The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  They were a sight to be seen, seated on the porch or in the living room—his father frowning, Ana praising the dietary excellences of sushi, Óscar already half drunk—and a multitude of exotic dishes his wife had learned in her latest Japanese cooking course spread out before them. His father’s face was a sight to be seen, the face of someone who usually devoured rough country stews, now staring over the top of his glasses at an unidentified dish full of raw fish while Óscar made quick work of the wine and came out with the odd dirty joke, made inappropriate remarks, or told some anecdote from his life as an adventure photographer. But it was perfect, he thought, in spite of everything it was, and with the appearance of a ruminant, his father chewed those balls of eel-stuffed rice followed by a dish of strawberries dipped in white chocolate, while looking at Laura over the top of his glasses. In the mornings, he would take her for walks in the local area. He knew the tracks, the forest paths, the toponyms, the names of the different fields, and, when they returned at midday, Laura, as if reciting a multiplication table, would sing out the names of birds they’d spotted—jay, hoopoe, golden oriole, blackbird, coal tit, robin—or newly discovered species of trees and plants—oak, beech, birch, chestnut, fern, lavender, boxwood—words that acquired the consistency of glass in her childlike voice. As a boy, he had also been taught about the diversity of bird life in the local region, and this repetition of actions seemed to him to confirm a bond, that emotional material, which could never be broken.

  Three shots ring out in the pinewood like a succession of barks. The sound surprises him as he walks along a muddy path. He stands on tiptoe, but finds nothing strange, here or on the other side of the coppice. He stops to catch his breath at the crest of the path. Further down, the gas station attendant is cleaning the windshield of a car. Jeremías sometimes does odd jobs for the houses in the valley, small domestic tasks that help to top off his salary. He used to buy those violet candies, the ones Laura liked so much, from him. His blue work overalls are too small, he is wearing a cap with earflaps that makes him look like a man from the steppes. Taking his time, he charges the driver for the cost of the service, then hands over the change, extracting a bill from an old, leather money belt. He lifts his chin on seeing the man, aided by a cane, heading in the direction of the river.

  He takes a path that slips away from the highway. The sound of engines gradually fades behind him, to be replaced by the wind humming in his ears and zigzagging between the forest and the fields. He likes to walk along the path that leads down to the river; as on other occasions, he gets the impression after a few steps that he is leaving everything behind. There is nothing now to indicate the proximity of the highway, only a wide vista that suddenly appears before his eyes. He is grateful for this emptiness, which startles him and banishes the old taste of violet candies. He advances, unaware of the picture he might offer an anonymous observer adopting the viewpoint of a black kite rising on a thermal—barely a dot, advancing unhurriedly, now stopping for a moment to catch his breath, and moving again, descending, tinier and tinier, almost invisible now, in the direction of the irrigation channel. A happy murmur rushes through the arches of the bridge. He promises himself a cigarette as soon as he reaches the water’s edge. He makes his way through the gorse and slowly descends, checking the firmness of the ground with his cane. His boots make a squelching sound as he walks toward the poplars. He chooses a trunk covered in lichen to sit on. He lights a cigarette.

  Óscar was a sight to be seen, leading Laura by the hand through the garden, saying “Lo, Lo, Lo,” as the child took her first steps; Óscar, the adventurer, who was already crossing the threshold where bachelorhood turns into a habit, evokes in his memory a figure on the grass that smelled of sun-toasted pasture, while the girl, holding his hand, said “Lo, Lo, Lo,” and Óscar raised his arms in sign of victory because Laura had just taken her first steps and crossed the entire width of the garden; he looked up from his papers, alerted by his wife’s shouts ordering him to come to the window and see how his crazy brother had just taught Laura to walk. When his daughter was no longer a baby but a teenager with a beauty spot on her cheek and eyes the color of dried moss, she continued to get along well with Óscar, as if the fact of having taught her to walk had created an initiation, a complicity. Perhaps she viewed Óscar as an older brother, a mature person who was still immature, or a falsely young adult, someone, in any case, who was not weighed down by social convention, a little harebrained, exempt from the inevitable family rebuke, the deaf and annoying voice of a paternal figure—someone, he thought, as close and complicit and yet as opposed to her father as the negative of a photograph. This special affection for Laura bothered him a little, arousing a father’s jealousy he would never have allowed himself to admit, and this bond, which became stronger over the years, disturbed Ana, as well, though they rarely spoke about it, since it was understood she didn’t approve of the compliments and endearments they exchanged at family gatherings with an impudence Ana judged inappropriate for a relationship between an uncle and a niece.

