“What do you think,” I asked, “does Villamediana have a river or doesn’t it?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Well, the people in the village can’t agree about it. Some say that, though it lacks water, there is a river with a valley, a streambed, and banks as well as bridges.”
“Bridges? Where?” He studied the streambed with his blue gray eyes and I realized that he’d never ventured any farther than the local shop owned by a pale woman called Rosi, that he’d never been beyond the place where he did his shopping. Because the bridges (two bridges to be exact) were in the square itself.
“Between Rosi’s shop and the shepherds’ huts,” I lied, hoping to confirm my suspicions.
“Ah, yes. Now I remember,” he replied.
I realized he was afraid to risk other people’s mockery. I realized too how terrible it must be to wake up, possibly from a happy dream, only to find that one’s deformity is still there. I realized then that dawn must be the cruelest time for all those who suffer.
“The people in the village also say that, once, this river even flooded,” I said, in an attempt to dispel the thoughts going around and around in my head.
Shortly before, in an old program for the village fiesta some years before, I’d read about a flood that apparently happened at the beginning of the century and it seemed peculiarly appropriate to mention to him the strange story recounted there. The author of the program said that, during the flood, some local people had seen a white horse ridden by a man dressed in red and that the rider kept thrashing at the waters with his whip to drive them back. But he didn’t know if that had really happened or if it was just the imaginings of a terrified populace. What most intrigued me about the story was its exactitude. It was such an archetype, it could have been an entry in a dictionary of symbols. As I remarked to Tassis, the part about the rider thrashing at the waters, for example, corresponded to the so-called Xerxes complex, because that was exactly what Xerxes had done. To say nothing of the rider all in red or the white horse. There was a mass of literature about what they represented.
But I saw that he wasn’t listening and dropped the subject. Tassis wasn’t interested in symbols, only etymologies.
“I’m boring you,” I said.
“No, no, it isn’t that. It’s just that today I’d rather talk about something else.”
“As you wish.”
“I’m going to tell you about something that can’t be found in books,” he said, ironically, giving me to understand that he’d cottoned onto my latest habit. For since getting to know him, and as befits a good pupil, I too had taken to studying etymologies. “It’s to do with whether Villamediana has a river or not,” he added.
“You still think it hasn’t.”
“Of course. Since it has no water, it has no movement and therefore lacks the vital ingredient. In all things, movement is the deciding factor. Movement means life. Stillness, on the other hand, means death.” He gave a triumphant laugh, as if he’d just been acclaimed the winner of some contest. But this time, unlike on other occasions, he gave me the impression that he was only pretending, that he didn’t really want to laugh.
“All things, if they are good things, are related in some way to movement. Or to life, if you prefer. But while you cannot see life, you can see movement. I would say that movement is simply another name for life.”
“Go on.”
“If I say that a person is animated, I’m saying a lot of different things at once; I’m saying that the person has anima or spirit, for example, or simply that they’re cheerful. But in fact all the word animate really expresses is life and movement. And the same goes, of course, for animation…”
He fell silent, as if something else had just occurred to him. But then he continued on in the same vein.
“And what, you might ask, about that excellent word vivacious? Where does that come from? Does that have anything to do with movement? Well, yes it does, a lot.”
“Where does it come from then?”
“From vivax meaning full of life, lively.”
It was the twilight hour when all the animals on earth fall silent. A gentle breeze was blowing and, in the west, the clouds were the color of dark wine. Far off, the rooftops of Villamediana were growing dim.
“Have you ever read anything by the poet Carlos García?” he asked me. I said he wasn’t a poet I was familiar with.
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason. It’s just that a few poems he wrote about this time of day, the twilight, contain some rather similar thoughts.”
“The word twilight appears in any number of poems,” I protested.
“But the ones I’m telling you about are good!” he shouted. But, possibly influenced by the atmosphere about us, he soon reverted to a whisper.
“Carlos García speaks of the stillness of this hour. He says that this is the hour when all the birds go to rest, fall silent, when the roads empty of people, and that, as the light fades, the landscape takes on the static quality of a stage set… and that the sky itself, with no sun traveling across it, with no shifting clouds, gives the impression of being just another backdrop.”
He was speaking very quietly, so quietly I could barely hear him. I didn’t know this Tassis at all.
“Go on,” I said.
“That’s all. All I wanted to say was that at this hour everything seems very still and that, because there are no reference points, time too seems to stop. In one way or another, it brings with it a remembrance of death.”
A little beyond where Tassis was standing there was a line of three tall plants. I noticed that only one of the plants was moving in the breeze.
“But there’s always some movement, however slight. We hear the beating of our heart, we walk…”
“Yes, of course. And that’s precisely what makes the twilight so speciaclass="underline" It mingles life and death and that’s why it has that capacity to make you feel simultaneously happy and sad.”
We spoke ever more quietly, he even more quietly than me. The silences between us grew longer and longer.
“The spectral hour,” I said at last, for it occurred to me that specters never move.
“I’m getting cold,” said Tassis suddenly. I noticed an odd note in his voice and I looked into his face. His eyes were shining with tears.
We walked the rest of the way home in complete silence. I wanted to say something to him but didn’t know what.
“Today’s talk has made you sad,” I remarked when it came to saying good-bye.
“Oh no, not at all!” he exclaimed. But I knew he was lying.
“Would you like to go to the bar? We’ve never been there together.”
“No, thanks, I’d better rush. Claudia will be getting impatient when she sees I’m not home yet. Anyway, I have to do some shopping first.”
He hadn’t even finished the sentence when he was already hurrying off to Rosi’s shop.
The following Friday he didn’t come to the forest, nor the Friday after that. When I think about it now, it seems to me I should have gone and searched him out and asked that we continue our walks together. But I did nothing and it was only much later that I went to see him. And I did so, moreover, for the very reason he’d forbidden: because I felt sorry for him. It was the worst thing I could have done.
During the installation of a bathroom in one of the houses in Villamediana some seventeenth-century frescoes were uncovered and because of that, some restorers came up from Madrid. I met one of them in the hunters’ bar and he invited me over to see what they’d found. Viewing the paintings — the city of Jerusalem on one wall and some religious scenes on the other — didn’t take us long, however, and we soon set to talking about things in general. Inevitably we passed from the name of the village to the figure of Count Juan de Tassis and from there, my fault — of course — to that of Enrique de Tassis.