The Selected Stories

WHITE GERANIUM

Balbina died on a warm night, amidst the last stars, the fog rising from the sea. I was forced to open the door from the dining room onto the balcony to create a draft from the street window, because as soon as death took Balbina from me, the whole house filled with her smell — the smell of decaying flowers. I sat in a low chair by the glow of a candle while Balbina was dying, never taking my eyes off her. From the time she had fallen ill, I watched her like that every day and every night till I reached the brink of sleep. I would lie beside her feverish body and gaze at her almond-shaped eyes: they looked at me unseeing, shining in the dark like a cat’s. The warmth of her protracted illness had kept me company, forcing me to close off the house for so long that it had grown damp and the wallpaper had started to peel. When Balbina died, she had no cheeks, nor flesh on the back of her hands, and the dimples in her knees — I adored them so — had vanished. She was fading, her eyes already protruding, when I lay down on top of her, drinking in her final breath, wanting to steal from her the last trace of life, wanting it for myself. As I was about to open the door to the balcony, still holding the last bit of life in my mouth, I realized that death would not leave. The courtyard cast its spell of sun and mist, and a white geranium petal fluttered into the room. On the railing over the street we kept red geraniums. They were mine. On the railing over the courtyard were the white geraniums, Balbina’s. As I watched the petal, I was reminded that I had waited months and months for Balbina’s death, always spying on her to see if her eyes closed with drowsiness, so I could wake her, keep her from sleeping, and be done with her sooner. The moment I heard her breathing calmly, I would slowly rise and cross the room to the wardrobe, climb onto the medium-sized chair, and take down the trumpet I had hidden at the very top.

One morning, some time ago, while I was at work chiseling marble curls for an angel, a tall, thin lady with a long nose and dry lips came in. She was holding a boy’s hand and wearing an awkwardly tilted hat with a bird on it. The boy was dressed in a sailor suit, clutching a shiny, golden trumpet with tassels and red strings to his chest. The lady had come to commission a gray marble headstone for her husband’s grave. Above the name and the words, she wanted three white marble chrysanthemums, standing upright, one beside the other, the first somewhat taller, the third shorter than the one in the middle. She wanted it made quickly. My employer told her that I would put aside the angel and make the headstone right away, but not with raised chrysanthemums, as if they had simply been placed on top of the marble, but engraved, gathered together to form a bouquet. But as soon as she had left, he told me the angel was urgent, the angel first, so I went back to pounding out the ringlets. Every evening when I reached home, I told Balbina that I was making an angel all by myself, because my employer had once told her that I wasn’t good with marble and couldn’t be trusted to make a complete figure. When I finished work on the day that the woman ordered the headstone, I noticed the boy had left his trumpet at the foot of a half-finished kneeling figure. The trumpet was so pretty, all gold and red, that I took it and hid it on top of the wardrobe, so Balbina wouldn’t ask me where I’d gotten it. I didn’t think about it again until one night, while Balbina was sleeping, I slid the chair over to the wardrobe, climbed up, grasped the instrument in the dark, and blew into it, just a little, softly, to punish her for her sins. Then I blew harder, and the sound it made was part moan, part grieving wail, part music from another world. I heard Balbina stirring. I replaced the trumpet above the wardrobe and cautiously slipped back into bed. From that moment on, whenever Balbina slept soundly, I would make the trumpet moan. After that first time, I was on the verge of laughter as I waited for Balbina to wake up, thinking she would talk to me in the morning about the strange noise that had troubled her sleep. But she never mentioned that she had heard the trumpet. My eyes used to trail her, fixed on her back as she moved between the dining room and the kitchen. I was trying to see if my dagger-like glance, traveling along her spine, could lead me to the thoughts she kept hidden in her brain, in the corner that held another, smaller brain, which gathers and stores all our secrets.

That was when her illness began. Always in bed, always lying in bed, with her thread of a voice moaning, I’m tired, tired. While I was watching her one night, I heard her breathing calmly, the way trees must breathe, and all at once she opened her mouth and stuck out the tip of her tongue, and with her tongue and lips she made the sound of a trumpet. What I had been patiently funneling into her ears now issued from her mouth.

