“It was a long time ago, after great success on the stage in Paris. One of the dancers in our company was a young Cuban woman named Mercedes. She was mixed race. Beautiful. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, truly. She had enormous dark eyes, copper-colored skin, curly black hair, and a figure to give a man a heart attack . . .” Vipond remembered suddenly that he was talking with a boy, though Jacob was thirteen now.
“Mixed race?” Jacob asked.
“Yes, her mother was black and her father was white. He was from Catalonia and had gone to Cuba to make his fortune. He married a Cuban woman and they had five children. Mercedes had been born an artist. She was a stunning dancer and actress, though there weren’t many roles in Paris for an actress who was half black. She did a bit with movies and then landed in the theater where I had been acting for two years. It was love at first sight for me—a direct shot from Cupid. I couldn’t resist her!”
Jacob did not necessarily understand all the vocabulary the old man used, but he liked hearing stories. It made him feel like he was living them too.
“She put me off at first. I imagine she thought I was rather green. She was two or three years older, had lived in different countries, knew people all over the world. For her, Paris was just one stop in her life, while I planned on staying there forever, especially if I kept making it big in the theater. One night, after the last show, I worked up my courage and asked her to dinner. I’ll swear to you: Nights in Paris are magical. We went to a lovely restaurant in the Latin Quarter, then walked along the Seine and ended up at the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The night was beautiful—clear, with a huge moon that must have driven us a bit mad. At the end, I kissed her. She was not the first woman I had ever kissed, but she was the first I had ever truly loved. I’d always been rather narcissistic; it’s hard not to be when you want to be an artist and leave everything else behind. But in that moment, she was the only thing that mattered to me.”
This was something Jacob could understand all too well. He had also known what it felt like to love. Every day that went by, he missed Anna even more, though he had decided to follow Magda’s advice and be happy. He knew that is what Anna would have wanted.
The car emerged from the more mountainous roads as they reached the area of Nîmes, with wide meadows and small forests dotting the way. It was still night, but the horizon was starting to lighten.
Vipond yawned before continuing his tale. He thought that this was precisely what it meant to be old: to have a long past and no future. As he relayed his life to Jacob, he felt that, in some way, it had all been worth it, though it had gone so fast, and death had become a constant companion for the journey. Nearly all of his friends were dead, as were his parents and most of his relatives. He was the last witness of a world that was going extinct, never to be seen again.
“What happened next?” the boy asked, impatient. Jacob, on the other hand, barely had any past. Uprooted from his home country and from his Jewish roots, he needed to feel that the ground beneath his feet meant something. Should he disappear tomorrow, he wanted to know that somebody would remember him.
“Patience, my boy. We’ve got a long road ahead of us and I don’t know that your mother would want me to tell you this story. She knows it, of course. Old men repeat themselves constantly.”
“Please, Mr. Vipond, go on,” Jacob begged.
“I don’t suppose Jana would get too mad at me. It’s just life, the wonderful and terrible existence we all share.”
Jacob was quiet. He wanted the old man to keep telling his love story about Mercedes, the exotic and beautiful Cuban dancer. In a way, that was how Jacob envisioned South America: a world so different from his own, full of new colors, smells, and tastes.
“A while after that first kiss, we got engaged. She was very reluctant to get married. She had always been free. She’d had any number of lovers and somehow felt I had tamed