The Love of the Last Sprout

I

For several days before the tragedy, people had been crowding along the railing of the bridge to watch the elephants of the circus, which had recently come to town, submerge themselves to a depth of two fathoms, draw water up with their long trunks (beyond the comprehension of those people) and then let it out in strong jets over their dusty, wrinkled bodies, like a watering can. That afternoon, the afternoon an elephant escaped into the brush, the number of people who had come to watch them bathe in the river was immense, so many that not even at carnival time, in the tunas of Calle Arriba, had so many people ever been seen in that town gathered around a single spot; so many that cars could no longer cross the bridge, since the throng filled the whole roadway, and anyone who needed to get from one side to the other had no choice but to swim across the river; so many that even the Africans from the circus, who had stolen those beasts from the placid savannas of the distant continent to teach them to do silly tricks under a circus tent, and who had walked them along the edge of the highway from the circus grounds to the river so they could bathe, took fright at the sight of the multitude leaning out from the bridge when it began to buckle under the weight of so many gawkers.

The Africans goaded the docile herd to get out of the river, so as to return to the circus before more people came to look, but they did not manage it in time, for the bridge of cement and steel girders gave way under the unbearable load of so many spectators pressed against it, and collapsed onto the river, causing the greatest catastrophe the town of La Villa de Los Santos remembers in all its history. Two elephants died crushed beneath the concrete (never living to see the day when their silent dream of returning to Africa to be free again might come true), three others fled in terror through the roads of the town, barging into houses and utterly upending the peace of the old folks, and one more ran frightened toward the tall grasses of the riverbank and was lost in the brush. Of the fourteen men, twenty-three women, and one hundred eighty-seven children who died, some drowned and some crushed, barely half the bodies were recovered, for the current carried them off in such numbers and in such a way that even several weeks later it was common for the fishermen of the surrounding area to find the corpses of relatives and acquaintances tangled in the trammel nets they set out at night.

The next day the circus, with its zebras, camels, clowns, lions, tigers, dwarfs, and jugglers, and with half its elephants (for the Africans had no time to look for the one lost in the brush), gathered up its tents, rolled up its colored garlands and left the unsettled town of La Villa de Los Santos, forever. Never again would they dare return with their show and their elephants, just as they never dared to camp in the neighboring towns either. They left in a hurry, who knows where to, leaving behind on the site where they had set up a great heap of garbage and a persistent smell of elephant crap that for several months took it upon itself to remind the people of Los Santos of the great misfortune that had befallen them.

It was a misfortune, not only because many men, women, and children died (who, like all the men, women, and children who die this way, turned out to have been the best and most virtuous ever to have lived in that town), and not only because a terrible famine struck the town on account of how hard it was to float the trucks loaded with food across to the other side of the river on fragile canoes, but also because for many days it was not possible to drink from its waters or even to bathe in them, for all the blood of gawkers and elephants that lay stagnant in its slow channel. Not to mention that the fearful men refused to work in the fields because of rumors that “the elephant that got lost the other day is out there somewhere” and “I swear to you I saw him yesterday perched up in the palms on Lito Pérez’s farm, knocking down green coconuts with his trunk.” All the fun the business had seemed to be, what with watching old women in housedresses and curlers running like startled hens, fleeing the elephants that barged into their houses breaking down the doors and filling the rooms with that foul stench, stopped being so much fun once the people of the town counted their dead and went several days without eating or drinking water, and then they decided it was too high a price, to be left incomplete, without a bridge and going hungry, all for wanting to look down from above at some filthy fucking elephants that had brought them nothing but frights, dead bodies, and a stench straight out of hell.

The uproar over the misfortune was so great that the tales of the fallen bridge, of the dead, and of the wandering elephant reached even the ears of the mayor; and such was the town’s worry over the possibility that this tragedy might one day repeat itself that, for the first time in the many years that official had spent shut up in an air-conditioned office, putting things off until another day, he feared that if he did not immediately take a firm position on the matter, he would be overthrown for negligence. So he hastened to dictate to his secretary, who in all the years before had done nothing but paint her nails with the telephone wedged between her neck and shoulder, an official resolution in which he expressed the State’s great sorrow at the terrible loss of the two magnificent African elephants who had sacrificed their lives trying to cushion the fall of the hundreds of gawkers who had been gazing at them from the bridge that collapsed. But seeing that this resolution failed to appease the town’s anxieties, he dictated a Solemn Mayoral Decree that went into effect at once and was proclaimed far and wide, prohibiting in it, definitively and irrevocably, throughout the whole territory comprised by La Heroica Villa de Los Santos, the arrival and establishment of circuses and other traveling shows that carried with them elephants or other animals prone to being bathed beneath bridges.

