The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  He drops the pajamas into the laundry basket. The mirror shows him the image of a man with an angular face and enlarged eyes, an odd sketch of himself that looks at him without alarm, without paying attention to the little lights that are jumping off his forehead again and surrounding the space of the cubicle, like firework sparks. He gets dressed, seated on a stool, but the image in the mirror remains standing in front of him, and he has the impression this figure, poised watchfully, will remain there, in the looking-glass, long after he has closed the door to the changing room and turned out the light, heading off down the corridor, with no wish to say goodbye or see you later, or maybe he will, even though only his shirt collar will hear him, while the notes of “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” play over the loudspeakers, a melody he, invisible and stunned, will not hum, driven only by the desire to set foot in the luminous street and feel the cold, midday air coming through the window, reclining in the seat of the taxi taking him home.

  5

  From the perspective of the black kite flying over the alfalfa field, waiting for a telltale movement in the bushes, the mountains are shaped like a bison’s hump, and the clouds, still on the other side of the massif, advance toward the house, the ravine, and the highway tollbooths. The bird’s pupils dilate, and the damp earth and the silhouette of a man are reflected in the amber of its irises. His presence may be enough to startle the hare hiding in the bushes, holding its breath, its eyes open, green, inexpressive as grapes. Although it is cold, the day has dawned full of light, combed by a breeze that smells of forest. Nothing presages the storm clouds that by midafternoon will accumulate on the other side of the mountain, driven by the north wind. Like a toy kite flying above the field, the bird draws a semicircle through the transparent air, barely rocks from side to side, folds the tips of its wings, and effortlessly descends in low-level flight. Its silhouette disappears from view. With a gesture of surprise, the man pulls his face away from the binoculars and squints in the direction of the now empty space above the valley floor, beyond the clods of earth shining like ounces of frozen chocolate. He drops the binoculars onto his chest and shades his eyes with his hand. He flashes an involuntary smile against the sunlight. No sign of the black kite.

  When he woke up, his body sensed the day’s vigor. He stretched under his sheets, ignoring the heavy weight of tiredness and the succubus lazing on the other side of the bed and scratching his calves with the claws of its feet. Taking advantage of a kind of impulse that seemed to come from the forest, or even further off, he threw the blanket onto the floor. He drew back the curtains, and immediately the succubus ran away from the light in search of the fluff piled beneath the wardrobe. He chose not to heed the sobs that sought and then demanded his attention, or the insults proffered in a castrato voice in the midst of a flurry of dust burs. He showered with pleasant urgency, and the water seemed to erase all traces of insomnia. He avoided the gaze of the figure that for days has been watching him shave in front of the mirror. The water from the faucet washed away the gobbets of foam. With strange determination, he tore off the surgical tape, as if this simple act were enough to erase the bruise that has spread during the night over his forearm, with the color of a black plum. When he closed the kitchen window, Polanski descended from the counter and, with a neutered cat’s mews, demanded his ration of chicken pellets. He served the cat its breakfast, removing the remains stuck to the inside of the can with a spoon. “Good news, Polanski, chicken and braised vegetables today,” he said, depositing the lumps of meat in the plastic bowl with an ice-cream seller’s flourish.

  He squeezed out the acidic juice of the first oranges of the season while the voice of a radio presenter read out the newspaper headlines: a limpet mine attached to the underside of a car had killed a man on his way to work; the arrival of fifty immigrants on a beach in the south; a hurricane making its way toward the interior of the United States; a politician’s most recent declarations—everything gathered together in the space of the kitchen, amid the steam of freshly made coffee and the María Fontaneda cookies stacked high like casino chips on the oilcloth covering the table. But the man couldn’t recall the name of the victim of the terrorist attack, or who demanded of the central government an immigration law “befitting of a border country, a host country, as ours should be,” somebody had said, or the old-wet-nurse-like name—Bertha, or Lucy, perhaps—of the hurricane threatening to sweep away several small towns in the American Midwest, because he seemed more attentive to the breeze shaping the alfalfa field outside and shaking the last branches of the oak trees than to the monotonous litany being uttered by the radio presenter in a peremptory, urgent voice. While he drank down his coffee, he clung to the idea of a walk. He remembered the nephrologist’s advice—“You can go for walks, but don’t tire yourself; half an hour a day is more than enough,” he said while squeezing his left foot—and the idea of a walk had taken hold of him, and it was a kind of exhortation, like the light framing the forest in the kitchen window at that particular hour with the feigned, falsely autumnal distinction of a Dutch landscape painting.

