Now I am blind, disabled, nearly a century old. Dozens of creatures inhabit my thoughts. For me, they have never grown up. They accompany me and I accompany them in a suspended time. When the Lord calls me I will carry them with me. I only await one thing: her greeting. At the holy gates, I hope to see her smile, which I attempted to draw out uselessly. Her farewell before she died was a bleat.
GARDEN OF THE MERCIES
THROUGH ME one can travel towards every place, towards no place.
I am a garden, a park, paths running between grasses, a wall.
Walkers move through me towards no place, towards every place. One of them has encamped beneath a tree; another one, in the silence.
Here blows the wind of never, of never ever. In it swirl petals from flowers that perhaps were splendorous. But weak, like frost flowers on panes. A breath of the world erased them. Rose-coloured, leaf-ribs of blue mist destined for a processional carpet.
If here remains any ear prone to music, close it down; certain noises abide.
If any eye still likes to see, wrap it in the gauze of night.
The air enclosed in me is like no other air. It has a name, but to keep it concealed let’s call it Calvary.
Through me one can travel… some might know where, and will say it in due time.
Garden, they call me, hospice of the Mercies.
Mercies it has not been my fortune to know.
A LONER
For H.A.M.
THE LIFE OF A LONER is just that: the life of a loner. No one scattered in the multiple existence of family life can imagine the way certain perceptions of the recluse set about crystallising. The slowness of the current of habit, the fluctuation like that of a flag in the sleepy air of the tropics, the move from habit to obsession, obsession to habit. The attention to detail. A life marked by signs, milestones, omens.
That is to say, a liturgy. A liturgy that condenses and expresses something, but what? Perhaps only the adaptation through the years of a particular being to the ever growing enigma of existence. A being who can only live alone, and who becomes ever less comprehensible to himself, yet more comfortable. Comfortable in a limited sense. The survivor of a shipwreck who has got used to the plank holding him, splintered but even so offering a minimum of hospitality, or at least some inclination to mutual interaction.
A loner.
This is how things happened.
Don Pino said he would sell his restaurant.
Of all his clients, only the loners took the news as if they’d just heard a rumble of thunder. There are accurate forecasters, such as snakes and toads. Also others less precise, like, say, a sudden pain in the feet. Some are indifferent to these signs, or mistaken in their readings. But loners know.
Don Pino’s announcement reverberated in their imaginations with an echoing roar.
What loners? Strictly speaking, there were three.
In the eating section, Teresina, the principal of a school, and Alberto Frin, a poet.
Both usually arrived just before noon. In the empty restaurant, their tables were just two cells, two mono-syllables solved in a crossword just started.
The third loner was Emilio, Don Emilio. He sat at a desk overlooking the tables; he kept the accounts. When waiters delivered orders and loaded trays, he wrote down what was on them, he charged and gave change. He had another occupation, the one that really mattered to him, one may presume. Music. He made all his albums available to Don Pino, or rather to Don Pino’s restaurant, music that had something old-fashioned about it, tangos and boleros. They made the place pleasant for diners, who were rarely young. He even had rare and coveted albums, as more than one had confirmed by approaching the desk and asking their price. Useless attempts, since he wouldn’t sell for anything.
Emilio made himself as available to the restaurant as his record library. He had worked for free for thirty years. He had a head of yellowish hair. His was a passive, patient, lunar nature. A lonely one too.
How was the thunder heard by the loners at the tables? Teresina, who had the soft appearance of an archangel or someone behind thick blurred glass, reacted with melancholy. Alberto felt deep distress. Take this chalice from me.
It sounded otherwise to Emilio. He must have known the news already, although no one ever saw him talking to the boss. But is speech necessary, anyhow? The slow boil of a decision is enough, one that lets out bubbles at intervals, a word today and another tomorrow. Or not even a word. A curse at a new display of the son’s imbecility, or silence. Emilio had sensed the change for a long time already, yes. Don Emilio did not let himself cry. He died the spring after the change of ownership, his records carefully stacked beside his bed.