Meanwhile, the elephant that had escaped through the grass that afternoon had gotten far from the place where the bridge collapsed. With his slow gait and his hulking sway he roamed the pastures and the hamlets of the poor people who lived near the river, dragging the wire fences along with him and knocking down the palm-thatched huts every time, in his innocence and guilelessness, he tried to go in where the people were, so as to feel protected and sheltered by a family, so as not to remain at the mercy of the dangers of that madhouse of a world where bridges fell on innocent elephants who would never go back to Africa to be free again.

He wandered for several weeks, eating grass by day and lying down on his side by night—to contemplate in silence the far-off twinkling of the stars—until he came to a place, near a big white-and-red house, where an old woman was sitting in front of some buckets of wet clothes, her gaze lost on an empty point in space. It was Geña, the lifelong washerwoman of the Pérez Franco house, a small, thin woman with a wrinkled face and an expression of anguished absence that gave her the appearance of being completely disconnected from everything around her. Since her youth she had worked in that house, washing clothes every Tuesday from dawn to dusk with no rest but the lunch break at midday, to have a hot beef-bone soup with a little yellow piece of melon in the middle, and another brief pause when the church bells rang at sunset, to smoke a cigarette thinking about her loneliness. Apart from that, the rest of the day went to scrubbing clothes. In her younger years she had earned the privilege of getting the sweat of a Spaniard on horseback out of the trousers, and the stains of gunpowder and blood out of the white and illustrious shirt, of Lieutenant Manuel José de Pérez y Delgado, after the exceedingly famous and glorious Battle of Rabelo, where the men of Los Santos fought like lions against the henchmen of the pirate Drake, the most feared man of the gulfs of Parita and Montijo, who were trying to steal the treasures that passed that way bound for Great Spain from the viceroyalties of Peru. From those glorious days to the present, no garments so illustrious as those had passed through her hands, but she contented herself with the odd wedding dress1 every few years and a couple of Boy Scout uniforms that, with their colored badges, reminded her of the uniform of Lieutenant Manuel José de Pérez y Delgado, overflowing with decorations and war medals. In her young girl’s heart there had burned a silent passion for the splendid man, a distant forebear of the Pérez Francos and, in those years, the sole great lord of the beautiful white-and-red house, but although on several occasions she had been very close to him, she had taken great care never to look him in the eye, for she was certain that her beloved lieutenant was so shrewd a man that he would discover in that single glance her burning and silent love. Years later, Lieutenant Manuel José de Pérez y Delgado died in bed, after five days and five nights of agony, victim of a ferocious attack of teeth-on-edge, an ailment he had contracted in the last of his glorious battles, against a tribe of savages who had come down from their mountain domains to sun themselves insolently in the streets of the town without his consent. Young Eugenia, who by then was ceasing to be young, found herself forced to give up her dream of love, and married a good man who, though no lieutenant, knew how to make her very happy, but with such bad luck that he died soon after, leaving her a widow with two children. Geña had worked as a washerwoman in the white-and-red house, passed down from generation to generation, since she was barely a little girl in the service of the first Pérez to dwell in these lands, arrived straight from Spain on a caravel under the orders of a certain Bastidas2, on through Lieutenant Manuel José de Pérez y Delgado and another twenty-four generations, until she came to the Pérez Francos. By now her children had given her grandchildren, her grandchildren great-grandchildren, and so on, in an almost endless chain of so very many years that the children, the grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren had already died, and her great-great-grandchildren, now very old, had not the slightest idea that they were her great-great-grandchildren.

The Pérez Francos had received the old woman as an inherited asset, like the house or the furniture in it, and they had not the slightest idea of her age or of how long she had been coming to wash clothes on Tuesdays from dawn to dusk. From the time they reached the age of reason, they saw the old woman arrive religiously every Tuesday at dawn, sit down with her buckets in the shade on the terrace and wash without interruption until dusk, stopping only to eat her plate of beef-bone soup with the little piece of yellow melon in the middle, and to smoke her cigarette listening to the distant bells and thinking about her loneliness, in a frightfully repetitive routine that was not interrupted until one day when a terrible accident changed things completely.

By the time the elephant escaped, some three years must have passed since that terrible Tuesday. The day had dawned wrapped in dense gray storm clouds. It was raining hard, and the distant thunder carried the echo of the mountains.

“I don’t like washing when it rains,” old Geña said in the face of the diluvial downpour, setting the soap aside.

