“You don’t even know the rumours that are being spread.” 3.14 came out of the bushes.
“You frightened me.”
“Comrade Gudafterov has disappeared. Everybody’s at the construction site lookin’ for him. I mean, Comrade Dimitry’s lookin’ for him. The soldiers are all drunk and some of them have already gone home.”
“How did he disappear?”
“I don’t know, maybe he drowned.”
“Drowned? What kind of tale’s that?”
“I don’t think the blue lobsters know how to swim. How is it that they stand here every day sweating in that uniform, right next to the sea, looking at the bright blue water, and they never feel like jumping in? It must be that they don’t know how to swim.”
“It can’t be that. You may not know how to swim, but you can still jump into the foam, like Foam does.”
“But they’d be ashamed that we’d give them a hard time for the rest of their lives.”
“No…I figure this tale about Gudafterov has to do with the letters.”
“Hey, you must be right.”
“We’re gonna try to read it again.”
“Read it again? Only if you can read ashes. I burnt the letter.”
“It’s better if we don’t say anything to anybody. There might have been something important in the letter.”
The afternoon didn’t want to end. No sooner did the sun approach the sea so that blackness could come and we could carry out our mission, than I began to feel nervous about it, and about the strange things that were happening on Bishop’s Beach. Granma Catarina wasn’t there any more, Gudafterov had disappeared, and Doctor Rafael had confirmed all of the plans about making the houses of our Bishop’s Beach disappear.
“The afternoon doesn’t want to end, 3.14. Everything’s so slow.”
“Get a grip and calm down. The Mausoleum’s quiet, Gudafterov has disappeared, there’s just the man in the watchtower left, and he won’t leave there even to go pee-pee.”
“He’s the one who could see us.”
“Only if they turn on the big surge light. They didn’t turn it on last night. It could be burned out.”
“But do you say ‘surge light’ or ‘searchlight’?”
“You say, ‘That big light that lights up the area we want to get through without getting caught,’ you smart-ass!”
“Calm down. It was just a doubt I had about the Portuguese language.”
“You know, you’ve got a lot of doubts. I’ve been thinkin’— but I’m not going to give the idea to Comrade Dimitry.”
“What idea?”
“To find Gudafterov,”—3.14 started to laugh—“all they’ve got to do is follow the aroma of the b.o.-dorov! Ha ha!”
Time didn’t want to pass. It reminded me of that poem we read in school about the lazy train that didn’t want to keep rolling forward along the railway line because it knew that the line had been diverted and that at the end of the day it wasn’t going to reach a station; it was going to be taken, by the same engineer who had worked on it for years, to a huge garage where it would be dismantled.
“You remember that poem?”
“I don’t remember anything, and I’m guessing you’re makin’ stuff up.”
“I swear I’m not making stuff up. That tale even ended with the engineer abandoning the train on the track and being fired because he didn’t have the courage to take the train to the garage where they dismantled trains that couldn’t run anymore.”
“So was it a poem or a tale?”
“That’s not important. Now you’re the one who has too many doubts. What’s important, and what I don’t remember, is whether or not the train was dismantled.”
“My dad was fired, too.” 3.14’s voice was all sad.
“Seriously?”
“Yes. They fired almost all the workers at the Mausoleum construction site.”
When the sun approached the horizon, the wind that usually arrived with it did not come.
On the veranda, Granma Nineteen smiled as she chatted with Doctor Rafael KnockKnock, and from where we stood we could see Dona Libânia pressed against the wall of the veranda to hear the conversation better.
Sea Foam came running out of his house, passed by the other side of the garbage dump, his legs leaping along the shoreline like he himself were running as though he wished to fly, balancing with his bare feet on the white sea foam of Bishop’s Beach.
“What’s he got hanging from his body?”
“Aren’t those his dreadlocks?”
“That long? They look like ropes.”
The sun sank, yellowed, into the dark blue of the sea and invented a beautiful sunset of a mulatto colour no words could capture. We just stared.
Time had decided it could pass.
13
And I stood still.
It wasn’t only the fingers or the toes, the legs or the head and eyes, that liked to look one way then the other. It was stillness itself. Within me. The voice that speaks within me had nothing to say, or else it wanted to practise a silence just like that.
Still from not thinking.
To feel the evening? To await a signal from the wind, a whistle like a segregated conversation taking account of the fact that the birds cried in a far-away and I could hear them? Wanting to hear mysterious sentences from Granma Catarina? Contemplating the things of Bishop’s Beach that I thought I alone saw?
Inventing minutes that were mine within the minutes of time?
Growing up with a heart and body that were fleeing from childhood? “Is someone running behind the child?” Granma Nineteen was in the habit of asking. Was time pursuing me with a body to frighten me? I felt the whole world there in the small square of Bishop’s Beach.
Nor did 3.14 say anything.
The two of us were still, imitating the ants when they stop for a tiny second to rest from their work, or the grasshopper stirring its body to get ready for a jump. Or the slug, still, lying on top of its spittle as though it could speak with the moon. Or sleeping fish.
“Don’t fish sleep even a little bit, Pi?”
“You should ask that crazy question of yours to the Old Fisherman. Did you ever see fish standing still with their eyes closed, almost throbbing with sleepiness?”
“I’ve heard it said that fish are really forgetful. It must be good to be like that.”
“Not remembering places and things? Forget it.”
“Aren’t there some things you’d like to forget?”
“I don’t think so. I like my life full of things that I can still tell to someone. If I have seven children, how am I going to have enough good tales to tell?”
“You want to have seven children?”
“I do.”
“Don’t worry about the tales. The tales that make the best stories are the ones we invent.”
“You think so?”
“I think so.”
Not even an eddy of dust to divert the eyes. It seemed like nothing wanted to happen.
“Are we just gonna stand here?”
“Yeah.”
“Doing what?”
“Just sitting. ‘Watching the time go by,’ as the elders say.”
“It’s really dark on Bishop’s Beach. I don’t know if time’s going to want to pass by here.”
3.14 drew an arrow in the sand, pointing in the direction of Granma Nineteen’s house. Then a heart and two well-drawn figurines.
“If Gudafterov is slow off the mark with your granma, I figure the Socialist Republic of Cuba is going to make some forward strides.”
I looked at the veranda. The two of them looked very calm as they conversed, and I really enjoyed seeing Granma Nineteen with that smile that I could only guess at because I was unable to see their faces.
“I don’t like that conversation.”
“But Gudafterov already invited your granma to go with him there to the far-away, right?”