by Jordi Puntí
* * *
A fragment of his map. The corner of Passeig de Sant Joan and Provença, Barcelona. After paying the bill Daniel methodically distributes his purchases into two bags. With practiced speed, he puts the heaviest things like the pack of tonic water bottles and balsamic vinegar at the bottom and, on top of them, a tender layer of greens—a lettuce, arugula, and a bag of cherry tomatoes—to cushion the journey of the pâté, the sausages and cheeses. Every movement he makes is loving, as if the food understands the important role it will have in a few hours’ time and therefore demands special treatment. Tonight, Daniel and Carola are going to celebrate their tenth anniversary of living together. It will be an improvised feast at home, because their son’s babysitter let them down at the last minute, but they’ve accepted the change of plan without much fuss and even a certain youthful excitement. After calling the restaurant to cancel their reservation, they planned a menu that would be up to the occasion. In the supermarket Daniel hasn’t stinted on their dinner—always cheaper than the restaurant, he told himself—and, carried away by euphoria, he even bought two bottles of French champagne.
So, with the weight balanced between the two bags, Daniel leaves the supermarket and, back in the street, is surprised to see that it’s getting dark. Last Saturday they switched back to standard time and he still hasn’t adapted to the hours of fall. Beneath the amber glow of the streetlamps the atmosphere is clear but sparkly, as if rain isn’t far away. Barcelona, too, gets sadder in the fall, he thinks as he watches a boy and girl kissing in a doorway. A few steps farther on, he once again notices the hobo in his usual place on the corner. The man rouses in Daniel an irrational feeling of apprehension. He’s never done or said anything untoward, but his presence is unsettling. Tall, unkempt, with thick greasy hair, big prominent cheekbones, and patchy whiskers suggesting that he’s shaved without a mirror, he’s there all day long, lying in an unnatural position. If it wasn’t for his eyes, violently scrutinizing everything around him, you’d think he didn’t have long to live.
It should be said that the hobo isn’t a permanent fixture. Sometimes he disappears from his corner and doesn’t come back for several days. Since he doesn’t look especially shabby—he always wears a baggy old-fashioned suit in herringbone weave, the cloth stiffened with age and stains—Daniel can’t help being reminded of his father, who he visits in the nursing home every Sunday. He has the same look of neglect and helpless air. Daniel always leaves both of them behind with the absurd impression that they’re plotting something and, worse, something bad. It’s possible that the withdrawn character of the vagrant on the corner encourages comparison. He never asks for a handout, although he accepts the offerings of some local residents who give him money or food. He spends hours on end leafing through newspapers and magazines he finds in nearby trash cans, and classifying the scraps he’s torn out. This silent, introverted world changes only occasionally and without warning. Like now. Daniel is walking with his bags, approaching the crosswalk. Suddenly the man stands up, extends his arms in the form of a cross, stares ahead at some indefinite place, and bellows as loud as he can, “Matter obeys God!”
He repeats it three more times, turning in the direction of each cardinal point. Then he lies down again on his patch of sidewalk. Daniel hears the words and repeats them in his head. Matter obeys God. He recalls having heard them before, some months ago, but now he’s trying to find some meaning in them. First, or so he muses, thought is lost in the dense construction of the statement, in the declaration of religious faith it implicitly bears; but by the time he gets in the elevator, a neighbor has definitively distracted him with a few platitudes about the bad weather that’s on its way.
* * *
When he opens the door of the apartment, Daniel can smell the fragrance of kids’ shampoo coming from the bathroom. Sometimes, when he’s having his shower in the morning, he’s so sleepy, he picks it up by mistake and then the cloying sweetness is with him all day. When he feels hassled in the office, he rolls up his sleeve and sniffs his arm to get back the familiar soothing smell.
“Hi, it’s me,” he calls, leaving his keys on the tray.
A double answer issues from the bathroom.
“Hi! All well?” Carola asks.
“Hi! All well?” Àlvar, his five-year-old son, asks two seconds later.
“Yes, yes. All well,” Daniel answers. He goes into the kitchen, sets out the shopping on the table, then moves things into the fridge and hides one of the bottles of champagne in the freezer behind the spinach.
He wants it to be a surprise for Carola. He opens a bottle of red, pours two glasses, and leaves them on the marble bench so the wine can breathe. Taking off his shoes, jacket, and tie in the dressing room next to the bedroom, he can hear Àlvar splashing in the bath and Carola’s delighted laugh. Àlvar must be playing, fooling around, and putting on an act for her, maybe wearing his goggles to keep the soap out of his eyes. Trying not to make any noise, he tiptoes to the bathroom and peeps through the slightly open door. Then he sees that Carola’s in the bathtub with Àlvar. He didn’t expect this and feels a small stab of jealousy. Since it’s not yet Àlvar’s dinnertime, he quietly starts undressing. The tub is large and circular. There’s enough room for three. As he’s taking off his underpants he hears Carola telling Àlvar they’ll have to get out soon. Daniel hurries. He makes his triumphal entry before it’s too late, planning to get in the bathtub, too. The mirror is misted in steam. Carola smiles and her face shines in the haze. Probably she’s reminded of one of those evenings before they had Àlvar when they used to get in the tub together. Candles, a glass of wine, bath salts in the water, love and slippery sex. Just as Daniel’s about to get in the water, Àlvar takes off his goggles—also fogged over—and sees his father.
