The Garden of Empty Graves

The idea to separate was mine; the idea to make the farewell trip was hers. For six years, since we started living together, we had wanted to come to the castle. We had once dreamed of it as the ideal choice for a honeymoon, if we ever got married. But in the end there was no marriage, no trip, no reason to stay together. We had made a deal: on the calendar, we would enclose in a red circle every day of fulfillment and in a blue circle every day of boredom. When we saw that there were more blue circles than red, the relationship would end. And that happened. Luisa had not wanted to accept it, but that’s how it was. A little out of guilt, perhaps, I agreed to come. It would be the last gift we would give each other. She took care of everything: buying the plane tickets, ordering the reservations, packing the suitcases, arranging the visas. The week before we left I dedicated myself to my move, to take everything I had from the common house to my sister’s apartment. That was the deal: after the vacation, we would go on with our lives.

We arrived here at the end of August, when the mountains were at their greenest, the lake was a beautiful mint color, and the avenue of chestnut trees leading to the castle was full of foliage. Everywhere there were flowers: clumps of petunias and geraniums, bluebells. The rhododendrons were a blaze of red, pink, orange, yellow flowers....

“The place for an artist,” commented Luisa, walking in front of me. A gust of wind shook the brim of her hat. We could feel it, we could feel the shadow rising behind those images.

It was a long trip: fourteen hours by plane, two more by train to get to town and another fifteen minutes by cab from town to the castle in the middle of the mountains. It was almost nine o’clock when we arrived to check in and it was not yet dark. It was dusk. The twilight was accentuating the smell of the conifers that surrounded the place. Luisa seemed happy; everything was more beautiful than we had imagined: the huge stone building and the small hamlet at the foot of the ramparts, the bronze statue in the square, the intensely green surface of the golf course visible from the avenue of chestnut trees. We were given a room on the sixth floor, overlooking the lake. It was an alcove like something out of a Russian novel: with its large four-poster bed with embroidered curtains, its closet, its iron stove, its ewer with basin and pitcher, and its antique bathtub.

“This could still be a honeymoon,” Luisa sighed as she put her suitcase on the bed to start unpacking.

“We said we weren’t going to discuss that anymore,” I reminded her.

She quietly finished taking out her clothes and hanging them in the closet. Then we went out to walk around the hotel. It was a place full of glass and old lights, of that languid splendor of the old empire. On the carpet of its endless tinkling halls, footsteps long gone were dragging, suffocated echoes, crinoline rubbing.

From the beginning I tried to establish a routine that would help us to start the separation: in the mornings I would dedicate myself to painting while Luisa walked around the surroundings; each of us would have lunch on our own and we would only meet at dinner, at seven in the evening, on the terrace overlooking the lake. After dinner we could go to the bar or play cards in the tea room and finally we would go to sleep, each on an opposite side of the bed. If we were going to live here for three months, it seemed to me, the best thing to do would be to mark the distance. Anyway, I have never liked couples who are together all the time. Having a woman constantly glued to me, at best, feels like having twenty kilos of gold tied around my neck: it may be very valuable, but I prefer to be able to move around. Luisa said she was fine. She had always answered in this way: “It’s fine”. That ease, almost indifference on her part to adapt to my will was one of the things that drove us apart. I was bored by such a woman. On that occasion, however, I no longer said anything.

Shoulder-length light brown hair, well-groomed; perfect complexion, white as white flowers. A straw hat slightly shading her almond-colored eyes. The neck --long, translucent: the fantasy of any vampire, harmonized with the light blue fabric of the dress. A serene, almost contemplative attitude: the gaze pregnant with sadness, languishing in the horizon...

I was absorbed in the painting and I was startled by the voice of a boy who approached me from behind.

“It doesn’t look much like her,” he said.

Luisa smiled at the comment.

“Are you an art critic?” I asked the boy, turning to him. He must have been nine or ten years old, maybe eleven. Since I don’t like children, I’m not good at estimating. He was short, chubby, with red hair. I suspected he intended to stay and watch us, so I lit a cigarette and called it a day. I began to put away tubes and brushes. Luisa yawned and stretched. She took off her straw hat. She came closer to look at the painting, trying to see it with the child’s eyes, to discover my gaze behind his.

“Are you from here?”, she asked.

The boy answered by pointing his finger toward the village down the hill. The lights had begun to come on there. It looked like a Coca Cola Christmas commercial village.

“What’s your name?”

“Alex. What’s yours?”

Apparently he was more interested in the model than in the painting.

“My name is Luisa.”

“Why do you talk funny?”

“Because I’m a foreigner. I come from a country where another language is spoken.

“Which language?”

“Spanish.”

“Are you from Spain?”, continued the brat, not realizing that he was bothering me.

“No, I’m from Mexico. We speak Spanish there too.”

“My big sister is learning French. You don’t know French?”

“No,” Luisa looked at me smiling, as if expecting me to join in the silly conversation. I didn’t, of course. The afternoon was getting cooler: the wind was bringing humidity from the mountains.

“Well, I’m leaving now,” the boy said suddenly, looking at me as I had finished putting my things away. Luisa looked amused. She was smiling. All I could think about was that I wanted to go to my room to get my pullover and then go up to the bar to have a beer.

Already a hundred meters away from us, the boy turned and came back.

“Do they play golf in your country?”, he asked Luisa.

“Yes. Why?”

Alex took a golf ball out of his pocket and gave it to her with the attitude of a man giving a bouquet of roses. He immediately took off running down the road to town. He was agile for such a chubby boy.

Luisa and I were left alone. The lights in the castle had come on.

“Are you going to the bar?”, she asked me.

“Yes, just for a while.”

“Why don’t we go down to the village? Let’s go to the Irish pub. I’m craving a Guinness.”

The truth is that the afternoon was exquisite: I felt like going out, walking, breathing life. But not with Luisa.

“Go by yourself. I’m cold. I don’t want to leave the hotel.”

