The sun was setting and a bluish light, as if spiritualized, conferred on the present an aura of absence and time past, as though my father and I were trudging yesteryear among the fig trees.
Many figs had fallen to the ground when the branches were shaken by rain and wind.
Apples and peaches were rotting in the mud. Quinces and sapodillas exposed their flesh, pits, and skins. As we stepped on them, leaves released water like sponges or tore soundlessly like damp paper.
A quantity of ripe fruits had blended into a single burst of fruit. The sun drank their juices and warmed them in the mud.
Voices traveled alone over the telephone, orphans in the night, detached from their faces.
At this end of the line, in Contepec, my father tried to find words to describe forty years of separation in a few minutes.
At the other end, in Brussels, his younger brother was heard, his voice altered.
And the two voices, made of time, asked and answered, intertwined and fell apart in the air.
When the telephone had rung my brother had said to my father, “It’s for you.”
And my father heard the voice of his brother, unseen for decades, who addressed him in Greek from the disembodied past:
“Nicias?”
And he, with a tired, older voice, and in Spanish, replied from the present, “Yes.”
His brother had begun to speak to him in Greek, but unable to articulate a single word, my father remained mute thanks to four decades of distance and a life elsewhere; and because Spanish had smothered the language of his childhood.
For the voice at the other end of the line was emerging from somewhere lost, from something irretrievable. It was like the voice of a photograph speaking, an old photograph; the voice of a phantom speaking from long ago. Without present, without future, only causing pain.
Perhaps this was why my father repeated in Spanish, “Yes, it’s me.”
As if he needed to emphasize that he wasn’t another, that he wasn’t the ghost of the one who was born and raised in a town east of Smyrna.
And so, like two transfigured people who no longer speak their common family language, they began with some effort to converse in French. And their voices suffered not only from crossing the ocean but also from the impossibility of being the people they were when they were separated.
It didn’t matter whether they updated each other on their current lives. Whether they were gray-haired, wrinkled, or bald; how many children they had; whether they were poor or rich; happy or sick. During the conversation their parents’ faces, their own childhood faces, the room where they used to play passed before their eyes like specters.
But despite my father’s ignorance of the language through which they recognized each other, they painfully found a single voice, calm, weathered, fraternal, like the voice of those who accept their death, knowing that no matter what they do they will die: be they together or apart, be they rich or poor. A voice without a face, orphaned in time, condemned to suffering, a voice that accepted its human destiny.
One Sunday afternoon, during a screening of the Cantinflas movie “Seven Machos” in my father’s theater, I was feeling forlorn in the midst of the audience, which was mainly composed of campesinos, young couples, and children. What set me apart from them was the knowledge that my father would travel to Mexico City late that night without me, for I had a bad cold and it wasn’t advisable to be outside in the early hours.
All of a sudden in the darkened hall, amid heads turned towards the screen, I remembered the things I’d been planning to do in the capital when my father promised to take me. But while I was remembering, the symptoms of my cold made those earlier days seem unreal, and erased the image of me walking along the city streets.
The darkness became overwhelming and I felt all alone in the audience, like a creature that belonged to another species. Not laughing when they laughed, not getting excited when they did, on the verge of crying, I stood up and left the movie theater.
I shut myself up in the dining room to write. So much silence of empty rooms surrounded me that I imagined I heard footsteps and doors creaking open, although no one was there.
Alone with my notebook, struggling to put what was happening to me into words, after several forced attempts where the atmosphere of my father’s trip was more intense than my concentration to write, I laid down my pencil.
The cold I longed to banish made me cry; it was worse than before, keeping me somewhere between nothingness and lucidity, so that I saw the colors in the room more sharply but they were opaque.
Finally I went to bed, hoping sleep would make me better, perhaps even well enough to travel in the early hours.
And so it was that I took up the solitary battle against the cold. I resented every moment of malaise, of weakening in my body, of headache, as if it were a defeat of my very self, and a humiliation.
When he left the movie theater my father came to see me. Without turning on the light he asked how I was. And he knew that, although I answered “fine,” my voice said the opposite, for I heard him tell my mother, “Make him some tea, he’s very sick.”
From that moment onwards, my struggle against the cold resumed in a desperate but doomed fashion. I had to drive it out of me before one in the morning.
The darkness of the room, my wish to travel, and the knowledge that my father was leaving got mixed up with the sweat, sneezes, and tears. Each time I awoke I felt worse than before.
So when the church clock struck one and my father turned on the light in his room, I realized I had to give up the fight to go with him. Passing by my window, and knowing I wasn’t asleep and could hear him, he said, “I’ll take you next time. I’m going again in two weeks. Go to sleep.”
His steps then faded in the corridor and I heard him close the street door.
Then the sound of an engine filled my room. When I heard it I felt like getting up, dressing, and running after him, yelling that I was fine and could go to Mexico City.
But between the tears from my cold and my frustration, soon all I heard was dogs barking.
Chapter 10
I SAT DOWN TO WRITE but it started to rain. This immediately prompted a battle within me between what I imagined and what was taking place, for on paper the pensive trees in the forest of my story were darkened by shadows; and the imaginary poet who wandered among them was obliterated by the actual fact of the downpour, which fell in torrents on the roof and lopped off branches from the rosebushes in the garden.
Even afterwards, once it had stopped raining, my dusky-voiced trees were flooded and I didn’t feel like writing. In a different mood, I understood that the rain had prevailed not only over what was imagined but also over the person imagining.
I had made the dining room my study. Mornings I would sit down to write. My parents didn’t ask what I was doing shut up in there; they didn’t seem to notice.
One afternoon my brother, searching for a camera, opened a drawer and discovered my writings.
When I returned from a walk in the fields I found him sitting on a step, reading. When he saw me he waved the notebooks in the air and came towards me. He asked why I’d never told him before that I wrote. And he went to tell my parents I was a poet and that he was going to publish my books.
At the pool hall, words piled up inside me like rain clouds. But even when I wrote them down they didn’t stop bubbling up, and when I leaned over the green cloth I took crooked aim at the cue ball. A story was hatching before my eyes, one in which the friends around me at that moment became both more real and more remote; they now existed in sentences in my mental village.