The Tenant and The Motive
Javier Cercas








"The Tenant" and "The Motive" are two darkly humorous novels from the award-winning author of "Soldiers of Salamis". "The Tenant" is the mischievous story of Mario Rota, a linguistics professor whose life starts to unravel after he twists his ankle while out jogging one day. A rival professor appears, takes over his classes and bewitches his girlfriend. Where will Rota's nightmare end — and where did it begin? "The Motive" is a satire about a writer, Alvaro, who becomes obsessed with finding the ideal inspiration for his novel. First he begins spying on his neighbours, then he starts leading them on, creating a reversal of the maxim that art follows life, with some dire consequences. Written with a supremely light touch, these witty novels are enjoyable masterpieces that linger long in the memory.






Javier Cercas




The Tenant and The Motive





The Tenant


‘Have you never been in love?’

‘Yes. With you.’

‘And how do you love me?’

‘With this.’

‘That’s your liver.’

‘Sorry, that’s not what I meant. I love you with my heart.’

    

SILVERIO LANZA








I


Mario Rota went out for a run at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. He immediately noticed the street was suffused in a halo of mist: the houses opposite, the cars parked by the sidewalk and the globes of light from the street lamps seemed to shimmer with an unstable and hazy existence. He did a few arm and leg stretches on the tiny rectangle of lawn in front of the house and thought: Fall’s here already. Instinctively, while jumping up and down and pulling his knees up to his chest, he reconsidered. He told himself September had barely begun, and vague threats flitted through his mind of ecological catastrophes. The initial symptoms, according to a well-known Italian weekly he’d been reading on the plane, on the way back from his summer vacation, would be a gradual disruption to each season’s normal weather conditions. After this worrying reflection he smiled somewhat incongruously. He went back inside and came out again a moment later, this time with his glasses on. The mist having dissolved, Mario began to run along the path of greyish flagstones between the road and the meticulous gardens, enclosed by flowerbeds and wooden fences lined up in front of the houses.

Although the difficult relationship he maintained with reality withheld any benefits that might have resulted, Mario was a fanatic for order: when he went out for a run each morning he followed an identical itinerary. Last year he ran up West Oregon, crossing Coler, McCollough and Birch, turned left on Race and kept going till Lincoln Square, an early twentieth-century plaza dominated by the mass of new stone and strange capitals of the First United Methodist Church. There he took Springfield, now on the way back, past automotive repair shops, banks, supermarkets and pizzerias, and when he got to Busey, turned left again and carried on until arriving back at West Oregon. This year, however, he’d decided to modify his route. Since he’d resumed his morning jogging routine, having returned from his vacation two days earlier, he ran in the opposite direction: now he turned left on McCollough, where the First Church of Christ Scientist stood at the corner of West Oregon, and headed towards the west of the city, crossing Nevada, Washington and Orchard. Then he ran along Pennsylvania to the end, where it was cut off by Lafayette Avenue; beyond that he ran across a grass field and up a gentle slope topped with a bare spot. Mario stopped for a moment at the crest, inhaled and exhaled deliberately, trying to keep his breathing regular, briefly admired the scenery and then took the same route back: colonial two-storey wooden houses painted white, red or olive-green, with ironwork screen-doors and garden fences covered with creepers; brick bungalows with sloping roofs; big mansions converted into student residences; squirrels swarming walnut, plane and chestnut trees, their profuse branches occasionally obstructing the paths of greyish flagstones running between the road and the meticulous gardens.




II


It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning. The streets were deserted. The only person he saw during the first five minutes of his run was a young woman crouched down beside an anemone bush in the back garden of the First Church of Christ Scientist, as he was turning right on to McCollough. The girl turned: she bared her teeth in a devout smile. Mario felt obliged to return the greeting: he smiled. Later, by then on Pennsylvania, he crossed paths with a grey-haired man in shorts and a black T-shirt, who was jogging in the opposite direction. The man’s expression seemed concentrated on a buzzing emitted from two earphones fed from a cassette player strapped to his waist. After that came a postal truck, an old, bandy-legged black man, who supported his decrepit steps with a wooden walking stick, a young woman with diligent Oriental features, a family having a boisterous breakfast on the front porch, complete with laughter and parental warnings. When, on the way home, he turned back on to West Oregon, the city seemed to have resumed its daily pulse.

That’s when he twisted his ankle.

Since he was feeling agile and keeping his breathing even, he picked up the pace for the last part of his run. When he got to West Oregon he tried to take a little short cut by jumping over a bed of dahlias. He landed badly: his left instep took the weight of his whole body. At first he felt a piercing pain and thought he’d broken his foot. With some difficulty, sitting on the lawn, he took off his running shoe and sock, checked that his ankle wasn’t swollen. The pain soon eased and Mario told himself that with any luck the mishap wouldn’t matter at all. He put his sock and shoe back on, stood up and began to walk carefully. A sharp pain tore through his ankle.

He arrived home with an obvious limp. On the porch, accompanied by a man, was Mrs Workman.

‘Mr Rota, what happened?’ said the woman with alarm, pointing at Mario’s ankle. ‘You’re limping.’

Mrs Workman was a tiny old woman, a widow with white curly hair, scrawny hands and lively green eyes. She was also Mario’s landlady.

‘Nothing serious,’ said Mario, grabbing on to the railing to pull himself up the porch steps. Neither Mrs Workman nor the man came to help him. ‘I just twisted my ankle in the most idiotic way.’

‘I hope it’s not serious,’ said Mrs Workman.

‘It won’t be,’ said Mario, as he reached the top of the steps.

Mrs Workman changed her tone.

‘I’m so pleased to have bumped into you, Mr Rota,’ she said, stretching out a hand: Mario felt as if he was shaking a bundle of dry skin and bones. ‘Let me introduce Mr Berkowickz. Barring unforeseen circumstances he’ll be the new tenant of the apartment across from yours, where Nancy used to live.’

‘Nancy’s moved?’ asked Mario.

‘She was offered a job in Springfield,’ said Mrs Workman. ‘A good job. I’m happy for her, she’s a nice girl; I loved her like a daughter. I suppose you’ll also be pleased that Nancy’s moved to Springfield,’ she added ambiguously.

‘Of course,’ Mario agreed hurriedly.

‘As for her apartment,’ Mrs Workman went on, looking at the new tenant with eyes that sought confirmation of her words, ‘I got the impression Mr Berkowickz was pleased with it.’

‘Absolutely,’ Berkowickz said. ‘It’s exactly what I need.’

He paused, then looked at Mario. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I’m sure I’ve found the perfect neighbour.’

Berkowickz cited the title of the only specialist article Mario had published in the last three years, in Italica. Smiling and turning to Mrs Workman, he declared that he and Mario were colleagues, researching matters of a similar nature, and that they’d undoubtedly be working in the same university department. Mrs Workman could not hide the satisfaction this happy coincidence gave her: a surprised smile lit up her face. Only then did Mario take a good look at Berkowickz. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with suntanned skin and a frank expression in his eyes; his incipient baldness didn’t contradict the youthful air his face exuded. He was dressed with elegance but without affectation. Otherwise, his appearance was less that of a university professor than of an elite athlete. But perhaps his most striking feature was his solid self-confidence revealed by each and every one of his gestures, as if he’d planned them in advance, or as if they were ruled by necessity.

