Lovers on All Saints' Day (18 page)

“In Iceland it wouldn’t be like this. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like on Grímsey Island. It must be different. The sun shining all the time, and you could be outside, doing things. Not thinking. Talking to people, and in daylight, what more could you ask for? Thinking is horrible, all those ghosts, what you’ve done, what you haven’t done.
Góda nótt
, Oliveira, that’s good night in Icelandic. But on Grímsey Island they must not even have the chance to say it. Isn’t that a perfect life?”

IV

Oliveira drove thinking about the strange way the town had been gradually surrounding them, arranging well-chosen elements on both sides of the road. First a vineyard, then a couple of brick houses, then traffic lights—one green and bright for Paris, Amiens, or Rouen, then another, white and smaller, which didn’t direct them toward L’Isle-Adam but confirmed they were in it—and finally, constructed block by block around the van as it advanced along a decidedly urban street. Only one window had a light in it: it was the shop window of a bakery that spilled a yellow light across the sidewalk and part of the road. A man was sweeping the sidewalk with a straw broom; several dry leaves and an Orangina can ended up in the gutter. The letters were projected onto the pavement backward. “Eiregnaluob,” said Oliveira. “Boulangerie.” He was starting to get sleepy; he felt pins and needles in his hands, found it hard to focus. He looked in the rearview mirror, and saw tiny paths of blood in his eyes like a route map.

“Eiregnaluob,” he said.

“What did you say?” she reacted.

“Here we are,” Oliveira said.

He parked right in front of the house. At this hour nobody was going to complain: not a single bicycle was visible. As he got out of the van, he felt in his nostrils and tear ducts the cutting cold of the early morning. She seemed more awake; it was as if she’d gotten a second wind. But, in spite of her alert step and clear diction, she was worn-out, no longer the woman whose skillful hands had operated on a horse on the sawdust floor of the Beauvais livery.

While Oliveira was looking for the key to the back doors of the van, she said:

“If you want, you can come in.”

Oliveira waited for her to say something more: a romantic proposal, a declared project. Something to flee from.

“It’s not something I usually do,” she went on. “Well, I never do. If you’re not able to take it the right way, forget it and be on your way.”

“Take it the right way? What do you mean?”

“As a way of saying thank you.”

“But there’s nothing . . . but I haven’t done anything any other person wouldn’t have done.”

“That any other person
hasn’t
done. But it doesn’t matter to you. How I spend my nights is something that doesn’t matter to you. What I decide to do—”

“It would give me great pleasure,” said Oliveira.

“What would?”

“To see inside your life.”

“It’s not my life, it’s my house,” said Agatha. “And it’s a mess.”

She took her instrument case, and Oliveira followed her inside the house. As soon as he closed the door, he found a living room on the right and a dark wooden handrail going up and a narrow hallway that went all the way to the back, where he could see a wall of sky-blue tiles and the black iron burners of a gas stove. On the widest wall of the front room, above the main radiator, hung a faded map of the world.

“There’s no coffee,” said Agatha.

“I didn’t feel like any,” Oliveira lied.

Oliveira was going to say:
Actually, I’m not going to
stay very long.
But the heating was so pleasant, the possibility of lying down and closing his eyes for a few minutes so tempting, that the words didn’t take shape in his mouth. He could just as easily sleep in a rest area, somewhere along the highway; but here he wouldn’t have to worry about thieves or noisy drunks, much less overly sociable creatures trying to look for company, something he, in particular, would be unable to provide. He discovered Agatha’s house smelled like her; or, vice versa, that all of her, her underarms, the nape of her neck, her belly button, had been impregnated with this smell, a blend of mothballs and pressed flowers. That, perhaps, gave him the sensation of already knowing or finding himself back in a place he was used to. They went up to Agatha’s bedroom, Oliveira’s eyes fixed on her hips. He noticed he was desiring her again. Or maybe he was confusing desire with the sudden instinct of belonging.

“I would, however, like to take a shower,” said Oliveira. “I’m falling asleep.”

“Well, we’re in luck, then. That’s the only thing I can offer you, hot water.”

“You’re not so bad,” he said, a yawn hindering his words. “You’ve had a couple of naps.”

She didn’t hear him.