She got up and walked away from the buckets full of the whole week’s dirty clothes, interrupting her work for the first time in her entire existence for a reason other than the beef-bone soup with the yellow melon in the middle, or the cigarette to the sound of the bells. She went walking off, through the kitchen, until she reached a broad picture window through which a great brightness came in, with a magnificent view of an enormous guayacán tree and of the field carpeted in grass, soaked by the downpour. The old woman stood gazing at that huge tree, remembering when it was barely a green, insignificant little shoot in the warmth of the afternoon. At that moment, a lightning bolt unleashed its fury on the tree, shattering it in an explosion of burning splinters. Poor Geña suffered irreparable burns in both eyes from the glare of the lightning, and her ears were terribly damaged by the roar that came when the violent wave broke the window and a stream of splinters and fire stampeded into the house. The old woman stood there like a dead shadow before the hole of the broken window, not moving for several minutes. Those who came afterward to see what had happened found her stiff as a mummy, covered in charcoal, her hair and eyelashes singed and her eyes wide open. She did not even notice that they were watching her. She was blind and almost completely deaf. That day she did not finish washing, nor did she have her plate of bone soup, nor smoke her cigarette, nor think about her loneliness. From then on she was an island cut off from the rest of the world. Only then did those who lived in the white-and-red house (formerly belonging to Lieutenant Manuel José de Pérez y Delgado) understand how incredibly necessary Señora Geña had been to them before the lightning did her harm. It was necessary to buy three electric washing machines and set them washing all day on Tuesdays, to make up for the loss of the old woman’s work. In return for a life devoted to the family’s service, the blind, deaf, and singed old woman was allowed to live in the house where two centuries earlier the man of her dreams had lived, in a spacious room with orange glass lamps brought from Italy. At first she spent her days between the darkness of her dead eyes and the silence of her half-deafness, and she managed to hear only the very loud thunderclaps that fell near the house on stormy days. Such was her idleness that she fell into the mortal sin of asking herself the why of existence, of coiling herself up in the blind alley of whether God was real or whether he was an invention of Father Conde’s so he could collect alms; and in these and other similar questions her time went by. But after several weeks, the old woman began to feel a slight boredom, and felt the need to wash, to do the only thing she knew how to do well, the only thing she had done since she was born, during her nearly five centuries of life. Slowly, the idea crept into her head that it was not worth going on living as a prisoner of that cruel isolation. Such was the depression she fell into that her blind eyes sank back into their sockets and she began to dry up little by little, until she was nothing but bones. She aged more in a week than she had aged in three hundred years. Frightened at the possibility that the old lady might vanish from sheer sadness, her hosts took a desperate measure. They decided to sit her on the terrace one Tuesday afternoon, in the shade, with some buckets full of wet clothes, the way she used to sit, to see if she improved. And it worked like a charm3. Old Geña put her hands in the water and smiled in such a way that her face lit up, as if she had just come back to life from the deep realms of death. She pulled a piece of clothing and the bar of soap out of the water, and without ceasing to smile for an instant, began to wash in silence. Thanks to this, she stopped aging, and from then on they sat her on the terrace every Tuesday so that she would wash and not dry up again from sadness. She washed all day, taking only the two sacred breaks: the one for the bone soup, which had never been served without its little yellow piece of melon in the middle, and the one for the cigarette when the church bells rang. They were able to sell one electric washing machine, and if they did not sell all three, it was not because the old woman did not wash with all the zeal of before and with the skill acquired after five centuries in that trade, but because the poor thing lost a great deal of time groping for the soap at the bottom of the bucket every time she set it aside to scrub the clothes with her hands.

The old woman was in the midst of one of those blind washings when the elephant arrived, dragging a great tail of palm thatch and barbed wire that had gotten tangled around his body. With great nonchalance, he drew nearer to the old woman step by step, plucking up grass here and there with his trunk so as not to attract attention. He approached very slowly, so as not to frighten her, for he was tired of everybody running away from him. When the elephant saw that the old woman did not so much as blink, he was delighted to have found at last a true friend, one who accepted him as he was and did not run off when he came near. As a token of friendship, he stuck his trunk in the bucket and shot a jet of water at the old woman, who fell off her little stool and lay soaked on the floor.

“You goddamn little brat!” the old woman shouted. “Coming here to screw up my life, are you!”

She got up, raising her arms and hurling insults blindly. The little elephant, frightened, backed away and let out through his trunk an incredibly thunderous sound, like that of the Banda Republicana, which shook the whole house and stunned the washerwoman’s wits. Believing it was Satan himself come up from hell to make her pay for five hundred years of sins, the old woman took off running with her hands in the air, and in her mad dash went and crashed headlong into the firm trunk of a palm, so hard that she bounced off and fell on her back, her forehead marked with four parallel cracks sunk into the skin. At nightfall, when they went to fetch her to lead her back to the house, they found her lying in the grass, her mouth full of flies, at the feet of an elephant who with his trunk was pouring water from the bucket onto her broken forehead.

