth birthday approached, Miguel suffered a hemorrhage in his left eye and in a few seconds was in total darkness. He had gone to the church for a night meeting with the residents of the neighborhood, who were organizing to confront the City Sanitation Department with a petition saying they could not continue to live amid all the flies and stench of rotting garbage. Many of those who attended were in the opposite camp from the Catholic church; in truth, they had no evidence of the existence of God. To the contrary, the suffering in their lives was irrefutable proof that the universe was one long free-for-all, but at the same time they regarded the parish church as the natural neighborhood meeting place. The cross Miguel wore about his neck seemed only a minor aberration, a kind of extravagance on the old man’s part. That night the priest was pacing back and forth, which was his custom when speaking, when he felt his blood pumping in his heart and at his temples and at the same time broke out in a clammy sweat. He attributed it to the heat of the discussion and wiped at his forehead with his sleeve and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he felt as if he were caught in a whirlpool at the bottom of the ocean: all he could see were undulating waves, spots, black upon black. He held out an arm, groping for support.
“The lights have gone out,” he said, thinking of sabotage at the power plant.
His friends grouped around him, frightened. Padre Boulton was a formidable comrade who had lived among them as long as they could remember. They had come to believe he was invincible, a strong, robust, muscular man with a drill sergeant’s booming voice and a bricklayer’s hands that even joined in prayer seemed to have been made for a fight. Suddenly they realized how much he had aged; he was shrunken, small, a child with wrinkles. A choir of women administered first aid; they made him lie down, they placed wet cloths on his head, they gave him warm wine to drink, and massaged his feet. None of this had the desired effect; just the opposite: because of their overzealous attent
ion he could scarcely get his breath. Finally, Miguel convinced everyone to stand back, and struggled to his feet, prepared to confront this new misfortune face to face.
“I’ve fucking well had it,” he said, but without losing his calm. “Please call my sister and tell her I have a problem. But don’t give her any details. I don’t want her to worry.”
An hour later Sebastián Canuto arrived, tight-lipped and reticent as always, bearing the message that señora Filomena had not wanted to miss the current episode of her soap opera and that she had sent money and a basket of provisions for his people.
“That’s not it this time, Cuchillo. I think I’ve been struck blind.”
The chauffeur helped him into the car and without a single question drove him back through the city to the Boulton mansion, which rose elegantly from the middle of a slightly overgrown but still majestic park. He honked to alert the household, then helped the sufferer from the car and almost carried him inside, touched to see the priest so frail and docile. Tears were running down his rough, debauched face as he told Gilberto and Filomena what had happened.
“I swear on my whoring mother’s head, don Miguelito’s gone blind. As if we needed that,” wept the chauffeur, unable to contain himself.
“Don’t curse in front of the Poet,” chided the priest.