I don’t know how long I was silent, lost in my obsession, driving to Meissen as fast as the van would go to drop off the girl beside me and return home without losing an instant, preoccupied by the idea that Agustina might somehow be hurt, while at the same time I surprised myself by turning over and over the possibility of such a thing happening; I don’t know, it was as if something not quite right were shifting inside me, something like the unspeakable notion of an eye for an eye, so deeply had I been hurt by her rejection of me. So when Anita spoke, I had forgotten her so thoroughly that her voice took me by surprise, Mr. Aguilar, she said, you won’t like what I’m about to say, you’ll be thinking what right do I have to get involved, but in my opinion it’s too hard on you being married to that crazy woman.
BEGONE FROM ME all remorse, Nicholas Portulinus said out loud after the lunch of roast pork. Once he’d had a cup of herbal tea for his digestion and a long swallow of valerian extract, he repeated, Begone from me all remorse! like a plea or a command requesting that the sleep-inducing properties of the valerian bestow upon him the brief bliss of a nap. Then he asked Blanca to unlace his boots, because his bloated body wouldn’t bend enough to permit the maneuver, and he lay down on his high bed protected by the gauzy cloud of a mosquito net, letting himself be lulled by the dull boom of the Sweet River, which tumbled into falls outside his window, and he saw again, in a certain kind of light that he himself would describe as an artificial glare, the polished surfaces of an ancient stage — at other times he will call it Greek ruins — on which two boys are fighting, wounding each other, and bleeding. “In the dream, I’m standing there bolted to the ground”—he will write later in his diary—” struck dumb by the metallic gleam of the blood and deaf to the call of the torn flesh. I don’t care about one of the fighters, the one whose back is to me so that I can’t see his face. I don’t know his name, either, but that doesn’t trouble me. I dream that his name doesn’t matter. The other boy, however, affects me deeply; I see that he’s the younger of the two and maybe the weaker, of that I’m not sure, but I do know that he’s whimpering and licking his wounds in a pitiful way.”
Portulinus wakes up at five in the afternoon and gets out of bed, although his mind is so scattered that it would be more accurate to say that he gets up without having completely awoken. He’s wearing a silk robe printed with a tangle of black branches on a forest-green background and the slippers that tend to lose themselves, which angers him so; his hair is plastered sideways from being pressed sweaty against the pillow and he’s still floating amid the passions of the dream that visited him during his nap. As if obeying an order, he takes up pen and staff paper and sits down at the piano, spending a few hours composing the song that for months has been buzzing in his ear, evading capture. From the garden, his wife, Blanca, spies on him through the latticework, happy to discover that Nicholas is composing again after months of idleness, “At last his creative energy is reborn”—she’ll write later in a letter—” and once again I hear the harmonies that spring from the depths of his soul.” Blanca, who also believes that her husband’s gaze has cleared a little, asks herself, Am I not the happiest woman in the world? suspecting that at this moment she really is. That’s why, entranced, she watches her husband through the latticework as he fills one page of paper after another, pretending to set down notes and beats to make his wife happy, or to convince himself of his own happiness. But he’s really only scrawling flies and fly tracks, black dots and wild strokes that are the exact transcription of his painful internal clamor.
There’s no point in asking what the bloody fighter boy he dreamed of was like, but rather what he is like, because Portulinus dreams of him often and has for years, which is what he tells his wife that night when the frogs, crickets, and cicadas pierce the darkness with their song. Blanca, my dear, he confesses to her, I dreamed of Farax again. Who is this Farax, Nicholas? she asks, visibly upset, and why does he always accost you in dreams? He’s just my inspiration, he answers, trying to calm her, Farax is the name I give my inspiration when it visits me. But is it a he, or a she? It’s a he, and he grants me the intensity of feeling that I need for life to be worth living. Tell me, Nicholas, she insists, is it someone you know? Have I ever seen him? Is he a dream or a memory? but Nicholas isn’t up to answering so many questions. His name is Farax, Blanquita darling, content yourself with that, and just then they’re interrupted by their daughter Eugenia, the quiet one, but she’s radiant now, bringing them the news that the piano student from Anapoima has knocked at the door again, asking for the Maestro.
The blond boy is back, she tells them, her heart pounding. What boy are you talking about? The one who came yesterday with the lead soldiers in his knapsack, he wants to know whether Father will give him piano lessons. To receive the visitor Portulinus went down to the spacious parlor with chairs set around the Blüthner rosewood grand piano that Portulinus had had sent from Germany and that today, a whole lifetime later, stands in Eugenia’s house in La Cabrera, in the capital, now an enormous, silent white elephant. Portulinus entered the parlor and saw that the visitor from Anapoima had sat down at the piano, though no one had given him permission, and was running a reverent hand over the precious dark-grained red wood, but instead of irritating Portulinus, this boldness struck him as a sign of character, and skipping the usual pleasantries he got straight to the point. If you want lessons, show me what you know, he ordered the boy, and the boy, although he hadn’t been asked, said that his name was Abelito Caballero and presented the list of references he had memorized, explaining that he’d come on the recommendation of the mayor of Anapoima and that he’d studied at the School of Music and Dance in Anapoima until he knew more than the only teacher, Madame Carola Osorio, which was why he wanted to receive more advanced training from Maestro Portulinus, but since the latter seemed uninterested in his story, the boy stopped volunteering information that hadn’t been requested and rolled up his sleeves to free his arms, shook his head to clear it, rubbed his hands to warm them, recited a prayer for God’s help, and began to play a creole waltz called “The Greedy Cat.”
Although timidity caused the boy to stumble here and there, Portulinus, who had begun to breathe heavily as if he were choked by some powerful internal trauma, could only murmur, Good, good, good, no matter if “The Greedy Cat” slid gracefully by or faltered. Good, good, good, sighed Portulinus and he couldn’t believe his eyes, that shimmering golden hair, those hands still a child’s and yet already skilled, that black silk bow the newcomer wore knotted around his neck as if he were a doll, the tanned leather knapsack still on his back. Nor could Portulinus’s ears believe what they were hearing, music that seemed to descend sweetly from on high to gradually inhabit the parlor’s shadows; all that was certain was that his heart as well as his senses were telling him that what was happening had to do with an old prophecy, that this was the longed-for fulfillment of a promise at last.
Trying to guess whether he would be accepted as a student or not, the boy lifted his eyes from the keyboard from time to time to cast a sidelong glance at the famed German teacher, who was sweating and puffing beside him in his robe and slippers, but he couldn’t decipher the teacher’s expression or understand the meaning of those good, good, goods that the Maestro muttered indiscriminately, whether he played well or made mistakes. When the piece ended, it was with apprehension that he sensed the great musician coming up behind him, brushing his shoulder with his hand, and saying, almost into his ear, I must call my wife; and then the Maestro made a great show of leaving, inclining his bulk forward and not watching where he was going, as if he were in a hurry to be somewhere else.