The courtyard called and called.
What I read made no impression. I grasped nothing. I thought it was the first time in my life I’d encountered such a book but there was no need to ascertain that the opposite was true: It was a law book I had used for years. The courtyard was calling!
I knew that the courtyard was not outside the door but inside me, and that it would assume its true form only when I was inside it.
I went out. It was a relief. There it was: the branches encrusted in white stains left by birds, the gray and crepuscular light. At the far end, standing in the arcade, her white hands crossed over her ample skirts, to all appearances impassive, untroubled by any anxiety, was the young woman.
She was looking at me.
She looked at me a moment, then turned, correct and graceful, back into the shadowy corridor. An instant, and she was there no longer.
I ran to the dark corner where I presumed the passageway must begin. That obscure spot revealed nothing but the juncture of two walls, set back far beneath the eaves and therefore lightless.
I cast an uneasy glance back at the courtyard. I longed for the daylight not to fade too quickly. I had to speak to Soledo, but first would have to investigate and verify things for myself. I had to keep Soledo’s iron reserve from deceiving me.
I took a few steps along the wall of the northern gallery.
I reached a familiar door—that of the parlor where Soledo had received me. From there, the possibilities were scant: The corridor that led to the other wing had to be no more than five meters away, down one arcade or the other. Only this region of the courtyard had been easy for me to see from the areas that I had never before ventured beyond.
Five meters along the second gallery, where bright light shone from above, was a closed door, nothing more, that was hardly to be mistaken for the doorway of a corridor, if anyone were ever to put a door on a corridor.
Past this door and farther down the gallery that faced the wing where my quarters were located, there was an opening, a window. Behind its glass panes I had twice seen the young woman.
It was open. I looked through, taking no precautions. The window gave on to an empty room, seemingly in ruins, for the door in the back wall was missing. Beyond it lay a courtyard or an overgrown garden that the falling night made indecipherable. Within the room, shadows drifted down like sooty spiderwebs. I looked up, as if to see who might be dislodging them. There was no roof.
I understood. The entire wing was abandoned. Any of its doors, perhaps even the one I had just gone by, gave access to the other part of the house.
I turned back and tried the other door. Its hinges were rusty and neglected. They squeaked like a rat but obeyed. The door granted entry to another hollow room, also roofless.
I crossed through it.
A dense garden of opaque vegetation and beyond it another wing and gallery where everything slept. A row of rooms ran along it; to my relief, they contained human beings who were capable of lighting candles and creating, by their light, garments, or a last will and testament, love or death.
My expedition would not advance a single vara farther.
I shut the door from the outside, taking care to secure its two panels as tightly as before.
No further explanation from Soledo was required. The thought of conversation with him repelled me.
In passing, I observed the window.
A woman sometimes came to this window. She installed herself in the empty room and directed her gaze toward me.
•
Night now openly made its presence felt in my room—in the gathering shadows, the damp, and my grumbling stomach.
I rang the bell, first through the open door, then out in the courtyard.
The sterility of the sound convinced me that the time for my light repast was long gone.
This, and the thought of how light the repast would have been had I received it, irritated me. I was served only two out of every three times I rang, and always poorly and tardily; it was clear that the mysterious lady of the house had no liking for me. She made no attempt at the slightest convivial gesture: a dish of preserves or a plate of abundant and graciously presented food. Nothing. Perhaps the husband controlled my collations very strictly, or the matter was left entirely to the abilities and discernment of the slave. Perhaps she lacked adequate authority. That, I conjectured, was the crux of it: a woman much inferior in age to her husband, limited by his imperiousness or his stinginess, and also very possibly by his jealousy.
That hypothesis was largely acceptable, but still a wave of doubt came over me. For when I had observed her most closely, as she walked through the gallery, she gave the impression of a mature woman, of forty or more, even if not as old as her husband. Why, then, when posted at her lookout beyond the glass panes or, earlier that evening, in the arcade, had I believed her to emanate not only the charm of youth but the shyness of adolescence, the sorrowful and resigned air of a young woman cloistered prematurely, against her will.
•
Fernández invited me to eat fish with him in his room.
I wrinkled up my nose as if at a stench. In this province fish is considered an inferior food; the natives call it pirá and spit when they mention it. I scowled, too. These reiterated invitations to feed me might be a secret favor of Emilia’s.
I said, “Your fish is from Emilia. Emilia neither sells nor raises fish, as far as I know, but she can acquire it.”
Fernández smiled like someone who has done a good deed without expectation of reward and then finds himself the object not only of his beneficiary’s ingratitude but of his stupidity.
He pointed out two bodily signs: deep blue circles under the eyes, extending to the cheekbones, and an obvious bite mark on three fingers of the left hand.
He had spent the night fishing. He had exchanged the tavern for the stream as a source of sustenance, his own and—when all was said and done—mine. And a source of something more, perhaps. Seated before the enormous platter, I said, “There’s plenty of it, and it’s good.” Then I asked, “But is this all?”