‘I assumed,’ Berkowickz went on in the same cordial though distant tone of voice, ‘that Professor Scanlan would have announced my arrival.’

He said he’d decided to take up the university’s offer last month and had only signed the contract two weeks ago. He was sure the misunderstanding would soon be cleared up, although, he added, they shouldn’t be surprised: summer vacations easily lend themselves to these kinds of mix-ups. Finally, he was delighted it had all led in some way to this meeting, as pleasant as it was unexpected.

Berkowickz brought these words to a close with a tidy smile. Mrs Workman joined the new tenant in his optimism with a sort of clucking that for an instant threatened to dismantle her fragile frame of skin and bones. Mario felt uncomfortable: the blood of all his veins was throbbing in his ankle. Soaked in sweat, his T-shirt clung to his chest, and his armpits stung. Brushing against the grass had made his legs itch.

Mario forced a smile.

‘I’m sure it’ll all be cleared up,’ he said. ‘And I’m absolutely delighted we’re going to be neighbours.’

Mrs Workman and Berkowickz remained silent. Mario supposed he’d better add something.

‘Well.’ He smiled again, spread his arms in an apologetic gesture. ‘I’m going to go have a shower now. I’m at your service if there’s anything I can do to help,’ he added, looking at Berkowickz.

‘Thanks,’ said Berkowickz. ‘If Mrs Workman has no objections, I’ll move in this very afternoon. I’ll let you know if I need anything.’

‘OK,’ said Mario. ‘In any case, I suppose we’ll see each other tomorrow in the department. And in the evening there’s a cocktail party at the boss’s house.’

‘Excellent,’ said Berkowickz, smiling. ‘See you tomorrow. And take care of that ankle.’

‘Yes,’ chimed in Mrs Workman. ‘Do look after your ankle, Mr Rota. Sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’




III


Mario had a shower when he got home. After carefully examining the injured ankle, he took an anti-inflammatory spray and cream out of the cabinet and applied them to the swollen area. Then he made breakfast (peach juice, scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, coffee with hot milk) and ate hungrily while listening to the news on the radio.

He washed the dishes and went to his study. Sitting at his desk, he wrote out a few cheques for overdue bills (water, gas, electricity) and sealed them in envelopes ready to be mailed. Then he read over various circulars from the university and the department, threw a couple of them in the wastepaper basket and filed the rest away. He made a note in his diary of the telephone calls he should make the following day from the office, he outlined the plans for the courses he’d probably be teaching that semester and postponed a more detailed design until the department had confirmed them. Classes began on Wednesday: he’d spend Tuesday preparing for them.

At eleven-thirty he went into the living room. He put on a record, opened a can of beer, sprawled out in the armchair in front of the television and lit a cigarette, trying to ignore the annoying tingling sensation in his foot.

Then he thought of Berkowickz.

At first he felt flattered that he’d known his article, the only one Mario had published since finishing his doctorate; but the flimsy research, to which Mario was the first to admit, as much as the utterly undistinguished quarterly where it had been published, made him think again. He came up with just two hypotheses to explain Berkowickz’s curious erudition: either he’d recently been working in the same area as Mario had been when he’d written the article, in which case he’d perhaps felt obliged to examine everything published on the subject in recent years, however insufficient or faulty it might be, or else he belonged to that limited caste of academics who, solely for intellectual pleasure or to satisfy their curiosity, read through the regular publications with morose assiduousness and keep up to date on any and all investigations in their field of interest. Mario discarded the second notion out of hand, not only because it didn’t fit with the impression Berkowickz had made on him, but also because in such a case the new tenant would undoubtedly be notorious in the profession, and truth was his name didn’t even ring a bell with Mario. This conclusion comforted him.

There was not the slightest doubt, in any case, that Berkowickz was aware of the unrefined intellectual bouquet of Mario’s work — unless he only knew the title of the article or had merely leafed through it distractedly without gaining an appreciation of the poverty of its contents. This fact, however, did not worry him: though it was certain to put him in a slightly uncomfortable situation vis-à-vis Berkowickz, it was no less certain that his departmental colleagues (among them Scanlan, who was, all things considered, the only one who mattered) would never read the article, as they hadn’t read the ones he’d published before nor would they in all probability read the ones he would publish in the future. There was nothing, therefore, to worry about. Furthermore, it was unlikely, according to his earlier reasoning, that Berkowickz would turn out to be anything more than a novice in the profession; from there it could be hoped that his own work might be either immature and incipient, or as mediocre as Mario’s. If, to either of those two possibilities, he added the knowledge Mario possessed of the explicit and implicit rules that governed the mechanics of the department, the result was that he found himself in an advantageous position in respect to Berkowickz.

He got up from the armchair, turned over the record and sat back down again. He took a long drink of beer, lit another cigarette. Then he tried to foresee the immediate consequences Berkowickz’s arrival might produce. According to his contract, Mario taught two phonology courses per semester; in practice, however, they’d always ended up turning into three, rounding his annual salary up to a satisfactory sum. If, as happened the previous year, the department didn’t manage to attract a sufficient number of students to fill three classes, they’d come to a tacit agreement by which Mario would teach a course in another speciality, either semantics, syntax or morphology. So, three classes were practically guaranteed. Seen from this basic perspective, the presence of Berkowickz could not alter things in any essential way: in all probability, the new professor, recently arrived in the department and therefore with fewer rights, less experience and, surely, with a more skeletal curriculum vitae even than Mario’s, would take one of the phonology courses he regularly taught, completing his workload with one of the leftovers from the other specialities. As for Mario, he’d undoubtedly add to his two courses — leaving aside the possibility, which they’d considered in the first semester of the previous year, of opening a fourth phonology class — a third in semantics, syntax or morphology, or else — which might even be preferable — some administrative work, not only ensuring his income would not suffer from Berkowickz’s arrival, but might well benefit from it.

After this series of petty reflections, the vague anxiety planted by the aggressively optimistic and healthy air the new tenant had brandished on the porch dissolved into a sort of pity not lacking in sympathy. And although he didn’t deny that Berkowickz could eventually become a threat to the preservation of his privacy — for Mario considered the separation of work and private life indispensable, on a par with an adequate salary — nothing led him to believe that it might make him feel uncomfortable or, in the last resort, oblige him to toy with the possibility of moving to a new apartment, especially since the one he occupied now satisfied him from every point of view. Not only was it located in a nice residential area relatively close to campus, but it also had a veranda, back yard and garage, and furthermore, he’d managed, with some effort, to furnish it entirely to his taste during the year he’d been living there.

