Lovers on All Saints' Day by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Read Free Book Online

see? That’s the first days, and it hurts. Later, you start waking up at night, very late or very early. You think someone’s holding you, and then you start to cry and you don’t know whether out of love or out of fear. That always happens. To everyone.”
    “It always happens like that?”
    “I’ve read a lot. It’s the same for everyone. Sometimes the stupidest thing occurs to me: I think if only I’d been prepared, everything would be easier now. But I wasn’t prepared.”
    “You weren’t prepared.”
    “No. How were we going to imagine?”
    “What?”
    “That we wouldn’t have time. Why didn’t anyone tell us how everything worked?”
    I wanted to touch her. I felt that would help. Then she said:
    “Can I ask you to spend the night with me? Just to stay here, not to do anything, I’m not asking for anything and I don’t want anything more. Can I ask you that and for you to respect it?”
    Her blouse was missing a button. I hadn’t noticed before. Behind the material, her collarbone was rising and falling like that of a cornered animal.
    “I’d need a blanket,” I said. “It’s horrible to sleep with your jacket on.”
    —
    I LOOKED AT MYSELF in the bathroom mirror. It was true that the pajamas fit me, and curiously, I didn’t feel too out of place. I’d only asked for a blanket, but Zoé led me to the bedroom and opened a drawer with a geometric design etched into the wood.
    “They were Graham’s.” She handed me a shirt and pair of pants the color of smoke. “I’m sure they’ll fit, you’re the same size. If you don’t want to wear them, it doesn’t matter. I’m just giving them to you so you can be more comfortable.”
    “I want to be more comfortable.”
    “Oh, good. Then you can change in the bathroom.”
    And again I saw her smile. But this time she bit the tip of her tongue, and I could almost recognize that texture and felt a breath of tea and fresh water. Absurdly, her smile became a sort of prize or offering.
    Now, from outside I could hear minimal noises from Zoé, who moved around the house like a little mouse, collecting the drinks, rinsing the glasses in the sink. I heard her come into the bedroom, open and close a closet. She knocked three times on the bathroom door.
    “Yes?”
    “Don’t come out. I’m changing.”
    “Okay. Let me know,” I said.
    I kept myself busy by snooping around the bathroom, the details of someone else’s bathroom. Since I was little, a locked door has always given me a sensation of absolute impunity. There was a cheap tape recorder in Zoé’s bathroom, sitting on a small enameled glass shelf. Beside it, a disorderly pile of three cassettes without cases. All the labels said the same thing: RADIO MUSIC . I imagined this woman recording songs from a radio station without bothering to edit out the commercials, and listening to the recordings until she knew both sides of the tape by heart, and then repeating the whole operation. I had never looked at solitude so closely. It was as if at that instant someone revealed the rules of the game.
    When I came out wearing the pajamas, smelling of wood and mothballs and dotted with flecks, Zoé was already waiting for me between the sheets. I was cold, the skin prickled on the back of my neck. I wasn’t obliged to make conversation: my script only called for my staying in the bed until dawn, filling a form whose emptiness was painful for Zoé. But I wanted to know what Graham was like, put a face to that name, and Zoé took out a spiral notebook with black pages, opened it to the first one, and showed me a dark photograph. I recognized the bed where I was now lying, the lamp on the bedside table to my left that in the photo appeared beside a crystal glass and a pair of sunglasses barely visible in the shadowy image, and I thought that Graham must have had a headache that night and the water was to take a pill with, if indeed it was water, and the headache might have been due to the strong summer sun