Whistling Shade

SOCRATES: What is it?
Has the ship arrived from Delos,
upon whose arrival I must die?

CRITO: It hasn't arrived yet,
but it seems to me it will come today
from reports of some who came from Sunium and left it there.

SOCRATES: ... I don't think it will come today,
but tomorrow.
I infer this from a dream
I had a little while ago during the night;
and it chanced opportunely that you did not wake me.

SOCRATES: It seemed a beautiful and good-looking woman
clothed in white, came to me,
called me and said, "Socrates,

In his mind, he could see her clearly now, going up the stairs at the end of the darkened corridor. The hem of her grey dress lifted and lowered about her calves, as she rose up each marble step. She carried something heavy in her right hand that made her shift her weight slightly to the left. As she turned up the first landing, she rubbed her cheek with the back of her free hand. Just as she did so, she turned her head, and he could almost make out the details of her face...

The question startled him, and the image of the woman faded abruptly. The old man opened his eyes. The bus number 60 came roaring down Guido towards Santa Fe Avenue. A few young girls from the prep school further up the street chatted and laughed loudly. A very tan beggar was pleading with a white-haired woman at the table next to his, asking whether he could take the two left-over scones in her bread basket back home to his children. The woman waved him away with her napkin and called for the check.

Sebastian looked at the young man seated across the table from him. He was wearing a tan suit with a light blue shirt and no tie. Sebastian supposed the young man thought it made him look "sophisticated but modern, just the right touch to interview the great writer." But Sebastian thought it just made him look a little gay.

"Another graduate student," Sebastian thought. Well, at least he wasn't a reporter. But the question... For the past last thirty years, whether Doña Rosa's Tower-his most "political" novel-was in or out of vogue, whether they understood it or not, whether they had even read it or not, reporters, students and literary critics always asked the same question: "What was the color of her skin?"

He looked at the young man and sighed. "Her skin was the color of café con leche," he said, "like the one you're drinking. But, of course, I prefer a lágrima"¹ and laughed. The young man began to scribble in his notebook. Why had he said that, Sebastian thought? The boy was probably writing a dissertation on Bigotry and Misogyny in Sebastian Ortiz de Thompson's Works, and he would take his preference for more milk than coffee in his cup as a sort of veiled racism.

There were surely other questions on his mind, too. Sebastian could tell from the way the young man knitted his brow. Was it "important" Doña Rosa was a poor mulatta? (Meaning we couldn't expect social change from the white bourgeoisie.) Was it "important" she was Brazilian? (Meaning Argentine society was too rotten save itself.) Was it "important" she was a woman? (Meaning that male power hierarchy was to blame for the last dictatorship, for all dictatorships.)

Certainly, there were many things Sebastian had "meant" in his novels. Sometimes, he'd chosen words with a Greek rather than a Latin root. Sometimes, he'd used Anglo Saxon or German words for their sound and weight.

But he hadn't meant anything with Doña Rosa. He'd just written her the way he'd seen her so many years ago. Her face was light brown, although her hands were much darker and coarse, too. Washerwoman's hands. The color of coffee.

What was that song he'd heard so long ago? "Couleur café ... I love your coffee color... " What was the rest of it, "your throat ... your hair"?² The words trailed away like smoke and disappeared.

Sebastian was driving up north in Minas Gerais in Brazil, to receive a literary prize from the federal university there. It was his first important award, for Errata de Fe, which came as a surprise after its limited circulation. The prize money wasn't much, but it meant the world to him. And not just because he could pay off his debts and have enough money left over to take Luisa on a small holiday to Córdoba. It was the confirmation he had been waiting for. He could now stop teaching and write full time.

It was the night before the award ceremony in Belo Horizonte, and he stopped in a small town that wasn't even on the map. He checked in at a cheap pensión across from a church. In fact, there wasn't much else, besides the pensión. A fruit stand, a butcher's shop, a kiosko selling newspapers three days old, and a small row of concrete houses stretching over the hill. And then the church.

As he signed in at the pensión, it was the first time he'd allowed himself to put "Writer" instead of "Professor" as his profession. He was nervous as he did this, but he enjoyed the guilty pleasure of it in a place no one knew his name. The manager reached over to hand him the key, and, looking at the registration book, said with a heavy Portuguese accent, "Oh, a writer." Then he added, "You must be here to see Pamela."

But the manager insisted, "If you go to the church before dinner, she'll still be there," and then went into the back room.

