Without Blood

Two

The signal changed to green and the woman crossed the street. She looked down as she walked, because it had just stopped raining and in the hollows of the asphalt there were puddles that reminded one of the sudden rain of early spring. She had an elegant gait, confined by the tight black skirt. She saw the puddles and avoided them.

When she reached the opposite sidewalk she stopped.

People passed by, crowding the late afternoon with their steps toward home, or freedom. The woman liked to feel the city trickling around her, so she stood for a while, in the middle of the sidewalk, inexplicable, like a woman who had been left there, abruptly, by her lover.

She decided to turn right, and fell in with the collective promenade. In no hurry, she went along beside the shop windows, holding the shawl over her chest. She walked tall and confident, with a youthful bearing in spite of her age. Her hair was white, gathered at the nape and held by a dark comb, like a girl’s.

She stopped at the window of an appliance shop, and stood staring at a wall of televisions broadcasting pointless multiplications of a single news commentator. Each was tinted a different color, which fascinated her. A film began of some cities at war and she resumed her walk. She crossed Calle Medina and then the little Plaza del Perpetuo Socorro. When she arrived at the Galería Florencia she turned to look at the prospect of the lights extending in a line through the belly of the building and out the other side, into Avenida 24 de Julio. She stopped. She raised her eyes to look for something on the grand iron archway that marked the entrance. But she found nothing. She took a few steps inside the Galería, then stopped a man. She excused herself, and asked him what the place was called. The man told her. Then she thanked him and said that he would have a most beautiful evening. The man smiled.

So she began to walk through the Galería Florencia, and eventually she saw, some twenty yards ahead, a small kiosk that stuck out from the left-hand wall, creasing for a moment the clean profile of the space. It was one of those kiosks where lottery tickets are sold. She continued walking, but when she was a few steps from the kiosk she stopped. She saw that the man who sold the tickets was seated, reading a newspaper. He held it resting on something in front of him, and he was reading it. All the sides of the kiosk were of glass, except the one that was against the wall of the Galería. Within, the ticket man could be seen, and a mass of colored strips hanging down. There was a small window, in front, and that was the opening through which the ticket seller talked to people.

The woman pulled back a lock of hair that had fallen over her eyes. She turned and for an instant stood looking at a girl who came out of a shop pushing a carriage. Then she looked at the kiosk again.

The ticket seller was reading.

The woman approached and leaned toward the window.

“Good evening,” she said.

The man raised his eyes from the newspaper. He was about to say something, but when he saw the woman’s face he stopped, completely. He remained like that, looking at her.

“I would like to buy a ticket.”

The man nodded yes. But then he said something that had nothing at all to do with that.

“Have you been waiting a long time?”

“No, why?”

The man shook his head, continuing to stare at her.

“Nothing, excuse me,” he said.

“I’d like a ticket,” she said.

Then the man turned and stuck his hand up among the strips of tickets hanging behind him.

The woman pointed to a strip that was longer than the others.

“That one there… can you take it from that strip?”

“This one?”

“Yes.”

The man tore off the ticket. He glanced at the number and nodded approval with his head. He placed it on the wooden counter between him and the woman.

“It’s a good number.”

“What did you say?”

The man didn’t answer because he was looking at the woman’s face, as if he were searching for something.

“Did you say it’s a good number?”

The man lowered his gaze to the ticket:

“Yes, it has two 8’s in a symmetrical position and has equal sums.”

“What does that mean?”

“If you draw a line through the middle of the number, the sum of the figures on the right is the same as those on the left. Generally that’s a good sign.”

“And how do you know?”

“It’s my job.”

The woman smiled.

“You’re right.”

She placed her money on the counter.

“You’re not blind,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

The man began laughing.

“No, I’m not.”

“It’s odd…”

“Why should I be blind?”

“Well, the people who sell lottery tickets always are.”

“Really?”

“Maybe not always, but often… I think people like it that they’re blind.”

“In what sense?”

“I don’t know, I imagine it has to do with the idea of fortune being blind.”

The woman spoke and then she began to laugh. She had a nice laugh, with no sign of age in it.

“Usually they’re very old, and they look around like tropical birds in the window of a pet shop.”

She said it with great assurance.

Then she added:

“You are different.”

