Lovers on All Saints' Day

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  ALSO BY JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ

  The Informers

  The Secret History of Costaguana

  The Sound of Things Falling

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 as The All Saints’ Day Lovers by Bloomsbury Publishing

  Originally published in Spain in 2008 as Los amantes de Todos los Santos by Alfaguara

  Copyright © 2005, 2008 by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

  English translation copyright © 2015 by Anne McLean

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, date.

  [Short stories. Selections. English]

  Lovers on All Saints’ Day : stories / Juan Gabriel Vásquez ; translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-19674-2

  I. Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, Los amantes de Todos los Santos. English. II. Title.

  PQ8180.32.A797A2 2015 2015004286

  863'.64—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR MARIANA

  Contents

  Also by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Hiding Places

  The All Saints’ Day Lovers

  The Lodger

  The Return

  At the Café de la République

  The Solitude of the Magician

  Life on Grímsey Island

  Author’s Note

  Hiding Places

  I DIDN’T LEAVE BELGIUM much during that season. I spent the time observing the people of the Ardennes and participating in their activities, and then learning to write what I’d seen in such a way that as little of it as possible would be squandered. In February, a Colombian magazine commissioned me to write an article about a certain Parisian bookshop. French trains went directly to Paris from Liège, but they’d gone on strike two weeks earlier and there was no resolution in sight. So I had to take an old orange train from Aywaille station—a switch in every second car allowed passengers to control the heating—a green one from Liège, and spend the night in the house of a couple of friends in Brussels, in order to catch the first direct train to Paris the next morning. I arrived at the bookshop, stayed there for several days lending a hand as an occasional assistant, and wrote my article. But what happened during the night I spent in Brussels will haunt me forever.

  Philippe came to pick me up at the main station, the most inhospitable of the three possible terminals for Liège trains. He was wearing a plaid beret and thick-framed glasses, which he took off to hug me, and on both sides of his nose were red marks from the weight of them. Philippe and Claire had been married the summer before; he was then (at the time of my ill-timed visit) an out-of-work actor. According to what Claire had told me over the phone, he was going through a rough patch: a good contract for a French film had just been canceled due to lack of funding; his first wife was threatening to sue if he didn’t hand over half the value of the house in Zaventem, where they’d lived before separating. I didn’t talk to him about any of this, because we didn’t have that kind of rapport, but in his face—on certain occasions when I asked a polite question, in the grimace with which he waited for a light to change—I could read his preoccupation. We parked right in front of 287 Rue du Noyer; we smelled freshly baked bread as we got out of the car, and this odd fact (it was four in the afternoon) gave us something to talk about during the following uncomfortable minutes. They were uncomfortable because Claire wasn’t there: she spent the afternoons in her studio and she had asked me to meet her after seven, to see her latest works and have dinner with her and the people with whom she shared the workshop. They were uncomfortable also because of the incident with the flowers, which in another place, in other circumstances or backed by a different past, might have struck me as slightly odd or banal. On the rough wooden table that served as both dining table and ironing board there was an arrangement of Spanish azaleas with a single sunflower. There was also a typed card: it was the color of raw meat, and around the border were blue watercolor marks. BEST WISHES, it said on the embossed cardboard.

  “My father-in-law,” said Philippe.

  He said beau-père, pronouncing the consonants loudly, and smiled with the kind of sarcasm I hadn’t thought him capable of. Then he didn’t say anything else. The house was tall and narrow (four stories, but each floor was barely four meters wide); Philippe excused himself and began to climb the creaking stairs, one after the other, as if he needed all his patience to get up to the master bedroom on the third floor, above the study where the only phone in the house was, beneath the guest room where I would be spending the night.

  —

  THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON, Philippe’s father-in-law, Claire’s father, the owner of the house in the Ardennes where I was living temporarily, had come looking for me to take advantage of an unusual circumstance: a late-winter day when the sun was shining.

  “The lake is waiting for us,” he said. “Hurry, there’s not much light left.”

  Monsieur Gibert did not wait for my answer. He turned around and the sleeve of his jacket snagged on the angular doorknob. A couple of minutes later, I heard the engine of his four-by-four start up.

  The lake was an artificial pond that Monsieur Gibert had built to irrigate a cabbage crop, but the crop failed before it got started, and now the only purpose the lake served was for the occasional distraction of a stubborn retired farmer who stocked it with his own trout, which he later fished. Monsieur Gibert carried a Sander rod in his gloved hand and I followed him, eyes fixed on the green water, on the marshy shore, on the heads of the frogs that shone like floating coins and escaped with small commotions when they saw us coming. I sat down on a beech log. Monsieur Gibert put on his bifocals and moved his skilled fingers over the end of the line and over the three sharp hooks of the lure, silver-plated and hard and shiny in the long rays of the afternoon sun. His left hand closed around the cork handle and his index finger held the line against the rod. He drew his arms to one side, and the momentum of the rod cut through the air and the reel sounded like a child sighing as it spun, and ten meters from the shore the lure broke the surface, with delicacy, as if worried about waking a sleeping frog.

