Gingerly, so as not to wake her parents, Maria Cláudia slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to the window, where she peered around the curtain. The car was still parked opposite. She saw a bulky male figure cross the street and get into the car.
The car set off and soon disappeared from view.
5
Dona Carmen had her own particular way of enjoying the morning. She was not one for staying in bed until lunchtime, which would have been impossible anyway because she had to prepare her husband’s breakfast and get Henriquinho ready for school, but she made a point of never washing or brushing her hair until midday. She liked to wander about the house, still in her nightclothes, her hair loose and looking generally disheveled and slovenly. Her husband loathed this habit of hers, which went against what he considered the norm. He had tried over and over to persuade his wife to mend her ways, but time had taught him that he was wasting his breath. Although his job as a sales rep imposed no rigid timetable on him, he always escaped as early as he could so as not to begin the day in a bad mood. For her part, Carmen could not bear her husband to linger at home after breakfast. Not because this would oblige her to abandon her own beloved habits, but because her husband’s presence made the morning so much less pleasurable. The result was that, whenever he did stay longer than usual, it ruined the whole day for both of them.
As Emílio Fonseca was preparing his case of samples that morning, he discovered that someone had tampered with both prices and samples. Not only were the necklaces out of their proper places, they were all mixed up with the bracelets and the brooches, which, in turn, had become jumbled together with the earrings and the dark glasses. The only possible culprit was his son. He considered confronting him, but decided against it. If his son denied all knowledge, Emílio would think he was lying, and that would be bad; if Henrique owned up, then Emílio would have to beat him or tell him off, and that would be even worse. And, of course, if his wife got angry and launched herself into the discussion, it would become an all-out row. And he was heartily sick of rows. He put his case on the dining table and, without a word, set about restoring order.
Emílio Fonseca was a small, wiry man, not thin, but wiry. He was about thirty years old and had sparse, pale hair, a rather wishy-washy blond color. He had a very high forehead, of which he had always been proud. Now, however, that it had grown still higher due to incipient baldness, he would have preferred a rather lower hairline. Meanwhile, he had learned to accept the inevitable, and the inevitable was not just his lack of hair, but the present need to sort out his sample case. In eight miserable years of marriage he had learned to remain calm. His firm mouth was marred by a few bitter lines, and when he smiled his mouth twisted slightly, lending his face a sarcastic look in keeping with the general tenor of his words.
With the awkward air of a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, Henriquinho came to see what his father was doing. He had the face of an angel and was fair-haired like his father, but his hair was of a warmer color. Emílio didn’t even glance at him. There was no love lost between father and son; they merely saw each other every day.
The flip-flap of Carmen’s slippers could be heard out in the corridor, an aggressive sound, more eloquent than any words. Emílio had almost finished restoring order to the contents of his case. Carmen peered around the dining room door in order to calculate how much longer her husband would be. He had, in her view, already taken quite long enough.
At that point, the doorbell rang. Carmen frowned. She wasn’t expecting anyone at that hour. The baker and the milkman had already been by, and it was too early for the postman. The bell rang again. With an impatient “Coming!” she went to the door, her son dogging her heels. A small woman wearing a shawl was standing there clutching a newspaper. Dona Carmen eyed her distrustfully and asked:
“¿Qué desea?” (There were times when she would not speak Portuguese even if her life depended on it.)
The woman smiled humbly:
“Good morning, senhora. I understand you have a room to rent, is that right? Could I see it?”
Carmen was astonished.
“A room to rent, aquí? No, there’s no room to rent here.”
“But the advertisement in the newspaper—”
“What advertisement? Let me see.”
Her voice trembled with ill-concealed irritation. She breathed deeply, trying to calm herself. The woman pointed at the advertisement with a finger that bore the scars of an old nail infection. There it was, in the section “Rooms to Let.” No doubt about it. All the facts were there: the name of the street, the number of the building and, clear as day, ground floor, left. She handed the newspaper back and said curtly:
“Well, there are no rooms to let here!”
“But the newspaper says—”
“I’ve told you already. Besides, the advertisement specifies a gentleman, un caballero.”
“There are so few rooms to let, and I—”
“If you’ll excuse me.”
And with that, Dona Carmen slammed the door in the woman’s face and went to find her husband. From the doorway, she asked:
“Did you put an ad in the paper?”
Holding a necklace made of colored stones in each hand and raising one eyebrow, Emílio Fonseca looked at her and responded in a cool, ironic tone:
“An ad? Only if it was to drum up more customers.”
“No, an ad offering a room to let.”
“A room? No, my dear. When I married you, I agreed that we would share all our worldly goods, and I would never dream of renting out a room without consulting you first.”
“No seas gracioso.”
“I’m not being funny. What man would dare to be funny with you?”
