A Strange Country Read online

  The young woman was raising her hand in welcome. She gave off an air of singular authority, although her appearance was frail; her hair and eyes were brown, she was rather thin, and very distinguished, her skin was golden, her lips the color of fresh blood. Beneath the skin on her face there were fine veins that radiated in concentric circles from the bridge of her nose. There were moments when these veins were paler, to the point of fading and disappearing altogether. Then they returned to throb gently and darken her serious features. All at once she smiled, and Alejandro saw that she was smiling at Clara.

  Turning to one side, he looked at the young woman and she took his breath away. She was smiling back at Maria; in her smile, he saw compassion and sisterly love, and his own passion was heightened still further. Now he knew that he would have to pray late into the night, no longer to die in honor, but that this flame would not fall to the enemy—how could I bear its loss? he pondered, and thought less of what he was feeling than of what Clara incarnated. And this was how Alejandro de Yepes, in his thirtieth year, was awakened to love. Neither the self-sacrifice of combat, nor the pledge to shed his blood down to the last drop, nor allegiance to the land of his ancestors, nor Luis’s poetry, nor Miguel’s ideas had ever shown him the way so clearly, and if he’d thought he was close to it when he stood before his dead, what was always missing was the echo of a sigh. Now the fact that he’d always taken and never given seemed so obvious to him that shame rose to his cheeks. He’d already sensed this, briefly, in the cellar, when he felt that he loved because he felt uplifted. But the smile Clara had given Maria tore like a raging wind at the last ties binding him to his former life, while he clung to the yearning to give with which she filled him, a yearning that was transforming the parameters of his heart one by one. Now he understood Luis’s lesson, the restlessness that comes from enthusiasm when passion has the power to bathe us in calm waters: this passion had made him cease to notice whether Clara was beautiful—never diminishing his desire for all that.

  The delegation from the alliance of humans and elves, now a few steps away, came to a halt. Close up, the beauty of the elves was almost unbearable. It emanated from the perfection of human and animal forms commingled in their slow choreography of mutations, but also from the manner in which the elves expressed their emotions, in the form of faint emanations that traced drawings in space—and, whether it was pride, sadness, weariness, goodness, mischief, or courage, a symphony of ethereal sketches was created, intelligible in the way that abstract paintings are intelligible, and this made their deepest hearts transparent to humans. Alejandro looked at Petrus and was stunned by the etchings which the only alcoholic squirrel in the civilized world was sending out in the air in leaping bursts. There was courage there, candor and obstinacy, irreverence flirting with ribaldry, but also a procession of juvenile aspirations bathed in ancient wisdom, in such a way that, through this consensus of lightness and depth, Petrus the minor elf actually appeared to be great.

  “Am I seeing things, or do they have their heart written on their brow?” murmured Jesús.

  Then the two men got down on one knee to greet the elves from the land of mists and their human companions.

  Jesús Rocamora, as he bent his knee, got the impression that he was returning to a semblance of reality. The stone was lukewarm, and he liked the trembling of organic life. The first minutes had been a succession of shocks: the absence of colors, for a start, the young brown-haired woman, then at last the elves themselves, in all their fantastical multiplicity. Now that he was getting used to the black sky and the trimorphic creatures, the true impact of the change of worlds became clear to him.

  “Welcome to Nanzen,” said Maria.

  She had a deep voice that evoked some elusive memory. For an unknown reason, he recalled his only encounter with Luis Álvarez, during the second year of the war—their one brief meeting, in a January of endless frost and exhausted soldiers. At the end, Luis had recited three lines to him. While some men are not cut out for words, that doesn’t mean they cannot be found by a poem that has searched the stars for them; that will be their loyal companion on days of glory and in times of hunger from that day on. These three lines were all that Jesús would ever attain in terms of literature, but at least he’d recognized them from the very start as his own. After reciting them, Luis had added:

  “They’re special, because I knew them before I ever composed them.”

  “Don’t you always have to know ahead of time what you are about to compose?” Jesús had asked.

  Luis had laughed and replied:

  “If you are a good craftsman, perhaps. But if you want to be a poet or a warrior, you have to consent to a loss of self.”

  In this mourning

  Liquid soul

  I sleep clothed in clouds

  The lines had carried Jesús into a great, white silence. At the heart of the silence, a sensation was being born and, although he couldn’t have explained why, he read it as the announcement of his redemption. Then it passed, and if Jesús sometimes thought of the three lines, it was when he despaired of ever understanding their effect upon his life—now, a young woman, her face stitched with tiny dark veins, was standing before him, and the poem became flesh, embraced as it was by passion and a woman’s grief. Jesús was a strange mixture, as we all are. Because of his childhood by the lake, he believed that life is a tragedy, and the fact that he’d fled made him feel obliged to endure it without complaining. He was a Christian because he had spent time with his priest, a righteous man left sublime and powerless by his obstinate desire to pray, and from him, he inherited the belief that the crosses one bears can compensate for an act of disloyalty. He bore his own cross without bitterness, with a cheer astonishing in a man of duty and remorse, along with a healthy heart and a lust for life that kept him from being crushed by his burdens. But while he might not know what Maria had experienced in life, he knew the pain of it, the perfume of regret; he thought that the mist from the lake of his childhood had gone up to that black sky to relieve them both of their sorrow; and that Luis’s poem, in a way, explained why they had met and, similarly, linked their fates. Of course, as a man who was as impermeable to introspection as he was to poetry, these were not the words he was thinking, and it will surprise no one to learn that, in the end, it could all be translated by a single thought in which he invested all his hope: we will suffer together.