Sebastian went upstairs to his small room and unpacked his bag. He washed his face and changed his shirt. The manager's wife wouldn't be setting the table for another half hour, and he hadn't brought anything to read. This always made him feel naked, and he wasn't sure what to do next. He didn't want to go over his acceptance speech again, so he put on his jacket and headed toward the church.

The graduate student cleared his throat. He said, "In Ortiz de Thompson Reconsidered, Bension writes, `Doña Rosa lived her life in the shadow of much larger political and social processes of the revolution,' and, yet, you focus on her relatively minor-some would say inconsequential-actions. As if indicating the personal has more weight than the public. Did you base her character on ... anyone you knew ... personally?"

Sebastian waved the question away. "No," he lied and sipped his coffee. The student seemed lost for a moment and consulted his notes.

Sebastian knew what the young man had wanted to say: "Did you base Doña Rosa on your wife, Luisa? Did you base her on the woman whose own life was insignificant compared to your own?" The student was young, but he knew enough not to mention Luisa. Sebastian would have just gotten up and walked away, and that would have been the end of it. Sebastian had done that two or three times in his life, once on national television, and he had even ended a life-long friendship as a result.

Even now, so many years after her death, Sebastian still kept his promise: he would never mention her in public. She would be forever separated from his interviews, anecdotes and commentaries. That's the way she'd wanted it.

It was impossible for critics to understand how Sebastian could have been married to her for over forty years, could have spent no more than two or three days apart from her at a time, and yet never spoke of her in public, never even dedicated a book to her. Perhaps that's why they were always trying to find clues to her in his characters. She must show up, somehow, filtered through his novels. Otherwise, they assumed, he must be the most ungrateful husband imaginable, a monster. After all, she'd given up everything for him.

By "everything", they meant she'd never had any children. The press always assumed-and Sebastian did nothing to dissuade them in this-that she had forgone having children in order to dedicate herself entirely to him. Such a man as Sebastian, such a demanding and important man, needed a wholly-devoted wife. Unconditional love between man and wife, by definition, can't be shared with children. Perhaps that's why the rumor circulated that she'd had an abortion. No one ever printed this, of course, for fear of libel. But the story persisted. The doctor, so they said, told him the fetus had a cleft palate. Being such a perfectionist, Sebastian had ordered Luisa to terminate the pregnancy. That was the story, at least.

In the end, it had been his decision not to have children. But not for the reasons they'd imagined. After the third miscarriage, he couldn't ask Luisa to go through that again. She'd become so fragile and pale. The last time, she'd spent three months in bed, just to avoid the slightest exertion. Even then she'd hemorrhaged while reaching for a glass of water on the nightstand. After that, she'd spent half a year recovering. But she would have tried again, if only he'd asked her to.

The priest met him at the door, a thin man with long hands. "I'm here to see Pamela," Sebastian said. He paused. "I'm the writer from Buenos Aires."

"Bem-vindo," said the priest and welcomed him in. Then in cautious, text-book Spanish, he said "For a long time, we've been expecting someone would come. Years actually. Maybe someone from the news service in São Paolo. But you came all the way from Buenos Aires?"

They walked a few steps into the church. Then the priest stopped by a few lighted candles at the base of a Virgin Mary, looking unsure as to what to say next. "It's not that I'm ungrateful," the priest continued. "It's just ... she only speaks Portuguese. I don't know how much she understands ... or how much you'll understand her."

"Don't worry," said Sebastian, shrugging a little. "I'm sure we'll understand each other just fine."

They stopped at the first row of pews by the altar, and the priest indicated Sebastian should sit down. "Please wait here," he said, "while I go look for her. She should be almost finished for the night."

The graduate student looked up from his notebook and said, "Alexis Rushton once described you as a `philosopher who fictionalizes,' and Maxwell Hattingh as a `novelist who philosophizes.' Which of the two are you?"

Sebastian grunted. "I am neither a novelist nor a philosopher. I'm what the Germans call a Shriftsteller, a story-teller. I draw from whatever I read or see or experience to tell a story." He wiped his mouth with a napkin. "As such, I am a dilettante. In fact, I know less about philosophy and writing now than when I started."

The young man was visibly frustrated by the response and quickly scratched down something in his notebook-probably "THAT BASTARD!", Sebastian thought, but he didn't care. "Where do they teach students to ask questions these days?" he thought. "Are you a communist or a fascist?" "Are you a fetishist or a prude?" Why did Sebastian have to fit neatly into any category, except to make it easier for librarians to shelve his books?

