The Night of the End of the World
It was midnight. Perturbed by what had just happened, I got dressed again and went out to walk through the streets and get some fresh air.
From the pavement I looked up at the two top floors of my side of the building. After recent events it had turned into a shadowy mausoleum, and I’d decided to run away before I was sealed inside forever. I didn’t want to share the same fate as the man from Tokyo.
Just above my head, a gigantic moon shed an eerie light over the city.
I was fascinated by the sight. I didn’t remember ever having seen the moon so close. It was as if it was only half its usual distance away. What if it was heading toward us because of some nasty trick of gravity? Then it would keep getting bigger and bigger until it crashed into earth. The end of the world was nigh.
Was there some connection with Valdemar’s disappearance?
There was no way I could stay at home. If this was the night of the end of the world, I wasn’t going to spend it in bed.
Maybe it was due to the proximity of the moon, but that February night was particularly warm. My legs were aching after the afternoon’s urban marathon, but I was high on adrenaline, so I walked to the city center with my eyes wide open.
I was certain that Valdemar’s flight was only the prelude to something momentous and inevitable. Instinct told me that this was going to be an eventful night, culminating in the moon’s collision with the earth. The final kiss of a love affair that had lasted 4,600 million years.
The strangest thing was that I wasn’t afraid. I accepted the catastrophe as a suitable end to my wretched existence.
—
As I walked down Passeig de Gràcia, I could see that a lot of people had the same idea as me. It was almost one in the morning, yet the street was packed.
Nobody seemed scared. More than anything, people seemed fascinated and kept flashing their digital cameras to capture the phenomenon. How could they be in such a good mood watching the disaster that was about to hit them?
Tired of dodging the crowds of people who kept colliding with one another because they were staring at the sky, I turned onto Gran Via to walk down the last stretch of Carrer Balmes. I hadn’t intended to go to the bar at the crossroads, but there I was, standing right outside it. The blind was halfway down, but the light was on. I thought that if Valdemar was anywhere in this world, he’d have to be inside.
After weeks of not going there, it seemed like a good spot to see in the end of the world. I ducked under the metal blind and entered the bar.
17 Minutes
When I popped up from behind the half-lowered blind, the waiter looked at me with ill-concealed annoyance. Convinced that the end of the world gave me total impunity, I leaned against the bar and asked for a glass of wine.
“We’re closed, but since you’re a regular I’ll serve you,” he said, uncorking a new bottle.
After he’d poured my wine, he disappeared into the kitchen, from which I could hear the sounds of a radio news program.
Alone at the bar, I sipped my wine and glanced at the day’s newspaper. On the front page there was a big photo of the moon hanging low over the rooftops of Barcelona. Perhaps they’d announced the end of the world and I hadn’t heard the news. Was I so cut off from everything?
Before I could read the article, a familiar figure entered the bar. It was the man in black, the redhead, the seventeen-minute fellow. The night was starting to get interesting.
“We’re closed,” the waiter shouted from the kitchen.
I stood up for him. “He’s a regular.”
Now that my heart was broken, I realized that there were only two things I wanted to do before the end came: read the article and time the man in black for the third and last time.
The waiter cursed out loud before leaving his bunker to get him a beer.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes and then I’m closing,” he informed us.
“Can’t you give us a bit more time?” I asked, thinking of the magic number.
He shot me a withering look, then vanished again and turned up the radio, which was now airing a scientific debate. Was Valdemar among the experts?
I checked my watch. It was ten past one. I kept an eye on the minute hand and read the newspaper at the same time.
WINTER MOON ILLUSION: scientists fail to come to any agreement as to the causes of the phenomenon.
Agencies. A NASA communiqué states that the moon will appear to be twice its usual size tonight. This is a purely optical phenomenon known as the “moon illusion” or, in more technical terms, the “apparent distance theory.”
Although the exact causes of this effect—usually a summer occurrence, which makes today’s phenomenon so exceptional—are as yet unknown, it would seem that the illusion is created by the convergence of rays of light from the moon, which appears much larger to observers when it is near the horizon.
This optical illusion results from the way in which the moon is perceived by the naked eye. It does not occur with cameras. To demonstrate this, NASA suggests an interesting experiment: isolate the moon by looking at it through a cutout circle or a tube. Once the reference points of its surroundings are thus eliminated, the magical effect disappears.
Annoyed, I closed the newspaper. What I had almost looked forward to turned out to be an illusion.
We’ll have to wait a bit longer for the end of the world. I checked my watch: twenty-seven past one. Set in motion by some invisible mechanism, the redhead left a coin on the bar and agilely ducked underneath the blind to emerge on the other side.
I felt an overwhelming urge to follow him. I was too tired to resist the impulse.
Even though it was late, I went after him. The huge, ghostly moon hovered over our heads.
Elevator Bar
The man in black strode across Carrer Pelai and kept going down Portal de l’Àngel, after which he turned left, heading for the cathedral.
