His Handwriting

2001

Ivan Walsh does not remember writing this version.

That is beginning to become a problem.

Before him are Bernardo’s pages, Fernando’s crossed-out name and now this: Bernardo, New York, 1944. It cannot be a diary of his, naturally, but the first person unsettles him because some phrases have that breathing he recognizes even before understanding them. There are words he would put exactly there. Or thinks he would. There are also mistakes, things he would change, repetitions that annoy him. That proves little. One grows old correcting the man one was until one ends up convinced that one has always written as one writes now.

He reads the date again.

1944

Riverside Drive.

That does make him uncomfortable.

Bernardo lives on Riverside Drive half a century later. Bernardo too. Both stories begin in the early hours, after a party, with a man who wants to get out of New York. In one version the phone rings. In this one an envelope appears. In one, Cuba calls. In the other, Mexico.

It could be a literary device.

That would be reassuring.

The problem is that the print is before him.

He takes it out of the black notebook.

He does not remember leaving it there.

The Virgin holds the child on her left arm. The child looks outward. The eight-pointed star is beside the shoulder.

No inscription remains on the front.

He turns it over.

There are traces of adhesive, a brown stain, a number written in pencil and later erased. Nothing more.

He looks for a magnifier among the studio materials and feels absurd as he does so. Casey would enlarge a photograph. Liliana would draw the lines. He has a painter’s magnifier and a paper image he may have bought in some church thirty years ago.

He looks at the star.

Eight points.

There is something around it.

It cannot be.

He changes the angle of the lamp.

Inside the star there is a figure.

A house.

Not a house. A dark rectangle with something above it. It could be a stain. He brings it even closer and, for an instant, is certain he sees an arcade, then a courtyard, perhaps a fountain.

He draws back.

This is exactly what he must not do.

Find shapes.

Connect them.

Turn a stain into a house, a house into a hacienda, a hacienda into a destiny.

The phone is still on the table.

Bernardo has said that Juan Diego is showing him his father.

Then he has told him not to show the Virgin to anyone.

That ought to be enough for him.

It is not enough.

I call Liliana.

She answers after the fourth ring.

—What happened?

She is asleep.

—The photograph.

—Ivan Walsh.

—The Virgin you saw on Juan Diego’s phone. Did it have anything written on it?

—What time is it?

—One.

—Then it is one.

—Liliana.

He hears her sitting up.

—I do not know. Let me think.

He waits.

—Pilgrims —she says.

He does not answer.

—I think it said Pilgrims.

—Are you sure?

—No.

—Tribulation?

Silence.

—That one is yours.

He looks at the print.

—What do you mean?

—You always called it that.

—Always?

Liliana takes too long.

—Since I have known you.

He hangs up.

Not because the conversation is over but because something has just occurred to him.

He looks for the notebook in which he had tried to make clean copies of the Roman diaries.

He finds it beneath a box.

First page.

Rome.

Seminary.

A date.

His handwriting.

He turns pages.

Prayers, scruples, stupidities, hunger, timetables. And then an entry appears that he remembers writing because he still remembers the table at which he wrote it.

The Virgin of the Pilgrims.

He remains motionless.

It is crossed out.

Above it, in another ink:

of Tribulation.

He does not remember correcting it.