The first few days here were difficult. I had a hard time recognizing the woman I once wanted in the one I no longer wanted. Luisa felt this changing inside of me and she tried to leave me alone. There was no need to avoid her. For many hours we each walked on our own. We would go for a walk in the woods or by the lake, on the golf course; idly, we would visit the cafes, bars and stores of the town filled with Japanese, American, Slavic tourists... we would walk through the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel with its dark carpet, its dim light of centuries-old chandeliers, its gold dust and its mystery of stifled voices and inaudible footsteps.

It turned out that the typical souvenir of the town was witches. That was what the tourist stores sold: all kinds of witches... big, medium and small, wicked and kind; old women with warts on their noses and seductive Morticias and Maleficents; witches with broomsticks, with pointed hats, with red veins in their eyes; greedy, wrathful, maternal, wise witches; wooden, rag, alabaster... some gave the impression of being alive.

We met very little. I preferred to stay in the room, watching from the window the changes in the landscape. And more than once I saw Luisa down there, leaning on the parapet of one of the terraces, smoking and looking in the same direction as me: the lake, the small teahouse at the foot of the mountain, the conifer-covered slopes. There were many guests and yet we didn’t feel like socializing. We barely spoke to newcomers looking for the spa or the ATM. At the bar there was a Colombian waiter who served us in Spanish and tried to be friendly; I thought Luisa would think he was cute, but in any case she didn’t notice him much. So after a few weeks what could be called a reconciliation ensued. We began to spend more time together, first in the after-dinner conversation. Then I came up with the idea of painting that portrait with the straw hat and the blue dress. After all, we had tastes in common: Irish beer, oolong tea, espresso coffee, Gitanes cigars, bitter chocolate and cloudy days. I know it was wrong: Luisa began to wait, to believe there would be something else. She was tense, expectant, as if on the lookout for any sign.

One night --I think it was the last night without cold, she proposed me to go down to the village and get drunk together, go around the bars until they would be closing one by one in the early morning. I accepted. I accepted thinking of her, of her sensuality so long stifled. Luisa did not know who she was, or so I thought; I did not know the being that inhabited those long and gloomy dresses. She was like a flower that had grown in a greenhouse, a flower that eventually, inexorably, would end up letting its petals exhale all the poison of the jungle where it really came from. I would not be there when that happened. I was not to care.

We walked, instead of getting a cab. We went all along the shore of the lake, following the road. The full moon looked duplicated on the still black water surface: two silver discs, cold. The town was a single long street full of restaurants, boites, bars with live music and stores for tourists, which in the evenings looked illuminated as in a perpetual Christmas.

It was a little after eleven o’clock when we arrived at the first nightclub: The Sick Rose. There we met a gay couple who were also staying at the castle. In the heat of the Guinness we began to chat with them. They were Italians, one of them a pianist; the other worked making videos. They were in their thirties and had athletic bodies, dressed with good taste. Kindly, they told us that we looked good together, that we seemed happy. They asked us if we had been to the castle one winter. At the end of November, they told us, the lake was completely covered with ice. Then a Russian dance company would come and present Swan Lake with all its lights and scenery. The show could be seen from the castle windows.

“It must be wonderful,” said Luisa, enthusiastically, “Why don’t we stay until then?”

I didn’t answer, but only she could tell. The Italians kept talking about the place. One of them, the one who made videos, had been coming here for ten years to spend the Fall. He knew everything: the tourist sites, the recommended restaurants, the ghost stories that had made the castle famous. There was a flutist who would go up the elevator with the guests, especially if one went alone; he played a strange, quiet music, like the kind you hear in your dreams when you dream of music. He would get off at some floor and go down the corridors playing that flute that no one heard. Then there was a poor crazy woman who was asking for a child. And there was also, said the other Italian, a suite from which sometimes came the noise of a party: radio music from the time of the war, the voices of men talking animatedly, the joyful laughter of inebriated women, the clinking of glasses, the clinking of silverware. But there was no one inside; the management had not given that suite to any guests for years.

We said goodbye at almost one in the morning. We left The Sick Rose and crossed the street holding hands, like two frightened children. The main avenue was already lonely; the lights everywhere shone amidst the silence with a strange glow, like an old toy store window. The stories of the Italians had made us nervous, and it was not from the cold that we were shivering. We didn’t want to get to the hotel, so we decided to continue drinking in the Irish bar and once there, to forget the subject of ghosts, we started talking about our things, our common memories, the friends who had stayed in Mexico. At a table near ours, a group of drunk young men were singing songs in a language we could not recognize.

It was a delightful evening, I admit it. However, there was no more than that. I didn’t want anything else to happen. I am anaphrodite: that is what Luisa could not understand. I’m not interested in sex, I don’t need it; it’s cumbersome, it always requires too much effort and in the end it gives less pleasure than a good meal or a good conversation. I am sure that sex addicts are people who very much need to feel accepted. I don’t need to feel accepted, and I find a beautiful woman walking down the street well-dressed, well-painted and walking gracefully more attractive than a woman with her legs open, in the buff, sticky with sweat and discharge. I was happy with Luisa that night. That was all. I fell asleep on my side of the bed for a while. I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and could not go back to sleep. I saw the window open to a sky that would soon begin to clear.

The swimming pool was located in a separate building of the castle, before reaching the golf course. Built on a slope in the grounds, on entering you first found the cafeteria, at ground level; to get to the pool itself you had to go down a staircase. And there it was: huge, intensely blue, filled with light coming in through the dome and glass walls overlooking the spa’s back garden. You could watch the swimmers from the cafeteria windows, designed for that surely: for parents to watch their children while reading the newspaper. Or for those who, like me, only went to watch the women in bathing suits.

Next to the pool was a jacuzzi, mostly filled with Japanese and elderly people. And at the back were the dressing rooms, the showers, the sauna and the massage room. Several times I saw Luisa go in there, without her seeing me. I guess she would spend hours in the sauna and then go for a massage. She had always liked that sort of thing. I imagined her there, naked, showing her body to the masseur and other women without feeling anything.

