“It has been a very long day,” he said, giving a little bow and turning away to cover the fact that he had gone quite crimson, and as he left them in the courtyard to go and let Doña Eulalia know, as she had asked him to, that they had arrived, his blush deepened and the tingling in the back of his neck returned, as did the shaking, and it was only with the greatest effort that he made it inside and up the short flight of stairs to Doña Eulalia’s room, where he leaned his head against the cool, reassuring wood of the door and said,
“I’ve brought them.”
As they stood in the courtyard waiting for Ireneo to reappear, Harry had more than enough time to remark that the circumstances surrounding this current visit differed in more than one way from those surrounding the last, and he had to admit, he told Solange, that he was disappointed that they had not been immediately led into a room full of mysterious individuals dressed in black and so forth, but Solange gave no clear indication that she had heard him so Harry busied himself with kicking at the dirty cobblestones, counting the coins in his pockets, looking up at the square of dark sky that loomed above them and wondering if he had eaten his dinner — a pork cutlet and some mashed yams sprinkled with fish flakes — too quickly or drunk too much sparkling water and otherwise attempted to keep his mind off ghosts, possibly treacherous golden centaurs, old guys who made his companion shiver because, as she had told him that afternoon after they had exchanged stories, of the way she had caught them all smiling horribly as they stood behind her one recent afternoon whispering about how sorry they were about her loss, etc., his own tendency to shudder, as he put it to himself, rather than shiver, a distinction Solange had said she found very interesting and wanted to explore during their next tête-à-tête, and guides who threw their shoes off cliffs in the middle of the day then acted unpleasant about it afterwards … convinced that if he let his mind go in their direction he would find himself off on a journey whose futility would only be exceeded by its unpleasantness, a formula which, to his annoyance, got stuck in his mind and played over and over again like, he thought looking back up at the indigo sky, the perfect description not just of his life over the past decade, but of his entire being, this thing that he had once described in one of many terrible love poems as an incandescent bulb that had come on and would not go out, even if someone smashed it, so much for that, at least in the case of his former wife, who had left him long before it had happened and had not blamed him or at least not too harshly, but he had to admit that he was not unhappy to be reminded, as he cast a glance over at Solange, that it was still capable of illumination, that it wasn’t, after all, quite as irrevocably cold as the Neptunists had once contended the interior of the earth was, that it still, that he still, had some life left in him as the hackneyed expression went,
“You know,” Solange said, breaking into his thoughts, “Ireneo looked more like he had seen a ghost than you did,” an assertion with which Harry found he wholeheartedly agreed and — because the gap between the previous apparently unflappable Ireneo of that first night and the one who had looked a moment ago like he might burst into tears seemed so enormous — was troubled by and thought to respond to, only at the moment he started to say, “He did, didn’t he,”
the individual in question, immense turquoise eyes seeming to float in front of him, came back out through the door he had disappeared through looking even more crazed than he had previously, no doubt in part because his head and upper torso were now sopping wet, but he shed no more light on this change in disposition than he had on the business of the shoes, nor did he say anything when Harry asked if they were now going to go into the room with the people and the lamps, and a moment later they found themselves sitting in a conventionally lit parlor of sorts in comfortable purple velvet armchairs with a beaming old woman dressed in a powder-blue pantsuit and improbably high heels, who offered them tea, which they accepted, then lemon-filled ginger cookies, which they declined, at which juncture Ireneo, who had been dripping away next to a sort of curio cabinet filled with odds and ends of all shape and variety, frowned and left the room — to spend the rest of what was to prove a very long, cold night fighting the urge to go back up to the cliff and kill himself — and Doña Eulalia said,
“Excellent, I am so glad you are both here,” a remark that was so far from being a mere nicety that she felt compelled to repeat it, this time laying the stress on the word “both,” for if she had been absolutely incapable of keeping this Harry and the unpleasantness that lay in store for him from her thoughts for more than a few seconds over the past several days, his companion, whose face Doña Eulalia could see had until recently been very broken indeed, had been more on her mind than she would have thought justified, given that, as best she could tell, anything that might until recently have required a candle and concomitant consideration had moved on, but as the specifics of the cases she was drawn to were, as we have seen, rarely her forte — so much so that it had dawned on her after she told Ireneo to go and ask the centaur where Harry was that she must have picked up the information from elsewhere, possibly Ireneo’s blasted shoes — she smiled at Solange, echoed Ireneo’s apology, and contented herself with saying that, as she, Solange, had clearly sensed herself, her loved one had moved on and was at peace, as she could now be, which, Doña Eulalia thought, was true, for now at any rate, and the limited parameters of “for now,” in Solange’s only mildly alarming case, struck her as sufficient, especially since contact had been reestablished in such a satisfactory way — in fact, she would have to ask them both to leave their cards or if they didn’t have cards, of course they probably didn’t, at least their phone numbers, so that any eventual follow-up protocols could be observed, which, who knew, might prove even more necessary in the case of Solange than Harry, though she doubted it, she highly doubted it — and with that in mind she reached for one of the ginger lemon cookies and put the whole thing into her mouth, crushing it with her tongue against the roof of her mouth in the way she was accustomed to and that always gave her great satisfaction, and she might have put another one in straight after the first if Harry, who until that moment had been sitting silently next to Solange, hadn’t looked around the room, made a sort of clicking sound then asked,
“Why don’t you have a lamp on your head and aren’t you supposed to hum or something?”
“Ah yes, well, different circumstances, different modes of transmission,” said Doña Eulalia, licking around in one of the gaps in her teeth for some remaining lemon crème and thinking, good god I must come off like a complete and utter charlatan,
“Oh,” said Harry, sounding a little deflated, as if by his question he had hoped to elicit an indication that even though they weren’t in the big room downstairs with her nincompoop relations at any moment the lights above them would go off and the lamps would come out and the furniture would start shaking or something like that, a speculation that diverged only in the matter of the shaking furniture from the actual thought that had run not just through Harry’s mind, but Solange’s as well, causing her, Solange, to raise an eyebrow and fix Doña Eulalia with a quizzical gaze this latter found so noteworthy that when a moment later she left off looking around in her mouth for more lemon crème, leaned forward, tapped Harry’s knee twice, cleared her throat, and said, “They’re coming,” she almost couldn’t refrain from turning to Solange and adding, “For both of you.”