A Strange Country Read online

  “Are you Maria’s sister? Are you elves?” he asked.

  Petrus observed Clara with tenderness and pride.

  “Exactly twenty years ago, less one day, two extraordinary children were born,” he said. “The first one is standing here before you. Her father is the guardian of our pavilion, her mother is a remarkable woman, but according to all logic, Clara should never have been born, because unions between elves and humans have always been sterile. The other child, Maria, is waiting for us in Nanzen. She was born to the head of our Council and his elfin companion but, unlike us, and like Clara, her appearance is strictly human.”

  “You look perfectly human to me,” said Jesús, surprised.

  “Not in our mists,” said Petrus. “There, you will see how different we are from you. We only adopt a single appearance when we are here. Only Maria and Clara, despite their elfin blood, keep the same physiognomy in both worlds.”

  “What do you look like when you are up there? Do you grow wings?” asked Jesús, obstinately situating mist and winged creatures in the sky.

  “Nothing grows on us at all,” said Petrus, taken aback. “Simply, we are multiple.”

  “Among elves, do you speak Spanish?” asked Jesús, ever pragmatic, now that he’d got going.

  “Anyone who has stayed at the pavilion can speak every language on earth,” answered Petrus.

  “What is the role of Maria and Clara?” Alejandro asked.

  “Well, to save the world,” said Petrus.

  “Is that all!” commented Jesús.

  “The question,” continued Petrus, ignoring him, “is how. Six years of war and we were still blind—until, four days ago, when we obtained possession of a gray notebook dating from the sixteenth century. It belonged to an elf who also crossed over the bridge. He was an extremely talented painter, and we still have one of his paintings, which you will soon see. But the most astonishing thing—and, for us, the most interesting—is that he was the first elf who stayed in your world for good and chose to live a human life.”

  Petrus scratched his head.

  “It’s a long story, and I cannot begin to tell it now. Let’s just say that the notebook contains vital information, both for the outcome of the war, and for the future of our mists, and now we are in a position to determine our next move. Not the one that we would have dreamed of, to be honest—what we have learned forces us to make a radical decision. But we have come so far that we must risk everything or face certain death.”

  “Who, in your mists, makes such decisions?” Alejandro asked. “Is it you?” he added, turning to Clara.

  She laughed.

  “Decisions are made by the Council of Mists.”

  “Presided over by Maria’s father, if I got it right,” Jesús said. “So he is your king?”

  “The head of the Council is at the service of the mists,” said Clara.

  “Is your mist alive?” Jesús asked, still determined to understand.

  “Come, we have to go now,” said Petrus. “Anything you don’t know yet, you will find out once you cross the bridge.”

  “Cross the bridge?” echoed Jesús.

  “We will try to cross with you,” continued Petrus, “and that is why Clara is here with us, for humans can only cross in her company.”

  “I think there’s something you’ve failed to take into consideration,” said Jesús. “General de Yepes commands the first army. He cannot leave his post in the middle of an offensive to go off and sip tea in a celestial pavilion.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  Then Petrus scratched his nose and said:

  “Yet that is precisely the plan.”

  And to Alejandro:

  “It will not constitute desertion.”

  He broke off. Alejandro was staring at him without seeing him, scrutinizing the darkness beyond. Petrus looked in the same direction.

  “Ah, so there are the dead,” murmured the elf.

  Alejandro found it hard to breathe.

  Before him stood all his dead.

  They appeared to him just as they had looked in days gone by, and had he not known that they were dead, Alejandro would have sworn on his honor that they were not ghosts. His family, Luis, Miguel, the men who’d fallen under his command, villagers he’d long forgotten: all of them had come through the gates of death to join the battalion of the living.

  “Why?” he asked, out loud, and the congregation of the deceased vanished, with the exception of Miguel and Luis.

  It was the same sensation as eighteen years earlier, when his family was being buried, and the funeral proceedings were enveloped in the torpor of a dream. He conversed with Luis and Miguel, back from the dead in the form of images they shared with him; he saw his tutor, thirty years younger, leading a group of men, marching through a baking hot day. The white-hot earth buzzed with insects, and the men moved forward, a holy spark in their gaze. He studied the poet’s face and his clear eyes, his aristocratic brow, his puny body, and he thought: the power of such a man! A new image appeared. A boy was slicing his way through the grasses down a gentle slope. The long stalks yielded to his hips then rose again with the smooth grace of swans. He made his way slowly through the wild grasses while time fell away, and all that remained was this walking through the fields. All I want is this ecstasy, thought Alejandro and, at last, Luis spoke to him. Once again it was the older man sitting at his councilor’s table; by his elbow the glass of sherry shone brightly like a splash of blood, and the young general heard the words his tutor was saying, smiling, so handsome, so poor, and so worthy in his laughable stronghold.

  “Everything shall be empty and full of wonder,” murmured Alejandro.

  He awoke from his dream and saw that Jesús was looking at him.

  “We’re leaving now,” he said. “We’re crossing the bridge with them.”

  There was a silence.

  “You didn’t see them?” he asked Jesús.

