PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE: OLD PORTRAITS

 Bárbara sits in her bedroom looking at old portraits. The room has whitewashed walls and a very high raftered ceiling, crowned with a frieze that depicts battling monsters, warriors assailed by dragons, and great black birds in flight.

Curtains tinged a very faded shade of violet hang above the door wells to form a dark backdrop, mobile as a riverbed, for heavy furniture of rough-hewn wood, still bearing the primitive weight of the tree. Among the massing shadows, the mirror shines bright, set so high that no one could see their face in it. Its clouded glass reflects only the throng of dusty dragons in the frieze.

At times Bárbara has felt sorry for this useless mirror, deprived of new images, condemned forever to immobility and the absence of all life.

But now she is mindful only of the catch of portraits she is hauling up from the past, as from a choppy sea where she is the sole forlorn fisherwoman.

There is a casement window that looks out on the garden; a bit of green shines through its half-closed door... A door that can never be opened, impeded by the trunk of an almond tree that has sprouted up next to the very wall of the house, steadying its sinewy branches against the wall with slow and growing pressure.

A light scent of almonds and mint persists in the air, a cold and bitter scent that impregnates the curtains, the bedclothes, the embalmed birds on the marble corner pieces. A collection of old lithographs, depicting the story of Thaïs, breaks up and alleviates the harsh, almost grating whiteness of the walls... The hands of the clock on the console table point to absurd hours, but we know that afternoon is falling because of the stream of living gold that flows through the diffuse light of the window and bathes her pensive figure, absorbed in banal devotion.

Bárbara is looking at old portraits, and her hands have taken on the delicate yellowness of the photographs strewn across her bed.

The portraits grow and form a pyramid that soon collapses, only to form once more by the headboard; some fall to the floor, where a whiff of breeze scatters them among a white flurry of mothballs. The mothballs are hard and cold, like star dust.

Delicious melancholy of old portraits... Plunging your hand into the powdered middle-classness of family portraits – the youngest child in his mother's lap, the heads lined up, shortest to tallest, the dog wagging its tail...

And the old-fashioned styles, the absurd inverted bodies, the cascades of frills and bows!

Her young great-grandmother... The face is a bit blurry, hard to make out. Lace, lace trim... Upon her ample, low-cut breast lies a beautiful filigree cross, a cross like the one Bárbara now squeezes slowly between her fingers...

(The embalmed birds stretch their necks and press their beaks against their glass cases to get a better view.)

Her great-grandaunt, that is... And what might she have been like? They say she was the most beautiful woman of her times, and that one of her eyes was a different color than the other; one eye bluer, the other more green...

The mothballs roll to a stop against the flowers painted on the carpet, and the scent of almonds mixes with the antiseptic and cooling smell of naphtha. (Are there shadows beneath the stagnant waters of the mirror?...)

Her great-grandmother was the most beautiful woman of her times, and certainly the best loved... She was a little strange, and died young. Some say she was poisoned with the juice of oleander petals; someone else insinuated, too, that she had pierced her own heart with her golden hat pin.

The green leaves are moving beyond the space left open by the half-closed door. Who is walking around the garden, not making a sound with their footsteps but stirring the leaves, scattering the birds?...

Bárbara's hands shuffle the portraits, undo envelopes, pull out the ones at the bottom of the pile... Out comes a primitive daguerreotype, almost completely faded. All you can make out are the gold braids on the uniform and the staring eyes, staring with a dark, impenetrable fixity; it is the portrait of a distant ancestor, a Royal Admiral, photographed in death.

Bárbara makes an effort to guess at the features of his expressionless face, already beginning to swell... Only his eyes look out, watching with vague fear, with infinite astonishment...

Her hands have trembled slightly, and the daguerreotype is rolling across the carpet...

Next comes the portrait of an adolescent whom Bárbara does not recognize. His strangely combed hair falls in a pallid fringe across his eyes, his neck emerges softly from a lace collar. A loose silk shirt blurs the outlines of his rather feeble body, the body of a child who has grown up too quickly...

Bárbara smiles very slightly... A moment ago, when she was walking around the garden, she was already thinking about this boy in the portrait... She had been thinking about him even earlier, yesterday, at the seaside, bent over by the wind; perhaps even earlier... (For how long?...)

Her life was so full of questions without answers! How she would have liked to know who had slipped this pallid face in among the old portraits of her house!... Because the subtle ash of time had not adhered to him; he looked different from the rest, he lacked the singular, indefinable air that portraits of the dead take on.