The apartment consisted of a study, living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. As well as the typewriter and computer, there was a dark oak table in the study, with drawers on both sides, which served as his desk, a filing cabinet, several bookshelves; there was also a wicker armchair, an easy chair and a few other places to sit. The bedroom furnishings were sparse: two closets built into the back wall with full-length mirrors on the doors, a chest of drawers made of a pale wood against the right-hand wall across from the bed, which was covered with a deep red eiderdown. An extension of one wall divided the living room in two. On the left-hand side was a pale wooden table surrounded by metal chairs; two vaguely cubist pictures hung on the walls, along with a poster for an exhibition of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec in a gallery in Turin. On the right-hand side of the living room there was a television, a record-player, a cream-coloured sofa, two armchairs of a similar colour but different design, a transparent, low double-decker table (through the top level periodicals, books and magazines piled on the lower level were visible); hanging from a hook on the wall was a reproduction of a medium-sized Hockney painting. Separating this part of the room from the dining area was a glass cabinet crammed with valuable and not so valuable objects: a marble elephant, an Algerian pipe, an hourglass, three antique pistols, a frigate imprisoned in a Chianti bottle, several clay figures and other trifles that Mario had collected over the years with neither acquisitive nor sentimental zeal. Except for those of the kitchen and bathroom, the walls of the house were covered with grainy wood panelling; the baseboard and door and window frames were painted white.

He could not have found the apartment more satisfactory, which was why Mario considered it foolishness even to raise the possibility of leaving it, for no other reason than the fact that a colleague had suddenly turned into a neighbour. Furthermore, he thought optimistically, it’s hard to imagine I’ll be worse off for the change. There was no doubt that Nancy had been at the very least an annoying neighbour. She was an untidily stout woman, careless about her appearance, with dry, straw-coloured hair, quite ugly but at the same time endowed with an obvious and aggressive sexuality. The feminist ideas and prejudices against Latin men that Nancy brought up in any conversation, no matter how casual or brief (on the stairway, taking out the garbage, while washing the car), had not facilitated pacific cohabitation in the building. Otherwise, the strange affection Mrs Workman professed for her translated into a blind trust that had always made Mario feel uncomfortable, for it put him in an awkward position not only each time Nancy accused him of getting drunk on his own, but also when she denounced him to Mrs Workman for spying on her whenever a man entered her apartment, especially at night. On another occasion, Mrs Workman and the rest of the tenants in the building — a married couple of Belgian origin, and a young woman who worked in the admissions office at the university — had to intercede to keep Nancy from filing an official complaint with the police for his alleged sexual aggression: she insisted she’d caught him masturbating behind the curtain in his living room while she was sunbathing on a lounge chair in the back yard.




IV


‘Ginger? It’s Mario.’

‘How are you?’ asked Ginger. Not waiting for a reply, she asked another question. ‘When did you get back?’

‘A couple of days ago,’ answered Mario. ‘I haven’t called because I’ve been getting things organized. You know.’

‘Yeah.’

Mario thought: The telephone dulls people. Ginger’s voice sounded neutral, colourless. Mario said, ‘If you like, we could have lunch together.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘At Timpone’s,’ Mario insisted. ‘We’ll celebrate our reunion.’

‘I don’t know,’ Ginger said again.

Mario insisted again.

There was a silence. The murmur of another conversation crossed the line. Mario heard, ‘OK.’

‘I’ll meet you at Timpone’s in an hour then.’

He hung up. He looked at his watch: it was noon.

At five to one he arrived at the restaurant. Ginger was sitting at one of the tables at the back, in front of the big windows that gave the room so much light. She was wearing a light-blue dress; her hair was bunched in an imperfect bun at the nape of her neck. As he pulled out a chair to sit down, Mario thought: She looks lovely.

‘What happened?’ asked Ginger. ‘You’re limping.’

‘Well,’ said Mario, smiling as if in apology, ‘this morning I twisted my ankle. Jogging.’

‘I hope it’s nothing serious.’

‘It’s not.’

Ginger ordered a cold steak with rice, Mario, a salad and curried chicken. They drank burgundy.

‘You don’t seem too happy that I’m back.’

‘I don’t know if I am,’ admitted Ginger. Then she asked, ‘How did it go?’

‘I got bored,’ said Mario with his gaze buried in the chicken. ‘By the second week I didn’t know what to do with myself.’

They ate in silence. The waiter came over twice to see if they needed anything and make sure they liked the food; they both nodded without enthusiasm.

Though he already knew the answer, Mario enquired, ‘How have things been going around here?’

‘Same as ever,’ said Ginger. ‘All very quiet; too quiet really: there was hardly anyone left to talk to.’

‘You must’ve got a lot of work done,’ Mario ventured.

Ginger had stayed at the university all summer to keep working on her thesis. To Mario’s question she replied with a shrug of her shoulders and a gesture of fatigue. She said, ‘I suppose, quite a bit, and in lots of different directions, but I’m still not sure which is the right one.’

Mario thought Ginger’s expression now was opaque and inexpressive, like her voice had been a little while ago on the phone. They talked about the details Mario had suggested she examine during his absence. Ginger answered Mario’s questions in monosyllables. At one point the girl’s features seemed to brighten up.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, as if leaving something behind. ‘Tomorrow I’ll talk to Berkowickz.’

‘To whom?’

‘Berkowickz,’ Ginger repeated, looking Mario in the eye. ‘They finally managed to hire him. Apparently he made all sorts of demands; you know how those people are. Anyway, Scanlan managed it; he was very determined and he did it. Branstyne told me he’s very pleased.’

The waiter took the plates away and asked if they wanted dessert. Ginger ordered apple pie; Mario declined the offer and lit a cigarette.

‘But I thought you already knew about Berkowickz,’ said Ginger.

‘I didn’t know,’ said Mario, puffing out a smoke ring.

‘I’m sure it had already been mentioned before you went on holiday.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Mario repeated.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ginger said. ‘The thing is, we all stand to benefit. Especially me.’

Ginger said that Berkowickz’s latest article, ‘The Syntax of the Word-Initial Consonant in Italian’, published in the April issue of Language, left the investigation open at precisely the point where she had begun. She said she was sure Berkowickz must have continued working in that very direction and, even if that was not the case, he would undoubtedly be interested in the study she was attempting to carry out and would certainly hasten to offer her his support. She declared again that the following day she would speak to Berkowickz. If things went as she expected (she’d been told Berkowickz was a kind, hard-working and enthusiastic man), perhaps he might offer to supervise her thesis. She was sure Mario wouldn’t mind letting him take over.

‘Besides,’ she concluded, half-closing her eyes and feigning an expression she meant to appear mischievous or dreamy, ‘just imagine: it always looks good having a guy like that direct your thesis.’

Mario was disconcerted. He didn’t know why he still hadn’t told Ginger that Berkowickz had just rented an apartment in the building where he lived, nor could he understand how Ginger could humiliate him like that, taking it as a given that he, seemingly incompetent, wouldn’t mind giving up the supervision of her thesis, however insignificant or merely nominal a position it might be, in favour of Berkowickz, whose intellectual worth was seemingly beyond doubt. And what surprised him even more — although here the surprise was perhaps only an instinctive form of defence — was not having recognised the title of the article Ginger had mentioned. For the rest, he found it impossible to associate Berkowickz’s name with anything vaguely related to phonological investigation. But what really had Mario stunned was the aplomb with which he was accepting the situation: not a single gesture of objection, nor of impatience, nor of nervousness. It was like when he realised he was dreaming while still dreaming: everything lacked importance except the certainty that nothing could affect him and that at any moment he would wake up and the dream would have vanished into thin air, without leaving the slightest trace.

