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 about 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.