I had the feeling that my entire life was a lie. Not only did places I had never been to start to seem familiar to me, but, sunk in a kind of numbness toward the world, anything that happened each day appeared to me predictable, a stupid repetition. I let the years slip by in this state of lethargy, as they solved—at an excruciatingly slow pace that even so was not without its suspense—the equation of my existence and that of my family. The passage of time also revealed that none of the members of our family had been right in our calculations about the man behind the curtain. Following a record of boyfriends that when it was reeled off sounded like the lineup of a football team, Eva realized in the end that Prince Charmings only exist behind curtains, and that the closest she could come to that was to imbibe each man’s moment of innocence, those fleeting moments of naivety when the monster played with the little girl without knowing he could drown her in the lake with his own hands. She emigrated abroad, to some countryside or other with an unpronounceable name, possibly because she had exhausted the purity of all the males in Spain. From there she wrote me the lengthy letters of an old maid with cats, leaving me to read between the lines that she was miserably happy. As for Grandma, she died in a hospital, without the intervention of the man behind the curtain, fading away with stoic dignity during my turn to visit her. I imagine she passed somewhat disgruntled that she had to perform the ceremony of her dying to the least interested spectator of her entourage. When I went home to give Marta the news, I found her astride Soriano and understood that I too had been mistaken, and that the man behind the curtain was not my wife’s lover.
After that evening, Marta and I had nothing to discuss apart from how long we would allow each other to find somewhere to live before we gave up the apartment we had shared. She soon found a loft in the center where Soriano, after shrugging his shoulders at me, went every morning to run his wife’s errands. I decided to stay on in the apartment until the real estate agency began to show it. I left my packed suitcases next to the curtain. They demonstrated an appetite for travel I could not share, as no destination seemed to me sufficiently distant for me to get far enough away from myself.
On the morning the agency advised me that the first clients would be appearing that afternoon, I placed the chair in front of the man behind the curtain and read him the last letter I had received from Eva. In it she spoke, inevitably, about him: this was the topic that all the previous ones had ended up being about as well. In this one, however, she didn’t speculate about his looks or his meaning in our lives, as she often liked to do in complex philosophical arguments, but informed me that, after many attempts, she had succeeded in locating Virtudes, the owner of the apartment. She lived alone, far from the hustle and bustle of the world, in a mansion with Gothic touches. Eva had gone there to see her, and found an impossibly young woman, a beautiful girl of no more than twenty, who wore her hair and clothes like a heroine of the silent cinema. Eva had to use all of her powers of persuasion for the woman to finally lay bare her soul and, after the fourth cup of tea beneath the crumbling vine trellis, reveal that it was the fact that she had not pulled back the curtain, not yielded to the love that chance had offered them, that kept her so amazingly young, as though that speck of the world in which they lived had become detached from the portion where the rest of us lived, continuing on its path to the land of shadows, where Grandma was already wandering. And so, what at first had merely been a postponement had ended up being a kind of immortality whose purpose she still couldn’t fathom, but that united them in a way nothing else could, banishing them from time, exempting them from the painstaking disintegration all the rest of us were heading for.
Putting away the letter, I stared at the man behind the curtain, who gave a vague nod of the head that perhaps he wanted to seem evocative. Eva had constructed a lovely tale that was not only based on what he had told me the one time we had talked but it also beautifully justified the vigorous outline behind the drape that was so far removed from the tremors and sagging of old age. I was pleased I could return him a tale akin to his own, an elegant way to convey to him that I accepted his lies that had more beauty than logic. After all, the reasons why he was there were up to him.
I had imagined that the reading of Eva’s letter would be the perfect goodbye, and so I stood up ready to recover my suitcases and leave. Instead, I took a step forward, grasped the curtain, and pulled it back with a simple, unceremonious gesture, wondering why I had never done so before and why I was doing it now. It had been fear that had kept Grandma from opening the curtain; Eva, because she intuited that the only thing keeping her from disappointment was precisely its mystery; and Marta, perhaps because she would not have been able to confront the gaze of the only witness to her misdemeanors. I, though, had no reason not to do so, although it wasn’t curiosity that now compelled me, but the hope that the secret hidden by the curtain might somehow provide an excuse not to have to face my own destiny, a reason that might relieve me of the wearisome obligation of having to begin a new life with such a tired soul.