When she had been dead for a while, her gaunt cheeks appeared to grow fuller, her lips taking on the shape of youth, her body seemingly at rest. This miracle occurred before I had crossed the room to open the balcony onto the courtyard. As this change was taking place, I noticed the cat lying at the foot of the bed. It had seen me drink in Balbina’s last breath. I grasped it by the scruff of the neck and flung it far away, but a moment later it was again at the foot of the bed, as if it had never moved. While Balbina was still warm, I dressed her, removing all her clothes, particularly the dress she had worn since she first grew ill. It made her look ugly, but I wouldn’t let her change it, not even to sleep. Suddenly I was charmed by the whiteness of her lily legs. My hand circled her knee, round and round, grazing the bone. The cat must have thought that I was playing, because it stretched out one of its paws and touched my fingers. When I had dressed her and combed her hair, I shut her eyes and crossed her hands over her chest; one was so tightly clenched that I had to force it open. Finally, with much grief mixed inexplicably with wild joy, I slowly closed her mouth. I left her side, thinking the cat had stayed with her, but it must have followed me; while the geranium petal was floating in the air, the cat jumped up to catch it before it reached the floor. But I was taller and snatched it. The petal looked like a tooth, smelled like a milk tooth, the same smell as Balbina’s mouth the first time we slept together. Before I realized what I was doing, I found myself standing beside her, a pair of pliers in my hand, wrenching out a front tooth, a tooth so firmly rooted and so hard that, when it yielded, I thought the whole jaw was slipping out. I held it up. It was clean, and I licked it to remove the red that stained the root, then stuck it in my pocket. The cat watched everything. From that day onward, I never again called him by his name — Mixu — I always called him Cosme, because Mixu was the name Balbina had given him when Cosme brought him as a gift. After I had decided I would call him Cosme, I lifted the dead Balbina’s skirt — with respect, I did it very respectfully — and ran my finger repeatedly over her belly, as if I had nothing else to do, from her navel down to her pudendum. And when I calculated that Cosme had to leave home for work, I pulled Balbina’s skirt down and left the house, the cat trailing me. I told Cosme that Balbina was dead. He couldn’t have turned more pale because his blood had already lost its redness and grown watery from thinking so much about my Balbina, who would never be his, and had never been. Because in fact Cosme and Balbina were in love.

The gravediggers came and welded the lid of the coffin shut with a large flame, and I thought I must be in hell. Returning from the funeral I stopped at the tavern to drink a glass of red wine, one of those that help build up your blood, and when I left the tavern, wine-filled, Balbina’s tooth in my pocket, the blue chimera began to materialize. It followed me as I entered the house. The cat brushed his belly up against my legs and made me stumble. I gave him a good kick. The moon, the stars, the water flowing from the faucet — everything was blue. Filled with the dream, I sat down at the table and talked to the cat, explaining to him that Balbina would soon be mere bones, and in less than a year her new pink dress, the one in which I had chosen to bury her, the one she had made so Cosme would fall in love with her — it would be covered with bones as white as the marble angel with extended wings and carefully combed ringlets. I showed him the tooth. He stared at it, closed his eyes, his honey-colored eyes, a black line dividing the honey in two, and his whiskers grew stiff. A moment later he glanced at the tooth again. I showed him the tooth every evening. One day, as I was leaning over to show it to him up close, he stretched out his paw, jerking it forward so fast that the tooth fell and rolled into a corner out of sight. I had quite a time finding it. I stuffed the cat in a pillowcase and beat him. Then I made a hole in the tooth and passed a thick thread through the hole. I would dangle it before the cat’s eyes and pull it away when his paw tried to grasp it. We played and played until one day he opened his mouth and swallowed the tooth. A piece of thread was left hanging, however, and with sweet words I tried to calm him, and when I had him nice and calm, I pulled on the thread to bring up the tooth, but the thread, worn and wet with saliva, broke, and the tooth stayed inside him, the cat that Cosme had given Balbina soon after he was born and had always followed her around the house, the courtyard, the roof top.

I went out to look at the blue stars, frantic at having lost the tooth, the cat sitting beside me, looking up, just like me. I took him back inside, closed the door, and started pacing, and as I paced, I kept saying to myself, Cosme loved Balbina, Cosme loved Balbina, and now Balbina is dead and the fact that she is dead makes me very, very, very happy. They never had the opportunity to embrace because between them stood the marble worker who made angel curls. From his hiding place he used to play the trumpet to drive Balbina mad, killing her little by little so he could bury her, devoid of the tooth, in that pink dress she had made one spring because Cosme had placed a pink geranium in the window overlooking the street. In this way he could see her walking past on her way to mass on Sunday mornings, wearing the finest of veils dotted with black sequins.