  He gazes at the embers of the cigarette between his fingers. It could be said that even the murmur of the river prefigures the tone of the voices in his memory. Back then, he was a different person, even the taste of tobacco was different, or seemed to be, and he didn’t notice how intense such a trivial act as inhaling tobacco smoke through a filter stuck to the skin of his lips could be, something as amazing as watching the capricious spirals of smoke rising before dissolving in the air, because perhaps in every act our consciousness can dilate and a man can sum up his life in that gesture, a present that dilates, unrelated to words. But he paid no attention to the slightest changes—the air suddenly growing stronger on the other side of the poplar grove, the murmur of the water in the irrigation ditch, the whistle of a goldfinch carried on the breeze, the report of a shotgun—that might encode a devastating, beneficial correspondence. Perhaps that’s love. But back then, he was a different Gabriel—a profile absorbed in a mirror, an observer who observes nothing, half asleep, smoking or making love or reading or walking, without smoking or making love or reading or walking, oblivious to the unavoidable fact that the taste of tobacco is bitter and acidic on both sides of the palate and leaves a slight pungency on the tip of the tongue, a remnant of toxicity that inundates his delicate network of veins and arteries, blocking the flow of blood, sinking him into the briefest of limbos early in the morning, after breakfast, over the first coffee of the day and the kiwi cut down the middle and the María Fontaneda cookies, his only concern to feel for a moment the lassitude in his muscles and the irrepressible desire to go to the bathroom on account of the effective laxative effect of nicotine. He would come out of the bathroom with just enough time to brush his teeth and take his leave of Ana, who, together with the cleaning lady, was already preparing some experimental dish. He glanced at Laura’s unmade bed, she would be at school by now, and then grabbed his leather wallet, ballpoint pens, keys, and money. He bought the newspaper from Jeremías, parked the car to avoid the foreseeable traffic jam, and approached the university on foot. He cannot recognize himself in that man climbing the steps of the history department and walking down the building’s gray, decrepit corridors, which are teeming with students, then greeting the old desk attendant seated like a stuffed saurian in his glass cubicle, just like twenty-five years earlier, reaching the elevator, and opening the door to the department of art history. He could breathe in the air, but he no longer perceived the smell of pencil wood, of old school, that filled the hallway and offices and yet would not escape the notice of an occasional visitor, bringing to mind, perhaps, the combustion of desks and brown paper. This ancient impression is prolonged in the faces that greet him from inside the offices—the faces of interns, some with a PhD student’s late blackheads on their forehead, with premature, erudite bald patches, and meritorious bags under their eyes; the forgetful professor emeritus who wears a university badge on the lapel of his herringbone jacket and carri
es a sheaf of yellow papers, typed on an Olivetti, under his arm; the pointed face of the department secretary, who, seeing him, raises his hand, solicitous and smiling, on the other side of the glass, an unlit pipe between his teeth, a cloth tie and rimless glasses, somewhat overweight for his age; and the distracted gazes of Clara, and Matilde, the latter correcting exams, hidden behind a black mop of hair she flicks back with coquetry, silent and competitive, on seeing him arrive. It is him, this dapper university professor, dressed like an intellectual from one of Woody Allen’s movies, walking down the hallway and saying hello in such a low voice that only his shirt collar hears him, and he makes his way to his office, on the polished glass door of which is a piece of paper, stuck with Scotch tape, that says, “Chair of Aesthetics and Art Theory. Professor Dr. Gabriel Ariz. Office Hours:Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a. m.–1 p. m.”

  His marriage deteriorated with the same lentitude with which they used to collect paintings by local artists and invitations to cultural centers in the capital, to book launches, events he threw himself into with a vehemence that could only suggest a certain sense of desolation that should never be named, never mentioned, except in passing, perhaps to exemplify, in his classes, the meaning of expressionist angst, his shadow reflected against a reproduction of The Scream by Edvard Munch. He maintained inwardly that such comments were part of the scene, of the embodied drama that a good professor should be—words, gestures, empathy, a certain dramatic quality. And yet his comments on avant-garde art were just a way of distancing himself from the real meaning of that desolate head, those hands covering the ears in order not to hear the inner voices.