Neither Don Pino nor his son attended the funeral, but a few waiters did. Let’s move on from that event.
For the waiters, the news also echoed like a thunderbolt. Thirty years treading the same paths, delivering and taking away full and empty plates, listening to opinions and secretly getting tipsy on Don Pino’s red wine mean something. It means something to enter a restaurant at twenty years old and hear thunder at fifty. They reacted in different ways. One spirit was broken forever. Another retired. Almost all managed somehow.
In a hermit’s day, no milestone is meaningless, just as for a seagull the crags of each sunset are ballast that give stability to each day. For Alberto Frin, the food at Pino’s was an important landmark. It was the same for Teresina. She had her school, with its students and parents. But that was rather a loose net, woven, so to say, on just one side of life. The waiters at Pino’s had a similar role, wove a similar net in the life of Frin.
He left his house at 11.45, almost always trembling with cold. He bought cigarettes halfway down the block, and continued to the restaurant. Buying cigarettes was the first landmark. If one morning the brand he smoked wasn’t there, he felt a certain distress, hard to accept as chance. Even the neighbours he met or didn’t meet in the elevator held some meaning.
These facts, which a member of a family usually absorbs without a second thought, mark the hours of certain sensitive loners. They are like words printed in capital letters.
The waiters at Pino’s with their white jackets and their idiosyncrasies were essential for Frin, and had been so throughout the years. A source of education. A balm. The sarcastic tenderness, the true friendship disguised as jokes had led that too lonely young man to confidence in humankind in one of its forms. He almost even reached that abandonment or at least that capacity for rest only achieved by love.
Love, no less, that milk of the soul, they had given and still gave. Those men had been the nursemaids of an always excessive, violently concealed thirst. They had been the secret source, one that flowed through hidden waterways, of a spiritual appeasement.
When the passage of the years brought to Frin’s attention, in the way a step was taken or a tray carried, the mortal condition whose discovery burns with the caustic of compassion those of an imaginative nature, the waiters knew how to defend themselves. They raised the shield of humour.
Humour, the incarnation of human immortality, rose up to reject the fluid of compassion, which, anyway, was never openly displayed. Or rather, to assimilate it in a certain way beneficial to both sides. It excluded the blasphemy of sentimentalism. But there is no friendship without compassion. They, the pitied ones, felt compassion for this too proud and susceptible young man, who just like them had arrived at his fifties. Yes, they were friends.
Thus was the cloth of love woven. Nothing more and nothing less. Every lunch, every noon. As befits men, there were no questions asked, no confidences. A long absence, the publication of a book announced in a newspaper, never drifted into overly personal subjects, as it does as soon as women speak. Delicacy, which like modesty is more genuine and exquisite in men, was exercised with the greatest care. Don Emilio’s music might be a little heavy, a red-hot iron in the ear of a nervous patron, but Frin wouldn’t complain. An opinion of his on the restaurant menu might be a little repetiti
ve, but the waiters would receive as if it were new.
Then that thunder sounded. Don Pino was selling. And he sold.
Now I would like you to imagine water in movement, the murky mirror filled with whirlpools usually almost imperceptible, which is life. How would this water, apparently unmoving but secretly living, appear to a group of agitated tourists with beach umbrellas, Thermoses and bathing suits? How does this group see? What does it see in the water? A fisherman, eye on the line, sitting in silence, as the dew on the shore gives way to the sun and the shadows cross from one side of a trunk to the other before the stars emerge, is able to notice changes in the current’s tone. Any palpitation in the fluidity, false transparency, movement around a piece of timber or splash would hold meaning for him. Not just for him. They exist in themselves. And they cannot be seen by tourists.
For Frin this ripple was Don Pino’s announcement: an appearance filled with news. News which concerned him.
The news came after the sale itself.
There wasn’t a huge amount of it. News is supposed to arrive with no warning. It has a hidden side which we don’t even call news, although that’s what it is.
