Three Messages and a Warning (14 page)

Later, kneeling down, you cleared away the weeds and garbage with your hands. It seemed as if you were someone other than yourself. You did not stop until you had cleared away a semicircle in the middle of the snail-like plaza and your hands were bleeding. You were running away from something. On that occasion there were no good-byes. After that day I did not see your eyes again for three weeks. The plaza exuded sadness, and my melancholy scared away the birds, which preferred to abandon their fragile nests to fate.

You were limping upon your return. The ornamental comb no longer held back the messy hair on your head. We conversed, and you confessed that a strange force was taking hold of you: voices that insulted you, resounding in echoes, people who appeared in your bedroom, taunting you. In an effort to escape it all, you tumbled down the stairs of your house, injuring yourself. You lost your employment. At times you misunderstood Francisco. You suspected that he remained by your side out of pity; although his eyes revealed that he loved you. You imagined that you were, and always would be, a burden to anyone around you: a manic-depressive disaster.

I recall the precise moment when the solution crystallized in your mind. The sky absorbed the blue glow of your eyes. Your preparation was meticulous: a semicircle in the plaza was cleared away; seabirds adorned the grass close to the place destined for something special. On the day of your departure your eyes were flooded with tears. You wore the orange dress that so pleased Francisco, revealing your body’s promises, and you embraced me, but the brilliance of your gaze was soon extinguished as the horizon announced the sunset.

The sculpture arose the next day in the semicircle. The woman’s body was identical to yours, but two heads emerged from the torso, neither similar to yours. Others failed to perceive your presence in the statue. But I did. And so did Francisco. He drew near and stared attentively at you. He slowly extended his right arm to touch you with his hand, as he was accustomed to doing. Gradually, he too turned to stone.

This old oak tree that I am has learned much of human hearts.

The evening light stained the white wall orange. It was like a bare double headboard for the two beds, one of which she was occupying. She grabbed the hand towel and climbed on a chair to wipe the dust from the wall’s surface. Dusk was falling. She would have liked to have excused herself from dinner and uncapped each little jar to play with the different hues. Forget the table and social niceties and have them bring her a sandwich—or not bring her anything, just a beer would do. Breakfast would come soon enough. But she didn’t want them insisting that she’d get sick if she didn’t eat. She didn’t feel like explaining herself, wanted to savor her solitude.

So she sat back down on the edge of the bed, her eyes focused on that immense white space, an indifferent space, cold, oblivious to the way she was mentally distributing designs across its surface. She felt an urgency she hadn’t felt in years, an agitation at starting a new project that in the past had enthralled her when creating set designs for university stage productions or when she designed a banquet for a group of lawyers (which at first she’d thought would be so boring) or when she’d helped a friend with a display for her shop windows.

She hardly tasted the guajillo-spiced enchiladas. She didn’t eat much and drank some coffee, staving off the torpor of a full stomach being lulled to sleep by a fan. “Good night,” she said abruptly and didn’t stay to chat with her daughter after dinner the way she had the first few nights, when the room had filled with confidences, sorrows, shared memories, and her daughter’s ineffectual consolations: “You look great,” “You don’t look at all your age,” “There’s so much still for you to do,” “Enjoy yourself, go out with your friends.”

She slid back the screen door to enter her room and then shut it again to keep out the swarm of mosquitoes that thronged beneath the hall light and would, if they discovered another light on inside, rush to loiter in its glow. She pulled the curtains closed on the melancholy gazes of the frogs who clung with sticky feet to the windowpane. Now shielded against reptile incursions and interruptions by family members, she put the lamp on a chair in the middle of the room, changed out of her linen blouse into a loose T-shirt, and started decorating the wall.

She began tracing the forms in charcoal. A great arch in the foreground, like an ogival window set in thick walls, on whose sill she sketched a bowl of fruit. In the background she drew the curving line of the horizon, which ended abruptly at a cliff with a solitary tree, its trunk twisted and rough. She didn’t dare outline a square or rectangle to frame the image, because the arch itself was a window that extended the room and the only boundary should be the wall itself, which was simultaneously a window looking out on a different landscape and a wall enclosing the room.