The man behind the curtain was an ordinary-looking individual of about forty years old, with skinny, bony shoulders, sharp features, and the face of an usher. I have no idea what I was hoping to discover behind the curtain, but I was disappointed to find someone so unremarkable, with no distinguishing feature about him that might merit him hiding in my living room—although I had no idea what that feature might be. He looked at me reluctantly, as though he regretted my action while at the same time approving it, or as if he could not condemn it because he himself had done the same in the past. We stood there staring at one another for a while, not knowing what to say. Then, after casting a nostalgic glance round the room and giving me a faint smile of farewell, he walked stiffly over to the door and renounced the apartment.
I was left on my own there for the first time, standing by the pulled-back curtain. I saw the strange emptiness that the absence of the man had left in the living room and couldn’t resist taking his place to observe how he had seen our lives. It was a huge relief when I felt the wall at my back and my heels against the skirting board. I drew the curtain across, simply intending to faithfully reproduce all the details. But as I did so, I realized this was how Virtudes’s husband had disappeared, and understood that he had been substituted in turn by the next tenant, so initiating a chain of disappearances that was now continuing with my own and threatened to perpetuate itself through the centuries, always with one man, a man in love who was waiting, heart aflame, for a woman—who by now was nothing more than a memory—to pull back the curtain.
The Heart and Other Viscera
On my birthday, Marcelo gave me his gallbladder. To celebrate, we had chosen one of those intimate restaurants where the waiters wander between the tables like ghosts, filling glasses or sweeping up crumbs with furtive gestures. At first glance, I didn’t realize what that wrinkled, greenish chili pepper he was handing me in a jar was.
“It’s my gallbladder,” he explained, pointing to the place on his side where it had lodged like a bullet before it ended up in the jar. “I’m giving it you as a token that my love for you will always be free of bile,” he said with cheerful grandiloquence. He sat staring at me very seriously, waiting for my reaction like someone who has just shown a photo of his children.
Love without bile. All right, got it. We had only been together for four months, but I was already beginning to discover that Marcelo was very fond of that kind of symbolism.
Maybe that was why he could not disguise his disappointment at the diamond-patterned necktie I gave him for his birthday two months later. His lack of enthusiasm made the loving process of choosing that particular pattern, which had taken up the whole of my morning, seem ridiculous. At the same time, I admit I was hopeful that he might take my gesture as a suggestion: a gift could also come from a shop window; it did not have to be the result of any dramatic bodily excision. Over the following months, I never saw him wear the tie, but his behavior led me to believe he h
ad understood the message. Or so I thought until our first anniversary, when, with increasing horror, one by one I opened the five small boxes laid out on the table and discovered the ring finger, forefinger, thumb, and eventually all five fingers from his left hand, which only then crawled out of the lair of his pocket to demonstrate the painstaking pruning to which it had been submitted.
Marcelo had as little need of his fingers as he did of his gallbladder. He was a top executive in a multinational company and had a harem of secretaries at his disposal whom he could control merely by means of his voice. Like a stork, he had built his nest high in the clouds, at the top of a tower clad in glass and steel. If you peered at it from down below, you became as giddy as a pregnant woman, overwhelmed by a vertigo of insignificance from which it was difficult to recover. One rainy day, I had ventured inside for the first time with my résumé under my arm and a leaden vise gripping my heart, hoping to obtain one of the vacancies I had seen advertised in the newspaper. I didn’t get the job, but I was lucky enough to bump into the monarch of this carpeted realm and to spill my coffee on his most expensive jacket. To Marcelo, accustomed as he was to pop-up women, females as curvaceous as they were sensual, my ethereal appearance and professor’s spectacles must have seemed to him a very different proposition. He saw me as a heart where he could settle without fear of being bored, someone from whom he could extract a genuine moan, maybe one of those words defined in encyclopedias. In a daze that was a mix of enchantment and amusement, he allowed his jacket to be cleaned, while his business mind was busy considering a merger with this girl who never stopped apologizing desperately, although underneath it was not hard to glimpse her annoyance, as if deep down she thought the blame for their collision was all on his side.