  “I want you to keep your eyes open,” he said.

  “They’re open, monsieur.”

  “At their house,” he said. “I want you to notice everything, and then tell me. How they live. If she’s all right, if he treats her as she deserves to be treated.”

  All this he said to me as his right hand turned the handle, reeling the line back in. We weren’t looking at each other: we both had our eyes fixed on the sinker and lure sailing toward us like a bullet in slow motion, causing a fragile wake on the surface and emerging upon arrival at the shore. Mo
nsieur Gibert had never been to his daughter’s house. They’d invited him once, and he’d come up with some unimaginative and rather banal excuse. I knew this because Claire told me, imitating her father’s nasal voice, his falsely solemn gestures. Gibert had never made this impression on me; Claire’s complaints made me feel uncomfortable, because I feared her resentments might be contagious. For Claire, everything that happened in her life was the result of what her father had ruined, wasted, or frittered away (emotions, not money).

  Gibert stripped tangled plants off the lure. The weeds stuck to the hairs on the back of his hand. He cast again.

  “I’m going to tell you something sad,” he said. “Philippe’s not good for my daughter. I mean, he’s a good man, but he has problems.”

  “But they’re not definitive, monsieur. He’ll find work.”

  “Work?”

  “He’s got a job offer in Montpellier,” I lied. “For the summer. They’ll pay well, it’s street theater.”

  “His father’s a drunk,” he said. “His sister’s husband beats her up all the time.”

  He reeled in his lure. He took off two or three little green branches, which looked like asparagus. He cast again.

  “His sister, I mean, not Claire. His sister’s husband beats his wife.”

  “Yes, monsieur. I knew what you meant.”

  “And him, with his first wife, all that . . . Anyway, it’s all a big mess. That’s what I mean. A chaotic mess.”

  Then, as he reeled in the lure, the line hardened like a glass tube. “Ah,” said Gibert. His hand wound the reel, and two steps away from us a brownish-gray trout appeared, thrashing in the water. Gibert lifted the line, the trout changed color in midair and fell onto the grass on the shore, and the pink flecks on its side looked brighter.

  “Here, hold this.” Gibert passed me the rod without taking his eyes off the fish. “We’ll throw this one back, it’s just little.”

  He began to try to free it from the lure, but the hooks had pierced its cheek and impaled its brown tongue. The blood spread over the silver-plated lure and Gibert’s pale fingers. The trout shook, fell to the ground, Gibert squeezed it in his hands again to try to free it, and said keep still, connasse, I’m trying to help you. The tongue was bleeding, the lure was stuck in it like an anchor, and I was imagining the intensity of the pain and the miracle of features—eyes, a mouth—in which pain is invisible. I don’t usually fish, and maybe that’s why I found myself imagining that a knife was going through my tongue, and I would have sworn I felt a surge of pain in my jaw. Little idiot, said Gibert. His thumbnail turned a watery red.

  “Trop tard,” said Gibert. “Too late, filthy creature.”

  He walked over to the beech logs with the fish still bending in his closed fist, gasping laboriously like an asthmatic. Then Gibert raised his arm and banged down hard against the edge of a stump, and the trout’s skull made a flat sound as it hit the bark. Gibert hit it three times, very quickly, and the unechoed crunch of broken bones was clear in the air. The bark of the stump was smeared with scales and blood. The trout, one eye burst and covered in splinters, stopped thrashing.

  —

  I SPENT THE AFTERNOON in the Waterstones bookshop near the Bourse, across the street from a peep show. I found a couple of books about the Paris bookshop I was going to visit. They mentioned George Whitman, the owner, and one of them mistakenly said this was the bookshop that had published Ulysses in 1922. The other, more useful, said that Whitman (who was not related to the poet, it emphasized) had arrived from California and founded three bookshops before the one that I would visit. It was a small book, almost a pamphlet; I thought I’d read it in the hour and a quarter the train journey from Brussels to Paris took. Then I looked at my watch, left in a hurry, and walked as quickly as the cold, biting February air would let me.

  Claire’s studio was on Rue Braemt, a street of immigrants in which every second or third building had a Turkish restaurant or a secondhand clothing shop on the ground floor. It was already dark, and only the polished gleam of the neon lights from the shops lit up the quiet street. As I turned the corner, I saw a silhouette in front of the workshop. I had to get very close, almost right in front of her, before recognizing an impatient Claire, who was waiting for me. Or maybe, I thought, it wasn’t me she was waiting for.

  Her hair was stuck to her temples, as if she’d been sweating. She told me she’d just had a call from Philippe, and after hanging up the phone, she’d cupped her hands under the tap at the workshop sink and splashed her face, as if trying to wake up.

