Three Messages and a Warning (20 page)

The fates’ thread wastes no metal.

I discovered it last night,

in the umbrarium

made of aromas,

of shirts turned inside out.

Generous thread of time, traveler

your destiny is Life, future or past

I saw in that false laudanum dream

what Dante’s delirium never envisioned

not the vast inferno

but my secret desires

with their entrails exposed

the solitude of that familiar house

—at midnight, the candle and I—

my young sex in the lake, the trees

I saw my father . . .

You’ll realize the intent of the poem. You read somewhere that it was “speculative fiction in verse,” but in its presence, its unraveled seams, its scent—an eternal scent of lime and dusty perfume—you knew immediately that it was a recipe, a set of instructions. For some reason you remembered those old books of witchcraft (“legs of a spider, dragon’s tail”), a set of precise instructions, though with uncertain results.

In this way you’ll know there were tailors who after buttoning their shirts backward were able to drink tea in their childhood homes, and women who while folding socks witnessed the revival of an empire. As usual, you were afraid of confusing life with a book, and the mere possibility that all these things might come true tightened your chest. “Is this true?” you’ll ask yourself, with the naivete of someone who’s never read a lie, your hand pressed to your brow. You’ll blend in the air his name and a hollow sigh. You looked in the mirror, yearning for it to be him looking back. You laughed at the idea, just so that you wouldn’t feel completely crazy.

You arrived at the last group of verses. The delicate down at the nape of your neck will stand on end in a feline gesture; a shiver ran through your body a few lines ahead. In the last poem, you’ll find what you were searching for:

Song for a Future Nereid (page 42)

Sorrowful notion,

I wanted to see what was to come;

in this blind faith of mine for the future

I saw the ashen destiny of my house

porcelain stained by banquets of mud.

I saw Montealegre street crowded with small trains,

lights all incomprehensible.

And I saw you.

returning nereid, close and Apollonian

I saw you moving

inhabiting the air with goodness and grace

You carried in your body something I had lost

Light clear as jewels caught in your hair

Somebody called you Nerissa

(Nerissa, like you, like that afternoon, and the street, and Ricardo.)

and in the simple consonance of your name

I understood it was you I had lost and recovered.

Return, future nereid

find out our plot

its invisible trail of scents and sundials.

Walk without fear

for one thing is certain:

the umbrarium already awaits the hour

when it will harbor us again.

You thought of burning the book like they burned books of sorcery in the old days; unsettled, struggling between panic and wonder, you’ll crawl into a corner of the bed. There can’t be any doubt: it’s you.

Either the book was telling you about yourself, or you’re mad.

What blessed blindness will make you decide for the former?

Half-dressed you’ll arrive at Ricardo’s; he’ll say, “I’m glad you’re here, though the hour is a little odd.”

You took out the book, inventing stupid excuses: “I have a report to write, due tomorrow, and I need this book to finish it.”

Where to go? Which station do all these impossible trains leave from? You’re well accustomed to stories where there’s a giant machine with calendars and levers and buttons that don’t make any sense. But you’ll be astute: you’ve noticed that such stories always have less science and more sorcery. You’ll resolve that the place where the witches are safest is in your own house, and you returned to this refuge, soliciting companionship from a stray cat, just in case.

You’ll review again and again the pages of the volumes written by Pascal Marsias, the touchscreen tarnishing with the sleek marks of your fingers; you’ll search again and again each class of formulas (botanical, mathematical, mechanical) for going back in time: none is useful for bringing him to you. You’ll touch the sensitive outline of your lips, knowing you’re loved across some kind of interval. You wept for the cruel condition of your love, your human insignificance. And at that moment, true gratitude, a true sympathy with all the variety of life took form in your bones, your flesh, your scent. And it was then that followed a victory for all lovers: you got up, brushed away tears on the way to the desk where rested your notebook and plume, and you’ll begin to inscribe:

Dancers have the code in the movement of their bodies, birds in magnetizing the air with their beaks. Me? It’s not only a question of knowing the method. To discover it, one must know who one is. Who are you, Nerissa?

In your mind there arrived in a mob the answers given over centuries, in pages and pages, but which will cost you only one of your own.

Who am I?

On the paper the ink began to flow like thick, black blood. Brilliantly and definitively you’ll write:

I am Nerissa. I swim and I read. I believe in the impossible worlds imagined by people, in the tacit truth of books, the life of the stories. With greater strength I believe it now that I feel myself a part of a story. I am Nerissa, I am the future nereid. And Pascal Marsias made possible the world necessary for me to live. I write these lines in order for the words and my body to shape the precise machine . . .

Here you’ll stop, as with the corner of your eye you perceived some movement. You didn’t notice when all the shadows of the world shifted to the opposite side, but the tingling in your belly made you continue.

I want to reach for him, towards the only moment I hope for. I know it’s possible because I’ve already succeeded, in some skein of the time his travels have made . . .

Your mirror will reflect other walls, other light; you sighted immense folios and a roof woven with vines that release sweet, earthy odors; you avoided movement for fear of undoing what you’d done
 . . .

because he, Pascal Marsias, has seen me in the umbrarium.

And as the vertigo of Time throws you into its abyssal current, I, Pascal Marsias, leave to one side the quill and the manuscript of your story, for I see you appear in front of me, beloved Nerissa, here, in the umbrarium.

“Future Nereid” recounts the love of Nerissa for a forgotten, eccentric author who studies forms of travel through time. It is a story of books and characters generated, in their time, by other books and characters. The first is Henri de Campion, who lived in France in the seventeenth century and of whom Michel Tournier wrote in
The Flight of the Vampire,
producing a man outside of time deeply lamenting the death of his little girl. The second is Els Bri, a character from the story “Quality and Strength” by the Gallician Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín. Els is an invention of the Eastern writer Seida Sokoara who manages to regain life several centuries after his death. So in reality, it could be said that “Future Nereid” is a love letter to these books and their authors.

Gabriela Damián Miravete

The man stopped near the shelves under a faint ray of light coming through a small window in the upper part of the warehouse. Now she could get a better look at him. He wasn’t so old, in his twenties, but his beard grew wildly and his skin was badly sunburned. He wore a military cap that covered his black hair, except for a few tangles. For a second, Avellaneda remembered the portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos in her best friend’s house. She had cried for all her family and all the people gone. In some cases, she saw their dead bodies. In others, as weeks turned into months, she became certain of their fate. Even so, remembering the portrait of the Cuban revolutionary and her friend made her eyes teary.

Maybe she moaned when she cried, or he felt her eyes upon him. The man suddenly turned and saw her. Avellaneda couldn’t guess what he was feeling. His face didn’t turn red, but rather pale. Even though she was the one who was frightened, the man took out his knife and held it in front of him. Avellaneda noticed a slight tremble in his badly scarred arm. She barely managed to raise her hands to show him that she wasn’t a threat.

“I’m not armed.”

“Come out and show yourself,” he ordered firmly but gently.

He patted her down and then slipped the knife back into its sheath, made of a thick fabric. Avellaneda turned her head toward the shelves. He followed her. If he was going to kill her, he would’ve already done it, she thought. It wasn’t a good idea to stay in the open part of the warehouse. For a long time no one had come in, but the streets were now more dangerous than ever. With food production halted, the world economy came to a halt. Money was useless without food to purchase. Force was the only law. After looting, pets and stray animals were the first targets. Of course, wild animals were fair game for those with guns and hunting expertise. In coastal cities, the sea was still full of life, but starving city dwellers lacked fishery technology and organization, and they ended up destroying boats and fishing equipment. What followed was cannibalism and subsistence farming, always threatened by thieves.