“Look, this wardrobe is a hundred and eighty years old. It belonged to my great-grandfather’s uncle, or something like that. A deacon, in any case.”

Agatha’s room was not that of a woman who spends much time at home: apart from the wardrobe, a reporter’s tape recorder, sitting on top of the television set, was the only proof of human presence. There was nothing to suggest the inhabitant’s tastes or opinions. The television was unplugged. Two black cables hung down like lianas and one of them touched the floor. The screen still had the factory adhesive on it, in spite of being an old model. The adhesive was covered in dust. Solitary people like him put the television in their bedroom; lonely, sad people like Agatha soon forgot about the television, left it to rot like fruit.

“This wardrobe is the first Christian of the house,” said Agatha.

When Oliveira didn’t make any comment, she turned her back on him, as if she were going to inform on someone and ashamed of her duplicity.

“It’s all I’ve got, Oliveira. This shitty religion is all I’ve got, this God is all that keeps me company, and not you or anyone else can understand that.”

“Maybe so. But tonight I’ve been here. And He hasn’t.”

“You’re leaving.”

“And He’s staying, is He? Where is He, then? Show Him to me. I’ve always wanted to meet Him.”

“It’s all I’ve got,” Agatha repeated. “And you’re leaving, Oliveira. Really, it’s as if you’d already gone.”

“Well, it would be best not to get any hopes up. I was never planning to stay.”

“Without pity, please. Have some respect.”

“I didn’t come here to save you, Agatha.”

She closed her eyes. It seemed as though she would rather not have heard the last sentence, but, at the same time, she seemed accustomed to grappling with it.

“It hurts me to think of you leaving. Is that bad? I prefer to convince myself you’ll stay until daybreak. I don’t suppose that’s a sin, carrying on believing things even when you know they’re lies.”

He didn’t dare try to comfort her, much less contradict her. He was afraid Agatha would start to cry, although it was obvious her declaration wasn’t intended to provoke sympathy or pity. Maybe, he thought, it wasn’t even directed at him, and just a part of this woman’s eternal struggle against herself. Nevertheless, he felt cruel. Then he understood he was content, because now he would have liked to erase those words that had threatened the fragile delicacy of the moment.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m not used to talking about things like this. I don’t know how to say what I think without trying to win an argument. It’s terrible, my father always scolded me for it.”

Agatha took a pair of unpadded headphones out of the wardrobe. “I wanted to show you something,” she said. She plugged the headphones into the tape recorder and put them on Oliveira like a princess’s tiara.

“Is that a good volume?”

—

O
kay, now a few little things I want you to do for me.

Give my clothes to Father Michel. He knows a Red Cross center nearby that’ll take them for sure, and I imagine they’ll be useful to some immigrants. I don’t know why I didn’t ask you this before. Tell him that I looked for the place once to give them the clothes personally, but couldn’t find it and ended up lost in Marines. I know you argued with him recently, he told me because I sometimes ask him for advice, and our conversations are long and focused. But don’t turn him away, Mama, for your own good. He’s not hounding you, like you said, it’s not that he wants to force you into anything, he’s worried about your soul. He didn’t even tell me you don’t go to church anymore. I figured it out myself from the things you’ve told me on the phone.

Everything to do with school you can give to Madame Mabilat, I don’t know if some of it might be useful to younger students. Ask her if she remembers the time, when I was in
troisième,
that she punished me for spraying yogurt around her desk and crumbling a slice of orange cake on it. Tell her that I dreamed of her furious face recently, but in the dream there was a chicken coop behind the school and I was going to break freshly laid eggs as revenge for the punishment. Ask her if she knows what that means.

We eat well here, Mama, so don’t worry about that. You ask me to tell you how things are, but what you want are material details and I find it very hard to talk about that. I’ve tried to explain and it’s as if you don’t hear me, here one distances oneself from all of that, other things matter more. I’m very glad to hear your work with horses is going so well, don’t get me wrong. The last time we spoke you told me about the things you’d done, you said the previous Sunday you’d been to a Lusitanian horse fair in Brussels and had a lovely time and forgot for at least a day that I was not at home anymore. And that’s when I realized you didn’t go to church. I don’t have any proof or anything, because I wasn’t with you, but I’m still sure you didn’t go to church that Sunday. Now do you understand why I chose to be here, with my brothers? Not that I think your influence was negative, of course. I know you’re still a good Christian, but I was afraid of straying from our Lord and from the truth in which you educated me. The Lord knows I love you and I admire you, and He has put this congregation in my path so my faith won’t be weakened. Always remember it’s you who I owe for the discovery of faith.

