Chapter Thirteen
In a reading room, by himself, the coronel sat and stared into nothingness. The shelves of musty books hemmed him in; the chairs and tables were arranged in such a way, he felt, as to allow no room for retreat. He had come here seeking company, someone with whom to share his allegiance to the inspector, but the other guests, who had been wasting their time with literature or conversation or cards, had pooh-poohed his passion, mocked his age and quality of intellect, and finally left. They were leading meaningless lives, he realised, and were too blind to see it. The brief snatches of discourse he’d overheard, centring as they did on such transient issues as family, politics, philosophy and art, pained him in the extreme, the way a small child, whose heart had yet to accrue the callouses of cynicism, might watch with aching sympathy a tortoise in a small enclosure, wandering round and round and round, congenitally unable, perhaps, to recognise that that tuft of grass over which he plods is the same he plodded moments ago, never finding the exit, because never knowing there is one.
When Enid, hair mussed up, a most unflattering wrap thrown over her person, came in, sat down, and greeted the coronel.
“You couldn’t sleep either?” she asked.
“I will sleep soon enough,” he mumbled back.
She sighed, and looked over his head at a dusty portrait of some old, dead person nobody remembered and about whom she wouldn’t have been able to summon the curiosity to ask even had a professor who’d written his definitive biography suddenly appeared; rather, in that scenario, she, startled, would have no doubt asked him to explain his apparent powers of teleportation. The professor, for his part, would have been, it would turn out, at a loss, seeing as his devaporisation had come about not through any skill, or even will, of his own, but rather through the (limited) omnipotence of yours truly, the narrator. Thus, awkwardly, would that hypothetical conversation end.
“. . .I once loved a woman,” the coronel suddenly remembered, out loud.
“Oh?” Enid found this, although something of a non sequitur, significantly more interesting than the identity of the dead sitter above him.
“I said, ‘I once loved a woman.’”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“But you said, ‘Oh?’—like that.”
“Yes, but I meant it as a—well, I didn’t really know what else to say.”
“So you heard me the first time?”
“Yes.”
“When I said that I loved a woman.”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
There was silence, now, for some time. Enid supposed that he wanted her to ask him to expand on his statement, and, as she did, in fact, have some interest, she went right ahead and asked: “Who was the woman?”
“Eh? Did you say something?”
“Who was the woman?”
The coronel, somewhat in a daze, looked about him. “Were you speaking to me?”
“Yes, coronel. You told me that you once loved a woman—”
“How did you know that?!” He drilled his gaze into her, fisting his hands with suspicion.
“You’ve just told me, coronel.”
“I did?”
“You did. And so, naturally, I asked you who she was.”
“Who who was—my mother?”
“No. . .unless, that was the woman you were referring to.”
“Do you mean, Irina?”
“Was that your mother?”
“No, damn you! That was the woman I loved!”
“Ah!”
And so, in this roundabout manner, did the coronel relate the story of his love for his Peruvian girl.
“. . .I was finally a man,” he concluded, “and my comrades and I were inebriating ourselves in the cantina, when, lo and behold, in she walked!”
“Irina?”
“The very same!” The coronel smiled, eyes closed, grasping with wistful fingers at the memory the edges of which had been, over the decades, like an old document, yellowing and charring away at the edges. “She saw me, recognised me, slowly walked over—on bare feet, I remember, in a torn dress—all of us ceased our chattering as she stood before me; our tankards wavered between table and chins; all in the tavern blurred save her. . .”
“And what happened?”
“. . .She looked at me as if I were just another brute, another killer, another piece of filth in a uniform. . .and turned and walked out. And it is that scene, that moment, that has echoed through my dreams, my ponderings, my sleepless nights, ever since.”
“I’m sorry, Eyague. But Fate must have written it this way.”
“Fate. . .and the laughable clumsiness of the universe. . .there’s not so much to distinguish the two, in my eyes, at my age, senorita.”
“I wonder where she is now,” Enid mused, “and what she’s like.”
“Who knows? She might be happily wed, with bushels of grandchildren. She might be dead.”
“She might be reminiscing about that moment in the cantina with you, Eyague.”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t wish that on her. If anything. . .if that moment convinced her never to marry a soldier—never to allow her sons to be soldiers—then, finally, I can rest, knowing that there was something good that I did in this world.”