I followed fairly close behind, like a detective hoping for a breakthrough in order to solve a case. Actually, I had embarked on this pursuit in order to ward off the pain of having lost Gabriela. All good detectives have something in their past they want to forget about.
The seventeen-minute man reached the cathedral. Now the moon looked like a gigantic, milk-colored fruit impaled on its highest spire. Then he took one of the side alleys, Carrer del Bisbe, which passes beneath a neo-Gothic bridge linking two old buildings.
The street was deserted, so I lagged a little farther behind, trying to make sure that my shoes made no sound on the ancient cobblestones. He, too, slowed down to light a cigarette, staring at the sky as he did so.
We crossed the Plaça de Sant Jaume and continued along one of the streets leading to the port, although the enigmatic redhead soon turned off to the left into Carrer Bellafilla. He paused for a moment outside a well-lit door before going inside.
Once he’d entered his lair, I stopped, just a few steps away from what turned out to be the door of a cocktail bar called L’Ascensor. True to its name, the entrance was an old mahogany elevator with sliding doors. It still had its original early-twentieth-century buttons.
In that old, out-of-place elevator, wondering what to do next, I remembered the final scene of the film Angel Heart, in which Mickey Rourke descends into the bowels of hell in an elevator.
The sliding door opened onto a small bar with mirrors and marble tables. Still hesitating, I went inside. All the tables were occupied by groups of young people cheerfully downing their drinks in that fin de siècle atmosphere.
I stayed close to the bar, not sure what to do. I wasn’t Mickey Rourke, and anyway I was very tired.
As often happens in such moments of indecision, someone else took the initiative. The black-clad redhead suddenly got up from his table—which he was sharing with two very good-looking women—and came over to me,
with a grim expression on his face.
His companions, who couldn’t have been much over twenty, observed the scene, somewhere between amused and expectant. I think one of them, a girl with extraordinarily blue eyes, said something along the lines of “Let him be.”
Leaning against the bar, I had no idea how I was supposed to deal with this situation and stop it from turning into an undignified fracas. Before I could decide what to do, the redhead asked, politely but firmly, “Were you following me?”
The only answer I could come up with—and which was not really Hollywood material—was “Yes.”
“Would you care to tell me why?”
“I’m helping a friend with a study in urban anthropology, and we’re looking at the habits of bar-goers, especially people who stick to some kind of predetermined ritual like yourself.”
He stood there with his arms crossed, studying me as if waiting for the evidence to be presented before pronouncing his verdict. Yet a faint smile told me that the man was not looking for trouble and only having a bit of fun at my expense.
Feigning indignation, he asked, “What makes you think I’m one of your bar creatures?”
“We’re regulars at the same bar. In fact, thanks to my earlier intervention you were able to have your beer . . . in seventeen minutes.”
That last comment seemed to mollify him, since he loosened up, patted my shoulder, and said, “Come and sit with us. Let’s have a drink.”
Seeing us coming over, one of the girls, a brunette with an angular face, stood up and said to me, “Here, take my chair. I’ve got to get up in five hours.”
Before I could respond, I was sitting between the blue-eyed girl and the redhead, who called the waiter over by snapping his fingers. The girl then put the icing on the cake of this bizarre gathering.
“Rubén,” she said, “this is Samuel de Juan.”
I was flabbergasted. It’s always awkward when someone you don’t know recognizes you. I didn’t want to say something embarrassing like “Who are you?” so I waited for some kind of clue to put me on the right track.
The girl continued, smiling, “He’s my contemporary literature lecturer. We’ll have to get him drunk so he does something crazy, and then he’ll have to give me a good mark to buy my silence.”
Then the penny dropped. This was Miss Know-It-All, Round-Specs. Since she wasn’t wearing her glasses that night, I hadn’t recognized her. Her nearsighted deep-blue eyes gave her a fragile look, which was very different from the impression she gave in my classroom.
“That won’t be necessary. You’ve already got it. The results will be out in a couple of days.”
She must have been drinking for a while, because she threw herself at me and planted a loud kiss on my cheek. I felt suffocated and unable to hide my discomfort, but luckily the waiter came over and saved me from this tricky situation.
“Three aquavits with ice, please,” said Rubén.
He was clearly a nightlife veteran, because he was brash enough to order for the whole table without asking what anyone wanted. As if to justify his unilateral action, he leaned over and muttered to me, “To celebrate my friend’s success.”
Before going off to get the drinks, the waiter asked, “Do you want Line?”
“Of course!” He seemed offended.
“What’s Line?” my student asked.
To which I added: “What’s aquavit?”
Pleased that his choice had aroused such interest, Rubén smiled and began his lecture. “Aquavit is a Norwegian spirit. A friend of mine here introduced me to it. There are two kinds, the normal one and the Linie aquavit, which is much more expensive because it’s aged in oak barrels then loaded onto ships sailing from Norway to Australia and back again, which means it crosses the line of the Equator twice before it’s bottled. Only then can it use the official Linie label.”