Fernández confessed that it was not. He had delivered half the catch to Emilia.
•
Already the twilight woman, a kind of guardian of that street, was suffering at her post. She watched me arrive. Did she fix her gaze on me in offer of something or to take something from me?
It amused me to see it.
Human life, I had furtively confirmed, seemed almost extinguished in that place. It was the surface of the moon, with four houses, a man walking between them, and a woman with an unknown voice, ready to send out signals with her fingers, her arms, her state of agitation itself.
In the middle of the street, rather than turning toward my house, I turned toward hers. Her face told me she desired this. Right away it looked softer to me, its sagging flesh more abundant than in fact it was.
I’d taken, at most, two steps, when she raised her hands to her mouth in horror and I realized I was in danger.
I looked back.
A horse was coming at me. Trying to turn it aside, the rider was pulling hard at the reins, hard enough to cut its mouth. The brute was almost atop me when it reared. I was safe.
The earth is red there and the roadbed far from solid. Open, almost unpopulated, it was a place that horsemen and carriages, emerging from the pineapple fields, used as a racecourse. A pedestrian, particularly if distracted, would not hear them until they were right on him. The dust they raised in the distance gave notice of their presence, more than any sound.
I took the episode as a warning of evils to come and turned away from the path I was on, which led straight to the woman and her window.
•
It was early. I had little to do.
I prepared maté and enjoyed the twilight as it coalesced in the courtyard.
I heard a distant knocking on a door. Such peripheral noise did not concern me.
The knock was repeated. I lent an ear and located t
he direction it was coming from.
A third time. It was my door. No one had ever come knocking for me at that house.
I straightened my clothes and combed my beard before going to the door.
I opened it.
A small girl stood there, a mulatta, eight or ten years old. She was a pleasure to see, such a little thing, uncommonly neat and proper, her eyes brimming with dismay as if she’d been hoping against hope that no one would answer her knock.
And who was she there for? I asked benevolently. She tried to explain. Twice she raised her arms in the air, as if to drive on the necessary words, but they did not come.
She then tried to place a bit of paper in my hands but with such awkwardness and haste that it fell to the ground. The child did not notice and considered her mission to have been fulfilled. She went back across the street at a run and entered the house where the woman sat at the window.
The slip of paper at my feet took on significance. It contained two terse lines, two questions: whether she could be of help and whether I would consent to a correspondence.
It was absurd. The woman was suggesting that she and I correspond as only adolescents or lovers do.
I devoted myself anew to the maté, pretending to relish it along with the inner laughter provoked by this unsought adventure.
No, no, I said to myself. Her aspirations struck me as excessive in such a woman.
I imagined Tora, a full-bodied female, pleasing to the eye, secretly carrying romantic notes to that flabby involuntary spinster. I was so greatly diverted by the image that I regretted not having a companion to share in its hilarity.
Then I wondered: Was my ridicule exaggerated? Her first question had stirred up things from my former life that I preferred not to face.
Once again someone was offering me help. Yet another woman felt authorized to furnish me with her protection. I was a fragile man, therefore, and visibly so.
And there was more. The message suggested some new version of Luciana’s scheme, that laborious intercession on my behalf which must have run aground, who knows, and which had become like the memory of some relative who has disappeared. The note was a travesty of Luciana’s initiative, this ugly creature and her unwanted advances a joke played upon me by time.
Then, as so often on other occasions, a complex sequence of logical conclusions was displaced by an unexpected and starkly legible intuition: This women wanted to help me with money.
I considered the question of whether to accept. I probed for the cause of my vacillation. It was not scruple, no. Not now. My hesitation was due to a piece of information in my possession: Tora had warned that this woman was no richer than her master, her master being poor.
My conduct, I knew, had to be guided by my current situation and prospects, not by any remembered afflictions or constraints.
Yet this woman promised no great benefit to me—a fact that supported my initial inclination to respond in the negative.
The final mainumbig abandoned its rapt, silent fluttering among the flowers, and I knew it was time to yield my place in the garden to the night.
Before I could light the candle in my room, tender little knuckles rapped at the door.
The sweet mulatta, her skin even darker in the dark street, stood there silently, gazing at me with the suffering eyes of one in the grip of another’s will.
I tried to help. “Did you bring another message?”
She looked down without answering. She stared at her naked feet which could not keep still.
That was not it. “What have you come for?” I asked.
Again, her resolve failed at the first attempt, and I had to repeat the question.
“Why did you come? For what? Go on. Say it.”
“I don’t know. She sent me.”
The timid little voice took for granted who “she” was.
The woman at her lookout post would brook no delay in our correspondence. She demanded a response.
I signaled to the little girl to wait and went to my desk. I made a light and found paper, quill, ink . . . not knowing what to write.
