but hate, a bile that overflows onto me and onto everything around us — the machinery, tools and work spaces that have ceased to be instruments he can use to his advantage — the lathe, the saw, the plane, the polisher, the workshop walls and the fluorescent ceiling lights, everything’s an object of hatred, he hates the planks, hates the machines and the tools, hates the place itself, none of it’s going to help him now to buy that RV and allow him to head off to gape in foolish wonder at summer snows and winter beaches, none of those tools or machines or instruments is going to work to realize his egotistical dream of a life spent circling around the warmest of suns, that infantile dream for which he’s sacrificed his life; naturally, that bile is aimed at me in particular and manifests itself physically in the sticky, white saliva at the corners of his mouth, saliva coagulated by rage into a substance like carpenter’s glue. It isn’t just what he says, it’s his tone of voice, his gestures — the violence of his response is conveyed by those tool-like hands, transformed into pincers, hammers: his nails dig into his palms leaving faint red lines, channeling all his rage, he squeezes hard — pressure, as if we had been enemies from the moment we first set eyes on each other, and as if he had always known that I would end up cheating on him; then he falls silent, he’s never been open and honest, he’s slippery, elusive, murky, but there is now a kind of clarity, a solidity, you could stand on him now and you wouldn’t have the feeling he was going to give way beneath you: I’ve never trusted you and with good reason, your father could always see straight through you too, say his eyes, his tight lips, his nails digging into his palms, in this final explosion of the suspicions that have been brewing inside him for more than thirty years. He entered the house when I went off to art school, my father was left alone, when Álvaro was my replacement, half-adopted by my father when his own father died, a boy, a beloved son who arrived to make up for the shortcomings of his own unwanted son; and even though I’m troubled, above all, by what his eyes are telling me, I watch his clenched fists, that seem like tools about to unleash all their force on the glass-topped desk, that supposedly elegant desk, with its Renaissance or Isabelline gothic carving, made by my grandfather, or by my grandfather and my father, and on permanent display in this tiny office, the desk that my father ended up claiming as his masterpiece, possibly a case of misappropriation. My father behaves as if skills were inherited rather than the fruit of a long, hard apprenticeship. He sees himself as carrying on his father’s work. The desk is a fake catalogue intended to seduce the customer, along with the four matching chairs, all apparently the same, but all actually quite different when you look at the detaiclass="underline" the incisions in the chair back, the carving on the back legs, because what on one of the chairs is a kind of geometric hemstitch, on another is a garland or a floral hatching, and one assumes that they are all the work of someone with ambitions to be a sculptor, although, as I say, it’s never been clear to me who actually did the work, whether he made it with his father’s help or whether his father made it with his help: the version changed depending on the customer, for reasons known only to him; he must have done his calculations and his sums, emphasizing either the traditional values of the workshop or his own merits — to each creature its own bait, as his brother used to say; over time, he became more and more likely to offer the first version in which he attributed all the work to himself, with his father as mere assistant or onlooker, and my uncle never cleared up the mystery, as if that would have been tantamount to revealing the murderer who committed the original crime on which the business was built, and as if the confusion served to conceal what really mattered. My father behind the desk: the workshop has been in existence for nearly a hundred years, he’s saying when I go into the office to pick up an invoice, and he talks that way because he likes to think he’s convincing the potential customer that this is the studio of a well-known cabinetmaker accustomed to using only the very finest woods, lime, walnut, mahogany, and not the workshop of some cheap carpenter, who survives by taking on odd jobs and various other run-of-the-mill tasks, someone incapable of carrying out any really delicate work, although he doesn’t hesitate to say that he can — yes, of course, no problem, we’ve often done this kind of work, why, last year we did something very similar, even more complicated actually, and the customer was so pleased that he still congratulates me on it whenever we meet — yes, taking on such commissions was a cinch, although, afterward, he would keep endlessly postponing the work until the customer got fed up and vanished. I mean, all the customer had to do was glance out over the workshop and see the materials stored there, the chipboard made respectable with a thin wood veneer, the poorly seasoned pinewood planks, the fiberboard, the plywood. All right, give me your card, I need to think about it and then I’ll give you a call closer to the time when I need the work done, says the customer — if he’s got any sense. But now I’m here with Álvaro, and his face is fixed in a grimace, with his lips pursed and his tongue making a sound as if he were about to shoot a gob of spit at some particularly repugnant