Lovers on All Saints' Day

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “He’s an expert,” I say. “I’ve never seen anyone so adept at the art of walking while drunk.”

  “He’s already drunk?” asks Viviane.

  “Of course he is. Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, he’s a charming drunk, your papa. The exact opposite of what you always told me.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “You told me physical strength. You told me moral weakness. But what I see is quite different. Of course, it’s only the second time I’ve ever met him, or the third.”

  “You’re right. It’s just that I barely know him.”

  Viviane smiles. I get impatient.

  “Now what?”

  “The two of you make me laugh,” she says. “Your irony, your sarcasm. Even if you don’t admit it, you’ve inherited all that.”

  I interrupt her: I’d rather avoid the psychology I used to get so often when we were a couple. I ask her, instead, how she is, how she’s been feeling. Viviane sets her glass down on the table.

  “I don’t want to talk about us. This is not going to happen again, so it’s not something you should get used to.”

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “I came with you today because I know it’s important, or at least I believed what you said in your letter. But that’s as far as it goes. Don’t come looking for me again.”

  “Understood.”

  “Understood?”

  “Yes, Viviane. Understood.”

  “Okay, now, tell me something. Is it true you’re on antibiotics?”

  “Of course not. I don’t even know what I have.”

  “Ah, okay. Because I was going to say you shouldn’t be drinking any whiskey if you’re on antibiotics, let alone as much as this.”

  Viviane has suddenly adopted a lighthearted, playful attitude, as if she wanted to forget about the bandage over my lymph node. The whiskey is an indispensable factor, of course. But Viviane’s behavior, by way of the brief alcohol-induced euphoria, is genuine and transparent. I’ve always liked that about her: there are no strategies or double intentions in Viviane. She is a woman who says what she thinks and never keeps things that need to be said to herself. Perhaps—I can’t say I hadn’t considered it—leaving her had been one of those mistakes that nothing can rectify. And for a while now that fear has been joining the others, and I’ve often wondered if I’d lost her by now, if I’d lost her forever. And then I don’t know if I’m frightened by the words or the fact of being stuck in the middle of the reality they describe. Mistake. Forever. Lost. Words like these scare me more than anything else.

  When my father gets back, Viviane takes his arm to help him fall onto his chair, precise and rough like the ballast of a balloon.

  “I wanted to ask you a favor, monsieur,” Viviane says, filling all three glasses up to the top. “Tell me about your son, tell me about his childhood. He’s so secretive, it’s impossible to get him to talk about himself.”

  “Well, if this is how things are going, I’ll get lost,” I say. “Nobody’s going to force me to sit through this torture. Besides, I have to make a call.”

  Above my father’s upper lip are white specks. His facial hair is dense and coarse, and when he’s shaved inattentively, like today, it’s inevitable that bits of toilet paper and loose threads from a napkin get stuck to his face. As I stand up and walk away toward the telephone, I hear him say:

  “Agreed, my dear. But first, let’s order a nice steak. I’m starting to need some food to go with this drink.”

  —

  THE FINAL DAYS of our marriage passed by in the midst of a perfidious affability, at least on my part. I was attracted to Viviane; I hadn’t lost interest in her conversation; she wasn’t docile, but she knew how to make me feel that spending time with me satisfied her, which is perhaps the highest tribute a lover can hope for. I, for my part, used absurd euphemisms to name the rift or absence I’d begun to feel, those words that explode if you’re not careful, like a box of fireworks or a father-son relationship. On the morning of November 6 last year—I remember the date because a local magazine ran a devastating review of my book that day, not criticizing the book but rather my father, the man who had faked an article years earlier—that morning, as I said, as I watched her from bed, I knew as if someone were whispering it in my ear that we no longer had much time left together. I sat up in bed, all my senses focused on this woman. Viviane never closed the bathroom door (she always teased me about my exaggerated modesty) and now, unexpectedly, she was a Pierre Bonnard figure, a faceless woman drying her legs with a towel the color of tropical fruits, or rather the towel was caressing her, encircling her thighs, preparing the surface of her skin for the application of seaweed moisturizer. Never had I liked a woman this much: Why was I thinking of leaving? It had been her idea to travel to Tibet, as long as we could find a hotel where they spoke French or English. She was the one who banned me, during the time it took to write the book, from getting distracted by banal articles, saying we could easily live on her salary from the importer for a short time. Perhaps that had been the only thing I’d been sure of lately: without Viviane, I would never have finished that book. And in spite of that, there I was, sitting cross-legged on top of the sheets of the unmade bed, receiving the scent of her deodorant and the steam from the shower, watching her and desiring her and thinking of leaving her. My forehead was damp and so were my palms, and it took me a few seconds to understand: neither the steam nor the radiators were to blame. I was sweating.