We were both spoiled children of wealthy families, although of different origins: Luisa came from the old Mexican aristocracy, which had lost most of its privileges with the Revolution and now lived only on its rents, its pride and its memories; my father, on the other hand, belonged to the new oligarchy, which had enriched itself by profiting from public office. We both hated our parents and tried to live as far away as possible from them, although we had not been able to do without their money. Those things in common brought us together at the beginning, after we met in a gallery in Zona Rosa, one afternoon when the exhibition of a painter who was her cousin and a friend of mine was opening. We were drinking there, chatting about art and everything but politics, and when the cocktail party was over we went out to the surrounding bars.

“So, tell me about yourself,” I asked her.

And she told me everything that was important: she wasn’t dating anyone at the moment, she had a best friend who had moved to London, she liked dancing, buying shoes and old toys, eating mangoes that were still green, visiting churches even though she didn’t believe in God... she disliked getting up early, cold feet, domestic animals, to be instructed, women who told jokes and men who told lies. She had had a son, at the age of seventeen.

“Where is he?”

“Died”. She would not speak of him again. She would never mention him again.

Dawn surprised us on the highway, driving to Tepoztlán because Luisa wanted to show me some Cauduro paintings she had there.

A man can get bewitched by such a woman, born from the abysses of the night as Aphrodite was born from the foam of the sea: luminous, naked, showing on her lips and on her fingers the blood of the gods who tried to subdue her. Man likes the flock of glitter that flies on her skin, the scent of poisons and night flowers in her hair, the fruit that she gives with her hands as if she were saying goodbye. He sees her helpless, cold from so much night; he looks at the crescent moon beneath her feet, and thinks she is not equipped to walk on the earth. He thinks he is going to protect her.

I believed that and fell in love with her. Then I discovered her power and I was still in love. I discovered she was a complete narcissist and a charming despot and went even more crazy. What cooled my feelings was the feeling of never being able to reach her, the need to reverse roles in order to save my self-esteem as a man and as an artist.

But yes, I was very much in love. After that trip to Tepoztlán, I was in such a state of mental excitement that I no longer felt anything else. All I could do was think about her. But Luisa was distant like those islands that appear in dreams, that the more the dreamer tries to get closer to them, the farther away they insist on floating, points in flight towards the horizon.

My favorite time to work was at dusk, when it was almost dark. I liked to watch the light change as I painted: on the horizon the sky emptied into a Venetian pink that turned cobalt; above me, a blaze of golden clouds over pale blue; to the east, smoky blue. I worked slowly, stopping constantly to contemplate, only to contemplate. The canvas was filling with stains that would later make me remember what I had seen: that instant, that afternoon that so quickly fled into the night.

A cold wind began to blow from the lake. I could hear the cawing of crows passing by in flocks. In front of me, Luisa shivered.

“Do you want to leave?”, I asked.

She looked pretty, haloed by the afternoon light. Behind her, the mint-colored lake. Behind the lake, the snow-capped mountain. It was already October and the water level had dropped; its color itself was different: less blue than before.

“I’m already cold,” she answered me, barely moving her lips so as not to lose her pose.

Twilight was approaching like a fire behind the forest, one of those fires that you dream of being chased by.

“Tomorrow I’m going down to town to buy a coat,” she announced. “Will you come with me?”

“You didn’t pack one?”

“Yes, but I want a new one. Don’t worry: you’re not going to pay for it.

I’ve always liked that, ever since I was a kid. Accompanying a woman on a shopping trip is like going on safari to watch a lioness hunt. Watching her trying on clothes, posing for herself in the mirror, smiling to herself... only in the clothing store does a woman recover the little girl she was, the one who played at putting on her mother’s shoes and dresses. And it is a male privilege to be not only a spectator but also an accomplice in these games. Playing the role of judge, fashion expert, beauty expert… What could be more flattering for a man?

At lunch we met Ricardo and Saverio, the Italians. They looked fresh. They had just come from the gym. They worked out together at six in the morning and spent almost three hours at it. Then they would go to the salad bar for breakfast. They would order the weirdest juices: cucumber with carrot, strawberry with beet, peach with orange.

They sat with us. They smiled at us. They watched us. Luisa looked bad: depressed, exhausted, raw. She had been drinking almost every night. I no longer accompanied her. I couldn’t and didn’t care. And I didn’t feel sorry. I had finished her portrait and no longer had to spend so much time with her.

“Did you go out last night?,” asked Saverio, the one who made videos. I turned to look at Luisa with a “That question is for you” stare.

“I was here, at the bar,” she answered. I was trying to smile.

On the pretext of going to serve myself apple juice, I left them alone. At the bar I met one of the guests I liked. She was in her sixties, but looked much younger. She always wore white clothes, as if she belonged to some exotic religion, and she had curious little animal eyes that moved quickly whenever she heard something interesting. She was an Australian writer, apparently famous in her country, and had come here to write a mystery novel. We talked about it for a few moments. I told her about the ghost stories of the Italians and recommended that she approach them if she wanted to know more.

“That flute player character is wonderful,” she said, squinting her rodent eyes. “I’m going to try to catch him in the elevator”.

When I returned to the table there were other people already seated: a woman with her two teenage daughters. They had large slices of apfelstrudel on their plates.

“The most important thing in this sport,” the older girl explained to her sister, “is that you know how to brake. If you are able to brake, you can ski anywhere.”

The two gays, probably bored with Luisa, made room for the mystery writer and started talking to her. Before I could do the same, Luisa stuck to me and said in my ear:

“Today morning I masturbated”.

