“Do you really believe that?”
“Of course I believe it.”
“After all these years you still believe it?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“You won the war. Does this seem to you a better world?”
“I have never asked myself.”
“It’s not true. You have asked yourself a thousand times, but you’re afraid to answer. Just as you have asked yourself a thousand times what you were doing that night at Mato Rujo, fighting when the war was over, killing a man in cold blood whom you had never even seen before, without giving him the right to a trial, simply killing him, for the sole reason that by now you had begun to murder and were no longer capable of stopping. And in all these years you have asked yourself a thousand times why you got involved in the war, and the whole time your better world is spinning around in your head, so that you will not have to think of the day when they brought you the eyes of your father, or see again all the other murdered men who then, as now, filled your mind, an intolerable memory. That is the only, the true reason you fought, because this was what you had in mind, to be revenged. And now you should be able to utter the word ‘revenge.’ You killed for revenge, you all killed for revenge, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s the only drug for pain there is, the only way not to go mad, the drug that enables us to fight. But it didn’t free you, it burned your entire life, it filled you with ghosts. In order to survive four years of war you burned your entire life, and you no longer even know—”
“It’s not true.”
“You no longer even remember what life is.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Yes, what can I know about it, I’m only an old woman who is mad, right?, I can’t understand, I was a child then, what do I know about it?, I’ll tell you what I know, I was lying in a hole, underground, three men came, they took my father, then—”
“Stop it.”
“Don’t you like this story?”
“I’m not sorry for anything—we had to fight and we did, we weren’t sitting at home with the windows shut, waiting for it to pass, we climbed out of our holes and did what we had to do, that’s the truth, you can say anything now, you can find all the reasons you want, but it’s different, you had to be there to understand, you weren’t there, you were a child, it’s not your fault, but you can’t understand.”
“You explain, I’ll understand.”
“I’m tired now.”
“We have as much time as we want. You talk, I’ll listen.”
“Please, leave me alone.”
“Why?”
“Do what you have to do, but leave me in peace.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m tired.”
“Of what?”
“…”
“…”
“Please…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Please…”
Then the woman lowered her eyes. She drew away from the table and leaned against the back of the chair.
She glanced around, as if suddenly, at that moment, she had realized where she was. The man was kneading his fingers, one hand clasped in the other, but it was the only thing in him that was moving.
At the back of the café, the three musicians played songs from other times. Someone was dancing.
For a while they stayed like that, in silence.
Then the woman said something about a celebration many years earlier, where there was a famous singer who had asked her to dance. In a low voice she told how, though he was old, he moved with astonishing lightness, and before the music ended he had explained to her how a woman’s destiny is written in the way she dances. Then he had told her that she danced as if dancing were a sin.
The woman smiled and looked around again.
Then she said something else. It was that evening, at Mato Rujo. She said that when she had seen the trapdoor raised she had not been afraid. She had turned to look at the boy’s face, and everything had seemed to her very natural, even obvious. She said that in some way she had liked what was happening. Then he had lowered the door, and then, yes, she had been afraid, with the worst fear of her life. The darkness that returned, the sound of the baskets dragged over her head again, the boy’s footsteps growing distant. She had felt lost. And that terror had never left her. She was silent for a moment and then she added that the mind of a child is strange. I think that at that moment, she said, I wished for only one thing: that that boy would take me away with him.
She went on talking, about children and about fear, but the man didn’t hear her because he was trying to put together the words to say one thing that he would have liked to let the woman know. He would have liked to tell her that while he was looking at her, that night, curled up in the hole, so orderly and clean—clean—he had felt a kind of peace that he had never found again, or at least hardly ever, and then it was looking at a landscape, or staring into the eyes of an animal. He would have liked to explain to her exactly that sensation, but he knew that the word “peace” was not enough to describe what he had felt, and yet nothing else occurred to him, except perhaps the idea that it had been like seeing something that was infinitely complete. Just as many other times, in the past, he had felt how difficult it was to give a name to what had happened to him in the war, as if there were a spell under which those who had lived couldn’t tell the story, and those who knew how to tell the story had not been fated to live. He looked at the woman and saw her speak, but he didn’t hear her because his thoughts again carried him away and he was too tired to resist. So he remained there, leaning back in the chair, and did nothing, until he began to weep. He wasn’t ashamed, he didn’t hide his face behind his hands, he didn’t even try to control his face, contorted in sadness, while the tears descended to his collar, sliding down his neck, which was white and badly shaved, like the neck of every old man in the world.
The woman interrupted. She hadn’t realized at first that he had begun to cry, and now she didn’t know what to do. She leaned over the table and murmured something, softly. Then instinctively she turned to the other tables and saw that two boys, sitting nearby, were looking at the man, and one of the two was smiling. Then she yelled something at him, and when the boy turned to her, she looked him in the eyes and said to him, loudly: “Fuck you.”
Then she filled the man’s glass with wine and pushed it toward him. She didn’t say anything more. She leaned back again. The man continued to weep. Every so often she looked around angrily, like a female animal standing guard at the den of her young.
“Who are those two?” asked the woman behind the bar.
The waiter knew she was speaking of the two old people, over at the table.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“Do you know them?”
“No.”
“The old man was crying, before.”
“I know.”
“They aren’t drunk…”
“No, everything’s all right.”
“But tell me, why should they come here and…”
To the waiter there didn’t seem anything wrong with weeping in a café. But he said nothing. He was the boy with the strange accent. He placed three empty glasses on the bar and went back to the tables.
The woman turned to the old people and watched them for a while.
“She must have been a beautiful woman…”