“There are no prophecies,” said Petrus, “only hopes and dreams.”
“Those who drank the thousand-year-old tea will live,” said Tagore. “And perhaps our daughters, who are from both worlds at the same time.”
On the fields of the two worlds, the resurrected had disappeared, and the fighters from each side were burning with an invisible fire. Cries of suffering could be heard; Tagore maintained their clamor for a moment, until the terror of the sight gave way to the lake in Extremadura. The fire had gone out and a brown mire, a plague that had infiltrated the black water, was overflowing onto the shores of the lake. It spread across the world, over the ground, and through the air, beneath the crust of the earth and into the strata of the sky, poisoning fields and clouds for more years than one could count. The trees were weeping, and they could hear a wrenching requiem rising from the transparencies of the path. Finally, the dead foliage faded away until it disappeared from view altogether.
“Our presence was revealed to humans,” said Solon.
“How will the war end?” asked Alejandro.
“Fighting will resume on earth,” said Maria.
“The tea has had its day,” said Solon, “we no longer have any purchase on the tide of History.”
“Other camps will be built,” said Tagore.
“The pavilion is still there,” said Father François.
“Amputated of its mists, its dead, and its bridge,” replied the guardian.
When death is drawing near, there is only one lake that can distract us from it. We all have one in our heart that stems from the favors and pain of childhood. It remains in our breasts and become granite, until the enchantment of the encounter makes it liquid again.
The images of the dried lake came back to Jesús, the place where his father and the long dynasty of poor fishermen had suffered; the taste of betrayal and the redemptive relief of burdens came back; the wars he’d fought as son and soldier, their insanity and afflictions came back; he looked at Maria and once again he saw the stones that the mist turned to liquid. In the end, everything is empty and full of wonder, he thought; so must we die to understand nakedness without suffering? And with a heart that was now unburdened of regret, he looked forward to going to join the dead souls of his fathers—the great Eugène Marcelot, who loved his wife the way one lights a candle in a church, and all those who, before him, had known the peace of encounter.
To Alejandro, the image of Luis’s calm, dark lake came back, a lake where men pray when they want to live and love. I have spent my entire life pleading that my dead might be saved, he thought, and they are the ones who are saving me in the hour of my death. He saw again the bowl where one could contemplate a life of effacement and of the land, he remembered the presence of the elves in the mists, he looked at the woman who’d elevated him to love, and heard the last message from those who had come before him. Empty and full of wonder, he murmured. Ideas always triumph over weapons and, whatever Luis might think, poetry triumphs over murder.
Every major tale is the story of a being who leaves the desolation of the self to embrace the vertigo of the other and, from this freely given absence of self, finally embraces the wonder of existence. Jesús Rocamora and Alejandro de Yepes had laid down their burdens. They looked at the women they loved.
In that hour when dreams were crumbling, and they did not know whether they would live or die, they were transfigured. The transfer that had come with the war, making Clara joyful and mischievous, was reversed once again; there was an ultimate migration of hearts, and Maria was the child she had been, lighthearted and full of cheer like a clear stream, spreading the charm of her impertinence all around her. But she looked at Clara and plumbed the wild soul the little Italian girl had regained through this reversal: that soul once bereft of laughter and tears had reconnected with her former gravity, but now she was unable to shed the traces of gaiety that had been entrusted to her for a time, and thus she forfeited the darkness and solitude of her newly recovered childhood. In this way, Maria Faure and Clara