He invited me to dinner the next evening and we fell in love before dessert, slightly embarrassed, as if falling in love was meant to be a slow surrender of the heart, a feeling that could only gush like a geyser in novels. Our love had a great deal of magic about it, like the inevitable attraction of a magnet and iron filings; a madness to which we had to surrender ourselves completely. I didn’t know what Marcelo saw in me, but whatever it was seemed to me as magical as it was permanent. For my part, I wasn’t seduced so much by the suave, gentle manners of someone who for years had not had to shout, as by the unforgettable look of helplessness in his eyes when he let his guard down, when all of a sudden he seemed to be struck by the disturbing certainty that he was nothing but a joke. He had gotten to where he was so easily, without having to stain his clothes with the sweat of effort, that his success seemed to him something anyone remotely intelligent could achieve. This made him terribly vulnerable within his invulnerability, a beggar dressed in prince’s clothing. That insecurity, that twitch of humiliation and bewilderment that occasionally took hold of him, spoke of a fragile soul. It made him, despite his determined air and the swagger of an Adonis polished at the gym, a frail creature who was easy to love and as moving as a sparrow fallen from its nest.
I have to confess, though, that nothing about him could have forewarned me of his tendency to chop himself into bits. But after the little number with the fingers, I was ready for anything. I awaited our next celebration with great curiosity, although in the end his third gift did not come as any great surprise. I knew what it was even before I opened the box; in fact, from the moment he entered the restaurant with a patch over his left eye. After unwrapping our gifts, we peered at each other silently for a long while, studying each other with looks that spoke above all of resigned acceptance, of surrendering to the other’s little whims: me toying with the glistening marble of his eye, and him with a pair of sunglasses that wouldn’t be much use to him.
Young brides-to-be usually buy a chest to keep their dowry in. I had to make do with a freezer. And there, in its tundra belly, I stored the man I loved. Marcelo had more money than he could spend, and he could buy everything with it, including a team of unscrupulous surgeons willing to saw his body to pieces in the operating theater he had built in his basement. It was from there that Marcelo, or what was left of him, now worked, conveying by phone precise instructions for his tower to continue to soar upward. And all he needed for that was his tongue. No one in his firm could suspect that his absence was due to anything apart from his privileges as a boss, or because he was devoting himself exclusively to the lover they speculated he had. And no one, but no one, knew he was busy with those joyful, repeated mutilations, except the team of butchers who sliced him up without asking any questions, the two nurses looking after him, and the aforementioned lover.
In the meantime, the months were going by almost without my noticing, and I still couldn’t find a job that lasted more than a week. There even came a moment when I stopped looking, because I suspected Marcelo was responsible for my sudden dismissals and that, in an excessive desire to protect me, he wanted to save me from any wear and tear. So I gave up trying to enter the world of work and instead dedicated myself to endless leisure. I took long walks in the park, went to the movies, did yoga, and even became a daytime television soap opera addict. The nights, though, I kept entirely for the guardian angel who had created this little girl’s life for me. We had picnics by the fireside, giggling as we emptied several bottles of wine, until a more lustful glance than normal incited us to come together on the hearthrug. Then, feeling the gentle warmth of the flames on my back, I slowly kissed the absences, the gaps in his body, before giving myself to him slowly, like a gift he had the whole night to open. It could have been paradise but for the fact that I was unable to forget that I was embracing a man who was constantly fleeing, a man determined to dismantle himself.