He leaned back in his chair, and his annoyance with the boy slowly began to fade. It was a warm day, a pleasant day. He thought back to earlier that morning. He'd gotten up just before sunrise, showered and shaved. As he ran the blade over his face, he'd lifted the folds of his skin under his chin, feeling for a few old scars with his fingertips. He stopped shaving now and then to wipe the steam from the mirror, his face appearing and disappearing within the outline of several smeared hands.

When the steam had cleared and when he'd wiped the remaining flecks of foam from his cheeks and neck, he arranged the things he'd left on the countertop. First he put on his cross and thought "Life eternal." And, then his watch, "Time eternal." And finally, his wedding ring. "Love, equally eternal."

As the steam cleared, he'd looked at himself in the mirror: the sagging stomach, the way his penis hung slightly to the left, and the strange bits of hair that grew wire-like and wild from the corner of his nose. The sight of himself made him laugh, a deep belly laugh until his sides ached. Then he coughed and couldn't stop coughing, doubling over on the wet floor. Finally, he steadied himself and reached for his pills. But in the end, he pushed the top back on the bottle without taking any out and placed them back on the shelf.

Today, he wouldn't take the pills. Just one more day, from dawn to dusk, on his own terms. His heart would last till then.

Sebastian sat in the cool interior of the church for five or ten minutes. He looked up at the Christ suspended in agony behind the altar and wondered whether he shouldn't be feeling guilty for this charade. But he was rather enjoying it. After all, he hadn't actually lied about anything: he was a writer, and he was from Buenos Aires. Besides, this was a nice diversion from thinking about tomorrow's speech.

The priest came back and sat next to him. He said, "She's just mopping the floor in the back. She'll be out soon."

There was a moment of silence. Then the priest said, "She's never told anyone what...what exactly the soldiers did to her. I wouldn't bring it up, unless she tells you directly." Sebastian nodded. "I'm not a writer, myself," the priest continued, "so I won't pretend to tell you... You know, one dabbles." The priest looked down at his shoes.

There was another pause, and then the priest said, "You know, I was here when they brought in the boy. Again, I'm not a writer, but if you think your readers would be interested..."

Sebastian smiled at him, hoping to put him at ease. "Yes," Sebastian pretended to consider, "I think my readers would be very interested in hearing your point of view ... about the boy at least."

The priest seemed pleased by this, and his shoulders visibly relaxed. "Well, he thought, I mean, Manolo, the butcher ... I don't know if you saw his shop just out front? Manolo thought the best place to bring him was the church. His cousin found him wandering in the fields. He'd lost a lot of blood."

"No, the closest medical outpost is the next town over. The boy was too far gone anyway. I thought the best thing to do was to give him last rites. It was here, on this pew."

Sebastian moved slightly in his seat. "Tell me about the boy. What did he look like?"

"Very clean and young. His face and clothes were stained with mud ... but you know what I mean. His hands were smooth, and his fingernails were closely trimmed. I remember thinking, `These hands aren't used to working in the fields.' He looked like the university students who come back to their villages on holidays with their bags full of books and leave stuffed with freshly-baked bread."

"Something... Nothing. I'm not sure. He was barely conscious and said one word when we laid him down, but I couldn't understand. I thought he said `pietà,' but Manolo thought he said `piedra.'³ Then he died."

Sebastian was roused from his thoughts, as the café owner, a thin, elegant Austrian, visited his table.

The owner said "Wie Sie wollen, Herr Doktor Professor" and walked back into the café.

Sebastian liked the café owner. As a rule, Sebastian liked all Austrians, for the first thing they always said was a booming "Great God!" instead of "Good morning." The man was attentive without being intrusive. Sebastian also admired his consistency. For all the years Sebastian had been coming to his café, the owner never felt "good" or "excellent". He was usually only "siemlich gut" or "rather good" and sometimes "schlecht" or "awful".

He also liked his ritual of calling him by all his titles at once, "Mister", "Doctor" and "Professor"-and always "Sie", never "Du". This elegant man and his pleasant formality were out of place in this informal, increasingly disrespectful city. "A permanent outsider, like myself," Sebastian thought. When had he ever felt he belonged? It seemed so long ago...

Sebastian had met Luisa at the old Gran Esplendid movie theater off Santa Fe Avenue, before it was turned into a book store. It was a beautiful October day, what used to be called "un día peronista".⁴ A classmate of his from the university had invited him to see some new American comedy. Sebastian couldn't remember the title of the movie, but it had something to do with the sea ... blue water.

No, Sebastian reconsidered, the movie wasn't about the sea. He'd been thinking of that ridiculous hat she was wearing, with a bright yellow flower painted on it, bobbing up and down in the line ahead of him. It reminded him of the sunflowers in his grandparents' garden by the sea at Pinamar.

