The bartender turned around and selected a large, squared, unlabeled bottle half full of clear liquid. He pulled the silver stopper, which resembled a stag’s antlered head, from its mouth and poured a dram into a large snifter, which he set before the man, who realized the liquid was not clear, but tinged with the silvery blue glow that snow reflects at twilight. He picked up the snifter and swirled the liquid up and around its glass walls, aware of both the bartender and the woman watching him, waiting, and then lifted it to his mouth and smelled the clean bracing smell of institutionally laundered linen and poured a little into his mouth, and let it pool there for a moment, cool and aromatic, tasting faintly of bleach and watercress and spearmint and rice.
He slowly lowered the glass to the bar and said, It’s lovely.
I knew you’d like it, said the woman. Lárus, pour him more.
The bartender once again removed the stopper from the bottle’s throat and held its open mouth above the man’s glass and, when the man nodded, he poured another dram of schnapps into the snifter. He then walked to the far end of the bar and poured more into the woman’s glass. She raised her glass to the man and looked into his eyes. She was old, the man realized, probably in her seventies, but there was something overtly and disconcertingly sexual about her. She wore a tight-fitting black gown adorned with iridescent sequins that reminded the man somewhat of fish scales—he thought of the prismatic bellies of fish lifted out of the water, how their flexing struggle made them gleam—and her long silvery-gray hair was swept back from her face and coiled atop her head in an intricate, antique sort of way. Her face was lean and strong, her eyes dark, her nose sleekly formidable, and her lips polished a deep wine red that separated them irrevocably from her pale skin. Her eyes were large and seemed to be set a fraction too far apart, as if some constant eagerness to see both what was in front of her but also beside her had caused them to become unfixed and migrate to either side of her face.
One shouldn’t shout in bars, she said, especially this late at night. I’m an actress, my voice is trained to project, but allow me to come sit next you, for I know you won’t come sit next to me, and it’s really too ridiculous to have this distance between us.
Without waiting for his reply, she stepped down off her barstool and picked up her drink and walked around the corner of the bar and reseated herself on the stool next to the man. She carefully placed her glass on the bar at the same latitude as his and then looked not at him but at their reflection in the mirror, through the interruption of bottles. Their eyes met and held there in the mirror, and the man felt the strength of the schnapps like electricity coursing through his body.
Are you here for the healer? the woman asked him. Or the orphanage?
The orphanage, said the man. There’s a healer?
Yes. Brother Emmanuel. Surely you’ve heard of him.
I haven’t, said the man. A healer? How do you mean?
How do I mean? What do you mean? He’s a healer. He heals people.
For real?
They say he does. I, myself, have not been healed by him—at least not yet—so I can give you no definitive answer. But why do you ask? Are you looking to be healed?
No, said the man. But my wife is ill. Very ill.
Incurably ill?
Well, said the man, I suppose it remains to be seen.
Of course, said the woman. Everything that’s coming remains to be seen.
The man realized that the bartender had somehow floated back to his original position at the end of the bar and was pretending he could not hear them, or see them, was pretending that he was alone onstage in some different play, a one-man show. The woman sighed and touched her hair, first one side of her head and then on the other, and the man realized she wore it as intricately coiffed as she did so that it could occupy her at moments like these; it could always be attended to, adjusted, primped.
It can work, she said. I’ve seen people arrive here at death’s front door—in the vestibule, even—and a few days later skip merrily away.
The man did not reply.
But I think for it to work you have to believe. Do you believe in that kind of thing?
I don’t know, the man said.
Then you don’t, said the woman. If you did, you’d know. What about your wife? Does she believe in it?
I don’t know, said the man. I doubt it.
Well, I don’t suppose it can hurt her to see him, so you might give it a go, since you got yourselves here. People come from all over the world to see Brother Emmanuel. Fortunately, I’ve never been ill a day in my life. My eyes are fine, my teeth—everything works fine. Knock wood. She rapped the underside of the bar with her knuckles. I don’t know why. I drink. I smoke.
You’re very fortunate, said the man.
Yes, she said. About that. My body has never failed me. Everything else, yes—but my body, no. I wonder how I’ll die. I am Livia Pinheiro-Rima. Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette? It makes me nervous to talk and a cigarette calms me.
The man shook his head, indicating that he had no objection to the woman smoking, and she fished a silver cigarette case out of her bag and sprung it open and slid one out from beneath the clasp. She held it between two of her fingers, and with her thumb she flicked it cartwheeling up into the air and caught it neatly by the filtered end in her mouth.
That’s a trick from my circus days, she said. She bent her face down and stuck the tip of her cigarette into a candle, sucked at the flame, and then raised her head, exhaling smoke through her nostrils.
I really was in the circus, you know, she said.
What did you do? the man asked.
I swung from the trapeze and rode atop an elephant. This was centuries ago, of course. But some things last.
It’s a good trick, the man said.
I know, she said. That’s why I’ve kept it. There are certain things I do every day, and that’s one. If you do something every day, you’ll never not be able to do it. People give up too easily in this regard. You, for instance.
What? the man said.
I can tell. You’ve given up, let go of certain things. I’ve had this dress since I was twenty-seven. And do you know, I was one of the original Isadorables.
You mean the children who danced with Isadora Duncan?
Yes. Although she didn’t think we were children. She thought anyone over the age of three was autonomous.
I don’t see how that’s possible, said the man. You’d be one hundred years old.
Perhaps I am. But don’t you know it’s rude to talk about a woman’s age?
I’m sorry, said the man. You’re remarkable.
Yes, but a lot of good it does me. It’s like a tree in the forest falling: if there’s no one there, who cares if it’s remarkable or not? I used to spend a lot of time in forests, waiting for trees to fall. It happens, you know—they suddenly just let go and crash. It’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever witnessed. And I’ve witnessed an awful lot of intimacy, believe me. Oh dear God the intimacies I’ve witnessed! By rights I ought to be blind. Do you believe in that?
What?
Hysterical blindness. The optic nerve ceasing to function as a result of a shock to the psyche.
I don’t know, the man said. I suppose—
I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, the woman hurriedly continued. I wasn’t in the circus for long. You see, I wanted to act, I wanted to be in the theater, and you’ve got to start out however you can. Wherever you can. So I started out dangling upside down from a rope and doing the splits atop an elephant. I don’t know if it still happens, but once upon a time there were people who were born to be on the stage. I was. They say I got down from my mother’s lap and crawled up the aisle towards the stage of the New Harmonium Theater when I was one year old. Who’d want to sit in the dark when they could be up there in that gorgeous light?