So my suspicions had been right, perhaps all that practice in the office with no name had not been in vain. Luisa hadn't intended to go out, she'd done so in order not to see me. She hadn't dared make me postpone my meeting with the kids, she would have found it far harder to come up with a credible excuse ('That long,' she had said, aware that it really was a long time). Where would she have gone, it isn't easy to spend hours away from home if you've nothing planned, when evening starts to come on, at twilight. She could have gone to the movies, any film would do, or gone shopping downtown, although she really hated that; she could have sought refuge with her lover, or gone to see a friend or her sister. She would have to kill an awful lot of time until I left, until she reckoned that I would have left the apartment and the coast would be clear, and she would know, too, how hard I'd find it to drag myself away, I felt very comfortable there, almost nothing had changed.
It was past eleven o'clock, which was the very latest the children were allowed to stay up on special occasions, we'd had a very entertaining few hours, but I could see they were tired too, it hadn't been particularly hard to persuade them that it was high time they went to bed, and Mercedes was in equal parts persuasive and firm. It wouldn't be long before Luisa was back. If I hung on for another half an hour, we'd almost certainly meet. I could at least say hello, give her a kiss on the cheek, perhaps a hug if that seemed appropriate, hear her voice, no longer disembodied, see how she had changed, whether she had grown slightly faded or was perhaps more beautiful now that I was far away and she had someone more flattering closer to hand; I could at least see her face. I wanted no more than that, so very little, but I was filled with impatience, an unbearable impatience. Added to that were feelings of insecurity, intrigue, possibly rancor, or perhaps wounded pride: she didn't even share my elementary curiosities, but how could that be after we had been each other's main motive for so many years, it seemed positively insulting that nothing should remain, that she was quite happy to wait another whole day and not even necessarily see me tomorrow—there was no guarantee that, on various pretexts, she wouldn't also avoid me tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, and so on, during the whole of my stay; she might even suggest I pick up the kids downstairs at the entry door on my next visit and take them out somewhere or arrange it so that when I arrived, she'd always be out, or else she might drop them off at my father's apartment so that I could spend time with them there and they'd get to see their grandfather as well. Yes, it was rude of her to be in so little hurry to recognize me in the changed man, the absent man, the solitary man, the foreigner returned; not to immediately want to find out what I was like without her, or who I had become. ('What a disgrace it is to me to remember thy name, or to know thy face tomorrow,' I thought.)
'Do you mind if I stay a bit, until Luisa comes?' I asked the false Mercedes. 'I'd like to see her, just for a moment. She won't be much longer, I shouldn't think.'—'What a painful irony' I thought, 'here I am asking the permission of a young Polish babysitter whom I've never seen in my life to stay a little longer in my own apartment or what was my apartment, and which I chose and set up and furnished and decorated along with Luisa, in which we lived together for a long time, and which I still pay for, indirectly. Once you abandon a place you can never go back, not in the same way, any gap you leave is instantly filled or else your things are thrown away or dumped, and if you do reappear it's only as an incorporeal ghost, with no rights, no key, no claims and no future. With nothing but a past, which is why we can be shooed away'
'Luisa said I should stay until she got back,' she said. 'She's going to pay for my taxi home as well, if she's very late. So that I don't have to wait to catch a buho, there aren't many during the week.'—The word buho rang a bell in that context, they were, I seemed to recall, the late-night buses or metros, I'd forgotten all about them.—'There's really no point in waiting,' she added. 'She's likely to be some time yet. I'll be here if the children should wake up, if they need anything.'
She was very discreet, but her words sounded discouraging, almost like orders. As if Luisa had briefed her when she phoned and what she was really saying to me was: 'No, the best thing would be if you left, because Luisa doesn't want to see you. And she doesn't want you hanging around when she's not here, unchecked and unwatched—my presence isn't enough; I don't have any authority—she doesn't trust you any more, she stopped trusting you some time ago.' Or else: 'She's erased you, all these months she's been scrubbing away at the stain you left and now she's struggling to remove the rim, the final remnant. She doesn't want you to leave any more stains and to see all her hard work ruined. So please be so kind as to go, if not, you'll be considered an intruder.' And these last two interpretations of her words were what made me decide once and for all to stay.