The man said that in fact he was not blind. But he was old.

“How old are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m seventy-two,” said the man.

Then he added:

“This is a good job for me, I have no problems, it’s a good job.”

He said it in a low voice. Calmly.

The woman smiled.

“Of course. I didn’t mean that…”

“It’s a job I like.”

“I’m sure of it.”

She took the ticket and put it in a small black purse.

Then she turned around for an instant as if she had to check something, or wanted to see if there were people waiting, behind her. At the end, instead of thanking him and leaving, she spoke.

“I wonder if you might like to come and have something to drink with me.”

The man had just put the money into the cash drawer.

He stopped with his hand in midair.

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“I… I can’t.”

The woman looked at him.

“I have to keep the kiosk open, I can’t go now, I have no one here that… I…”

“Just a glass.”

“I’m sorry… really I can’t do it.”

The woman nodded yes, as if she had understood. But then she leaned toward the man and said:

“Come with me.”

The man said again:

“Please.”

But she repeated:

“Come with me.”

It was strange. The man folded the newspaper and got off the stool. He removed his glasses. He put them in a gray cloth case. Then, very carefully, he began to close the kiosk. He lined up each gesture with the next, slowly, silently, as if it were an ordinary evening. The woman waited, standing calmly, as if it had nothing to do with her. Every so often someone passed by and turned to look at her. Because she seemed to be alone, and was beautiful.

Because she was not young, and seemed alone. The man turned off the light. He pulled down the little shutter and fastened it to the ground with a padlock. He put on an overcoat, which was loose on his shoulders. He went over to the woman.

“I’ve finished.”

The woman smiled at him.

“Do you know where we could go?”

“Over here. There’s a café where one can sit quietly.”

They went into the café, found a table, in a corner, and sat down across from each other. They ordered two glasses of wine. The woman asked the waiter if he had cigarettes. So they began to smoke. Then they spoke of ordinary things, and of people who win the lottery. The man said that usu-ally they couldn’t keep the secret, and the funny thing was that the first person they told was always a child. Probably there was a moral in that, but he had never managed to figure out what it was. The woman said something about stories that have a moral and those that don’t. They went on a little like that, talking. Then he said that he knew who she was, and why she had come.

The woman said nothing. She waited.

Then the man went on.

“Many years ago, you saw three men kill your father, in cold blood. I’m the only one of the three who’s still alive.”

The woman looked at him. But you couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“You came here to find me.”

He spoke calmly. He wasn’t nervous, not at all.

“Now you’ve found me.”

Then they were silent, because he had no more to say, and she said nothing.

“When I was a child my name was Nina. But everything ended that day. No one called me by that name anymore.”

“…”

“I liked it: Nina.”

“…”

“Now I have many names. It’s different.”

“In the beginning I remember a sort of orphanage. Nothing else. Then a man whose name was Ricardo Uribe came and took me away with him. He was the pharmacist in a little town deep in the countryside. He had no wife or relatives, nothing. He told everyone that I was his daughter. He had moved there a few months earlier. Everyone believed him. In the daytime I stayed in the rear of the pharmacy. Between customers he taught me. I don’t know why but he didn’t like me to go out alone. What there is to learn you can learn from me, he said. I was eleven. At night he sat on the sofa and made me lie beside him. I rested my head in his lap and listened to him. He told strange stories about the war. His fingers caressed my hair, back and forth, slowly. I felt his sex, under the material of his pants. Then he kissed my forehead and let me go to sleep. I had a room to myself. I helped him keep the shop clean and the house. I washed and cooked. He seemed a good man. He was afraid, but I don’t know what he was afraid of.”

“…”

“One night he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. He went on kissing me, like that, and meanwhile he stuck his hands under my skirt and everywhere. I did nothing. And then, suddenly, he pulled away from me, and began to cry and ask me to forgive him. He seemed terrified. I didn’t understand. A few days later he said that he had found me a fiancé. A young man from Río Galván, a town nearby. He was a mason. I would marry him as soon as I was old enough. I went to meet him, the following Sunday, in the square. He was a handsome boy, tall and thin, very thin. He moved slowly, maybe he was sick, or something like that. We introduced ourselves, and I went home.”

“…”

“It’s a story like any other. Why do you want to hear it?”

