While the Women are Sleeping (8 page)

(1989)

a kind of nostalgia perhaps

It is quite possible that the main aim of ghosts, if they still exist, is to thwart the desires of mortal tenants, appearing if their presence is unwelcome and hiding away if it is expected or demanded. There have, however, been instances of pacts made between ghosts and mortals, as we know from various documents collected by Lord Halifax and Lord Rymer in England and by Don Alejandro de la Cruz in Mexico.

One of the most modest and touching of these cases is that of an old lady living in Veracruz, around 1920, when she was not an old lady, but a young girl who knew nothing of such visitations and waitings
—
or are they perhaps a kind of nostalgia? In her youth, this old lady had been the companion of a wealthy widow of advancing years, to whom, among other services rendered, she used to read in order to ease the tedium of her mistress’s lack of visible needs and preoccupations, and of a premature widowhood for which there was no remedy: for, according to people in that port city, Señora Suárez Alday had suffered the occasional illicit disappointment in love after her brief marriage, and it was probably this—rather than the death of her slightly or entirely unmemorable husband—that had made her seem curt and withdrawn at an age when such characteristics in a woman are no longer considered intriguing or charming or a fit topic for teasing. Boredom made her so lazy that she was barely able to read by herself, in silence and alone, so she had her companion read out loud to her details of affairs and feelings which, with each day that passed—and they passed very quickly and monotonously—seemed more and more alien to that house. The lady always listened very intently, utterly absorbed, and only occasionally asked her companion (Elena Vera by name) to repeat a passage or a piece of dialogue to which she did not wish to bid farewell forever without, first, making some attempt to hold on to it. When Elena finished reading, her only remark was: ‘Elena, you have a lovely voice. You will find love with that voice.’

And it was during these sessions that the ghost of the house first made his appearance. Every evening, while Elena was speaking the words of Cervantes or Dumas or Conan Doyle, or verses by Dario or Martí, she could just make out the figure of a young man of somewhat rustic appearance, a man of about thirty or so, who politely removed his broad-brimmed hat and whose perfectly decent clothes were, nevertheless, full of holes, as if he, or, rather, the short jacket, white shirt and tight trousers that clothed his absent body, had been riddled with bullets. The latter, however, seemed quite unscathed, and his face, barricaded behind a bushy moustache, had a healthy glow. The first time she saw him standing there—leaning his elbows on the back of the chair occupied by her mistress, occasionally playing with the hat he held in his hand, as if listening, rapt, to the words she was reading—she almost cried out with fright, especially when she saw that, although he wasn’t carrying any weapons, he did have a cartridge belt slung across his chest. But the young man immediately raised one finger to his lips and made reassuring signs to Elena, indicating that she should continue and not betray his presence. He had a very inoffensive face, and there was in his mocking eyes a constant, shy smile that occasionally gave way, during certain sombre passages—or perhaps when he was assailed by thoughts or memories of his own—to the alarmed, naive seriousness of someone who cannot quite distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. And so the young woman obeyed, although that first day, she could not help but keep glancing up rather too frequently and staring at a point above the bun on her mistress’s head, so much so that Señora Suárez Alday also kept glancing anxiously up, as if wondering whether some hypothetical hat were awry or whether her halo were not quite bright enough. ‘Whatever’s wrong, child?’ she said, somewhat annoyed. ‘What do you keep looking at?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Elena Vera, ‘it’s just a way of resting my eyes before going back to the text. Reading for such a long time is tiring.’ The young man with the scarf about his neck nodded and raised his hat for a moment in a gesture of approval and gratitude, and her explanation meant that the young woman could thereafter continue the habit and thus at least satisfy her visual curiosity. For, from then on, evening after evening and with very few exceptions, she read for her mistress and for him, without the former ever once turning round or discovering the young man’s intrusive presence.

