“You needn’t worry about me, my dear. I’m not alone. Your brother has come to see me.”
Rigid in his chair, waiting to see what would happen next, Alberto slowly chewed the sugary morsel he had just put in his mouth. He heard the woman at the other end of the line say something in reply in a tone that sounded suddenly harsh, which left the old lady speechless for a moment, as if she was searching for the right response.
“Don’t start that again, my dear,” he heard her say. “Why do you always say the same thing? José Luis isn’t dead! He didn’t die in a plane crash! He’s right here beside me, eating my birthday cake.”
Alberto stopped chewing and fixed his gaze on the photograph of José Luis. Was he supplanting a dead man? He glanced again at the old lady, who was still insisting that her son was alive. But the other woman’s voice made it plain she wasn’t about to give in.
“Come on, talk to your sister,” the old lady suddenly ordered, holding out the receiver. “Show her how dead you are.”
Alberto looked at the telephone as if it were a snake. Not knowing how to refuse without arousing his hostess’s suspicions, he stood up and walked rather unsteadily over to the phone. He seized the receiver, not knowing what to do.
“Hello, sister,” he said, his heart pounding in his chest. “How’s everything?”
A sepulchral silence followed at the far end of the line.
“Who the hell are you, you son of a bitch?” he heard the woman ask, once she had recovered from her surprise.
Despite the harshness of her tone, Alberto thought she had a pleasant voice. He looked at her portrait on the wall, which allayed his concern to some extent, as if knowing what she looked like gave him some kind of strange advantage over her. His silence provoked a barrage of insults and even a threat to call the police if he didn’t tell her who he was.
“Listen,” said Alberto, lowering his voice, after making sure that the old lady had returned to her chair and was no longer within earshot, “I’m a simple encyclopedia salesman. Your mother mistook me for your brother, and I decided to play along. I don’t mean her any harm, I assure you, and I’m not going to rob her. I’m simply offering her some company, that’s all. I’ll finish my cake and then leave.”
The woman remained silent for a few moments, taking in his explanation, while Alberto, aware of how bizarre the truth sounded, feared she might not believe him. But to his astonishment, when the unfamiliar voice spoke again it was to apologize and thank him for what he was doing for her mother.
“She’s very lonely, the poor thing,” the woman explained in a gentle, slow voice, as if she was thinking things over at the same time. “She hasn’t been the same since José Luis died, you know? She refuses to accept that he’s gone. She’s constructed a world where everything is exactly as it was. Thank you for helping to make it more real. That’s what we all do.”
Not daring to interrupt, Alberto let her continue, aware that the woman was simply unburdening herself. When she fell silent again, he insisted that she had no reason to thank him: the cake was delicious, and he’d had nothing better to do that evening. The woman gave a little laugh, which sounded extraordinarily sweet to Alberto’s ears. It seemed incongruous to hear such a delicate, diaphanous sound in that bleak room sunk in the clammy despair of sorrows, and he was on the verge of asking her if she could laugh again, if she could caress his eardrums with that flutter of light, but this felt like too bold and unseemly a request between two strangers. Uncomfortable in the silence that settled over them once everything had been explained, they said a hasty goodbye.
As he hung up, Alberto was surprised to realize that in far-off Brussels a woman he didn’t know was imitating his gesture. He had guessed from the old lady’s comments that the woman wasn’t married and didn’t appear to be living with anyone, and so he imagined her sitting on a sofa, dressed in a simple pair of striped pajamas, the type usually worn by men, her dark hair wet and shiny after the shower she treated herself to as a fitting end to the wearisome day in some government office, between whose walls her life was draining away without her noticing. He placed her in a small apartment, tastefully decorated if without much flair, possibly overlooking a small park carpeted with fallen leaves that crunched almost melodiously as she walked through it in the mournful twilight every evening. He had no idea how much of what he had just imagined was true. Possibly he was only right about the sofa or the pajamas. But what he could be certain of was that at that very moment the woman was thinking about him. She might never do so again, but just then she was conjuring him up, endowing him with a body, compelled by that reflex action that moves us to give a face to strangers who call us on the telephone. And the fact that, even though they’d never met or seen each other before, they were thinking about each other in perfect unison, separated by an ocean of miles, gave him a pleasant sensation of complicity.
