While your voice, Liliana, is drowned out by the contemporary racket—the future that is fast approaching and no longer includes me—they come back to me and occupy the space you have vacated: they return to perform their dance, Ginger and Fred. I see them dancing, hand in hand, leaping, turning. He’s wearing a top hat and, holding her hand above her head, he whirls her around like a spinning top, her skirt swirling about her thighs. They are, of course, taking an active role in the big closing number, just before the curtain falls to rapturous applause. They walk with the others to the front of the stage, and the whole cast bows to the audience. They’ve clearly rehearsed this beforehand, and the applause continues as the curtain rises two or three times more, before falling for the last time: she is like a piece of pale gauze, she looks as if you could easily pass straight through her, as the strange light from the spotlights does, impregnating whatever it is she’s made of, if, that is, the bluish fingers that take his hand, not mine, really are made of matter. They always appear to me together, as if they were just one person, they remind me of the Siamese twins joined by their beards who appeared in a fantasy film I saw as a boy,
The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T.
, or the two inseparable detectives in the adventures of Tintin. But it isn’t true, they’re not joined together, and this fact could and does console me. The performance continues for Francisco as it does for me, a torrent of memories bursting through the floodgate, Leonor has escaped downstream, free, belonging to no one, and this grants her a redeeming weightlessness. As the nightmare ends, the scissors have snipped the couple in two, and Ginger has left Fred all alone, setting him unexpectedly adrift. She leaves without so much as a wave of the hand, without saying goodbye. Leonor, too, left without saying goodbye, without a word of warning as to what she was about to do (you should leave as well, she said, and I thought she was talking about the future, about her and about me too); after the operation, she vanished from Misent and, shortly afterward, I learned that she’d gone to live with Francisco in Madrid. I just couldn’t understand it. I didn’t know then that women have a sixth sense telling them where best to invest in what one might call the human futures market. They see in a man the germ of what he will become, a bit like the barely perceptible red speck in the yolk of an egg indicating that it’s been fertilized. Some people believe the maternal instinct activates that impulse in women, that eugenics search. Who knows? They came back for a few days and were seen together everywhere: the bars in Olba, the restaurants, cafés, the beach at Misent, various bank branches. Francisco was shown off like a trophy. She—the daughter of a fisherman—stayed at the Marsal house. She did not, as Francisco believed, leave Misent with a hook through her lower lip, but had gladly taken the bait that best suited her. You’ve caught me, but just wait and see how hard a catch I prove to be, how much I wriggle before you put me in that basket. The instantly acquired air of superiority (she proffered her cheek for me to kiss,
mwa mwa
, as if we were passing acquaintances who hadn’t seen each other for a while, while a beaming Francisco looked on), as if that marriage had been just one of the possible options open to her, when, in reality, what future awaited her in Misent? Becoming a dressmaker? Going to the warehouse with the other women to sort, wash, wax and wrap oranges? Packing persimmons? Joining the other employees for their coffee break in the bar opposite the cookie factory? Running to get to the shop before it closed and buying a couple of chicken thighs and wings after work? Racing home to warm up the food prepared the previous night, before the kids get home from school? At the very most, becoming a school teacher, which was, you said, your true vocation. Day after day, writing the word “Dictation” in careful script on the blackboard, trying to explain that most inexplicable of things, according to which the letter pi equals 3.14159; that
baca
is written with a
b
when you mean the rack you put on the roof of the car and with a
v
when you mean an animal whose meat and milk is used to feed human beings (that’s what teachers used to teach then, although, shortly afterward, things changed, and I’ve no idea what they teach now). Or making the most of her elementary knowledge of arithmetic to keep the accounts in my father’s—and her father-in-law’s—poky carpentry workshop. Another option—almost the same, but considerably worse—would have been to marry one of the local fishermen, a fisherman like her father, like her eldest brother, for whom the wife waits with the supper ready so that he can eat as soon as he gets home, having first drunk a few rounds of beers and anises in the local bar. A lovingly prepared supper left for hours with a plate covering it to keep off the flies. She