“No-o-o!” he shouts. “Not you!”
Daniel has no place in his son’s aquatic kingdom. Carola scolds naughty Àlvar—she likes the image of the three of them together in the tub—and he begins to whimper. With one foot in the water, Daniel’s not sure whether he should get in or retreat, and feels ridiculous. He’s a little cold and in the end decides to get in. Àlvar cries louder.
“Now it’s not even lukewarm. It’s more like cold,” Carola warns, and turns on the hot-water tap. Since his parents are ignoring him, Àlvar wipes away his tears with his hands and gets soap in his eyes, which start stinging, so now he’s really bawling, with a lot of feeling this time. The blissful harmony that reigned in the bathroom a moment ago has evaporated. Carola gives up. With a brusque movement she swishes out of the water, lifts Àlvar out too, and unceremoniously bundles him in a towel. As she dries his hair, the crying is muffled and calm seems to return. Lying in the bathtub, Daniel looks at her naked body, smooth skin, gleaming wet back, little ribbons of foam scattered on her ass. Right now, this evening, this anniversary Friday, the image is exciting. He turns off the tap. He wants to masturbate but desists because of the presence of his son and the prospect of the sex that will come later, after dinner. He looks up and finds Carola observing him from the mirror with a hint of a smile.
When mother and son leave him alone, Daniel listens to the silence that enfolds him. His mind links up several ideas. He slides under the water and says, “Matter obeys God.” The words disintegrate in a string of bubbles rising to the surface. Daniel holds his breath while he counts to forty, and when he can’t keep counting anymore, he sticks his head out again. An explosion of air.
* * *
Àlvar got over his tantrum, made peace with his father, and dropped off to sleep when they were reading a story. Now alone in the dining room, Carola and Daniel toast their anniversary with French champagne. Since they never married, they chose as the date for their celebration the first night they slept together under a shared roof, the day Daniel moved into Carola’s apartment. They met as students in the fine arts faculty. In their shared prehistory they’d both chosen to do Russian cinematography. Coming out from screenings of Eisenstein or Pudovki
n, they’d go off to the faculty bar with some of their classmates and amuse themselves with smart-ass analysis in an improvised movie forum. Then everyone went home and, in the subway, Daniel and Carola translated all those glances, gestures, discussions, and visceral understanding into the language of love. Having got past the phase of tentative approaches and now dating, their interests began to diverge. Carola focused on history of art, especially sculpture, while Daniel toned down his ideas about moviemaking to channel them into the more predictable world of television. The professional estrangement only increased after Àlvar was born. Shortly beforehand, when she was already pregnant, they agreed that Daniel should accept a very attractive offer from a production company famous for lightweight, provocative programs. Carola would stay home to look after the baby and use her spare time to make some progress with her never-ending doctoral dissertation on sculpture and landscape. In the end, as tends to happen, she didn’t have much free time and the baby absorbed all her energy. Daniel, however, found in his job—project analyst specializing in new formats—an escape from the pressures of his newly acquired paternity.
They open the second bottle of French champagne. The sparkle of the bubbles has shifted to Carola’s eyes. When they reach this point, Daniel always gazes at her adoringly. Watching her talk, he thinks they should carry the glasses and bottle off to the bedroom and finish the party there. But he’s not sure whether Carola would want that. Today might be an exception, but the thing is, for a while now, when they do decide to fuck, he’s sensed something ambivalent or elusive about her. Sometimes he worries that she suspects he’s having an affair with someone from the office. (He’s not but is tempted by the possibility, although none has arisen so far.) Perhaps that’s why, instead of hinting that they should fall into bed, he waits for her to make the first move and, meanwhile, starts telling her about the vagrant on the corner, saying that he’s seen him again today.
“I don’t know, but sometimes I think the guy’s dangerous,” Daniel says, but then realizes that he’s exaggerating. “No. Rather than dangerous, he’s intriguing. With that thing he sometimes shouts, ‘Matter obeys God’ . . . You know, at work, I’ve met more than one of these screwballs. They’re unpredictable, and often the day comes when they’ll do something really crazy.”
“Well, I think exactly the opposite,” Carola says. “I often have a good look at him when I’m going past and I always get the feeling he’s trying to tell us something—that he wants to ask for help but can’t find the words. One of these days I’m going to stop and talk to him, to see what he’ll say.”
“No, don’t do that,” Daniel hastens to say. He knows his tone is too sharp and disagreeable, so repeats himself more gently: “No, don’t, please. You won’t get anything out of it. It’s blindingly obvious that he’s a nutcase. He just needs someone to provoke him . . . Heaven knows what’s going on in his head.”
“And that’s supposed to be a problem?” Carola’s indignant. “Are you trying to say this doesn’t happen to everyone? You, for example. Sometimes I haven’t got a clue what you’re thinking . . .”