  He was different back then, he thinks, but he could follow his trail like somebody following a shadow, even if that shadow belongs now to another, just as there are others steering vehicles down a lane on the highway at this very moment, driving peacefully, absorbed in a daily act that, like so many others—having an aperitif, blinking on seeing the first drops of rain, buying a cinema ticket—forms a fragile network of threads, a maya of cause and effect on which they walk with the folly of one who is unaware of the void gaping below, sleepwalkers, tightrope walkers, not even suspecting that the thread along which they are sliding at that very moment could break right now—right now—on account of a mechanical failure, a triviality, a broken axle, a flat tire, an oil slick on the road surface, an invisible layer of ice on the brow of the hill, or just a furtive, frightened animal running out of the forest, pursued by the yelps of a pack of hounds that have picked up its scent, a fox emerging from the bushes and racing across the highway in order to reach the poplar grove on the other side, next to the irrigation ditch, and the sudden swerve of the driver who sees only a lengthy shadow, barely bigger than a cat, jumping over the median in front of the car, and the sudden braking of the car, which skids and spins out with a screech of burned rubber, and then the landscape spinning dizzily in front of the driver’s eyes, earth and sky inverting their natural order, because the car flips one, two, three times and collides with the median and then breaks the guardrail, and now the driver cannot see anything, or anybody, because the car, transformed into a heap of metal, flies over the hard shoulder and smashes into the hillock next to the alfalfa field, and none of the passengers feels fear, or vertigo, or pain, because they are just silent bodies, three fragile shapes, knocking against the engine casing, the bodywork, and the windows that have burst in an explosion of tiny prisms that sprinkle over the road, next to the useless skid marks and a splash of oil and gasoline. A few objects are left scattered here and there, in slightly absurd quietude, over the road. A flip-flop, a travel bag, a blue and white beach ball that rolls off toward the gas station, and the tires of the car, still turning in the same direction as the wind blowing over the alfalfa field.

  That wind, however, carries no sound to the poplar grove where the man breathes peacefully, filling his lungs, only the echoes of other voices.

  She suggested, “We could go away for the weekend. The countryside looks beautiful.”

  And he replied,“Maybe.”

  “You remember that little hotel on the other side of the valley? What wonderful views it had . . .”

  “And a good wine list.”

  “We could go for a drive and then have dinner in town. Something.”

  “Something?”

  “We should try.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “We haven’t been on a trip for a long time. I could go to a travel agency tomorrow, I’m told Bali is fantastic.”

  “Bali?”

  “Or New Zealand. It must be an extraordinary country. Or Madagascar.”

  “The other day, I saw a documentary about some amazing monkeys that live in Madagascar. Although, now that I think about it, I think they may not have been monkeys, but a species of gigantic squirrels.”

  “I saw an antique shop where they were selling Chinese sculptures at knock-down prices. A real treasure trove.”

  “We can’t fit anything else inside this house. All we need now is to put a terracotta warrior in the garden.”

  “What if we go to the cinema? Don’t you want to see the latest Woody Allen movie? It’s just opened.”

  “All of Woody Allen’s movies seem the same to me.”

  “If you won’t come, then I’ll go on my own.”

  “Please, Ana, we’re grown-ups here. If you want to go and see Woody Allen’s latest piece of trash, then go, but don’t make a scene. I’m not in the mood.”

  “I’m not making a scene . . . I’m expressing myself, that’s all, something you never do.”

  “‘I’m expressing myself, that’s all,’ . . . it sounds like a sentence out of a self-help guide.”

  “And you? Tell me, what do you think you sound like?”