He did not appear at any other moment, so Elena never had the opportunity, over the years, of speaking to him or asking who he was or had been or why he was listening to her. She considered the possibility that he might have been the cause of the disappointment in love suffered by her mistress at some time in the past, but her lady never offered any confidences, despite the promptings of all those sentimental or tragic pages read out loud and despite the hints dropped by Elena herself during the slow, nocturnal conversations of half a lifetime. Perhaps the local rumours were false and the lady had no adventures worth telling, which was why she enjoyed hearing about the most remote and foreign and improbable of tales. On more than one occasion, Elena was tempted to take pity on her and tell her what was going on each evening behind her back, to allow her to share this small daily excitement, to tell her of the existence of a man between those ever more asexual, taciturn walls in which there was only the echo, sometimes for whole nights and days together, of their female voices, the lady’s grown ever older and more confused, and Elena’s, each morning, a little weaker and fainter, a little less lovely, a voice that, contrary to her mistress’s predictions, had not brought her love, not at least of the permanent, tangible kind. But whenever she was about to give in to that temptation, she would suddenly remember the young man’s discreet, authoritative gesture—one finger on his lips, repeated now and then with a slightly teasing look in his eyes—and so she kept silent. The last thing she wanted was to make him angry. Perhaps ghosts got as bored as widows did.

One day, Elena noticed a sudden change in the expression on the face of that man, half-peasant, half-soldier, with the holes in his clothes which she always felt an impulse to sew up, so that the night chill from the sea air would not slip through them. Señora Suárez Alday’s health began to decline, and a few days before her death (although no one knew then that she would die so soon) she asked Elena to read from the Gospels rather than from novels or poems. Elena did as she requested and noticed that whenever she pronounced the name ‘Jesus’
—
which was often—the man would grimace in pain or sorrow, as if the very name hurt him. By the tenth or eleventh time, the pain must have become unbearable, because his always rather diffuse, but nonetheless perfectly distinguishable body grew gradually more and more tenuous until it disappeared altogether, long before she had concluded her reading session. Elena wondered if the man had been an atheist, an enemy of official religions. To clarify this, she insisted, a couple of days later, on reading her mistress a novel much praised by the critics,
Enriquillo
, by the Dominican author Manuel de Jesus Galván. And before beginning her reading, she spoke a little to her mistress about the novelist, making a point of saying his whole name and never just his surname; and she saw that whenever she pronounced the name ‘Jesus’, her visitor shrank back and his eyes shone with a mixture of fury and fear. Elena came to suspect something that had, for a long time, seemed unimaginable, and as she read the book, she invented a very brief dialogue, in which she had Enriquillo address an inferior in these terms: ‘Hey, you, Jesus,
guajiro
.’ The ghost covered his eyes in terror for a moment, utterly shaken. Elena did not insist and the man regained his composure.

Elena kept back her final test for another three days. Her mistress was growing weaker, but she nonetheless refused to stay in bed and sat in her armchair as if that sign of health would be a safeguard against death. And Elena expressed an interest in
The Travels of Marco Polo
, or so she said, because, in fact, what really interested her was the prologue and the biographical note about the traveller. She introduced a few words of her own, saying: ‘This great adventurer travelled to China and to Mecca, among other places.’ She stopped, and feigning surprise, added: ‘Imagine that, Señora, what a long journey, all the way to China and to Mecca.’ The man’s tanned weather-beaten face turned deathly pale and, at the same time and without transition, how can we put it, his entire figure abruptly vanished, as if that ashen pallor had erased him from the air, made him transparent, a nothing, invisible even to her. And then she was sure that the man was Emiliano Zapata, murdered in his thirties by the treachery of a supposed
zapatista
called Jesus Guajardo, in a place called Chinameca, or so the legend goes. And she felt very honoured to think that she was being visited by the ghost of Zapata, his clothes still full of the holes made by those treacherous bullets.