  “My name is Maria,” she said again.

  She turned to the man who was also a gray horse and a hare.

  “My father, given his authority over the Council of Mists, asked me to greet you here,” she said.

  “Welcome to Nanzen,” said the Head of the Council in turn.

  “Welcome to Nanzen,” said the man who was also a white horse and a wild boar. “In my capacity as Guardian of the Pavilion, I am honored to meet you. You are those we were not expecting, but it seems Yepes has a role in the history of our bridge.”

  Alejandro and Jesús stood up straight, and realized that they no longer found it incongruous to be conversing with a horse or a hare.

  “How should we call you?” Alejandro asked.

  The Head of the Council smiled.

  “That is always the first question humans ask.”

  He let out a quiet modulation which was not exactly a melody, but a liquid sound, rather, where an ancient stream flowed.

  “That is my name,” he said.

  He addressed his fellows in the same natural musical language which bathed Alejandro’s and Jesús’s spirits in a summer rain. It was very beautiful and harmonized so closely with the landscape that Nanzen now made them feel dizzy.

  “But we also like the language of humans,” continued the Guardian of the Pavilion, “and we are not averse to borrowing their names. To you I shall be Tagore.”

  “Solon,” said the Head of the Council.

  Jesús, who was no more enlightened a
bout the former than the latter, looked at Maria. When the guardian had resorted to the language of elves, he saw in her eyes the gleam of the tall trees reflected on the flagstones, and in this way, he understood that invisible foliage lived inside her, its memory so enduring that it sometimes turned into a vision.

  “Like you, I grew up in a poor region,” she said, “but you could see very beautiful trees there.”

  She turned to the painter and the priest and said:

  “Here are two men who used to know those trees.”

  The men came forward and held out their hands to Alejandro and Jesús.

  “Alessandro Centi,” said the painter. “In Italy, they call me Sandro.”

  The priest took a sudden unexpected little bow.

  “Père François,” he said. “I am glad our paths have crossed.”

  Jesús made this sign of the cross.

  “Are you French, Father?”

  “I am indeed,” said the priest.

  “Are we in heaven?” Jesús asked.

  Père François looked at Petrus and laughed.

  “If we are, the angels are awfully strange-looking,” he said.

  Then he became serious again.

  “To be honest, I don’t know if all this is real or if I’m dreaming.”

  “Those who drink know that reality resides at the bottom of a bottle of amarone,” said Petrus.

  “I’m the only one who can say what can be found at the bottom of an Italian bottle,” declared Sandro.

  “Ecstasy,” said Petrus.

  “And tragedy,” added the painter.

  Maria, addressing the entire company, made a gesture of invitation toward the pavilion.

  “In the name of the Council of Mists,” she said, “may I invite you to have tea with me?”

  She bowed slightly to Tagore and led the small group along the path to Nanzen.

  Nanzen. As they made their way toward the Pavilion, they saw below them a valley of tall trees, their tops veiled in mist. The pavilion was built on a promontory and elevated on pillars planted in thick moss gleaming with dewdrops. Worn steps led to a veranda that ran all the way around the old bandstand. When Alejandro stepped onto it he felt a brief, intense vibration. He went immediately behind Tagore, Solon, and Maria. The rest of the delegation followed, with Clara and Petrus bringing up the rear. From outside, the building seemed rather cramped, and Alejandro and Jesús were surprised to find it was big enough to accommodate them all and still project a feeling of spaciousness. As they left the veranda to go inside, they could sense they were going through an invisible vestibule, and now the sounds of the outside world were stifled. Oddly, Alejandro found the tranquility of the place seemed to match the nature of the mist in the valley, woven from the same evanescence, where a deep, vital breathing could be felt. All around, through openings that set off discrete portions of the panorama, the landscape unfolded in a succession of images. In the background, the red bridge, squeezed into the narrow space of a little window, revealed only the rising section of its arch; this confined perspective suggested the abstraction of a red stain upon the surface of an inky lake. Visible through other openings, further enhancing the tableau, was the splendor of trees and the mists in their successive rebirths. Every swirl of mist, every branch yielding in the wind, every mottled streak of black sky relentlessly produced the highest configuration of beauty.

  The polar bear showed everyone where they should sit on the floor. Tagore and Solon sat across from each other to preside over the cenacle.

  “Quartus, at your service,” said the polar bear with a slight bow.

  “Hostus,” said the other minor elf just as he was being transformed into a squirrel.

  He added:

  “We are today’s assistants.”