"Some American comedy..." that was what his friend had said when they were about to buy their tickets. In response to this, Sebastian clapped his friend on the back, smiled and paraphrased Wittgenstein, "There's something about the vacuity of American movies that purifies the mind."

At this, she turned around with that floppy, ridiculous hat pulled down around her face and said "I think that's the most pompous thing I've ever heard anyone say."

Sebastian was somewhat taken aback, shocked at being addressed like that by a stranger. Then, for the life of him (he didn't know why), he laughed, and she laughed back. He said, "You're right, Señorita. That was rather pompous of me. I have a tendency to over-intellectualize."

She replied, "That's a pity, because you have rather nice, blue eyes," and she walked into the darkened movie theater with her friend.

Thinking back, that was the moment Sebastian had begun to fall in love with her.

Everyone else had always taken him so seriously. Even as a little boy, they'd invested everything he did or said with such meaning. At the British school his grandmother-Mrs. Alice de Thompson-sent him to, his teachers would say, "Look, he's reading Homer, he's going to be another Schliemann," and his classmates would remark, "Look, he's reading poetry, he's going to be another Byron."

It wasn't that he liked being treated rudely by Luisa. (He especially abhorred bad manners in a woman.) But she hadn't been rude to him. She'd just said things the way they were, and Sebastian thought that was marvelous.

He remembered now why he didn't recall anything about the film. He'd spent the whole time looking at the reflection of light the movie screen cast upon her face, as she laughed and chatted to her friend next to her.

At the movie's end, he maneuvered towards her. (Impossibly awkward, he thought.) He invited her to coffee, and she accepted, and they talked for hours, so easily. It was as if no one else in the café was around, as if all the millions in Buenos Aires ceased to exist, and the city was a vast cavern of empty apartment buildings and avenues, inhabited by them alone.

His love for Luisa was built on moments like these, in the coffee shop, in the theater, slow and pure. That's why he never really liked Bioy-Casares... Certainly, he admired his writing. It's just that he'd found one anecdote from his private life so distasteful he couldn't enjoy reading him.

In an interview, Bioy-Casares recounted how, as a young man, he'd seen a young maid across the street from his house eating a peach. Something about that sight, the juice coming down her lips, her pouting breasts, excited him. So he ran to the house where she was working and made passionate love to her. That was what Sebastian could not stand.

Had Sebastian ever voiced this criticism in public, he was sure people would think him prudish or jealous, because Bioy-Casares had been what Sebastian could never be-spontaneous. Perhaps there was some truth in this, he thought. But what upset Sebastian most about this anecdote was that, for him, love-true love-was a procession of small connections, an understanding of the simple things, and a building towards complex meaning. If all that love was were the arousal produced by dripping nectar, the fumbling fingers of adolescence, then it was too simplistic to be of any use to him.

When he'd finally tried to make love to Luisa, he had, in fact, been unable to. He was too anxious, afraid of disappointing her. And, yet, he found no reproach. She kissed and stroked his great, ugly forehead. They lay in bed and talked about a pair of shoes she had seen in a storefront window that had just come in from Paris, and he smoked, which was something he seldom did. And when he did make love to her later that night, it was the most sublime feeling he had ever had, a sharing without performance, a giving without the fear of judgment.

"What was your biggest regret of public life?" the young man asked from across the table.

Sebastian thought of snapping back, "Giving this interview." But he decided not to be resentful. After all, the student had to have guessed the answer. "My biggest regret," said Sebastian, looking into the student's eager eyes, "was accepting the post of Secretary of Education during the dictatorship. At the time, I had my doubts, but..."

"When you're young, or, rather, younger, because I was almost fifty at the time, the world seems full of possibilities. And it is. Remember, at the time, the military hadn't set up the torture camps. They were destroying the terrorist bases, they were doing everything that your parents and grandparents were demanding them to do. They could just as easily have stopped there. There could have been a transition to democracy."

"No, there wasn't. But we didn't know that at the time. It's easy to look back now and say `I should have guessed how this was going to turn out.' But that's my point: nothing had turned out, nothing had concluded. It could have gone any number of ways, and, in the meantime, the schools had to be maintained. Moreover, what had I done that was so despicable, what tyrannical policies had I promoted? I opened three or four provincial libraries. I approved a few textbooks and settled a teacher's grievance in Chubut."

The young man leaned forward and said "It wasn't what you did. It was that you lent the military your reputation. You gave them Doña Rosa."

