Lovers on All Saints' Day by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Author:Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

The Solitude of the Magician

I

What happened inside his pocket struck Léopold as one of the most extraordinary things he’d ever seen—the interaction of a wedding band, a key ring, and a hand’s magical gesture—and he could not think it was a mistake, as everyone insisted at the time, to have publicly questioned a magician’s skills, even just an amateur magician, a mere weekend apprentice. The magician’s face (Léopold remembered the moment when he’d heard his name, Chopin, and hadn’t been able to ask whether it was a vulgar nickname or a coincidence) emerged from a thick turtleneck, and the smooth skin under his chin wrinkled when the man nodded or worried, and also wrinkled when Léopold approached the tallest lamp with the evidence of magic in his hand and his right heel searched out the switch on the parquet floor; the light came on and Léopold’s eyes stared at that miracle, a wedding band linked onto a key ring. Selma, his wife, saw him walk toward her, take her left hand, and slip the band, a single diamond set in the gleaming surface, back onto her finger, as if marrying her again, and she couldn’t help wondering, given that her marriage still seemed new to her the way shoes you don’t wear very often still seem new for quite a while, if this would continue to happen in the future: if small acts or banal circumstances would seem to belong belatedly to the same, now long-ago liturgy.

They had been married in a Catholic ceremony in which her cream-colored, rather than white, bridal gown had caught on the armrests of the seats, because she, willful girl that she was, had insisted the service be held outdoors beside the little stone chapel on the hill that faced Hamoir, in spite of the strong kite-flying wind at that time of year, and all just because it terrified her in the middle of July to be stuck inside the humid and sinister darkness of the Cathedral of Saint Paul, in Liège, with stained-glass windows, grimy with urban grime, that allowed no light through, and a door that on weekends appeared clogged with chocolate and cream gaufre stalls and diners’ cars and the diners themselves, families of clumsy children with clumsy hands who Selma could already envisage sullying her dress’s shimmering train with sweet sticky caramel, apple, or wild blackberry sauces. So Father Malaurie, of Xhoris, used a safety pin to tame his soutane, and blessed the couple without keeping the rice-paper pages of his Bible from fluttering like a caged bird, without ever finding out that the bride was pregnant, and without knowing, of course, to what extent the pregnancy was one of the most pertinent reasons for her being there that day, holding her veil with her hand so Léopold could kiss her and turning to face the wind so her hair wouldn’t tickle the groom’s face and make him sneeze at such a solemn moment or get in her eyes. Léopold’s kiss

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