A Strange Country Page 4
“Which is why bridges are so important,” he said. “And please bear in mind that it is not up there. Elves do not live in the sky. It’s crowded enough up there as it is.”
“Do you mean with angels?” said Jesús. “Have you ever seen any?”
Petrus smiled, amused.
“The only traffic jams in the sky are those of the sky’s own fictions,” he said.
He took a swallow of amarone and let out a long sigh.
“This is the best I’ve ever drunk,” he said, “And under these favorable auspices, I will begin at the beginning.”
Jesús laughed.
“Now that I know there are no angels in the heavens,” he said, “you can begin wherever you like.”
“Ah, but there are angels on this earth,” said Petrus.
He caressed his glass lovingly.
“The bridge that connects the world of mists to the world of humans leaves from a sacred place on our earth we call the Pavilion of the Mists. By order of the guardian of the pavilion, the bridge makes it possible to reach any point on the earth of humankind. Its arch is shrouded in thick mist, in which the traveler immerses himself, the guardian fulfills his task, and the voyager finds himself where he wanted to be. Elves can come and go as they see fit, but this has always been impossible for humans. However, a few days ago, four of them crossed over for the first time.”
He poured another round of amarone.
“There is a war on now. You know all about it: the fronts are endless, the battles, too, and no one seems able to carry the day. The Confederation, who were on the verge of victory two years ago, have now become bogged down in absurd tactics. As for the League, they have been worn down by the length of the conflict and the deadly violence of the cataclysms.”
“Tell us about these cataclysms,” said Alejandro.
“Elves cannot fight in your world,” said Petrus. “Rather, to be more precise, they lose most of their own powers there, and it becomes impossible for them to kill. But we know how to make use of natural elements, although ordinarily we do not allow ourselves to go against nature. Unfortunately, there is a very powerful elf in our world, the one who started the war, who doesn’t care about that prohibition and has been causing the climate to go off kilter, using it as a weapon.”
“The war was started to by an elf?” said Jesús. “I thought it was Raffaele Santangelo’s intrigues.”
“The president of the Italian Council is an elf,” said Petrus.
Jesús’s chin dropped.
“But Santangelo is just a lackey,” continued Petrus, “who came into the world of humans to support the aims of his master, the cataclysmic elf who stayed behind in the mists. I’m sorry to sound so melodramatic, but that is more or less the true story.”
Probably to cure himself of melodrama, he poured a third glass of amarone.
“Does he have a name?” asked Alessandro.
“We call him Aelius,” said Petrus.
“Is ancient Rome in fashion where you live?” asked Jesús.
“Unlike humans, elves are not in the habit of using names handed down through their lineage. As it happens, one of us, a very powerful elf allied with the League, lives in Rome, so that is where we went for inspiration.”
He gave a big grin.
“As for me, I made a point of combining Roman empire and French vineyard.”
He simultaneously reassumed his air of gravity and took a long sip of wine.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that Santangelo hasn’t won?” he asked.
“Everyone thinks it’s strange,” said Alejandro. “No one can figure out his strategy.”
“You’re a strategist and a member of the high command of the League,” said Petrus.
Alejandro looked at him, thoughtful.
“I think Santangelo doesn’t want to win,” he said, “he doesn’t want a victorious side busy dressing its wounds. He wants men to die, all men, no matter which side they’re on. I’ve said this many times, but no one wants to believe that after the last conflict there could still be people who want total war. In spite of this, I’m convinced that is Santangelo’s intention. Why? I have no idea.”
“There is dark smoke over parts of occupied Europe,” Petrus said. “Your aircraft detected it. What do you think it is?”
“Massive fires,” said Alejandro. “But what are they burning, there?”
Petrus fell silent, his expression and gloomy.
“So that’s it,” said Alejandro.
“Never before has the human race been so passionate about exterminating its fellows,” said Paulus, “and never before have the elves fought such bloody battles. Even the mists are at war, and our kind are dying by the millions.”
“In the beginning Aelius only wanted humans to die,” Petrus said, “but those who want the death of one end up wanting the death of all. They end up wanting death as a crown so that a chosen few can reign over the scorched earth.”
“Why did he want humans to die?” Jesús asked.
“Because our mist is declining, and he is holding you responsible for this plague,” replied the elf.
“The mist on the bridge?” Jesús asked.
“The mists of our world,” Petrus answered. “We are a world of mists. Without it, we cannot survive.”
“It is your oxygen?” Jesús asked.
Petrus looked at him, puzzled.
“Our oxygen? No, no. We breathe the same air as you. But we are elves. We are a community of mists.”
He wiped his hand across his brow.
“This is the part I always have trouble explaining. I forget every time that you separate everything.”
“Could he be right?” Alejandro asked. “Are we responsible for the decline of your mists?”
Petrus, Paulus, and Marcus glanced at one another.
“That is something we have wondered, too,” said Petrus at last. “But even if you were, it would not warrant war. And I am convinced that is not the true cause.”