I bought a fish covered with scales and ate it fried with tomato and parsley. I gave the head to the cat and forced him to swallow the thick hard spine that I turned the wrong way round so the bones would prick him if he tried to cough it up. Right away he began to heave and heave to disgorge the bone, and the more he heaved, the deeper the bone cut into the pink flesh of his throat. His stamina kept him from dying quickly. It took days of dry heaving and attempts to dislodge the bone before he finally offered up his soul, and while he was still warm, just as I did when I dressed Balbina, I slit him open, top to bottom, with a razor blade. I discovered the tooth in a corner of his swollen intestine, as white as ever. I washed it with soap and rubbed my fingers over it for a long time to make it shiny again.

That evening I buried the cat. I began to go out every night to determine when the stars would cease to be blue. I would stroll down the road until I reached the fields where the houses no longer obstructed the streetlight and the wretched vegetable gardens stood with worm-gorged cabbage leaves and insect-ravaged rue. Here too, with no houses to interfere, the glow from the streetlights was blue. I came to believe that everything was blue, not because I saw that it was blue, but because it had turned that color. I asked people, one after another, what color the stars were, what color the moon was when it had been stripped naked, what color when it wore a necklace. They would stare at me for a while, as if I had asked something outrageous, then reply that the stars were the color of a light bulb, the moon too. And the water flowing from the faucets was the color of water, nothing else. I continued to chisel the marble. My employer had finished the angel, and I the curls. The tombstone was ready, and I was working on the pleated skirt of the girl who had died and been laid out, but the first pleats came out uneven and my employer remarked, Your work has gotten worse since your wife died. That night I wandered further than before, beyond the vegetable gardens, beyond where I had buried the cat, beyond the cabbages and rue. The last streetlight was blue, and for a while I threw rocks at it, all of them aimed at the blue glow. The night was dark, and after hours of hurling rocks, I finally smashed the light bulb, causing it to shatter and fall to the ground. Then I sat with my back to the streetlight, alone, facing the dark night, and when the first star appeared and the windows in the distant houses had blackened, out of the blackness of night and the smell of untilled land came a meow, then another, another, always closer, and out of a clump of tall weeds emerged the noiseless shadow. The approaching shadow was a huge cat, as big as three cats together, and the pupils that I thought might be as blue as the stars were honey-colored, the color of old honey, and the honey was cleaved, top to bottom, by a black line. The cat brushed past me, rubbing his belly against my knees three or four times as he circled the streetlight. I stood up and took the road back; he followed me, but I turned around when I reached the first gardens and realized he had disappeared. The following day, as I was chiseling the pleats for the girl who was laid out, constantly coughing up marble dust, I pondered the blue glow, the bulbless streetlight, and the cat.

That night I returned to the farthest light. You could hear a multitude of frazzled, mad crickets singing. The huge cat showed himself again. He didn’t appear out of the wasteland and tall weeds; I discovered him directly in front of me, his honey eyes staring at mine, blacker than the night of souls. He came every night. I would sit against the streetlight, waiting as the wind carried away the fallen leaves, and suddenly I would find him beside me, still as a corpse. I got in the habit of showing him Balbina’s tooth, and when he saw it, his body would rub up against my legs and he would go rrromm-rromm over and over again, looking at the tooth with eyes like honey. On the last night I found him waiting for me. I pulled the tooth out of my pocket and began tossing it in the palm of my hand. Without even a glance, he began to circle the light as if he were a rope, and each time round he tied me to the streetlight, tying and tying me, tighter each time. I felt as if he were tying up my life forever. My thoughts floated beyond the gardens, toward the cemetery and back, but they never quite returned to the fields and the bulbless light, and as I gazed at the night before me to see if it had grown blue, blue from top to bottom, back to front, with the knot at my throat, my tongue protruding, the night turned blue and tender, like the stars Balbina had embroidered on a tablecloth, because Balbina did needlework, and in addition to embroidering blue stars, she embroidered pillowcases and sheets with letters that looked like flowers and branches, and the blue of the night was blue like the stars made of thread, blue like Balbina’s blue eyes. When I first met her, I called her the girl with the blue eyes. But then I forgot she had them.