What did she want me to answer? I didn’t understand. I quickly drank my apple juice and said goodbye to everyone. I went down to the lobby. Several stuffed deer and bear heads stared at me from the stone walls as if mocking. I needed air. I walked out onto the avenue of chestnut trees and crossed the village and the wall, towards the golf course. It was cold and that gave me a sense of energy, of masculine strength, of independence. Once, I remembered, more than a year ago, I caught Luisa masturbating. She reacted embarrassed, obfuscated. I tried to see it as something normal, but I ended up getting nervous myself because of her reaction. A few days later, while in bed, I asked her to do it again, in front of me. She stared at me as if she didn’t understand and didn’t answer; she turned her back and pretended to fall asleep. She never wanted to talk about it and never let me surprise her again. Why did she bring up the subject again now?

A girl passed by me on her bicycle. She was pretty: tall, laughing, with hair the same color as the rhododendron blossoms. I watched her until she got lost on one of the trails leading down to the lake and I turned off in the opposite direction, towards the mountain. For the first time I was going there. It was a little-traveled, wooded area. Among the trees, on the thick carpet of moss, colorful mushrooms grew like the ones they say in children’s books are elves’ houses. I didn’t know them live. I felt like painting them. Yes, the next day or as soon as I had the chance I would go back that way with my materials to make at least a sketch. The richness of the landscape seemed to be increasing. However, I didn’t want to go any further into the forest. I have never had confidence in nature: it is treacherous, violent.... Suddenly I felt a hand on my back. I was startled: it was Luisa.

“Why did you leave like that?”, she asked me, on the verge of tears. I was shaking.

“I wasn’t feeling well.”

She sat down on a rock next to me and lit a cigarette. I was disgusted by the smoke at that time of the morning. We didn’t talk. We didn’t look at each other. I waited for her to finish smoking and then, perhaps more out of hatred than desire, I began to fondle her breasts. She let me, without passion and without rejection. I pulled up her sweater and unbuttoned her blouse. Only then did she react, weakly.

“What are you doing?”

“Didn’t you want this?”

I made her get up from the rock, put her in front of it and pulled down her jeans and panties. I felt nothing when I penetrated her, and this not feeling anything made me master of the situation. Luisa started to moan. She asked me if I wanted her. I did not answer. She asked me if I liked her buttocks. I didn’t answer.

Suddenly I heard a rustling of dry branches. I stopped and looked around, thinking in panic of a wild animal. Luisa had heard it too, because she turned away from me and adjusted her clothes.

“What is that?”

I also adjusted my pants and climbed up the rock where we were to see if I could discover the source of the noise.

Alex tried to run away.

“What are you doing here,” I asked him. His guilty look told me he had seen us.

Luisa came up behind me. Her expression of alarm had changed to excited sympathy.

“I came to look for golf balls,” the boy said to her, not to me who had questioned him. “There are a lot of them around here.”

“And what do you do with them?” Luisa asked him perfectly calm, as if she had never been sad.

“I keep them. I already have a lot of them: about three hundred.”

Somehow I thanked him for interrupting us.

“In Summer I find ten or fifteen in a single day.”

We went with him back to the castle, listening to him talk about golf balls. As last time, he gave one to Luisa as a farewell gift. It had the monogram of the hotel printed on it, like all the other things there.

That early morning the first snowflakes fell. I saw them because I woke up again in the middle of the night and could not go back to sleep until the gloom of the room began to turn blue at dawn. It was always like that now. I was awakened by that: that thirst for who knows what, that suffocation that was like anguish for not being able to cry... that’s why I saw that it had begun to snow. At dawn, a huge white magpie landed at our window.

I perceived in Luisa a pain that did not cease, a dull, stagnant pain. It was as if she had decided not to let it go. It had settled in her eyes, in her smile and had changed everything. It seemed as if her hair was no longer heavy: it no longer fell over her shoulders as before; it simply descended. The violence with which that once beautiful hair used to throw reddish sparkles had disappeared. It was something dead that Luisa carried with her. And it was her decision that it should be so. Only her body still seemed to cling to something, as if it did not understand what was going on inside.

On the terrace of the bar, she took a handful of snow and offered it to my lips.

“Willst du nicht?” she asked me in German, just to be snobbish. Under the black coat she wore a dark red, turtleneck pullover.

When she saw that I was not interested, she ate the ice herself, which burned so cold, with a totally puerile attitude. Her white fingers had turned a rosy pink.

“I heard about a place that might interest you,” she said, coquettishly. “I’m sure it will excite your morbid curiosity.”

What could excite me? I was bored with everything and she knew it. She wouldn’t be foolish enough to want to impress me with a sex shop or a whorehouse. To my regret, I fell into her trap.

“What is it?”

“Tomorrow you’ll see,” she said, smiling sideways, satisfied. And she went away and left me thinking.

It was a boarding school for girls nestled in the foothills of a neighboring mountain. It was an imposing building, with high stone walls, that spoke of values and education unalterable over the years, perhaps centuries. Young girls from good families from all over the world were sent here by parents who wanted to turn them into aristocratic ladies or simply did not wish to have them around or could not take care of them. It was closed to visitors, but what Luisa wanted me to see was not inside, but somewhere in the surrounding forest. It was a miniature cemetery, an enchanted place where, among mosses and fungi, a dozen white, perfectly well-made tombs, ten centimeters long, stood out.

The guide we got, an old man who was almost blind but nevertheless moved confidently among those paths, told us the story: it was all the work of the platonic devotion of a gardener, dead for almost a hundred years, who had the bad habit of falling in love with the inmates. He secretly adored them, spying on them when they let themselves be seen through the windows or when they went out to have fun together in the gardens. He measured the passing of the seasons not by the color of the plants he tended, but by the change in her girls’ dresses: from light muslins and satin booties to riding boots, coats and hats. They were his real plants, his most precious flowers, and when one of them left the boarding school, either because her family claimed her or because she had passed the maximum age to be there, the gardener mourned her as if she had died and carved in her honor a tombstone with her name on it.

