The Ink Was Already Mixed

The Vandercook was already humming when the phone rang, and for a half-second I thought about not answering it.

Mi abuela decía que el plomo no perdona — lead doesn't forgive — and I had a chase half-locked on the bed of the press, twenty-two lines of a love poem some boy from UCR had paid me forty mil colones to set by hand because his novia liked old things. Roses, naturally. He'd written about roses. I'd been arranging the word espinas — thorns — for the better part of an hour, because the type was a 12-point Bodoni I hadn't touched since Aurelia died and the lowercase s kept slipping out of its bed like a tooth.

The rain had started maybe ten minutes before, a soft tin sound on the corrugated roof of the bindery that always made me feel, in spite of everything, that the shop was holding me. The mineral spirits sang their thin chemical note over the lead. On the counter at the front, twenty-three unopened envelopes stacked in a leaning column the color of bad news. I had cut a sheet of Fabriano in half that morning to save the other half for next month, and I had felt, briefly, like a woman in a wartime photograph.

The phone rang again. The black landline Aurelia had refused to replace, even when the cord frayed down to copper.

"Pacheco," I said, wedging it under my chin and reaching for a rag.

"Mija." Doña Lucía. Her voice did the small soft thing it did when something was about to be required of me. "Ven. Ven ya. Don Adán is asking for you."

I set the rag down. I did not set it down carefully.

"Voy," I said. "Diez minutos."

"Cinco, mija. Five."

The Vandercook kept humming. I left the chase half-locked — a thing Aurelia would have slapped my hand for — and pulled her old rain jacket off the hook behind the door. It still smelled like her: rosewater and the iron tang of the type cabinets. The sleeves swallowed my hands. I had been meaning to take it in. I had been meaning to do many things.

The street was slick and orange under the sodium lamps. Barrio Amón in the rain has a particular smell — old wood swelling, jasmine from someone's wall, a thread of guaro drifting out of the cantina on the corner where two men were arguing politely about a soccer match from 1997. A stray dog had taken refuge under the eaves of the old Cuban embassy, the one that had been closed since I was a child, and he watched me pass with the philosophical indifference of an animal who has decided humans are weather.

I walked too fast. The manuscript I was going to be given — I didn't know yet I was going to be given a manuscript — would have told me to slow down, to notice. To set the line clean.

I should have gone to see him last week. I had told myself the press kept me. The press did keep me. But Don Adán had been dying for a month and a half, with the slow deliberation of a man who had survived two exiles and intended to leave on his own schedule, and I had let Tuesday become Thursday become next week become this.

Mi abuela decía that the worst sin in printing was the one you committed because you were tired. You set the wrong sort, you mixed the ink too thin, you locked the chase before you'd checked the kerning, all because your hands wanted to be done. Grief, I was beginning to understand, was a kind of tiredness that mistook itself for everything else.

The Pensión Otoyo glowed at the end of the block — yellow light through tall windows, the pink-tiled entryway gleaming under the bulb of the porch, the avocado tree in the courtyard heavy and dripping. Doña Lucía was at the door before I reached it, her silver braid over one shoulder, her face arranged in a small severe expression that said: hurry, but do not run. Do not bring weather into this house.

She took my wet hand in both of hers. Her palms were warm and dry and smelled faintly of coffee.

"He has been asking since five," she said. "He is lucid, mija. Now."

The pink tiles clicked under my boots. The stairs were lined with photographs I had walked past a hundred times — a younger Doña Lucía at the door with a bearded man I now recognized, with a jolt, as Don Adán in 1985. Aurelia in the courtyard, laughing, the avocado tree behind her shorter than she was. I did not stop to look.

The door to his room was ajar. The Olivetti pushed against the far wall like a small green animal that had been asked to be quiet. The guayabera he loved — brown linen, soft as a held breath — was draped over the back of the chair. The silver crucifix his wife had given him in 1971 sat on the nightstand beside a glass of water nobody had touched.

And Don Adán, propped on three pillows, breathing the careful breath of a man who had decided to spend his last lungfuls of air well.

"Tamarita," he said, and his eyes — which had been the eyes of a hawk all the years I'd known him — found mine and softened. "Cochina. Look at your hands."

I looked at my hands. Lead under three nails. A blue smear of ink across the knuckle of my right thumb where I'd wiped my face earlier without thinking.

"You're one to talk," I said. My voice did not crack. I had decided, in the stairwell, that it would not. "You're wearing cologne, viejo. On your deathbed."

He laughed — a small dry laugh that became a cough that became a laugh again. "Of course. What kind of man dies smelling like a hospital?"

"A practical one."

"Pf." He waved one hand, and I saw how thin his wrist had gone. "Practicality is for tax accountants. Ask Esteban."

Esteban was in the corner. I had not seen him when I came in — he had the quality of a piece of well-made furniture, present but declining attention. He was in a pressed white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He did not smile. He nodded once, the nod of a man who is grieving and would like the room to remember it.

"Mijo," Don Adán said to him, without looking. "The package. In the second drawer."

Esteban did not move for a long beat. Then he crossed to the dresser, opened the drawer, and lifted out a thick parcel wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine the color of old wheat. He held it for a moment as if weighing whether to drop it out the window. Then he placed it, with surprising gentleness, in his father's lap.