After a while Mario realised Ginger had been talking away without his paying any attention, absorbed in the task of crafting smoke rings. Feeling rather tired, Mario supposed she’d been talking about Berkowickz, about her thesis, about herself, maybe about him. He tried to change the subject by asking about mutual friends, about Ginger’s parents, whom she’d visited for a few days, about news from the department. Then the conversation lagged again. They paid and left.

On the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant, Mario noticed his ankle was hurting.

‘I’ve got some things to do right now,’ he said. ‘But what do you think about coming over this evening for a drink?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ginger apologised, perhaps insincerely. ‘I promised Brenda we’d go see a movie.’

Brenda was Ginger’s room-mate; to soften the blow of the rebuff, Mario asked after her. Ginger told him she’d just come back from California, where she’d spent two weeks.

‘You could see a movie some other time,’ Mario suggested without much conviction. Then he lied. ‘I have to talk to you about something.’

‘Some other time,’ said Ginger. ‘I can’t today.’

‘OK,’ Mario gave in. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ Ginger agreed vaguely, and as Mario walked towards his car she added, raising her voice slightly, ‘Take care of that ankle, Mario. Sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

Mario thought: Everything repeats itself.




V


Instead of going home he drove towards the hospital. He parked on an expanse of asphalt surrounded by grass, and was about to enter the building through the main door when he noticed someone waving to him. He changed direction and approached the car window out of which a young woman with bulging eyes had just been waving her hand.

‘Sorry,’ said the young woman when Mario was a few feet away. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

Mario thought: How strange.

He went into the hospital. At the end of a corridor with very white walls, he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy hands was entrenched. Leaning on the counter to take a bit of weight off his ankle, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone, Mario explained the problem. The nurse made him fill in a form and asked him to sit down and wait in one of the rows of chairs facing the counter. Mario sat down in one of the chairs, leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. A couple of times he was distracted by the nurse leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He could hear her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. It’s incredible, he thought, as if smiling. I’m going to end up obsessed. After a while he stood up and went over to the counter. He asked the nurse if it would be much longer before he was seen. With a certain harshness, perhaps angrily, the nurse answered, ‘No,’ stood up and disappeared through a back door in the cave. As he limped back to his seat, Mario thought that since he’d entered the hospital he hadn’t seen anyone except the crimson-faced nurse, no doctors, no patients, no other nurses. Then, as if someone had read his mind and wanted to reassure him, he heard his name: at the other end of the foyer a nurse was motioning him to follow her.

They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to remove his shoe and sock from his left foot and lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room. She examined the injured ankle, which had now swollen considerably. Since he thought the nurse was caressing him, Mario sat up, leaning on one elbow: he noticed she was young and pretty. The nurse placed a hand on his chest and brought her face close to his with a smile Mario didn’t know how to interpret.

‘The doctor will be here in a minute,’ she announced, and the beam of oblique light revealed a downy shadow darkening her upper lip.

After a few minutes the doctor came in. He was a pale, small Oriental man who moved with a strange blend of nervousness and precision. He greeted Mario in a friendly way and tried to joke about the benefits of sport. Mario said to himself that at least he’d read the file he’d filled out in the foyer.

‘Hmm,’ the doctor murmured, looking extremely closely at the ankle, seemingly trying to decipher the meaning of the bulge of flesh around it.

Smiling, the nurse watched from a discreet distance. The doctor pressed the foot in several spots. He looked carefully; his eyes narrowed into tiny slots.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asked, pressing one finger against the lower part of his ankle.

‘Quite a bit,’ Mario admitted. He was on the verge of adding, somewhat impatiently, ‘I wouldn’t have come here if it didn’t hurt.’

‘Hmm,’ the doctor murmured again.

‘Is it serious?’ asked Mario.

‘I don’t think so,’ the other man answered, straightening up and looking him in the eye: the two slots turned into green ovals. ‘Nothing’s broken, it’s just a sprain.’

Mario wanted to ask something, but the doctor turned to the nurse, whose quiet smile had not altered, and gave her some instructions he couldn’t quite catch, then left the room.

The nurse began to bandage his foot. Just as she fixed the bandage in place with a piece of surgical tape, the doctor reappeared.

‘Excellent,’ he said.

‘How long will I have to wear this?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the doctor, incredibly. ‘A week. Maybe more. It depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘I don’t know,’ the doctor said again. ‘Come back in a week.’

‘I suppose I’ll be able to walk.’

‘Of course,’ said the doctor. ‘The nurse will give you a crutch to help you. But carry on as normal, avoiding excessive efforts, of course: the less you use your ankle, the better.’

Mario called a taxi from the cave by the entrance. The nurse accompanied him to the door. When the taxi stopped on the driveway outside, the woman smiled. She said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to the doctor. Come back whenever you like.’

For no particular reason, Mario thought: Thank goodness.




VI


Mario had arrived in the United States in August 1981. He’d been given a grant from the Italian government that would allow him to complete a doctorate in linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin.

The first months in the new country were not pleasant. He couldn’t or didn’t want to begin any friendships. With Americans, mostly young southerners, he found it difficult to get past the limits of simple utilitarian relationships. As for the Europeans he chanced to meet, they all struck him as bland, entirely lacking in charm. Although he had ample time and resources, he barely worked; he spent his time in the city’s cinemas, reading newspapers, watching television, waiting for the Christmas holidays. When they arrived, Mario returned to Turin.

He’d always believed that no special link bound him to his country; back in Italy he understood that no special link bound him to any place other than his country. He felt happy.

By the time he returned to Austin after the holidays, he’d decided to give up the grant in the summer and go back to Italy for good.

That was when he met Lisa.

Lisa was then a twenty-seven-year-old woman with straight, black, shiny hair, gentle eyes and sharp features, as if chiselled on to her face. She walked with short, very quick steps, and her every gesture revealed an iron will. But the thing that really attracted attention, in the midst of the sloppy attire that reigned on campus, was the extreme care, almost luxury, with which she dressed. She applied her lipstick time and again, meticulously, and her eyebrows were always a perfect line.

Although no one had introduced them, Mario and Lisa smiled at each other whenever they passed in a corridor, on the stairs, or at the entrance to the humanities building. From there they quickly struck up a conversation at a party to which Enzo Bonali, a history professor Mario had met by chance and who was supervising Lisa’s doctoral thesis, had invited them both. Hiding behind cocktails and canapés since entering the house, knowing none of the other guests, Mario was pleased to see Lisa arrive at the party: he immediately approached her.

They spent the whole evening talking. Lisa told him she’d been born in New York, although she’d spent most of her life in San Diego. Now she was working with Bonali on her thesis, whicn dealt with some aspect of the process of Italian unification. Mario told her he intended to return to Italy in the summer, and laughingly confessed to not liking the United States. Lisa admitted she didn’t like it much either, but insinuated that she considered it an error not to take advantage of the opportunities the country offered. At the end of the party Lisa offered to drive him home.

Two days later they went out for dinner.

