An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky (3 page)

My wine was almost gone. “It is hard, Olin, to know when you are telling the truth.”

“No, Daniel, it's easy. I'm always telling the truth.” He paused. “I mean, I never am. It's hard to tell the difference. I get so confused.” At which he winked, stood up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked away, out the room, empty wineglass still in hand.

I took a last sip and followed him, nodding and waving at those I knew, making my good-byes, glancing at the chair playing cards at a table with a stately older man, somewhat portly, dressed in an evening jacket whose lining was scarlet, and whose lips, if I wasn't mistaken, were slightly rouged; a man whom I had never seen before.

The night was bitterly cold. No stars. A kind of brittle fog, unique to our landscape, had settled in. The street-lamps with their cloudlike nimbus lit the walkway. The cold air had fallen to the ground in the minute ice crystals that, at my every step, crunched and dissolved, leaving behind me my dark prints. The night played through my mind, myriad images caught in the chandelier's facets, organized not by time, but by some other order, crystalline.

I walked up the steps and put my hand on the knob, colder even than the night was cold. My father had owned this house; it was the house I grew up in. He had died many years ago; my mother many years before him, when I was still a child.

I opened the door; I'd left it unlocked. And in a pique, for no reason, I shouted out into the empty house, “Ishmael, I'm home.”

T
HE CLOCK STRUCK
NOW
ELEVEN TIMES.

The same mute faces on the wall.

Only one photo of my mother exists. In it her eyes are cast downward. The photo is in black and white, but the photographer hand-colored it: the blush on her cheek, the blue handle of the parasol, the green embankment. As a young boy I would, as Father translated in his study, stand before the photo, bending lower as I neared it, as if I could find an angle from which I could look up and see her eyes staring down at me. My father, catching me crouching, said, “It won't work,” and dropped his eyes back down to desk and work.

Now
marked the half hour with a single toll.

I walked down the hallway, entered my father's study that is my study now, opened the bottom drawer to the desk, and shuffled through the folders until I found the one I wanted. At night, the mind thinks and the body acts. Or is it the body thinks and the mind acts? Sitting down in the old chair my father sat down in, the chair that's always been old. This body that performs its memory, these hands that open and open the folder, these eyes that see, that read, that read what the mind behind them knows by heart, this heart that pumps the blood,
this blood, this ancestral blood in which untold stories circulate, untold tale in the finger, this finger, that touches the page it wrote. Or I wrote. I mean to say this story I didn't write but that I wrote down. This story Father told me. Someone told it to him—or maybe not. Maybe he made it up, a distraction for him more than for me, his son who after his mother died feared sleep, and the dreams in sleep in which his mother, my mother, returned. Maybe he memorized it—the words never altered—so that, as he spoke, sitting in the chair in the corner of my darkened room, his mind could attend to what mattered to him: the language he was learning, an oral language whose basic words and grammar were translated by a missionary two hundred years ago and whose helper had written down, in the phonemes of the romantic alphabet, though tainted by the Latinate habits of his ear, a story told by an elder of the tribe, written on a scroll, titled in Spanish,
Mito de Creación
, a thick roll of paper my father found in a box in a country library as he travelled through England as a young man, bought for a few pence, and whose academic life, when I was a boy, and until he died, was devoted to translating. It was a task he never finished, much to his regret. I might be wrong. Perhaps every word of the story he spoke he vividly saw, escaping into the same story he gave me for my escape, and to change a word would destroy the world he was conjuring. Either way, he sat in the darkest corner of my room, so that his voice seemed to come from the night itself, the
night lulling to sleep the child unwilling to go to sleep, the night telling its story.

After my father died, the very day he died, I sat at this desk and wrote down that story word for word. I wrote it down in my illegible scrawl and took it to my room, lay down on my bed, and in the dim light read it, and read it again, over and over again, until the window began to grow light. The alarm clock went off at 5:45. There had been an earthquake in Guatemala, a powerful earthquake felt in Belize and Panama; only one person had died.

I took the pages to my room, undressed, and got in bed. The wine tugged my mind toward the still house's familiar silence. I read the story.

After the giant removed his heart and buried it in the ground his eyes gradually grew smaller and smaller until he seemed to have no eyes at all. He did still have eyes, but they were no larger than pinpricks, smaller than the eyes of a mole, as small as a spider's eyes, and let in so little light that the giant was mostly blind. He couldn't tell when it was night or day and so he stopped sleeping. He couldn't walk without running into trees or tripping over ridges or falling down in rivers. The giant just sat down and didn't move. He sat so long that moss grew on him. Grass grew on the moss. Trees in the grass: an aspen grove. He seemed dead but he was not dead. When the wind pushed through the aspen and the leaves made a riverlike music the giant would hear it, some nerve would awaken, and though he had no heart, from his
pinprick eyes a tear would fall, so thin and meager that the wind that caused it would also take it away. People who passed the giant thought he was only a hill whose stony crest was pink as skin. Their parents and their parent's parents had walked by the hill many times, had carted their goods down the road that curved around the giant, and in all their memory that hill had only ever been a hill. But the birds knew. Whether they could hear his breath, or feel the slightest twitches of muscles that sometimes sent a leaf spiraling down from a branch in midsummer, or sense beneath his head the hum of his thinking, no one can say—so there were no nests in the aspen trees. But the people didn't notice this either. To the sudden absence of birdsong at the hill when they walked past it the people all were deaf
.

It was at the foot of this hill that the people of the village built their schoolhouse
.

The story has no end I know. It has no end because my father never told me an end. As a boy I would ask him to tell me the rest.

The voice from the dark would say, “The rest is in your dreams.” And then from out the dark my father would step and walk from my room.

It was not a dream I ever had.

I read the story once, twice, I read the story. In the room, my winter room, I could smell the scent of an apple—why is that? I could smell an apple as if an apple were asleep in the old wardrobe, dreaming about me. I turned out the light. The phosphorescent glow in my
eye, the bright white-purple glow behind my lid—do you see it?—doesn't it look a little bit like an apple tree in bloom? Don't you see it?—

I asked who?—

And fell into a fitful sleep.

        
none of the schoolchildren could explain

        
they opened their eyes into circles

        
they found the desks pushed against the walls

        
when they walked in the schoolroom's door

        
and on the old rutted wood

        
near the center of the room

        
—they saw a single pearl

        

        
the giant's heart is

        
at fault in the fault

        

        
my father at his desk, looking up:

        
there is no difference in this

        
language between

        
the definite article and the indefinite

        
“The” or “A”—there is no way to tell

        
he started crying

        
“And it's the first word written down here on the page”

        
holding up a page marked by a

        
musical note