To put on their vestments, Agustina and her brother stand back to back and don’t look at each other until they’re ready, and then begins the most important part, the part with the photographs, the center of everything, the Last Call, because those photographs are our power cards: the aces of our truth. You and I know very well that the photographs are more dangerous than an atomic bomb, capable of destroying my father and ending his marriage to my mother and making our house and even all of La Cabrera explode, which is why before we lay them out on the black cloth we must always take the oath, speak the Words. Do you swear that you’ll never reveal our secret? I ask you in a low, solemn voice and you, Bichi, half closing your eyes, say, Yes, I swear. Do you swear that you’ll never, under any circumstances or for any reason, show anyone these photographs that we’ve found and that belong to us alone? Yes, I swear. Do you swear that even if you’re killed, you won’t show them to anyone or confess to anyone that we have them? Yes, I swear. Do you know that they’re dangerous, that they’re a deadly weapon? Yes, I know. Do you swear by all that’s most sacred that no one will ever find out about our ceremony, or anything that happens in it? Yes, I swear.
Then you make me take the same oath, with the same questions and the same answers, and we look at the photographs one by one and put them in their proper places on the bed, Aunt Sofi with her shirt undone, Aunt Sofi naked on the recliner in my father’s office, Aunt Sofi sitting on the desk in high heels and silk stockings, Aunt Sofi lying on her back and showing the camera her behind, Aunt Sofi displaying her breasts as she looks at the camera with a shy smile and tilts her head in an old-fashioned way, Aunt Sofi in bra and panties, and the one that you and I like best, the one we always place highest on the slope of the pillow: Aunt Sofi in jewelry, with her hair up, and dressed in a long gown that’s black and very elegant, but that leaves one breast covered and the other exposed, and neither you nor I can take our eyes off the enormous thing that Aunt Sofi has left out on purpose, fully intending for our father to fall in love with her and leave our mother, her own sister, who doesn’t have awesome breasts like hers.
BUT HOW CAN I COMPOSE, sweet Blanca of mine, Portulinus asks his wife, when the living won’t leave me in peace either? Relax, Nicholas, lie down here beside me on the grass, beneath the branches of our myrtle, and let the good sun warm your bones. Then he takes up the endless stream of urgent appeals again, Did you say our myrtle, our tree? in an identical repeat performance that proceeds to the tremulous final sentence, The two of us? and he even tries a third time to seek the assurances that will let him rest but she, who at this point knows that there’s no rest to be had, is quick to say, Enough, that’s enough, Nicholas, you’re making me tired, alert as she is to the rhythms and reiterations that open the door in him to wild ravings, although she’d like to say, That’s enough, Nicholas, you’re driving me mad, but she knows not to tread on that sensitive spot. Despite her youth, Blanca is as solid as a rock and on that rock her husband has built his life, My fortress on high, he says, or My castle stronghold, or in German, My starkes Mädchen, and she confirms this whenever she can, as the pages of her diary attest: “I feel that my courage is enough for what will come, and where my beloved Nicholas is concerned, that could be anything. But I live for him alone and he’ll always have my love and support, whatever happens.”
Blanca is starkes Mädchen but the one thing that makes her falter is harsh or accusatory words, and even more so on her husband’s warm, fleshy lips, a feverish carnation red, as prone to revelation as to outrageous outbursts. I always believed that the difficulties Nicholas sometimes had in expressing himself in Spanish were because he was a foreigner, Blanca confessed to her two daughters, Sofi and Eugenia, when they were adults, until a cousin of his who was passing through Colombia on her way back to Germany and who came down to Sasaima to visit told me that in his native language, too, he was sometimes coherent and other times confused and stumbled over his words. From this same woman I learned that as a child, in the town of Kaub, Nicholas had serious difficulties learning to speak, and that he could scarcely stutter, if that, since he usually took refuge in a stubborn silence in which there was room only for his inner melodies. When he was four, his father, fearing deafness or mental retardation, took him to a neighboring city to have him examined by a language specialist, with the result that what he already knew perfectly well was confirmed, that the young Nicholas, a talented and precocious piano player, was slow-witted and hopeless when it came to speaking. Not even his father’s threats and physical punishment could prevent him from obstinately closing his mouth and covering his ears to shut out the human voice, including his own, as if it was worming its way into his skull to burst inside him.
So in adulthood as well as in childhood, Nicholas Portulinus had a difficult relationship with words, which explains those deep silences that became more and more prolonged, If I talk to you too much, Blanca my dear, my love for you turns uncertain and slips away. That’s why he made up for it by composing children’s songs with simple lyrics that pleased her and made her feel that sometimes her husband was like a boy; she, who truly was a girl, saw her older husband as a sweet boy, silent and remote. But other times Nicholas would be moved to unleash a torrent of words and string together one sentence after another in bad Spanish, assembling mixed-up and dizzying trains of thought, and then Blanca was afraid and sought shelter beneath a black umbrella of inscrutability from the rain of syllables flooding her soul. At a breakneck pace and dragging out his r’s too much, he swears his eternal love to her, besieges her with promises of happiness, frightens her with jealous words and endless interrogations. He swamps her in speech: That’s enough, Nicholas, I can’t bear to hear another word, she implores him in a whisper and then a peaceful silence settles over the myrtle again. The pleasantness of midday stretches out around them, and the scattered pieces of the universe fall into place with no struggle or lingering bitterness.
At this point in their lives, resting together under the myrtle tree, they are as one, or at least that’s what Blanca believes, because Portulinus is adrift, near and at the same time far. Portulinus thinks: Blanca is watching. If Blanca’s enormous eyes weren’t fixed on him he could recite his litany, but her vigilance prevents him from sailing as he pleases on the sea of his ruminations. In German and to himself, Portulinus begs Blanca to give him the space he needs and not to monopolize the air he breathes, that she not make all his worries her own or try to harness his thoughts, because Portulinus is and isn’t with Blanca on that placid Sasaima midday under the myrtle, now that inside of him everything has begun to double and triple in meaning. The air is charged with confusion and has grown thick; the dreams in his head gradually impose themselves on the world around him, and in the middle of the radiant green of the tropics there appear before him, bleached and nocturnal, Greek ruins that have nothing to do with this time and place, the same Greek ruins he dreamed of the night before, and before and before, hearkening back in a continuous delirium to the mists of his adolescence. What am I doing amid these ominous ruins, since when did all color fade, why am I losing myself in smudges of blood, whose is all this blood that trickles on the cold smoothness of the marble and why is that boy wounded, what is he doing among the ruins and why is he bleeding, that sacred and ethereal being, that boy called Farax who exists only as a creature of my nights, that sweet, wounded Farax who has always lived in the annals of my memory?