Alberto noticed that the old lady had dozed off. Too much excitement for one day, he thought. He took off his paper hat, left it on the table, and, after retrieving his briefcase, smiled a goodbye at her. He closed the door to the apartment quietly and descended the stairs. In the hallway, he paused to glance at the mailboxes, feeling a need to give his hostess a name. He found the corresponding box and ran his finger over the little plaque, touching the letters that made up the old lady’s identity the way a blind person might do.
“It’s her birthday today,” a voice behind him said.
Startled, Alberto wheeled round. The ground-floor neighbor, a woman of about sixty, was watching him from the half-open door to her apartment, holding a plate wrapped in tinfoil.
“Doña Elvira, that is. It’s her birthday today. I’m just going to take her some donuts I made. The poor thing is very lonely. Do you know her?”
“A little,” replied Alberto, uneasy at being interrogated by the woman. She was eyeing him suspiciously, the plate wobbling perilously. “I was a friend of José Luis,” he felt obliged to add, hoping that might reassure her.
“He was a wonderful boy,” the woman said, seemingly pleased to meet one of the dead man’s friends. “Losing him was a terrible blow for Elvira. The truth is, I don’t know how she’s able to bear it. Especially since, two months after the accident, José Luis’s sister, who blamed herself for his death, took her own life by swallowing a bottle of pills.”
Alberto felt unable to breathe. His head started to spin and, fearing he might faint, he said goodbye to the neighbor with an unintelligible murmur and made a dash for the front door. The freezing night air helped him to recover his composure. He leaned against a lamppost, gasping for breath. The daughter had died as well? Then who had he been talking to? he wondered, as he felt a shiver go down his spine. Had he just spoken with a ghost? Recalling the woman’s voice, her tinkling laugh, he felt afraid, a terrible, exaggerated fear, and at the same time he felt something like a profound revulsion as he realized that he had been in touch with someone who didn’t exist, with someone who lived in another world. But that was impossible, he told himself, desperately searching for some alternative explanation as panic engulfed him. It was more logical to suppose that he hadn’t been talking to the woman in the photograph but to someone else, possibly her roommate, who like him had pretended to be a dead person. Perhaps the old lady, sunk in her loneliness and mad with grief after her daughter’s death, continued to dial the number at her apartment each night to scold her for never calling, and her ex-roommate, taking pity on her, had decided to supplant her friend. That idea, which was far more sensible, calmed him.
Feeling reassured, he buttoned up his coat and promised himself he would continue to play his role. He would return each year, put on the paper hat, cut the cake, wait for the call from that unknown woman, and talk to the sister he’d never had. It was perfectly possible that, even if his real life never went anywhere and remained stuck on the landing of the stairwell at Cristina’s house, in this other life, the unknown woman would come to visit them, sit in the other empty rocking c
hair in the room, and while he listened to her talking about Brussels, he would be able to take her hand beneath the skirts of the table. And it wouldn’t matter to him that it was as cold as his own must be, because why should he care if she had died after swallowing a bottle of pills and him in a plane crash if the three of them were now together in a world of lies, a world within a world where they could be happy. He smiled as snowflakes started to fall from the sky in slow, gentle drifts, as if someone somewhere had shaken a snow globe.
The Land of the Dolls
At that time of evening, the playground resembled a childhood graveyard. The swings creaked mournfully in the breeze, the slide rose toward the moon like an absurd, useless object, and the crisscrossed bars of the climbing frame traced the skeleton of an impossible dinosaur . . . Without the clamor of children, without their shouting and running, the enclosure might have been mistaken for one of those apocalyptic film landscapes, where life has been systematically wiped out by some mysterious virus—if it wasn’t for me, that is, circling the playground apparatus with a melancholy air. I had gone back to search for Jasmyn, my daughter’s doll, though even before I arrived I knew that I wouldn’t find her. We don’t live in the calm, rational universe where forgotten dolls remain where we left them, but in the neighboring universe, that cruel domain governed by wars, brutality, and uncertainty, where orphaned objects instantly disappear, possibly because, unbeknownst to us, the things we forget go to make up the dowry we will possess in that other world.