You might think he was about to smile at any moment... Looking at him, she had almost expected that sudden smile to bloom beneath her obstinate eyes... The impossible smile of the dead. Who could still give a lukewarm smile, pressed against her heart!...

Bárbara slowly turns the photograph over in her fingers. There are letters on the back, almost illegible letters, written in ink.

The first letter is a P, delicate and straight as a pin, followed by two or three more faded letters. Then, very clear and firm, clinging very close to the line, a name: Bárbara...

Strange coincidence... There are more illegible words, and the last one, easier to read, begins with another P, followed by an A, an R; no, an S... These two letters are faded: Pas... Pasture, perhaps? The boy has the look of an indolent herder, a herder tired of pasturing his sorrows.

Pas...? Passive, rather? The adolescent's eyes are passive beneath his fringe of lukewarm hair... His mouth is passive in the whiteness of his face, like a pallid coal that the wind has blown far from the bonfire.

What is this delicate letter that appears at the end? A Y; the word ends in Y, and before the Y comes an L, and before the L is an E, and the word says: "Passionately."

Passionately?...

Where the name of the person who dedicated the portrait should be, there is only a wormhole, and all that has been saved from that tiny clearing is the first letter, a handsome English A that remained outside it, fresh as if it had just been written.

This is a nice, clear A, like the initial for the name of Alberto or of Armando; perhaps its the A of Alfonso, which is sort of rounder, or of Alfredo, such a romantic name. And the letter moves, it yawns and stretches in the breeze that blows in through the cracked-open window.

(The wormhole is filling with melancholy...)

Is Bárbara the name of one of the women in the family? Is that what the great-grandmother with the oleander was called?

A spring sun paints golden rays on the carpet.

Her nervous hands grow impatient and demolish the remains of the latest pyramid.

The portrait of a child falls unexpectedly on her skirt, and there he lies, looking at her with a smile... Ay, the smiles of the dead!... Bárbara does know this portrait very well!... It is her little brother, dead at the age of three. She looks at him without touching him. It is nothing but a little boy sitting up on a cardboard horse, but there is a triumphant expression on his firm and willful mouth.

It is a bit sad to look at him there among the toys he had so little time to enjoy; sad to see in him, as if in a broken mirror, her own almond eyes, her own manner of holding her fingers wide apart.

Bárbara remembers when he died, remembers the mysterious voluptuousness she tasted then, seeing the satin pillows and the fresh bed of lilies where they had laid him out...

She had recalled, too, the strange, sorrowful joy that had disturbed her days later, when her mother, not crying, not saying a word, had put in her hands the little ship in the glass bottle, which she had wanted so much, and which its proud owner had never let her touch...

It had been necessary for him to die, for him to plunge the house into cataclysmic silence, for her to attain some small measure of his omnipotence, just one, the smallest of his rights.

Bárbara has smiled, almost imperceptibly; then she takes the portrait with the tips of her fingers and slips it in among the infinite pages of a Bible.

The sun is on the carpet and in the windows up in the arches. Her hands look once more for the portrait of the adolescent with the elegant English letter.

A could be Alberto, or it could be Alfredo... The eyes are hard to see under the fluid strands of colorless hair.

Passionately...

What a strange word!... It sounds like deep water that has been stirred, like stars that have been stirred, if stars made any sound. It sounds like the sea once sounded, when that nightlong storm fell on the garden, a dull grumbling that kept growing closer and more powerful.

Passionately, passionately...

(The sun is on fire beyond the windows...)

Bárbara, a bit discomfited, doesn't know what to do with her solitude, and shuffles the portraits on the bed... Suddenly her hand runs into a small bundle of postcards tied up with a blue ribbon.

She draws it close to her breast, and bestows a second smile over the circle of portraits.

She begins to untie the ribbon and to look at the photographs in order. They are all of the same image, a young girl who lives, grows, and comes of age through them.

Her smile trembles and broadens beyond the corners of her lips, rising into her cheeks until it bursts into golden points inside her eyes... She picks up the first portrait and sees the girl, two years old, with thin hair and ribbons falling over her head. Lots of ribbons and lace, too, on her shoulder-strap dress, making her lean clumsily forward. Shoes with buckles larger than her feet.

Bárbara's smile continues to grow, and the bedroom fills with golden points, and the air is laced with sequins...

Bárbara looks at the portrait and thinks. Thinks and smiles. Smiles and lights up the air, and the moment, and life...

And life?...