00.13 — What Was Only Just Beginning to Be Born — Book II Revision

00.13 — WHAT WAS ONLY JUST BEGINNING TO BE BORN — BOOK II REVISION

1985 → years later · Mexico City / Cuetzalan

Smoke lingers longer than people. Sometimes objects do too.

For years I thought my father’s death began the moment someone told us.

No.

It had begun much earlier.

That does not mean it was predestined. I detest that kind of consolation. It only means that, when someone dies, we suddenly discover how many things were already waiting to become memories.

The crematorium smelled of cheap flowers and disinfectant.

My mother still did not understand what she had to decide.

—He didn’t even ask us —she said—. What do we do with your father?

As though he ought to have left instructions on the proper procedure for ceasing to exist.

Tony lit a cigarette.

It was not allowed.

The click of the lighter echoed through that room with an insolence I liked.

—Cremate him.

She said it without solemnity.

My mother looked at her.

Tony smoked.

I wanted to leave.

That is what I remember most: not the body, not the urn, not even my mother crying. I wanted to get out of there and become someone else.

To be Bernardo.

For a long time I used that expression without explaining it to myself.

To be Bernardo meant being able to leave a room before pain had time to find me. To walk at night. To steal a record I could afford. To kiss someone in a doorway just because a policeman was watching. To dance until the body no longer belonged to the family, to the surname, to the dead father.

To be Bernardo was frivolity turned into a defense.

I understood that much later.

When the furnace closed, my mother began to cry.

Tony did not.

Neither did I.

The person who received the ashes asked an administrative question. I do not remember what it was.

Tony threw the cigarette on the floor and put it out with her shoe.

It is strange what survives.

I do not remember what music was playing in the car on the way back.

I remember the cigarette butt.

Alejo was the only one who went up to the body before they took it away.

He kissed his forehead.

Then he went into my father’s room and took a picture down from the wall.

The Virgin.

By then we already called her the Virgin of Tribulation, though no one could quite explain since when.

My mother saw him.

—What are you doing?

Alejo held the painting against his chest.

—I’m taking her with me.

Nothing more.

He did not ask permission.

There was no argument either.

Sometimes the most important inheritances are divided up before anyone finds the will.

For years I thought that had been an act of piety.

Now I am not sure.

Perhaps Alejo knew something.

Perhaps he only needed to take an object that had been near my father.

Both things can be true.

Being Bernardo came afterward.

Or it had begun before.

It does not matter.

In Acapulco I walked for hours without a purpose. Papagayo, the Costera, downtown. Sometimes I had enough money to take a taxi back and walked anyway. There were nights when kissing someone was enough to make me feel that something important had happened.

Other nights I needed more.

Havana arrived that way.

As certain cities arrive: after you have invented them.

There I learned that you can use the body to stop thinking and end up thinking only about the body.

To dance.

To drink.

To wake naked with the sun on your legs.

To spend a few minutes without asking who you have been before.

That was being Bernardo.

Not hiding.

Precisely the opposite.

Becoming visible in a way no one in my family could manage.

The Virgin appeared sometimes.

Not literally.

A holy card in a wallet.

A reproduction on a wall.

A woman holding a child in a painting I had not gone there to see.

At first I paid no attention.

You find virgins everywhere when you have grown up surrounded by Catholics.

Then the coincidences began.

Or what we call coincidences when we have not yet decided what to do with them.

Years later I went into Tony’s office at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas.

It smelled of reheated coffee and tobacco.

There were reproductions leaning against the wall, open books on the desk, and a photograph of a fake Vermeer beside the window.

Tony was reading.

—Can I ask you something?

—That has never stopped you.

I sat down.

For a few seconds I looked at the painting.

Christ.

The chalice.

Fraudulent perfection.

Van Meegeren had managed to paint a lie good enough to make extraordinarily well-trained men want to believe it was true.

—What is the Virgin of Tribulation?

Tony looked up.

She did not smile immediately.

Then she did.

—That’s a decent question at last.

—Why?

—Because you asked what.

She lit a cigarette.

—Everyone asks who.

—And isn’t she someone?

—I don’t know.

An art historian’s answer.

Perfect.

—Then what is she?

Tony looked toward the window.

—A record.

I waited.

—Of what?

—Of losses.

—That doesn’t mean anything.

—It means too much.

She stood up and looked for a folder.

She did not show it to me.

—An image changes its name. It is repainted. Copied. Someone steals it. Someone else restores it badly. It appears a hundred years later in another city. Everyone thinks they own it.

She put the folder on the table.

—But perhaps that’s where the mistake lies.

—What mistake?

—Thinking we own images.

She crushed a little ash.

—There are images that organize the lives of those who look at them.

I said nothing.

I thought of Alejo taking the painting away.

Of my father.

Of Casey Walsh drawing a woman he claimed never to have painted before.

Of myself seeing a finished painting where there was only charcoal.

—Hakim is looking for us —I said.

Tony stopped smoking.

It was only a slight change.

But it happened.

—Who told you?

—It doesn’t matter.

—Yes, it does.

—He wants the Virgin.

Tony slowly shook her head.

—He doesn’t understand.

—What?

—That no one has her.

She went over to the desk.

—That’s the trouble with relics, with paintings, with countries, with people. Everyone wants to possess what possesses them.

—Then where is she?

Tony looked at me.

Behind her, the fake Vermeer seemed more real than many authentic paintings.

—I’m never going to give her to you.

I did not ask whether she meant the painting.

Years later I remembered that conversation in Cuetzalan.

Casey had left his sketch on the table.

The same face that was not yet a face.

The same curve.

The purple.

By then I already knew that Alejo had taken a Virgin from my father’s house.

I knew Hakim was looking for her.

I knew Tony refused to say where she was.

What I did not yet know was whether we were talking about the same object.

That was the wrong question.

In our family we had always made that mistake: believing that two things have to be identical to be the same.

Outside, the frogs began again.

I looked at Casey’s drawing.

I thought of the urn.

Of Alejo.

Of the fake Vermeer.

Of Bernardo dancing so as not to have a surname.

And for the first time I understood that perhaps the Virgin did not survive because someone protected her.

She survived because she changed.

Paintings.

Names.

Owners.

Stories.

Like us.