The man thought the way she spoke was strange. As if it were a gesture that she wasn’t used to. Or as if she were speaking a language that was not her own. As she searched for words she stared into space.

“A few months later, on a winter evening, Uribe went out to the Riviera, a sort of tavern where the men gambled. He went every week, always the same day, Fri-day. That night he played until very late. Then he found himself with four jacks in his hand, in front of a pot in which there was more money than he would see in a year. The game had come down to him and the Count of Torrelavid. The others had put in a little money and then had let it go. But the Count was stubborn. He kept raising the bet. Uribe was sure of his cards and stayed with him.

They reached the point where the players lose any sense of reality. And then the Count put in the pot his fazenda of Belsito. In the tavern everything came to a halt. Do you gamble?”

“No,” said the man.

“Then I don’t think you’ll understand.”

“Try me.”

“You won’t understand.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Everything came to a halt. And there was a silence you won’t understand.”

The woman explained that the fazenda of Belsito was the most beautiful fazenda in that land. An avenue of orange trees led to the house at the top of a hill, and from there, from the house, you could see the ocean.

“Uribe said that he had nothing to bet that was worth Belsito. And he placed his cards on the table. Then the Count said that he could always bet the pharmacy, and then he began to laugh like a lunatic, and some of those who were there began to laugh with him. Uribe smiled.

He still had a hand over his cards. As if to say goodbye to them. The Count became serious again, leaned forward, across the table, looked Uribe in the eye, and said to him:

“‘You have a lovely child, though.’

“Uribe didn’t understand right away. He felt all those eyes upon him, and he couldn’t think. The Count simpli-fied the situation.

“‘Belsito against your daughter, Uribe. It’s an honest offer.’

“And on the table, right under Uribe’s nose, he placed his five cards, face down.

“Uribe stared, without touching them.

“He said something in a whisper, but no one could ever tell me what it was.

“Then he pushed his cards toward the Count, sliding them across the table.

“The Count came and got me that same night. He did something unpredictable. He waited sixteen months, and when I was fourteen he married me. I gave him three sons.”

“…”

“Men are difficult to understand. The Count, before that night, had seen me only once. He was sitting in the café and I was crossing the square. He had asked someone:

“‘Who is that girl?’

“And they told him.”

Outside it had started raining again, and the café had filled up. One had to speak loudly to be understood. Or sit closer. The man said to the woman that she had an odd way of talking: she seemed to be telling the story of someone else’s life.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s as if nothing matters to you.”

The woman said that, on the contrary, everything mattered to her, too much. She said that she felt nostalgic for every single thing that had happened to her. But she said it in a hard voice, without melancholy. Then the man was silent, looking at the people around them.

He thought of Salinas. He had been found dead in his bed one morning, two years after that business of Roca.

Something with his heart, they said. Then a rumor came out that his doctor had poisoned him, a little every day, slowly, for months. A slow agony. Horrifying. The matter was investigated but nothing came of it. The doctor’s name was Astarte. He had made a little money, during the war, with a preparation that cured fevers and infections.

He had invented it himself, with the help of a pharmacist.

The preparation was called Botrin. The pharmacist was called Ricardo Uribe. At the time he worked in the capital. When the war was over he had had some trouble with the police. First they found his name on the list of sup-pliers for the hospital of the Hyena, then someone came forward and said he had seen him working there. But many also said that he was a good man. He presented himself to the investigators and explained everything, and when they let him go he took his things and went away to a small town buried in the countryside, in the south. He bought a pharmacy there, and resumed his profession.

He lived alone with a small daughter he called Dulce. He said the mother had died many years earlier. Everyone believed him.

Thus he hid Nina, the surviving daughter of Manuel Roca.

The man looked around without seeing anything. He was in his thoughts.

The savagery of children, he was thinking.

We have turned over the earth so violently that we have reawakened the savagery of children.

He looked back at the woman. She was looking at him.

He heard her voice saying:

“Is it true that they called you Tito?”

The man nodded yes.

“Had you ever met my father before?”

“…”

“…”

“I knew who he was.”

“Is it true that you were the first to shoot him?”

The man shook his head.

“What difference does it make…”

“You were twenty. You were the youngest. You had been fighting for only a year. El Gurre treated you like a son.”