Last of all: don’t keep asking me where we are, understand that our life is now far from our families. Master Albert wants us to gradually detach ourselves from our mortal and earthly pasts, and in a little while I won’t be able to send you any more recordings, because we are going on a journey. It has to be enough for you to know there is a light guiding us, and that Christ has died so that light won’t go out, so we all have the chance to be born again.

If you see Tempo, give him something to eat from me. He likes raisins and to have his back legs stroked. But don’t let him come in ’cause the baker has spoiled him. He gets scared when he’s in other people’s houses and he might pee, it happened to me once, on the stairs, almost at the top. But I cleaned it up before you got back, and I bet you never even noticed.

—

O
LIVEIRA LOOKED UP
and found Agatha sitting on the edge of the bed, naked. She’d opened the heavy curtains, and the vague hint of dawn bathed her flesh in blue, turned her into a specter. Oliveira knew: something was expected of him. But he was as afraid of his reaction fulfilling the woman’s expectations as of getting it completely wrong. The world seemed like an impenetrable space at that moment, a room without doors where the luckiest ones walked around wearing blindfolds. He didn’t know what to do. He had one certainty: his presence was enough to tow Agatha and bring her to safety, to get her as far as the edge of the night, and that thought touched him with strange pride. Suddenly, nothing was more important. He lay down on his side, his face a few inches away from the buttocks of the seated woman, and he saw how in that position the shadows of cellulite were accentuated. He took her by the shoulder and pulled her toward the pillow, and saw her disappear into the hollow of his underarm like a bird. He felt his fatigue closing his eyelids; he thought if he closed his eyes he’d sleep for three days and not even the outbreak of war would wake him.

“All the parents are wondering the same thing,” he heard himself say. “What did they do and what could they have done differently. And this would have happened anyway.”

Agatha didn’t move. From some point lost in Oliveira’s side came a tiny voice in which there was no complaint or grievance, just a terrible emptiness, the exhaustion of a defeated person and the notion that this defeat would be repeated until infinity.

“Before, I needed that, Oliveira. I wanted people to tell me it wasn’t my fault. Now all I want is not to be alone at night. And in this house I am always alone and now there’s no way to change that.”

“That’s not true. Everything changes, you just have to know how to look at it.”

“I hate that wardrobe. I hate the deacon, whoever he was, I hate this house. I hate God, Oliveira.”

Oliveira looked up. The ceiling was white plaster; in the center, an eighteenth-century design had been sculpted without too much talent in bas-relief, unevenly and asymmetrically. “If only I could at least have chosen so many things,” said Agatha. The hanging lamp seemed to have sickened with pallor; just as happened at dusk, this moment when the electric light got confused with the gray of the sky was, absurdly, the darkest of all.

“Dawn is breaking,” said Oliveira. “Now you can forget about Iceland.”

“Now I can forget,” Agatha echoed.

“At least for tonight,” said Oliveira.

He smiled, but she didn’t look at him. Without even looking at him once, she found his flaccid organ in the folds of his trousers and made it grow, and Oliveira closed his eyes, felt the head moving and the woman’s lips confining it. The important thing was Agatha, to keep her company, be with her. This trip south, disguised in the cheap magic of a return to the land of his parents, was not actually anything more than a small private desertion, the act—some would say the cowardice—of a man incapable of living in the place life had assigned him. But now, suddenly, it was taking on a new transcendence. Oliveira had a role in the world and an important position, although momentary, in the life of Agatha, the woman whose tongue he could feel. Here he was safe and the night was safe, too. Here, Oliveira was no longer a threat to himself. He let himself go then and enjoyed doing so, and when he felt himself coming it was as if the night behind him was releasing all its weight, as if the road from Beauvais was repeating over his shoulders in a single instant. Before falling into a deep sleep, he thought of the van and the things inside, and imagined himself emptying his boxes of records on this very bed and organizing them alphabetically in the wardrobe of a long-dead deacon.