  The wooden floor was bare, apart from a faint silvery dust left undisturbed by their footsteps. A slight breeze traced swirling arabesques in the dust. On one of the walls of sand, a band of light-colored cloth, the only visible adornment, was decorated with unfamiliar writing as beautiful as a drawing and made with ink like that of the sky. Between two views onto the trees in the mist, against the wall on the side of the valley, was a bench covered in cups, teapots, terra-cotta bowls and a few rough-hewn wooden spatulas and ladles. Earthenware tea jars stood in a row under the bench. Next to them, on a brazier on the floor, a cast-iron kettle was whistling.

  The only sound or motion in the room was the boiling of water and the dancing of silver dust. Quartus and Hostus set down two little cups of differing size and shape in front of each guest, then Quartus brought a teapot to Tagore along with a bowl and one of the tea jars. From it, the Guardian of the Pavilion took out a sort of crumbly brown cake and broke off a small piece. Hostus dipped a ladle into the kettle and Tagore poured a first splash of water onto the crumbled tea, which he set aside in an earthenware bowl. Then the assistant brought him another ladle of water and, as with the first spoonful, he poured it onto the tea leaves.

  The guardian let out a sudden soft trill and everything changed. The power of ritual confers a rather stiff dignity upon humans until the moment it develops into a trance and, causing them to leave themselves behind, gives them the strength to grow. In Nanzen, the elves hadn’t abandoned their nonchalant air, but their gaze showed they were conscious of the beauty and vanity of the world, the certainty of darkness, and the desire to honor whatever it was that, in spite of war, kept creatures standing tall under the heavens. Time passed, empires crumbled, people perished; at the heart of this disaster a fragment of the sublime was hidden; it was a serious moment, yet not solemn, deferential without being formal, and joyful, however grave the hour.

  The silvery reflection on Tagore’s face intensified. Something welled inside him. It was an intangible transfiguration, but Alejandro recalled the way Luis Álvarez would turn handsome when passion lit up his puny, ugly self and, in that light, made him more dangerous than an assassin. Now he looked at Tagore, no longer splendid, suddenly dangerous. Where did they gain such strength? he wondered. Looking around him at the austerity of the pavilion, with its ink calligraphies, its silver dust, and its views onto trees and mist, he found the answer in himself: from beauty.

  “And, in its wake, fervor,” murmured Petrus on his left. “Take note that one can also achieve it through poetry or, better still, amarone.”

  Solon looked at him and kept silent, laughing softly to himself.

  Tagore poured tea into the first cup in front of each guest. When he sat back down, he raised his cup to eye level but, to the surprise of Alejandro and Jesús, he then transferred the contents into the second cup. They followed his example and, like the others, raised the empty cup to their nose.

  They had imagined they would smell some rare perfume, but they were overcome with a fug of dust and cellars. There were so many layers of memory and childhood sensations here that Alejandro and Jesús relived long-ago adventures, when the cellar opened doors leading to an enchanted land, a place of moss and hiding places where they could hope without hindrance and travel without ever going anywhere, a land of undergrowth, and storerooms where dreams were metabolized, a land blessed with that inexhaustible time which the next day would run like water through one’s fingers—they breathed in the tea, wishing that it would never end, while the magic of the empty cup wove its way through the years. Now they saw themselves in the forest of the time when they were no longer children. A downpour soaked the branches and the earth dripped and steamed in newfound brilliance; the smell of wet pathways rose from the ground with a telluric spirit that recalled that of their youth. Alas, they had to make their way in life, and mature, and the boys became men in whom faith in infinity was transmuted into the awareness of death. However, as they leaned out of the window at the fortress, toward the rain-drenched courtyard, General de Yepes and his major breathed in the pungent fragrance wafting toward them and over them, be
tween heaven and earth. We have gone back through time, thought Alejandro, just as the cup lost all smell, and with it the intoxication of seeing the world through the prism of years gone by.

  “It is customary for one of us to recite a poem before we drink the tea,” said Solon.

  Alejandro thought of the words he’d received from Luis’s ghost, and a very old memory came to him.

  “In my country, there is a song we sing at funerals, in a dialect of Spanish no one can speak anymore,” he said. “It’s an old poem from Extremadura which the women brought to me long ago for my dead.”

  And, suddenly understanding the old idiom, he recited the last two lines.

  To the living the harvests to the dead the storms

  And then everything shall be empty and full of wonder

  A prolonged murmuring spread among the elves.

  “Those are the very words someone wrote here this morning,” said Solon, pointing to the cloth on the partition of sand. “Usually we write the poems down after we have recited them, but today an invisible hand got there before us.”

  “I don’t understand a thing,” said Jesús, who was beginning to have pins and needles in his legs, and was wondering if they would ever get around to drinking.

  Tagore smiled, put down his empty cup, and drank slowly from the full cup. The taste of the tea was subtle, and retained none of the aromas of dust and cellar. Rather, it tasted of the affability of days and the relaxing interval of twilight; nothing changed, nothing became, the tea was drunk, the universe was in repose.

  A few seconds went by.

  Alejandro blinked.

  Before them, in the middle of the room, an earthenware bowl had appeared.