“So what is the true cause?”
He smiled.
“The decline of poetry?”
It was Alejandro’s turn to smile. The fact that Petrus had invoked poetry made him a brother to Luis Álvarez. Time fell away and he could see his tutor sipping wine by the fireside.
“The older I get, the more I look for fervor,” Luis had said to him, “and the more I find it in places where previously I saw only beauty. You are young and enthusiastic, your mind is fresh and excited, but fervor is the opposite of that. When it deserts us, we turn agitated and feverish, when it takes possession of us we are transformed into a calm, tenebrous lake, darker than the night, more motionless than stone. In this condition, we can pray without lying.”
“I never pray,” Alejandro had said.
“Oh, you pray,” smiled Luis, “you pray every day when you go to the cemetery. Humans never pray more than when they are listening for their dead. But you will have to pray even more if you want to pay your respects to the earth and sky, and you will have to instill the compassion of poetry into your prayers. That’s where passion is found—and in its wake, comes beauty.”
In the half darkness of the cellar, the amarone coated the glasses with a dark lacquer that reminded Alejandro of Luis’s tenebrous lake, and he suddenly remembered what he’d dreamt that night. He was standing in the middle of a wooden veranda, facing a forested valley. The valley was shrouded in a mist penetrated with organic breathing, an inspiration infused with elusive, vibrant life. Alejandro stood for a long time looking out at the extraordinary landscape, and yet a veil of anxiety was gradually changing it. Just when fear supplanted the joy of being there, he turned around, and in the darkness of a wooden pavilion with windows that had neither panes nor frames, he saw a woman. He could not make out her features, but he knew that she was young, and he
thought she was smiling at him. Then he woke up. He’d been dreaming about that woman for several years now, ever since leaving Yepes to become a soldier, and this time, just after he woke up, he had seen her face, her pallor and her arctic eyes. He couldn’t have said now whether she was beautiful or ugly, he could have said nothing about her beyond her youth, her fairness, and the gravity of her eyes. He’d thought she was smiling at him, but in fact she was looking at him gravely, and his entire childhood was in that look, along with the valleys of Extremadura, its stones, its parched landscapes, the slopes of the bluff where he lived, the harsh winters, and the violet dawns.
“More prosaically,” Petrus resumed, “I believe our mists are dying because things in general are dying. The only hope of saving it is to accept that it will be reborn in another form. That is what we are striving for, those of us who believe in the eternity of poems. There is no other way out. When everything is used up, it will mean the end of our known world.”
“That is very moving,” Jesús said, “but you still have not told us the reason why you have come.”
“I’m getting there,” said Petrus, in no way offended, “I’m getting there.”
He drained his glass and looked dejectedly at the empty bottle. Alejandro stood up, went once again to the far end of the cellar, and came back muttering interesting, like the first time.
Petrus read the label and seemed moved.
Jesús leaned closer in turn.
“Nuits-Saint-Georges,” he read, “vin de Bourgogne.”
“I’ve been there often,” said Petrus. “The first time I was quite young.”
The memory pleased him and he smiled to himself.
“And I went back there exactly twenty years ago, right after my visit to the castillo in Yepes.”
He was no longer smiling.
“We chose your fortress as a safe place for our protégée, Maria, whom you heard us speak of just now, the young woman who commands the snow. But when I arrived, your family had just been murdered, and I decided to hide Maria in Burgundy.”
“Do you know who killed them?” Alejandro asked.
“Not yet,” said Petrus, “but everything is linked. If we chose your fortress to accommodate Maria, it was because of a series of corroborating factors. Among other disturbing events, a few days ago we came to discover that the first elf who ever ventured into the world of humans probably came to Yepes. Moreover, the castillo has the same motto as our mists.”
“Mantendré siempre,”1 said Alejandro.
“Which is also the motto of our council,” Petrus said.
“And Maria, what role does she play?” asked Jesús.
“Maria?” echoed Petrus, surprised by the question. “She unites our forces.”
“She’s an elf?” Jesús insisted.
Petrus hesitated for a brief moment.
“We’re not sure what she is,” he replied.
Jesús seemed to be on the verge of asking another question, but the elf raised his hand.
“Now, if you will, the time has come for me to tell you what we hope to gain from our meeting.”
He glanced at his glass.
“Apart from these wonders,” he added. “Of course, it is rather difficult to sum up a war in a few words. But it so happens that the final battle will be fought tomorrow.”
Jesús burst out laughing.
“Wars like that no longer exist,” he said. “This is not Alexander at Gaugamela or even Napoleon at Wagram. There is no final battle.”
“I’m afraid there is,” said Petrus, “and it will be fought tomorrow, and you will be called on to play a part in it—if we manage to get you across the bridge.”
He laughed quietly to himself. He suddenly seemed old, but his gaze was even more beautiful than at the beginning of the story; his eyes a flinty gray, glinting with silver.
