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, between 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