It was a brief Mass, attended by only the five members of the Pérez Franco family, at that time the inhabitants of the white-and-red house, and a few devout old women in black dresses and rosaries who, since they all but lived in front of the altar, found themselves by chance praying for the eternal peace of the soul of Señora Eugenia. Father Conde improvised an ornate sermon, in which he spoke of elephants as an indispensable part of the Kingdom of God, affirming that that poor animal, a direct descendant of the elephant and the she-elephant the Lord had saved from the Flood aboard Noah’s Ark, was not to blame for the death of that poor old woman. And after taking up the collection, he gave the final blessing, and the Pérez Francos went home, leaving the church as lonely as before their arrival: the priest withdrawn to the sacristy, the candles burning before the plaster saints, and the pious old women yawning on their knees through a prayer worn threadbare by routine. The church, large and rejuvenated, recently rebuilt by the scrupulous hand of the finest architects of the Old World, gleamed resplendent in the middle of the town, and stood out like an enormous pearl, of disproportionate size and beauty, above the moldy, dirty rooftops.

The previous church, a building of walls whitewashed with milk and of enormous wooden beams, built when the first settlements were taking root on the Isthmus, was swept away by a flood of the overflowing river some decades earlier, a flood so great that not a tree or a house was left standing anywhere in the surrounding area. The historic structure, an irreplaceable heritage of humanity and the only tangible vestige of the colonizers’ architectural arts in these lands, floated off downstream on the current and was lost on the wide horizon of the sea. Some men in canoes managed to rescue the pious old women and to save a few plaster saints—which, as people say, were carved by hand by Saint Augustine during his chats with Don Bosco in idle moments—but the church sank little by little until it disappeared several miles off the coast, in the blue waters of the open sea. It was not until the water level in the town went down that the great discovery was made. On the spot where the church had stood, a great stone slab had been laid bare. When it was lifted, there was found beneath it a spacious, deep chamber, full of wooden chests, barrels, and leather bags that, having given way to the corrosion and rot of the years, had split open, scattering their precious cargo of coins and objects of gold over the floor of the underground storeroom. They also found in it a half-mummified body, dressed in a cassock, with a crucifix hanging from its cervical vertebrae and two small horns filed down almost flush with the skull; and beside it, a book of large folios that gathered the confessions of that priest who had had to face, with the help of God and of his wiles, the fiercest pirate attack ever recorded in all the history of the southern coast, written in his own hand. It recounted his sad childhood with special attention: every day, he related, his godmother tormented him with that business of “this boy is the devil hisself,” and after so much of her saying it and him hearing it, two little horns began to grow on him, one on each side of his head. He spoke of his endless struggles to hide his wretched devil’s horns, of how he filed them down with sharkskin to keep them flush with his head and tried to cover them with his hair, and he confessed that his fear of turning completely into a devil had led him to the priesthood as a last salvation. The book told that on the afternoon the pirate Drake attacked the town, that glorious afternoon when Lieutenant Manuel José de Pérez y Delgado defended tooth and nail4 the splendor and honor of Great Spain, the streets were packed with caravans carrying gold on its way to the route to the other ocean, and that to save all those treasures from being plundered, the Spaniards stowed them out of the pirates’ reach in an underground chamber they had dug beneath the church in anticipation of an attack of this kind, cramming it with riches; and it told, moreover, that the priest had decided to remain hidden in the underground refuge, praying for the Spaniards’ victory and waiting for the battle to end so that they would come and get him out again, and that when he saw that no one came to rescue him, he knew that the few brave men who knew his whereabouts had died in the fray. Resigned to his terrifying fate, he set about narrating these events in that book, along with some confessions and the story of his own misfortune, and after all this, about preparing himself for his death in that tomb of gold and solitude.

That book told the story of the first Spaniards newly arrived on the unexplored coasts of these inhospitable lands of mosquitoes, rains, and savages; the story of their heroic struggles against the jungle to build a decent town in the Spanish style; and the story of the argument over naming the town they had built, among Spaniards each of whom wanted to name it after the saint of his own preference, an argument that went on for several months, until a battle came to settle what words could not, not because they agreed on a name, but because they were left without a town, set fire to the houses, and destroyed in hours what they had built in years. That was why, according to the book written by the priest with the filed-down horns, when they rebuilt the town they agreed to hold the founding ceremony on November 1, All Saints’ Day, and to call it La Villa de Los Santos, so that there would be no upsets or arguments about it in the future. The priest’s mummy was sent, with a little violet bow on its head, as a goodwill gift from the Republic of Panama to the Kingdom of Spain; the book was sent to the Pre-Columbian Museum of Portobelo; and the gold was used to rebuild the town church, which had been swept away by the overflowing current of the river. No expense was spared. European architects expert in Renaissance styles, materials of the finest quality, and two decades of uninterrupted work were required to carry out the colossal undertaking. The lands adjoining the footprint of the old church were bought so that this new version would far surpass it in size and luxury, but since not even with all these expenses, nor with the help of the committee, which stole half the funds, was it possible to use up the money from the treasure of the underground storeroom, they had to add several more stories to the church and fill them with all manner of religious objects and images of saints, brought from the Vatican, so that it came to be the most lavish and largest church in all the world.

