I got a postcard of the streets of New York City. In Central Park, a couple of perfect models with perfect tans skated into a perfect sunset. Milan wrote: Some time ago, Félix Lajkó, the most famous Gypsy violinist from Novi Sad, was passing through town. He played in Madison Square Garden. After the concert, several of the Serbian artists living in Manhattan decided to take him out to dinner. Writers, painters, a filmmaker. I didn’t say a word the whole night. I spent two hours sitting next to one of my idols, in the most absolute silence, petrified. When the coffee was finally served, Lajko turned to me and said that he knew an accordionist whose last name was Rakić who was also from Belgrade, and maybe he was family. Without looking up from my espresso, I whispered that no relative of mine was an accordionist in Belgrade. And that was it.
I got a postcard of a cowboy on horseback, from San Antonio, Texas. Milan wrote: Long, long ago, the Gypsies built a church of stone and the Serbs built a church of cheese. When each of the churches was finished, they decided to swap. The Gypsies would give the Serbs the church of stone, and the Serbs would give the Gypsies the church of cheese, plus five cents. But as the Serbs had no money, they still owed the Gypsies the five cents. Immediately the Gypsies began to eat their church of cheese, and little by little they polished it off. And then they had no church. The Serbs still owe the Gypsies five cents, and the Gypsies still demand it every day. I think the time has come, Eduardito, to settle that five-cent debt with myself. Tshiocha, I cry, like that beautiful black Welsh woman.
There then followed a long silence. As if the angst had overwhelmed him and so, wishing me the best, he’d dived headfirst into the earth’s core. Initially, I thought perhaps something had gone wrong at the post office, some technical failure or some kind of epistolary disruption, but I quickly discarded that theory, given all the bills and junk mail I kept receiving. Then I thought something had happened to Milan. An illness, or something worse. His postcards had been so punctual, one a week, sometimes two or three a week, and I’d gotten hooked on them almost without realizing it, the way you might get hooked on sleeping pills or a bad soap opera or a six o’clock Cinzano with lots of ice. Lía made fun of me, look how worried you are, Dudú, watching me arrange and then rearrange and then disarrange all of the postcards on my studio walclass="underline" first chronologically, then geographically, then thematically, then photographically. I was worried, no doubt, but I also understood, even if only hypothetically, that part of Milan’s game consisted of straying from the path, absenting himself, disappearing for a time and leaving no trace, no signs of any sort. It was one more way of breaching boundaries and borders: the boundaries and borders of a routine or of a preestablished, systematic path. It was, I suspect, one more way of always playing the least predictable piece.
Making the most of two weeks we had off from the university — Lía from her last few anatomy courses, and I from giving a yearlong series of seminars on screenplays adapted from short stories — I packed all of my recently acquired Gypsy music and, for seven days, we escaped to a frozen, secluded cabin in a village called Albores, in the Sierra de las Minas: a biosphere reserve in the cloud forest, almost three thousand meters above sea level.
We spent the days looking for venomous snakes (pit vipers and rattlers, mostly), noisy howler monkeys, owls, wild turkeys, pink-headed warblers, and, astonishingly, a flock of shimmering red-and-green quetzals perched on the branches of immense wild avocado trees, and which later took off with the synchronized, rhythmic undulations of a paper kite. We regularly came across peccaries’ tracks in the mud and, from time to time, those of a big cat. Jaguars, the park ranger told us with hazy affability. Each morning, over our first coffee, a mob of blue magpies breakfasted with us on the balcony, pecking our crumbs off the floor and the table and sometimes even out of our hands.
We spent the nights making love (there’s nothing like making love in a biosphere reserve) and listening to the violin and magic sitar of Félix Lajkó; the Hungarian café music called olah, by Kek Lang and Kalyi Jag; the robust songs of Rajasthan; Darko Macura’s duduk; Turkish clarinets; Egyptian drums; Kálmán Balogh’s cimbalom; the brash, fast trumpets of Boban Marković and Jova Stojilković; the unstoppable guitars of French Manouche Gypsies; the voice of Macedonian singer Esma Redžepova; and a lot of flamenco. The music played and we made love in an almost primitive manner, an almost prehistoric manner, as if all of the cries and the drums and the pain and the moon and the clouds and the shrieking of all those bats were also there with us, between the sheets.
Lía, like a doctor, or perhaps more like a scientist, or perhaps more like a zealous disciple of quantum physics, ended up associating various types of Gypsy music with different positions. Automatically. Without realizing it, of course. I began to infer certain patterns on the third or fourth night, but they remained unconfirmed until the fifth. Kolos: her on top. Sambas: me on top. Olahs: both seated, facing one another, legs entwined. Flamenco: her on top, both faceup. Rumbas: both on our sides, facing each other. Čočeks: me on top, her facedown. Ciftetelis: the position she called zero gravity because that’s apparently what she felt, zero gravity, but which I find nearly impossible to describe. The music would change and Lía, just as quickly, would turn me over or push me down or jump on top of me with the uninhibited agility of a young gazelle. And the more drumming, needless to say, the more noise she made. On our last night, I explained this all to her and Lía laughed and said you’re crazy, Dudú, and made me turn off the music before I could take off her clothes.
Perhaps it was that music, perhaps it was the mountain altitude and the cold, or perhaps it was the fact that we were so alone and when two people are so alone their spirits seek to express themselves even more exquisitely, but even Lía’s orgasms were transformed. Seven sketches made by someone else, drawn by another hand. Seven pages of her almond-colored notebook that bore no relation to any of the pages that had come before and that would bear no relation to any of the pages that were to come. A seven-orgasm parenthesis, one might say, though I’m not entirely convinced by that stylistic device. The lines were now more curved than straight, much more tenuous and unsure, as though they’d been drawn when frightened or perhaps when sleepy. The blank spaces took on greater importance, giving the sketches a desert-like air or a flighty air, where the emptiness seemed exclusively to be filled with more emptiness and where silence was the only thing you could hear and the only thing really worth hearing. The different signs and symbols also underwent a profound metamorphosis: streams and clouds and craters and spasms were still there, but nearly unrecognizable. On that last night, the seventh, with only the music of all the bats twittering in the grooves of the ceiling, Lía sat on the edge of the bed, turned on a small lamp, and covered in goose bumps from the cold or perhaps from something more esoteric, closed that brief parenthesis with a quick sketch of a spiderweb being spun.