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

during some maneuvers. However, in the photo only Zoé appeared, seated in the lotus position on her pillow. Her body was the only luminous point in the frame. The rest were vague suggestions of objects or profiles that were lost entirely in the uniform black of the edges.
    “Where is he?” I asked.
    “Almost everywhere. We were studying photography, going together to a studio here in Ferrières.”
    I brought the paper close to my face. I examined it.
    “He’s here?”
    “Yes, he’s walking. If I look illuminated it’s because he’s standing beside me shining a light, first on one side of my face, then my body and knees. Then he walked around the bed and in front of the camera, and he lit me from the other side.”
    “He’s walking past here. He’s in front of the camera?”
    “But we’d turned off all the lights. The room was in complete darkness. He was explaining what the teacher had explained to him. He was saying: “Now I’ll open the diaphragm as wide as it goes, and take the photo over the course of fifteen minutes. You have to stay still the whole time, try not to blink.”
    “Fifteen minutes,” I said.
    “In those conditions, the camera only captures what is very still and illuminated from up close. Nothing is shining on him and he’s also moving. That’s why he can’t be seen.”
    Zoé passed her hand over the image, as if she were performing a magic trick.
    “But he’s there,” she said. “Even though we can’t see him.”
    Zoé put the notebook back in the drawer. “Can you hold me?” she asked, and I stretched out my arm and she took refuge in my embrace. Her head smelled slightly of sweat. I thought that she would be taking in the familiar scent of Graham’s clothes. Before starting to feel sleepy, I heard her speak, almost to herself.
    “When I feel very lonely, I turn off the lights. I pretend that this is the room in the photo and I am the one in the photo, and Graham is here running back and forth. There’s nothing odd about my not being able to see him. It’s just a question of optics.”
    —
    I WOKE UP SHORTLY before first light. Zoé was sleeping with her back to me, breathing through her mouth and with her arms relaxed. As I was getting dressed, I thought
Saturday, November the first
, and then I thought
All Saints’ Day
and then I thought of Michelle. I left the pajamas neatly folded beside the headboard of the bed. I left without saying good-bye, so as not to remind Zoé that she’d slept beside another man, to let her live for a few minutes more inside the spell she’d woven.
    The house had been devoured by a bank of damp fog. The pickup’s fan was on, and what the night before had been heating was now a blast of ice-cold air. I didn’t turn on the radio. I wanted, without knowing why, to preserve the predawn silence, the gentle repose of the mountain, the pleasure of not seeing anyone in the sleeping streets: all that filled me with the sensation of testing out a new pair of eyes. In a short while, the men who had survived the night of the dead would begin to come out of their homes. All those who had worn disguises—as had I, who spent the night in a dead man’s clothes—to survive this night, would soon be emerging, and all those who had bribed the spirits with offerings. I counted myself among them. I was alive, in spite of having been chased by souls of sinners trapped in animal bodies. Because I knew that the night that had just passed was the last of the old calendar, the moment when debts are paid, revenge is taken, and the dead are buried so their bodies will rest during the winter. But on this night, the curtain that separated this world from the other was torn: souls were freed from their captivity and some walked the earth, divesting men of their brief pleasures, sowing discord, broken hearts, and terrifying solitude among them.
    It amused me to think of all that. It was Michelle who first told me about the superstitions of Halloween. She told me