Carmen did not respond. Her imperfect knowledge of Portuguese meant that she was always at a disadvantage in these exchanges of barbed remarks. She chose instead to explain in a soft, insinuating voice:
“It was a woman, una mujer. She was carrying a newspaper and had come about the ad. It was definitely this apartment, no había confusión. And since she was a woman, I thought that perhaps you had put the ad in . . .”
Emílio Fonseca closed the case with a loud snap. It was not entirely clear what his wife meant, but he could see what she was getting at. He looked at her with his cold, pale eyes and said:
“And if it had been a man, should I then immediately have assumed that you had put the advertisement in?”
Carmen blushed, offended:
“You brute!”
Henriquinho, who was listening to the conversation unblinking, stared at his father to see how he would react. Emílio, however, merely shrugged and murmured:
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want your apologies,” retorted Carmen, already getting agitated. “Whenever you apologize, what you’re actually doing is making fun of me. I’d rather you hit me!”
“I’ve never hit you.”
“And don’t you dare, either.”
“Don’t worry. You’re taller and stronger than me. Allow me at least to preserve the illusion that I belong to the stronger sex. It’s the only illusion left to me. And, please, let’s not argue.”
“And what if I want to argue?”
“There would be no point. I always have the final word. I’m going to put on my hat now and leave, and I won’t be back until tonight. Always assuming I do come back, of course.”
Carmen went into the kitchen to fetch her purse. She gave some money to her son and sent him off to the grocer’s to buy some sweets. Henriquinho tried to resist, but the pull of the sweets proved stronger than his curiosity and his courage, which was telling him to take his mother’s side. As soon as the front door had closed, Carmen returned to the dining room. Her husband had sat down at one end of the table and was lighting a cigarette. His wife plunged straight into the argument:
“So you’re not coming back, eh? I knew it. You’ve got somewhere else to stay, haven’t you? So the little god has
clay feet, has he? Y aquí estoy yo, the skivvy, the slave, working away all day for whenever his majesty chooses to come home!”
Emílio smiled. His wife grew more furious still:
“Don’t you laugh at me!”
“Why shouldn’t I laugh? What do you expect? This is all complete nonsense. There are plenty of boarding houses in the city. What’s to prevent me staying in one of those?”
“¡Yo! Me!”
“You? Oh, don’t be silly! Look, I have things to do. Just stop all this nonsense, will you?”
“Emílio!”
Carmen barred the way, trembling with rage. She was slightly taller than he; she had a square face and a strong jaw, and despite the two deep lines that ran from the sides of her nose down to the corners of her mouth, there was still the remnant of a now almost faded beauty, of warm, luminous skin, velvety, liquid eyes, youth. For a moment Emílio saw her as she had been eight years before. It was only a moment, a flash, then the memory flickered and burned out.
“You’ve been fooling around with someone else, Emílio!”
“Rubbish. Of course I haven’t. I can swear on the Bible if you like. But even if I had been, what would you care? It’s no good crying over spilled milk. We’ve been married for eight years and have we ever really been happy? There was the honeymoon, I suppose, but even then . . . We fooled ourselves, Carmen. We played with life and now we’re paying for it. You really shouldn’t play with life, don’t you agree?”
His wife had sat down and was crying. Still sobbing, she exclaimed:
“¡Soy una desgraciada!”
Emílio picked up the sample case and with his free hand stroked his wife’s head with a rare and now forgotten tenderness, murmuring:
“We’re both of us unfortunate, each in our own way, but believe me, we both are, me possibly even more than you. At least you have Henrique . . .” The affectionate tone grew suddenly hard: “Anyway, enough of that. I might not be back for lunch, but I’ll definitely be here for supper. See you later.”
Out in the corridor, he turned and added, with a hint of irony in his voice:
“And as for the advertisement, it’s obviously a mistake. Maybe it’s meant for the neighbors.”
He opened the front door and went out onto the landing, holding the case in his right hand, his right shoulder pulled slightly down by the weight. Without thinking, he adjusted his hat, a gray, broad-brimmed affair that cast a shadow over his pale, distant eyes and made his face and body look smaller.
6
Dona Carmen had sent two more would-be lodgers packing before she decided to test out her husband’s idea. And when she did, still fuming from that earlier domestic dispute and from arguing with the various candidates for the room, she spoke very sharply to Silvestre. He, however—suddenly understanding the inexplicable absence of applicants—replied in the same vein, and Carmen was forced into retreat when she saw the plump, round figure of Mariana—sleeves rolled up and hands on her hips—hove into view behind Silvestre. To avoid any further confusion, Silvestre suggested that he put a notice on her door sending any more hopeful candidates to him. Carmen grumbled that she wasn’t prepared to have bits of paper stuck on her front door, to which Silvestre replied that she would be the one to suffer then, because she would have to answer the door to anyone responding to the ad. Reluctantly she agreed, and Silvestre wrote an appropriate note on half a sheet of letter paper. Carmen, however, would not allow him to affix it to the door, and did the job herself with a dab of glue. Even so, she was faced by one more person asking the same question and brandishing the same newspaper as proof, for the simple reason that the interested party was unable to read. What she thought of Silvestre and his wife went far beyond what she said, but what she said also went far beyond what was right and just. Had Silvestre been of a bellicose nature, we could have had an international incident on our hands. Mariana, it’s true, was spitting feathers, but her husband calmed her violent impulses and her desire to imitate that heroine of the Battle of Aljubarrota, who slew seven Castilians with her baker’s shovel.