Mario didn’t go back to Italy in the summer. Spurred on by Lisa, he’d begun to work on his thesis, and thought that a vacation in Italy would unnecessarily interrupt the rhythm of his work. He only allowed himself a week off to go to New Orleans with Lisa.

A year and a half later he defended his thesis; Lisa had done so a few months earlier. They both applied for teaching positions in various North American universities. Mario had several interested replies, but nothing definite. Lisa, on the other hand, received three offers. After discussing it with Mario, she accepted a position at Brown University: it wasn’t the best, but the university agreed to employ the contracted professor’s spouse.

They were married in July, travelled around Italy for all of August, and returned to the United States just in time to begin the new semester.

Before a year was up Mario had realized his marriage was a failure. One night, after two weeks of fights and uncomfortable silences, Mario and Lisa went out for dinner, then they went to a movie. When they got home they sat in the back yard and smoked in silence. It was a clear spring night, but the smell of summer was on the breeze, the sky was strewn with stars. At some point, Lisa said, ‘Mario, it’s over.’

They divorced that summer.




VII


The next day Mario woke up at eight, had a shower with his left foot wrapped up in a plastic bag and had breakfast. Then he called a taxi.

At nine-thirty he arrived at the foreign languages building: in his left hand he carried a leather briefcase, in the right, a crutch. When he crossed the foyer of the building he noticed that his bandaged foot and precarious gait attracted more attention than he’d expected: he felt uncomfortable.

He went up in the elevator alone. When he got to the fourth floor, instead of going to the central office of the department, he walked towards his office. He was happy not to bump into anyone in the corridor: although he knew he was going to have to explain about his ankle, the mere thought of it made him feel sick. After poking the key about in the lock for a moment he opened the office door. He instinctively closed it again, because the light was on and someone was inside. He apologized as he pulled the door closed. ‘Sorry.’

How strange, he said to himself. I’ve never gone to the wrong office. Immediately he reasoned logically: the key to his office could only open the door to his office. He looked at the number on the key and the number on the door. They were the same: 4043. He was about to put the key back into the lock when the door was opened from inside: the silhouette of Berkowickz filled the frame.

‘What a coincidence,’ Berkowickz exclaimed with a smile. ‘We seem to be condemned to meet in the most unexpected ways.’ Then, pointing at the white bandage around Mario’s foot and the crutch tucked under his right arm, he asked, ‘But hey, what’s happened with your ankle?’

‘There must be some mistake,’ Mario stuttered clumsily, immediately noticing the incoherence of his observation.

‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Berkowickz went on, as if he hadn’t heard what Mario had just said. ‘Though with things like that, you can never tell.’

Mario thought: Now he’s going to say that sometimes the silliest little things can complicate our lives. He repeated, ‘There must be some mistake.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Berkowickz, perhaps understanding. He turned around and left the office door open. ‘Of course, there’s been some mistake. This is a complete pigsty. I understand that before I arrived it was occupied by one of those Spaniards who shower once a week and leave a trail of filth wherever they go. There’s a bit of everything here,’ he said, sweeping his arms around the office, ‘beer cans, empty yogurt tubs, ashtrays full of cigarette butts, even a little fridge with a piece of mouldy cheese in it, and papers in a mess all over the place. I’m going to have to find someone to help me clean all this up. I can’t do it on my own.’

‘I’m going to speak to the secretary,’ said Mario.

‘Thanks so much, Mario,’ said Berkowickz. ‘But I don’t think it’s worth your trouble. I don’t think the secretary will be able to come and help me: she looked very busy.’

When he got to the main office of the department, Branstyne and Swinczyc were speaking in low tones. They stopped talking as soon as they noticed Mario’s presence; they turned towards him and said hello. Mario thought they’d been talking about him.

Branstyne was younger than Mario, short with a fragile complexion, receding hairline, indistinct features. He had very intense blue eyes, which revealed a vigorous intelligence: he was without doubt, despite his youth, the most brilliant member of the department. To all that, Branstyne added an unfailing congeniality and an Italian wife, Tina, young and lovely, who made absolutely divine fettuccini al pesto. Tina had managed to turn the friendliness they felt towards one another into a closer bond. As for Swinczyc, Mario barely had anything more to do with him than the routines of work imposed, but at the same time had little enthusiasm for his sidelong glances, at once servile and haughty, his nervous little laughs and the annoying jokes he frequently enjoyed. He knew, however, that Branstyne had a link with Swinczyc, though he was unaware how strong it was, and this caused him to treat the latter with a certain deference, which could at times be mistaken for affection.

Branstyne and Swinczyc asked about Mario’s ankle. He tried to play down the importance of the mishap, joking about the benefits of exercise. While he was talking, strangely, he felt an excessive awareness of the smiles of the two professors, as if someone was focusing a spotlight on their faces. He thought: I’ve experienced this before.

Branstyne said, ‘See you this evening at the boss’s house.’

‘Of course,’ said Mario. ‘See you there.’




VIII


‘What is professor Berkowickz doing in my office?’ Mario asked brusquely.

Without knocking, he’d barged into the office of the secretary, who never closed her door.

‘You don’t know how glad I am to see you, Professor Rota,’ exclaimed Joyce, smiling behind her desk and standing up from the chair on which she’d spread her flesh. She immediately asked, remorsefully, ‘But what’s happened to your ankle?’

‘It’s nothing,’ answered Mario.

‘What do you mean nothing? Is anything broken? Is it a sprain? Oh, my goodness! You have to be so careful! Just this summer, as a matter of fact,’ Joyce went on, her eyes bright, ‘a friend of my Winnie’s. . incidentally, I suppose you’ve heard that Winnie got into the University of Iowa. I’m so proud of her, imagine: already in university, and she’s really just a little girl. . Anyway, as I was saying, this summer a friend of Winnie’s. .’

Joyce was the secretary to the head of the department. A mature woman, with hair so blonde it looked bleached, eyes without brows, she was at least six foot two and easily weighed over 250 pounds: all this combined to give her a notorious cetacean air. The childish clothing she tended to wear (flowery dresses with flounces, silk ribbons in her hair and around her waist, flared or pleated skirts, kilts) and her innocent ponytails, as well as her habit of swaying down the corridors of the department like a subway car, humming charming popular children’s songs, contrasted starkly with her age and the boundless dimensions of her body. She was a widow and had but one passion: her daughter Winnie, the ups and downs of whose life each and every member of the department could expect to be punctually and personally informed of. At the end of the previous year, however, she made an exception: the day that Winnie received her acceptance from the University of Iowa, Joyce stood in front of the elevator door, on the fourth floor, shouting the news in a tone sounding vaguely like a radio announcer. Later, when the university police — alerted by someone who’d told them a fundamentalist preacher was causing trouble in the building — came to arrest her, Scanlan had to intervene to clear up the misunderstanding.

‘Excuse me for interrupting, Joyce,’ Mario cut expeditiously into the secretary’s discourse. Then, with the impression that he was about to formulate a question that would remain unanswered, he added, ‘I’m in a bit of a hurry. Could you be so kind as to explain what Professor Berkowickz is doing in my office?’

