Free Lovers on All Saints' Day by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

tickets.”
    “To where?”
    “France.”
    Georges looked out the window. Xavier and Jean were playing with the boar’s head. The most obvious strategy for the adulterer was to show up at social gatherings where his lover would be. That way he gave the impression of not having anything to hide and, therefore, that nothing was actually going on.
    “I thought I was pregnant,” said Charlotte. “We were going to live in Nancy until the baby was born.”
    Georges looked at her chestnut hair and the vertex on which the button of her blouse joined the line of her breasts. Having a child with Xavier in another country was a way of beginning a new life. Later Charlotte and Xavier would have married. Everything would have gone back to normal, and they might even have returned to Belgium. But Charlotte wasn’t pregnant. She’d chosen not to run away; she didn’t need a new life.
    “I’m staying,” she said. “I’m staying with you.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “You don’t know how much I’ve suffered. I don’t want any more of this. I want us to go back to being ourselves.”
    “But we haven’t stopped being ourselves, Charlotte. You’ve lied very well. You have an admirable talent.”
    “No sarcasm, please.”
    “Also, you’re not young. This is no time to be having babies.”
    “Let me stay.”
    “How long has it been going on?”
    “I don’t know,” said Charlotte. “Three, four months.”
    “Exactly.”
    “I don’t know, dear.”
    “Of course you know. That book is an anniversary gift, I’ll bet you anything.
Madame Bovary
. He’s not what you might call subtle, our friend Xavier.”
    They did not embrace. They did not kiss, not even like friends. But their marriage was safe, even if just for this moment. The next step would be to work at it, work tenaciously. Georges loved her, and that certainty should be enough for him to go back with Charlotte, for that complicated return to the body of a woman he’d never left. That Charlotte was not young, at forty-five, was false, but that didn’t prevent them from feeling the excitement of the surprise of realizing they’d stay together, that they had their whole lives ahead of them.
    —
    T O FRIGHTEN THE PREY, to force them to leave the woods and expose themselves to the hunters’ sight, each beater had developed a particular and private voice that Georges, over time, had begun to be able to distinguish. He made an effort, a sort of personal challenge, to discern them in the air. That
oooooooo
with hands clapping was from Guillaume Respin; Frédéric Fontaine shook the bushes with a polished stick and shouted
ah-ah-ah-eeeee
. Catherine had decided, quite a while ago, to do without onomatopoeia.
    “Get a move on, brutes!” she shouted.
“Foutez le camp!”
    But no animal escaped down this side. With a bit of luck, the hunters on the other side would trap at least one boar. Georges looked up, but the pigeons were flying too high: it would be arrogance for a man whose aim was not as sure as it used to be to attempt such a shot. Nevertheless, he pointed his rifle at the gray sky and looked through the telescopic lens, dusty and smudged with fingerprints: years ago he would have tried, he thought calmly, his finger caressing the trigger. He lowered the gun and listened to the beaters; the commotion of branches breaking under their feet didn’t drown out that other commotion of their threats. It was possible to follow those movements among the trees, because the boundary of the woods was clearly established and the way the wind played with the sounds intensified the voices as soon as the beaters came around the western corner.
    Then three shots rang out.
    “Tiens,”
Georges said to no one. “Someone’s had some luck.”
    He tried to relive the sound of the shots, and smiled as he guessed someone had fired a shotgun and was going to be admonished by Jean. He imagined the prey, made bets with himself: a young boar, an out-of-season deer, a banal rabbit