Pino’s restaurant never even closed. One afternoon the tables and chairs were swapped out for more expensive ones. Prices shot up, and the food decayed to the point of tasting like gruel, the soft runny mash of those days that lacked salt and had an aftertaste of dishwater. Some screens that had given privacy were removed. The music was changed, no longer Emilio’s nostalgic tracks, and the homemade pastas disappeared. The restaurant had a new name, and remained almost empty for a longish time, months. An expanse of white tablecloths which looked a bit like photographs of Antarctica at sunset with sky-blue shadows. Teresina continued to go there before noon, but Alberto Frin tried to manage otherwise. He began to cook at home.
There’s no need to dwell on the cooking of a man who’s never cooked. Sometimes he preferred to go without eating, but he made progress. He developed an interest in cooking. Every now and then he lost heart and resorted to sandwiches, beer. But the fatigue of poor nutrition forced him to change his ways, and he would return to the restaurant for a week or so, until the prices and repulsion forced him out again. And then he would try once more to cook.
A slow current of water in a secret whirlpool.
Men need other human beings. Even loners do. Saint Anthony crawled wearily out of the rocky den where his temptations and his ecstasies took place; he made his way to a convent near the Red Sea where pilgrims awaited. Soon, he headed back to his cave.
Alberto Frin did not have a job. A hermit’s scarce need for the companionship of others is often polished off by the hard edges of a working life. At the end of the day, he seeks retreat once again with voluptuousness. Thus it was with Teresina and her school. Ever since he was young, Frin had invested all the effort many use to get a good job into the opposite, avoiding one. He didn’t live on air; he proofread, translated and wrote book reviews. But he did all of this from home.
When young, he had sold lottery tickets on the boardwalk of a seaside resort. Then he was an usher at a neighbourhood movie theatre, excellent work by his standards, but he had to leave after a too violent romance with the daughter of the owner. At fifty years old he was translating articles from German for a medical magazine, and novels from English and French for a publishing house.
His poems appeared in European newspapers, as well as in Latin American magazines, always accompanied by unjustly truculent illustrations. After looking at them for a moment in such a guise, he threw them in the basket, and the woman who came to clean once a week used them along with the other old newspapers to line the garbage can.
Frin’s peers had been the waiters at Pino’s restaurant. Women were another story; sex has little relationship with fellow feeling. Love… Considerable damages at his apartment bore witness to fits of desperation following a love that ended. But that had been years ago.
Forced from the restaurant out of disgust for its dishes, fury at the prices and the impossibility of speaking with the old waiters due to the loudness of the music, Frin drifted aimlessly along another path.
The relationship of a loner with the drinking establishments surrounding his home is complex. Some simple souls prefer to become customers of the nearest bar. Frin was not a simple soul, but he was an extraordinary walker. When he walked, his ideas got moving like coal-driven locomotives, throwing out sparks and puffs of smoke, poems swirling into form inside his head. He burst into bars like someone walking in the clouds who’s decided the fate of a storm kicking at rays of lightning and thunder bolts. He felt winged, in a state of illumination. The barmen hurried to serve him when they saw him. Those in the nearest bars to the south, north and east (to the west there was only Pino’s restaurant) already knew what whisky he liked. Everyone appreciated him and served him in excess, since his payment was always exaggerated, even in periods when he dined on cheese and bread; at such times, he’d drink Hollands instead of whisky. He let a few bills drop on the counter as if he had forgotten them, no grand gesture.
Yes, he was familiar to the barmen as well as the other clients. The latter appreciated him because bar patrons are loners. To make the acquaintance of the loneliest of all, gifted with winged feet that made him even more ungraspable, pleased them. He never suspected his popularity. He believed that he was invisible, or in the case of those he knew, hated. An error, based on the legions of enemies who panted hostilities at him from the shadows of the literary reviews. But the corridors of a speciality are one thing, the wide world another.