  Noticing I was watching her, Viviane fastened the towel around her waist like a man—she knew that few things could excite me as much as seeing her like that—and came back into the bedroom to get dressed. Our bedroom was narrow. A map of the world covered the widest wall; on the IKEA bedside table Viviane had a vase sometimes containing an iris and sometimes a sprig of chamomile. She chose a blue sports bra: she was going to have to do a lot of walking over the course of the day, up and down lots of stairs in the metro. The previous day she’d brought me a gift of an unvarnished pinewood shelf to put up on the wall, beside the closet, for my first editions; this morning, turning to tell me something, she banged her head on the shelf to which her body had not yet become accustomed. We laughed, but the impact was a hard one, and the screws crunched and a goose egg came up on Viviane’s forehead. I made her sit down on the bed, went to get some cotton balls and iodine, and improvised some modest first aid. I said good-bye to her at the door with a kiss to her forehead, and felt on my lips the heat and roughness of the grazed skin damaged by the blow.

  Right afterward, repeating the whole time (as if someone might be listening) that I needed exercise, I put on a gray sweatshirt, stuffed a couple of white T-shirts in a knapsack we’d bought in a temple in Jokhang, and jogged down the five flights of stairs. My body decided on its own to take Rue Monge toward Gobelins, and I kept jogging without feeling the muscles in my legs, leaving behind the tiny apartment Viviane and I had lived in since our marriage. I was alone, even in the midst of the people who crowded the sidewalks, and I recognized the privilege of that solitude. I tried to imagine the feeling of absolute certainty, separate from the desire I felt for Viviane, and that destroyed our relationship because it was accompanied by the fear of abandonment; I thought of the feelings I’d discovered when I left my parents’ house—or my father’s, who was living alone by then—yes, that was certainty, that was absolute confidence, for dependence on someone else would no longer intimidate me and neither would the fear of looking at my reflection in the mirror one day and seeing what I saw in my father’s eyes: imbalance in the black iris, the shining cornea of men who are lost.

  I didn’t stop until I no longer recognized the neighborhood around me, and even then I didn’t stop completely. I must have walked for more than half an hour, first along Port-Royal and later through Montparnasse. Then I leaned on the back wall of the Hôpital Necker
—where later I would go for an MRI—and tried to weigh up my life that afternoon or plan an itinerary, to keep my head from falling into an uncontrollable disorder or to name what had just happened, with the terrible awareness we get once we’ve hurt the person we love. On the corner of Rue du Cherche-Midi, a woman with purple hair and a mink coat was sweeping up her dog’s excrement.

  —

  “WAIT A MINUTE,” says Viviane, laughing her head off. “I’m dizzy, I need to stop for a second.”

  We’re at the entrance to Jussieu, the closest station to the apartment I don’t live in anymore. Viviane has few inherited traits, but one of them is some kind of middle-ear disorder that makes her vulnerable to the most unexpected bouts of dizziness. When she has too much to drink, the symptoms get mixed up, and sometimes the situation gets so serious that she has to sit down—on the floor of the shower, in the middle of the street—and just pray for the world to stop spinning.

  “You want to know what I think?” I ask her. “I think the princess has a very refined palate. The princess can only drink Lagavulin’s, that’s the thing.”

  “You talk like you know what that is,” Viviane says.

  “Well, neither do you.”

  “You’ve never even seen a bottle that good,” she says.

  “Neither have you,” I say.

  “But friends of mine have,” she says. She waits a moment and adds: “There is something you don’t know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I masturbated yesterday. For the first time since you left.”

  Viviane laughs. I laugh, too, an accomplice to her game.

  We’ve left my father lying on his bed. The effort required to get him up the spiral stairs has not been negligible. Viviane got lost under his left arm, I was carrying his head on my shoulder like a marble bust. The smell of his metallic breath has stayed on my clothes, that mixture of whiskey, toothpaste, and betel nut. Before we left the Café de la République, my father began to hum “Février de cette année-là,” the song he chose to learn by heart a long time ago, before an interview with Maxime Le Forestier that never took place in the end. By the time we covered him with his yellowing bedspread—Viviane had instinctively shaken it out, and the lightbulb at the entrance transformed the dust into floating flour—he’d started repeating the same bit of the tune over and over again, and Viviane, taking pity on him, filled out his monotonous delivery with any old line here and there, Tu peux venir chez moi, or perhaps Les yeux pleins de brouillard. Still beside the bed, she asked me in a whisper if my mother had slept on this same mattress. I confessed that I hadn’t noticed and would never notice that sort of detail, but it always seemed normal to me that she did. Then my father grabbed my hand, squeezed it between both of his, and said:

  “Come back on another day.”

  And then, in a harsher tone:

  “Not for your sake, though. It’s your wife, who does actually know how to carry on a conversation like friends from the old days.”

  Now we’re walking down the streets we’ve walked together thousands of times, arriving from somewhere to the bed that used to be ours and no longer is. I look at the windows of the buildings on our street, and I think how the lives of others fascinate people and that perhaps somebody, at this very moment, is spying on us from behind a half-open blind, and is pleased to see us together again, to see Viviane with a spring in her step like before. And that person will not think of my confusion or my sadness, because I’m the one who chose to leave.

  “I’ve passed by here so many times,” I say. “I’ve thought of coming to see you, to find out how you were.”

  “And your knees shook, I imagine.” Viviane bursts out laughing. “It’s true, your cowardice is beyond redemption.”