'No, I think I'll wait for her anyway,' I said and sat down on the sofa, after first having taken a book from the shelves. The books hadn't changed, they were in the same arrangement and order in which I had left them, there was my entire library, I mean, our library, we hadn't divided the books up, and I had nowhere to put mine, everything in England was provisional and, besides, I had no space, and I wasn't going to start moving things if I didn't know where I was going to live, either in the short term or the long. Mercedes wouldn't dare oppose me, she wouldn't dare throw me out if I sat down and read and said nothing, if I asked her no more questions and didn't bother her or try to worm things out of her. She hadn't realized that was what I was doing, or perhaps only when it was too late. 'I'm in no hurry,' I added, 'I've just arrived from London. This way I'll be able to say hello to her—in Madrid and in person.'
I waited and waited, reading in silence, listening to the small noises that seemed either eerily familiar or instantly recognizable: the fridge with its changing moods, occasional distant footfalls in the apartment above and a sound like drawers being opened and closed—the upstairs neighbors obviously hadn't moved and kept up their nocturnal customs; there were also the faint notes of a cello coming from the boy who lived with his widowed mother across the landing and who always practiced before he went to bed, he might well be almost an adolescent by now, his playing had improved a lot, he got stuck or stopped less often from what I could hear, which wasn't much, the boy always tried not to play too loudly, he was well-brought-up and used to say 'Good afternoon' to us even when he was only small, but in a friendly not a cloying way, I tried to work out if he was playing something by Purcell or by Dowland, but I couldn't, the chords were very tenuous and my musical memory was out of training, in London I listened to music at home and rarely went to concerts, not that I spent much time at home, where I couldn't rely on the consoling daze that sustained me daily and liberated me from the curse of having to make plans. The only thing I knew for sure was that the music being played wasn't Bach.
The Polish babysitter got out her cell phone and made a call, retreating into the kitchen so that she could talk to her boyfriend where I wouldn't hear her, perhaps out of modesty, perhaps in order not to bother me with a schmaltzy or perhaps obscene conversation (however Catholic she was, you never can tell). It occurred to me that if I hadn't been there, she would have used Luisa's landline, on which she could talk at greater length because she would be saving herself the expense, for that reason alone it must have really irritated her that I hadn't left when I should have. I had taken Henry V down from the shelves, because Wheeler had quoted from it and referred to it in his house by the River Cherwell, and since then I had kept it handy and dipped into it or leafed through it now and then, even though I had long since found the fragments he'd alluded to. Or, rather, what I picked up was King Henry V, to give it its full title, a copy of the old Arden edition, bought in 1977 in Madrid according to a note I had written on the first page, and at some point I had written in it, although I couldn't remember when—but before I would have met Luisa—and my mind was in no fit state to pay due attention to the text or to trawl back through the past, I merely glanced through it, looking at the unde
rlinings left by the young reader I had been on some distant day, so long forgotten that it no longer existed. My mind was concentrating on one noise only, which is why I heard all the other noises too, my ear cocked and waiting for the sound that mattered to me, that of the elevator coming up, followed by the key in the door. I heard the first several times, but it always stopped at other floors and only once at ours, and on that occasion it was not accompanied by the second sound and wasn't Luisa returning.