In that church the most recent Sprout of the Pérez Francos was baptized, just as there too was baptized the one who would come to be the love of his life. The little girl was so tender and beautiful that the priest baptized her twice for the sheer pleasure of holding her in his hands, and when she turned fifteen she was as exquisite as ever.

“She’s like a rose just opened,” the Sprout’s friend, the blond boy who always went around with his dog, told him one day. “She’s got a little cherry mouth and eyes the color of ferns that are going to drive you out of your mind.”

The one with the dog had watched her from the window while she bathed, and he persuaded his incredulous friend to go with him that afternoon to spy on her and understand the reason for the turmoil that had him in its grip. When the Sprout saw her, he was left breathless. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he sighed. In the days that followed he did everything in his power to bring about a meeting with her as accidentally as possible.

They saw each other for the first time on a Saturday of festivity, of music and parades in the streets of the town. The girl, dressed in a pink housedress, was watching a motorcade from the balcony of her house, and as he passed in an old, noisy green convertible, they stared at each other, somewhere between curiosity and attraction, and blew each other kisses until the motorcade was lost among the streets. They saw each other again on the night of the great shower of stars, amid the crowd scattered over the plain. The people watched the spectacle in wonder, and gathered up the falling stars to take home and hang in their living rooms and bathrooms. When he saw her, he found her surrounded by stars on every side, luminous and diaphanous, with that sugared look that inevitably reminded him of the little marble angel he used to visit in the cemetery on the gray afternoons of his lonely days, to see her frozen forever at the moment of taking flight with her wings spread, to touch her cold, hard, white lips, and to feel that there was someone to keep him company in this life, even if she was made of marble. He took her hand, kissed it tenderly, and they strolled together all night gathering up stars and tossing them back into the sky. He talked to her about classical music, about Beethoven, Mozart, and Prokofiev, about Schubert, Brahms, and Mendelssohn, about Strauss, Dvořák, and Chopin; and she talked to him about ballet, about arabesques, ports de bras, battements frappés, petits battements, grands pliés, demi-pliés, and révérences, and they had a world of fun falling in love together.

The third time they saw each other—the first time they were able to be alone—was when, taking advantage of the crowd and the general disorder caused by the bridge falling on the elephants, they plunged into the river and let themselves be carried downstream to a place the boy knew from his Boy Scout days. It was a small waterfall over a black rock, where the water that had fallen for thousands of years had hollowed out a cave that extended into an abyss of very clean water. Into that cave the two of them went, and they hid for several days so they could be alone, days that turned out to be the most fantastic of their lives. They spent the first day embracing in silence under the stream of water until nightfall. When night fell, the boy dove into the abyss and swam until he found some fluorescent weeds of a very intense green, like the light of fireflies, to light their way in the darkness of the cave. That night they slept peacefully, suspended in mid-water, and the cold currents of the waterfall carried them all night long through the length and breadth of the cave, and from rubbing against the fluorescent weeds, their sleeping bodies took on a green glow, like that of the weeds, like firefly light.

Seeing this, on the second night they gathered many glowing algae and rubbed them over their warm, naked bodies, and the pulsing fluorescence of the weeds seemed to intensify with love as it soaked into their skin. She smiled in amusement to see that they were both shining and green as mint candies under the noonday sun. They left the cave and ran for a long while under the moon, shining like enormous shooting stars against the black firmament of the open countryside.

They stayed several more days in the cave, hidden beneath the foam of the waterfall, loving each other in the silent passion of a long, cool embrace. It was not until the moment they decided to leave the dark cave once more—only to get some air and then go back to loving each other in the depths—that they discovered their bodies had gradually become covered in a thin, gelatinous film of green slime, perhaps the product of the friction with the glowing weeds. They also noticed that they had spent so long embracing without seeing each other’s faces, naked in the cool stillness of the waters, that their faces were no longer as familiar to them as their bodies, and on rediscovering each other in that encounter he found her so beautiful—as if she were made entirely of emerald-colored water—that he fell in love with her all over again. They thought they would be missed at home by now, and they gathered up their clothes, which for several days had been drifting in the whirlpool of turbulent water in the cave, got dressed and said goodbye with a kiss on the lips.

Then, when he saw her walking away, with her voluptuous mermaid’s sway, he felt his heart beating through his whole body and his young soul slipping out of him to fly off just above the ground after her, tangled in her wet hair, clinging to her waist, and delirious with love for her.