I have to confess that finding Jasmyn would have restored my self-confidence. She was an ordinary plastic doll, skinny, with a slightly oversized head, like all dolls nowadays, and came already baptized from the factory. My daughter had endowed her with a degree of humanity and took her everywhere, as if she were the little sister Nuria and I had refused to give her. Ever since we had presented our daughter with the doll the previous Christmas, we had been forced to get used to this diminutive woman occupying a place at the table, in the car, on the sofa. We had no idea whether this was a reminder of our failure to continue to procreate or simply because Laura could no longer be without her passive companion.
Though I was tempted to take advantage of Laura’s carelessness to rid us of the doll’s irksome presence, I was painfully aware that in the previous few months my image as a father had suffered a progressive decline, and it occurred to me that arriving home with the doll in my arms would redeem me in my daughter’s eyes, and possibly also in those of my wife. However, after combing the playground several times, I realized forlornly that this was just another pipe dream, yet another impossible enterprise, and that I would once again discover my natural incapacity to deal with the problems of life under Nuria’s scornful gaze.
The prospect of returning home without the doll was not a pleasant one, and I found myself loitering, even though I knew my wife was going out that evening to one of those inconvenient work dinners that were so flagrantly encroaching on our love life—the only area of our marriage that was still free from recriminations. I imagine it was my eagerness to postpone the inevitable that led me to enter the café near my house when I saw my colleague Víctor Cordero inside.
Víctor taught literature at the same secondary school as me, and although I had never warmed to his verbose, rather presumptuous nature, the shared workplace had made our relations friendly enough. It was scarcely a year since I had arranged regular dinners with Víctor and his wife with the purpose of injecting new life into my marriage. These were forced affairs, which I struggled to keep going for four or five months, until I became weary of the insufferable banter he and Nuria couldn’t help engaging in over the grilled turbot and vegetables. When Víctor and his wife separated, and he returned to a bachelor’s predatory habits and lewd jokes, I finally threw in the towel, and the dinners died a natural death, like wilted roses that have fulfilled their mission of beauty.
“What are you doing in my territory, stranger?” I said, cocking my forefinger at him. “Don’t you know this here neighborhood isn’t big enough for both of us?”
Víctor seemed surprised to see me, but quickly composed himself, grinning smugly.
“I’m enjoying the benefits of being single, Diego,” he replied, inviting me to sit with him. “Now that no one is waiting at home for me, I’m free to explore the city at my leisure. I’m the fuckin’ Lone Ranger, my friend.”
“Right,” I replied skeptically.
Víctor had always struck me as someone incapable of being alone, because of his incessant need to see himself favorably reflected in other peoples’ eyes.
Taking the brandy glass he held out to me, I added, almost in a whisper, “I couldn’t live without Nuria.”
“What’s your excuse?” Victor said at last. “Why are you out so late?”
I was preparing to think up some pretext when, to my surprise, I found myself telling him the truth. Possibly it was the comforting sensation of the brandy trickling down my throat, or the dense silence enveloping the streets, or the exquisite display of stars the sky had put on for nobody in particular, or possibly a conspiracy of all of the above, that made me consider this man, with whom I had no affinity, the ideal custodian of my cares. I told him about the doll, embellishing my story with my existential anguish and the complexities of my frustrations as a father, as you might send a written complaint in the hope that someone higher up will listen and take pity on you. Once I had finished, Víctor gave a smirk, as if the real difficulty was my inability to solve problems, rather than the problem itself.
