After a period of astonishment, or rather several days spent examining the photographs, shut up in the bathroom, Agustina knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had taken them himself, my own father, not only because I found them in his study but because the furniture in them is just like his, the same window, the same desk, the same recliner, and also because my father’s hobby, besides stamp collecting, is photography; my father is an excellent photographer and at home we have twelve or fifteen albums of pictures he’s taken of us, at our first Communions, on our birthdays, on weekends at the house in the cold country and on vacations in Sasaima, on our visits to Paris, on our trip to see snow, and a thousand other occasions; all the pictures he takes of us prove how much he loves us, but there’s nothing like these photographs, the most incredible thing is that the woman in them looks just like Aunt Sofi, is Aunt Sofi herself, or rather at first Agustina couldn’t believe it but in the end she finally had to admit that it was, because whoever sees them realizes immediately, just as Bichi realized when she showed them to him for the first time, It’s her, said Bichi, it’s Aunt Sofi but with no clothes on, what huge breasts Aunt Sofi has.
IT’S BECAUSE SHE’S SIMPLE, Agustina told me in a moment of calm, when I asked why she’d take food from Aunt Sofi and not from me. Aunt Sofi, who is simple, can understand why Agustina fills the house with containers of water while I, who am not simple, become upset over stupid things like something spilling, or tables being stained, or the rug getting wet, or Agustina catching a cold or going even crazier than she already is, or all of us in this house going crazy. Look, Aguilar, Aunt Sofi tells me, madness is contagious, like the flu, and when one person in a family has it, everyone catches it in turn, there’s a chain reaction that no one can escape except those who’ve been vaccinated, and I’m one of those, I’m immune, Aguilar, that’s my gift, and Agustina knows it and she trusts in that, whereas you have to learn to neutralize the charge, Tell me, Aunt Sofi, who is Agustina praying to with all this religious bustling about with water? The truth is I don’t know, I think she’s talking, not praying, Aunt Sofi replies, as Agustina, kneeling devoutly, covers a platter of water with a cloth and blesses it. And who is she talking to, Aunt Sofi? Why, to her own ghosts, And why does she need so much water? My understanding is that Agustina wants to clean this house, or purify it, says Aunt Sofi, and this gives me a start, as if I’d discovered shadows flickering in my wife that I’d never even suspected, And why does she want to purify the house? Because she says that it’s full of lies, this morning she was relaxed as she was eating the egg I made her for breakfast and she told me that it was the lies that were making her crazy, And what does she say about her own lie, about going away for the weekend with a man to a hotel behind my back? With what man, Aguilar, what are you talking about? About the man who was with her that Sunday at the Wellington Hotel, you don’t know how it torments me, You see? Now you’re the one who’s raving, Aguilar, that’s exactly what I mean when I say that you’re letting the madness contaminate you, But I saw him, Aunt Sofi, I saw him with my own eyes, Be careful, Aguilar, delirium can enter through the eyes, Then what was she doing with him, what can a man and woman possibly do in a hotel room but make love on the bed? Wait, Aguilar, wait, don’t jump to foolish conclusions, because we’re facing a more serious problem here, for the last few days Agustina has been talking about her father as if he wasn’t dead, How long has it been since her father died? More than ten years, but she seems to have forgotten it, I don’t know whether Agustina herself ever told you, Aguilar, but although she adored him, she didn’t cry when he died and she wouldn’t go to the funeral.
BLANCA, SWEET BLANCA, your very name clears away the shadows, says Grandfather Portulinus to his young wife, but it isn’t true, because despite her efforts, Blanca isn’t always able to ease his torments, on the contrary, it often happens that her very presence is a slippery slope toward all things that split and tangle, because nothing provokes a nervous person like being told to be calm, nothing troubles him like being asked not to worry, nothing thwarts his urges to soar like the charitable ministrations of a good samaritan. This is confirmed for Blanca day after day, and yet she still makes the same mistake over and over again, as if when faced with her husband’s dark malady, she felt her ability to help reduced to a fumbling, clumsy distress.
There’s the sleeping tree, says Portulinus, pointing to a myrtle that stands by the side of the road leading to their house, not a mango or a ceiba or a caracolí or a jacaranda, or any of the sumptuous, sweet-smelling trees that in the warm country crowd close together in exaggerated profusion, heavy with rain, fruit, parasites, and birds, but a myrtle, scraggly and stunted, though giant in Portulinus’s memory, a myrtle that has accompanied him from the lands of his childhood and is therefore his, his tree, its shade the place where he chooses to lie down after his morning walk. He likes to repeat that the sleeping myrtle nourishes itself from airborne dreams imbibed through its outstretched branches, but someone less wrapped up in his own imaginings might simply notice that it’s a tree bearing little yellow or red seeds, depending on the season or the particular efforts of each seed, something unrelated to the matter of interest just now, which is that Portulinus and Blanca have sat down under the tree to take up, once again, a certain difficult conversation, during the course of which he watches her intently, restraining his eagerness to ask her the burning question, Our tree? and experiencing a momentary relief when he hears her confirm, Our tree. Yours and mine? Yours and mine. You and me? You and me. The two of us? Yes, my dear, the two of us.
The reassuring power of the number two, the first even number, repeated by Blanca day after day under the myrtle, brings back shreds of the tranquillity that was lost to Portulinus somewhere between Kaub and Sasaima, cities that would have little or nothing to do with each other were it not for the imaginary line that Portulinus has traced between them. For Portulinus, a man who knows alchemy and loves kabbalistic riddles, two is a number that makes it possible for him to shield himself, at least at the instant Blanca utters it, from the unbearable duality that interposes itself like a void between the sky and the earth, the beginning and the end, the male and the female, the tree and its shade, his love for his wife, Blanca, and his urgent need to escape her control.
What a burden you’ve become, Blanquita, Portulinus tells his wife, how fat and earthbound, while I fly over your head, light and unfettered, and comprehend the symmetry of crystals, the pathways of the blood, numbers and their analogies, the march of the constellations, the stages of life. Suddenly he sees her with new eyes, one the eye of compassion and the other the eye of scorn. How small and fat you look to me down there, my little Lard Ball, and how limited in your understanding, he says to his wife, who not only is naturally thin but has lost several pounds since his cosmic forays became frequent, forays leading her to oscillate painfully between the impulse to send him to a home for the mentally ill and the suspicion that Portulinus does in fact understand, that he understands better than anyone the framework of the constellations, the music of the spheres, the mysteries of numbers, and the unfolding of crystals.