Luisa and I leaned over to some of the small graves and read aloud the names and dates, engraved on the marble in meticulous handwriting: Georgina Maciver, Erin Gerling, Nastasha Ösberk, Michelle Pauline Berthaud, Montserrat Nadall... above each stood a small cross.

“Did any of them have a better burial than this one?” asked Luisa.

At that moment a ray of sunlight flashed through the trees and a magpie seemed to come to tell us that visiting time was over. We headed back, without speaking. I wondered if, for a moment, Luisa had remembered her dead son. In any case, she seemed satisfied with the excursion. The place had a greater effect on me than I expected. I wanted to peek into the boarding school, but through the huge gate I could only see an avenue of bare trees and, in the background, an overwhelming building: tall, authoritative, unmovable, with a tower on which a pre-war flag was flying.

A magpie --the same one we had seen before, came to perch on the magnolia growing at the entrance. Luisa had to detach my hands from the bars for us to finish leaving.

All day I was mentally going over the gardener’s story, trying to imagine the face and figure of each of those girls who, isolated from the world, were taking piano lessons, history lessons, dead languages... I would see their gaze suddenly caught by some memory, the rise of their chest in a sigh, the pale hands paused anxiously on their lap.

Something happened between Luisa and me after that: I saw her beautiful again.

Back at the castle we parted ways: she went to the elegant stores in town to buy clothes and get her hair done; I went to the town library and there I spent the afternoon looking for material on the history of the castle and the region in general. Among all the data about princes, scheming cardinals and heroic defenders I found only one interesting paragraph: the boarding school had served as a hospital at the end of the World War I. There was a photo of one of the halls filled with beds and wounded, with the nuns serving as nurses. That was all there was to it. I returned to the hotel unsatisfied.

In the evening, when I went to the bar to have a drink, I met Luisa there and almost didn’t recognize her: under her coat she was wearing a low-cut black velvet dress with long gloves. Her hair was impeccably straightened and she wore a necklace of green stones with the corresponding earrings, which sparkled with her eyes as if they were exchanging mysterious signals. And she had put on her makeup: her cherry-colored lips contrasted violently with the translucent white of her skin.

When she saw me enter, she gave me a mysterious smile and took a sip from her glass. Then she turned, without looking at me again, facing the huge mirror on the bar. Therein lay her mistake: if she had flirted a little more, I would have been attracted. But she played it cool and her gesture reminded me of her bad character traits.

I sat down next to her, in silence, and lit a cigarette. Someone was playing languid, uninteresting music on the piano.

“Why don’t you sit with them?” I asked Luisa, seeing through the mirror that Ricardo and Saverio were in the background, shrouded in a gloom of low lights and cigarette smoke.

“Does it bother you that I’m here?” She stole a cigarette from me with the same suspicious smile as a moment ago. “I remind you that it was you who came to sit with me.”

“You’re defensive,” I said, looking at her through the mirror. “You like them, don’t you?”

“Jealousy, then?”

“Jealousy? Of those…?”

“Why not? Saverio sometimes looks at me in a special way.”

“Maybe,” I was getting in a bad mood and I wanted to humiliate her. “Why don’t you try to seduce him? Maybe even straighten him out.

“You want something like that to happen, don’t you? Something sordid, morbid, “interesting” you would say.”

I did not answer. We remained silent for long minutes. The bartender came over to change our ashtray and glass. Luisa was drinking red wine. She drank with a voluptuous fruition: with each sip she closed her eyes, licked her lips, held the liquid in her mouth for a moment and then swallowed it slowly while the muscles of her face tensed in an almost sexual rictus; only then did she open her eyes again, returned to the world and to her thoughts.

“What wine are you drinking?” I asked her.

She turned at last and answered me with another question:

“Would you love me again if I…?”

I saw her beautiful again, very beautiful. I let my senses slip inside her warm halo, smelling of fine clothes, recently abandoned sheets, alcohol and scented cigarettes and who knows what ancient fragrance of flowers about to wilt.

From the moment I saw him I realized he was a womanizer. I am not and never have been, but I have known some of the trade and I know how to recognize them. You can tell by the way they dress, the way they walk, the way they sit, the way they kiss women’s hands or light their cigarettes, but above all by the hypocritical contempt with which they treat other men and unattractive women. This one, in particular, began to look for Luisa’s gaze as soon as he saw her.

We met him one night at The Sick Rose. We had seen him before at the hotel, but it was at The Sick Rose that he approached us --that is, Luisa. He introduced himself as Evgeni and started trying to impress her.

“You haven’t been here long, have you?” He asked her. “Honeymoon?”

“Eh... No. Not exactly.”

“Where are you from, if it’s not indiscreet?

“Mexico. And you?”

“Ah, Mexico,” the guy sighed. He had a nice, deep voice. “I had the good fortune to visit there many years ago. It’s a shame what’s happening there, isn’t it? The drug violence and all that stuff you read about. I’m Russian. From St. Petersburg.”

“I can’t wait to go! One of my dreams is to visit the Hermitage Museum.”

“Whenever you want, I’ll be happy to be your guide.”

“I’ll take you at your word, huh?” The smile and the squinting of the eyes at full beauty.

“Well,” he smiled and squinted in return, “Have you seen all the interesting things here? I mean food and drink.”

“What do you recommend?”

“If we’re talking about bars, this is certainly the best. If you want to have lunch or dinner, I highly recommend the Walpurgisnacht. Have you guys been there?

“No.”

“You really have to go. And you have to try the goose breast in fig sauce. And the pork jowl.”

“Thank you,” I felt obliged to say, since he was kind enough to occasionally include me in the conversation and I had so far not opened my mouth.

We were in the middle of that when a character appeared who seemed to be a friend of Evgeni’s. He was more modest than he: about forty years old, short of stature, stocky, dressed in ordinary clothes and a gray woolen coat. He was carrying a black musician’s case.

“Marcel,” the Russian called him.

