At the previous appointment, the doctor had told him that if he didn’t undergo the treatment he’d have only a few months left, it would become increasingly hard to breathe, and he would suffer unbearable pain.
I felt as if Haydée had entered the dining room, a strange, fleeting presence; Carmela turned to look at me. Old Man Pericles finished eating the meat casserole, then pulled the bowl of bean toward him with relish, breaking into a smile and saying:
“Horrifying, don’t you think?”
The rumble of the bus broke the heavy midday silence.
“You should make another appointment. If you don’t get the treatment, you’ll regret it,” Carmela said, clearly upset. Then right away, before getting up, she asked, “Are you going to want more juice?”
Old Man Pericles asked her also for more tortillas, toasted rather than fresh, the way he liked them.
“Did you ever find out who was living at that house at mile nine?” I asked.
The old man wiped the plate of beans with a piece of tortilla. He nodded, without looking up.
“Nothing good is in store for us.,” I commented.
“Things here are always worse than we imagine,” he said before bringing the dripping piece of tortilla to his mouth; he left the bowl clean, pure, without a trace of beans and cream. “Fortunately, I won’t be around to see it,” he added with no self-pity, as if he really did foresee what was coming.
Now I understand how grateful Old Man Pericles was that Albertico had left the country: some of his companions at the university, his age, were already appearing in the newspapers as supposed members of the burgeoning guerrilla cells that were confronting the military government. Surely the old man was staring at the specter of the insurrection of 1932, at the butchery armed struggle can lead to.
Albertico was the grandchild with whom the old man most identified; this was evident when he told us that the young man had started studying sociology at the University of Costa Rica, and that he took on politics with a dedication and lucidity that neither his father nor his Uncle Clemente had ever had; he called Clemente’s children “futile flesh,” and Pati’s “meek Costa Rican lambs.”
Carmela insisted that the best thing for Old Man Pericles to do after the treatment was to go to San Jose, where his two children were living, so he could spend his last few months with has family. I was certain he would never take that comfortable and predictable route; nothing would have horrified him more than to watch his privacy suddenly intruded upon by his children and grandchildren and their concerns: he didn’t have the temperament of a patient, much less of a dying man.
Of his two remaining children, Pati was most like Old Man Pericles: she was a tall, graceful, haughty brunette; she had a fiery temperament and no time for trivialities. Married to a powerful Costa Rican communist, she had a couple of children and had made her home in that city, where Haydée had spent long stretches, especially toward the end, when the cancer was ravaging her. Old Man Pericles always called his daughter’s house “the Costa Rican rearguard,” because that’s where he went into exile each time the baboon currently in charge gave the order. I met Pati when she was little: she always was a livewire; then I heard about her marriage and didn’t see her again until her mother’s funeral.
“What are you painting, Chelón?” he asked me while Carmela was making coffee in the kitchen.
“I’m still on the fallen angels,” I answered.
“You’ve spent more than two years on them,” he said. “Have you found your gold mine?”
“The buyers like them, and they still aren’t boring me,” I explained, which was absolutely honest; every week I painted one oil and one watercolor of an angel with a different occupation, and they came to me on their own, without much effort. “As far as it being a gold mine, not. ”
“He’s now painting one where a poor ice-cream vendor, with his wings and dripping with sweat under the burning sun, is pushing his little cart,” Carmela said from the kitchen. “He modeled it after the ice-cream vendor’s cart that parks here at the entrance to the park on Sundays.”
“Not only the cart,” I said, “the hat as well.”
“It’s a source of solace,” Old Man Pericles said as he lit his cigarette.
“What do you mean?” Carmela asked, walking toward us with the coffee pot.
But I understood right away.
“People like to buy solace, the rich most of all,” he answered.
“There you go with your notions,” I said. “The poor are the ones who need solace.”
“But they don’t have the means to buy it. ”
“The Italian ambassador already reserved the ice-cream angel,” Carmela said, pleased, while she poured out the coffee.
He was one of those boors who begin to fancy themselves renaissance men after being posted to a backward country like ours. When I described to him what I was painting, he said he loved ice cream and asked me to put it aside for him, and he even had the nerve to offer me some suggestions. He’d been at the house the previous Saturday, insisting we come to a reception at the embassy; he appeared incapable of comprehending that his world was so alien to me that his offer to send his chauffeur would do nothing to induce us to attend his party — we had already had our share of protocol for our lifetimes.
“He brought me some first-rate cigars,” I said, remembering the Italian’s good side. “Would you like one?”
“Of course. I hope such high quality doesn’t irritate my taste buds. ” Old Man Pericles said, ironically, for he smoked the cheapest cigarettes around.
“What they’ll irritate are your lungs,” Carmela cut in, glaring at me reproachfully for what she considered to be my imprudence, as if she still didn’t want to accept that there was no return, our friend had already crossed the line, his refusal to submit to the treatment was not a mere whim, not a reaction to fear, but rather the result of a final, resounding decision — and Old Man Pericles had always been a decisive man.
I went to the studio to get the box of cigars off the bookshelf.
We rarely spoke about politics, only when there was pandemonium in the streets due to strikes, elections, or a coup d’état. Old Man Pericles always had the latest bits of gossip, but he doled them out slowly as if they were old jokes everybody had already heard. Already before Haydée’s death his tone had become sardonic, even when he talked about his own comrades’ adventures, as if he no longer believed what he preached and belonged to that gang because one has to have something to cling to in this life. He despised the military even though he, his father, and his grandfather had been in the military; more than anything, though, he despised the rich: the fourteen packs of hyenas, he called the so-called fourteen families who own this parcel of land. It was his loathing of the arrogance of the powerful that made him remain a communist to the very end rather than any illusion about the supposed goodness of that other world. “There’s deep shit everywhere, Chelón. This is mine. What is to be done?” he said one day after returning from a long trip to Moscow and Peking, when those two cities were still on friendly terms.
At some point in the afternoon he’d always enter my studio: he would cast an eye over the canvas I was painting, rummage through my books with the hope that I had bought something that might interest him, then look pensively out the picture window. He never offered an opinion about my paintings, always claiming to be incapable of evaluating the visual arts; he was contemptuous of non-figurative art and was grateful I had never wasted my paint on such things. Whenever I showed him any of my poems, published or not, he’d make a measured comment, but would always end by saying: “You’re right to prefer painting.” That was another of his characteristics: he seemed to go through life forgiving the world. I reminded him of it that afternoon when I noticed him looking attentively at the ice-cream vendor as a fallen angeclass="underline"