She woke up late. Her daughter was already on her second cup of coffee and the children were darting around half-naked beside the sprinkler watering the yard. Her son-in-law was nowhere to be seen; he’d been out taking care of the ranch for hours. Lucrecia was worried about her: “Did you sleep all right? Is anything wrong?” But her mother’s quiet expression and the appetite with which she consumed her scrambled eggs made it clear that she was in perfect health.

“You’ve started painting,” her daughter guessed.

She spent the day looking at her grandchildren, accompanying Lucrecia to the market, watching the distant gray-blue river flow in the midday lethargy, while beer and conversation made the heat a little more bearable. She didn’t talk much, observing another family’s scenes as if she were attending a play. She waited for that dark hour to arrive that belonged to her alone. At lunchtime her son-in-law proclaimed her “much better, almost like before.” Then she remembered. Like someone engrossed in a task who is brought abruptly back to reality by a sudden noise: her son-in-law’s words reminded her of her forgotten mourning. She smiled in response. And Lucrecia explained, “It’s because she’s painting now.”

He looked kindly at his mother-in-law, her hair undyed and sticky, her eyes shining.

“Can we see?”

“No, not yet.”

That night she started on the color, tenuous hints of color: faint beige on the wall, dry green on the plain, a cindery sky above the horizon, palest ochre on the rinds of the oranges in the bowl. She stopped because the light of the lamp she was using to illuminate the painting made her eyes tired and irritated, and because, naked except for her T-shirt, she began to feel the cold of dawn on her bare legs.

Next morning, Lucrecia had left early for the market. A plate of fruit and a little cheese with bread and jam were waiting for her on the dining-room table. She reheated the coffee and ate alone, the silent flow of the river in the distance and red flowers scattered across the tender green of the flame trees. She contemplated that wild green, so unlike the green of her painting, which was parched and ancient, Mediterranean, like whitewashed walls and Valencia oranges. She hadn’t willfully rejected the lush, unruly landscape of the jungle, but when she leaned out her painted window, her eyes surveyed a landscape that brought her peace, as if it belonged to her, as if at some point she had reclined on that windowsill before the simplicity of that landscape, with an olive tree as a witness and a bowl of fruit, lost in time, in any time at all.

She was grateful for the silence reigning in the house, for the fact that they were all gone, so she could take refuge in the landscape there in her room, through the arched window, unsettlingly close. At three in the afternoon, they tapped on the windowpane of the guestroom, summoning her to lunch, and seemed to have grown accustomed to her voluntary exile.

The maid took the opportunity to tidy the room and mopped hastily, trying not to stare at the wall, dizzy and disoriented, uncertain whether she was here or there. She whispered something to the cook, who sneaked in when everyone was eating to see what had so upset the maid. She, too, had to lean on the chair for support, while the room grew incomprehensibly large.

That afternoon, Lucrecia insisted she let her see the painting, said that if she didn’t, she wasn’t going to let her shut herself away anymore. Besides, she said, she’d commissioned the work herself and had a right to approve it. Her mother had no choice but to let her in. Lucrecia stood undaunted before the looming arch and the olive tree in the background. She felt the waxy rind of the oranges so close that she almost tried to pick up the one lying there on the sill and set it with the others in the bowl. The room had been transformed into another place altogether. It couldn’t be called the guestroom anymore. Deeply moved, Lucrecia left.

The heat was brutal that night and the widow didn’t go to dinner. The maid brought her a sandwich, a beer, and—Señora Lucrecia’s orders—a thermos of hot coffee. Her hair damp with sweat and her sundress stained with moisture from her armpits to her waist, she undressed in a frenzy, eager to give the fruit bowl the whiteness that would transform it into porcelain and differentiate it from the powdery texture of the wall. Still dissatisfied, she placed a white lace napkin under the fruit bowl: porcelain on cloth, cloth on whitewash. Outside, the green and the old olive tree. Inside, the oily scent of orange rinds. Sweat trickled down her torso and seeped beneath the elastic band of her underwear to her pubis. She removed the last impediment and breathed deeply.

Near midday, Lucrecia slid open the screen door of her mother’s room, opened the curtains wide, and called to her, apprehensive. Not a trace of her mother, except on the path to the olive tree.