“It is time for us to greet our lady and entrust the rest of the story to her,” he said.
He stood up, along with the other two elves, and all three turned to one side and bowed deeply.
In the darkness before them stood the young girl whom the general from Yepes had already seen in his dreams.
Darker than the night
More motionless than stone
The lake where we pray
Book of Prayers
1I shall always maintain.
WINE
My people live beneath the enchanted earth of Yepes, and there is no more pleasant place for our purpose than the cellar of the castillo, for wine lays in the memory of centuries, stones, and ancient roots.
It should come as no surprise that elves are not familiar with the vine. For those who are together, reality suffices; these are not people of fiction and drunkenness. But the wine of humans is the brother of friendship and fables. It confers upon the whispering of the deceased the turn of phrase that will carry their words a great distance. Through wine, the bitterness of solitude turns sweet, in that exquisite relaxation that causes so much to blossom. It joins the nobility of the land with the chronicles of the heavens, the deep roots of vine stock with the clusters of grapes reaching for the sun—there is nothing better suited to telling the saga of the cosmos.
Still, there was one remarkable exception to the mists’ indifference to the vine: Petrus was an accomplished elf and a master of wines. He could taste the poetry of his world, but he loved the stories of humans above all else, and he would gladly listen to them with a glass in his hand. Thus, he incarnated a bridge between the two worlds, as did all the other providential players in this war.
POETRY
If there is one intoxication shared by humans and elves, it is poetry.
On a day of drizzle or a night of pale moon, welcome the winds from the moor and write verses in honor of the old poets. The breath of the world will pass through you and vanish, but trapped in your feelings, it will have acquired a singular form—the birth of poems.
IS SHE BEAUTIFUL?
Blonde, pale, and gracious, she studied them gravely and Alejandro’s life tipped on its end.
For a long time, he’d been hoping the war would forge him, grant him the humanity he dreamt of. From Luis, he learned that a man must look to the stars for guidance; from Miguel, that kingdoms are born from ideas; and from Jesús, that the heart lives off bareness. He’d entrusted war with the care of turning this instruction into a sparkling in a cemetery, so that he would know how to honor his duty to his dead. Now that six years had gone by, there was something he could still not grasp, and he hoped the elves would supply the missing element to the fulfillment of his destiny, through the new, more beautiful and terrifying guise of a women’s gaze. No one understands what happens in the fleeting instant of an encounter—eternity contracts into a divine vertigo, then takes a lifetime to unfold again on a human time scale. How long have we got? wondered Alejandro.
The young woman stepped into the circle of torchlight and smiled at him.
Alejandro’s whole life rushed headlong into that smile. He was submerged by visions and, as in his dream, he was gazing out at vast expanses where the hours of his childhood could again be found. The key is in the landscape, he thought, and on his palm, he felt the brief touch of an illumination, but when his fingers seemed to have curled around it, he laughed at the thought that he could have grasped the flow of dreams. The slopes of Extremadura were those of a land where tiny villages were swallowed by lofty summits and deep valleys. Above the mountains was a sky of hastening clouds; on the edge of his vision, the sparkling light he’d always known; perched on an outcrop was a church where a piano waited. How do I know all this? he wondered, as he flew on an invisible eagle’s back over the valley of the promontory, unending fertile plains, then finally the outskirts of an unfamiliar city.
“Rome,” said the young woman.
Alejandro remained silent and she said:
Alejandro still said nothing, and she seemed troubled. The wavering torchlight blurred her features, but when she’d said mingling, she’d taken another step forward. How old was she? he wondered, terrified. He studied her face, her blond hair, her light eyes. Could someone so young have such a gaze? he wondered again, then he found out she was a pianist. Is she beautiful? he thought, and although he could see every detail and every one of her features, he understood, intoxicated, that he did not know. He also saw that her forehead was too large and her neck too thin, and to him she looked like a swan adrift in improbable tropics. What an absurd idea, he thought; ever more lost and intoxicated with his own state of being lost, he laughed. He wondered how much time had gone by since she had appeared. Someone behind him cleared his throat and he shuddered. He stepped forward and bowed in turn.
“You are Maria,” he said.
There was a faint sound and Petrus appeared next to him, unsteady, his nose red and his eyes hazy.
“No, no,” he said, “Maria is in Nanzen.”
Gripping the edge of his cape in vain, he almost collapsed onto the young woman. With surprising agility, he caught himself just in time and, looking at her, he muttered, “My child, be good to Uncle Petrus.”
Against her thighs she was holding a woven basket, and from it she removed three gray flasks which she handed out to the elves. They sobered up as quickly as the first time and Petrus, friskier than a filly, turned and continued to speak to Alejandro.
“Maria stayed behind at the Pavilion of the Mists.”
“My name is Clara,” said the young woman, and again she seemed troubled.
Petrus looked at her, then at Alejandro.
“I missed something,” he muttered.
Jesús came in turn to bow to Clara.