Everyone laughed, but they knew better than to believe Miguel’s words, for he alone was able to leave the cemetery, for reasons which the others could only guess, assuming it had something to do with Gaspar Henriques.
“Where have you been lately?” Jaime asked Gaspar.
“Oh, I have been staying home listening to the radio for news on the island and watching the papers. They are saying that very soon it may break through the surface.”
“An island from the bottom of the sea. It is hard to imagine.”
“But imagine is what we must do. People have imagined finding islands for centuries, and many have gone out to search for them, sometimes finding them, only to return again and find nothing, and many have never been seen or heard from again. Perhaps this new island is simply the sea spitting up again what it had once swallowed.”
The ghosts watched him, his voice tremulous and eyes closed, the expression on his face hauntingly similar to their own when they recollected, in fond remembrance, the joyous pains of living.
“The birth of a new island,” Gaspar went on, “is the birth of new life, new possibilities, the unlocking of secrets deep in the earth.”
“It is almost as though it is a part of you, as if you have seen it.”
“I have been there, Miguel, at night, in my dreams.”
“It sounds heavenly,” Mariana said.
Miguel later assisted Gaspar back to his room, after seeing that Gaspar’s eyes were getting worse.
“I don’t know why, Miguel, but some things I see so clearly, and others—well, it’s good to have you here beside me.”
“It is my pleasure, Senhor Gaspar. After all, this is the only way I can get away from that bothersome woman of mine.”
“Ah, you two couldn’t possibly get along without one another,” Gaspar said, laughing.
Gaspar listened to the news reports while Miguel gazed at the wall charts of the islands, where Gaspar had marked the location of the eruptions. Then Miguel picked up a book by Fernando Pessoa and read for Gaspar, who sat staring out the window at the Azorean sky above and the sea below, reflecting on how, of late, with the worsening of his vision, came a sharper, clearer, brighter and more colorful sight of his friends in the graveyard, of his view of the island which wasn’t yet.
Gaspar realized that, at some point in his life, he had stopped living according to the restraints and parameters that others had imposed upon themselves and the world, that somehow, unconsciously, he had defined his own world.
It was very subtle—but also obvious, he thought, after backtracking through the accumulated years of his life, the events and circumstances which had brought him at that particular time, to this particular place, thinking those very thoughts.
~ ~ ~
Gaspar sat in the late afternoon warmth of the graveyard. The others had left him alone with Mariana dos Reis. Miguel was unsure about the situation and spoke his doubts.
“What are you troubling about?” Rosa said.
“I just think this might not be so good,” Miguel said. “A dead woman might take his life, or he might take her . . . ah, I don’t know.”
“Of course not. Just let the two of them alone. They are lonely. I should know. I could tell you a thing or two about loneliness.”
Gaspar and Mariana quietly chatted as he pictured her invisible beauty, the young lady who had died with a heart that had never known love, and whose heart now went out to this man, unlike any she had ever met.
She too dreamed, content and happy when he was there with her, yet insecure at times about the meaning and the unknown ramifications of this love that crossed the lines of life and death, and that so confused her.
Neither was aware of the secret language that electrified the atmosphere surrounding them; nor of the music that somehow arose from the very soil, the trees, the wings of the birds and butterflies that hovered and danced about in the air. “I love you,” the sea in the distance murmured. “I love you too,” said the wind through the grass. “I’ve never known anyone like you,” the music sweetly whispered. “I’m so happy I’ve found you,” answered the trees in unison.
Their union was reflected in the brushing of branches, in the humming of insects, the joyous chirping of the birds, and in the silent stirrings of the earth beneath their feet. Love was painted across the sky with the dispersion of sunlight and clouds over a pastel blue.
Mariana forgot her earlier conversation with Rosa. “Never mind your pretty head about it,” Rosa had told her. “Love is love, and it certainly does nobody any good to worry themselves about it.”
“I hope you are right, Rosa. But what can I give him? Not even the warmth of my flesh.”
“No, but that is no matter. You have his heart and that’s all that counts. To him it is as if you are many miles away, but so much the better for you. He cannot forget about you because you are here with him all the time. It is the perfect arrangement, believe me. I should have been so lucky with my Miguel.”
“Oh, everybody knows you two secretly love each other.”
Gaspar reached out to touch Mariana’s hair, but of course there was no possibility of his feeling her skin or her hair. Even still, when he did, she turned to him as though sensing his touch and she smiled. Her smile in turn warmed Gaspar more than any touch was possible.
~ ~ ~
Gaspar stared hard into the dark, the unknown. What was there? What lay beyond sight, beyond the shadows? There was more, much more; he could feel it. Like the invisible matter that littered the unlit regions of the universe, there was so much more that lay beyond comprehension.
How far could he see, with eyes open wide, what was the range and scope of one’s vision?
~ ~ ~
“Thousands of people die every day,” Gaspar said to Miguel. “But very few people’s lives, much less their deaths, affect the world. When so many leave and come into the world every day—it makes no difference really.”