Silvestre returned to his place at the window, wondering how the mistake could possibly have arisen. He knew full well that his handwriting was not of the finest, but it was, he thought, pretty good for a cobbler, especially when compared with that of certain doctors. The only explanation seemed to be that the newspaper had got it wrong. He was sure it hadn’t been his mistake; he could see in his mind’s eye the form he had filled in, and he had definitely put ground floor, right. While engaged in these thoughts, he remained focused on his work, glancing out at the street now and then with the aim of spotting among the few passersby anyone who might be coming to see the room. The advantage of this tactic was that by the time he came to speak to the interested party, he would already have reached a decision, for he held himself to be a good judge of faces. As a youth, he had gotten used to studying other people, in order to know who they were and what they were thinking, at a time when knowing whom to trust was almost a matter of life or death. These thoughts, drawing him back along the path his life had taken, distracted him from his role as observer.
The morning was nearly over, the smell of lunch was already filling the apartment, and no one suitable had as yet turned up. Silvestre now regretted being so particular. He had spent good money on an advertisement, got into an argument with his neighbor (who, luckily, was not also a customer) and still they had no lodger.
He had just started nailing metal heel and toe taps onto a pair of boots when he saw a man walking slowly along on the pavement opposite, looking up at the buildings and at the faces of the other people passing by. He didn’t have a newspaper in his hand or, it would seem, in his pocket. He stopped opposite Silvestre’s window to study the building floor by floor. Pretending to be absorbed in his work, Silvestre continued to watch him out of the corner of his eye. The man was of medium height, dark-complexioned and probably not yet thirty. He was dressed in the unmistakable manner of someone caught midway between poverty and earning a modest income. His suit was well cut, but rather shabby. The creases in his trousers would have been the despair of Mariana. He was wearing a polo-neck sweater and no hat. Despite appearing quite satisfied with the results of his inspection, he still did not move.
Silvestre began to feel uneasy. Not that he had anything to fear; he hadn’t had any trouble since . . . since leaving those things behind him, and besides, he was old now. Nevertheless, the man’s immobility and ease of manner troubled him. His wife was singing to herself in the kitchen, in the out-of-tune way that so delighted Silvestre and provided him with a constant source of jokes. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, Silvestre raised his head and looked straight at the stranger, who, in turn, having finished his inspection of the building, met Silvestre’s eyes through the window. They stared at each other, Silvestre with a slightly challenging air, the other man with an inquisitive look on his face. Separated by the street, the two men locked gazes. Silvestre glanced away so as not to appear too provoking, but the other man merely smiled and crossed the street with slow, firm steps. Silvestre felt a shiver run through him as he waited for the bell to ring. This did not happen as soon as he expected; the man must be reading the notice on the door opposite. Finally the bell rang. Mariana paused in the middle of a particularly painful dissonance. Silvestre’s heart beat faster and, half joking to himself, he decided that it was mere presumption on his part to think that the man had come for reasons unconnected with the room, reasons to do with remote events during the time when . . . The floor trembled beneath Mariana’s approaching bulk. Silvestre drew back the curtain:
“What is it?”
“There’s a man come about the room. Can you deal with him?”
What Silvestre felt was not relief exactly. His faint sigh was filled with sadness, as if an illusion, his very last, had just died, for it clearly had been presumption on his part, and as he made his way to the front door, the thought going around in his mind was that he was an old m
an now and over the hill. His wife had already told the potential lodger how much the rent would be, but when he’d asked to see the room, she had summoned Silvestre. When the young man saw Silvestre, he smiled, but only with his eyes. He had small, bright, very dark eyes beneath thick, clearly delineated eyebrows. He was, as Silvestre had already noted, dark-complexioned, with clear features, neither gentle nor severe, and a masculine face, slightly softened by a curved, somewhat feminine mouth. Silvestre liked the face.
“So you want to see the room, do you?”
“If that’s all right. The price suits me fine, but I just need to know if the room does too.”
“Come in.”
The boy (or so he seemed to Silvestre) stepped confidently into the apartment. He glanced around at the walls and floor, alarming the estimable Mariana, ever fearful that someone might find fault with her cleaning. The room looked out onto the small garden where Silvestre, in his scarce free time, grew a few equally scarce cabbages and kept a few chickens. The young man looked around him, then turned to Silvestre:
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