“Don’t compare,” he says. Now he’s silently cursing himself for mentioning the hobo.
* * *
In Socrates, Pennsylvania, there’s a sculpture park funded by a millionaire philanthropist. In an area covering several acres of forestland, the wild vegetation has to coexist with a series of works of art created for this place. The foundation’s catalog explains that “the sculptures aim to blend with nature, create visual violence, or simply question man’s influence on the landscape.” In one of the park’s fields, the visitor tends to stop before a work in granite, more or less oval in shape and about the same size as a sack of potatoes. At first, from a distance, it’s difficult to see whether it’s a work of art or just a big rock that predates the sculptures, but then it turns out that, balanced on top of the rock, is another, smaller one, golden in color and the size of a melon: this one’s pyrite. Ever since it was installed in that corner of the park, rain and general exposure to the elements have been working on the pyrite’s mineral content and whittling the granite, carving out new furrows in its matter and changing its color. The piece is called “No Wishes, 1983” and is the work of an American sculptor called William Bartholomew, known to his friends as Bill. In the nineteen eighties, thanks to the good offices of a well-connected art dealer, Bartholomew managed to get his work placed in quite a lot of the most prestigious museums and private contemporary art collections. Far from going to his head, success drove him to paring down his genius into ever more primal forms. He abandoned his family, moved to an isolated mountain region, and kept working in solitude. One day, after a long silence, he disappeared from the cabin where he’d been living. Then there was no more news of him. The story was published in arty magazines and was a theme of the Kassel documenta that year. Some artists idolized him for his stand, which they almost certainly understood as voluntary and extreme.
Recently, every time she sees the man on the corner, Carola thinks of William Bartholomew. Her argument with Daniel last Friday, his intransigence, has made her return to her old projects, and this Monday morning she’s set about trying to glean more information about the artist. After spending quite a while trawling through her thesis files, she finds some photocopies of an American art magazine. The article gives an account of the artist’s disappearance and suggests that, in the final analysis, this could be his last work, the ultimate gesture in his zeal to explore the connection between matter, being, and nothingness. The text offers a biographical note and is illustrated with a few photos of William Bartholomew. Carola studies them carefully. They’re more than twenty years old, and the dark tones of the photocopy make them look slightly scorched, but this could certainly be the man on the corner. His face has a fugitive look about it. Excited, she reads the biographical note again. Among other things, it says that Bartholomew was hospitalized as an adolescent after some psychotic episodes—he’d been experimenting with LSD—and, toward the end of his creative life, as part of his general evolution, he’d become a radical vegetarian, a vegan. One of the very few friends who visited him occasionally said he only ate raw vegetables—garlic, onions, tomatoes, and bell peppers he grew in his garden—and he recycled his urine and feces as fertilizer.
Carola suddenly feels full of pity for the man. She goes out onto the balcony, looking for him on the corner, below her, through the trees. In the space between the newsstand and the traffic lights, she sees his curled-up legs. She stays there for some minutes. The man gets up and takes a few steps. Now he’s in her field of vision. He goes over to the traffic lights and looks up at the sky. If he turned, he’d see her. But he doesn’t. Carola keeps staring until the lanky figure melts into the gray ether of the city. By the time she has him back in focus, he’s lying in his spot on the corner again.
Carola goes to collect Àlvar from preschool in the afternoon. If Daniel can leave work on time, it’s usually his job to get him, but today he’s called to say he won’t be home until evening. The producer has started choosing the new participants for one of those competitions starring freaks, misfits, and lunatics, the kind with huge audiences, and he has to go to the studios to supervise the selection. Carola and Àlvar reach the hobo’s corner. (Deep inside, without really being aware of it, she’s started calling him Bill.) He’s sitting there in his stronghold, legs crossed and absorbed in tearing out photos from a newspaper. He keeps turning the pages, and when he finds an image he likes, he folds the page several times until the picture is framed, and then dampens the edges with his tongue so it tears straight. When he’s finished with one of the images, he folds it again and puts it in his jacket pocket. This afternoon, a little thicket of bits of paper is peeping over the top of his pocket like a scrunched-up handkerchief. Carola misses no detail of the operation. She’d like to take a look at the pictures that attract him and try to find some sense in it all. Àlvar tugs at her hand, wanting to go home. She opens her bag, t
akes out a twenty-euro bill, and asks him to give it to the gentleman. Àlvar fearlessly goes over to the stranger and holds out the money, but the man, still absorbed by his bits of paper, seems not to have seen him. Àlvar moves closer and squats beside him. The man squints at him briefly but keeps turning the pages of a newspaper. Carola is still rooted to the spot. Then Àlvar does something surprising: he moves still closer to the man, puts his hand in one of the deep, dark, dirty pockets of his trousers, and leaves the money there. Carola shivers. “Àlvar, come here,” she says sweetly. “Don’t bother the gentleman.”
The man stands up, as if Àlvar has activated some inner mechanism, but his attitude isn’t aggressive or pained. It’s more like slow-dawning surprise. When he moves, his clothes give off a sour, rank smell, and Àlvar covers his nose and goes back to his mother.