Then the woman asked if he remembered.

The man stared at her. And only in that instant, finally, did he see again, in her face, the face of that child, lying there, impeccable and right, perfect. He saw those eyes in these, and that extraordinary strength in the calm of this tired beauty. The child: she had turned and looked at him. The child: now she was there. How dizzying time can be. Where am I? the man wondered. Here or there?

Have I ever been in a moment that was not this one?

The man said that he remembered. That he had done nothing else, for years, but remember everything.

“For years I asked myself what I ought to do. But the truth is that I never was able to tell anyone. I never told anyone that you were there, that night. You may not believe it, but it’s so. At first, obviously, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. But time passed, and it became something else. No one thought about the war anymore. People wanted to look ahead, they no longer cared about what had happened. It all seemed to be buried forever. I began to think that it was better to forget everything. Let it go.

At a certain point, however, it emerged that Roca’s daughter was alive, she was hidden somewhere, in a village in the south. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed to me incredible that she had come out of that inferno alive, but with children you can never say. Finally someone saw the girl and swore that it was really her. So I realized that I would never be free of that night. Neither I nor the others. Naturally I began to ask myself what she might have seen and heard. And if she could remember my face.

Who can know what happens in the mind of a child, con-fronted by something like that. Adults have a memory, and a sense of justice, and often they have a taste for revenge. But a child? For a while I convinced myself that nothing would happen. But then Salinas died. In that strange way.”

The woman was listening to him, motionless.

He asked if she wanted him to go on.

“Go on,” she said.

“It came out that Uribe had something to do with it.”

The woman looked at him without expression. Her lips were half closed.

“It may have been a coincidence, but certainly it was odd. Little by little everyone was persuaded that the child knew something. It’s difficult to understand now, but those were strange times. The country was going forward, beyond the war, at an incredible speed, forgetting everything. But there was a whole world that had never emerged from the war, and was unable to fit in with that happy land. I was one of those. We all were. For us nothing had ended. And that child was a danger. We talked about it a lot. The fact is that the death of Salinas didn’t go down with anyone. So finally it was decided that some-how the child should be eliminated. I know it seems madness, but in reality it was all very logical: terrible, and logical. They decided to eliminate her and charged the Count of Torrelavid to do it.”

The man paused. He looked at his hands. It was as if he were putting his memories in order.

“He was a man who had been a double agent for the whole war. He worked for them, but he was one of us. He went to Uribe and asked him if he would rather spend his life in jail for the murder of Salinas or vanish into nothing and leave him the child. Uribe was a coward. He had only to stay quiet, and no court would have succeeded in con-victing him. But he was afraid, and he fled. He left the child to the Count and fled. He died ten years later, in some godforsaken village on the other side of the border.

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.

“He was found with a bullet in his back, face down in the manure, in front of his stable.”

He looked up at the woman.

“In his pocket they found a note. On the note was written the name of a woman. Yours.”

He made a light writing motion in the air.

“Doña Sol.”

He let his hand fall back to the table.

“It was his handwriting. He had written the name. Doña Sol.”

The three musicians, at the back, struck up a kind of waltz, dragging the tempo and playing very softly.

“From that day I began to expect you.”

The woman had raised her head and was staring at him.

“I knew that nothing could stop you, and that one day you would come to me as well. I never thought that you would shoot me in the back or send someone to kill me who didn’t even know me. I knew that you would come, and would look me in the face, and first you would talk to me. Because I was the one who had opened the trapdoor, that night, and then closed it. And you would not forget it.”

The man hesitated a moment more, then said the only thing he still wanted to say.

“I have carried this secret inside me for my whole life, like a disease. I deserved to be sitting here, with you.”

Then the man was silent. He felt his heart beating rap-idly, in his fingertips and in his temples. He thought how he was sitting in a café across from an old woman who was mad and who, from one moment to the next, might get up and kill him. He knew that he would do nothing to stop her.

The war is over, he thought.

The woman looked around and every so often glanced at her empty plate. She said nothing. From the moment the man had stopped talking she had stopped looking at him.