II

It was about eleven in the morning of that Thursday when the day suddenly faded and grew heavy, the colors of things turned to pastels and whites, and time began to run slower, and the people, bewildered at witnessing the world come to a standstill in that quagmire of infinity, came out of their houses to watch aghast as the birds flew slowly through the air like leaves falling gently in a windless autumn, to see how the water spouting from the fountains fell into the basin with an exasperating leisureliness, and to see how the sun, hanging motionless in the sky, bathed with faint rays that paradise of pale tones and total paralysis. The cries of the monkeys were not heard in the mountains, nor did the clouds move in the sky, nor the leaves on the trees, and this was so not only in the small town of La Villa but in every town that existed on earth in those times. By the beating of their hearts, the men and women who had gone out into the street, frightened by that stupefying phenomenon, knew that they were still alive, but the hens, dogs, birds, and all the other animals around them looked stuffed, frozen in the position in which the universal torpor had caught them. It was not until the moment they realized that that breakdown of time exempted only humans that those people understood that the whole world had stopped because God was thinking very seriously about what he would do with that decadent race of children of his, who had him bored by now with their spoiled-brat antics; so seriously was he thinking it over that he did not let the sun move from its place while he did so, so that it would not disturb his decisions, so that he could determine in peace and without pressure whether this time he would at last and forever destroy every human vestige from the face of the earth, or whether he would give them, for the umpteenth5 time, a new chance, even knowing that in the end they would let him down either way. Once the people of Los Santos realized this, a contagious explosion of pious fervor broke out in the town, and various religious sects sprang up, brought on by the fear of a possible final day. It was during these days of uncertainty among the people that the young Sprout decided to join a mission of monks of the millenary Order of San Longuiño who were passing through the town on their way to the mountains, even though this meant for him the greatest sacrifice that can be imposed on a man: parting from his beloved companion, from the woman who shared the good and the bad with him, and who helped him make his dreams come true. He felt deeply moved to serve God above all else, and that was the best way he found to do it. The boy was widely known in various circles for his discoveries and inventions, and his migration from the fields of science to the meadows of the spirit was of great symbolic significance and instilled a counterproductive sense of urgency in those humble people. He was not held back by the certainty that if he left he would never again make great discoveries, for he was convinced—at seventeen—that his golden age had already passed, and that there would be no more days like the one on which he demolished all the knowledge of astronomical science, revolutionizing it from its foundations in just a few idle minutes, lying on his back one night on his cot, looking out the window. That night his mind found the answer to one of the most inscrutable unknowns of science: why the stars shine, a fabulous conclusion that brought him fame within the scientific sphere of the day and crowned his name with prestige. Through the window he saw a star timidly twinkling in the sky, and on a pane of the window he saw the reflection of a candle’s light, and his swift mind rushed like a runaway beast to hurl itself over the cliff into that indisputable conclusion, so obvious and simple that it surprised him that humanity should have had to wait so many centuries until he came along to explain the simple celestial phenomenon to them: the stars were nothing more than the reflection of the lights of earthly houses on the lustrous vault of the sky. But his greatest triumph came when he devised a method for capturing the image of an angel on photographic paper, thanks to a combination of mirrors, lamps, and flash-powder lights aligned in a special way, placed on either side of the place where one was suspected to be found. He tried it by installing that complex apparatus on the roof of a dying man’s house, waiting for him to pass away and for an angel to come down from heaven to fetch the soul of the deceased. From the rooftop he heard the laments and weeping in the room beneath his feet growing louder, and he lit the lamps. When he felt a light breeze pass by him on its way to the room, he knew the angel had gone in in search of the soul. He put his finger on the shutter release, and when he sensed that whisper in the air rising back up, he fired off several exposures in sequence, lighting up the funereal night with the flashes of the lamps and the gunpowder. He obtained images of hair-raising sharpness that in a short time traveled not only the whole country but the world. In them one could clearly make out the image of the exquisitely beautiful winged woman, with very fine features, her hair loose and a scant, thin white veil covering the nakedness of her perfect body, and carrying in her arms the smiling deceased, who was waving at the camera.

That photographic technique quickly caught on as a last consolation for the families of the dying, and he, taking advantage of his friendship with a gravedigger, managed to offer the service of posthumous photography as part of the funeral package. When a sick person of some means lost all hope of living, the family would order, along with the hearse and the flower arrangements, as part of the funeral arrangements, a nice photo of the soul of the deceased with the exquisitely beautiful she-angels who came down from heaven to fetch his soul. That business brought him a good income and fed him for some time, but he had to give it up after an occasion on which he was commissioned to take the funeral photograph of the soul of a general, and instead of one of the angelic females who used to appear in the previous commissions, the image showed a hideous little devil snatching the soul from the body to carry it off to the kingdom of shadows.

