Four years before the outbreak, I traveled into the snowbound hills west of Beijing with my first husband, Tomas.
He was an installation artist from Lima who was working at the time on a replica of a 10th-century cloister. Years before, he became obsessed with the story of a nun in medieval France who awoke screaming one morning and couldn’t stop. She was joined over the following days by another sister, then another, until the whole convent echoed with their cries. They only quieted when the local soldiers threatened to beat them. What compelled Tomas, I think, was the lack of choice in these women’s lives, in their fates, placed as girls in convents by parents who didn’t want them, or couldn’t support them. The screaming seemed like a choice that they could make. In any case, he was struggling with the project. At the time of our trip, he didn’t think he’d finish it, and neither did I. Already then, something was going out of him.
But that morning of our journey out to see the Great Wall, the hours felt whole and unspoiled. We had been bickering for weeks, but the novelty of the Chinese countryside, with its strange textures and weather and food, had shifted things between us. Tomas grinned as we arrived at the tourists’ entrance, his teeth very straight and white in his narrow face.
Vendors along the stone path called to us, their breath clouding on the air. A woman hollered for us to buy polished jade paperweights and shimmering cloth wallets, fake money tied with red string and transparent pens in which small plastic boats floated through viscous liquid as if journeying up the Yangtze. The wind was sharp and fresh, with an almost grasslike scent you didn’t get in the city.
We crawled into the glass cable car that would carry us to the upper paths. As it began to lurch its way across the canyon, above trees black as night water, we laughed nervously. Then we were up, finally, walking the ancient stone corridor, the pale light cold on our foreheads. The air tasted faintly of metal.
“Should we have bought something back there, from that woman?” I said. “For my mother?”
“Gabriel wants Chinese cigarettes,” Tomas said, his dark eyes watering in the strong wind. “I don’t know. Somehow it’s more stylish to smoke foreign ones.”
“You’re hard on him,” I said.
I shouldn’t have said it. Tomas glanced at me, quiet. He didn’t like to talk about his brother much in those days. Between them lay a gentle hatred whose childhood roots were still murky to me, despite a decade of marriage. It could only be made worse, later, by the accident that happened two years after we returned from China. Tomas would strike his nephew with his car, killing the boy. The child just 3. By then Tomas and I had entered the era of our disaffection. What I’d know I’d learn through a mutual friend. The death would be a barrier through which nothing could pass, and everyone connected with it would disappear on the far side, lost.
But that day, over the coming hours, the twisting rock path stretched out before us into the distant fog. We walked along a section that had purple veining on the stones, as well as starker, whiter rock, and stone of such muddy gray you felt intensely how ancient and elemental it was. And though we spoke easily, laughing, I could feel — we both could — the shadow of my earlier remark.
The fog grew heavier. Snow began to fall.
It seemed the right time to leave. We retraced our steps back to the glass cable-car entrance, but it was nowhere to be found. We tried another path, but it ended in a lookout. We stared at each other. The snow got thicker.
Behind us, a sudden figure was striding away. Tomas called out to the man, but as we rounded the corner, he was gone.
The afternoon was growing darker. A strong smell of soil filled the air. We ascended a set of crooked steps that led onto a landing that stopped abruptly at a barrier. Another set descended to a solid wall. One path seemed to stretch into nowhere, and we gave up following it. My fingertips began to burn with cold. I pictured Beijing at this hour, the bright restaurants on the street near our hotel, the air smelling of exhaust and fried meat and sun-warmed blossoms, their fallen petals like drops of pale wax on the pavement.
“We are in an Escher drawing,” Tomas cried, strangely elated.
I smiled, too, but shivering, the wind a high whistle in my ears. Snow had clotted on my eyelashes, so that I blinked hard.
Two dark-haired women appeared then, a cluster of canisters at their feet. I was surprised to see a mild disappointment in Tomas’s face. I began to gesture and explain we were lost. They listened without expression, their wet wrinkles glistening. Then one turned to Tomas, and speaking shyly in Mandarin, she lifted her ancient hands and brushed the flakes of ice from his hair. He gave a boyish laugh, delighted.
The second woman drew from a canister by her feet two foam cups steaming with tea. When she had poured these, or how she’d managed to keep the water hot on so cold a day high up in those hills, I did not know. But Tomas took his with great ceremony. I waved mine away.
The women gestured behind them, and there they were — the cable cars. The glass domes swayed over the open black valley as if newly restored.
Tomas made a noise of astonishment. As we went toward the cable cars, he spoke in wonder at the feel of the woman’s palms on his head, their surprising weight, the roughness of her skin.
But on the drive back to Beijing, we said little. It felt strange not to talk, after so long. Tomas was always garrulous in his moments of happiness, but now he seemed emptied, as if something had been slowly forced out of him. As we reached the hotel, I could tell by the tension in his mouth that he was still troubled by a thing I couldn’t quite grasp. Gently, I took his hand. He gripped mine back, as if he knew where our lives were going, as if the ravages had already happened. All over the world there were lights going out, even then.
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