“But to ourselves.”
“Yes. To us we are everything. I don’t know if it’s better or worse, but those few who are nothing are generally the ones who accomplish the most and are remembered.”
“Who are nothing?”
“Who have something—music, some civic cause, art, religion—that takes the place of themselves, that takes away the idea that there are limits.”
Gaspar picked things up from the air, the scent of a breeze, the murmuring of the trees, and the chatter of running water. He didn’t need to check calendars for upcoming events: no one had to tell him when the weather would change or when the earth would shake and rattle.
Gaspar was physically aware of the inevitability of events that would occur, no matter their distance.
It wasn’t even a conscious thought that had driven him to dress up and bring flowers and a bottle of wine to the cemetery for the festival of All Saint’s Day, where he first met Mariana, Miguel, and the others. They greeted him like an old friend when he arrived, knowing he was unlike the others who came to pay their respects.
~ ~ ~
It had been several days since anyone in the cemetery had seen Gaspar. Miguel finally went to check on him. Gaspar was gone. Miguel followed Senhora Figueiredo to the hospital. His eyes had gone from bad to worse, leaving him completely blind now.
“Are you stronger, senhor?” Miguel asked.
“It’s too early to tell, Miguel. I’ll let you know.”
Miguel visited him over the next few days, after Gaspar was taken back to his home. Miguel sat and listened to the radio.
“Why is this island so important for you?” Miguel asked.
“It is a new place, a place of myths born of the past but created in the future;
the new island, Miguel, like life, is defying death, denying limitations. We can stay here and never move, never dream or think, or we can reach forward, step across the abyss to a new shore. I can’t help but believe that somehow this transformation, this leap, will teach us how to survive.”
For a moment Gaspar was back in his bedroom as a child. The room was dark, and he was alone. He saw there were worse things than death; he saw the prolific and prolonged death-in-life, in which one became a mere entity, going through the motions but by no means living life, not as it was meant to be lived.
He focused his eyes on the unlit candles on the table in front of him. Burn he thought, burn. He stared, thinking that one thought again and again, mouthing the words, practicing what he knew he would eventually learn, tasting the sulfur and the sodium nitrate which would one day erupt into the conflagration he so strongly desired.
He lit matches to burn his fingers with, to test himself, in order to withstand the pain; he carefully folded pieces of paper and sailed them out the window of his bedroom, bending his will to keep them aloft, carried farther and farther by the winds his mind conjured, everything practice for the greater leaps he would later make.
~ ~ ~
The radio played softly. The night was warm, heavy with the threat of rain.
Gaspar listened both to the music and for the sound of the skies splitting open. Rain had been falling for two days, a torrential downpour.
He listened to the rain falling again. Looking out upon the darkness from within his own night, he saw the flooded ground erupt with new life, as the barren rocky stretches of land began crawling with green shoots and vines.
Delicate strains of Mozart then, soon after, Tchaikovsky seemed to mimic the instant growth of trees and flowering shrubs.
The rain fell unrelentingly, forming deepening pools and rushing rivulets, which grew into streams, as empty fields suddenly teemed with dense forests.
Gaspar glanced in the direction of the graveyard, his eyes suddenly alive with colors and shapes. The cemetery bloomed with vegetation. And his friends? Were they now embodied as trees, or vines? How many times had the surrounding earth been spilt with blood? The lives of men, women, and children run into the ground. Even animals. How many animals over the centuries had returned their elements to the soil?
And now, right here, every life which had ever touched this ground was being resurrected in plant form. And it was spreading. For where was there a bare patch of earth? A place where blood had not at some time been spilled, and spilled again? Didn’t all life, in fact, contribute something in part to the future?
The rain (was it really rain, or tears, or perhaps blood?) continued to fall, breathing new life into the leaves, limbs, roots, and buds of the garden, which rose along slope after slope, spreading into canyons, down riverbeds, and across fields.
Gaspar remembered, many years before, traveling down roads that shot in a straight line to the horizon, through miles without cities or towns. There had been occasional isolated crosses where hardships—perhaps greed or accident—had taken the lives of some traveler, left here and there to enrich a patch of earthen poverty.
~ ~ ~
Miguel came shouting. “Senhor Gaspar, senhor!” Gaspar rose to greet him. They danced with merriment. “What is happening, senhor?”
“I don’t know, Miguel. But isn’t it wonderful? The earth will be covered with trees. The whole planet, like the garden of Eden.”
“And look, senhor, you can see and walk.”
“Yes!”
“But how is it possible?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“It is a miracle, senhor.”
“Yes, yes it is. Where is Mariana, Miguel?”
“I will take you to her. She is back with the others.”
Mariana sat waiting, and when Miguel came with Gaspar she stood staring in disbelief. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “You are whole again?”
He took her hand and they twirled together. “It’s true, Mariana! It’s true!”
How it had happened he didn’t know, but somehow he had broken through yet another barrier, as if he was no longer human, but not dead either, some other stage altogether. A foot in each world.
