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Now that communication with the Outside has become easier than it used to be, the stream of books coming to the Guzmán household is never-ending. His mother grumbles and sighs at every delivery, but Mariano is a man on a mission.
“I liked the alliteration in that one.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
Dolores frowns. Leave it to her to pick up on his distinct lack of enthusiasm. “Something on your mind?”
“Nah, I just feel a little… outdated, is all.”
“Outdated? At our age? Wait until your first grey hair to say that, at least.”
“It’s not a matter of age, it’s… wait here, I’ll show you.”
He hurries to grab his latest acquisition off the shelf and cracks it open at random.
“Read this.”
“I’m not some literary critic, Mariano, I’m just…”
“… my second set of ears, and it’s made all the difference already. My writing has improved so much now that I can read it to someone who won’t make me feel silly for it. Go on. Read it.”
He gives her a few moments to take it in, and God, he just wants to kiss her forehead smooth in the spot where her brows knit together in concentration.
“So? Do you notice anything?”
“This is… different,” is her timid final verdict. “Beautiful, but different.”
“My point exactly! Things have changed out there, even literature has gone on without us, modern poetry doesn’t sound anything like what I’ve been doing, how am I ever going to be good enough for publishing if I sound fifty years out of date?”
He blushes fiercely at the rant that has spilled out of his mouth. Maybe that was a little much. He’s so used to poetry being something to be done at night, not exactly in secret, but after he’s done with the practical, sensible needs of daily life, that he always half expects reproach for being passionate about it.
“You never told me you wanted to get published, cariño. That’s amazing, I’ll be cheering for you.”
“I… I don’t know, actually. I’ve thought about it often, but it was never more than a plan B, you know? Find a steady way to make a living first, then maybe fancy myself a poet later.”
“First of all, you are a poet, whether or not we’ll ever see your work in print. And second of all, I like a man with a good head on his shoulders, but you’ll never find out if you don’t even try.”
“I know, I know, but,” he plucks the book out of her hand and holds it up demonstratively, “my confidence has been right out the window lately. Even if I do finish a manuscript and send it Outside, I’ll be laughed out of any respectable publishing house.”
Dolores’s face lights up with mischief. He has no idea what she’s planning, but she is truly her brother’s sister.
“You just need a little kick in the pants. And for the record, I like your work better than this fancy ‘modern’ stuff.”
“Nope. Not happening. Not in a million years. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an episode to finish.”
“We are not done talking about this, Tío Bruno.”
“You’ll never find out who the baby’s father is if you don’t let me finish,” he says in a taunting, sing-song voice. Touché.
“Okay, that is a low blow.” His cliffhangers have been killing her since he learnt to shut his mouth and not talk himself through the writing process. She’s good, but not good enough to decipher her uncle’s chicken scratch just by the sound of his pen. “Are you sure, though? What harm can it possibly do?”
“Ask me that question again when your boyfriend stops writing altogether just because I predicted his failure, and then he doesn’t get published because there’s nothing to publish in the first place. Ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?”
“Or,” she leans into the word pleadingly, stretching it, “you could see his name in a bookstore window, and that could be the thing that convinces him to try. Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Dolores, please. Just… just look at my track record, okay? You of all people should know I don’t exactly have a history of predicting sunshine and rainbows.”
“That was on me for jumping to conclusions and we know it, tío. You only ever said ‘betrothed’, not ‘married’, and look at us now. If anything, he can learn from my mistake. You don’t necessarily see the full story. So what if you see him getting rejected by one publishing house, or two, or twenty? The next one could be it, we just wouldn’t know it because the vision was cut off early.”
“I don’t know where you’re getting all that optimism, young lady, but I promise you, it’s entirely misplaced. Now let me finish, I have a cliffhanger to resolve.”
“If he asked you himself, would you do it?”
“I would have to, eventually, if only to get my mother off my back, but let it be on record that I think it’s a terrible idea.”
“Alright, fine, I can take a hint, Dolores. I’ll do it.”
“Why, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” she says, playing coy.
“You… you just suggested going to your uncle because we couldn’t decide on a picnic spot, and that’s the fourth time this week you’ve brought him up apropos of nothing. I’ll… I’ll see if he can spare some time for me tomorrow.”
He would be lying if he said that promise doesn’t make him nervous, and as it generally happens when you’re nervous, tomorrow becomes today much too quickly for comfort.
He has never gone to him for a vision before. At first, he had the excuse of being a child who was too busy living in the present to give a second thought to the future, and then, just as he grew to be of an age where questions such as ‘what will I be when I grow up?’ began to be serious concerns rather than far-fetched dreams, the man simply vanished into thin air.
