You must surely have noted, sir, a certain slowing down of the deliveries recently. I wondered if it might not be the case to deduce from that the imminent arrival of the Son.
The Father looked at him silently. He was coming from distant thoughts, but he registered on some peripheral edge of his mind the beauty of loyalty to a style, often more visible in servants than in masters. He ratified it with an imperceptible smile. But since he remained silent, Modesto went ahead.
I happened to notice, on the other hand, that the last morning telegram is from twenty-two days ago, he said.
The Father, too, had noticed it. He wouldn’t have been able to fix an exact day, but he knew that at a certain point the Son had stopped reassuring the Family about the outcome of his nights.
He nodded yes, with his head. Yet he remained silent.
In the strict interpretation that he gave to his work, Modesto considered being silent in the presence of a master to be an excessively intimate practice, and so he avoided it systematically by resorting to a couple of elementary operations: asking permission to leave, or continuing to speak. Usually he preferred the first. That day he risked the second.
So, if you will allow me, I would begin to plan the preparations for his arrival, to which I would like to devote all my attention, given the affection I have for the Son and considering the joy that seeing him again will bring to the whole household.
The Father was almost moved. He had known that man forever, so at that moment he was perfectly able to understand what he was really saying, in the reverse of his words, with an irreproachable generosity and elegance. He was saying that something was going wrong with the Son, and he was there to do everything necessary to see that the rule that in those rooms did not permit anyone to give in to sorrow was not broken. Probably he was also reminding him that his devotion to the Son was such that no task would have seemed to him inappropriate if the purpose was that of tempering his fate.
So the Father remained silent — touched by that man’s proximity. By the intelligence, by the control. He was, just that afternoon, measuring his own solitude and, looking at Modesto, was aware of seeing in him the only person who in those hours inhabited with dignity the open landscape of his distress. And in fact, at moments like those, when we are called on to endure secret, or not easily expressed, sorrows, it’s secondary characters, of programmatic modesty, who from time to time break the isolation we have forced ourselves into, with the result that we find ourselves, as happened to me only a few days ago, granting strangers irrational entrance to our labyrinth, in the childish illusion of being able to gain from it a suggestion, or an advantage, or even just a fleeting balm. In my case, I’m ashamed to say, it was the stock boy in a supermarket who was meticulously placing some frozen foods in the right case — but I wouldn’t know exactly what to call it — his hands reddened with cold. I don’t know, it seemed to me that he was doing something similar to what I ought to do, analogously, to the case of my soul — but I wouldn’t know exactly what to call it. I ended up telling him. I was pleased to see that he didn’t stop working while he said he wasn’t sure he had understood clearly. So I explained better. My life is broken, I said, and I can’t get the pieces back into place. My hands are getting colder and colder, I haven’t been able to feel anything for a while, I told him. He must have thought he was dealing with a lunatic, and in fact that was the first time I thought I might go mad — an eventuality that the Doctor, foolishly, felt he could exclude, before I hit him with the clock. The secret is to do it every day, the supermarket stock boy told me. You do something every day, and so it becomes easy. I do it every day, I don’t even notice anymore. Is there something you do every day? he asked me. I write, I said. How nice. What do you write? Books, I said. Books about what? Novels, I said. I don’t have time to read, he said — it’s what they always say. Of course, I understand, I said, it’s not serious. I have three children, he said — maybe it was a justification, but I took it instead as the start of a dialogue, as an authorization to exchange something, and so I explained to him that, odd as it might seem, I could put pieces of a book one on top of the other without even looking at them, I just have to touch them with my fingertips, so to speak, while the same operation becomes impossible when I apply myself to the pieces of my life, with which I can’t construct anything that has a sensible form — or even just refined, if not pleasant — and this in spite of the fact that it’s an activity I devote myself to practically every day, and so many days by now that, you know, I told him, my hands are frozen, I don’t feel anything anymore.
He looked at me.
Do you know where to find the paper napkins? I asked.
Of course, come with me.
He walked in front of me, in his white smock, and for a second I saw the only person who in those hours inhabited with dignity the open landscape of my distress. That’s why I’m able to understand how the Father, instead of saying something about the Son, reached into a drawer and took out an envelope, which had been opened and was covered with stamps. He turned it over in his hands. Then he offered it to Modesto. He said that it came from Argentina.
Modesto did not have imagination at his disposal — a useless, if not harmful, gift in his occupation — so he didn’t move: he was talking about the Son, Argentina had nothing to do with him, or, if it did, it was through connections that he couldn’t chart.
But the Father was frightened by his own solitude, so he made a peremptory gesture and said:
Read it, Modesto.
He took it. Opening it, he found himself thinking that, in fifty-nine years of service, he had had access to a lot of secrets, and yet it was the first time that someone was ordering him expressly to do so. He was wondering if this would in some way change the laws of his position in that House, when the first lines carried him away from any thought. The letter was written in a somewhat labored handwriting, but with an orderliness that only toward the end yielded to weariness. It named things without seeking elegance or precision, but restoring everything to the simplicity that we imagine facts have, when we haven’t had the privilege of studying them. There was no luxury, or fuss, or intelligence. Stones, if they spoke, would do so like that. It was a short letter. It was signed with a seal.
Modesto refolded the sheet of paper and, with an instinctive vocation to order, put it in the envelope. The first thing he noted, disoriented, was that there was no trace of the Son in that letter: it was something completely different. He wasn’t used to confronting things in that way — he had always had the ability to arrange problems in a linear sequence, in which it was possible to consider them one at a time: setting the table constituted the most elevated example of that precept.
The second thing he noted he said aloud.
It’s terrible.
Yes, said the Father.
Modesto put the letter on the table, as if it were burning hot.
When did it arrive? he asked. He didn’t remember having ever in his life uttered so direct a question to the Father, or to the Father of the Father.