DURING THE DAYS leading up to the Feast of San José – the saint who, according to my mother, had saved me when I’d been on the verge of dying from the gunshots – the ladies in charge of his worship at church would come to the house.

And so one morning in March three elderly campesinas, in clothes so ragged they resembled patchwork, knocked on the door. Grizzled, lame, and pockmarked, they smiled at me toothlessly when I opened the door, and my impulse was to shut it.

The skinniest one had a hanging lip; the prettiest was cross-eyed; the least old had large hands like baseball mitts. Trying to be likeable, all three produced forced smiles so grim I wished they’d remained solemn.

The squint-eyed one asked me if my mother was home, in a voice so soft it seemed to come from some other person or be thrown by a ventriloquist. When I answered yes, she said they wanted to see her, so I went to the garden and called my mother. She took fright at the sight of them, asking right away what they wanted. To which the skinny one replied, as if a young woman were speaking with her tongue and blushing in her ears, that they wanted to sing at the Feast of San José, a proposal that made my mother think that if their voices were as off key as their bodies were bent over and their faces grotesque, they would scare everyone off. Nonetheless, she asked them to sing her a devout song. And they did so with such enthusiasm that the stiffness of their features began, as they sang, to relax, the roughness of their faces to soften, and their eyes to shine so brightly that they seemed to become young again before us. As if the joy that burst from their mouths lightened their bodies and poured out their souls with their voices.

Amid the flowerpots and the plants, the three women, sunlit in the corridor and singing in unison, personified ugliness transformed into song. As if by optical illusion, or a reversal of reality occasioned by solar flares, they were now the Furies, now the Graces.

That March afternoon, my mother, her hands floured, was about to put some cookies into the oven when my father came into the kitchen and asked me to take a walk with him. It was a Wednesday, meaning the store was closed. A cage hung on the wall; inside shivered a goldfinch with wet wings. Beside the cage dangled a string bag of eggs. The sun coming through the window was like a brilliant yolk and its rays whitened the table legs and the brick floor.

Before we headed out, my mother slipped a piece of Ojo de Agua cheese into my mouth with a hand smelling of vanilla.

But as I watched her hand withdraw to pour milk into a copper pot, I noticed wrinkles on the back. I quickly sought my father’s hands for comparison, and studying them, I perceived the passage of time … And perhaps to drive away that image of their old age and death, I shook the goldfinch’s cage. The bird, its wings stiff, clung to a wire and did not move.

Outside the kitchen, swallows that had built nests on top of the hanging lamps in the corridor swooped overhead. Their wheeling seemed to celebrate the sun-filled instant; perched on the roof tiles they throbbed on their little feet, like tremulous hearts about to leap into the air.

Around the square, similar to a sleeping fence, the houses and the stores were closed eyes; and, confronted by the dearth of activity they manifested, I felt that my body was a covered pot with water boiling inside.

Seated on a bench two old campesinos, boozy and bewhiskered, wrapped in ponchos with their foreheads hidden by hats, sang with more rage than rhythm:

Get out of here, my father, more than a lion I am fierce,

We wouldn’t want my dagger your only heart to pierce.

—Son of my heart, for what you’ve just spoken,

ere the sun rises, your life will be taken.

Strolling along the empty road that led to the fields, my father and I seemed very close, though we didn’t speak; our faces were illuminated by the sunlight, our bodies cast long shadows.

My father’s kindly rhythm kept in step with my silence so well that seeing his eyes beam with happiness, I felt that neither time nor death could destroy him.

Although I wanted to say, “Father, don’t go.”

But I didn’t, realizing it would mean nothing to him, because he was physically present and had no intention of going, so the words merely sprouted from my thoughts.

A vulture glided over the ash tree, descending lower with each gyre, until it turned into a black claw and plunged into the magueys like a shadow. Right afterward it rose again, dead flesh clutched in its crooked talons, and circled above as if watching us, until it flew off towards the village and over the houses.

The sun was setting and a bluish light, as if spiritualized, conferred on the present an aura of absence and time past, as though my father and I were trudging yesteryear among the fig trees.

Many figs had fallen to the ground when the branches were shaken by rain and wind.

Apples and peaches were rotting in the mud. Quinces and sapodillas exposed their flesh, pits, and skins. As we stepped on them, leaves released water like sponges or tore soundlessly like damp paper.

A quantity of ripe fruits had blended into a single burst of fruit. The sun drank their juices and warmed them in the mud.