"Gave them Doña Rosa?" Sebastian repeated. As if his novel were the exclusive property of what was now broadly considered the Left. And then, out of spite, he'd "given" his book to the Right instead? That would be like "giving" the soldiers mathematics by teaching them the Pythagorean theory. Or "giving" them the stars by pointing out where Orion's Belt was in the sky. His readers, thought Sebastian, were like schizophrenics on a crowded bus. They all thought he was speaking to them.

And then, when he finally did something that did not fit with what they had assumed was his wholesale acceptance of their worldview, they'd woken up to find he'd "given" his books away to the other camp. Like when they'd woken up to find they'd "lost" las Malvinas.⁵ That implied, Sebastian thought, that they'd had them in the first place. When had they, any of them, ever stepped foot on those barren islands, except the children they'd sent to die there?

Yes, the only ones who had any claim to those frigid rocks were the children buried there. Children had claims, and you could claim them, especially the dead ones. But his books didn't belong to anyone. Not even to himself.

Sebastian didn't say this. He was sure the boy would misunderstand. Instead, now feeling even more tired than ever, Sebastian replied, "Young man, the military would have done whatever they'd wanted, with or without me. And they did, after they had me removed."

People's memories were strange, Sebastian thought. They were still scandalized by the seven months he'd served the dictatorship. But they had collective amnesia of the three years after the military had kicked him out. The soldiers had ransacked his office, burned his files, thrown out of the office window, fluttering, the pages of a novel draft-it would have been his best work yet-he'd never attempted to start again.

How the military ever imagined themselves reflected in the cruel Latin grammar teacher, Eugenio Bazterrica, in his short story "Pabulum, Pablo et Parabellum" was beyond him! But there it was. Like the Left, who saw themselves celebrated in Doña Rosa, the Right saw themselves lampooned in Bazterrica. Then followed house arrest. Threats of deportation.

After the transition, the very people who'd blamed him for "having become political" under the dictatorship criticized him for "not being political" under the democracy. As if what he wrote had to correspond with whatever politics was in vogue, and, every time he was out of sync, he needed to place a mea culpa in his characters' mouths.

The only one who'd never judged him, inside or out of public office, was Luisa. The day he'd come home and told her he'd accepted the post, she'd become very quiet. "Do you think it's best, Sebas?" she'd finally asked. He'd faltered for a moment, standing in the living room with his hat in his hands and his overcoat still on, and then said "Yes." Without a word, she'd gotten up and started walking into the kitchen. Then, very softly, she said over her shoulder, "Then I'll get you a cup of tea, Mr. Minister."

The priest was silent, and Sebastian didn't know what else to say. He thought of excusing himself, because he was getting hungry, but he didn't want to be rude.

The priest continued, "Then we understood why they'd shot the boy when we opened up his backpack..."

"I hope you don't think we were prying. It's just that he'd died, and he wasn't carrying any identification. When we saw the pamphlets inside the bag, we guessed the story. We knew why he'd been shot."

"Mind you, I've never been political. I'm not one of those liberation theology priests. But the pamphlets weren't anything I'd call revolutionary ... or violent. They just said things like workers have the right to vacations, and schools should be better maintained. We sat there, next to the body of the boy, passing the pamphlets amongst us."

The priest continued, "It was myself, Manolo, Teresita-a widow and long-time mourner who had come to light a candle after Manolo brought the body in. And then Pamela. I remember her wiping her hands on her apron as she came in. She bent down next to the boy's body and cleaned his face off with a towel. She licked the ends of it like a mother does when wiping her baby's face."

Sebastian remembered how Luisa had come into his study that night, naked, water shimmering in droplets on her stomach. She was trembling, clutching a towel to her grey hair, as blood ran down her cheek. "Sebas, I think I've fallen down in the shower" she said.

As he looked up from his papers, Sebastian's first thought wasn't "Oh, God, that's awful!" or "My love, my love!" It was, "You think you've fallen down. Of course, you've fallen down, or how else do you think you got that gaping wound in your head?" But he didn't say this. He grabbed her and steadied her. He hugged and covered her, and he drove her to the hospital.

He'd always thought they would go out together in their sleep, take a final bow like Edward Hopper's Les Comediennes. But there was no slow retreat, not dimming of the lights. She slipped into a coma and died the next day. And that was it.

Afterwards, he sat on the yellow, plastic bench outside her hospital room. The nurse said something kind as they wheeled Luisa's body away, but he wasn't listening. He was thinking of what the doctor had said as he'd pointed to the CAT scan of her brain. "This part that's injured here is the locus coreuleus, or Latin for `blue bits'..." Sebastian had whispered under his breath, "It would be more accurate to say `deep blue place.'" That was a comforting phrase, he thought: deep blue place.

