The day after we threw Vera’s ashes into the ocean, Daniel left his house.
In the first weeks, we’d spend the day on my rooftop and at night he’d go back to the hotel room he’d taken. However, before long he practically stopped going back there. One afternoon we went to the hotel; he paid the bill, picked up his suitcase, and moved in with me. A few days later, we collected Charly and Arthur. Even though Daniel had been going to Vera’s house every day to walk and feed them, we both thought it was obvious that they should come and live with us.
With Daniel, I experienced a new freedom, as if I’d been filled with air. Everything that had remained in silence now found a way of expressing itself. They were sensations and images difficult to formulate, and because of that all the more deeply rooted, for no thought could destroy their mystery.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t thinking.
Everything was suspended. Daniel’s life, mine, and that possible future together that neither of us would bring up. He didn’t go into details about his separation, nor did I ask him for any.
In the morning he’d get up early and go for a jog. When I woke up, he’d be back already, having bought fresh bread, made coffee, and squeezed some oranges. After breakfast, I did my produce deliveries, and then I’d head for the Bombal Library. Daniel had countless meetings to go to. The comments on our recently inaugurated Transatlantic in magazines and newspapers left nothing to be desired. But the most important thing was that Daniel was encouraged enough to request a loan from the bank to buy the site on the cliffside. Going forward, he wanted to build the real Transatlantic.
After a few weeks, I already knew that Daniel slipped a hand under his pillow when he slept, that he woke up several times a night, that along with cooking he took a secret pleasure in the act of cleaning up, that he shaved every other day, that when he woke up his hair was damp with nocturnal perspiration, and that his skin brought back from his dreams the smell of wet earth. We never stopped talking. Even the most insignificant detail about the other interested us.
On one of those mornings, Daniel found Infante’s letter in the mailbox. I’d sent him an email the day after Vera’s death and he had replied, obviously shaken. He’d gone on to announce that within a few days, he would send me the text he’d promised. He asked me to read it calmly and not to judge him until I’d reached the end.
What Daniel brought upstairs was a big envelope containing a typed manuscript with a handwritten note from Infante on the first page:
Emilia:
When Vera fell down those stairs, I knew she would never come back to us, and I knew that our story, if I didn’t reconstruct it as soon as possible, would be buried with our old bones forever. And so I’ve spent the past few months working on that task. For Vera, for us.
But only some weeks ago, amid delirious memories of her, did I finally realize that you would be the recipient of this account, that the reader I was talking to was you. I kept on writing, even though I was assailed by doubt at every turn. Everything that until then had seemed essential turned out to be superficial, and what I had previously rejected now appeared immensely important. I address these words to you in fear. Perhaps I should have spoken sooner, much sooner, or perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut. I actually don’t know. Now you’re the one who will have to decide the fate of the truths you’ll find here. Because in the end, all this is nothing more than my clumsy, belated attempt at expiation. If that’s in any way possible.
Horacio
After reading the letter, I put the manuscript under my pillow and went out to make my produce deliveries.
I felt a great sense of worry and foreboding.
I had a premonition about that manuscript. I knew that reading it was going to disrupt my life, one way or another. That I’d never be in the same place again. When I got back to my apartment, I made myself some tea, sat out on the terrace, and opened the manuscript. It was a sunny morning. There was a fresh, benevolent breeze.
It was the summer of 1951, and I was thirty-three years old. For the past thirteen, I’d lived in various cities, but mostly in Geneva, working for the High Commissioner for Refugees, in whose offices I occupied a minor position. My return was a response—according to the official story—to my mother’s plaintive letters, wherein she detailed the multiple infirmities that could, any day, snatch her away to the grave. But the truth is, I was returning home chock-full of anticipation and plans, which included renting a cabin facing the ocean and dedicating myself completely to poetry, or meeting an attractive, intelligent compatriot to share the rest of my life with. From a distance, Chile had turned into the place where all the dark corners of my existence would be filled with light. The Promised Land, the Paradise Lost…
I kept reading, and by the time Daniel came home that evening, I’d read more than half. While trying to process what Infante had written, I tried for the first time to cook something for Daniel, following the instructions for a pasta recipe I’d found on the Internet.
A new Vera had emerged in Infante’s words. A woman of flesh and blood, but a woman who at the same time opened up new mysteries. Try as he might, Infante hadn’t ever managed to pierce the shell she lived inside, which made her inaccessible for everyone, maybe even for herself.
We sat on the terrace and ate the pasta, followed by an arugula salad with warm slices of pear and parmesan cheese shavings that Daniel prepared. I told him about my confirmed suspicions. And about the discovery I’d made, and how it had been halfway corroborated by the manuscripts in the strongbox and was now a reality. That was Horacio’s great secret. The cross he’d carried all those years. I also described to Daniel a few of the episodes in the manuscript. I told him about Vera’s fortitude in confronting prejudice because of her Jewish origins. About the meeting in the snow in New York, which was in one of Vera’s novels and Infante’s poems. I talked about Vera’s son Julián and the obsessive love she’d lavished upon him.
After dinner, Daniel lit a few candles, and their fragile light shone on the place I was occupying, the armchair on the terrace.
Soon I went back to my reading, with Arthur lying by my side.
I was sailing on an ocean. I wanted to get a look at its floor, at the scrap scattered down there, at the substratum that underlay the vast, ungraspable, and somehow artificial sea constituted by Infante’s words. I’d read a stretch and stop and wonder, why did he send me this long manuscript? What sense did it make that I should be the repository of secrets, things kept in confidence for so many years?
There had to be something more.
It was late in the night when I got into the bed I shared with Daniel and nestled against his body. The person who was there, clutching his shoulders, wasn’t me, but then again it was. He wrapped both his legs around one of mine and kept on sleeping.
I wondered if that was how people felt when they said they were happy.
When I woke up, Daniel was almost finished dressing and about to leave. He had a meeting with an investor who’d shown some interest in joining him in the Transatlantic adventure. Daniel had dressed himself with care. A blue-and-white-striped shirt and a well-ironed pair of black trousers. His hair was damp and combed back. His facial features showed in all their splendor, naked and firm. He raised his eyes and met mine as they were watching him. He took my hand and explored my palm with his fingertips.
I had isolated myself from everything, imagining that my own interior silence would be where I’d find real life. Now I was learning that I could go there and come back, and that this entering and exiting, this in and out, was a kind of freedom.
“You’ve never looked at me like that, Emilia.”
“Like how?” I knew what he meant. For the first time, I had got a glimpse of his disturbing beauty. And I felt neither rejection nor fear. Because what I knew was still there, under that male carapace.
“Like this.” He focused his pupils on the bridge of his nose, making himself look cross-eyed. We both laughed. A tingling sensation ran up and down my spine.
After Daniel left, I took a bath.
I felt the weight of the water on my skin. I stretched out one leg, as though disentangling a ball of wool. My arms too, which I made circles in the air with, like two blades of a lazy fan. My breasts, two little animals, poked out into the semidarkness. When I pressed them, my nipples opened their eyelids. I submerged my head and listened to the hum. In the silence, someone or something was being born.
How could I feel so good if, for the first time, I was going forward without any certainties, without the boundaries that had protected me?
Daniel had left a tray on the kitchen table with everything laid out for my breakfast. I sat on the terrace under the white canopy and continued reading Infante’s manuscript.