could sense who would provide her with a safe nest, who would promise security for any children that might come along. Placing any chicks who were born—and who would, this time, be loved and wanted—on a high enough branch to keep them safe from the inevitable predators prowling below, that’s the law of the jungle. Placing herself on that same high branch, her wings spread to cover her chicks: you see, I’m not like you, she seemed to be saying when she came back. And I was just one of many. I remember her getting out of the car, wearing a silk scarf tied under her chin, revealing a couple of strands of blond or dark hair, she went light or dark depending on her mood. She showed her white teeth in a smile that appeared to be directed at the universe, while he removed the suitcases from his Volvo and placed them on the pavement outside the front door, designer luggage, a leather weekend bag, another small suitcase; she was wearing a full print skirt or perhaps, more daringly, a pair of tailored slacks (in Olba at the time, it still took a certain degree of courage for a married woman to wear slacks), her chest molded by a tight-fitting Breton sweater, blue stripes on a white background. The perfume that lingers in the street for a few long minutes. The smell of burnt gas from the engine of a car far beyond the reach of most of us in Olba, and the smell of perfume that pursued me for weeks like a thorn in a finger that has become infected. Her and Francisco. A brief hello, her proffered cheek, my brief kiss. As if nothing had happened between us. He smiles. My subordinate position. Forty years later, when he returns to Misent, Francisco still carries the guilt I placed on him, I can’t help it, whereas Leonor has received the forgiveness bestowed by irreparable loss. Her lightness—she is only a shadow now—exempts her from guilt, death has snatched her away. Death, the supreme dealer out of justice. After that, there is no guilt, no sin. She has passed through all the stages required by purifying asceticism: suffering and illness, the anointing with holy oils (or, in place of the oils, endless manipulations by doctors and nurses), music by Bach and the cortège with the long hearse climbing the hill up to the cemetery and parking a few yards from the place where my grandfather’s body was found.
Requiescat in pace
. The sordid nature of the disease—her hair coming out in clumps in her hands, sores in her mouth, her nails coming away from the skin—has cleansed her of life’s miseries, has tamed the flesh, transformed desire and anger into pity. Something similar is happening to the marsh; its fetid, unhealthy state helps it to remain intact, preserves or redeems its innocence, and constitutes its own peculiar form of purity, a variant on the lightness that comes from its unwillingness to fit into a world different from itself (and yet, it isn’t exactly pity I feel for her, no, though I do feel infinite pity, but as if covered by a
gratin
of resentment, what did you do to me, what have you done to me?). Francisco began to visit Olba more often after Leonor died. After the packed funeral, attended by journalists, Michelin-star chefs and the odd politician, and where the locals gazed in amazement at the abundance of wreaths heaped inside the hearse and the car escorting it, he had a pink marble headstone erected, a rather vulgar declaration of his supposed love for her—he wept inconsolably as the coffin was lowered into the grave—one of the few elaborate graves in Olba cemetery, which is otherwise a modest place: simple graves and niches, a couple of dozen cypress trees and three or four old family vaults (new arrivals like the Marsals and the Bernals haven’t dared to compete with them) as befits the egalitarianism of the region, where, as used to be said a few years ago, no one has too much, but everyone has something (the last ten years canceled that social equilibrium). He screwed up his face and his nose twitched nervously just as it did when he was sniffing a glass of wine, uhhmmm, uhhmm, making unpleasant sucking noises with his mouth, swilling the wine noisily around inside: oh, hm, gorgeous, just a faint touch of violets, ah, yes, and a hint of aquatic flowers beginning to fade, can’t you taste it? Water lilies, irises (but Francisco, my friend, don’t aquatic flowers smell a bit like rotten fish?—you’ve been to the marsh with me and know perfectly well that water lilies give off a disgusting scent, yes, the same
ninfées