Now that past of glories had been set aside to embrace the missionary vocation. Before leaving, the young man paid his last nocturnal visit to the window of his beloved’s room, taking care that the moonlight not betray his presence to the neighbors. He jumped the fence, crept along the ground to the window, and called her by tapping softly on the glass. She leaned her beauty out into the moonlight and they talked for a long while, but soon words fell short of expressing the immense love they felt and they had to replace them with kisses. The first glimmers of day found them kissing, and before going, at the moment of saying goodbye to the other half of his soul, the boy promised her that he would come back, that this retreat was only temporary, only until his heart felt at peace with God and I’ll be back soon, wait for me, my love, I’ll love you all this time, I’ll think of you every second, and when I come back I’ll be yours alone. He handed her a beautiful flower of a red as fiery as your lips, as my heart in love with you, and ran off before anyone could discover him. That morning the girl planted the red flower in front of her window and gazed at it for several days that seemed to her unbearably empty and long.

The mission continued on its way to the distant mountains, and the young Sprout went with them. Along the way they sang songs in Latin of which the boy could understand nothing, and walking by day and camping to sleep by night, at the end of a month they arrived at the place where the hand of the Lord had sent them. It was an Indian village drowned in the midst of a sea of endless jungle, on the impenetrable slopes of the Bijao mountains. The monks of the mission presented themselves before the chief of the tribe and brought him as a gift a crucifix made of the finest English chocolate. Enthralled by the delicious taste of that exquisite and rare delicacy, the headman received them into his lands with open arms. He walked them all around the village, showed them the grandeur of his domains, and presented them to his subjects as friends of his, placing at their disposal not only his own person but also his people and the greatest treasure of that village: a small elephant that the Indians had found lost in the mountain jungle not long before. The Indians treated him with great care and affection, and from time to time used his immense strength to move loads or pull trees up by the roots, for the betterment of the village. The Indians helped the monks build huts to settle in, and to raise a chapel in the center of the village. From then on, every Sunday, the missionaries handed out a few chocolates among the Indians, and between one chocolate and the next they spoke to them of the mysteries of the Gospel, of the new covenant and of love among men. Then they taught them to sing in Latin and to speake, with fair correctness, the Castilian of Castile, and they managed to learn and handle a basic vocabulary in the natives’ dialect. Thus were those of the Order of San Longuiño able to communicate with those men and women of cinnamon skin and feline eyes, to learn their history, traditions, and beliefs; and on finding that they possessed a theology of their own, the missionary monks confined themselves to professing their religion through examples of work and love, without trying to change the notions of those people, which after all had no reason to be any more true or less true than the Catholic ones. Later, the young Sprout learned that that tribe was the same one that centuries before had come down from the mountains and entered the town of La Villa to sun themselves in the streets to relieve the great epidemic of teeth-on-edge that was scourging them and had wiped out one in every two natives. His quixotic forebear, Lieutenant De Pérez y Delgado, had done battle with those peaceful beings, without pausing to learn their motives, himself contracting the ailment that took his life after a long agony in bed.

“He must have been mad to fight these gentle children of God,” the Sprout said to himself.

After some time, the young monk was put in charge of caring for the little elephant, who had found at last, in the people of that village and in the monks of the mission, friends who did not run from him and who treated him with affection. The boy fed him grass, oranges, and cassava roots, and took him daily to bathe in the river; he brushed his tusks, wiped his trunk with a cloth, and combed him with a part down the middle, and then let him go off free and spruced up to wander about the village. Every day, when he finished bathing the elephant, the monk religiously devoted a few minutes to writing a letter to his beloved Angel—as he called his sweetheart—confirming to her that his heart still beat in love with her and that before long he would have fulfilled the mission he believed had been entrusted to him on earth, and would be free to be with her and enjoy her company. Every day, after sealing the envelope, he cut in the yard the biggest and prettiest flower he could find, and went out onto the porch where a young Indian—who had offered of his own free will to serve as his messenger, and a different one from that of the days before—waited for the letter and the flower to carry them at a run through the jungle, wetting the flower’s stem in every stream along the way so that it would arrive fresh, eating roots and wild fruit, and sleeping in the treetops, until he reached—after several weeks of harsh travel on foot through that green hell—the little town the Spaniards had founded five centuries earlier, and then waited until nightfall for sleep to make the whole population drowsy, and jumped the fence and slipped like a thief into the girl’s house, delivered the flower and the missionary’s love letter to her, and shot off before anyone could discover him. The girl waited up for the messenger every night, and read the letters eagerly; they told her of the new things her sweetheart was doing at the mission of San Longuiño, of how much he loved her and how much he missed her, and they promised her a prompt return and a happy reunion. Then she would look out the window toward the distant horizon, for she knew that somewhere in the distance her missionary was sighing with love for her, perhaps lying on his cool camp cot, or looking at the sky from the door of his hut. And she wished with all her soul to be with him to tell him of her dreams with the silence of her green eyes; and her heart was stirred by her own loneliness, and she wept a long while on her pillow, until she fell asleep clawing at time with short little sobs. The next day, she would plant the flower in front of her window in a row of flowers from different days that withered with time, one after another, becoming part of a succession of leafless little sticks that meant nothing to ordinary mortals, but that for her symbolized all the love of that passionate young man, a love that went beyond the monk’s habit, beyond the jungle mountains, beyond time and distance.