  “More ghosts?” Jesús asked.

  Again a silence. Jesús sighed.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said to Petrus.

  “We haven’t the foggiest,” answered the elf.

  He ran his gaze over the vast cellar.

  “We’ll be back, I hope,” he said.

  “How do you intend to get us across?” asked Alejandro.

  “I’m getting there,” said Petrus. “That is the last thing you must know before changing worlds. The mists, the gray notebook, the painting and all the rest—that will be for the other side. For the time being, we’ll ask you to drink some tea that’s been slightly altered and doesn’t taste all that great.”

  “How do we know that your concoction won’t kill us?” Jesús asked.

  “Four days ago, Maria and Clara came here for the first time, thanks to this very same tea,” Petrus replied. “But they were not alone. There were two humans with them.”

  “You mean real humans?” Jesús asked. “Not ghosts, or semi-something-or-others?”

  “Real humans,” said Petrus, “as human as one can possibly be.”

  “Are they waiting for us there?” Alejandro asked.

  “They are waiting for us and, what’s more, they are watching us at this very moment,” said Petrus. “A priest and a painter, but they are also soldiers.”

  For some unknown reason, to Alejandro these words seemed to echo those of his tutor, and again he murmured, empty and full of wonder.

  “It’s time, I think,” the elf said to Clara.

  The young woman smiled at him tenderly.

  “I always obey Uncle Petrus,” she said, with delightful irony.

  She took a few more flasks from her basket, and when she turned to face Alejandro, she smiled at him with just a touch of mischief that said, Here we are, trapped like two fish in a net. To fall in love in the mi
ddle of a war, what a mad idea, he thought. For the second time that night, he laughed out loud. Petrus cast him a suspicious glance before holding up his flask: it acted as a prism, and the sparkling of the dead flickered in every direction through the cellar.

  They all drank their gray tea.

  For several seconds, nothing happened. The brew tasted vile, of fermentation and decomposition.

  And they waited a few more seconds.

  Life was split into two equal parts that went to crash on either side of infinity, then re-bonded under the sky. To Alejandro and Jesús it seemed to last forever, and yet to be occurring outside of time. In the second when the world faded away, images had scrolled past their inner gaze—fields, lakes, fine-weather clouds with the faint outlines of beloved faces. Above all, they had the sensation of eternity being transmuted into a journey, and they could have stayed in limbo forever to take that journey with neither movement nor duration, suspended in an infinite space devoid of place or shape. Finally, everything ended abruptly in a great sensory void. Now they couldn’t take their eyes off the spectacle unfolding before them.

  Beyond the red arch of the bridge of mists, beneath a black sky, an old wooden pavilion overlooked a valley of white trees. In the entire motionless scene, the only colors were the white of the trees and the black of the sky, and the crimson bridge like a splash of blood in one’s vision.

  Alejandro looked at Clara and knew that she was beautiful.

  Is she beautiful?

  A splash of blood in one’s vision

  Book of Paintings

  GHOSTS

  Whatever shape you give them, it’s useless to deny the existence of ghosts. If few humans encounter them outside of their imagination, that alone suffices to show how much they live among them.

  How do we know what happened in ancient times? Because we know inherently. The blood of ages runs through our veins like a river, and as long as we pay attention to the earth and the sky, that blood will convey the heritage of those people who came before us.

  It’s not magic, it’s not a chimera. Who could forget the first line ever drawn, when it came time to paint the landscape of the world?

  GAIETY

  Clara had not always been mischievous and joyful. For far too long she had been confined to the fallow regions of the heart, and only laughed for the first time when she turned eleven. But love and war had immersed this solitary soul in a gaiety of the sort everyone will surely need, if it is true, as a great man wrote one day, that gaiety is the most amiable form of courage.

  EVERYTHING SHALL BE EMPTY AND FULL OF WONDER

  The company who had come from the land of humans stood on the bridge of mists beneath an inky sky shot with light. The day was emerging from darkness and lit up the landscape. At the heart of this landscape was the red arch of the bridge, radiating with untold strength. Unlike the world around them, the creatures of flesh had preserved their colors.

  “I don’t understand what I am seeing,” Jesús said.

  “You are seeing the essence of our world,” Petrus said. “Once you see it with the eyes the tea will give you, it will appear more normal to you.”

  “More tea?” muttered Jesús.

  Beneath their feet the wood was vibrating slightly.

  “Welcome to Nanzen” said Petrus.

  Alejandro was stunned by the black sky. It was as if it had been wash-painted, and his gaze could follow the lazy, shimmering ripples as they merged with other magnificent figures. From this liquid ink came the light of dark lacquers, to which the invisible grooves of a brush gave a clear texture. Although Nanzen, with the exception of the bridge, was entirely black and white, the sense of nature there was more concentrated than elsewhere. The whiteness of the trees revealed their structure, without concealing their overall beauty, and in the center of this arboreal arena stood the Pavilion of the Mists. It was at the mercy of the wind through its paneless, frameless openings which were arranged asymmetrically, although the building itself was square. This broken rhythm surely led to a melodic vision of the landscape; the more one’s gaze wandered aimlessly through the spans, the more the panorama took shape, in keeping with the most beautiful music; but if you asked the two men what they were seeing, they would simply have answered: an old bandstand at the mercy of wind and rain. The veranda all around had acquired the patina of age, and Alejandro understood that the building was not a vestige of the past, but the spirit of that past—neither rhyme nor reason, he thought again, before he was seized by another realization.