Don Adán's hands closed on it. He looked at it the way I had seen him look at his wife's photograph: as if it were both finished and unfinishable.

"Ven," he said to me. "Siéntate."

I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped. He smelled of his cologne and beneath it, faintly, of the iodine smell that had been settling into the room for weeks.

"La maldición del último jardín," he said. "Three hundred and forty pages. The last twelve are not there — Inspector Morales will have to wait — but the rest is clean. Green ink in the margins. You'll recognize my hand."

He lifted the parcel and set it in my hands. It was heavier than I had expected. Manuscripts are always heavier than you expect; paper has a memory, and three hundred and forty pages remember a great deal.

"Print it," he said. "Even if nobody reads it for ten years. Print it, mija."

"Don Adán —"

"Listen." His hand closed over mine on the parcel. The bones were so close to the surface. "There are people who would prefer this book did not exist. They are not many. They are not, I think, dangerous to you. But they exist. Tu abuela would have known what to do. You will figure it out."

From the corner, Esteban made a sound that was not a word but had the grammar of one. I did not look at him. The weather of him filled the room anyway — a clean cold front rolling in along the wall.

"I'll print it," I said. My voice was lower than I meant it to be. "I'll print it well."

"I know you will." He smiled. The smile of a man whose work was finally not his anymore. "Cochina," he said again, but tenderly this time, looking at the ink on my thumb.

Doña Lucía appeared in the doorway with a tin pot of café chorreado and three small cups on a tray. The smell of it — bitter, dark, almost burnt — filled the room like a second blessing. She poured. We sat. Don Adán drank a quarter cup with both hands and then let her take it from him. His eyes began to drift toward the window, where the rain was making its patient argument against the glass.

After a while he pulled at my sleeve. I leaned in. His lips were dry against my ear.

"Lorenzo Argüello," he whispered.

That was all.

I waited. I waited for the second half of the sentence, the verb that would tell me what to do with the name. None came. His eyes closed. His hand on my wrist went slack and then, after a moment, tightened again, as if he had remembered something and then forgotten what.

Doña Lucía's fingers found my other wrist. She shook her head, just slightly. Not yet, the shake said. But soon. Go.

I stood. The manuscript was against my ribs, inside Aurelia's jacket, where I had put it without remembering doing so.

"Gracias, mija," Doña Lucía said at the door, and kissed me on both cheeks. Her mouth was warm. "Camina con cuidado. The streets are slick."

I walked home through the rain with both arms wrapped around my own chest, the parcel pressed against my ribs like a second heartbeat. The bookstore on the corner was dark. Café Triángulo had pulled in its chairs. A motorcycle went by too fast and threw a fan of water across my boots. I barely felt it.

Lorenzo Argüello.

Mi abuela decía his name the way other women said the names of saints. Lorenzo escribió. Lorenzo me dijo. Lorenzo, una vez en Limón. I had grown up inside the music of that name without ever thinking to ask what key it was in. There was a literary prize named after him. There was a bust of him in the Parque Morazán, bronze going green at the temples. He had died when I was three.

At the corner of Calle 9 I glanced back, I don't know why. A man was standing across the street, under the eaves of the closed pharmacy. He was not running for cover from the rain. He was not smoking. He was just standing, and looking, and the angle of his shoulders was the angle of someone who had been standing there for some time.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself that Barrio Amón in the rain was full of men waiting for buses, for wives, for the rain to stop. I did not register, not consciously, that the white shirt under his jacket had been pressed that morning by someone who cared about pressed shirts.

I walked faster.

The shop was as I had left it. The Vandercook still warm — I put my palm against the flywheel and felt the faint patient heat of it, like the flank of a horse that has been waiting. The chase half-locked. The boy from UCR's love poem with its slipping s. The tin of ink I had mixed an hour before sat open on the bench, and a thin skin had already begun to form across its surface — a dark wrinkled film like the cooled top of café con leche, the way ink does when you leave it and turn your back.

I laid the parcel on the imposition stone. The stone was cold under my fingers through the butcher paper. I untied the twine. I lifted one corner of the wrapping and saw the title page, and beneath the typed words La maldición del último jardín, in the slanting green-ink hand I had been reading in the margins of manuscripts since I was nine years old: para Tamarita, que sabrá qué hacer.

For Tamarita, who will know what to do.

The rain was steady on the roof. The shop smelled of mineral spirits and damp wool and the faint ghost of Doña Lucía's coffee on my breath. I was alone in a way I had not been alone before — not the alone of these six months, which had been a shape I was learning, but a new alone, the alone of someone who has just been handed something.

"Lorenzo Argüello," I said, out loud, to the empty taller.

The rain answered on the roof. The Vandercook hummed its low patient hum. And somewhere inside me, very quietly, a question I had not known I was carrying my whole life began to turn over, the way a key turns in a lock you didn't know was there — because mi abuela had spoken his name with reverence, yes, all my life, with reverence, and I was twenty-four years old and standing alone in a rainy printshop with a dying man's last book against my fingertips, and I was only now beginning to wonder whether reverence had been the right word for it at all.

The ink in the tin had finished skinning over. I would have to break it before I could use it again.