person. He is a gloomy walnut-wood carving of some un-named devil’s face, not Baal, not Beelzebub, not Lucifer, no, another anonymous devil, tense, tormented, one not mentioned in the Bible or in any treatises on esoterics and demonology. That crease in his lower lip. I am that repugnant person, a soft, glutinous being like those green monsters made out of snot or plasticine that you get in children’s cartoons. He almost yells at me: What am I going to do now? Do you honestly think that, with the way things are, anyone’s going to give a job to an old man who’s just turned sixty? He snorts. He lingers over the word “old man”—a very low blow — and I feel something resembling disgust. He is now the soft plasticine doll. The bastard hates me, and yet he’s pretending to be helpless, not angry, not scornful, just so that I won’t hit back, won’t even put myself on my guard, so that I’ll feel sorry for him. What does this son-of-a-bitch want? Does he expect me to burst into tears, when I haven’t even wept any tears for myself? I don’t like people who want you to take pity on them, for example, beggars who, rather than asking for alms in a dignified fashion, instead kneel down, arms outstretched at the door of the church, with some religious image hanging around their neck, and mumble Our Fathers and other fervent prayers. It’s not their poverty I find repellent, they just seem morally reprehensible to me. Frauds. I’m sorry, Liliana, but all too often I just don’t like myself. Oh, that’s normal, Don Esteban, it happens to us all, I often feel the same way. When I look in the bathroom mirror, I feel like crying, I look so ugly and tired, and then I go out onto the terrace and look up at the starless sky and see only the dense yellowish glow from the streetlamps, like an awning of luminous air. Here in Olba, I can’t see the stars. Apparently, when she stood at the door of her house, out in the countryside in Valle del Cauca or Quindío, she would look up and it was as if a whole array of possible lives lay before her. That’s what she tells me. Each star was like a possible life, a different life from the one she was living. But all she sees here is that whitish, yellowish awning, the spider’s web of light from the streetlamps, from the roads, from the factories, from the housing developers, shutting off her view, closing her horizons. I say to my husband Wilson: I thought we came here to have a better life. But he just laughs at me: life’s the same everywhere, or did you really think we would come here and be walking upside down like in the Antipodes? I sometimes think that, when I came here, I’d been hoping for that something none of us can quite put our finger on, but which we all aspire to in secret: instead, what I’ve discovered is that there is no paradise anywhere. They say the Spanish brought their God to Colombia, but it seems to me that he abandoned Spain altogether and left to go over there, but that, since then, he’s abandoned Colombia too, and escaped somewhere else, who knows where: in Spain, heaven is the clothes you buy, the moisturizing creams, the fridge and what’s in the fridge, the car you drive to work or to take the children out on a Sunday afternoon, to the beach at Misent, so that they can play in the sand and splash around in the waves, although the truth is they don’t get to the beach very often because whenever I ask Wilson, he tells me that the weekend is for lying on the sofa and doing nothing, for resting or watching soccer, not playing chauffeur and getting stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the beach. He’d be all nerves and tension then, and not rested at all. No way, he says. The only heaven is this business of accumulating things, and that heaven costs money, money is the key to heaven, and that creates a lot of anxiety if you don’t have the euros you need to make the payments. It’s just soul-destroying having to keep adding up the bills over and over each month only to end up with nothing, with me asking you for help. Back home, the poor people pray to a little figure of the Virgin holding a child and standing on a half moon, Our Lady of Chiquinquirá she’s called, or to a child wearing a red cape and a crown on his head and holding the globe of the world in his hand, or to that other Divine Child, so pretty in his pink tunic and his little green belt, who holds out his arms as if asking his father to pick him up, but in Olba, there’s no point, the saints are just dolls no one believes in, and I know perfectly well that the saints can’t really help, but at least they keep you company and give you the illusion that something extraordinary or unexpected might happen, a miracle, something that will come along and change this painful life of ours, the huge lack of love filling everything, because it even fills the kids now, they go off to school in the morning and when they come back, they don’t want you, they don’t want what you’ve got and can actually give them, they want things you can’t afford or only if you make a huge sacrifice, and they keep asking you for them and throw tantrums when you say you can’t afford Nike trainers, an Adidas track suit, a Playstation, the little bit of heaven that costs money and that you can’t give them, and when you think about it, you realize that they’re right, because why should they love you if you’re refusing to give them heaven? It’s not so straightforward, Liliana: there are other things too. What, for example? I don’t know, the things that bind us together, our conversations. Why don’t we have a black coffee, a