  Seeing him dressed in the old clothes he used for walks, the cat rubbed up against his calves. It may have sensed the traces of aromatic plants still clinging to his corduroy pants, his turtleneck, his jacket, and canvas boots; it fawned even more when it saw him take his father’s old cane from the closet and return from the porch with the binoculars hanging around his neck. It watched him, eyes wide open in surprise at this interruption of routine—the predictable reading of the newspaper in the kitchen, the penetrating smell of the anti-inflammatory cream in the bathroom, the slow filling out of the crossword at midmorning—searching in the cupboard, on the sofa, then at the foot of the stairs for the line of shadow it’s noticed in the house over the past few days. While adjusting the neck of his jacket, the man said, “Take care of the house, Polanski,” and, without further ado, closed the door.

  The black kite reappears beyond the space above the alfalfa field. It moves away, taking advantage of a thermal that’s forming over the valley at the height of the clouds. He follows it with his gaze until it disappears, effortlessly, on the other side of the pinewood. In deep inhalations, the air brings him the shaded smells of the forest, of spongy earth and trunks coated in moss, and these sensitive signs seem to give rise in his body, which is still swollen under his clothes, to a kind of vigor that is transmitted to his leg muscles and fills his chest with a satisfying sense of plenitude, though the wind also brings strengthening gusts of the stench of waste coming from the direction of the ravine. He leaves the edge of the forest behind. Down below is a drum of detergent, bottle necks, bags of garbage. He throws a stone, which clatters away into rusty machine parts and thistle heads.

  From inside the pinewood, on the other side of the highway, he can hear the reports of shotguns, a succession of muffled bangs, like firecrackers being set off underground. He imagines what it must be like to walk from early in the morning alongside dogs following the improbable trail of a specimen across the frosty ground, to be part of a team of hunters that has arrived from the capital and probably stopped at dawn at a roadside café to drink coffee while outside the light of dawn grew stronger, then the silhouettes leaving the cars, rubbing their hands, assembling their shotguns while the dogs frisk about, a group of four or five men that will have fanned out and scoured the pinewood and now, after several hours of exhausting effort, are pointing their guns, because the dogs have finally picked up the scent and bark like crazy when a shadow emerges from the thicket, those men who shoot, as they’re doing right now, at a hare that has just jumped out in front of the group and is hit full on by the cone of pellets, frozen in midair, and falls down dead in the bushes; one of them rushes to pick up the specimen, clenches an unlit cigarette butt between his teeth, points toward the cornfield, and says “this big,” indicating with his hands the unlikely size of a fox he has seen running in the direction of the highway, and the men step up their goadi
ng of the dogs, whose barks can now be heard throughout the whole valley, because if the fox reaches the field, there’ll be no chance of catching it.

  Another, closer shot does not interrupt his childish entertainment of throwing stones into the ravine to see if he can get them between the joints of a car chassis. In this way, he forgets, or thinks he forgets, the cohort of presences, hums, and voices that seem to accost him at home, from behind the partition walls, among the pictures and everyday objects, in a logomachy whose meaning escapes him and is sometimes confused with the murmur of leaves piling up on the porch, and then other, withered leaves flutter in his memory like dead butterflies.