“I can feel your hand, Mariana!” he shouted.
“I, too, can feel your touch, Gaspar.”
Not only had Gaspar changed, but everything else had as well: the island, the cemetery, the air, Mariana. Somehow she too had become more.
They laughed and sang, strolled together arm in arm, as if they were alone in the universe, which was now a garden that stretched on forever, in all directions.
The rain did not disturb them. It inundated the land around them, forming quick rivulets and pools.
Mariana and Gaspar walked and sensed the newfound physicality of their world, listening to birds sing, the happy sound of plants reaching new heights, intertwining and mingling, covering the landscape and filling the air with their scent. Plants with the infinite faces of life.
For the first time Mariana and Gaspar kissed.
The current grew stronger and surged through Gaspar like a halo, and when he touched Mariana it grew and enveloped her as well. She felt it, lifting and pulsing, feeling, as if for the first time: the warm rain pouring; the fire-dance of touch when Gaspar held her or kissed her; the giving and taking without restrain or reservation, but with a free willingness and the desperation that came of the mistrust that there might never be another chance. Miracles didn’t often repeat themselves.
Somehow things had become inverted: the more he died, the closer he got to death, the more alive he became, the more he felt.
“I’ve been a fool. A fool, Mariana.”
“But how, why?” she asked.
“Because I’d forgotten where all that power came from. What was its source?” He held her, kissed her. “Now I know.”
~ ~ ~
Gaspar waited impatiently for changes to occur with the same eager anticipation of a child awaiting Christmas. When they did, they came about too slowly, in steps too painfully small. Sometimes he waited for years and years while envisioning each new alteration in the universe and how everything would turn out when all was said and done. Why not stay awake all night? Sleep was a thief, stealing valuable time to think and act, to create and seek—until, at last he reconciled himself with sleep, taking into account the fertile potential of dreams. Still, he grew to resent any and all hurdles; even eating seemed a bothersome chore, unproductive and all too frequent an occurrence.
Later Gaspar went back to see Mariana. “Don’t go, not again,” she said. “It has taken so long for us to find one another.”
“I won’t go,” he said, and they walked, exploring the new richness of a life neither had known before, where the intangible became suddenly tangible, transparent became opaque, and the opaque became light. Where dreams became reality, and reality was anything at all.
No, there was no reason ever to leave now. Gaspar and Mariana ventured farther into the world of their making.
“Life,” Gaspar said, laughing.
“Death,” Mariana shouted.
“Isn’t it all preposterous?”
“It is very silly,” Mariana said.
Quebrado do Caminho and the graveyard were a million miles away, and time—no more than a vague uncertainty that the two of them had left behind somewhere, forgotten.
They held hands and walked without really knowing if they were lost in a legion of trees and valleys, rivers and hills which were only illusions, or if Mariana and Gaspar were the illusions. But neither of them thought it mattered.
“Where is Miguel?” Mariana asked.
“He’s still back there at my home, I think, listening to the radio. Seems funny, a dead man, worrying himself about news reports of an island being born.”
The latest report had detailed how the island, just as it appeared to be on the verge of surfacing, had sunk.
“You are disappointed about the island?” Mariana asked.
“Yes. I had envisioned a new world there, the transformation of a desert into a beautiful place with gardens and water.”
“Like here?” she said. “This is so beautiful, Gaspar.”
“Yes, it is.”
Maybe the
y belonged here after all. Would they eventually become two trees, limbs intertwined? Would they cover the earth with their vines and flowers, overpowering the rocks?
Gaspar wondered if it could really last, or if it would dry up the way many of the riverbeds did in summer.
She heard the shout before he did. “Senhor! Senhor!” Miguel was looking for them.
He arrived breathless. “It is there, Senhor Gaspar, the island.”
“What do you mean?”
“It has finally risen from the sea. The island is there.”
“Will you go there?” Mariana asked.
“I don’t know. If I do, I may not be able to come back. There are limits.”
“I’ll go with you,” Mariana said.
“And I too,” said Miguel.
“All of us together on the new island?” Gaspar said. “Are you sure?”
“You said we can turn it into a garden like here. Why not there too?”
“Maybe we can. What if we cannot return?”
“That is okay. It will be our new home.”
“But it has never been done before.”
“No, but with you we will do it,” Mariana said, defiantly.
Gaspar tried to reason things out, but found he couldn’t hold onto anything. Night and time had become a cool liquid. Thoughts slipped away like a thing he tried too hard to cling to. During his last visit to the hospital, the doctors had told him he might lose his other leg. He didn’t know if he were more alive or closer to death—or beyond death. It was as if none of that pertained to him anymore.
~ ~ ~
As expected, Rosa made a big commotion. “So, you will abandon your wife, an old woman, to go chasing some foolish island in the ocean?”
“I told you we will all be there. Senhor Gaspar, too. An island which will be all ours.”
“I refuse to leave. This is holy ground. That new island is not.”
“So, we’ll make it holy, then.”
The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales Page 19
