The Gray House

Some people were afraid of them. Others awaited them eagerly. They were mentioned in prayers, asked to postpone or hasten the end. Their images were on playing cards and old engravings. Very few thought about how many of them there were. It was agreed that Death was one, just in two different personifications. Night and day. Light and shadow.

In fact, there were many of them. They were almost godlike, possessing innumerable wondrous abilities, and unbearably lonely. Sometimes they would flee to other worlds, to meet their own deaths. Some of them would even be born in other worlds. They were always born dead there, coming to life only later. Those of them that could. These refugees from different worlds were no longer true emissaries of Death. Their abilities were not as sharp. In time they became almost harmless, and could only bring death in a dream.

Here is how you can tell them. They have beautiful voices, they dance well, and they know everyone’s secrets. They are also lazy, never losing themselves in the pursuit of a single goal. The women don’t know how to laugh, and the men don’t know how to cry. They hide their eyes, sleep a lot, and never eat eggs, because in their world they hatched from one.

TABAQUI’S TALE

Once upon a time and ever since then there lives a curious little old man. He lives in a secret place. This place is very hard to find, and to find the old man in it is even harder. He has many houses, or maybe it’s the same house that only looks different for anyone entering it. Sometimes it stands in the middle of an orchard, sometimes it is in an empty field, sometimes on the bank of a river, and it almost never looks the same, only very rarely. It could even be that there is no house at all, that the old man is holed up in a single room of a huge project. And there were times when he chose to live in the hollow of a dead tree.

That’s why finding him is so difficult. No one who visited him can describe his dwelling to anyone else, or point out the way and explain how to reach it. There are many who would like to meet him, but only those who seek tirelessly and have the knowledge of invisible ways and passages, of secret signs and prophetic dreams, can ever hope to come to the right place. But even when they reach it they often have to leave empty-handed, because the old man is grumpy, obstinate, and does not like giving out presents.

The old man’s houses all look different from the outside, but very similar on the inside. They are crammed with things. Sometimes there are so many that the old man can barely find a place for himself among them. But this way everything he needs is always close to hand. It would be impossible to imagine something that he does not have.

He keeps music inside conchs, skulls of small animals, and fruit seeds. He puts smells in the bean pods and nutshells. Dreams, in empty gourds. Memories, in cabinets and perfume bottles. He also has hooks of every shape and ropes of every thickness, clay pots of any size, except large ones, and jugs, also small but very elaborate. Whistles, flutes and fifes, buttons and buckles, jack-in-the-boxes, precious jewels and stones that only he knows the value of, spices, seeds and roots, old maps marked with locations of sunken treasure, flasks, earrings, horseshoes, playing cards and tarot cards, figurines made out of wood, gold and ivory, crumbly pieces of meteorites, bird feathers, baubles, bangles and beads, bells, eggs being kept warm, insects encased in amber, and also some toys. And most of these objects are usually more than what they seem.

But those who come to the old man do not want spices, jewels, myrrh, or frankincense. They all want gears from busted watches. The old man loathes parting with those.

Some of the guests get snared by the inventive traps the old man keeps around the house. Others he lets through and refuses himself, for varying reasons. He has a list of questions, and if you do not answer each and every one of them you will not get your present, this he ensures firmly and gleefully.

The unluckiest guests of the house find only the old man’s mummified corpse. It lies in the cardboard box that the stereo system came in, in the company of withered flowers, carved nutshells, and faded postcards. Some bury him before leaving, others dump him out of the box and beat up the body, venting their disappointment, and then there are those who remain in the house, waiting for who knows what—another old man instead of this one, a replacement, so to speak, since this one seems to be dead? Sooner or later they too leave empty-handed. The old man can be a mummy for however long he wants. It doesn’t bother him at all.