“Imagining? Only that?”
“Listening, Laura.”
“Do you know something? I leave here admiring your indifference and your serene wisdom. Which I don’t have.”
“Raquel is buried in an unmarked grave, mixed with hundreds of other naked bodies. Can we be more than she? I’m not better. I’m different. Just like you.”
“Why do you think you’re liberated?” she asked incredulously.
“Because you came to see me filled with incredulity. You’re the truly incredulous person here. As I was before. I’m finding health seeing a human being with less faith than I. What insignificant things we are, Laura.”
She asked him to answer the question she’d been asking since she reached Lanzarote. (You shouldn’t have come here. This island doesn’t exist. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there.) Do you believe or don’t you?
“Which is like asking, is Christianity true or false? And I answer that your question has no importance. What I want to find out here on Lanzarote, halfway between monastic life and life as you understand it, between security and danger, is whether faith can give meaning to the madness of being here on earth.”
What had he discovered?
“That the life of Christ is always possible for a Christian, but no one dares imitate it.”
“No one dares, or no one can?”
“It’s that they think that being like Christ is acting as Christ acted-raising the dead, multiplying loaves… they transform Christ into an active ideology. Laura, Christ only seeks us if we don’t believe in Him. Christ finds us if we don’t look for Him. It’s Pascal’s truth: you found me because you didn’t seek me. That is my truth today. Go away, Laura. Realize I have no joy. Every afternoon on this island is very sad.”
I came because your place was empty, Laura said to herself as she left the nocturnal coast of Lanzarote, sailing for Tenerife, as the night became black and the island red. I couldn’t bear it anymore. It’s dangerous, living in a vacant space, nostalgic for the life my son didn’t have and the love you took away from me. But I lost my son, and you lost Raquel. We both gave up something precious. Perhaps God, if He exists, recognizes that loss and takes note of our sorrows, each of them. Now I no longer want to think about you. To think about you consoles me too much and keeps my imagination going. I want to renounce you completely. I never met you.
When they had separated at the monastery entrance, Laura had waited for a moment, confused. Why wouldn’t they let a woman in? She saw that nothing was keeping her from entering, from looking for Jorge just once more, from feeling his hot lips for the last time, from repeating the words that would now be unspoken for all time.
I love you.
He was on all fours in the solitary refectory, licking the floor with his tongue, tenacious, disciplined, tile after tile.
18.
Avenida Sonora: 1950
THERE COMES A MOMENT in life when nothing but loving the dead has any importance. We have to do everything we can for the dead. You and I together, we can suffer because the dead person is absent. Their presence is not absolute. Their absence is the only absolute. But the desire we have for the dead person is neither presence nor absence. There is no one left in my house, Jorge. If you want to believe my solitude is what returned me to you, I give you permission to do so.
My husband, Juan Francisco, died.
My auntie, Maria de la O, died.
But the death of my adored son Santiago is the only real death for me, it comprises all the others, gives them meaning.
My auntie’s death actually gives me joy. She died as she wished, in her beloved Veracruz, dancing
The real death of Juan Francisco had occurred long before. His inanimate body merely confirmed it. He approached death dragging his feet, saying to me, “I can’t think of anything,” asking me, “Should we have married, you and I?” Because the day he died I asked him if we could finally stop hurting each other.
“I’ve lost too much time hating you.”
“And I, forgetting you.”
Who said what, Jorge? He or I? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know which of us said, “If you don’t tell me I deserved your hatred, I won’t tell you you deserved to be forgotten.”
I want to believe I didn’t love him when he died. Ever since I went back to him after you left for Cuba, I always asked myself, Why does he accept me again? Is he weak or perverse? Is he making a profession of his failure so he can get the only form of love left to him-the compassion of others? How could I abandon such a weak man?
Every day, my son Santiago makes me think that everything I love is dead.
I console myself the way we all do. Time will pass. Gradually, able to bear the absence.
Then I react violently. I don’t want my pain to fade, ever. I want the absence of my son always, always, to be intolerable.
Then my pride takes control of me. I wonder if a love with no other foundation but memory won’t ultimately become tolerable, I wonder if a love that always wants pain should subdue that caress of memory and demand a void, a great void in which there is no room for memory or tenderness and where absence, knowing him to be absent, will admit no consolation.
It came from where she least expected it. Pity.
It was Juan Francisco’s tears over the body of Santiago. The father mourned the death of the son as if no one in the world had loved him more, more secretly, less openly. Why had he kept his distance from Santiago and drawn so close to Danton? To suffer less when Santiago died? Did he weep because he was never close to him, or did he weep because he loved him more than he loved anyone and only death allowed him to show it?
Seeing the father weep over the body of the son returned to Laura’s memory one verbal slap after another, as if everything her husband and she had said to hurt each other over the years was being repeated, more venomously, at that very moment, marrying you was like turning the other cheek to destiny, don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a temptress, speak to me, look me in the eye, why didn’t you judge me for my will to love you, Juan Francisco, instead of condemning me for the adultery? I have no idea why I thought you an exciting, brave man, that’s what they said about you, you were always “they say about him,” a whisper, never a reality, between the two of us there was never love, only illusion, mirages, which never last, not love based on respect and admiration, life with you has overpowered me, you’ve left me perplexed and sick, I don’t hate you, you just tire me out, you love me too much, a real lover should never love one too much, should never cloy, Juan Francisco, our marriage is dead, either everything or nothing killed it, who knows? But let’s start burying it, dearest, because it stinks to high heaven.
And now she could say thank you, thanks to your all too facile adoration I was able to achieve something better, that constant expectation which requires passion, thanks to you I reached Jorge Maura, the difference between you let me understand and love Jorge as I could never love you.
“I thought I had more strength than I do, Laura. Forgive me.”
“I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory. You forgive me.”
And now she saw him weeping over the body of the exhausted son. She would have wanted to ask his forgiveness for having been unable, for thirty years, to penetrate beyond appearances, legends, the mystery of his origins, the myth of his past, the betrayal of his present.
It was terrible that they were finally able to speak thanks to the death of their son.
It was terrible for them to identify themselves, Laura and Juan Francisco, revealing that both, in secret, were staring with equal love at Santiago the Younger, thinking the same thoughts, he has everything, good looks, talent,
