Just when the painter felt that the plot was thickening, it was dissolved by a laugh. The laugh went traveling, and returned, riding on the trees and the trembling of the spiderwebs at dawn. The willows shook off the last drops. The season settled in with forgetful lingerings. The first frosts made the hour shine, as if the willows had been covered with a layer of liquid aluminum. The previous winter had passed like a dream spilling over into the real. The painter waited for the delayed realities to be reflected in the water. The silhouette of the Ventana range pulsed on the horizon, discharging its heavenly inks. The passage of the clouds became more visible as the branches were bared.

A daylight moon watched over the painter from the very first moment. In its mobile fixity it seemed to be saying that a single glance was enough. Because a glance, however focused, never contained only one thing. There was always a set of elements which, properly coordinated, made up a picture or a work of art. The problem of the picture—and this lay at the heart of what the painter was trying to grasp—was the contiguity of everything displayed within it. Distances appeared as pure signs. It was as if attention had already performed its task and withdrawn.

The cycle of the seasons provided a scheme that enabled him to understand these relations between painting and the landscape. In the summer heat, everything expanded; objects and beings drew apart, setting up rickety survival machines. In the winter cold, it all contracted; the world’s fist clenched. He lived at the center of the diamond.

Contiguity, however, went beyond the mere compression of space. One silvery morning of frost, as he was drinking tea on his cabin’s circular deck, he heard laughter and voices: kids swimming in the river. Joyful plunges one after another, drops exploding in the air, tussles, more laughter. The scene appeared before him as if the air were opening curtains, and a group of moving figures emerged from the background to complement the soundtrack. The children’s wet torsos shone for a moment, plunged, and reappeared; the bikes they had ridden lay on the grass. The activity in which they were engaged was at odds with the sub-zero temperature and the dawn. But for them it was a summer afternoon, not psychologically, not by suggestion or hypnosis, but because the diamond was exerting a compression force on itself, attracting the great summers and arranging them in its internal circuits. Fishermen waiting patiently with their rods on the banks of secluded meanders frequented by tararira fish and manatees; feral picnics; people hiding to spy, or kiss. The painter finally understood the story of Mohammed and the mountain. The mica crag reared before him, carrying the roaming tree.

At night a storm broke over the gardens of the Pillahuinco. It had waited until the painter was asleep. Lightning tore the sky; flashes blinded the little, large-eyed creatures of the night and made the darkness blacker. Clouds the size of cities came down to touch the treetops and opened, dumping torrents of icy water. The river leaped and writhed, lashed by the willow withies. After these paroxysms came steady rain, falling through all the hours of the night.

Finally, dawn broke. The painter woke earlier than usual, with an anxiety that prompted him to open up the front of his little house, sliding the panels on their rails, and sit there in the uncertain half-light. Day was advancing with difficulty. There was something unusually gentle about the cold. The damp plants trembled; a discontinuous dripping filled the scene with vertical lines. Suddenly the painter’s attention sharpened. Someone was coming.

It was the ghost of his wife. Although he didn’t believe in the existence of supernatural beings or visitors from the beyond, the popularity of stories about them meant that he knew how ghosts were supposed to behave, and was able to appreciate how anomalous this apparition was: the typical time for such visits was closer to midnight than to this crystalline daybreak. That detail alone was enough to suggest that if this was the start of a ghost story, it would not be of the conventional kind.

And indeed, the ghost was preparing to speak, which was another point of difference. The classic rules of the genre stipulate that ghosts speak only when spoken to, and the painter was too astonished to start a conversation, even with a little cough.

“I know all about your idiosyncrasies,” the ghost began, “and your skepticism. The artistic gifts that enable others to fly on the wings of the widest-eyed fantasy turned you into a hard-nosed realist. But I hope to prove you wrong, at least about people coming back from the beyond.”

The painter kept still as the apparition spoke, not taking his eyes off her for a moment, fearing that if he did, or even blinked, she would dissolve into the air before she could deliver her message.

“I’ll prove it to you by appearing before you again tonight. I advise you to stay awake and wait for me. Then you’ll be convinced.”

As he had feared, she dissolved into the air, which had continued to brighten. At least she’d been able to make the appointment. He had concentrated so hard, straining all his mental faculties in the effort to grasp and retain the message, that when she disappeared, what had been behind and beside her—trees, grass, water, sky—seemed to explode with an excess of reality.