Mercedes returned to the living room, looking happier and more relaxed. She was an attractive girl, but so excessively blonde and pale and cold that she appeared not to be. She asked if I would mind if she turned on the TV, and I said I didn't, although that was a lie, because the sound of the television would wipe out all other sounds; but I was there as a mere unexpected visitor, if not an out-and-out intruder, which I was more and more becoming with each minute I lingered there. The young woman used the remote control to flip through the channels and finally opted for a film with real animals in the main roles, it was as I realized at once, Babe, I recalled taking Guillermo to see it at the movie theater a few years before, it was mystifying why the moronic programmers should put it on at that hour, when most children would be asleep. I was happy to watch it for a while, it was less demanding than Shakespeare and the little pig was a great actor, I wondered if perhaps he had been nominated for an Oscar that year, but I doubt he would have won; I would buy it on DVD for Marina, who, having been born later, might not have seen it. I was just considering the sad fate of actors—anyone can do their job, children and dogs, elephants, monkeys and pigs, but, so far, no one has found an animal capable of composing music or writing a book; although, of course, that depends on how strict you are with your definition of animal—when I saw Mercedes spring to her feet, scoop up her things in a matter of seconds and, after addressing an abrupt 'Goodbye' to me, race to the front door. Only when Mercedes was already there did I hear the key in the lock and the door opening, it was as if she was endowed with extraordinarily acute hearing and had picked up the exact moment when Luisa arrived at the street door in a car or taxi. She, the babysitter, must have been in a tremendous hurry to leave, she clearly didn't want to stay any longer than it took for her to be paid and provided with her promised expensive transportation home, for it was nearly midnight, Luisa had been out for a little over four hours. Or perhaps it wasn't just that, perhaps she wanted to warn Luisa immediately that, contrary to her expectations, she wouldn't find herself alone: that I had insisted on waiting for her, against her wishes, or perhaps in disobedience to the orders that Mercedes had received and failed to enforce.
I heard them whispering for a few moments, I got up from the sofa, but didn't dare to join them; then I heard the door close, the Polish babysitter had gone. After that came the sound of Luisa's footsteps in the corridor—she was wearing high heels, I recognized the click-clack on the wooden floor—she always wore them to go out—heading towards the bathroom and her bedroom, she didn't even look in at me, she must be desperate for a pee, I assumed, as one so often is on arriving home; that seemed quite normal really, if she'd been with other people and not wanted to get up, for example, during a meal, either at someone's table or in a restaurant. Or perhaps she wanted to tidy up before showing herself to me, assuming she had spent the evening with my ephemeral replacement and was returning as women sometimes do return from such prolonged encounters, with her skirt all wrinkled and slightly askew, her hair disheveled, her lipstick erased by kisses, a run in her stockings and the signs of all that impetuosity still in her eyes. Or perhaps she was so angry with me that she had decided to go to bed without even saying hello and to leave me in the living room until I got fed up or until I understood that when she had said she wasn't going to see me that night, she had meant it. She'd probably decided to shut herself in the bedroom and not come out, to get undressed, turn off the light and climb into bed, pretending that I wasn't there, that I was still in London and did not exist in Madrid, or that I was a mere ghost. She was perfectly capable of that and more—I knew what she was like—whenever anyone tried to impose something on her that she didn't want. But she would have to leave the bedroom before she closed her eyes, at least once, and if the worst came to the worst, I could intercept her then, for it would be quite beyond her powers not to go in and see the children and make sure they were safe and sleeping peacefully.
I continued to wait, I didn't want to rush anything, still less go and pound on her door, beg her to let me see her, bombard her with awkward questions through that barrier, and demand explanations I had no right to demand. That would have been a bad start, after such a long separation, it would be best to avoid anything that smacked of confrontation or reproach, unnecessary and absurd and not at all what I wanted. From now on, the initiative lay with her, I had already made things awkward for her by refusing to leave, once the excuse of enjoying spending time with my children had lapsed. On hearing the key in the door, I had muted the TV, but could still see the antics of that porcine emulator of De Niro and John Wayne—he was an extremely polite little pig—and his co-stars: a few dogs, some sheep, a horse, a bad-tempered duck, all of them superb actors.
After a few minutes, I heard the door of her bedroom open and a few footsteps, she was still wearing her high heels, so she obviously hadn't changed her clothes, but she walked more quietly, trying not to make noise: she peered into Marina's room and then into Guillermo's, she didn't go right in or only a little way, just far enough to see that everything was in order. I still didn't want to get up and go and find her, I preferred for her to come into the living room, if she did, and when at last she did—her footsteps firmer, normal, now that she had breathed in the sound of the children's deep sleep, which had been enough to reassure her that she ran no risk of waking them—I thought I understood, despite any efforts at concealment she may have made in the bathroom that had once been mine, why she had wanted to avoid me, and that it hadn't been because she didn't want to see me, but because she didn't want me to see her.