Joyce seemed disappointed: her eyes dulled. She sounded almost irritated. ‘Oh that,’ she said, turning away to sit down behind her desk. ‘Professor Scanlan wants to talk to you. He’ll probably explain it. I just follow orders,’ she concluded while smiling in a way Mario thought either stupid or worrying.

He knocked on Scanlan’s office door.

‘Come in,’ he heard.

He opened the door. Scanlan stood up and came over to shake his hand. He asked about the state of his ankle and how the accident had happened. Then he asked him to sit down in one of the leather chairs facing his desk and said, ‘Just let me finish signing these papers and then we’ll talk.’

Scanlan had been running the department with a firm hand for several years, combining demonstrable administrative capability with academic prestige cleverly carved out over the years not so much with intellectual tools as with political ones. He was getting on in years, a tall man, exaggeratedly slim, with complex, polite, almost cloying gestures. His hair, white and plastered down at the base of his skull and at his temples, lengthened, greying into a pointed goatee beard. Like fish swimming in a fishbowl, his eyes worried the lenses of his glasses. He dressed immaculately with a calculated touch of extravagance.

‘Joyce told me you wanted to speak to me,’ Mario said when Scanlan set aside the papers he’d been signing.

‘Well, there’s no rush,’ said Scanlan, smiling with all his teeth. ‘Really, it’s not so important. We can talk about it some other time more calmly.’

‘Whatever it is,’ said Mario, ‘I’d rather do it now.’

Scanlan lowered his eyes, shifted in his chair, changed position, pensively straightened the papers he’d just signed and stroked his beard. When he raised his gaze, the fish flashed anxiously behind the lenses of his glasses.

‘You’re right, it’s better to do it now,’ he agreed. His tone of voice had changed. ‘It can’t wait till later. Allow me to get straight to the point.’

‘I’d appreciate it,’ said Mario.




IX


‘As I believe you know,’ Scanlan began in a neutral voice, ‘the department is going through a difficult time economically. Actually it’s not just the department: the whole university is over a barrel. The state teaching subsidy has been reduced by five per cent compared to last year and, this past month, we have been obliged to bear a series of expenditures and anticipate others that have put us in the firing line. I’ll spare you the details: the circumstances don’t differ fundamentally from those I described at the last meeting we held in June; if they have changed, it’s for the worse. I don’t know if the elections are going to improve the outlook; what I do know is that at this moment it’s disheartening. I’m left with no option but to battle with it and, believe me, it’s no easy task: the main thing is to protect the general interests of the department, even if this adversely affects one individual. Well.’ He paused, ran his right hand over his hair, stroked his beard, went on in the same tone of voice. ‘On the other hand, as you must undoubtedly know as well, we have managed to attract a professor as prestigious as Daniel Berkowickz. I must admit it wasn’t easy. Between you and me, up to the last minute I didn’t believe we’d be able to achieve it: the conditions he demanded were virtually prohibitive. Nor will I hide from you that I’ve spared no effort to secure what I had set out to achieve. As you’ll understand, it’s barely possible to exaggerate the significance that the presence of someone at the forefront of linguistic investigation and with such an enviable CV might have for the department. But, as well as improving the department’s prestige, I am convinced that Berkowickz will be an invaluable stimulus for us all, even those who publish an article every five years in a third-rate journal.’

Since he’d seen the allusion coming, Mario was able to take it without batting an eye. He just pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger, and, as he noticed his right arm beginning to get faint pins and needles, he eased it off the brace of the crutch. When he heard Scanlan’s voice again he wondered if he might have stopped listening as he changed position.

‘At last we have him here.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What do we have here?’ asked Mario, glancing over his shoulder.

‘Professor Berkowickz, of course,’ Scanlan explained kindly, without apparently registering Mario’s momentary lapse. He went on, ‘To do so we had to make him an offer that I wouldn’t hesitate to describe as attractive. Once again I’ll spare you the superfluous details and summarize; among other things we’ve guaranteed him a minimum of three courses per semester. You’ll understand that this affects you directly: your situation is going to have to change, but I’m convinced you’ll be able to accept the sacrifice for the good of the department.’

‘No, I won’t,’ Mario heard himself say. ‘Cut it short.’

Scanlan looked annoyed. He explained, ‘At the moment, we’re only able to offer you one course per semester. This means your salary will be reduced to a third of what you were earning. You’ll also have to keep in mind that taxes have gone up: we’ll all be feeling that. On the other hand, we mustn’t rule out the possibility that, student numbers permitting, we could at some point (not, of course, this semester) open a new course; naturally, that class would be yours. Moreover you could always apply for one of the research grants the university offers, or even one of the administrative posts from the rector’s office, although I fear they’re all taken for the time being. And it goes without saying that you can count on the department’s support and, if need be, on my own.

Mario didn’t listen to the last sentence of Scanlan’s speech. He blinked. He tried to put his ideas in order. Affecting a false self-assurance, he began, ‘Look, Scanlan, in my contract it states that the department —’

‘Mario,’ Scanlan gently checked him, ‘don’t make things any more difficult. I expect you realize you’re in no position to demand anything: if we’ve been able to offer you three courses up till now it’s because we had them. Things have changed now. As for your contract, don’t force me to tell you it’s not worth the paper it’s written on: it was hard enough keeping you here with all the pressure I’ve been getting. Rest assured you can be thankful not to have found your contract rescinded when you returned from your vacation.’

Mario blinked again. He mumbled something Scanlan didn’t hear, or pretended not to hear.

‘I suppose I don’t need to tell you either that any legal action would be counterproductive,’ added Scanlan. ‘You’d find yourself out of a job before you knew what hit you.’

‘Sons of bitches,’ Mario murmured in Italian.

‘What did you say?’ asked Scanlan.

Mario erased the comment with a gesture. Scanlan sighed.

‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘it’s a matter of tightening your belt for a while. I’m sure that by spring at the latest, if not after the elections, things will change.’

Mario stood up to leave. Perplexed, he noted that he didn’t feel resentful: a strange calm overcame him, as if nothing he’d just heard could really affect him, or as if instead of it happening to him he’d been told about it. That’s why he wasn’t surprised by Scanlan’s almost affectionate tone of voice.

‘I hope you’ll be coming to the house this afternoon,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Joan would like to see you. It’s at five.’

‘Of course,’ said Mario unthinkingly. ‘I’ll be there.’

As he left the office he reflected: I’ve gone crazy. Scanlan just practically fired me and I’m going to go to his party. And instead of protesting I say nothing. I’ve gone crazy.




X


‘Professor Rota,’ warbled Joyce at his back. ‘Let me show you your new office.’

Mario walked down the hall beside the secretary, whose voluminous body oscillated dangerously over the high heels of a pair of summer shoes, with tiny buckles. Joyce talked about a possible boyfriend for Winnie. They crossed paths with two graduate students who looked at Mario’s bandaged ankle and the crutch that supported his vacillating steps. They said hello; he returned their greetings. As they passed the office that until recently had been Mario’s, Joyce pointed, like someone finding a piece of information that confirmed a new hypothesis, at the pile of objects mounting up in the hallway: a portable fridge, books, cardboard boxes brimming with papers, dirty ashtrays. Mario said to himself that Berkowickz had found someone to help him with the clean-up. He also noticed that the office door was slightly open and caught a snippet of conversation, which he didn’t understand.