Her mistress died the next morning. Elena stayed on in the house, and for a few days, saddened and disoriented, with no reason to continue, she stopped reading. The young man did not appear. And then, convinced that Zapata wanted to have the education he had doubtless lacked in life, and persuaded by the idea that in his lifetime he had suffered from an excess of reality and for that reason, after death, wished to find repose in fictions, but also fearful that this was not the case and that his presence had somehow been mysteriously linked to the old lady—a love affair with Zapata required more secrecy than any other, a secret that would have to be kept forever—she decided to go back to reading out loud in order to call him back, and she read not only novels and poetry, but books on history and the natural sciences. The young man took some time to reappear—perhaps ghosts go into mourning, for who else has more reason to or perhaps they are still wary, perhaps words can still wound them—but he did finally return, attracted perhaps by the new material, and he continued to listen with the same close attention, not standing up this time, leaning on the chair back, but comfortably installed in the now vacant armchair, his hat dangling from his hand, and sometimes with his legs crossed and holding a lit cigar, like the patriarch he never, in his numbered days, had had the chance to become.

The young woman, who was growing older, jealously guarded her secret and spoke ever more confidingly to him, but never received a reply: ghosts cannot always speak nor do they always want to. And as that one-sided intimacy grew, so the years passed, and she was always careful not to mention the name ‘Jesus’ again in any context and to avoid any words that resembled ‘
guajiro
or ‘Guajardo’ and to exclude forever from her readings any references to China or Mecca. Then one day, the man failed to appear, nor did he in the days and weeks that followed. The young woman, who was now almost old herself, was worried at first like a mother, fearing that some grave accident or misfortune might have befallen him, not realising that such things only happen to mortals, that those who are no longer mortal are quite safe. When she understood this, her worry turned to despair: evening after evening, she would stare at the empty armchair and curse the silence, she would ask sorrowful questions of the void, hurl reproaches into the invisible air, and curse the past to which she feared he had returned; she wondered what mistake or error she could have made and searched eagerly for new texts that might arouse the
guerrilleros
curiosity and make him come back—new topics and new novels, new adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for she put more faith in Conan Doyle’s narrative skills than in any other scientific or literary bait. She continued to read out loud every day, to see if he would come.

One evening, after months of desolation, she found that the bookmark she had left in the Dickens novel she was patiently reading to him in his absence was not where she had left it, but many pages ahead. She carefully read the pages he had marked, and then, bitterly, she understood, experiencing the disappointment that comes in every life, however quiet and recondite. There was a sentence in the text that said: ‘And she grew old and lined, and her cracked voice was no longer pleasing to him.’ Don Alejandro de la Cruz says that the old lady became as indignant as a rejected wife, and that, far from accepting this judgement and falling silent, she reproached the void thus: ‘You are most unfair, but in life, so they say, you always tried to be scrupulously fair. You do not grow old, and want to listen to pleasant youthful voices, and to contemplate firm luminous faces. I can understand that; you’re young and always will be, and you may not have had much time, and many things escaped you. But I have educated and amused you for years; and if, thanks to me, you have learned much, possibly even how to read, it hardly seems right that you should leave me offensive messages in the very books I have shared with you. Bear in mind that when the old lady died, I could easily have read in silence, but I didn’t. I could have left Veracruz, but I didn’t. I know that you can go in search of other voices, nothing binds you to me and it’s true that you’ve never asked me for anything—you owe me nothing. But if you have any notion of gratitude, Emiliano,’ and this was the first time she called him by his name, still not knowing if anyone was listening, ‘I ask you to come at least once a week and to have patience with my voice, which is no longer a beautiful voice and no longer pleases you, and now will never bring me love. I will try hard to read as well as I can. But do come, because now that I’m old, I need you to amuse and keep me company. I would miss seeing you and your bullet-riddled clothes. Poor Emiliano,’ she added more calmly, all those bullets.’

According to the scholarly Don Alejandro de la Cruz, the ghost of that rustic man and eternal soldier, who may have been Zapata, was not entirely lacking in sympathy. He accepted her reasoning or felt that he owed her a debt of gratitude: and from then until her death, Elena Vera awaited with excitement and impatience the arrival of the day chosen by her impalpable, silent love to return—from the past, from a time in which, in fact, neither past nor time existed—the arrival of each Wednesday, when he was perhaps coming back from Chinameca, murdered, sad, exhausted. And it is thought that those visits, that that listener and their pact, all kept her alive for many more years, in that city facing the sea, because with him she still had a past and a present and a future too—or perhaps they too are a kind of nostalgia.