  “The lines are perfect,” he said out loud.

  And he thought: the proportions of this rickety refuge are absolute.

  The red bridge reigned over the austere territory. The arch was veiled in thick mist, and radiated a form of unfamiliar harmony.

  “The bridge of mists is the bridge of natural harmonies,” said Petrus. “It holds the elements of our community together. But it also brings about the union and synthesis of our worlds.”

  He broke off.

  “You will hear the whole story,” he said then, “but for now we must not keep our welcome committee waiting.”

  And indeed, leaving the pavilion, the delegation was coming to greet them, and I owe it to my integrity as a chronicler to mention that Alejandro and Jesús stood there speechless. One woman and two men, escorted by four creatures as absurd as they were splendid, were making their way along a path of black stones. Further along I shall relate the impression the woman made upon Jesús, but just then he was completely absorbed by the emotion of discovering elves in their native environment. Taller than humans, they seemed to be made up of different species that blended with one another in a slow ballet of metamorphoses. At the head of the delegation came a white horse that was also man and wild boar, becoming each of its constituent essences in succession. The blond man with glacial eyes changed into a snow-white horse, then his nostrils were transformed into a broad, steaming snout, he grew horns, and now he was a wild boar, finer than any Alejandro had ever seen in his territory for major hunting. Intermittently, the reflected light of an ancient waterway passed over the creature’s face, and through a clearing in the mist Alejandro could see that the bridge spanned a silver stream with wild grasses growing on either side. The elf had about him the same fragrance of eternity that filled the young general with the greatest reverence. The second creature in the escort, a brown-haired man whose horse, a moment later, seemed made of quicksilver, inspired the same respect. His coat glinted with great beauty, a beauty preserved by the fur of the hare into which he was ultimately transformed—beige and brown, extraordinarily silky, and rippling with gentle quivers.

  “The Guardian of the Pavilion and the Head of the Council,” said Petrus.

  What land is this, that creates leaders like gods? thought Alejandro.

  “That is the impression the high-elves generally give,” murmured Petrus.

  Behind the masters of the mists, two elves displayed their fine human features and their lustrous coats of wild horses, while the third species turned out to be a squirrel for one, and a polar bear for the other. One was not overcome with deference in their presence, and it seemed to Alejandro that in comparison with the high-elves they must be minor elves, but their beauty was perhaps all the more moving in that it was instilled with innocence. Now Petrus advanced onto the descending arch of the bridge, and Alejandro and Jesús followed him, disrupting the enchantment to notice how, surprisingly, they were growing accustomed to the black sky. When their elfin companions stepped onto the path of stones and were transformed in turn, they could see that they all contained an essence of man and horse, and that Petrus, in addition, became the prettiest, most jovial, potbellied squirrel one could ever hope to meet. Then he gave his place to a little chestnut horse with lovely thoughtful gray eyes. Next to him, Paulus also turned into a squirrel and Marcus became a large brown bear. Just as they all regained thei
r human form, a strange garment covered their bodies. It looked like a soft, organic cloth shot through with ripples which ceased the moment the human part of the elf vanished. It was difficult to identify the fibers the cloth was woven of, but it adjusted to the body while preserving the glow of the animal, and Jesús would have liked to touch its light and flesh.

  As for Alejandro, it was the path that led to the pavilion that fascinated him above all. The stones were wide and flat and reflected the trees in the hollow below, as they were actually above the stones. There were no trees along the lane, but the flagstones radiated a swinging of branches in the wind which gave an impression of walking beneath thick foliage. Alejandro stepped onto the first stone and was surprised by the invisible, stream-like wave that went through the mineral hardness of its surface.

  “Soon you will see liquid stones,” said the adorable chubby squirrel Petrus had once again become.

  Behind the four elves, a priest in a cassock brought up the rear of the delegation. His face was open and magnanimous, his form freighted with a paunch that attested to his delight in earthly pleasures. Although as a rule Alejandro did not like priests, he immediately took to this one, as did Jesús, who revered the men of the cloth, whence we may conclude that they had not met just one sort of man in the Church, for there are so many sad souls there, but also true scouts who set off to explore unknown lands with no aim to enlighten any other consciousness than their own. Above all, the priest’s good-natured contours couldn’t hide his gaze, that of a man who had observed and, upon observing, grown. He was walking with one arm around another man’s shoulder, a tall, very handsome man, the same age as the good father—perhaps sixty or so—and this man, according to Petrus, used to be a painter. The man smiled at them with the sort of elegance that is born of the mockery one reserves for oneself, and the equal and opposite consideration which, on principle, one displays toward others: Alejandro and Jesús liked him, too.