At fifty, Alberto Frin entered what some call the dark night of the soul. It coincided with the sale of the restaurant. Don Pino, for one, would have found it perfectly natural for this crisis to be solely explained on the grounds of his retirement from the gastronomic union. But life is more complicated.
Frin’s health also suffered in those days, and he had to leave off his walks. Guided by small flurries in the water just as the cork of a fisherman bobs along after being let go, carried to other temperatures and velocities and suffering transformations in his being, Alberto Frin was carried through melancholy and physical fatigue and the closing down of Pino’s restaurant to seek spiritual sustenance at Moreiro’s bar.
It wasn’t that it was unknown to him. But the shadow of the dark night, when neither poems nor thoughts appeared to accompany him, incapable of the old walks that had carried him flying along the city’s broken and filthy pavements, led him to a temporary rest at the old watering hole. The circles of life made a soothing hollow around him. Alberto Frin found himself asking Moreiro, the biggest, most intelligent, most sardonic of the blond Spaniards who had arrived there in 1950, how his family prepared stew.
When one resorts to talking about things like this, the nursemaids of the soul go back to work.
Moreiro’s conversation with Alberto Frin was interesting for them both. His stop at the counter allowed for the resurfacing of muted sympathies raised by twenty years of appearances and disappearances. The man who renounces movement will see the world move. Even the hermit in the forest will watch the plants grow, and the most reclusive animals will stretch themselves out by his legs.
Sitting at Moreiro’s counter, Frin heard a shy joke from a nearby table about the stew. It came from a skinny sixty-something, hunched over and frizzy-headed. Matías. An electrician, he told people, although his excuses for not showing up were known far better than any job he’d done. He spoke Spanish with a heavy accent, less German than Yiddish.
Alberto Frin knew him by sight. Living on a street for twenty years means something. Many conscious or unconscious connections are formed.
The conversation became a triangle, two at the counter and one at the table. And Frin’s soul discovered his fellow men’s thoughts.
One must imagine a gardener who, on the way to the palace where he works, sits down to rest in a vacant lot. There he discovers the beauty of the weeds that surround him, the grace
of their leaves and their grains moved by wind. So the soul of Frin was enchanted. The shuddering spirit that only drank the wine of the gods encountered in the water of each day an immortal wine.
Pino’s waiters had been something else. Those nursemaids of the soul had spoken and laughed as they served meals, but the crowd at Moreiro’s bar had no relationship with food. A coffee or a few drinks were enough excuse to stay a while in those peaceful waters, under the neon lights, reading an evening newspaper or chatting with a neighbour at the table. In the light and shadows, their souls floated and expanded like algae before flowing back to their owners at the hour for sleep, nourished by those oblique exchanges with humankind.
A club of loners, that’s what the bar was.
Moreiro and his brothers, who were vigorous and married and fathers to thriving children elsewhere, gathered there to feed the lonely ones. As if from inside an aquarium, they watched the newspaper seller, a creature somewhat similar to the bar’s clientele, though endowed with cirrhosis and a murder in his past; he and his wares were adhered to the glass from the outside.
Not all was silence. There were yells during games of cards, domino or dice, discussions about football and shouts into the public telephone. But not at night. And all the sounds floated above the essential damper of silence in a bar, a silence that was wholesome for them all.
On those quiet nights, Frin and Matías exchanged sarcastic remarks about German pronunciation and commentaries on the effects of race on man, a theme that interested them all. The strangeness of the Celtic spirit, and its differences with respect to the Latin, Germanic and Judaic, were taken up with jokes and brief definitions. Scepticism about politics and a certain primordial anarchism characterised all those men.
One day Diogenes joined their group.
Twenty years before, during a period when cigarettes were scarce, Alberto Frin had offered a packet to Diogenes in that bar. Since then Diogenes had considered him a friend, although they crossed paths without greeting. Now he made a joke from the counter, and was incorporated into the dialogue.
Land of Smoke Page 15
