forest. The moonlit trees were tall and straight, an orderly row reaching for the sky. At the center of the clearing, the windows of the guardian’s residence, which was lower and more spacious than the Pavilion of the Mists, were covered with light veils that floated in the night air. Next to the door, camellias had been placed in a little bamboo vase hanging on the wall. Everyone fell silent and took in the gentle murmur of ancient trees. Clara and Alejandro sat apart in one corner of the veranda, Jesús and Maria did likewise, off to one side. Petrus, Marcus, Paulus, Sandro, and Father François deliberated amongst themselves. Tagore and Solon went inside.
Time rustling, like tissue paper.
“We might be dead tomorrow,” Clara said to Alejandro.
She smiled and he understood why he thought she was beautiful. Her brow was too big, her neck was too long, and her eyes were too light, but there was something about her smile that made him feel as if he were embracing the waters of a dream. Not a word was exchanged, but, through their gazes, despite the absence of intimacy to which war condemned them, they concentrated in one hastily-snatched hour all the days of a lifetime of love. It happened in the order everyone is familiar with, and thus they experienced those first gazes where they drowned in the headiness of adoration and temptation; then, after the magic of the early days, they slowly came to reality; after having construed love, they elevated it to its authentic life. After the luxuriant dawns and wild storms, they saw their true faces; he sat at the hearth, tired and worn, and she knew what sort of man he was. When at last they fell asleep, exhausted and happy, they had known their fill of lovemaking, of every parting and every joyful meeting, of every tempest and every wonder ever known to mind and body, through the sharing of tea and the song of ancient trees, and afterwards when they woke, they were a man and a woman enriched by every moment of transport, every transfiguration of love. Just before waking, they shared the dream of a chilly late afternoon on the farm on the plateau in the Aveyron, while clouds of crows whirled and shrieked overhead, gathering under a storm on the horizon. The lovers were hurrying to take shelter when a solitary snowflake appeared, light and fluffy among the birds, that all on its own caused the storm to recede—and though the storm was wild with rage, other fat snowflakes, soft and dumb as feathers, fell tenderly to hide a land of newfound peace.
At the far end of the veranda, Maria was talking to Jesús with the same silent, tea-induced affinity.
She was telling him about the trees in the countryside where she’d grown up, the tall elms and riverbank willows, but also the oaks by the field next to the farm, their quivering branches leaving etchings on the air. She told him about the hill, to the east of the village, that they could reach by a winding trail until it merged into an undergrowth of poplars, where every family was permitted to gather wood and where they would come for their share by first snowfall—and then she described the towpaths of the six cantons, their lakes of emerald and rushes, Eugénie’s vegetable garden, her artemisia, marjoram, and mints. The faces of her grannies, wrinkled like autumn apples, went through their shared vision until there was only the smallest of the four faces, cheerful and stubborn beneath her cap with its ribbons the color of forget-me-nots.
“Eugénie,” said Maria.
In the tiny, boundless space that divides loving hearts, Jesús felt her sorrow and mourning as if they were his own. In turn, he told her of his arid land, the dried lake of his childhood, the pain of staying and the wrenching loss of going, but also, some days at dawn, the beauty of the water in a calligraphy of dark mist.
“We were innocent,” she said, with a pang of sadness.
He went on telling her about Extremadura, its plains and desolate forts, the onslaught of sunlight, the cruel rocks and his amazement at the way the stones in the mists turned liquid.
Her gaze was full of distress, like that of a wounded child.
“What did Eugénie say to you before she died?” he asked.
She told him how her auntie had lost all desire to live when her son died in the war, how she came to