They started talking in French and then Evgeni introduced him to us. Luisa was about to order a beer, but Marcel stopped her. He looked into her eyes and took her hand to kiss it.

“In this place the best thing is wine,” he said, “And it’ll be on me,” he got up and went to a table in the back with his black case.

“Watch what’s going to happen,” Evgeni told us.

Marcel took out a horn and began to play a cheerful and energetic melody.

“Look at the manager’s face,” the Russian pointed to an old, white-haired man, who began to sigh as he concentrated all his attention on Marcel’s music.

After the first piece came the glasses of wine, without anyone asking for them. The Frenchman continued to play, seemingly happy. He played and drank.

“The owner was a hunter,” explained Evgeni. “And every time he hears the horn, he has the illusion that he is in the woods again, with his dogs and his rifle. He likes it so much that he invites Marcel as much wine as he wants, as long as he keeps on playing.”

“What beautiful men they both are, don’t you think?” Luisa was delighted.

“Marcel is right,” I commented, so as not to be left out, “The best thing about this bar is the wine.”

Evgeni agreed with a gesture and began to contemplate his glass with an attitude of immeasurable nostalgia. He waited for Marcel to finish the piece he was playing and said:

“Just as there is music for all moods, so there are wines. Some wines tickle your tongue and make you talk like a parrot; others go to your legs and you feel you need to move: these are the dancing wines. There are also wines for singing, for making love, for crying. Once, in the Black Sea coast, I tasted an exquisite wine for crying; it was such a moving stuff that I sat on the beach drinking from the bottle and started to look at the waves feeling that all of me was melting in tears, sweet tears that did not stop flowing. I was moved until it got dark. The bottle had disappeared, perhaps into the sea.

“I have to taste it. Luisa exclaimed with genuine passion.”

She was one of those women whose essence is totally manifested through beauty, who do not seem interested in being anything else but beautiful and live concentrated on that: they move, walk, sit, sleep, remain still, all concentrated on their beauty. Curiously, when this character has reached such a dimension, almost priestly, the woman, contrary to all that could be supposed, does not become superficial or frivolous, but on the contrary: she is filled with depths, she abides in her own beauty and becomes one with that abyss: she becomes unfathomable.

That must have been what attracted the Russian and led him to constantly seek her out in the bar, in the corridors, on the terraces, in the bohemian corners of town. In an increasingly audacious manner, more and more challenging to me, he would offer her his arm as he descended a staircase or perpetrate any other of his gallantries. And Luisa never missed an opportunity to use it to annoy me. Or maybe not. Maybe I was too self-centered to think that way and she really enjoyed it.

“I’m going with Evgeni to ski and then parachute jumping,” she told me one particularly cold morning when I didn’t feel like staying in the lobby of the castle, smoking and drinking hot cider in front of the huge burning fireplace.

“Isn’t it dangerous at his age?” I asked to annoy her.

She answered me with another question:

“Don’t you want to join us? They say the view is beautiful from the parachute.”

“No.”

“What a pendejo,” was the last thing she said, before leaving.

“On moonlit nights they let them out,” Alex commented quietly, but soon seemed to regret it.

“What did you say?” asked Luisa, feeling shivers even before she knew why. We were at the edge of the forest, from where the castle could be seen in the distance like a dark spot in the snow.

“Nothing,” Alex recanted.

“Who are they letting out?”

“No one.”

“Alex,” Luisa looked him hard in the eyes, “I’m pretty sure you said, ‘On nights when the moon is full, they let them out.’ Who do they let out?”

“No one. No one, really.”

“Are we going to stop being friends over this?”

“Don’t blackmail him,” I had to intervene. “If he doesn’t want to tell you, let him. He must have his reasons.”

The poor boy made a face like he was going to cry and was afraid.

“No.”

“No what?” Luisa asked him, ignoring me.

“I don’t want us to stop being friends,” Alex looked around as if he was afraid someone might hear him. “But will you both promise not to tell anyone?”

“Yes,” Luisa agreed.

“I promise,” I said, more emphatically than she did.

“Okay. I was talking about the girls at the boarding school.”

Luisa stared at him without believing.

“Isn’t that place abandoned?”

The boy looked really nervous.

“Yes, but the girls live there.”

“Which girls?”

“The boarding school girls. No one has seen them because they are not allowed to go out. Only on moonlit nights.”

“You’re not making up stories to scare me?”

“No… I mean, yes. I made it all up. I’m sorry. I’m leaving now.” And he left in the direction of town as fast as the snow-covered road would let him.

Out the window I could see a white landscape: the frozen lake, the mountains and trees covered with snow, the roads turned into skating rinks. Not wanting to go out, I looked for some activity to keep me warm and entertained. I had bought a book in town, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. I went down to the tea room, where there were newspapers and magazines from various countries.

It suddenly occurred to me: I went to the internet room, which was right there at the end of the elevator corridor, and looked up the names I had copied from the miniature cemetery, the names of the girls. I enjoyed that activity immensely, although the search engines only referred me to one of the entries: Georgina Maciver. Painter. 1889-1926. There was nothing else: the entry was part of an obituary. There was not a single image, neither of her nor of her paintings. I went to several art websites, in several languages, and finally I came across an advertisement about an auction of artworks in Rome. It was of little known painters and, therefore, the page provided some biographical information. Georgina Maciver had produced a scarce body of work, most of which had been acquired by the castle administration.

I cursed Luisa for not being with me celebrating the discovery. I closed the navigator, left the room and went to find the maître d’hôtel. The cold had gone and, along with it, the desire to stay cooped up and passive. Indeed, there were pictures of that woman everywhere: in the corridors, on the staircase landings, by the telephones and, of course, in the rooms. But neither Luisa nor I had taken much notice of them. They were idyllic landscapes, almost all treated according to pre-war nationalist sentimentalism.