His new office was at the end of the hall, among the grad students’ offices. The door had a metal plaque with a number — 4024 — and two names: Olalde, Hyun. Humming through her teeth, Joyce wrestled with the lock; finally she opened the door.

‘Good morning, Professor Olalde,’ the secretary sang out. ‘I’ve brought you a new office-mate.’

Mario thought Joyce was making fun of him, but didn’t say anything. At the far end of the office Olalde looked up suspiciously from the heap of papers he had in front of him, arched his eyebrows, emitted a grunt and lowered his gaze again.

Olalde was Spanish, overweight, almost completely bald and rather ungainly. He leaned to the right when he walked, with one shoulder higher than the other, and never smiled, but when he opened his mouth he revealed a double row of uneven, ochre-coloured, quite deteriorated teeth. He was a bachelor, and some attributed this fact to his notorious lack of attention to personal hygiene. But the most striking feature of his physical appearance was the black patch held in place by a band that crossed from one side of his virtually bare skull to the other, covering his right eye and making him look like an ex-combatant, an appearance his broken-down frame did nothing to contradict. He taught Spanish literature and, despite his being one of the longest-standing members of the department, Mario knew that his opinion barely counted at decision-making time. Mario also knew he was a sort of scrap the department had decided to keep on for some reason that escaped him.

‘Professor Olalde, as friendly and communicative as ever,’ said Joyce, addressing Mario with a voice tinged with animosity. ‘But don’t worry, Hyun is a charming young man. And you’ll see that, even though it doesn’t have air-conditioning, the office is very good. It’s just a matter of tidying it up a little. Oh, and before winter sets in we’ll get the heating fixed.’

The new office was no smaller than the old one, although Mario was going to have to share it with two colleagues. There were three desks covered in books and papers, with several drawers on each side, three revolving chairs, two metal cupboards, a filing cabinet with a coffee maker on top of it and some shelves built into the walls, where books piled up in perfect disorder. A picture window looking out on to a red-brick wall let in insufficient light. There were damp stains on the ceiling.

Joyce said, ‘I’m going to go get Sue to help us bring your things from the other office, Professor Rota. I’ll be right back.’

As soon as the secretary had left, Olalde raised his gaze from his papers and looked at Mario with his one eye. Then, as Mario took a seat, he stood up, as far as his stoop would allow, and lumbered towards him.

‘Don’t worry, young man,’ he said in a laboured and complicit English, as if he were confiding a secret. ‘That’s the way things work around here. What are you going to do?’

Since he thought Olalde wanted to console him, Mario replied drily, ‘I’m not worried.’ Then he thought and didn’t say: But I should be. He asked, ‘What makes you think I am?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Olalde repeated, ignoring Mario’s question. He went on without sarcasm, ‘Deep down this is paradise. You only have to look around: everything’s clean, everyone’s friendly, everything works — except this office, you understand. I suppose at first it was an accident, but later, when I saw that nothing worked here (pay no attention to whatever they might say, we’ll spend the winter without heating and no one will fix the broken pipes that soak the walls), once I realized that, it was me who requested staying here.’

With a mixture of pity and scorn, Mario thought: He’s crazy.

‘And tell me,’ Olalde enquired, ‘why have they sent you here?’

‘I requested it.’

‘I see, I see,’ nodded Olalde, twisting his mouth into a grimace that might have been a smile. He clicked his tongue against his palate. ‘You feel hard done by. I don’t blame you: it’s normal not to trust anyone any more. I confess I don’t trust anyone either. And nevertheless I’ll tell you something: this country is full of fantastic people. Yes, sir: enterprising, healthy people, bursting with optimism, a little dull, perhaps boring, I’ll grant you that. But let me tell you something else, the great advantage of this country, something that makes me feel a bit at home, because in Spain the same thing goes on, you don’t have to listen to anyone here, the only thing you have to do is talk. People talk and talk and talk, but no one listens. You’ll realize that for someone like me that’s a delight.’ He paused pensively and added, ‘Otherwise, I understand, young man, Europeans never get entirely acclimatised: the old civilisation, the experience of centuries and all that. Have you read Henry James?’

‘I don’t have time to read philosophy.’

‘Henry James wrote novels; the philosopher was his brother.’

‘I don’t have time to read novels either.’

‘You don’t have to read them all, man. One’s enough: in reality all James’s novels say the same thing.’

Mario was glad when Joyce walked in just then with Sue, a typist who worked in the main office. Olalde retreated to his desk and turned his attention back to the papers on it.

In half an hour they’d completed the transfer of Mario’s things from one office to the other. Olalde, enclosed in a gruff silence, didn’t move from his chair in all of this time. Mario thanked Joyce and Sue, then went over to Ginger’s office, which was on the other side of the hall. He knocked on the door: no one answered. He returned to his office and called a taxi. When he passed Berkowickz’s office, as he was leaving the department, he noticed the door was shut. He stopped for a moment, stuck his ear to the door, held his breath but heard nothing.

When he got home he phoned Ginger.

‘Brenda? It’s Mario.’

‘Oh. How are you?’

‘Fine. Is Ginger there?’

‘I haven’t seen her all morning. Do you want me to give her a message when she gets home?’

‘No, that’s OK,’ Mario hesitated. ‘Just tell her I called.’

‘I’ll tell her,’ said Brenda. ‘How was your vacation?’

‘Really good,’ Mario lied, to avoid explanations. ‘And yours?’

Brenda spoke passionately about California.




XI


At five o’clock on the dot a taxi dropped Mario off in front of Scanlan’s house. It was a one-storey, rectangular building, long and low, with an expanse of cream-coloured walls, interrupted only by the pale wooden front door, and a big picture window on the right. In front of the house were clumps of hydrangeas and chrysanthemums and an ample lawn watered by constant sprinklers. Two slate pathways cut across it: one led directly to the front door, the other, parallel to the first, ended at a shed or garage made of dark wood, with a red door, in front of which were parked two cars of European design.

Scanlan’s wife came out to meet him on the path. She was wearing a very tight black dress. Ash-grey highlights lightened her short, straight hair here and there. Her hands had more rings than fingers. Whenever he saw Joan, Mario reflected that years of shared life eventually conferred on couples a similarity that had something depraved about it: Joan moved her hands with the same quick, almost nervous precision with which Scanlan moved his. They also shared that sort of resignation that softens the faces of people who’ve given up the struggle to camouflage the ravages of time and taken refuge in the consolation of a dignified old age.

‘How are you, Mario?’ Joan greeted him, taking his arm. ‘David just told me about your ankle. If he’d told me earlier I would have come and picked you up at home.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Mario. ‘I’m starting to get used to it. To taxis and to the ankle.’

Joan laughed deafeningly and said without irony, ‘The best people get the worst luck.’

They went inside. In the living room there were two tables covered with canapés and drinks. Beyond them was a glass door giving on to a garden with flowerbeds, potted plants and hammocks. Scanlan was standing in the middle of the living room serving punch and talking to a group of graduate students. Mario raised his eyebrows in greeting, and forced an awkward smile. Joan offered him a glass of wine and asked, ‘How was your vacation?’

