“You make me laugh, profesor. Your way of changing the subject.”
“What subject?”
But now his wife was with him, and with me, although she and I were separated by the wall, and time. Sweat glistened on her forehead. All of her smiled: the wide grin began in the sparse hair of the pink cleft in her center that I sensed more than spied, up to the open mouth, with its small teeth, that laughed as if crying.
“Neighbor,” she shouted festively, as she always did whenever we met on some street corner, “I’m so thirsty. Aren’t you going to offer me an orange?”
There they were, happy, embracing now two meters below me, their young heads upturned and smiling, observing me as I did them. I chose the best orange and began to peel it myself, while they swayed together, amused. Neither she nor he seemed concerned about her nakedness. Only I was, but gave no sign of this solemn, inescapable emotion, as if never, in these last years of my life, had I suffered nor could I suffer from the nakedness of a woman. I stretched my arm down, the orange in my hand, toward her.
“Careful, profesor, don’t fall,” the Brazilian said. “Better throw that orange. I’ll catch it.”
But I kept leaning, outstretched, over the walclass="underline" she needed to take but one step and catch the orange. She half-opened her mouth, surprised, took the step and caught my orange, laughing again, enchanted.
“Thank you,” she said.
A bitter and sweet fragrance rose from her reddened mouth. I know that same bittersweet exaltation struck us both.
“As you can see,” the Brazilian said, “Geraldina doesn’t mind being naked in your presence.”
“And she’s right,” I said. “At my age I’ve seen everything now.”
Geraldina laughed out loud: it was an unexpected flock of doves exploding at the edge of the wall. But she also looked at me with great curiosity, as if she had just for the first time discovered me in the world. I did not mind. She would have to discover me one day. She seemed to blush, for a moment only, and then she was disenchanted, or calmed, or perhaps she took pity. My old man’s face, my future corpse, my saintliness in old age, quietened her. She did not yet perceive that my nostrils and my whole spirit were dilating to take in the aromas of her body, a blending of soap and sweat and skin and inaccessible bone. She had the orange in her hands and was pulling it apart. Finally she lifted a section to her mouth, spent a second licking it, bit into it, then gobbled it up with pleasure, shining drops trickling over her lip.
“Isn’t our neighbor a delight?” the Brazilian said to nobody.
She took a sharp breath. She looked amazed, but still ruler of the world. She smiled at the sun.
“He is,” she said languidly. “He is.”
And they moved away, arm in arm, to the edge of the shade, but then she stopped, after a long step, so that now she looked at me with open legs, the sun converging in the center, and cried out — the call of a rare bird.
“Thank you for the orange, kind sir.”
She did not call me neighbor.
As she spoke, she had in that half-second already sensed that I was not looking into her eyes. She discovered suddenly, my gaze drawn, like a whirlpool of cloudy water, full of who knows what powers — she would have thought — my suffering eyes furtively glanced downward, to her revealed core, her other mouth on the verge of her most intimate voice: “Look at me, then,” shouted her other voice, and shouted it despite my age, or probably, because of it: “Look at me, if you dare.”
~ ~ ~
I am old, but not so old as to go unnoticed, I thought, as I climbed down the ladder. My wife was waiting for me with two glasses of lemonade — her way of saying good morning. But she looked me over with a somewhat haughty sadness.
“I knew they would make fun of you one of these days,” she said. “Looking over there every morning, aren’t you ashamed?”
“No,” I said. “What should I be ashamed of?”
“Of yourself, at your time of life.”
We drank our lemonade in silence. We did not talk about the fish or the cats as we usually do, or about the oranges, more of which we gave away than sold. We did not pick any flowers, the new blooms, we did not discuss possible changes in the garden, which is our life. We went straight to the kitchen and had breakfast, each absorbed in our own thoughts; in any case the black coffee, the soft-boiled egg, the slices of fried plantain absolved us of grief.
“Actually,” she said at last, “I’m not worried about you, since I’ve known you for forty years. Or them. There’s no hope for you three. But the children? What is that lady doing, walking around naked in front of her son, in front of poor little Gracielita? What kind of example are they setting?”
“The children don’t see her,” I said. “They walk right past her as if they really do not see her. Whenever she takes her clothes off, and he sings, the children play at her side. They’re simply used to it.”
“You don’t miss a trick, do you? I think you ought to ask for help. From Father Albornoz, for example.”
“Help?” I was shocked. And worse stilclass="underline" “Father Albornoz.”
“I hadn’t given a thought to your obsessions, but I think at your age they’re detrimental. The Father could listen to you and help you, better than I could. To me, to tell you the truth, you don’t matter anymore. My fish and my cats matter more to me than a pitiful old man.”
