“What would you do, Chelón?” he asked me.
We were walking down the road toward the path that led into the grove of Guanacaste trees, where those tall broad-leaved evergreens shade out the sun and the air is cool, damp, and comforting. I was wearing my cap and carrying my cane.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
Although the rains had not yet begun, and the mountain was dry, the color of straw, inside the forest the greens of the vines and the bushes emerged seductively.
“Well, you should know, because your turn will come,” he said with touch of a grimace.
“Maybe it’s better when it arrives all at once, no warning,” I noted.
I had an intuition, a fleeting idea, but I shooed it away, like one shoos away a fly.
“What I would do, Old Man, is settle any outstanding accounts; let go of any resentments, hatreds, lay my burdens down, for where we’re going it’s all just excess baggage anyway,” I said.
“And if we’re not going anywhere. ”
“Still, the lighter, the better.”
“I have a fever,” the old man said, suddenly stopping.
“You want to return?”
“No, let’s do our usual route.”
He seemed exhausted, and he had always been the one to set the steady, almost martial, pace, never showing the least consideration for my fear of falling.
“If you don’t do the treatment, you’ll soon not have enough air to go out of the house,” I said.
“I feel badly for María Elena,” he said.
Since Haydée’s death, María Elena spent half the week at the house with Old Man Pericles and the other half with her family in her village.
“We’re going to avoid all that,” he said.
That was when I understood the raven’s reasoning.
We walked across the small hanging bridge over the spring; he stood for a while holding onto the lateral ropes, his gaze lost in the thin tongue of water.
“This morning, after talking to you, I called The Pole,” he said. “He’ll take care of the wake and the burial.”
With my cane, I pushed aside an orange peel that was littering the path.
“He’s very fond of you,” I said.
“It’s no skin off his back: he’ll write off the cost of the funeral home and the cemetery as publicity for his radio stations,” he said, smiling.
“Don’t be such an ingrate,” I rebuked him.
But Old Man Pericles was like that: he never missed an opportunity to get in a jab.
We emerged from the forest into an open field; from there we could reach the highway circling the park that would take us home.
“Pati and Albertico will come to take care of everything,” he said. “Truth is, the only objects of any value in the house are Haydée’s.”
We walked along the sidewalk that ran parallel to the highway.
I would have liked to tell him to take it easy, not to let himself get carried away by his obsessions, even in the worst-case scenario he still had a few months, but he was laying all his cards on the table.
“Can’t let the pain have its way with me,” he mumbled as he took a deep breath, just to make sure I understood.
I’ve often asked myself what we had in common, what united us, apart from the friendship between our wives. He didn’t admire my paintings, or my poems (“metaphysical poetry,” he’d say, despite my enthusiasm), or my way of understanding the world (“too much Eastern marijuana, Chelón,” he’d insist in his mocking tone). I couldn’t care less about his passion for politics, his militancy alongside people he himself disdained, his loyalty to the interests of communists in faraway land. But we never argued, not in the sense of ideas clashing head-on. It seems we met over an ineffable, inviolable terrain, someplace far beyond any generational empathy. Or as if deep down I was doing what he would have liked to do and he was living an adventure I would have liked to live. It’s not worth delving into too much. Some friendships are destiny.
Carmela was waiting for us with two glasses of fresh fruit drink. Then she made coffee and cut a lemon tart she had baked earlier in the day. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how much Pericles had declined in the last two weeks: he was ashen and was having difficulty breathing, as if he would never recover from what had been our traditional evening stroll for the past decade.
“If my lungs were in better shape, I would have liked to go to the Devil’s Doorway,” Old Man Pericles said as he drank this last coffee and smoked a cigarette.
The Devil’s Doorway was a huge cliff about three-quarters of a mile into the park, where the mountain abruptly ended. The view there was spectacular: one could see the sea and a good chunk of the coast; at night it was crowded with cars full of furtive lovers.
“It wouldn’t have been good for you in this heat,” Carmela said.
Before I had so many ailments, I used to walk to the Devil’s Doorway more often; I went many times with the old man. Watching the sunset from those heights is a revelation.
But the name was derived from its more sinister side: Milena, a feather-brained ballerina and a friend of ours from childhood, knocked off balance by the ravages of old age, was the last to throw herself off the cliff into the void, six months before. The list was long.
The old man lit another cigarette.
“It’s time for me to go,” he said.
Carmela gave him a piece of pie for María Elena; he put it in his bag.
We walked him to the bus.
“Don’t be stubborn, old man. Get the treatment,” Carmela said to him, with the voice of a scolding mother as he kissed her on the cheek. I know how she must have struggled over whether to say those words, but now she was on the verge of tears.
We hugged each other, as if it were just another parting, wordless.
The Viking had scampered onto the bus through the back door.
Old Man Pericles sat two rows behind the driver; he barely waved.
A few times, later that afternoon, amid waves of melancholy, we would reminisce about Haydée. Above all, her enthusiasm during the general strike, when she got involved in a way we never would have expected, with courage and audacity, relentlessly demanding the old man’s release and amnesty for Clemen; clearly etched in my memory is that night we found her in the crowd next to the National Palace when we heard that the dictator had stepped down. Haydée was jubilant, shouting and dancing with joy. And the following morning, when we accompanied her to the Central Prison, in the midst of those throngs of people waiting anxiously for the release of their families and friends, she was radiant, shouting slogans, cheering, until finally Old Man Pericles and all the other prisoners emerged, Pericles with that roguish expression on his face. That same afternoon we learned that Clemen was alive and hiding on the island of Espíritu Santo, along with his cousin, Jimmy Ríos. I never again saw her so happy, so unreserved, so fulfilled.
Then we remembered the period toward the end of the fifties, when we had just returned from New York and they from their exile in Costa Rica. Haydée and Carmela suggested using their savings to start a patisserie. All four of us were excited by the idea. Old Man Pericles joked around, saying I would dream up exotic pastry designs and he would be in charge of the texts for promotion and publicity. I warned him not to get his hopes up, that considering our wives’ characters, the most we could aspire to would be to paint the walls of the place they rent. But when the old man was suddenly arrested by the new colonel and again expelled from the country, all our plans were dashed.