Now that Bruno is back, Lord knows he has been tempted, especially when his mother is having a bad day, but he has already been living for some time with the sick certainty in his gut that it’s a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, and knowing when wouldn’t change things much at all. Her affairs are in order; all that’s left is to provide whatever comfort he can give until it happens, whenever it may be.
This, however, is different. This is a simple yes or no question, and, well… was the way between his home and theirs always this long?
Of course, the inordinate amount of time he’s taking to get there probably has something to do with the fact that it’s impossible to walk the streets without being stopped for a chat (or three, or five), and as soon as the small talk broaches the subject of where he’s going, he is met with such expressions of pity you’d think he was walking to his own funeral. By the third casual acquaintance who sees fit to waylay him with a tragic tale of how the resident fortune teller shattered their hopes and dreams, it begins to get to him.
It’s terribly stupid and he knows it. He’s shared meals with the man, for heaven’s sake, and he is not at all like the picture they paint. The first few times were quite jarring. Going by the stories alone, you’d expect at best an all-knowing soothsayer who possesses the wisdom of the ages and only ever speaks in riddles, and at worst a walking omen of destruction who delights in bringing misfortune; then you get invited to dinner and what you find is a frightfully thin slip of a man who’s about as threatening as a spooked rabbit, who hides morsels of food in his ruana despite being admonished time and time again about no rats at the table, and does his level best to talk about anything and everything but the future.
Grow a spine and knock on that door, hombre, you’re not walking to your own execution.
His first impression is that it’s Dolores who answers the door, but before he can find comfort in that, he is seized by the gut feeling that she’s… off. A little too loud in a way that would ordinarily hurt her own ears, a little too clingy as if they’d been separated for ages, and the fatal mistake—she actually acts surprised to see him, as if she didn’t know perfectly well what this expedition is for. Mariano rolls his eyes.
“Cut it out, Camilo,” he says by way of a greeting. “If this is your idea of a test…”
The figure before him deflates on the spot, dropping in height and shifting into the boy’s true form with a great bounce of curls.
“Aww, really? I have her down to a science, only my parents have ever been able to catch me out. What gave it away?”
“For one thing, I’m her boyfriend, so I might know her a little better than you anticipated. And for another thing, she wouldn’t ask what I’m doing here, since she put me up to it in the first place. Do you happen to know where your uncle is?”
It occurs to him half a second later that the boy has, in fact, more than one uncle, but the confusion never even crosses Camilo’s mind. If you come to that door asking for his uncle, there’s really only one person you could possibly be talking about, unless you’re looking to be targeted by every angry swarm of bees for miles around by proxy.
“Oh. Let me, uh, let me go get him for you.” His mouth opens and closes as though he’d been about to say something, only to change his tune before the words came out. “Good luck, whatever it is.”
He appreciates the well wishes, he thinks as he watches the boy scamper up the stairs, but he can’t help the sinking feeling that he jinxed it.
About halfway up, Camilo twists around to look at him. “Is this about the five babies thing?”
He runs before Mariano can put together a coherent response, enjoying his blushing and spluttering.
By the time the boy comes back down with his uncle in tow, he thinks he has somewhat recovered his dignity. The difference in their countenance is a sight to behold: Camilo is a bundle of energy, his steps springy and loud and carefree, while Bruno walks as though his feet were a most interesting spectacle, several steps behind and probably wishing he hadn’t been summoned at all. At one point, he seems to freeze and step carefully over some obstacle only he can see. Between that and the horror stories rattling around in his head, Mariano is really starting to question what in the world he has managed to get himself into.
They exchange their stilted greetings, and the silence after that is like a taut string that’s about to snap. The unspoken knowledge of what he’s here for seems to make the air between them palpably heavier. Mariano doesn’t want to broach the subject first, he knows how they hate for their gifts to be treated as a commodity, and everyone knows it’s more polite to make a bit of small talk before you talk business anyway, but he feels oddly like his reserves of small talk have been exhausted. As for Bruno, he can’t say he knows the man very well, but one thing is certain: the later the elephant in the room is addressed, the better it is in his book. It’s a painful game of who’s going to crack first, and in the end, it’s neither.
“Uh, so, you gonna take this upstairs, or are you just here for a staring contest?” Of course Camilo wouldn’t allow more than five seconds of awkward silence without feeling obligated to fill it.
Bruno sighs. “Right. We’ll just, uh, be upstairs if you need us, pretending we don’t know whose idea this really was.”