You would have said that she was sitting at the table alone, waiting for someone. The man had let himself fall back into the chair. Now he seemed smaller and tired. He observed, as if from a distance, the woman’s eyes wander about the café and over the table: resting everywhere except on him. He realized that he still had his overcoat on, and so he sank his hands in the pockets. He felt the collar pulling at his neck, as if he had put a stone in each pocket. He thought of the people around, and found it funny how no one, at that moment, could have any idea of what was happening. Seeing two old people at a table one would find it difficult to imagine that at that moment they were capable of anything. And yet it was so. Because she was a phantom and he a man whose life had ended a long time ago. If people knew it, he thought, he would be afraid.

Then he saw that the woman’s eyes had become bright.

Who could say where the thread of her thoughts was leading?

Her face was without expression. Only, the eyes were at that point.

Was it tears?

He thought again that he wouldn’t like to die there, with all those people watching.

Then the woman began to speak, and this was what they said to each other.

“Uribe picked up the Count’s cards and let them slide slowly between his fingers, revealing them one by one. I don’t think he realized at that moment what he was losing. Certainly he realized what he was not winning. I didn’t count much for him. He got up and said goodbye to the company, politely. No one laughed, no one dared say a word. They had never seen a poker hand like that. Now, tell me: why should this story be any less true than the one you told?”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“My father was a wonderful father. Don’t you believe me? And why?—why should this story be less true than yours?”

“…”

“No matter how you try to live just one single life, others will see inside it a thousand more, and this is the reason that you cannot avoid getting hurt.”

“…”

“Do you know that I know everything about that night, and yet I remember almost nothing? I was there beneath the trapdoor, I couldn’t see, I heard something, and what I heard was so absurd, it was like a dream. It all vanished in that fire. Children have a special talent for forgetting. But then they told me, and so I knew everything. Did they lie to me? I don’t know. I was never able to ask. You came into the house, you fired at him, then Salinas shot him, and finally El Gurre stuck the barrel of the machine gun in his mouth and blew off his head with a short, dry volley.

How do I know? He told me. He liked to tell about it. He was an animal. You were all animals. You men always are, in war. How will God forgive you?”

“Stop it.”

“Look at yourself, you seem to be a normal man, you have your worn overcoat, and when you take off your glasses you put them carefully in their gray case. The windows of your kiosk are clean, when you cross the street you look carefully to the right and the left, you are a normal man. And yet you saw my brother die for no reason, only a child with a gun in his hand, a burst of gunfire and he was gone, and you were there, and you did nothing. You were twenty, holy God, you weren’t a ruined old man, you were a boy of twenty and yet you did nothing. Please, explain how it is possible, do you have some way of explaining to me that something like that can happen, it’s not the nightmare of a man with a fever, it’s something that happened, can you tell me how it’s possible?”

“We were soldiers.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were fighting a war.”

“What war? The war was over.”

“Not for us.”

“Not for you?”

“You don’t know anything.”

“Then tell me what I don’t know.”

“We believed in a better world.”

“What do you mean?”

“…”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t turn back, when people begin to murder each other you can’t go back. We didn’t want to get to that point, others started it, but then there was nothing else to do.”

“What do you mean, a better world?”

“A just world, where the weak don’t have to suffer for the evil of the others, where everyone has a right to happiness.”

“And you believed that?”

“Of course I believed it, we all believed it, it could be done and we knew how.”

“You knew?”

“Does that seem so strange to you?”

“Yes.”

“And yet we knew. And we fought for that, to be able to do what was right.”

“Killing children?”

“Yes, if it was necessary.”

“But what are you saying?”

“You can’t understand.”

“I can understand, you explain and I’ll understand.”

“…”

“…”

“You can’t sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth.”

“…”

“First there has to be a time of suffering, do you understand?”

“No.”

“There were a lot of things that we had to destroy in order to build what we wanted, there was no other way, we had to be able to suffer and to inflict suffering, whoever could endure more pain would win, you cannot dream of a better world and think that it will be delivered just because you ask for it. The others would never have given in, we had to fight, and once you understood that it no longer made any difference if they were old people or children, your friends or your enemies, you were breaking up the earth—then there was nothing but to do it, and there was no way to do it that didn’t hurt. And when everything seemed too horrific, we had our dream that protected us, we knew that however great the price the reward would be immense, because we were not fighting for money, or a field to work, or a flag. We were doing it for a better world, do you understand what that means?, we were restoring to millions of men a decent life, and the possibility of happiness, of living and dying with dignity, without being trampled or scorned, we were nothing, they were everything, millions of men, we were there for them. What’s a boy who dies against a wall, or ten boys, or a hundred, we had to break up the earth and we did, millions of other children were waiting for us to do it, and we did, maybe you should…”

“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…”

She said it aloud, even though there was no one to hear her.