The maître d’hôtel knew nothing. He called a tour guide who worked there and asked her to assist me. The woman took me through rooms and corners I did not know; she showed me some paintings --landscapes and portraits of peasant children, and, as we went up and down, she told me that Georgina Maciver had left most of her work in the hotel by virtue of a patronage contract: she lived there, enjoying the privileges of VIP guests, in exchange for giving the administration everything that came out of her easel.

“Did she die here?” I asked.

“Not at the hotel. But very close by, in the woods behind the golf courses. She was attacked by a pack of wolves.”

“We were told there were no wolves.”

“That was in the late 1920s. They don’t come down here anymore. Besides, she liked to hike at night.

Finally, in one of the corridors, hanging next to a small writing table, we found a truly remarkable piece: In the small painting, a child was floating drowned in dark water, amidst an armada of red flowers. The card had the artist’s name, the year –1920, and the title: Not waving, but drowning.

Luisa came to the room in the wee hours of the morning, when I was already asleep. She smelled of alcohol and --she didn’t bother to hide it, sex. She didn’t turn on the light: enough light was coming through the window. She began to undress, making as much noise as possible, wanting to wake me up. Wanting me to realize what time she had arrived and how. I turned on the lamp and stared at her naked body.

“So,how did it go?” I asked her, dryly.

“Ochen harasho, comrade.”

“You feel well-fucked, don’t you?

Luisa lifted her body, proud of it.

“Wonderfully. Do you want to hear the details?”

She reached between the sheets, touched me, saw that she had achieved the effect she was looking for and started to tell me. She told me everything, even what the Russian’s semen tasted like. We ended up copulating as if we had suddenly fallen in love again: with hunger, with pain, with a bottomless thirst. We didn’t know when or how we fell asleep: we were drunk.

What happened later, I never knew if I dreamed it or if it was real. I was awakened by the movement of the bed. Apparently, Luisa couldn’t sleep either. She got up and went to look out the window. There was a full moon, a huge, orange moon. The light filtered through the gauze curtains and soaked Luisa’s naked body, her bony shoulders, her arms.... She mumbled something I couldn’t hear and turned away. Just as she was, without even bothering to put on a robe, she left the room. I quickly got dressed and went after her. She was ahead of me, but I didn’t lose her. I followed her through the corridors of the hotel, at that hour shrouded in a silence so heavy it seemed as if no one had lived there for a hundred years.

Still naked, barefoot, she left the hotel and walked down the avenue of chestnut trees. Everything was covered with snow and the snow reflected the orange moon: a light like sunset when it was early morning. It was not cold. Or maybe it really was a dream and in dreams you don’t feel cold.

We took towards the mountain, towards the boarding school. In that liminal light it was hard for me to follow Luisa. She would get lost at times: she would disappear and reappear. Almost arriving at the boarding school, I had to slow down and even then she crossed the gate without me being able to see how. When I got there, she was already on the other side. And it was locked and there was no way to reach her. I was beginning to feel anxious when I saw several girls coming out to greet her. There must have been eleven, twelve, maybe more, and they were between puberty and adolescence. They wore white nightgowns and their hair was down. Almost all of them were blond. Two of them took Luisa by the hands and began to dance to music I could not hear, slowly at first, sweetly, and then with more and more energy until it became a wild dance. Sweat glistened like molten copper on Luisa’s skin.

Suddenly, obeying a choreography that seemed to go back to the darkness of time, a girl --another one, one that wasn’t there before, appeared holding a boy by the hand. Even from a distance I could recognize him: it was Alex. He seemed asleep or drugged. He barely moved his feet. A couple of girls had to pull him. They tied him to a post in the background....

What followed I have tried to erase from my memory. Suffice it to say that it was a barbaric ritual and that Luisa acted as high priestess. I did not get to see the end because at the first screams I fainted.

I woke up in bed, next to Luisa, late in the morning. I felt disturbed, but the doubt of whether that had been real or not tied my tongue. And there was something more than that, something stronger, darker: I felt as if I had sworn an oath of silence. In the end I preferred to think about other things, I went to take a bath and got dressed to go downstairs.

During lunch, I told Luisa about my discoveries concerning Georgina Maciver.

“So,” she commented, “she must have seen the tombstone with her name on it.”

“Yes. I thought so too.”

“Surely, when she left school, the gardener didn’t think she would return.”

“Although he was supposed to keep his cemetery a secret.”

“But she liked to walk alone in the woods, isn’t that what they told you? That’s why she died.”

“What if she didn’t leave? What if she always lived here?”

“The gardener wouldn’t have made the gravestone. If he did, it was because he thought he’d never see her again. And she must have been gone for several years. Imagine: one day, sick with nostalgia for the place where she had spent her adolescence, she decided to come back here to paint. So she stays and sooner or later she has to know the story of the gardener. She must have been curious to see her grave.

She stood thoughtfully, sucking on the fork with which she had been eating salmon and ravioli, and suddenly took me by the hand.

“Show me the pieces!”

She didn’t even stop to say anything to Evgeni, who was arriving. She barely greeted him with a smile. We almost stumbled in the corridor with a cart full of towels, shampoos, soaps, matches, water bottles, sewing kits and all that.

“It looks like Alex,” She remarked quietly, almost terrified, when I showed her the painting Not waving, but drowning. Then she turned to look at me, questioning, “What if Alex is a ghost?”

I tried to smile. Luisa had never liked children. The maternal instinct in her was atrophied or, at best, directed at abstract things, abstract children like UNICEF or National Geographic. But with Alex she felt something. It wasn’t love, of course; it wasn’t that sentimental sympathy with which girls who dream of marriage stop to talk to someone else’s baby. What was it that she felt for Alex? The image of the gruesome ritual I witnessed, in dreams or in real life, came to my mind. But I said nothing.

“They say this place is full of ghosts,” she insisted. “And no one but us has seen him. You see how he appears suddenly, without making a sound.”

“I don’t think...”

“I do! Let’s go look for him. Come with me.”