Voices traveled alone over the telephone, orphans in the night, detached from their faces.

At this end of the line, in Contepec, my father tried to find words to describe forty years of separation in a few minutes.

At the other end, in Brussels, his younger brother was heard, his voice altered.

And the two voices, made of time, asked and answered, intertwined and fell apart in the air.

When the telephone had rung my brother had said to my father, “It’s for you.”

And my father heard the voice of his brother, unseen for decades, who addressed him in Greek from the disembodied past:

“Nicias?”

And he, with a tired, older voice, and in Spanish, replied from the present, “Yes.”

His brother had begun to speak to him in Greek, but unable to articulate a single word, my father remained mute thanks to four decades of distance and a life elsewhere; and because Spanish had smothered the language of his childhood.

For the voice at the other end of the line was emerging from somewhere lost, from something irretrievable. It was like the voice of a photograph speaking, an old photograph; the voice of a phantom speaking from long ago. Without present, without future, only causing pain.

Perhaps this was why my father repeated in Spanish, “Yes, it’s me.”

As if he needed to emphasize that he wasn’t another, that he wasn’t the ghost of the one who was born and raised in a town east of Smyrna.

And so, like two transfigured people who no longer speak their common family language, they began with some effort to converse in French. And their voices suffered not only from crossing the ocean but also from the impossibility of being the people they were when they were separated.

It didn’t matter whether they updated each other on their current lives. Whether they were gray-haired, wrinkled, or bald; how many children they had; whether they were poor or rich; happy or sick. During the conversation their parents’ faces, their own childhood faces, the room where they used to play passed before their eyes like specters.

But despite my father’s ignorance of the language through which they recognized each other, they painfully found a single voice, calm, weathered, fraternal, like the voice of those who accept their death, knowing that no matter what they do they will die: be they together or apart, be they rich or poor. A voice without a face, orphaned in time, condemned to suffering, a voice that accepted its human destiny.

One Sunday afternoon, during a screening of the Cantinflas movie “Seven Machos” in my father’s theater, I was feeling forlorn in the midst of the audience, which was mainly composed of campesinos, young couples, and children. What set me apart from them was the knowledge that my father would travel to Mexico City late that night without me, for I had a bad cold and it wasn’t advisable to be outside in the early hours.

All of a sudden in the darkened hall, amid heads turned towards the screen, I remembered the things I’d been planning to do in the capital when my father promised to take me. But while I was remembering, the symptoms of my cold made those earlier days seem unreal, and erased the image of me walking along the city streets.

The darkness became overwhelming and I felt all alone in the audience, like a creature that belonged to another species. Not laughing when they laughed, not getting excited when they did, on the verge of crying, I stood up and left the movie theater.

I shut myself up in the dining room to write. So much silence of empty rooms surrounded me that I imagined I heard footsteps and doors creaking open, although no one was there.

Alone with my notebook, struggling to put what was happening to me into words, after several forced attempts where the atmosphere of my father’s trip was more intense than my concentration to write, I laid down my pencil.

The cold I longed to banish made me cry; it was worse than before, keeping me somewhere between nothingness and lucidity, so that I saw the colors in the room more sharply but they were opaque.

Finally I went to bed, hoping sleep would make me better, perhaps even well enough to travel in the early hours.

And so it was that I took up the solitary battle against the cold. I resented every moment of malaise, of weakening in my body, of headache, as if it were a defeat of my very self, and a humiliation.

When he left the movie theater my father came to see me. Without turning on the light he asked how I was. And he knew that, although I answered “fine,” my voice said the opposite, for I heard him tell my mother, “Make him some tea, he’s very sick.”

From that moment onwards, my struggle against the cold resumed in a desperate but doomed fashion. I had to drive it out of me before one in the morning.

The darkness of the room, my wish to travel, and the knowledge that my father was leaving got mixed up with the sweat, sneezes, and tears. Each time I awoke I felt worse than before.

So when the church clock struck one and my father turned on the light in his room, I realized I had to give up the fight to go with him. Passing by my window, and knowing I wasn’t asleep and could hear him, he said, “I’ll take you next time. I’m going again in two weeks. Go to sleep.”

His steps then faded in the corridor and I heard him close the street door.

Then the sound of an engine filled my room. When I heard it I felt like getting up, dressing, and running after him, yelling that I was fine and could go to Mexico City.

But between the tears from my cold and my frustration, soon all I heard was dogs barking.