When she was young she had dreamed of becoming a movie actress. Everyone said she had wonderful self-confidence, and she liked to sing and dance. She had a pretty voice, rather common but pretty. Then she had met a salesman of beauty products who brought her to the capital to do advertising photos for a night cream. She had sent the photographs home, in an envelope, with some money. For a few months she had tried to succeed with singing, but it didn’t work out. Things went better with the ads. Nail polish, lipstick, once some kind of eye-drops for redness. She had given up on movies. They said you had to go to bed with everyone, and she didn’t want to do that. One day she heard they were looking for TV announcers. She went to a tryout. Since she was wonderfully self-confident and had a pretty, common voice, she passed the first three tryouts and ended up in second place. They told her she could wait, and maybe something would open up. She waited. After two months she got a job doing radio shows, on the first national channel.

One day she went home.

She had married well.

Now she had a café, in the center of town.

The woman—the one at the table—leaned forward slightly. The man had stopped crying a little before. He had pulled out of his pocket a big handkerchief and had dried the tears. He had said:

“I’m sorry.”

Then they had said nothing else.

It seemed, indeed, that they no longer had anything to understand, together.

And yet at a certain point the woman leaned toward the man again and said:

“I must ask you something a little stupid.”

The man looked up at her.

The woman seemed very serious.

“Would you like to make love to me?”

The man stared at her, motionless, silent.

So the woman was afraid for a moment that she had said nothing, that she had only thought of saying those words without having in fact done so. So she repeated them, slowly.

“Would you like to make love to me?”

The man smiled.

“I’m old,” he said.

“So am I.”

“…”

“…”

“I’m sorry, but we’re old,” the man said again.

The woman realized she hadn’t thought about that, and had nothing to say about it. Then something else occurred to her and she said:

“I’m not mad.”

“It doesn’t matter if you are. Really. To me it doesn’t matter. It’s not that.”

The woman thought for a moment and then said:

“Don’t worry, we can go to a hotel, you can choose it. A hotel that no one knows.”

Then the man seemed to understand something.

“You want us to go to a hotel?” he asked.

“Yes. I would like that. Take me to a hotel.”

He said slowly:

“A hotel room.”

He spoke as if by pronouncing the words it had become easier for him to imagine the room, to see it, to understand if he would like to die there.

The woman said he mustn’t be afraid.

“I’m not afraid,” he said.

I will never be afraid again, he thought.

The woman smiled because he was quiet and this seemed to her a way of saying yes.

She looked for something in her bag, then she took out a small purse and pushed it across the table, to the man.

“Pay with this. I don’t like women who pay in a café, but I invited you, and I’ll stick to it. Take this. Then give it back to me when we’re outside.”

The man took the little purse.

He thought of an old man paying with a purse of black satin.

They crossed the city in a taxi that seemed new and still had plastic on the seats. The woman looked out the window the whole time. They were streets she had never seen.

They got out in front of a hotel called California. The sign went vertically up the four floors of the building, in big red letters that lighted up one by one. When the word was complete it shone for a little while, then went out completely and began again from the first letter. C. Ca.

Cal. Cali. Calif. Califo. Califor. Californi. California. California. California. California. Darkness.

They stood there for a little while, one beside the other, looking at the hotel from the outside. Then the woman said, “Let’s go,” and moved toward the door.

The man followed her.

The desk clerk looked at their papers and asked if they wanted a double room. But without any inflection in his voice.

“Whatever there is,” the woman answered.

They took a room that looked onto the street, on the third floor. The desk clerk apologized that there was no elevator and offered to carry up the suitcases.

“No suitcases. We lost them,” said the woman.

The clerk smiled. He was a good man. He watched them disappear up the stairs and didn’t think badly of them.