“No,” I grumbled. “Where are we going to look for him? You have no idea. I don’t want to walk like a stupid.”

“Come on! I need to see him again, touch him, check that he’s breathing like everyone else.”

“No.”

She kept looking into my eyes in a way that seemed to say many things: threatening, spiteful, loving, playful... all at the same time.

“Let’s go, then,” I sighed.

I agreed because what had happened the day before with Evgeni had made us reconcile in an unforeseen way; I felt close to her, attracted to her, and perhaps, in some way I didn’t want to admit, that story about the boy had also disturbed me. I thought of the flute player who went up the elevator with the guests and played music that no one heard. But I didn’t say anything: I didn’t want to make Luisa nervous.

“Do you remember the story of the flute player?” She asked me. She was thinking about that too.

Alex was nowhere to be found. We knew it was to be expected; why would he go up there in the winter, when no one was playing golf? I told Luisa so, but she remained worried. She made me promise that another day we would go to look for him in town. I didn’t want to go. I figured that he was dead, that he had been sacrificed to a terrible female divinity.

During the days that followed, life flowed slowly and peacefully, without surprises, allowing us to bask in the charm of inertia, in the fine dignity of laziness. It had stopped snowing and instead everything was covered with ice, a hard ice that pressed anxiously against the earth as if seeking its warmth.

Luisa went out again with Evgeni, the Italians left, the mystery writer finished her novel... the atmosphere of those days could be summed up in one image: the hotel labels stuck on the trunks of departing guests.

Alex continued to be a no-show. We had extended our stay two months longer than planned, and money and credit were running out fast. Soon we would have to leave too. Yet there was something about the place that held us back: we had no desire to part with it. We would have been happy to be cursed with having to haunt the castle until the end of time.

Thanks to her new adventure, Luisa became attractive again: she freed herself and me from all the burdens she had put on the relationship. There was a truce: she stopped loving me and instead she could give me her desire. That was what I wanted, no more and no less. I was sick of all that went with love: the day-dreaming, the tenderness turned into habit, the curiosity about the other’s life, the insistence on seeing the other as special and all the things that happen as if they were happening for the first time.

She also stopped expecting me to kiss her. I don’t like kisses. I find them disgusting. They developed as a survival resource among primitive humans, because mothers passed chewed food to babies, mouth to mouth. It was the Gerber of prehistory. There is no longer a need for that exchange of bacteria.

So, while she was having fun, kissing in the most primitive way and regaining her youthful taste for sexual gluttony, I went back to painting. I painted winter landscapes: the lake, the statue of a naked faun looking out over the forest from one of the terraces, the snowy mountain with the gondolas carrying skiers up and down....

“There he is!” Luisa exclaimed one morning as we were walking down the avenue of chestnut trees.

Indeed, Alex was skating on the solid white surface that had been the lake. We walked towards him, waving our arms to get his attention. He stopped, trying to recognize us under the beanies and other winter clothing. Then he came toward us at high speed.

“That’s fast!” Luisa praised him.

The boy held out his gloved hand.

“I don’t suppose there are any golf balls, are there?” I said.

“No. They won’t come again until summer.”

“And what do you do in the meantime?”

“Skating.”

After a few moments of silence, he asked:

“And you? What are you guys doing?”

“We’re going for a walk. Would you like to join us?”

The boy hesitated for a moment.

“Okay.”

What happened next I remember as if it had not been me who was living it, as if it were a sequence in a movie of which I was only a spectator. And perhaps that is why all the details are recorded in my memory with meticulous precision. Luisa acted with the aplomb of someone who has everything planned. We followed the shore of the lake to the edge of the forest, where there was no one to see us. There, she proposed that we sit on a dry, snow-covered log to look at the mountains. Only I accompanied her. Alex started skating.

“You see he’s not a ghost?” I said, putting my arm around her shoulders.

“I’m still not sure,” she replied. Her lips drew a bright smile, which was reflected in her eyes. She took my hand, the one that was free, and brought it to her breasts. She started kissing me, hoping to get Alex’s attention.

And indeed, the boy began to wander near us.

“Come,” she called him at some point.

He approached her, with the attitude of someone waiting for a gift. Luisa stood up, took a few steps towards him, unbuttoned her pants and immediately began to pull down her thermal panties and the black lace panties she wore underneath. She didn’t look cold.

“Do you want to look at me?”

The boy stared at her face, almost frightened, as if he couldn’t believe what was being offered, and finally he couldn’t resist: he looked down at the triangle of black hair that had already begun to poison the air with its brassy, warm scent.

“Touch it,” Luisa invited him. “Take off your gloves and touch it, don’t you want to?”

Alex obeyed her immediately.

-Do you like it?” Finished the inspection, Luisa adjusted her clothes. Then she took the boy by the hand and leaned towards him.

“I’ll let you see all of me if you manage to cross the lake and come back here in ten minutes.”

“There’s a spring on that side,” the boy explained in a professional tone. “The ice can break.”

“Well, go where it won’t break. I mean, if you want to see me.”

Alex thought no more about it. He started skating at full speed towards the opposite shore of the lake.

Not waving, but drowning, said the title of the painting. We looked at it one last time before leaving.

“Indeed, it wasn’t a ghost,” Luisa said in my ear. “It wasn’t the ghost of my child.”

I didn’t answer. I remained admiring the repulsive beauty of her face, framed by hair cropped in the style of the twenties. She understood my gaze and abruptly changed her attitude: she pouted like a child.

“You love me again, don’t you? We can’t be separated anymore.”

“No,” I answered, “We won’t be separated.”

When we went out into the avenue of chestnut trees, followed by the bellboy who carried our luggage to the cab, a funereal, painful horn music was coming up from the village: Alex’s family, probably, the sister who spoke French, the bereaved mother who would still wait to see her son arrive on the way from the castle, with pockets full of golf balls.

Evgeni passed by us, leading by the arm an Asian girl with dyed blonde hair, and did not greet us.