Then Sebastian suddenly felt ashamed, quibbling over the translation as his wife lay dying. He'd always been too analytical. Luisa had occasionally chided him for that. But he'd had that running commentary inside his head ever since he was a boy-his grandmother used to call it his "divine voice"-and he couldn't disengage it even at her death.

After Luisa died, Sebastian wandered the streets of Buenos Aires at night. The wide boulevards calmed him, provided soothing anonymity after the press had covered every angle of the funeral. He turned down alleyways that would normally have frightened him during the day time, pushed past drunks on Santa Fe at 2:00 a.m., skirted beggars on urine-soaked mattresses down 9 de Julio near the obelisk.

It wasn't that he was tempting death. Rather, he felt such an immense emptiness that nothing, not even his own death, frightened him. Nothing could be as frightening as being without his wife. He began to be careless, leave his front door unlocked. He even left it slightly ajar now and then (something that troubled the concierge to no end, who'd secretly come up just before his shift ended to pull it closed).

But then these feelings of emptiness subsided, bit by bit, and finally disappeared. He was walking down Los Tres Sargentos late at night, feeling the cobblestones under his feet, when something stirred near a rubbish heap. It was a small child separating cardboard from some other debris. But, at the sound, the old fear leapt in his chest again. He ran blind, stumbling down the street and hailed the first cab he could find. He locked his door that night and checked it several times before he went to bed.

He felt older than he'd ever been, but he was full of fear like when he was a child. Like the night when he was twelve and his father came home drunk. Pushing past his grandmother, eyes glistening, mouth open, demanding to see "That faggot British son of mine!" Sebastian had picked up the book next to him on his nightstand, The Courtesan's Handbook, to cover his face as his father beat him. He had whimpered, "I'll be good Papá. I'll be a strong man, just like you want. I'm sorry. I'm sorry..."

Running down that dark street, Sebastian felt as if all the years in between his childhood and old age had disappeared and all that filled the middle ground was fear. Even the years he'd spent with Luisa began to fade.

Sebastian began to wish some of Luisa's kisses had left a mark on him. Perhaps if she'd bitten or scratched him once, he'd have had a scar to remember an afternoon of lovemaking or even an argument. In the last, few years before her accident, they'd had little physical contact. There was no need for it.

Their love was implicit, omnipresent. There had been no need to mention or evoke it. But now that she was dead, there was nothing to remember her by, except his memories, and these faded rather quickly. You don't need words if the other person's there, Sebastian thought. But in her absence, how many kisses and whispers had vanished?

He could have tried to "immortalize" their moments together, described a moment of love-making with her in one of his books, placed their kisses upon the mouths of his characters. (He was sure the graduate student across from him thought "That's what writers do.")

Certainly, there were little things, gestures, fragments of conversation he had used, when they fit with a certain character or situation. But mostly ideas, concepts. Nothing ever physical. None of the kisses he described were ever their kisses. How could they be? The kisses from her lips were noumenal, his words phenomenal. Kant, after all these years, was right. There was a whole world beyond words that words couldn't touch.

And memories were worse. They were the things you tried to grab hold of with words, but they were separate constructions, parallel to experience. Scars were much better, for they were continuations of the original experience, extensions of cuts that turned pink and then white, stretched and elongated with time.

The student asked, "What about the charge that you're an atheist, or, at best, an agnostic, hedging your bets?" There, finally, Sebastian thought, he had glimpsed a spark in the young man's eyes. Perhaps he wasn't such an imbecile after all.

"Young man," Sebastian replied, "I was too churchy for the communists and too heretical for the Catholics. I suppose that probably makes me a saint." The boy still looked annoyed, but his grimace broke and he laughed, and Sebastian laughed too.

Soon after Errata de Fe had become a favorite among high school students, Bishop D'Agnasio had called for Sebastian's books to be banned. From the pulpit, he'd declared Sebastian a threat to today's youth: "Anyone who could treat the Holy Roman Church in such a heartless fashion clearly has no love for God." D'Agnasio's moral outrage appealed to Sebastian's sense of humor, because the bishop was a well-known pederast. ("Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor the Church," Sebastian thought.)

As for the charge of being an atheist, it simply wasn't true. In fact, Sebastian considered himself twice the believer D'Agnasio was, because he did not believe in one god-but two. One God that did good, one that did evil. One God had created a woman like Luisa. Another had made her slip on a bar of soap. There could be no other explanation for the mixture of wonderful and awful things that happened every day. Otherwise, God would be well-meaning but incompetent, able to part the seas now and then for the Jews to escape Pharaoh's chariots but helpless to prevent bathroom accidents.