They went into the room and neither of them made a move to turn on the light. The woman placed her purse on a chair and went to the window. She pushed aside the transparent curtains and looked down for a while, into the street. Occasional cars passed, unhurried. In the wall of the house opposite, lighted windows told the domestic tales of little worlds, happy or sad—ordinary. She turned, took off her shawl, and put it on a table. The man waited, standing, in the middle of the room. He was wondering if he should sit on the bed, or maybe say something about the place, for example that it wasn’t bad. The woman saw him there, with his overcoat on, and he seemed to her alone and timeless, like a movie hero. She went over, unbuttoned his coat, and slipping it off his shoulders let it fall to the floor. They were so close. They looked into each other’s eyes, and it was the second time, in their lives.

Then he slowly leaned over her because he had decided to kiss her on the lips. She didn’t move and in a low voice said, “Don’t be silly.” The man stopped, and he stood like that, leaning slightly forward, in his heart the precise sensation that everything was ending. But the woman slowly raised her arms, and taking a step forward embraced him, first gently, then hugging him to her with irresistible force, until her head rested on his shoulder and her whole body pressed against his. The man’s eyes were open. He saw before him the lighted window. He felt the body of the woman who was holding him, and her hands, light, in his hair. He closed his eyes. He took the woman in his arms. And with all his old man’s strength he hugged her to him.

When she began to undress she said, smiling:

“Don’t expect much.”

When he was lying on her, he said, smiling:

“You are very beautiful.”

From a room nearby came the sound of a radio, just perceptible. Lying on his back, in the big bed, completely naked, the man stared at the ceiling, wondering if it was weariness that made his head spin, or the wine. Beside him the woman was still, her eyes closed, turned toward him, her head on the pillow. They held each other by the hand. The man would have liked to hear her speak again, but he knew there was nothing more to say, and that any words would be ridiculous at that moment. So he was silent, letting sleep confuse his ideas, and bring back to him the dim memory of what had happened that evening.

The night outside was illegible, and the time in which it was vanishing was without measure. He thought that he should be grateful to the woman, because she had led him there by the hand, step by step, like a mother with a child.

She had done it wisely, and without haste. Now what remained to be done would not be difficult.

He held her hand, in his, and she returned his clasp. He would have liked to turn and look at her but then what he did was let go of her hand and roll onto his side, giving her his back. It seemed to him that it was what she was expecting from him. Something like a gesture that left her free to think, and in a certain way gave her some solitude in which to decide the final move. He felt that sleep was about to carry him off. It occurred to him that he didn’t like being naked because they would find him like that and everyone would look at him. But he didn’t dare tell the woman. So he turned his head toward her, not enough to see her, and said:

“I’d like you to know that my name is Pedro Cantos.”

The woman repeated it slowly.

“Pedro Cantos.”

The man said:

“Yes.”

Then he laid his head on the pillow again and closed his eyes.

Nina continued to repeat the name in her mind. Without corners, it slid away, like a glass marble. On an inclined tray.

She turned to look at her purse, sitting on a chair, near the door. She thought of going to get it, but she didn’t, and remained lying on the bed. She thought of the ticket kiosk, of the waiter in the café, of the taxi with the plastic-covered seats. She saw again Pedro Cantos weeping, his hands sunk in the pockets of his overcoat. She saw him as he caressed her, without the courage to breathe. I will never forget this day, she said to herself.

Then she turned, moved closer to Pedro Cantos, and did what she had lived for. She curled up behind him: she pulled her knees up to her chest; aligned her feet until she felt her legs perfectly paired, the two thighs softly joined, the knees like two cups balanced one on the other, the calves separated by nothing; she shrugged her shoulders slightly and slid her hands, joined, between her legs. She looked at herself. She saw an old doll. She smiled. Animal and shell.

Then she thought that however incomprehensible life is, probably we move through it with the single desire to return to the hell that created us, to live beside whoever, once, saved us from the inferno. She tried to ask herself where that absurd faithfulness to horror came from but found that she had no answers. She understood only that nothing is stronger than the instinct to return, to where they broke us, and to replicate that moment forever. Only thinking that the one who saved us once can do it forever.

In a long hell identical to the one from which we came.

But suddenly merciful. And without blood.

The sign outside said its rosary of red lights. They were like the flames of a house on fire.

Nina rested her forehead against Pedro Cantos’s back.

She closed her eyes and slept.