Conversation with an Engineer
Luckily, L’Ascensor closed at half past two, which meant I only had to have a couple of glasses.
“My friend lives right here, almost next door,” Rubén said, his car keys in his hand. “Do you want a lift home?”
“Don’t worry, thanks.”
“It’s no problem. It’ll give us a chance to talk about urban anthropology. Don’t you want to know about the seventeen minutes?”
I got a second kiss from my student, which destroyed any remnant of academic authority I might still have had, and walked with the redhead to a nearby parking lot, from which he emerged in a brand-new Saab sports car. He was clearly a man of Nordic tastes.
“I spend a lot of time in Scandinavia,” he answered when I mentioned this to him. “I’m an oil-well engineer, but I’m on vacation now.”
As we drove slowly up Via Laietana, he gave me a brief account of his life. He lived alone in an uptown apartment but only used it two months per year. The two girls were friends from high school.
“I don’t have the time to find a girlfriend,” he informed me without my asking. “With all the coming and going, the best I can hope for is the occasional tryst.”
Another loner. I’d met a lot of them since the new year.
We stopped talking for a while. I let my thoughts drift among the blurry lights of the cars coming toward us, as I brooded over my woeful behavior with Gabriela in the Plaça dels Àngels.
It seemed incredible that I’d committed this blunder earlier that day, the same day that was now coming to an end. So many things had happened since then: my flight up the mountain, Valdemar’s disappearance, the moon illusion, my encounter with the redhead, and, subsequently, the blue-eyed student.
Even so, I suspected that I hadn’t reached the end of the story. A couple more surprises surely still lay in store for me in this crazy dash from one outlandish episode to another. But nothing could fill the void left by my debacle with Gabriela.
The engineer pulled me out of my well of sorrows.
“When I’m in Barcelona, I often go to the bar at the crossroads. It’s a stop on my way to buy books in the city center.”
“But why do you always stay for seventeen minutes?”
“It’s a favor I do for you.”
He lit a cigarette and offered me one, which I rejected, thinking he was just as loony as Valdemar.
“I’m also observant. One day at lunchtime, I was sitting outside and noticed the bearded guy writing down the exact time each customer spent in the bar in his notebook, so I decided that from then on I’d always stay there for seventeen minutes. It was a kind of game. Then I saw that you were timing me too, so I kept doing it because I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
I leaned my head against the back of the leather seat and said, “This relationship that has sprung up between you and us is like the one between quantum physics and particles. You were there for seventeen minutes because that’s what we wanted to see.”
“Right. As I said, I was doing you a favor.”
The car stopped in front of my door and the engineer said good-bye, patting me on the shoulder as if I were some kind of silly teenager, though I was ten years older than him.
“As far as I’m concerned, you can break your routine at the bar,” I said as we parted. “Have a second beer next time.”
“I’ll have one with you two,” he said, and drove off.
Death Misses the Train
I was dead on my feet when I got back to my place in the small hours of the morning. I flopped on my bed and fell asleep.
However, before seven that morning my slumber was interrupted when the doorbell rang with long, insistent blasts. An emergency. The abruptness of my awakening enabled me to hang on to the last scene of the dream I was having: Valdemar was walking along the hallway of my apartment with the manuscript in his hand, following Mishima, who was leading him somewhere.
Another salvo from the doorbell put an end to my recol
lection, so I didn’t get a chance to remember where Mishima had taken Valdemar.
It’s as if he’s gone back to the moon. I shot out of bed still half asleep.
When I answered on the intercom I got the shock of my life, because the person on the other end wasn’t the one I had imagined. An unexpected voice said, “Samuel . . .”
Had my ears deceived me? That couldn’t be Titus down there on the street! Yet it sounded like his voice. I clasped the handset to my ear. Yes, it was Titus, and he was clearly getting impatient, because he shouted, “Open up, will you! And come down and help me!”
Like a kid seeing his father again on his return from a long journey, I flew downstairs and flung myself into Titus’s arms. He was beside himself with joy but pretended to be annoyed.
“You told me you were dying,” I reminded him.
“It was the only way to get you to listen to me. Anyway, I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. We all start dying the day we’re born, but there are lots of rebirths along the way.”
I was delighted. “So are you cured?”
“No one’s ever cured of anything, least of all at my age. But let’s just say death missed the train and will turn up some other day.”
Revelations
I immediately understood that this wasn’t the end of the story. Somehow Valdemar had left so that Titus could come back, even though they didn’t know one another. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Now I had to explain a lot of things, like why there was a telescope in his kitchen. Yet Titus didn’t seem very interested, because when I pointed at it he merely said, “Yes, I can see that it’s a telescope. I’m not blind, you know.”
“Aren’t you surprised to find it here?”
“Valdemar asked me if he could set it up in there, and I said yes. So let’s leave it there for now.”
Love in Lowercase Page 15