At first sight, she looked very good, well-dressed, well-shod, although rather less well-coiffed, and yet wearing her long locks caught back in a ponytail suited her, gave her a youthful, naive air, almost that of a young girl caught in flagrante on returning home late, but who was I to say anything, or even to feel surprised. Before I noticed anything was wrong, she had time to say a few words, with an expression on her face of mingled pleasure to see me and annoyance at finding me there, but also of fear that I had caught her out or perhaps it was embarrassment doing battle with defiance, as if I had surprised her doing something I wouldn't like or that would seem to me reprehensible, and, realizing that, she didn't know whether to strike her flag or to run it up the flagpole and stand and fight, it's odd how former couples, long after they have ceased being a couple, still feel mutually responsible, as if they owed each other a certain loyalty, even if that amounts only to knowing how they're coping on their own and what's going on in their life, especially if something strange or bad is happening. Things were happening to me about which I, being far away, had said nothing: I had clearly lost my footing or lost both grip and judgment, employed as I was in a job about whose consequences I knew nothing, not even if it had any consequences, and being paid a suspiciously large salary too; I had, by then, been injected with strange poisons and was leading an existence that grew ghostlier by the day, immersed in the dream-like state of one who lives in another country and is starting not always to think in his own language, I was very alone there in London, even though I was surrounded by people all day, they were just work colleagues and never really developed into pure friendships, even Pérez Nuix had turned out to be no different—not even my lover, which she wasn't, since there had been no repetition and no laughter—after that one night I had shared with her carnally, a fact we had kept concealed and excessively silent, from others and from ourselves, and when one pretends that something hasn't happened and it's never spoken of, it ends up not having
happened, even though we know the opposite to be case; what Jorge Manrique wrote in his 'Lines on the Death of His Father' some five hundred and thirty years ago, and only two years before his own early death when he was not yet forty, wounded during an attack on a castle by a shot from a harquebus (even worse and more dishonorable than that of Richard Yea and Nay, felled by an arrow from a crossbow), 'If we judge wisely, we will count what has not happened as the past' is as true as the contrary position which allows us to count the past, along with everything else we have experienced, our entire life, as also not having happened. Then what does it matter what we do in our lives, or why it does it matter so very much to us?
You just had to stay, didn't you, Jaime?' Luisa said before I could say anything. 'You just had to wait up to see me.'
Now, though, after that initial glance, I spotted what was wrong at once, it was impossible not to, at least for me. She had tried to cover it with make-up, to conceal it, hide it, perhaps in the same way that Flavia would have tried unsuccessfully, with the unlikely help of Tupra in the ladies' restroom, to make the wound on her face invisible, the mark of the rope, the weal left by the whip, the welt caused by De la Garza's clumsy lashings during his wild gyrations on the fast dance floor. That wasn't what Luisa had on her face, it wasn't uno sfregio, not a gash or a cut or a scratch, but what has always been known in my language as 'un ojo morado'—literally 'a purple eye'—and in English as 'a black eye,' although since the impact or cause was not recent, the skin was already growing yellow, the colors that appear after such a blow are always mixed, there's never a single color, but several, which combine at every phase and keep changing, perhaps the disagreement between the two languages stems from that (although mine does lean more to English when it refers to such an eye as 'un ojo a la funerala'—more or less 'an eye in mourning'), they always take a long time to fade, it was just our bad luck that not enough time had yet passed. When I saw it, I no longer had to respond to her words, nor to apologize. Unfortunately, I couldn't greet her either or give her a kiss or embrace her, I had waited so long for this meeting and now I couldn't even manage a smile or an 'Hola, niña—'Hello, love'—as I used to when we were still together and on good terms. I immediately went over to her and the first thing I said was: 'What's that? Let me see? What happened? Who did it?'
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