  Unable to sleep, he twisted and turned, and from the space between his eyebrows arose a bubbling of words and the sound of an echo questioning and answering itself, and saying yes and saying no, or perhaps, or may have been, or should have been, or must have been, and his head spun like a carousel with the music of little horses around the chattering and the blah-blah-blah that didn’t stop even though he got up from bed and went downstairs, holding on to the walls, and into the kitchen to have a glass of milk and check, while he was at it, if he had left the window open, in case the cat came back from its nocturnal outing and turned up the next morning frozen on the porch. It’s better to wander around the house a little to distract the insomnia, to sit in the kitchen and smoke a cigarette, to turn on the radio and listen to the presenter’s voice in the distance and some soft music, a jazz composition that jarred against his ears, while staring at the warped toes of his slippers and tapping out the rhythm of the song in the hope that the notes of the piano and the double bass—once he had half opened the window, emptied the glass, and extinguished the cigarette—would encourage him to yawn. He went back to the bedroom without making any noise, on tiptoe, so as not to wake even himself, turned out the light, and the mattress springs creaked beneath his hip, and the soap-pump mechanism concealed behind his forehead turned on, like a telephone answering machine switches on, and again the bubbles emerged from his forehead, blop, blop, blop, up to the ceiling, in a litany he already knew he wouldn’t be able to calm either by counting sheep or by relaxing his leg muscles, even though he had nothing to do the next day (he remembered he hadn’t even put a new sticky note on the door of the fridge with a task waiting to be completed—Buy boiled ham; Go to the bank; Call Ana), since he didn’t have to get up early to go to the clinic, just sleep, and each attempt to make his body comfortable provoked a new groan from the mattress springs, a harsh sound that struck him as identical to the laughter of the succubus of his bad dreams. When he opened his eyes in the dark, it was almost three in the morning, and freezing outside.

  He could have been a man of independent means, a man of leisure, with a healthy complexion, playing golf every Friday morning and improving his handicap from week to week, a collector of bibliographical rarities, a yoga adept who has visited the Dalai Lama and gone around the world three times in first class, someone, in short, whose only concern was to justify time he had bought with ease. Ana’s inheritance would have allowed for this and other possibilities, but he rejected the temptation of a life devoted to meticulous, long-winded digestion at the table after a meal at his in-laws’ house, of journeys by yacht, in order to pursue his own intellectual goals, which, in the end, had been dreams, only dreams. He needed to avoid naming despair; pathos was the best way to condemn oneself to a kind of ancient puerility, an old prejudice resting on transcendental questions for which there was no answer except a grimace that on occasion would condescend to accept its own melancholy. He needed to avoid naming despair, on penalty of sounding ridiculous, emphatic. “Blessed chitter-chatter that conceals us, so that nobody will suspect we are naked and weak,” he thought sometimes with secret cynicism while adjusting the cuffs on his academic robes and walking in time, solemnly, formally, down the aisle of the university auditorium the day the new academic year was inaugurated, gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus; he needed to solemnize the obvious, so that nobody would suspect, to affirm himself without sorrow or glory on the armrest of his position as chair, post iucundam iuventutem, post molestam senectutem. Dreams, bad dreams. Language was a wrapping; art, disguised emptiness. A can of air. That had been his imposture, his indigence. Clearly nothing at all to do with real emotion, that material that, in the darkness of the bedroom, he succeeded in evoking in the figure of his father.