After each celebration—and there were lots of them, because everything seemed to Marcelo worthy of being celebrated—I went home with another piece of his body. Over the next few months, I carefully wrapped in transparent plastic bags his kidneys, the strange slippers of his feet, the arms that embraced me, the hailstones of his teeth, the hand orphaned of its fingers. Some stormy nights, I imagined with awe that while Marcelo was stubbornly and diligently decimating himself in his basement, in the icy dungeon of my freezer a different Marcelo, a kind of lost, incomplete, and sinister twin brother who was as linked to him as a negative was taking shape, patiently reconstituting himself, just waiting for the moment when he became presentable enough to leap out and embrace me.
One fine day, as I was wrapping his latest gift, I realized with horror how routine all this had become for me. Almost without becoming aware of it, the passing of the months had effaced all remaining trace of surprise, so that now all I did was regard Marcelo’s conscientious dismembering as inevitable. I even tried to find a reason for it. Marcelo was reducing himself, minimizing himself, stripping off everything superfluous in a harsh journey toward his most basic essence. But for what purpose? Within a few weeks, he had substituted his crutches for a motorized wheelchair, a sophisticated jalopy he went around everywhere in. Eventually, he decided to acquire one of those little guide monkeys. From the start, my relationship with the ape was one of mutual mistrust. I was horrified to see the monkey obey Marcelo’s orders almost before he had given them; I couldn’t bear to see the animal giving him a drink or combing his hair with maternal, solicitous haste. But the night that I watched incredulously as the primate mimicked by the insistent trombone movement of his little hand the only desire that Marcelo could feel by this stage of his dismemberment, I understood that all this had gone way too far.
I had to put a stop to this nonsense right away! And there was only one way to do that: if I was the accomplice in that demented slicing, all I had to do was to leave his side to put a stop to his imminent disintegration. But how could I abandon a man who had given me so much? The only way to do so was to approach it from a different angle, to interpret his exercise in dissection as an act of tremendous egotism, to consider that Marcelo was only offering me what he did not need, that the tender carving up of his body was exactly akin to giving the church the clot
hes you no longer wear. I confess that however hard I tried to view his dismemberment in this way, I did not succeed. Marcelo loved me. I only had to see how he was giving himself to me. All that was left was for him to give me his heart.
He gave it to me one rainy night, in a cooler filled with ice. Without my being aware of it, as if they had ganged up on me, several green men placed it in my chest to replace my own, which had chosen that night to reveal how weak it was. I knew nothing about the exchange until the next day, when I woke up in a hospital room with a huge scar between my breasts. I was surprised to find myself surrounded by a swarm of doctors and nurses who were celebrating my return from the shadows. They said I had slipped away and come to them, very ill prepared, the previous night. I immediately recalled the sudden tingling in my left arm just before dinner, and then the stabbing pain in my chest that left me in darkness. But everything had turned out fine, because they had immediately found a donor heart. From now on, I simply had to take care of myself, to lead as quiet a life as possible. I listened to the surgeons’ explanations in a daze, as if they were talking about someone else, still trying to get my bearings.
Due to the effects of the anesthetic, the world came together for me only very tentatively, as if it was obeying the erratic dictates of some octogenarian demigod: the window beyond which a radiant morning was forming, the gaggle of doctors, the crucifix on the wall with its emaciated Christ, the visitors’ chair in which Marcelo’s lawyer was sitting. He was a friendly, well-groomed sort, so pink it always looked as if he had just emerged from a steaming-hot shower. When I was with Marcelo, I had been present at several of his discreet but decisive appearances. He appeared out of nowhere, perfectly naturally, wherever we might be, and after bestowing a polite smile on me, laid a couple of incisive phrases in Marcelo’s ear, after which he nodded or shook his head forcefully, as if these movements were some kind of exorcism that would allow him to vanish once more into thin air. I have to admit he was the last person I expected to see in the hospital. And yet there he was, blending in with his surroundings, seated in the chair as impassively as a ventriloquist’s dummy, simply waiting. And this time too his performance was a tribute to brevity. As soon as the doctors left the room, he stood up and handed me Marcelo’s parting gift: a heart-shaped box. Then, after expressing his delight at the success of the transplant, he bowed and disappeared before I could even ask where his boss was.
The Heart and Other Viscera Page 14
