WHITE GERANIUM
Balbina died on a warm night, amidst the last stars, the fog rising from the sea. I was forced to open the door from the dining room onto the balcony to create a draft from the street window, because as soon as death took Balbina from me, the whole house filled with her smell — the smell of decaying flowers. I sat in a low chair by the glow of a candle while Balbina was dying, never taking my eyes off her. From the time she had fallen ill, I watched her like that every day and every night till I reached the brink of sleep. I would lie beside her feverish body and gaze at her almond-shaped eyes: they looked at me unseeing, shining in the dark like a cat’s. The warmth of her protracted illness had kept me company, forcing me to close off the house for so long that it had grown damp and the wallpaper had started to peel. When Balbina died, she had no cheeks, nor flesh on the back of her hands, and the dimples in her knees — I adored them so — had vanished. She was fading, her eyes already protruding, when I lay down on top of her, drinking in her final breath, wanting to steal from her the last trace of life, wanting it for myself. As I was about to open the door to the balcony, still holding the last bit of life in my mouth, I realized that death would not leave. The courtyard cast its spell of sun and mist, and a white geranium petal fluttered into the room. On the railing over the street we kept red geraniums. They were mine. On the railing over the courtyard were the white geraniums, Balbina’s. As I watched the petal, I was reminded that I had waited months and months for Balbina’s death, always spying on her to see if her eyes closed with drowsiness, so I could wake her, keep her from sleeping, and be done with her sooner. The moment I heard her breathing calmly, I would slowly rise and cross the room to the wardrobe, climb onto the medium-sized chair, and take down the trumpet I had hidden at the very top.
One morning, some time ago, while I was at work chiseling marble curls for an angel, a tall, thin lady with a long nose and dry lips came in. She was holding a boy’s hand and wearing an awkwardly tilted hat with a bird on it. The boy was dressed in a sailor suit, clutching a shiny, golden trumpet with tassels and red strings to his chest. The lady had come to commission a gray marble headstone for her husband’s grave. Above the name and the words, she wanted three white marble chrysanthemums, standing upright, one beside the other, the first somewhat taller, the third shorter than the one in the middle. She wanted it made quickly. My employer told her that I would put aside the angel and make the headstone right away, but not with raised chrysanthemums, as if they had simply been placed on top of the marble, but engraved, gathered together to form a bouquet. But as soon as she had left, he told me the angel was urgent, the angel first, so I went back to pounding out the ringlets. Every evening when I reached home, I told Balbina that I was making an angel all by myself, because my employer had once told her that I wasn’t good with marble and couldn’t be trusted to make a complete figure. When I finished work on the day that the woman ordered the headstone, I noticed the boy had left his trumpet at the foot of a half-finished kneeling figure. The trumpet was so pretty, all gold and red, that I took it and hid it on top of the wardrobe, so Balbina wouldn’t ask me where I’d gotten it. I didn’t think about it again until one night, while Balbina was sleeping, I slid the chair over to the wardrobe, climbed up, grasped the instrument in the dark, and blew into it, just a little, softly, to punish her for her sins. Then I blew harder, and the sound it made was part moan, part grieving wail, part music from another world. I heard Balbina stirring. I replaced the trumpet above the wardrobe and cautiously slipped back into bed. From that moment on, whenever Balbina slept soundly, I would make the trumpet moan. After that first time, I was on the verge of laughter as I waited for Balbina to wake up, thinking she would talk to me in the morning about the strange noise that had troubled her sleep. But she never mentioned that she had heard the trumpet. My eyes used to trail her, fixed on her back as she moved between the dining room and the kitchen. I was trying to see if my dagger-like glance, traveling along her spine, could lead me to the thoughts she kept hidden in her brain, in the corner that held another, smaller brain, which gathers and stores all our secrets.
That was when her illness began. Always in bed, always lying in bed, with her thread of a voice moaning, I’m tired, tired. While I was watching her one night, I heard her breathing calmly, the way trees must breathe, and all at once she opened her mouth and stuck out the tip of her tongue, and with her tongue and lips she made the sound of a trumpet. What I had been patiently funneling into her ears now issued from her mouth.
When she had been dead for a while, her gaunt cheeks appeared to grow fuller, her lips taking on the shape of youth, her body seemingly at rest. This miracle occurred before I had crossed the room to open the balcony onto the courtyard. As this change was taking place, I noticed the cat lying at the foot of the bed. It had seen me drink in Balbina’s last breath. I grasped it by the scruff of the neck and flung it far away, but a moment later it was again at the foot of the bed, as if it had never moved. While Balbina was still warm, I dressed her, removing all her clothes, particularly the dress she had worn since she first grew ill. It made her look ugly, but I wouldn’t let her change it, not even to sleep. Suddenly I was charmed by the whiteness of her lily legs. My hand circled her knee, round and round, grazing the bone. The cat must have thought that I was playing, because it stretched out one of its paws and touched my fingers. When I had dressed her and combed her hair, I shut her eyes and crossed her hands over her chest; one was so tightly clenched that I had to force it open. Finally, with much grief mixed inexplicably with wild joy, I slowly closed her mouth. I left her side, thinking the cat had stayed with her, but it must have followed me; while the geranium petal was floating in the air, the cat jumped up to catch it before it reached the floor. But I was taller and snatched it. The petal looked like a tooth, smelled like a milk tooth, the same smell as Balbina’s mouth the first time we slept together. Before I realized what I was doing, I found myself standing beside her, a pair of pliers in my hand, wrenching out a front tooth, a tooth so firmly rooted and so hard that, when it yielded, I thought the whole jaw was slipping out. I held it up. It was clean, and I licked it to remove the red that stained the root, then stuck it in my pocket. The cat watched everything. From that day onward, I never again called him by his name — Mixu — I always called him Cosme, because Mixu was the name Balbina had given him when Cosme brought him as a gift. After I had decided I would call him Cosme, I lifted the dead Balbina’s skirt — with respect, I did it very respectfully — and ran my finger repeatedly over her belly, as if I had nothing else to do, from her navel down to her pudendum. And when I calculated that Cosme had to leave home for work, I pulled Balbina’s skirt down and left the house, the cat trailing me. I told Cosme that Balbina was dead. He couldn’t have turned more pale because his blood had already lost its redness and grown watery from thinking so much about my Balbina, who would never be his, and had never been. Because in fact Cosme and Balbina were in love.