Several nights the two of them stayed awake, from dusk to dawn, in long, loving conversations, no longer through the window of her room but spanning the enormous distance between the mountain and the far-off town by means of a system of light signals in which several Indian messengers took part, on the summits of the highest hills, repeating the blinking signals of the lovers’ lamps and carrying from hill to hill “I love yous” and “I miss yous” said a thousand times in the silent language of that nocturnal love, across the hundreds of miles that separated them.

One night the young Sprout was lying on his side next to the elephant, contemplating in silence the far-off twinkling of the stars, when he realized that the work of the Creator was immense and perfect, and he wished with all his heart to become an intimate part of that creation, living forever in that lonely village in the Bijao mountains with his Indian brothers, the monks, and the elephant, devoted to doing good for the benefit of all. Inspired by this thought, he headed for the hut of the Indian who served as chief of the village to inform him of his decision and ask his permission to remain in that place for good6, without the slightest idea that what he was about to see would change his destiny forever. He reached the hut, peered in at the door, and there they were, the ruler and a beautiful Indian woman who was surely his wife, embracing on the floor, together like two little birds in the rain. He retraced his steps, and the couple got to their feet, with more surprise than shame.

“No, my children, don’t worry, I won’t interrupt you,” said the Sprout. “I’m going now.”

And he walked slowly away, looking at the sky and thinking of his beautiful sweetheart, wishing to be with her as he had never wished for anything, and desperate at being so far from his love. It was then that the pent-up longings of all those days suddenly burst, in anguish, desires, and a muffled little sob that for a long time had been seeking a way out of his heart. Nature was summoning him, not as it usually summons a missionary monk, but as it summons a man in love. And he felt the hand of God more present in his delirium for that woman than in the high stars that adorned the night, and he felt that his place was beside those warm lips, soft as rose petals, and not beneath that monk’s habit. On thinking it over, he had no choice but to accept that his soul was not the soul of a self-sacrificing believer, but that of a passionate lover who slips in through windows on moonlit nights to entwine himself with his beloved and sing to God, with the passion of two bodies and one single great love. He sat down on the mountaintop and made out on the far horizon, like a sprinkling of stars, the lights of the distant town. There was his beloved Angel. Then he took from his pocket a small box of carved mahogany, and from it, a shining sphere of light: a precious star of lilac and turquoise glints that he had picked up alongside his beloved the night they rained down over the countryside, and that had accompanied him ever since that magical moment. Bathed in its dazzling light, he analyzed in his mind every aspect of his new life, and found it empty and meaningless far from her. That same night he set off on the journey back. He said goodbye to his brother monks and his brother Indians, and climbed onto the back of the elephant, who carried him through the jungle faster than any known man or beast, reaching the town the next morning.

That morning, the girl was awakened by a delicious scent of fresh flowers flooding the house. Curious, she looked out the window, and what she saw sent an electrifying tingle through her whole body, like the one she used to feel on moonlit nights with the missionary’s warm kisses. All the flowers (from the one she had planted the morning of the day before to the first flower she planted the morning her sweetheart left with the mission, which had turned over time into a little stick without leaves or color, along with many other flowers from other days of melancholy) looked fresh and lush with their green leaves and their petals of a burning red, and gave off an exquisite perfume of freshly cut flower.

“He’s back,” she said to herself, in a sigh of relief.

Then she went out onto the porch just in time to see the monk appearing along the long road, advancing toward her, come out of the jungle riding on the elephant. The Sprout dismounted and let his mount head back, and walked toward her, calmer than the night. He passed by the porches, by Death, by the little mango tree, and by the fragrant, radiant flowers, and went straight on into the warm arms of his beloved. The girl let out a settling sigh, for herself and for him, when she felt the Sprout’s head nestled in her neck and heard his words of love and calm. They stayed embracing until they ran out of words and had to replace them with kisses, and they stayed embracing until it was no longer possible for them to go on embracing, because by then they were no longer two bodies close together, but two free souls fused into one over the vast horizon of the end of time.