that Monet painted so obsessively and deliciously, because they do make a wonderful subject for painters. I’m going to make you smell one so that you remember the vile stink from our childhood). Floral, silky, full, fruity, intense. That wasn’t so very long ago. What? Six or seven years? When you tightrope-walk along the fragile thread of the seventies, you realize that ten years is nothing, and that even twenty years is no big deal. Nor are the seventy years you’ve been alive. Life is gone in a breath. I think Leonor died in 2003. Perhaps shortly before. Francisco had stopped visiting Olba after his parents died and his siblings moved to other towns and sold the family house to make way for an apartment block. But she, it seems, said—and even wrote in her will—that she wanted to be buried in Olba. I don’t know why, because she had no family here. Her brothers, with whom, as far as I know, she had lost all contact, live in Misent as her whole family always has; the fisherman brother came to the funeral with his wife and children, looking serious and solemn, but he didn’t shed a single tear; the other brother didn’t even bother to come. Olba is Francisco’s territory, although for a few hours it did occur to me to wonder if perhaps my presence here could have had something to do with her last wish. That she had felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for her first love. Why not? As we get older, we have a longing to put things right, to correct the mistakes of our childhood or adolescence, as if such a thing were possible. We often wonder what’s become of that girl we once knew. This doubtless happens because we are aware of our own inability to correct anything in the present. You don’t want to accept that the girl you once knew will now be an old lady with dental implants or dentures like yours. At night, you’re besieged by memories of people who are no longer here, by stories you can share with nobody, because the ones who lived through them with you are gone. Yes, I did foolishly think that perhaps she’d chosen to come back to Olba out of melancholy, as an homage to her own youth, to the rooms in cheap hotels, our mingled saliva, the darkness in the dunes, the moonlight on the water and the water on her skin: a longing for the happiness of those years of which I was, I presume, a part. I even thought that I would, at last, have her near—as if a dead person can be near or far—and I imagined myself walking up to the cemetery each afternoon to talk to her, as some widowers do, yes, making a daily visit to his wife’s grave, kneeling down next to it, keeping it clean, polishing the glass protecting the wife’s photo, and placing a little bunch of flowers on the headstone. Not everything had been lost—there were still the ashes from the bonfire. Life was trying to correct a few mistakes. She had come back. All too often, it’s the dead who impose meaning on the living. The grave of the beloved, who, after her sojourn in the world, decided to return to rot in the place where she had experienced her first love, her first exciting discovery of the flesh.
A few days ago, when I drove past the cemetery, I noticed an enormous rat creep out of the shrubbery and crawl over the wall, doubtless attracted by the stink of the most recent burials. With the crisis, people are now getting buried in really cheap coffins that don’t always retain the rotting bodies. When I saw the rat, I swear I jumped, jolted by a tremor of fear for you, afraid the rat might harm you in some way, although I doubt there’s much left to gnaw on beneath the stone bearing your name and your photo, but who knows, rats will give anything a try: the wooden planks of the coffin—even top-quality ones like yours—or bones or any remnants of cloth that have survived the pervading damp. Because here it’s damp in summer too, even on really hot summer nights, when the temperature is more tropical than Mediterranean, sultry nights when you toss and turn, unable to sleep, nights that seem interminable even though they’re the shortest of the year, when, as I lie in my bed, I can hear the night dew dripping from the roof onto the sidewalk. You flail about between the damp, burning sheets, stewing in the heat, your face glued to the pillow with sweat, as sticky as the still air around you. And as you drift in and out of sleep, the blinding light of the sun suddenly appears, unannounced, and the crushing heat of day falls on the scorched grass and the whirring cicadas. No, Leonor, this isn’t Sweden or Germany or gentle Brittany, those shady, gothic, nocturnal places, where sex seems to take on a metaphysical density. There’s no room here for the tale of a lover returning to her first love. For a while we used to have sex together, then you chose someone else to keep you company in bed, and that was that, there’s nothing melancholy about it, nothing that needs to be put right, nothing to feel nostalgic about, such rhetoric is quite simply unthinkable: this is the Mediterranean, where all mysteries shrivel up and die in the excess of light. No romantic metaphysics can survive under such a sky. Not for us the vast, shady forests, splendid deciduous trees, or sad, solitary, wandering souls, no poetic penumbras. Our trees are more gnarled than leafy, have more wood than leaves, are more gray than green. You have to keep your feelings to yourself, because they fade fast beneath this impertinent light. But surely everyone knows that. And so the only person to visit and leave flowers on her grave every month or so was her husband. As is only right and proper.