The two women gasp.
“Leave?” Geraldina is shocked. She has circled the table to come and hug her son. “Leave?” she repeats, and buries her face, her sobs, in her son’s chest. But then she appears to think it over, while she looks at Hortensia and at me. She finds, surely (I see it in her hopeful eyes), reasons, and permission, to leave. “Thank you, profesor, for getting him to speak,” she stammers, and weeps without untangling herself from her son, which does not keep Hortensia from starting to eat.
I find the coffee pot. I pour myself a cup. I have waited a long time for this moment.
“Do you remember me?”
The boy nods. This time it is I who has a sinking feeling inside.
“Do you remember Otilia?”
He looks at me again as if he did not understand. I am not going to give up.
“You remember her, she gave you a coconut biscuit one morning. Later you came back and asked for another and she gave you four more, for your father, your mother, Gracielita, and the last one for you. You remember, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you remember Otilia, then?”
“Yes.”
“Was Otilia there where they took your father? Was Otilia with Gracielita, with you, with the hostages?”
“No,” he says. “Not her.”
The silence around us is absolute. My eyes stray unbidden to a lobster, encircled by rice, slices of plantain. I apologize to the women. I feel the same nausea as when I came down from Maestro Claudino’s cabin. I go back through the garden to my house, to the bed they had got me out of, and I stretch out on my back, as if I were ready to die, now, and alone, fulfilled, although the Survivors meow beside me, curled up on top of the pillow.
“What day is it?” I ask them. “I’ve lost track of the days. How many things have happened without our noticing?”
The Survivors leave the room and I am left more alone than ever, now definitively alone, it’s true, Otilia, I have lost count of the days without you.
~ ~ ~
Monday? Another letter from my daughter. Geraldina brings it to me, accompanied by Eusebito. I do not open it. What for?
“I already know what she says,” I explain to Geraldina, and shrug my shoulders, smiling to myself.
Yes. Smiling and shrugging my shoulders; why do I not read my daughter’s ninth letter, even if just out of affection, although I know in advance what she says? She is asking about Otilia, and one day I shall have to answer her. Not today. Tomorrow? And what shall I tell her? That I do not know, I do not know. The letter slips from my hands, a dead thing, lands at my feet. We are in my garden, sitting in the middle of the rubble; Geraldina picks up the letter and hands it to me, I put it in my pocket, folding it.
Then the boy’s face appears before me, he plants himself in front of my eyes, like I did to him, at the table.
“You asked me about her,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. But who is she? And I find, very far away in my memory: Gracielita: the two children were prisoners.
The boy’s face is stunned; it is a rapid memory, that terrifies Geraldina and me, without knowing exactly why.
“We were looking at a butterfly,” he tells us. “The butterfly flew, behind, or around, we couldn’t see it, it was gone.
“‘I’ve just swallowed the butterfly,’ she told me. ‘I think I’ve swallowed it, get it out,’ she said.”
She opened her mouth all the way; she was someone else, disfigured by fear, her hands at her temples, her eyes popping in disgust, her mouth open wider and wider, an immense round darkness where he thought he could see the iridescent butterfly flapping its wings against a black sky, going further and further in. He put two fingers on her tongue, and pushed. Nothing else occurred to him.
“‘There’s nothing,’” I told her.
“‘I’ve swallowed it then,’ she screamed. She was going to cry.”
He saw on her lips a film of the fine powder that detaches from butterflies’ wings. Then he saw the butterfly crawl out of her hair, flutter a little and soar up to the other side of the trees, in to the clear sky.
“‘There’s the butterfly,’ I shouted. ‘It only brushed you with its wings.’”
She caught sight of the butterfly as it disappeared. She held back her tears. With a sigh of relief she saw again that the butterfly was flying far away. It flew in front of the sun, far from here. Only then did they look at each other for the first time, and it really was as if they had just met — in captivity. A shared joke made them laugh: were they playing and tumbling in the garden, their faces together, not letting go of each other, as if they never wanted to be separated again, while the men were coming to take them? But he looked at his fingers, still wet from Gracielita’s tongue.
“And Gracielita?” Geraldina asks her son, as if she had just realized, or understood at the last moment that all this time she had thought only of her son. “Why didn’t they bring her?”
“She was going to come, they had put us both up on the same horse.”
The boy’s voice trembles, broken by fear, by bitterness.
“One of those men came and said he was Gracielita’s uncle, and he took her. He made her get down off the horse, and took her.”
“That’s all we needed,” I say to myself out loud, “Gracielita turning up here in a uniform, dealing out shots left and right, filling the town she was born in full of lead.”
I burst out laughing, unable to hold back my laughter.
Geraldina looks at me in surprise, disapproving; she moves away, taking her son by the hand. They cross through the breach in the wall and disappear.
I keep laughing, sitting there, my face in my hands, uncontrollable. The laughter hurts my gut, my heart.
Thursday? Mayor Fermín Peralta cannot return to San José.
“I am under threat,” he reveals, and no one says specifically by whom.
Enough to know he is still under threat, what more? Not long ago his family left town, to be reunited with him. Now he deals with things from Teruel, a relatively safe town — compared to ours, with its landmines, and the reminder of war every now and then.
Professor Lesmes returned only to collect his things and say goodbye. We were with him, six or seven regulars, at Chepe’s, sitting at the tables outside. Among us was Hey, distant but alert, a beer in his hand. Apparently, Lesmes had forgotten that Chepe’s wife, and my own wife, had been kidnapped.
“Did you hear?” he asked us, almost happily. “They kidnapped a dog in Bogotá.”
One or two smiled, amazed: was it a joke?
“I saw it on the news. Didn’t you see it?” he asked us, not remembering that we, without electricity, no longer had access to television, and perhaps for that reason we chatted more, or sat in communal silences, for whole afternoons, at Chepe’s.
By that point nobody was smiling.
“And what was this dog called?” asked Hey, strangely interested.
“Dundí,” Lesmes told him.
“And?” Hey urged him on.
“A purebred cocker spaniel; what more do you want to know, the color? The smell? It was pink, with black spots.”
“And?” Hey continued, actually interested.
Lesmes looked resigned.
“He showed up dead,” he said at last.
Hey sighed heavily.
“It’s true,” said Lesmes, contradicting the incredulity of his listeners. “The news program was tracking it. It was all the country needed.”
A very long silence followed his words.
Lesmes ordered another round of beer. The serving girl brought them, unhappily. Lesmes explained that he would travel with a military convoy, back to Teruel, and from there he would go onto Bogotá.