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.”