The painter spent the rest of that brief winter day waiting for the night. As the hours went by, he wavered between doubt and hope. Reason, which he had exercised consistently throughout his life, told him that it was impossible. He’d accepted the death of his wife and all the anguish of feeling abandoned, cast upon the mercy of the young, as part of the natural order of things, the natural annihilation that everyone must face in the end. Adventures beyond the grave belonged to the domain of fiction. But something within him kept nagging. Was he going to let the arrogance of reason prevent him from seeing his beloved wife, after she’d gone to the trouble of returning? The years of his marriage, a lifetime’s worth, had been the happiest years of his life, those in which his art had flourished, paradoxically grounded in a system that wasn’t artistic at all: regular hours, home-cooked meals, raising the children, minding the store, outings on Saturdays. But maybe there was no paradox: in that gentle flowing of the years, in the deep, slow, enduring absorption of experience, rather than its shocks, he had tasted the true flavor of life.

The announcement seemed genuine. It had to be. To make it in jest or with the aim of creating false hopes would have been gratuitously cruel. But there was also the indisputable fact that ghosts did not exist. Or did they? So many people believed in them; and so many ancient cultures, wise and refined in other respects, had given them credence. Perhaps it was all a matter of believing and accepting the hallucination that followed. If so, it wouldn’t work for him, because of his commitment to reality.

Hours went by in this soul-searching, and before the painter knew it, night was falling. It was lucky that he had so many questions to ponder; otherwise there would have been nothing to occupy the time that remained, and its emptiness would have been unbearable. He had lost the habit of waiting. The deepening shadows told him that the hour was drawing near. But he refused to let impatience take hold of him; it was contrary to his system. Darkness properly understood fostered sublime varieties of patience.

There was no moon. The stars were barely visible. All things were infused with a great silence. And yet, the painter thought, there are many little beings talking all around me, and my brain is canceling all that insignificant noise so that what matters to me will stand out. But does anything matter to me, at this point?

As the segments of the night went by, he gradually came to realize what was at issue: that old and crucial question of how to occupy time. By pure chance he had found, and now found himself practicing, what seemed to be the most extreme of all time-filling activities: waiting for the apparition of a ghost. He felt he should use this exceptional situation to come up with an intelligent thought. It was his opportunity to notice that when people said, “There’s a car coming,” or a motorcycle, or a bike, what was coming (or going, or passing), was in fact a person in a car, not a car on its own. It was a common confusion, sedimented in speech, the part for the whole, but it was the inhuman part that was chosen. The same thing happened with ghosts: “there’s a ghost coming” meant that someone was coming in the form of a ghost. And the comparison could be extended to the sensations caused by the apparition. He thought back to his childhood, when there were very few cars in Pringles, great black catafalques thundering along the dirt roads, spreading terror. When mothers heard one in the distance, they brought in the children who were playing outside and wouldn’t let them out again until the sound of the motor had faded away. They were moved by fear of imminent death, while the baseless fear that a ghost could provoke had its source in a death that had happened already to someone else.

These interesting reflections went no further, because something was happening. There was a silent harmonic, as if the silence were resounding or producing a deep echo of itself. The trees seemed stiller and closer to each other while parting to open paths into darkness. A familiar scent came to him. And then…

It was her. His wife. She was returning with a smile and one hand raised, showing her palm, as if to say: “Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you, I won’t even tell you off for having broken the lampshade in the living room when you screwed it on wrong.” No, she wouldn’t. She was a benevolent ghost who had come in a spirit of remembrance and love. And of all the forms she might have taken, she had chosen the one that moved him most: not the girl he’d met and courted at the dances in Alem but the sturdy matron of the silver years. And the evening dress, the pearl necklace, and the glittery brooch were all transparent as things can be only in the dark of night. She kept coming toward him, through that bucolic version of the Melody, with a smile that said it all.

His skepticism took a serious blow. For many days he went on thinking about what had happened, but a sense of the present moment’s fullness kept interrupting his thoughts. He couldn’t deny the reality of the apparition, because it would have been like denying reality as a whole; and yet something was telling him that he could in fact do just that. In any case, the kindness of the visit lingered in his heart. He wondered if he would have done for his wife what she had done for him.

This is an excerpt from Musical Brushstrokes, originally published as Pinceladas Musicales by Blatt & Ríos in Argentina in 2019. In 2026, it will be published in the United States by New Directions.