He left a note saying that he had done nothing and that God would follow his enemies to the gates of Hell.”
The woman turned to look at a girl who was laughing loudly, leaning on the bar of the café. Then she picked up the shawl that she had hung on the back of the chair and put it over her shoulders.
“Go on,” she said.
The man went on.
“Everyone expected that the Count would have her killed. But he didn’t. He kept her with him, at home.
They made him understand that he was supposed to kill her. But he did nothing, and kept her hidden in his house.
Finally he said: Don’t worry about the girl. And he married her. For months people spoke of nothing else, around there. But then people stopped thinking about it. The girl grew up and bore the Count three sons. No one ever saw her around. They called her Doña Sol, because it was the name the Count had given her. One strange thing was said about her. That she didn’t speak. From the time of Uribe, no one had ever heard her say a word. Perhaps it was an illness. Without knowing why, people were afraid of her.”
The woman smiled. She pushed back her hair with a girlish gesture.
Since it had grown late, the waiter came and asked if they wanted to eat. In one corner of the café three men had set themselves up and begun to play music. It was dance music. The man said he wasn’t hungry.
“I invite you,” the woman said, smiling.
To the man it all seemed absurd. But the woman insisted. She said they could have a dessert.
“Would you like a dessert?”
The man nodded yes.
“All right, then, a dessert. We’ll have a dessert.”
The waiter said it was a good idea. Then he added that they could stay as long as they wanted. They shouldn’t worry about it. He was a young man, and spoke with a strange accent. They saw him turn to the bar and shout the order to someone invisible.
“Do you come here often?” the woman asked.
“No.”
“It’s a nice place.”
The man looked around. He said that it was.
“Did your friends tell you all those stories?”
“Yes.”
“And you believe them?”
“Yes.”
The woman said something in a low voice. Then she asked the man to tell her the rest.
“What’s the point?”
“Do it, please.”
“It’s not my story, it’s yours. You know it better than I do.”
“Not necessarily.”
The man shook his head.
He looked again at his hands.
“One day I took the train and went to Belsito. Many years had passed. I was able to sleep at night and around me were people who didn’t call me Tito. I thought I had done it, that the war was really over and there was only one thing left to do. I took the train and went to Belsito, to tell the Count the story of the trapdoor, and the child, and everything. He knew who I was. He was very kind, he took me into the library, offered me something to drink, and asked me what I wanted. I said:
“‘Do you remember that night, at the farmhouse of Manuel Roca?’
“And he said: ‘No.’
“‘The night when Manuel Roca—’
“‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
“He said it with great tranquillity, even sweetness. He was sure of himself. He had no doubts.
“I understood. We spoke a little about work and even politics, then I got up and left. He had a young boy take me to the station. I remember because the boy couldn’t have been more than fourteen, yet they let him drive the car.”
“Carlos,” said the woman.
“I don’t remember his name.”
“My oldest son. Carlos.”
The man was about to say something, but the waiter had come with the dessert. He brought another bottle of wine, too. He said that if they wanted a taste it was a good wine to drink with sweets. Then he said something witty about the owner. The woman smiled, and did it with a movement of her head from which, years earlier, it would have been impossible to defend oneself. But the man barely noticed, because he was following the track of his memories. When the waiter left, he began to speak again.
“Before leaving Belsito that day, as I was walking down the long hallway, with all those closed doors, I thought that somewhere, in the house, you were there. I would have liked to see you. I would have had nothing to say to you, but I would have liked to see your face again, after so many years, and for the last time. I was thinking of that as I was walking down the hallway. And an odd thing happened. At some point one of those doors opened. For a second I was absolutely certain that you would come out of there, and would pass by me, without saying a word.”
The man shook his head slightly.
“But nothing happened, because life is never complete—there is always a piece missing.”
The woman, with the spoon in her hand, was staring at the dessert sitting on the plate, as if she were trying to see how to unlock it.
Every so often someone brushed by the table and glanced at the two of them. They were an odd couple. They didn’t have the gestures of people who knew each other. But they were speaking intimately. She looked as if she had dressed to please him. Neither of them wore a ring. You would have said they were lovers, but perhaps many years before. Or sister and brother, who could say.
“What else do you know about me?” the woman asked.
The man thought of asking her the same question.
But he had begun to tell a story, and he realized that it pleased him to tell it, perhaps he had been waiting years for that moment, to tell it, once and for all, in the shadowy light of a café, with three musicians in a corner, playing the three-four rhythm of dance music learned by heart.
“Some ten years later the Count died in a car accident.
You were left with three children, Belsito, and everything else. But the relatives didn’t like it. They said you were mad and couldn’t be left alone with the three boys. Finally they brought the case to court and the judge concluded that they were right. So they took you away from Belsito and handed you over to the doctors, in a sanatorium in Santander. Is that right?”
“Go on.”
“It seems that your sons testified against you.”
The woman played with her spoon. She made it ring against the edge of the plate. The man continued.
“A couple of years later you escaped, and disappeared. Someone said it was your friends who had helped you flee, and that now they kept you hidden somewhere. But those who had known you said, simply, that you had no friends. They looked for you for a while. Then they stopped. No one spoke of it anymore. Many were convinced that you were dead. Plenty of crazy people disappear.”
The woman raised her eyes from the plate.
“Do you have children?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
The man answered that one had to have faith in the world to have children.
“In those years I was still working in a factory. Up in the north. They told me that story about you, about the clinic and the fact that you had escaped. They said the most likely thing was that you were at the bottom of a river, or at the foot of a cliff, in a place where sooner or later a tramp would find you. They told me that it was all over. I thought nothing. It struck me, that business about your being mad, and I remember that I wondered what sort of madness it was: if you wandered around the house screaming, or if you were just silent, in a corner, counting the floorboards and holding a piece of string tight in your hand, or the head of a robin. The idea one has of crazy people is ludicrous, if one doesn’t know them.”
Then he paused. At the end of the pause he said:
“Four years later El Gurre died.”
Again he was silent. It was as if it had suddenly become tremendously difficult to go on.