“You know what you could do,” he said. I gazed at him in astonishment. The last thing I expected was for Víctor to come up with a solution, or even bother to try. “The same as Kafka.” I looked at him, puzzled. “You know, Franz Kafka, the Czech author?”
“Just because I teach math, Víctor, it doesn’t mean I’ve never heard of Kafka.” Víctor chuckled, and I realized from the way he sat upright in his chair, that he was going to subject me to another of his long-winded anecdotes about authors.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “During the autumn of 1923, Kafka was accustomed to strolling in a park near his home in Berlin. He had moved there with Dora Diamant to spend what he thought were his last days. One afternoon, he came across a little girl who was crying her eyes out. He must have been intrigued enough by her grief to overcome his habitual shyness, and he asked her what was the matter. The little girl replied that she had lost her doll. Just like your daughter, Diego. And what did the author do? Moved by her plight, he promptly disguised the sad truth the best way he knew how: through fiction. ‘Your doll has gone away on a trip,’ he assured her. The girl stopped crying and eyed Kafka suspiciously. ‘How do you know?’ she asked. ‘Because she sent me a letter,’ he improvised. ‘I don’t have it with me now,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘but I’ll bring it for you tomorrow.’ The girl seemed unimpressed, but agreed to return the next day. That night, one of the greatest authors in the world shut himself away in his study to write a story directed at a single reader. And, according to Dora Diamant, he did so with the same seriousness and intensity he applied to all his works. In that first letter, the doll explained that although she greatly enjoyed the little girl’s company, she needed a change of scene, to see the world. She promised she would write to her every day to keep her informed of her adventures. And so it was that Kafka composed a letter every night for the last three weeks of his life,” Víctor said reverentially. “A magnificent personal remedy designed to cure the sorrows of an unknown child. This was Kafka’s last work. You could say that he wrote it with his dying breath.” My colleague shook his head mournfully. “Alas, the letters were lost,” he murmured.
Speechless, I sipped my brandy. Did Víctor seriously imagine that I, who had never written a word in my life, could resort to such a convoluted ploy to console my daughter? Or had he simply used the opportunity of our chance encounter to dredge up another of the weird anecdotes he collected like rare orchids?
Back h
ome, I pondered the matter. Undoubtedly, it was a charming tale, but I wasn’t Kafka, I was an ordinary math teacher, incapable of such flights of fancy. Wouldn’t it be easier to buy my daughter an identical doll? The fact is, I returned home that evening defeated yet again, except that this time, from the angry look Nuria gave me as she breezed past on her way out to her work dinner, I had taken even longer than the prescribed period to demonstrate my ineptitude. I sighed despairingly as my wife left, slamming the door behind her. However, the worst was yet to come, I told myself, noticing the light coming from Laura’s bedroom door, which was ajar. My daughter was awake, waiting for Jasmyn.
I approached her room with the resignation of a prisoner on his way to the gallows. I didn’t have to say a word, Laura burst into tears as soon as she saw I was empty-handed. I sat down beside her and put my arms around her. It was then, as I cradled her, trembling in my arms, that I resolved to become a different man. I wasn’t going to give in this time; I was going to act. I was going to surprise everyone. How could I not do something for my own daughter that the Czechoslovakian author had done for a little girl he didn’t even know?
When Laura fell asleep, I prepared a flask of coffee and shut myself in my study. I had no idea what would come of all this, quite possibly nothing, and yet I refused to let that deter me. I wanted to comfort my daughter, and this very unique method was as good as any other. I started off by disguising my writing, which I made smaller and flatter, until it looked conceivably as if it could have been penned by Jasmyn’s tiny, plastic hand. That was the easiest part. Composing the letter in which Jasmyn explained to my daughter the reasons for her sudden disappearance took me most of the night. By the time Nuria came home, I was still holed up in my study trying to think like a doll. I wasn’t too convinced by the final result. Even so, I placed it in an envelope and, over breakfast the next day, I plucked it from my jacket pocket and waved it in front of Laura’s tearstained face.
The Heart and Other Viscera Page 5
