Distant Relations

16

I feel as if black shadows had congealed in my throat. I feel, above all else, that I am the object of a relentless hostility. But, in spite of everything, I refuse to walk away from that boy who is observing me from behind the beveled windowpanes. I do not walk away, although I turn my back. I am not sure whether the barbarity I feel in my eyes is my own or a reflection of his gaze and of his baroque stories in which passion and vengeance are raised on a revolving altar of gold leaf and moon mist. I stand, unspeaking, my back to the boy who is watching me. A woman is approaching along a path in the infinitely mutable landscape of the Parc Monceau; the boy watches us from the window of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. I do not know what time it is. I look at the boy and the woman, and I realize that for both it is difficult to distinguish night from day. I want to tell them not to worry, that what they are witnessing is not really being seen by them but by someone who has the gift of seeing things through eyes that register a rate of speed that is not, he thanks God, that of human beings, because otherwise we would all be destined, without exception, to be separated as soon as we have come together. But birth and death are not simultaneous for us. The woman does not understand, because she is not looking at me now, she is looking toward the boy in the window, and she tells him not to be troubled about distinguishing farthest skies from the depths of his troubled heart. The woman speaks to the boy as if I were not standing between them. But as she comes closer I smell leather and sandalwood. I hold out my hands in supplication, but she passes by, turning her back to me, trailing the white satin shreds of a high-waisted ball gown, the tatters of the stole tied beneath the décolleté neckline and bare shoulder blades, the tower of her hair about to crumble into ruins of sticky cotton candy. I stretch out a hand to touch her and tell her, you see, we had no need to worry, the raging time in which birth and death occur simultaneously is not our time. To us belongs the sweet, slow time of all the lovers on the earth and it does not demand that lovers be separated the moment they meet. But the woman stares at me, uncomprehending, seemingly unhearing. Her worn, low-heeled slippers scurry like white mice and she disappears behind the iron fence of the house on the Avenue Vélasquez. I am still in the Parc Monceau, awaiting her return, but now she is inside the house. There she croons to the boy as the mulatto had crooned to her, she protects him, and prevents anyone from coming near him, least of all a usurper like myself, for I am no longer a child and yet I presume to claim the attention and affection she reserves for the boy with whom she used to play, while still a girl, in the Monzoon or Monsewer Park, before leaving to fulfill her destiny among the steep hills of La Guaira and the reverberating barrancas of Cuernavaca. She places a finger to her lips, and tells us to leave the child alone in his bed; time hovers near, keeping watch over him. They had been reunited. They have emerged from graves in rotting barrancas of mangrove and plantain to be reunited on the high rock cliffs where moans forever concealed the heart of insomniac nights. Let no one enter that chamber again, exclaims the woman in the outmoded dress of the First Empire; nothing will leave this refuge, except an enormous dog that has lost all memory of the past and that will search the ends of the earth, land and sea, for the man it left behind, unmoving, in the strong, decisive hands of the new mother and nurse, at last reunited with the son she never had, but who chose her enclosed with him in the chamber where birth and death are indistinguishable, and no evil, no ugliness, no humiliation, no intrusive vulgar demands can penetrate the seamless surface of things that exist in instantaneous simultaneity: this love, this proximity, this perfect awareness that time will not exist between being born, loving, and the act of loving, dying. I shall wait forever outside. Perhaps the dog without memory will bring me the final notice of the moment when my birth coincided with my death. Both solitary. She will never return. She has condemned me to death because I was too impatient to remember the boy; to her, this is a horrifying desertion. A crime. I am alone in the Parc Monceau. They are reunited at last.

Reunited at last.