I hesitated between a lengthy epistle of postponement designed to stoke her longings on the chance that I might one day find myself in need of her help, or a few laconically expressive lines, like those she had sent me, to dash all her hopes.
I peered out to see if the girl had departed and left me free of immediate obligation. But there she was, frail and subjugated, all her small life unwittingly put to serve the sensual greed of a stunted, monstrous woman.
I had my answer in mind, precise and specific. The woman asked if she could lend me her assistance, if I would consent to epistolary relations. A single word of response sufficed: No.
I wrote: Sí.
•
The paper handed over, the door closed, I returned to my table. I had thrown down the pen in such haste, as if to ward off regret by preventing delay, that several white pages were splattered with ink.
I observed the dark drops, still fresh.
Deliberately and very much aware of what I was doing, I pressed down on them, smearing my hands and the papers with ink. I wanted to spread the filth farther, make everything filthy.
I tested the heft of my purse: A few coins remained. Enough.
I went out to find a woman.
31
With purse and stomach empty, I awaited an invitation from Manuel Fernández. Lunchtime drew nigh, and it had yet to be extended.
I dropped a hint. “You’re well rested, that much is clear. There are no bags under your eyes.”
“Sí, Señor Doctor. I slept soundly.”
“No fishing last night, then.”
“No, Señor Doctor.”
“And what you caught the night before has gone bad?”
“Sí, Señor Doctor. Yesterday already, none of what was left could be cooked for dinner.”
My inquiries did not appear to be prospering.
We applied ourselves to our papers.
As I could not eat, I was in no hurry to rise from my work.
Fernández took a liberty that under other circumstances would have merited punishment. “Señor Doctor,” he said, “I believe the hour has come.”
“Hour? Hour for what?”
“For lunch. A stewed hen awaits us.”
To conceal my contentment, I said, “Another hen? You’re quite the spendthrift, Manuel.”
“This one is a gift, señor.”
“May I inquire from whom?”
“Sí, Señor Doctor. From the señora.”
“You mean Señora Emilia?”
“Sí, Señor Doctor. La Señora Emilia.”
I inquired no further.
We went to our lunch.
•
So as not to speak of the hen as we ate it, I pursued the topic of the book whose composition had first brought us together. I asked Fernández about it, inquiring as to its nature—of which I knew nothing, having understood nothing of the one page I had read— and its progress. I suspected he had put off writing it now that he was alert to the unseemliness of expending ink and office time on it.
He allowed me to heap question after question upon him and seemed determined to bear their weight, as if it were a punishment.
Then, with regret, he stated, “I gave it away to an old man. I don’t know who he is or where he came from. He was in the tavern, complaining about the delay of a ship, which left him stranded in the city for three weeks, and in all those weeks he couldn’t lay a hand on a book that didn’t treat of religious matters. I had mine, the seven small notebooks of it I had written thus far, on the bench beside me. I asked whether he wanted to read them. He looked them over and said yes, but there wouldn’t be time, for soon he would have to leave. I told him they were his, to take away forever and dispose of as he willed.”
“How could you have done that? Were you afraid of an investigation? Had the Gobernador ordered you to relinquish your work?”
“No, not at all.
It happened later. I can tell you when.”
“When?”
“The day I took the money to Señora Emilia.”
Fernández was guiding me along to a revelation. So long as I needed to share his table, I preferred not to take it in.
Perhaps whatever he sought to impart was not of the slightest importance to me.
•
Nevertheless, I was overcome by a deep irritation with Fernández. It was as if I had him in my body.
To be rid of him, and of my need for him, I decided to apply myself to the exacting task of courting the woman in the window.
There she was, behind the glass panes. Making my way down the street, I had a notion to knock at her door and speak to her, but upon closer inspection, I could not.
As I closed the door to my quarters—the treasure-house of all her bliss, or so it seemed—I blew her a kiss.
An hour or so later the little mulatta brought two letters.
The first, while wrapped in circumspection, was permeated with an iron-clad faith that I had placed my hand in hers. She begged me to tell her how she might be useful to me, apparently well aware of what was most likely to impel me to action. In the following paragraph came what I took to be the reward she expected in exchange for these promised favors, and that was the patronizingly protective tone of her intrusion into my domestic intimacy, as if she were certain there was no risk of rejection. She told me she would look out for me zealously, with open eyes, in that unwholesome house, and would take care to keep me always on my guard. I thought she was alluding to the dampness of the rooms, the storeroom in particular.
This first epistle appeared to have been written prior to my amorous pantomime. It was followed by the second, which had undoubtedly absorbed the hour that had elapsed since my arrival, and which was the letter of a woman in love, with the savor of the first kiss still upon her lips.
These letters presented a complication, but a necessary one. I read them hurriedly, as if catching up on a business matter, then reduced them to ashes, storing their contents in my memory in case, on some future occasion, they should prove useful.
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