  “It’s his nephew,” she said. “He’s been in an accident.”

  Philippe had only one nephew: his sister’s son was an eight-year-old with green eyes who looked nothing like her, but a lot like his father. The only time I met him he confessed that he hated the Flemish language and was never going to learn it.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Is it serious?”

  “We don’t know anything. Go on up, wait for me upstairs. He’s on his way here, and I don’t think he’d like you to see him right now.”

  A little kid in baggy trousers went past on a skateboard. Claire didn’t even notice him.

  “This can’t be happening to him,” she said. “Not him, not now.”

  “But Philippe’s coming here?”

  “Yeah. He won’t want you to see him in such a state. Go on up, go, I’ll be there in a bit. Poor thing, he’s a rotten mess.”

  The door to her studio was ajar, as she’d obviously rushed out. I thought I caught a whiff of bad eggs, but it might also have been an oil fixative I wasn’t familiar with. I thought about the smell and about the word Claire had used, rotten, a word barely applicable to a living man. Four neon tubes hung from the high ceiling. On top of a little electric stove, the food Claire was preparing still steamed: stuffed peppers. I took off the lid and the fragrance of the spices mingled with the chemical smell of the fixative and paints. While I waited for Claire, I thought, I could have a look at her canvases. Then I thought she would like to guide me through the paintings when I saw them for the first time, and looking at them without her would be a minor betrayal; so I stretched out on a camp bed covered in wool blankets and picked up a Giacometti book. I couldn’t concentrate (part of my attention was trying to hear any sound coming from the street or the ground floor, a crying man, a consoling woman), but I found an old catalog between the pages: in it, Giacometti was asked why the feet of his figures were so big, and he said: I’ve always had the impression or sense of the fragility of living beings, as if each moment required an arduous energy to remain upright. The words struck me as opportunistic and emphatic, an artist’s pose. I was involved in these ridiculous imaginings when Claire arrived.

  “They don’t know anything. And he’s very confused. The boy was out for a drive with a couple of friends and the father of one of them. Nothing happened to any of them. Just him.”

  “But what happened?” I asked.

  “They were on the highway. Or not, maybe that’s what Philippe thinks. But maybe they were on a mountain road. Why him?”

  “Who?”

  She looked up and the neon was like powder on her nose. “What do you mean, who?” she whispered, and I realized we were on the brink of a serious misunderstanding. I wanted to say there was an injured child and saying Why him? could refer to Philippe but also to the boy. Then I understood I could not speak those words.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  “Poor Philippe, his poor family. I swear, they have such bad luck, it’s as if they’re cursed.”

  The intercom buzzed just then. Claire lifted the receiver, said hello to someone with sudden politeness. “Come on up,” she said, and pressed a button with an image of a key on it.

  “They’re here. Shit, now I don’t know if I want to see them.”

  “Tell them what happened.”
<
br />   “It’s too late. They’ve come all this way. They live really far away, I asked them to come and they came. . . .”

  “Whatever you say. Can I ask you something?”

  Claire opened the door. From downstairs came the voices of her friends who were on their way up.

  “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  “Because he didn’t want me to go with him. Because he’s always wanted to protect me.”

  And then she added: “At least, that’s what he tells me.” The voices on the stairs kept approaching. I asked her what she meant by that, if she didn’t believe Philippe’s reasons. It was as if she were choking on a marble.

  “It’s possible he doesn’t do it to protect me,” she said. “In his family terrible things have happened, if only you knew, it’s as if nothing comes out right for them. But maybe, just maybe, he does it to look out for himself. To get home at night, having seen his sister or his father or whoever, and feel that he’s entered another world, that he’s safe. I don’t know, ‘cursed’ is a strong word, I feel horrible saying it. But there is something he’d like to hide from. If he takes me to these things, if he lets me go with him and I get soaked in that pain, what hiding place remains for him?”

  —

  AT ABOUT TEN we walked back to Claire’s house. The wind had dropped and the streetlights cast shadows of bare branches. We skirted a park and a basketball court. I noticed that the hoops didn’t have nets and then I saw the nets piled up on the concrete bleachers. Claire was carrying her phone in her hand, not in a pocket or in her bag, but prepared for it to ring as if urgently answering Philippe’s call would alleviate the gravity of events or prevent their consequences. The women she shared her studio with hadn’t picked up on anything; we’d discussed Claire’s paintings, those pregnant wombs and cartilages and lungs that she was able to bring to life on the canvas. We ate stuffed peppers, and one of her friends (maybe Vera, the one with short hair and a bullfighter’s pigtail) pointed out that they resembled the saffron-colored lungs of the paintings. Claire said yes, maybe, that one never knows where shapes and colors come from. But her head was elsewhere, and I was starting to understand that much more than a child’s life was at stake: for Claire, something immense and something of her own was at risk that night, as if she’d placed a bet, as if her happiness or ruin depended on a call about another person’s fate.