  He arrived on the first Friday of each month, pulling along the station platform a small case with two changes of clothes inside, a shaving brush, and an ornithology manual. He waited for them in the café, seated at a table in the back, bent over a cup of coffee, his glasses perched on the edge of his nose, adopting a falsely defeated attitude, since back then he still possessed his intellectual faculties, the features of a silent, distrustful character, and a physical strength that was revealed as soon as he saw them coming, when he jumped up from his chair, forgetting his cane, and lifted Laura into the air; a stern man with bushy eyebrows and a strong skull, used to dealing with animals, to sticking his hand up the anuses of mares, to touching cows’ uteruses. When he was introduced to Ana, the old man observed her over the top of his glasses with a professional gaze, as if he were evaluating the health of a newly purchased head of cattle, and was able to see through the twenty-year-old with narrow hips and small breasts who drove a car he could never have afforded and to make out a rich girl from the capital, attractive, yes, but simple and squawky as a barnyard bird. He was somebody who had been able to support his family by driving a van around the local valleys and towns, each farm and stable, who managed to win over the normally sullen mountain folk, to prosper, and to provide an education for his two sons—Óscar, so rebellious, such a lover of risk; and Gabriel, so timid, so shy, always with his nose pressed against prints of paintings or in art books, who sometimes led him to wonder whether he hadn’t raised a fairy. So when he saw him holding hands with such a refined young lady, he must have thought he was marrying for money, that’s right, that’s what the old man must have thought, he was marrying for money, not so stupid after all, he must have thought when he saw Ana’s expensive dress, her even more expensive convertible, and listened, like someone listening to the rain, to the stories of trips abroad and smelled the rich perfume emanating from that non-existent cleavage and her medium-length, ash-blond hair. He apologized to Ana for his father’s rude manners, for the primitive opinions of this provincial man, proud as an Apache Indian, but his father, loyal to his Calvinist work ethic, valuing austerity above any other indicator of virtue, saw in her a frivolous woman who spent her inheritance on trips and decorative objects and filled her time with something so lacking in responsibility and good judgment as writing a book of exotic recipes. He must have weighed his future daughter-in-law against the frugal, self-sacrificing woman who had been his wife, and the result of comparing the two images cannot have favored Ana. He was unfair to her, as he himself had been, and in the darkness of the bedroom, he wondered whether he wasn’t condemned to repeat his father’s mistakes, though this comparison was also unfair, because his father had made mistakes, but they were honest, born out of conviction, whereas his own had been nothing more than the calculated steps of a bad, sentimental man.

  He enjoyed a standard of living he could never have dreamed of with his salary as a university professor and art critic—cruises, social reunions, vacations in inoffensively exotic countries, get-togethers at the house, Art Tatum’s piano on the record player, like the parody of a Woody Allen comedy, and he felt very fortunate to be able to talk to a diplomat about Japanese calligraphy, or to a shipowner who explained to him the principles of the Plimsoll line; the good manners, the grateful deportment, the warm brandy, it all formed a pleasant world of soft lights and long banquet tables with mirrors, exclusive places for exclusive people, Ana’s friends, her parents, a little false and frivolous, perhaps, artificially cosmopolitan, he thought at the beginning. But Ana was able to take him by the hand and introdu
ce him into this comfortable world with the authentic optimism and lack of pretense of a creature born to be happy. And this, he thought, had been his major sin: to have frustrated the expectations of a being who deserved to be happy, for happiness was what Ana longed for without demanding it, her natural inclination, and that was love, the fact she existed was enough, to glimpse the aura surrounding her ash-blond hair, her white skin, rosy on the corollas of her breasts. Even this splendor would not cease to shine on those occasions when, in gentle rebuke, a smile on her lips, seated on the porch, having listened to his masculine diatribes and taken a sip of green tea, Ana would say,“Gabriel, you men are so childish, so weak . . .”

  Ana kept a cautious distance from mundane affairs, placidly, her hand resting on her newly pregnant belly, while showing him the room that was to be Laura’s, already prepared, the walls painted a pearly color, the booties, the bottles of baby cologne, the tiny clothes folded up in drawers in the wardrobe, and he inhaled deeply—the fragrance of Nenuco, dry bottom, healthy bottom—kissed her on the forehead, placed his hand on her round belly, and everything was in its place, everything was perfect, especially after the two miscarriages which seemed to his father to confirm his village vet’s early diagnosis, irrefutable proof that his daughter-in-law was a sickly, weak creature. He persuaded Ana to buy a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, next to an oak forest, a local road, and an alfalfa field. What better company for a little girl, he adduced, than trees and clean air, walks in the country, less than twenty minutes from the city and downtown, a house for one’s whole life, a house to be born, live, and die in, solid, a little solitary, perhaps, but beautiful. And Ana agreed to the plans for their future home.