Part 2. The Lunch (1973)
SARPEDON: Nobody ever kills himself. Death is destiny.
Old Man Pericles called at ten thirty in the morning. Carmela answered the phone: surprised to hear his voice, she invited him over to eat, telling him she was making a casserole he would love. A bit apprehensive, I took the handset: he told me he needed to talk to me; he wanted to know if it was a good time for me. I asked him where he was calling from. He said he was in the public phone booth in front of the hospital. I told him Carmela had already invited him, and he should come without delay. I wanted to believe his voice sounded as it always did: a stranger to dismay. When I hung up, Carmela questioned me by raising her eyebrows; I must have given her a look of resignation.
I returned to the terrace and my rocking chair, where I spend my mornings, but I couldn’t take up my reading again. Old Man Pericles was barely two years old than me, and his time was coming. I felt uneasiness waft over me like a light breeze from the patio. I got up and stretched. Then I went to my studio, to my writing desk, and reread the notes I’d written at dawn. I was thinking that what I needed was a scarecrow to scare off the crows in my mind.
A short while later, I thought I heard Carmela in the living room dialing the phone. I assumed she was calling María Elena, the Aragóns’ maid, the only person who now lived in the house with Old Man Pericles. Carmela whispered so I wouldn’t hear; I disapprove of her meddling in other people’s lives, fretting over the old man as if he were a defenseless child and not a seventy-five-year-old adult.
It would take Old Man Pericles approximately forty-five minutes to get to the house. We live at the top of the mountain, across the street from the last bus stop, in front of the entrance to Balboa Park, which is bustling every Sunday with people who come up from the city. The house is small, but more than enough for two old folks like Carmela and I; the patio abuts the most heavily forested section of the park. The air is clean and the night sky is awe-inspiring. We’ve been living here almost fifteen years. It is true, the area is getting more and more crowded. There’s more noise: during the day, youngsters play on the street, and buses arrive and depart every twenty minutes. But at night, silence takes hold, broken only by the chirping of the crickets.
Old Man Pericles would take a bus from Rosales Hospital to downtown, then get on the number 12 bus, which would bring him here. Once a month, at least, he came for lunch, whenever he was in the country — and not in jail or in exile, which fortunately he hadn’t been for the last year and a half. The last time was when he was stopped by customs at Ilopango Airport, interrogated, then immediately deported by plane to Costa Rica. The press said the authorities had prevented a well-known communist from entering the country and bringing money from Moscow to finance subversive activities. I told myself that some perverse fear must be eating away at people who can treat an old man this way.
Once in a while, at dawn, I still write a few lines in my diary, I jot down a verse, an aphorism; in the mornings, as the sun is rising, I draw, make sketches, sometimes just a few lines; toward evening, I like to pick up my brushes, stand in front of the picture window overlooking the park, and contemplate the swath of green that joins the deep blue. For more than fifty years such idleness has been my vocation. Old Man Pericles always said that no art makes sense; I never argued with him, though on one or another occasion a crack would show up in his hard shell, and he’d admit to having “sinned,” that is, written a few verses. Never, of course, would he have read them to me: he would say that this business of lifting up one’s tail feathers to display one’s rear end is only for peacocks, not leathery old birds. “Bitter ones,” I would answer, and he would just smile, because I’d reminded him that at the beginning he too had illusions, the muse of poetry had also tempted him, but he had succumbed to a different temptation, the one he called “the perfidious wench” — wretched politics.
Carmela entered the studio, walked up to the desk where I was sitting and digressing; she placed her hand on my shoulder and offered me a glass of fresh watermelon drink. She also had not stopped thinking about Old Man Pericles. Fifteen days before he’d confided in us that he had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. We were sitting in the rocking chairs on the terrace, drinking coffee after lunch. And he said, without any preamble and without any particular emphasis, while smoking, that they had told him that morning at the hospital, the exam results in hand. “No return,” he said with a grin, words I remember precisely because they were the same two words he would use whenever he wanted to mock the possibility of the eternal return, an idea I sometimes liked to entertain.
But the doctor had told him they could treat him to prevent the spread and that he should return in fifteen days for his first session. That’s why, as the sun was getting hotter and hotter, we waited to find out what was going on.
“What could have happened, why did he leave the hospital so soon?” Carmela muttered behind me.
I asked her if she had spoken to María Elena. She had been working for them forever, Haydée even brought her with them once when they went into exile in Costa Rica.
“She told me she thought he was at the hospital. He left the house early this morning, carrying a bag with his pajamas and a few toiletries, ready to check in for his treatment. She was surprised when I told her he had called us and was on his way here.”
“Maybe there was some delay,” I said.
María Elena also told her that in the last few days Old Man Pericles had been even more withdrawn than usual, he ate little, and he barely left the house, spending all his time in his office with the door closed; his cough had gotten worse.
It now feels as if I’ve always known him, because memory is deceptive and attaches itself capriciously to things. But it must have been around 1920, shortly before I married Carmela. Old Man Pericles was already married to Haydée, and Clemente was about three years old. Carmela and Haydée were classmates, neighbors, friends in the same club.
As for Pericles, all I remember from those days was his military haircut, his upright bearing, his stern gaze, and his wrinkled brow, as if he were already old. He was a second lieutenant in the cavalry, a graduate of the military academy. He was following in the footsteps of his father, who was then a lieutenant colonel. He would, however, suddenly abandon his military career and enroll in the university to study law. As he would say, this was his first insubordination: the eldest son’s break from paternal authority. An insubordination against the military world of his father, which as the years passed, would become the central theme of his life. “They’d already passed me the baton when I saw the folly of continuing in that world,” he once told me. “That’s my story.”