The city responded to our enthusiasm by displaying the humility of a newly established town and the Plaza de Bolívar welcomed us with the golden glow of a slanting light; at Agustina’s request, we went into the cathedral, where I showed her Jiménez de Quesada’s tomb, Look, Agustina, we were just talking about him and here’s his tomb, then she walked to the vestry, where she bought six big red candles, lighting them and setting them beside the tomb, Wouldn’t you rather offer them to some saint? I asked her, Look, over there is Saint Joseph with the Christ Child in his arms, and in that chapel there’s a saint ascending among cherubim who must be the Virgen del Carmen, and there’s the Dolorosa with beams of light shooting from her crown, any one of them would work, whereas there’s no guarantee of the saintliness of the founder of Santa Fé de Bogotá, who knows how good he really was, Good enough, because once they get to heaven they’re all alike, Agustina assures me, And why six candles? I ask her, One for each of my five senses, so that from now on they don’t betray me, And the sixth? The sixth is for my sanity; let’s see whether by some miracle this Don Gonzalo brings it back.
THOUGH IT’S NOT CLEAR just when, Abelito Caballero, alias Farax, gradually becomes the center of the Portulinus household: Nicholas’s beloved piano disciple, Blanca’s companion in the tasks of feeding the rabbits, collecting the eggs from the henhouse, letting the dogs loose at night, shooing away the bats that nest in the rafters, and taking Nicholas on walks to clear his head, confidant of Sofi, who is just beginning to have secret loves, and accomplice in Eugenia’s slow, mute games. Writing regularly and at length in her diary, Blanca tells how she spends her days, without altering the general shape of things or omitting details, while Nicholas, in his own diary, shows a notorious lack of precision in his stories, which are sometimes cut off in the middle and other times lack a logical order, often becoming so tangled that it’s impossible to understand what they’re about, but this complete chaos, on a level that might be called literary, contrasts with a curious and obsessive tendency to quantify certain events; for example, in the upper left-hand corner he writes “m. r. B”—marital relations with Blanca — each time he has them, which occurs with astonishing frequency, or to be more specific, almost every day. The longest period of abstinence recorded is scarcely five days long and corresponds to a week when he was severely depressed; another of the regular accounts he keeps in the margins is “dreamed of F last night,” or “dreamed of F during nap,” with the F definitely standing for Farax.
Although husband and wife had vowed to respect the privacy and secrecy of each other’s diaries, there’s no doubt that Blanca regularly leafed through Nicholas’s, perhaps less out of an unhealthy curiosity than as a means of obtaining clues to her husband’s state of mind that would allow her to anticipate major attacks of rage and melancholy, and Nicholas was undoubtedly aware of this systematic spying, because when he didn’t want her to know something he would write it in German, as on the page for a day in the month of April, when the customary “dreamed of F last night” is followed by parentheses and in tiny, cramped, almost illegible handwriting “Ich bin mit auffälliger Erektion aufgewacht,” or I woke up with a considerable erection.
Not only did Nicholas give the boy piano lessons but he also made an effort to teach him to compose, unveiling the musical structure and lyrical secrets of bambucos and pasillos and introducing him to English and German poetry so that it might serve as a source of lyrical inspiration for his future compositions, and as if all that weren’t enough, he gave him, one by one, most of his own books, much to the surprise of Blanca, who watched entire shelves disappear from the library, their contents later appearing scattered across the floor of Farax’s room. Tell me why you’re giving the boy all your books, Nicholas, she asked him, but she received only vague replies like, So he can educate himself, woman, a musician without knowledge of the classics is nothing. Little by little he had given up all contact with his daughters, contact that had never been particularly close anyway, and whenever either of them required his attention he would reply, Ask Farax, he knows, or Get it from Farax, he has it, or Go with Farax, he’ll take you.
As the boy grew physically and spiritually stronger, as if nourished by the love and care of his adopted family, Nicholas was deteriorating, each day becoming more bloated, lost in his own musings, detached from everything around him, and prone to confusing real people with imaginary ones, especially Abelito with Farax, and vice versa. More painfully than in other instances his mind seemed to go to pieces at the spectacle of Abelito, the real boy, and Farax, the dream boy, battling each other on the smooth white marble of ancient ruins and wounding each other, bleeding, and in the process wounding Nicholas, too; or rather wounding only Nicholas, because he was the real victim of this imaginary combat, the one bleeding to death in the temple crumbling into dust amid the greatest splendor. I see a polished surface, Blanquita darling, I see a spotless expanse, I’m dazzled by the metallic gleam of blood on that expanse, I’m overwhelmed and transfixed by the enigma of spilled blood. What are you talking about, Nicholas, look, your lunch is getting cold, stop thinking about blood and unpleasant things, the girls and Farax are already at the table. Farax or Abelito? he asks her, perturbed. Please, Nicholas, you know very well that they’re the same person. Yes, Blanquita, but only one of the two is real, only one of the two is strong, and I don’t know which it is. You’re dreaming, Nicholas, you got up from your nap but haven’t woken yet. I’m sorry, Blanca my dove, but it’s only in dreams — daydreams? — that I’m able to understand the true nature of things, and today I realized that the one who’s licking his wounds is bleeding to death. These are fancies of yours, Nicholas, you’re just hungry. You refuse to see that something terrible is going to happen, woman, because I can’t tell which one really exists, whether it’s Farax or me, Farax or Nicholas, one of the two will prevail and the other is fated to disappear, because there’s no room for both on the face of the earth.
In an attempt to keep track of Portulinus’s ravings, the following outline of several steps might be drawn up: first, Nicholas builds a bubble or a parallel world in which what he imagines acquires real-world worth, as when he meets Abelito and identifies him with the Farax of his dreams; in the second step, the bubble is divided into opposing halves, Abelito and Farax, for example, or Farax and Nicholas, that polarize Nicholas’s mind, making him flit unbearably fast between two extremes; third, Nicholas transfers his deepest feelings to the bubble, making everything inside it a matter of life or death, in such a way that after he’s built up an impossible conflict between the opposing forces, he crucifies himself on his own creation. I’m a helpless and horrified witness, Blanca laments, to the way he is caught in the pincer of opposites and driven to destruction. Fourth, once the parallel world is perfected in every detail, Nicholas detaches himself, breaking contact with the real world, and is left sealed and alone inside his bubble; fifth and last: during the course of his ravings, Nicholas is swept away by an anxiety that feeds on itself; he’s like a man bewitched, unable to escape his delirium, though he doesn’t want to escape, either, because the relationship he’s established with it is that of a slave to his master.
This is more or less the state of things inside Nicholas Portulinus’s head, but not entirely, of course, since nothing can ever be quite so precise, and anyway, it was taken for granted at the house in Sasaima that he should rave or be queer, as his daughters put it. The odd thing lately is that Blanca seems a little unbalanced, too; nothing has been the same since Farax knocked at the door with his old alpaca jacket and his knapsack full of lead soldiers. Farax has become the dream and the nightmare of both Nicholas and Blanca, the love object and the rival of both in an ascending spiral, a spiral that rises to where the air is so thin it’s impossible to breathe. Does Nicholas suspect that if Blanca had to choose between the two men living in the house, deep in her heart she would choose the younger one, even if her lips professed otherwise? I liked the number two, Bianchetta darling, Nicholas confessed to her one afternoon when the world was flooded with rain, two made it possible for me to get along, two filled the void between you and me, but three makes my head explode into a million pieces.