The priest continued, "After the boy died, we didn't know what to do. I mean, the soldiers were bound to come. Someone would tell. There was nothing more we could do for him."

Sebastian moved towards the priest to see his face, because he had shrunk back under the shadow of the Virgin Mary's leg. "Did you bury him, secretly, then?"

"No, not exactly... You see, he did die in a state of grace, so, naturally, my first thought was to give him a proper burial ... with a mass. But ... the others were against it."

"No, she didn't vote. She didn't say a word. She just stood there, silent, looking at the boy. We decided we couldn't risk being caught with the body. Though we knew he was a Christian-did I mention I found St. Francis' cross hung around his neck? No? But he was also a revolutionary. So, we decided the best thing to do would be to put him back"

"Back in the field where Manolo's cousin found him. Teresita held the door, and Manolo and I loaded him back on the cart. I told Pamela to clean up the blood before we got back. It was difficult work for me. I've never been a very fit man."

Sebastian looked at the priest's smooth hands, thinking how happy he must have been practicing Chopin at the seminary.

"We brought him back to the same place, wedged him behind a tree stump. We wiped mud on his face, so no one would suspect he'd been moved and cleaned up. It was Manolo's idea to rub his face with dung to ... to cover up the smell of oil I'd anointed him with."

Sebastian thought back to the week after Luisa's burial, the night when he'd gone back home. (After nights of staying in cheap hotels where no one recognized him.) He approached the bedroom door, but he hesitated and turned back. He'd decided that, until he turned the doorknob and found the empty bed, she wasn't really dead. He went, instead, to his study and thumbed through the bookshelf.

Absentmindedly, he picked up the old family Bible his grandmother had given him when she was ill and failing. She had been so very British, proper with her long, white gloves. Five o'clock tea in the garden was never interrupted, not even during revolutions. The day before she died, she'd had the hairdresser come fix her up. She wouldn't let anyone except Sebastian see her until she was presentable. He held her hand as the girl put her in curlers, and she talked about a vacation she'd taken to the beach at Bristol when she was thirteen.

He felt the cover of the Bible with his fingertips. It was leather-bound, cracked in places, beautiful. On the back pages, it had the names of every Thompson born, baptized and buried since 1763. He ran his fingers along the names, written in quill. All his ancestors. And then his own name, written in ball-point pen, and the space reserved for the children he'd never had.

He turned to the Book of Job, flipped towards the end to chapter 42. There it was, the quote that had always frightened him as a boy, the quote that now angered him as an old man:

So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Kerenhappuch. And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters of Job... So Job died, being old and full of days.

To prove Job's love, God let Satan murder his children. But that wasn't what troubled Sebastian most. It was Job's thankfulness. Job was thankful that his next set of daughters was so much more beautiful than the first. They were like a fresh rack of muffins cooling on the countertop while the earlier batch had been tossed into the kitchen sink, smoking and black on the bottoms.

All Sebastian had wanted was one child. He wouldn't have cared if the baby were hump-backed or retarded. It would have been his and Luisa's, and that would have been enough. He would have given up the spoken word, to hug an autistic daughter, to communicate with her just through the warmth of their skin. He would have learned Braille or sign language. He would have given up writing all together, to suction phlegm, day and night, out of his son's failing lungs.

And there was Job, happy for his replacement children. It made Sebastian think back to his last public appearance. He'd winced when the dean of the Department of Bellas Artes at the Universidad de Buenos Aires had proclaimed "Ortiz de Thompson's books are his children, his legacy to Argentina." His books weren't his children, Sebastian thought. They couldn't come close.

What God had done-the evil God-was unacceptable, unpalatable. He felt the pages with the tips of his fingers and breathed deeply. Yes, Sebastian considered for a moment, the most appropriate word was "unpalatable". Then he picked up the Bible and took it with him into the kitchen.

He boiled rice in one saucepan and warmed a little olive oil and garlic in another. He took out a filleting knife from the drawer and sharpened it a bit. Then, slowly and precisely, he began to cut out each page from the Book of Job, just far enough away from the binding so as not to ruin the rest of the book.

He tore the pages into long, thin strips and added them into the pan with some creamery butter. He kept stirring, until the pages were reduced to pulp and the dark ink dissipated and was lost in the butter. He chopped some parsley and onion and added a bit of salt to taste.

He opened a bottle of white wine and added a dash. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and ate the risotto. He sponged up the sauce with a hard piece of bread he'd found in the cupboard and licked the bowl clean.