  When we get to the apartment, I notice that Viviane has not let herself go, that her life has not given way to incoherence. In the sink is just the small breadboard with traces of honey and hazelnut spread and the fuchsia-colored plastic glass from this morning’s breakfast; there are no dirty dishes piling up on the drying rack, no jackets hanging carelessly over chair backs. Les yeux pleins de brouillard, sings Viviane. I ask her to change the tune, and she, laughing, says she doesn’t remember any others and she likes that one because the mention of fog in the eyes has made her think of a recently awakened Le Forestier, his hair still a mess, rubbing sleep out of his eyes the way I used to before starting to write. I’ve almost forgotten the unmistakable signs of her contentment, the way she forgot about everyone else when she was happy. She couldn’t care less that a guffaw might make her seem rough or masculine; she couldn’t care less about her posture.

  “I’ll be right back to say good-bye,” she says on her way into the bathroom. “You don’t mind, do you? I won’t be two minutes, it’s just that I’m about to burst.”

  I hear her close the door. That’s not a familiar sound; the sound of water running out of the cistern, however, is familiar, as Viviane always flushes it to cover her own sounds when there’s a stranger in the house. Tonight, I am the stranger. I look around: on top of two boxes of books I haven’t had time to collect sits a new lamp, with a silver base and translucent glass; my screwdriver set is open and spread out beside a small revolving CD rack that Viviane had just picked up at a flea market and hadn’t put together yet. Everywhere I see signs of a changing life. Every object tells me that the minuscule order I belonged to no longer exists.

  Then Viviane reappears.

  “Okay, that’s better.”

  “Are you still dizzy?”

  “I had a lot to drink, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” says Viviane. “Tomorrow I’ll be better, but I did drink a lot. I still feel a little drunk.”

  We could make love, and we both know it. There is a sort of impunity in the air, as if the whiskey we drank and the visit with my father—in which no one embarrassed the other, nor have there been insults or old reproaches—might allow us this small luxury. I sense our fear, and remember having once thought that our love was a shared fear of being alone. Now, the exaltation we feel needs, like any crime, a barely perceptible push. Somehow, I know that Viviane hasn’t slept with anyone since we split up. We could make love and tomorrow we could pretend it had been an accident. I could even stay the night here; it would be, for a few hours, as if nothing had changed in our lives.

  “I told you not to get in touch again,” says Viviane. “But I want you to call me when you get the test results.”

  “All right.”

  “Only if you want to, of course.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

  Then it happens. I’ve seen it coming from a long way off, like a crash of locomotives. Viviane’s face has crumbled meticulously; the precision of her successive sorrows has been a painful spectacle. She starts to cry, and when I hug her and ask her what’s wrong, she keeps crying, as if the distress were a tangle of wool caught in her throat.

  “Calm down,” I say. “What’s the matter, calm down.”

  “I came with you today.”

  “Yes.” I stroke her hair. “Thank you, Viviane.”

  She pulls away from me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “You know full well, don’t play the fool. I would rather not have spied on you, but now I’m glad.”

  While she was talking about my childhood in the Café de la République, I called Dr. Fauchey from the pay phone. I heard the irritation in his voice, asking how I got his cell phone number, cursing his patients in general for the habit of interrupting his days off. After all that, he said tubercular infection and he said triple treatment, nine months. And I repeated each of these words as if they were a mantra against the evil eye. The infection was severe, the treatment was going to be expensive and serious; but it
wasn’t what we’d feared. Fauchey asked: Had I undergone any abrupt changes in environment or diet? Had I been emotionally off balance, depressed? I answered no, none of that. The side of the phone was decorated with propaganda for the ’98 World Cup and the national lottery. My fingers scratched at the stickers, and shreds of blue, white, and red plastic like fish guts got lodged under my nails.

  “I don’t really know why I didn’t tell you straightaway. Everything was fine without talking about that, we were happy.” I pause and say: “I can’t believe you followed me like that, secretly.”

  “If we were still living together, I wouldn’t have done it. That’s the most ironic thing. All those stupid ideas about respecting the other person, not listening to each other’s conversations, not opening each other’s mail, it’s pure bullshit, you know?”

  “The day was going well, Viviane. I forgot that I’m not with you and I got some good news. And I was able to be with my father.”

  Then Viviane’s eyes opened wide. She’d found the magic formula, the alchemist’s secret.

  “Don’t tell me . . .”

  “What?”

  “Were you saying good-bye?”

  “Not at all.” I tried to smile. “Medical science has come a long way.”

  “Don’t give me that. Were you? Did you think—”

  “Let’s make love.”

  “And what about me? Settle outstanding scores? Oh, please, how tacky. And you thought I wasn’t going to notice, you’d have to be pretty naive.”

  “Let’s make love, Viviane.”

  “Why can’t we be together?”

  The sound of footsteps reaches us from the stairs.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if we were together?”

  “Don’t start,” I say. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Wouldn’t you like me to come with you to your appointments, open the envelopes and read you the results? Wouldn’t you like me to be by your side when they tell you on the phone that you’re not going to die?”