“But Father Albornoz,” I laughed in amazement. “My former pupil. To whom I have myself confessed.”
And I went back to bed to read the paper.
Like me, my wife is a teacher, also retired: the Secretary of Education owes us each ten months’ worth of pension payments. She taught in a school in San Vicente — she was born and raised there, a town six hours from this one, where I was born. I met her in San Vicente, forty years ago, in the bus terminal, which in those days was an enormous corrugated-zinc shed. There I saw her, surrounded by sacks of fruit and orders of cornbread, dogs, pigs and hens, amid the exhaust of the motors and the prowling of the passengers waiting for their buses to leave. I saw her sitting alone on a wrought-iron bench, with room for two. I was dazzled by her dreamy black eyes, her wide forehead, her narrow waist, the ample backside under a pink skirt. The white, short-sleeved, linen blouse showed off her fine, pale arms and the intense darkness of her nipples. I went over and sat down beside her, as if levitating, but she immediately stood up, pretended to fix her hair, gave me a sidelong glance and walked away, feigning interest in the notices outside the transport office. Then something happened which distracted my attention from her uncommon rustic beauty; only such an incident could wrench my eyes from her: on the next bench was a much older man, rather fat, dressed in white; his hat was white too, as was the handkerchief poking out from behind his lapel; he was eating ice cream — just as white — clearly anxious; the color white was stronger than my love at first sight: too much white, also the thick drops of sweat soaking his bullish neck; all of him trembled, and that was in spite of being directly beneath the fan; his hefty body took up the whole bench, he was sprawled out, absolute master of his world; on the fingers of each hand he wore silver rings; there was a leather briefcase beside him, overflowing with documents; he gave the impression of total innocence: his blue eyes wandered distractedly all over the place: sweet and calm, they looked me over once but did not give me a second glance. And then another man, exactly the opposite, young and bone-jutting thin, barefoot, in a T-shirt and frayed shorts, walked up to him, put a revolver to his forehead and pulled the trigger. The cloud of smoke from the barrel was enough to envelop me; it was like a dream for everyone, including the fat man, who blinked and, at the moment of the shot, looked as though he still wanted to enjoy his ice cream. The one with the revolver fired only once; the fat man slid to one side, without falling, his eyes closed, as if he had all of a sudden fallen asleep, abruptly dead, but without letting go of his ice cream; the murderer outthrew the gun far away — a gun that nobody made any attempt to look for or pick up — and walked unhurriedly of the bus station, without anyone stopping him. Except that a few seconds before throwing the gun away he looked at me, the fat man’s nearest neighbor: never before in my life had I been struck by such a dead look; it was as if someone made of stone were looking at me: his gaze made me think he was going to shoot at me until he had emptied the chamber. And that was when I saw: the murderer was not a young man at all; he must have been no more than eleven or twelve. He was a child. I never knew if they followed him or caught him, and I never tried to find out; after all it was not so much his look that nauseated me: it was the physical horror of discovering that he was a child. A child, and that must have been why I was more afraid, and with reason, but also without reason, that he would kill me too. I fled from him, from where he had been, hunted for the bus station toilet, not yet knowing whether to piss or vomit, while cries rose into the air. Several men gathered around the corpse, no one decided to give chase to the murderer: either we were all afraid, or it did not really seem to matter to anyone. I went into the lavatory: it was a small space with broken opaque mirrors, and at the back, the only cubicle looked like a crate — also made of corrugated-zinc sheets, like the terminal itself. I went and pushed the door and saw her just as she was sitting down, her dress bunched up around her waist, two thighs as pale as they were naked narrowing in terror. I said an anguished and heartfelt “Pardon me” and immediately closed the door at a speed calculated to allow me to take another look at her, the implacable roundness of her rump bursting out from under the hitched up skirt, her near nudity, her eyes — a rumble of fear and surprise and a hint of remote pleasure in the light of her pupils at knowing herself admired; of that I am now sure. And fate: we were assigned adjoining seats on the dilapidated bus that would take us to the capital. A long trip, more than eighteen hours, awaited us: the pretext to listen to each other was the death of the fat man in white in the terminal; I felt her arm brush against my arm, but also all of her fear, her indignation, the whole heart of the woman who would be my wife. And the coincidence: we shared the same profession, who could have imagined? Two educators, forgive me for asking, what is your name? (silence), my name is Ismael Pasos, and you? (silence), she was only listening, but finally: “My name is Otilia del Sagrario Aldana Ocampo.” The same hopes. Soon the murder and the incident in the toilet were forgotten — but only apparently, because they went on recurring, becoming associated, in an almost absurd way, in my memory: first death, then nakedness.