Then Sebastian went into the hallway and opened the bedroom door. He lay down in the empty bed and fell asleep.

"We got back to the church late," continued the priest. "It was already dark. Teresita met us at the door, tears running down her cheeks."

"The soldiers had come in our absence and taken Pamela away. We never knew who betrayed us. I have my suspicions, but I really can't say... You've seen the kiosko down the street? I've always thought..."

"Who knows? That's what they used to do. They come to kill a man. He's not there, so they kill his wife. They come to rape a mother. She's not there, so they rape her daughter. I suppose, they'd come to take me, because it's my church, but I wasn't there, so..."

"The next day. They dropped her in a heap outside the church. Her arm was broken, here and here," the priest indicated. "Her lip was bloody, and she was burning with fever. She kept saying over and over, `You're safe, Father. Don't worry. They didn't find them. They'll never find them. You're safe.'"

" I didn't know what she meant at the time. She was delirious. I... There, she's coming through the back door."

She was a washerwoman like many Sebastian had seen, like many he had overlooked, he thought. She was wearing a gray frock, and her hair was tucked under a pink kerchief, elbows and knees chafed. She limped slightly as she walked to them. (He wondered if it was because of what they'd done to her.) But there was something about her, some quiet dignity, some peace. He knew at that moment he would write a story about her. He also knew it would be impossible to describe her properly.

"This man has come to see you, Pamela. He's come a long way, from Buenos Aires. Please tell him what happened."

She looked at Sebastian, taking him in. She didn't look impressed or afraid. Sebastian liked that.

She rubbed her nose and wiped her hands against her apron. She began speaking in slow, determined Portuguese. "It wasn't right they killed the boy. Not for the things those pamphlets say. Those were good things, what the priest read. About schools and jobs. Someone had to do something."

"After the priest and the other man got scared and took the boy back," she said, and the priest flinched a little, "I gathered up the pamphlets. The old woman was shouting. She said we should burn them, before the soldiers came. I think, that's not right. The people in the village should read them. But we couldn't hand them out in front of the church, or the priest would get into trouble. That's when I decided."

"I put them in my bucket, soaked them in the water. It was red from where I'd cleaned the floor. And I walked up the tower steps. To the bell tower. I thought that would solve all problems. I leaned over the edge of the tower and stuck them there, right on the outside, to the stones." She pantomimed her action. "When paper's wet, it does that. But when the sun comes out the next day, I think, it dries the paper. And they just float down like leaves. The people read what the boy had to say. No one hands them out, no one gets blamed."

"Yes, after ... they brought me back, I saw them come down. I saw them float down through the window in the back room where I lay."

"No... Are you sorry that you pasted the fliers to the tower-and no one found out-but that they took you anyway."

Pamela paused for a moment, and then she said, "No, Those are two different things. I'm not sorry. Is that all, Señor?"

Sebastian moved his chair a bit into the light, because the sun had shifted. He closed his eyes. Sitting there, he felt an increasing sense of contentedness. The sun streamed down his face, and a breeze picked up from around the corner. It felt ... it felt like being in Luisa's arms. After making love to her and holding her, or writing in his study, knowing she was sewing in the parlor next door.

It felt like standing the nave of that cool church, looking Pamela directly in the eye. No pretense. No fiction. Real and raw and true. So true, it hurt deep inside of him. He thought of the pills he'd left on the bathroom shelf, and smiled.

The bus number 60 rumbled by the café again, but he heard it only faintly now. The girls with their school uniforms were coming back in the direction of plaza Vicente Lopez with a number of boys laughing and tickling them, their school ties loosened just at the neck. But he was far away.

The sun was mid-way in the sky now. As it shone down, he saw, in his mind, how the wet fliers on the bell tower dried and creased. Some stuck there, pasted, perhaps forever. Others, as they dried, slowly separated from the stone ledge, one edge, then a second, a third and forth, and they released themselves from the church, falling, twirling, spiraling down onto the pavement below.

One passerby bent down to see what had landed at his feet and picked it up, holding it close to his face. Then he stuffed it into his pocket and hurried along.

The student thought of one last question, but he waited for a moment before asking Sebastian. The old man looked so peaceful now, he didn't want to disturb him. He thought he might have fallen asleep.

¹ Note: The "lágrima", or "tear drop", is a typical drink in Buenos Aires-a cup of hot milk with a drop of coffee.

⁴ "A Peronist day", for those who equated President Juan Domingo Perón with all things good.

Rounding Sunium

by Eric Stener Carlson