Mariano cracks a smile at that. Looks like Dolores’s not-so-subtle pushing wasn’t as one-sided as he’d assumed. The silence as they march up the steps is marginally more comfortable, only to go tense again as they stop in front of Bruno’s door. He expects him to do the honors and let him in, but he just… doesn’t.
The contrast between the image on the door and the real person standing before it is stark: while the actual Bruno looks about ready to bolt and carries himself with a bit of a permanent slouch as if he were sorry for existing, the softly glowing picture engraved in the wood is… oddly serene, his flowing clothes framing a prominent hourglass motif, his eyes wide open to gaze at something the rest of the world isn’t privy to.
It reminds him of the stories, or rather, of the underwhelming feeling you get when your perception of the man has been fed to bursting with those stories, and then reality punctures it without mercy. He’s trying not to let the gossiping townsfolk poison his impression, really, he is, he knows they are hopelessly wrong and this is Dolores’s uncle, for God’s sake, not some boogeyman ready to snatch children at night, but when something is repeated enough times, it has a way of slithering into the back of your mind and taking up residence.
Bruno finally opens the door, not without stopping to rap out that rapid sequence he’s seen him do every time he’s within touching distance of a wooden surface, and he can only hope Dolores’s superhuman ears do not extend as far as hearing his stomach clenching. He’d never hear the end of it.
He has visited these impossible rooms before (supervised, he would be struck by lightning faster than he can blink if he so much as entertained a single inappropriate thought), but this is… different. The first thing he is met with is a curtain of falling sand, but as soon as he has resigned to finding traces of it everywhere for the next week, it simply stops for its owner, letting them both through sand-free.
The scene that opens before his eyes is yet another study in contrasts. It’s more of a room as he knows it and less of a dreamlike wonderland, though there are no doubt surprises awaiting at the top of the long, winding staircase that encloses a largely colorless space that someone (or more likely, several someones) has forced an explosion of color into as an afterthought.
There is greenery sprouting in strange places, no doubt Isabela’s doing—not dainty flower arrangements like before, but hardy, spiky things growing in odd, asymmetrical shapes, things that are happy in the thin layer of sand that crunches beneath their feet. The bed, which is rather on the large side for one person, sits in pride of place on a raised platform, sporting a quilt that bears all the marks of Mirabel’s peculiar style, that is to say, a skilled hand and not a care in the world for what colors go together. A curious, multi-tiered contraption of rat-sized tunnels, ramps and wheels is being used as a playground by a sizeable population of scurrying rodents, and is that a miniaturized stage, curtains and all?
But what catches Mariano’s eye most of all is Bruno’s desk, because he knows the telltale signs of a man who’s been doing a lot of writing: the overflowing wastepaper basket (he thinks he spots yet another rat appropriating a discarded draft for its nest), the stubborn ink stains left over from that time he was too busy chasing ideas to fix the mess before it dried, the general chaos of a creative mind interrupted in the middle of its endeavors.
“You’re a writer?”
“Of a sort. Speaking of which… we’re only doing this on one condition.”
There’s an odd, fluttery feeling in his gut. This… this is closer to the tall tales whispered by the townsfolk. A hurdle to jump in exchange for a service rendered, something that paints Mariano, if only for a moment, in the light of a storybook hero pleading for the wisdom of a sage on top of a mountain, only to be told that knowledge has a price.
“What condition?” That sounded braver in his head.
“Whatever we end up seeing… promise me you won’t stop writing either way, okay?”
If not because he’s aware of Dolores’s gentle meddling, he would be thoroughly spooked by the fact that he already knows what he means to ask about, but as it is, he deflates. Just like the wide gap between Bruno the man and Bruno the prophet, the absurd simplicity of it leaves him fumbling, unbalanced, wondering if he’s missing something. He’d been mentally building up to God knows what impossible task, and his ‘condition’ is… this?
“I—what—who said anything about stopping?” he blurts, hating his own stumbling. “I’m not doing it just to get published, I’m doing it because it makes me happy. Worst case, it stays a hobby; best case, I prove my mamá wrong and she finally stops saying it’s just a phase. It’s been a phase since I was fourteen, you’d think…”
Mariano trails off. Perhaps confessing his undying love of poetry to his girlfriend’s uncle is a little… intense.
“Right.” Bruno goes to clap a hand on his shoulder and aborts the gesture before it’s completed. He exhales long and slow, as if bracing himself for something unpleasant. “Come on up, then.”
Of all the things he’d come to expect from this, a workout for his legs was most certainly not it.
“You’re lucky you’re seeing the new room,” says Bruno almost teasingly, watching him lag behind. “The stairs used to be a lot worse.”
Mariano picks up his pace, stung in his pride. The man is easily twice his age, now is not the time to complain about a few measly steps.
