Stepping lightly, Patri ventured toward the back. This is not unusual. When a woman, in a film for example, approaches a mysterious room where the bravest spectator wouldn’t dare set foot, fear counts for nothing. In this case, it’s true, there was no possibility of supernatural danger or any other kind (although the gate in the fence had been left unlocked and unchained). She reached the back landing, onto which the bedroom doors opened; the empty spaces were outlined with strong yellow light. There was not a sound to be heard. She went into the middle room. Somewhat dazzled, she took two steps, and two ghosts passed her saying, “We’re in a hurry, a big hurry,” then disappeared through the wall. She turned around, went out, and rushed into the adjoining room, so as not to miss them. They were already passing through another wall, and their legs seemed to be sinking into the floor. “Why?” she asked them. She went onto the landing. One of the ghosts had turned toward her. “Why what?” “Why are you in a hurry?” “Because of the party,” the ghost replied. They had been tracing a downward curve through space and now they were sinking into the floor and the base of the bathroom wall. “What party?” she asked. Before his head went under, the slower ghost had time to reply: The Big Midnight Feast….
Patri rushed to the stairs, realizing there was something entirely new and unprecedented about the ghosts. In her surprise all she could do was hurry, without stopping to think about what they had said. The novelty was precisely that they had spoken to her, and answered her questions.
Although she hated running (and was aware that whatever disappears will reappear), when she got down to the fifth floor, Patri ran to the place where, according to her calculations, the ghosts should have emerged from the ceiling (it still hadn’t dawned on her why she was hurrying), but they were already gone. She plotted the curve approximately with her gaze, down to the point where the floor should have swallowed them up. She hesitated for a moment, and then, through a doorframe, saw a group of five or six go by, floating half way between the ceiling and the floor. Although momentary, the vision struck her as even stranger than what she had just seen, almost as if she were in the presence of real men. She took a few steps in the passageway; on this floor there were a number of bedrooms in a row. She could see ghosts in the next bedroom, and in the third. “Are you going to the party too?” she asked, finally. One of the ghosts turned his head and said, “Of course, Patri,” but a second later they were disappearing through the wall. These ghosts were moving along a curve as well, but it would only have been visible from above, since they were maintaining a constant altitude. They passed briefly through the corner of the third bedroom, and came out into the big living room at the back, which was flooded with light. There the velocity of their movement increased. Patri got her first good look at them, as they traced an increasingly rapid arc in front of her. “Why did you say ‘of course’?” she asked, continuing the conversation. A different ghost, not the one who had spoken before, asked in turn, “Who’d miss the Big Midnight Feast?” but didn’t look at her (indeed he seemed to be facing the opening at the back, the source of light). And when they were already disappearing through the wall on the left, she heard one of their characteristic peals of laughter, which, for some reason, sounded incongruous now. She wanted to ask who was throwing the party, but was too shy. Instead she followed their circular path all the way to the big living room at the front (corresponding to the one at the back) where they scattered like a squadron of fighter planes.
Since she had ended up near the stairs, and various ghosts had been following downward paths, she decided to go down to the next floor. From one floor to the next, the light diminished. Since fewer partition walls had gone up on the fifth floor, she could see through to the back, where some of the ghosts were floating in empty space, beyond the edge. It wasn’t really accurate to say that they were floating. It looked to her more like they were standing, on something that could not be seen. She went toward them, with a sleepwalker’s clear innocence. And they were watching her.
There was something architectural about the dusk as well. It was a construction, not governed by chance, as one might have supposed in the case of a meteorological phenomenon, but well thought out; or rather, it was itself a kind of thought. The largest conceivable spaces were transformed into instants, and under covering layers like roofs or paving stones, grids of shadows, light and color formed. But it couldn’t be called a real construction, not in the usual sense of the word, not as the building was real, for example. The dusk was provisional, indifferent, subtle; its compartments of light were home to no one, for the moment, but anyone could see their image cut out of a photograph and stuck to the beautiful heavenly roof. Within the imaginary Great Construction, minor, real constructions reared, gloriously useless and incomplete, provisional too, but in their own way, hinting at permanence. And the strangest thing about it was that all this was a time of day, or night, but really more a time of day, and nothing else.
Absorbed by the sight of the ghosts, Patri had come almost too close to the edge. When she realized this, she took a step back. She observed them in the half-light, although they were a little too high, relative to her line of sight, for her to study them in detail. She could tell that they were the same as ever; what had changed was the light. She had never seen them so late in the day, not in summer. The unreal look they had in the saturated light of siesta-time, at once so shocking and so reassuring, like idiotic bobbing toys, had evaporated in the dramatic half-light of evening. They rose up in front of her quite slowly; but, given her previous experiences, Patri had reason to believe that their slowness was swarming with a variety of otherworldly speeds. Seen from the right distance, what seemed almost as slow as the movement of a clock’s hand could turn out to be something more than mere high velocity; it could be the very flow of light or vision.
In this new, late apparition, their bodies had become three-dimensional, tangible; and what bodies they were, such depth and strength! The dust that covered them had become a splendid decoration; now that it didn’t have to absorb tremendous quantities of sunlight, it allowed the dark golden color of their skin to show through, and accentuated their musculature, the perfection of their surfaces. Here were the bulging pectorals she thought she had seen in normal, living men, the well-proportioned arms, the symmetrically sculpted abdomens, the long smooth legs. And their genital equipment, somewhat curved, but also slightly raised by the sheer force of its own bulk (it’s true she was looking from below), was different from anything she had seen, as if more real, more authentic.
They watched her as they rose, since they were rising and moving forward, toward the fifth floor, at the rear of the building. They looked down at her and smiled an indecipherable smile.
Who’s throwing the party?
We are.
They were no longer laughing as if possessed. They were speaking, with warm voices and words she could understand, in a Spanish without accent, neither Chilean nor Argentinean, like on television. They were speaking to her, and it was like being addressed by television characters. She was even more surprised by the way they seemed to be rational. Her surprise crystallized the feeling that had made her come downstairs; that vague, indefinite worry and alarm were becoming a specific torment, a pain, which was indefinable too, but for different reasons, as if it were impossible for her to touch the most genuine reality, the reality of a promise that eluded her grasp. Not that the ghosts had aroused her desires; that was, of course, impossible; and yet, in another sense, they had. Some desires, while less exact and practical, are no less urgent, or even less sexual. She told herself she shouldn’t have heeded her curiosity, she should have resisted. But it was useless. She would do it again, a thousand times, as long as she lived.