  Their conversations did not end then, as used to happen, with the domestic melodrama of a Mexican ceramic plate smashing on the terrazzo of the porch, or with a punch aimed at the wardrobe door, the same door he had hit on three separate occasions in the same place, above the handle, with so much force and such a lack of precision that, the first time, he had grazed his knuckles on the wood, but ended now without a way forward, with the full stop of the door closing and Ana’s car heading in the direction of the city. Anything but mentioning Laura, anything to escape from Laura. So they never discovered a charming hotel or a restaurant whose wine list—not very extensive, but well curated—could have served as a prelude to a reconciliation, then a walk home through the neighborhood, feeling tipsy, searching for each other’s skin under their clothes to see if they might find each other that way. They were outbursts, brief flashes of vitality he didn’t encourage, since he was convinced that every move Ana made to emerge from the darkness she had sunk into was a false one. And if he did occasionally yield to the proposition of an innocent marital fling, he did so in the knowledge that a Woody Allen movie, dinner at a French restaurant, a vintage wine, and the predictable, fleeting, protocolic intercourse in the bedroom were nothing more than subtle strategies that would make her even more dejected.

  Events, however, proved too much for Ana. In the months after Laura’s death, she began to lose her mind. One morning, she went so far as to assure him she could hear somebody at night knocking softly with her knuckles, that’s what she said—“with her knuckles”—while at the same time imitating the gesture of knocking on the kitchen window, tap, tap, tap, and it could only be Laura, that is to say—she explained—Laura’s spirit. He tried to convince her that their house was not the house of the spirits, and that the only cause of such poltergeists was Polanski,“the fucking cat,” he exclaimed in a fit of temper at Ana’s insistence, “going tap, tap, tap with its paw every time you leave the kitchen window closed,” but Ana regarded him with sadness, her eyes bleary from lack of sleep. How was it possible he couldn’t understand that their daughter, transformed into ether after her collision with a frozen-fish truck, wanted to come
home? As a way of pacifying the ghost and persuading it to leave the house, he secured the services of a medium from Guipúzcoa. But at the end of that attempt at communication with the great beyond—or the right beside you, one never knows—via a Ouija board on a tall, round table decorated with esoteric liturgy, all he achieved was for Ana to wonder whether she would really end up going crazy. “To start with, I thought it was a mischievous spirit, but now there can be no doubt—it is your daughter,” pronounced the medium, still transfixed by the energy with which Laura had, apparently, expressed herself. A few days later, Ana saw, or thought she saw, her daughter in the hallway, in a red parka with her hair covered in frost. That was her own craziness, not his, he thought at the time with a coldness that frightens him a little now and explains his innate inability to give free rein to his own particular ghosts, whether mischievous or not, his intimate energies, his secrets, which was just another way, possibly more neurotic than silent, of dissolving his anguish, since, unlike that of Ana—whose unease kept moving away from her in a kind of continuous exorcism, like an emanation of bad humors, and whose pain was expressed in pointless, compulsive purchases to decorate the house or in cooking new ethnic dishes—his own was a centripetal neurosis, which instead of manifesting itself in anxiety attacks, squeezed up inside him like a ball bearing, locking him in a stunned, hieratic pose. If the plates moved, let them move, he thought; if Ana saw Laura in the hallway, let her take more sedatives; if the cat urinated on the curtains, scratched the sofas, mewed for no good reason in the hallway, or knocked at the window, tap, tap, tap, then it would be better for the vet to inject it with a mixture of potassium chloride, or arsenic, or whatever the hell vets use to sacrifice neurotic household pets; if Ana wanted to have another session with the medium from Guipúzcoa, let her do so, better that—he thought—than squandering her fortune on bingo, taking to drink, or ending up on the useless, costly couch of an inevitably pedantic, Argentinian psychoanalyst. Ana’s visits to the cemetery turned into a rite she performed alone, one he did not feel part of, though he wasn’t excluded, either. He knew they were both creating separate environments in which to dissolve their anguish, private rituals they couldn’t share with each other or communicate. They were united by silence. But when Ana asked him to go with her, he felt a superstitious fear, despite his wish to disguise it with a pretext of agnostic prejudice, or a rational argument of distance, or a slight anticlericalism before the liturgy of flowers and priests’ high-pitched voices. He thought that perhaps, deep down, what he felt was a great fear of returning to that sacred ground—after all, that’s what it was, it was a cemetery—and that the sight of the niche he hadn’t visited since the day of the funeral would arouse in him a kind of religious fervor, something like enforced piety. This wasn’t entirely improbable, under the effects of mourning, at least. In fact, Ana had discovered in prayer a way of dissolving her anguish, something that in his eyes was respectable, just as the private space he believed he needed, or that he demanded, simultaneously lessening and feeding his pain, should be in hers.