A simple bridge connects the staircase to what he can only describe as the entrance to a cave, half natural, half man-made, a little too round to be true and fitted with a heavy door. He’s not entirely sure about the physics of how this all fits inside the house, but that’s a riddle he has long since given up on solving. It’s barely more than a strip of stone, really, but Bruno seems to derive a strange pleasure out of testing it with one stomping foot.
“Used to be a lot less… sturdy, you know. I heard it caved in entirely when I… yeah, let’s not dwell on that, maybe.”
He really shouldn’t be surprised to find yet more sand on the other side: a large expanse of empty floor stained with what appear to be small scorch marks, and past that, a large pit that never seems to overflow despite the constant whispering stream of sand issuing from somewhere on the much, much too high ceiling. The jarring addition of a common metal bucket lying beside it almost has him in hysterics. A study in contrasts once again.
The wall in front of them is almost entirely concealed by a set of thick curtains, with the exception of a narrow gap down the middle that gives off an eerie green glow. If the door behind them were to close, it would be the only source of light. Mariano can feel his palms beginning to sweat, and he has to forcefully choke down the little voice that says that maybe the stories were correct.
Other than the curtains, the only concessions to decoration in this very stripped-down space are some shelves carved directly into the stone off to the side, from which Bruno retrieves a small container picked without hesitation among several, a matchbox, and a pair of cushions. These, too, have his niece’s touch in the bright geometric patterns that adorn them. Better that than sitting on the bare floor, Mariano notes as the older man sets them down in the middle of the cave.
He watches the preparations in silence, only moving when a gesture from Bruno invites him to step forward, not daring to take a seat until he’s told to. It’s obvious from his demeanor that this is something familiar, something he’s learnt off by heart, but to someone who’s never witnessed it before, it’s oddly fascinating, not to mention quite a bit more involved than he expected. Other than perhaps Julieta’s miraculous delicacies, which he supposes are as complex to make as everyday food and don’t just sprout fully formed on a plate, he had grown accustomed to thinking of the gifts as something that just happened—flowers exploding into full bloom with a thought, a whisper resounding as clear as a shout, entire buildings being here one day and there the next with no more apparent effort than lifting a sack of flour. This, by all appearances, is not something that just happens.
Bruno leaves the matches and the tiny jar next to one of the cushions in the center, marking his own seat, and begins to pour out a circle of sand. That, at least, explains the bucket, as well as the barely visible groove etched in the floor to help make it perfect. A sinking feeling of finality grips Mariano’s insides as he realizes that the other man’s little ‘come hither’ sign has placed him squarely inside. What’s left at the bottom of the bucket, he notes with no small amount of trepidation, goes into a pattern of tiny little mounds of sand that matches the pre-existing burn marks with unerring precision. There’s an air of forbidden excitement about it all; Mariano feels a bit like a child caught doing something he’s been repeatedly told he’s too young for.
When Bruno finally takes his place in the modest little setup, Mariano finds himself mirroring him unthinkingly, plopping down cross-legged and wishing there were something, anything, to look at other than his face.
Bruno’s sudden confidence, no doubt wrought of infinite repetition, stutters to a halt.
“Ah, why not?” he mutters more to himself than to Mariano. “You’re never too careful.”
He throws a generous handful of salt – where did the salt even come from? – over his shoulder and relaxes minutely, as if that had somehow brought him back into the swing of things. He twists the little jar open and Mariano’s nostrils are assailed by a pungent, earthy smell he cannot place, even more so when he tips out the contents first in tiny amounts to crown the piles of sand, then with a heavier hand in the dead center of the arrangement, and sets the whole thing alight.
The feeling of being witness to something he’s not meant to be seeing reaches fever pitch as Bruno lets his eyes fall shut for the longest few seconds of his life, then offers him both hands. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize that he’s supposed to hold them.
Bruno’s eyes fly open, and Mariano hopes he can’t feel him flinch. He’s only ever seen his nephew’s corny impression of that, never the real thing, those strange green beacons shining out of his face to match the shade of the glow behind the curtain. Is he even seeing him at all right now, or is his mind in another place entirely?
The wind picks up, which only confuses him further once he remembers that they’re still inside the house, and whips the circle of sand into a roaring, spinning dome above their heads, little flecks of green light coming to life among the swirling currents and coalescing into… something.
His stomach swoops when that something becomes a green-tinted phantom image of himself, larger than life and… slicing open a letter?
“Does that make sense to you? I can't see who it’s from,” says Bruno, half-shouting to be heard over the whistling winds and squinting as if that could make it clearer for both of them. Maybe it can, for all Mariano knows of such things.
As they scramble for details that refuse to come, the other Mariano tosses the letter aside, shoulders slumped in defeat. An ice-cold flash of clarity makes its home in his gut—a message from a publishing house, telling him oh-so-politely that he’s not what they’re looking for. The image loses cohesion, only to reform nearly identical: another letter, another sigh as his other self crumples it up and sends it flying into a fireplace. Then a third, this time torn to shreds and sent fluttering around his head like so much snow.
“Well.” He forces a shrug, his own shoulders protesting the dismissive motion. “I think I’ve got the gist of it.”
Nothing much will change, then. He’ll still have Dolores as a captive audience of one, with her uncanny ear for rhythm and rhyme and sound, and his mamá rolling her eyes at his flights of fancy. It’s fine, really. But was it too much to hope that maybe, someday…?
He goes to rise from where he’s sitting, only to be stopped by a firm but gentle tug.
“No, don’t. The next one could be it, I just have to go a little further… come on…” Bruno’s voice strains as if he were lifting something heavy.
His other self dissolves into specks of light and sand once again, and the thing that reforms is different, less like the general shape of a person and more like a man-made object, all sharp angles and lines, like… is that a box? Mariano watches with rapt attention, praying for a label or an identifying sign of any kind that never shows up.
What does show up is hands, one, two, three, four, possibly his own and God in heaven, let that be Dolores, attacking the thing with scissors from all sides, then five, six?!
Mariano chokes on air. Unless he’s hallucinating, which he wouldn’t rule out completely given how his day has been going, that was three pairs of hands demolishing the box, and call him crazy, but the third pair was, well, tiny.
The box all but falls apart under their combined onslaught, revealing yet more books. He’s almost ready to shrug it off, what with all the deliveries he’s been getting, receiving books is just another Tuesday, until Bruno notices the obvious.
“Huh? Who in the world would send you the same book fifty times over?”
Mariano’s mouth falls open.
“You’re joking. Advance copies? You’ve got to be joking.”
He springs to his feet, pulling the other man with him, and nearly sets himself on fire trying to step over the flaming piles of herbs and sand to engulf him in a bone-crushing hug.
“Wha—no, don’t, I’m gonna lose it, stop… agh!”
The dome only survives for another instant, raining sand all over them as it collapses. Well, there goes his hope of only getting it into his shoes. Somewhere in the shower of particles, born of one last flash of magic, something else, something larger, drops out of thin air. Bruno, looking suddenly a lot more like himself now that the green light has blinked out of his eyes, extricates himself from the embrace to execute a flawless catch, probably one of many.
He proffers what looks like a slate of translucent green glass, an imprint of that last moment, still holding something of that light. Mariano takes it and counts again, just to make sure—six hands, all right, two of them looking like they belong to no more than a toddler.
“You can… uh, you can keep it. God knows it’s not every day I get one that you might want to keep.”
Bruno’s eyes flick rapidly towards the curtained wall and Mariano’s next question – where do they go when people don’t want to keep them, then? – becomes useless before it’s even asked, but he answers it anyway. He marches up to the curtains and pulls a cord to open them. Mariano’s jaw drops for the second time in as many minutes. The wall is packed floor to ceiling with them, and he averts his eyes, not wanting to know about destinies that are not his own.
“They usually end up here, or just smashed to pieces, depending.”
“You’ve done it this many times?” Actually, scratch that, there is no way the delicate glass-like substance of his past prophecies survived the fall of the house. “You’ve done it this many times since the rebuilding?”
“Uh, not exactly. Casita… doesn’t like it when I try to get rid of them. They always end up whole again, somehow. This is an entire lifetime of… of the ones that nobody wanted.”
Mariano chances another peek, begging forgiveness for the gross invasion of privacy, and he sees it now—the recent ones, the ones within reach, are whole, for the most part, but in the rows and rows of older ones that Casita has pushed up and out of the way, there are so, so many that are cracked and pieced back together.
“I… wow.” It’s especially frustrating for him to be speechless. So much for having a way with words. “Yeah, I think I’ll take this home.”
The shock is beginning to wear off. A whole box of advance copies… he lets himself grin.
“So, fourth time’s the charm, then?”
“Eh.” Bruno shrugs, looking as far from mysterious and sage-like as he ever has. “Fourth, fifth, tenth, those were only snapshots. I can’t really give you a number, just… just keep trying.”
Mariano looks down at the tablet again, just to be certain it won’t vanish in a puff of smoke.
Six hands.
Oh, God.
“Dolores?” he calls out, his voice barely above a normal speaking level, knowing that no more is needed. “I… I think we need to talk.”