‘By the second week I didn’t know what to do with myself,’ answered Mario, feeling immediately, almost physically, that he’d been there before and given the very same reply. He thought: Everything repeats itself.

‘The same thing happens to me,’ Joan assured him. ‘That’s why I never like going away from home for more than two weeks in a row. And then only when there’s something definite to do. Luckily, David shares that opinion. This summer, in fact. .’ She stopped for a moment to look out the window in front of them, which gave a view of the entrance: several guests were getting out of a car. Setting her glass on a shelf, she said, ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ and went out to greet the recent arrivals.

Mario went to the library. Wojcik, a Polish semantics professor, tall, bony and impersonal, was talking to a young man with olive-coloured skin and exaggeratedly thick lips. They were sitting in two armchairs, face to face, and each had a glass of wine in his hand. They stood up when they saw Mario come in; he had no choice but to approach them. Wojcik introduced him to the young man, who seemed to have arrived in the department with a grant from the Indian government. His English sounded to Mario like Russian at first. While they were talking the library kept filling up with guests. At some point, Mario excused himself from Wojcik and the Indian. He went to the living room, said hello to a few familiar faces, and looked around for Ginger: he didn’t see her. He felt uncomfortable among so many people. He opened the sliding door that opened on to the garden and went outside to smoke.

Olalde was stretched out in a hammock, at the bottom of the garden, with his gaze lost in a bed of gladioli. From his lips hung a disparaging cigarette. Mario lit a cigarette and went over to him.

‘Excellent bibliography,’ Olalde was muttering, ‘excellent bibliography.’

Sensing Mario’s presence, he stood up. ‘And what do you think of these parties, young man?’ he asked without looking at him. ‘I’ve spent God knows how many years in this country and I have yet to find a better pastime.’ Gesturing and projecting his voice, he began, ‘I’ve just read your latest book, Professor So-and-so. Excellent bibliography, excellent bibliography. I’ll not deny it, Professor Something-or-other, and I’ll tell you something else: Professor What’s-his-name copied it unashamedly in his latest tome, which is otherwise filled with errors. Indeed, Professor Something-or-other, I also read your last article and I must admit I was impressed by the scientific honesty with which you refuted the ridiculous hypothesis of that lamentably slapdash Professor What-have-you, according to which the progenitor of Pitarra was twenty-seven years old at the moment of the writer’s conception, when it is quite obvious, as revealed by the data you contribute with your habitual modesty, that she was twenty-five.’ Olalde took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled the smoke through his nose, smothered a giggle and went on. ‘Mass of mediocrity: they find merit in reading what no one wants to read, they puff up like turkeys when they speak, and think they have the right to express their opinions on everything because they know how to distinguish a thirteenth-century manuscript from a fourteenth-century one. What I don’t understand is why this country insists on isolating them in these paradisical concentration camps called universities, hundreds of miles from anywhere, in the middle of the desert, as they say. I imagine that it used to have a certain rationale: you know, the danger of infecting society with pernicious ideas and all that. But now, tell me, how the hell are they going to infect society now when they haven’t an idea in their heads, not a single one; they’ve got dates and facts and statistics, but not a single idea. And don’t go thinking I consider myself any different, no, sir. I’ve passed the stage of self-indulgence; when you get to my age only idiots and those with a calling for slavery condescend to indulgence.’ Olalde paused, as if an idea had just crossed his mind, then smiled in a way meant to look meaningful. ‘Yes, sir, I’m just like them, except in one detail: while they’re blinded by drunken vanity and completely unaware of the insufficient, petty lives they lead, I realize that we are the real barbarians.’

The appearance of Branstyne and Tina, and Swinczyc and his wife Phyllis, interrupted Olalde’s speech. They arrived with cheerful greetings and glasses of wine in their hands. Mario felt a bit dazed; his temples were buzzing slightly. He thought: It’s the wine. Olalde put out his cigarette on a patio stone, threw it into a flowerbed and sat back in the hammock with laboured slowness. As he did so Swinczyc cast Mario a sidelong glance. ‘I bet Professor Olalde has been saying nasty things about us,’ he said with irony but not spite, since Olalde was listening. ‘Or about the department, the university, the country, whatever. I’ve always wondered,’ Swinczyc went on in an almost joyful, almost affectionate tone, ‘why Professor Olalde doesn’t leave this country that treats him so badly once and for all and go back to live in Spain.’

‘Spain’s no place to live,’ said Olalde, very slowly, turning towards them and looking at Swinczyc with his one good eye. ‘Spain’s a place to die.’

There was a silence too long not to be uncomfortable. Other guests wandered into the garden: Wojcik and the young man from India, Deans, Sarah Soughton and her husband, a few graduate students. The group divided into several circles of animated conversation. Tina and Mario talked about their vacations. Then Tina asked, ‘When are you coming over for dinner?’

‘That depends on the chef,’ Mario joked.

‘The chef will outdo herself.’

‘In that case, name the day.’

‘Thursday?’

‘Thursday.’

Mario claimed he needed more wine and went back inside. He looked for Ginger: she wasn’t in the living room or the library. Only then did he notice that Berkowickz hadn’t arrived either.

He went into the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror; he barely recognized himself: his skin was pallid, his lips and cheeks gaunt, his chin tense. Although it didn’t reach that far, the echo of the conversations in the garden still hummed in his head. Without meaning to he thought: I’m going to end up like Olalde. He immediately regretted having thought such a thing. He relieved himself, washed his hands, splashed water on his face and wrists, dried off with a towel. When he came out of the bathroom, feeling slightly more at ease, he noticed most of the guests had moved from the garden to the living room. Blatantly absorbing the attention of the most numerous group, who’d gathered round the fireplace, Berkowickz was speaking energetically, explaining something, gesturing. The group exploded in unanimous laughter as Mario approached. When the laughs died down, Berkowickz carried on speaking in a calmer tone. Mario saw Ginger at one side of the circle, beside Branstyne. He smiled affectionately at her and wondered if she’d arrived at the party with Berkowickz. He thought: She looks lovely. The group broke up. Mario noticed that Ginger stayed talking to Berkowickz, Scanlan and Tina. Branstyne, Swinczyc, Wojcik and Deans chatted and laughed by the drinks table.

Mario went back out to the garden; he didn’t see Olalde. While he lit a cigarette he wondered if he’d gone out with the intention of talking to the Spanish professor. He couldn’t answer himself because Branstyne interrupted his thoughts.

‘What’s the matter, man?’ he said in a tone of light-hearted disapproval. ‘You’re not being too sociable.’

‘No,’ Mario admitted, smiling weakly, then added by way of an excuse, indicating the garden with the hand holding the cigarette, ‘I came out to get some air and smoke. The truth is my head aches a bit.’

‘You’re not worrying about the courses.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘No one had to tell me,’ said Branstyne. ‘I only had to sum up and subtract. There’s no two ways about it.’

‘I wasn’t worried until you reminded me that I should be,’ said Mario. ‘I wonder how you’d be in my place.’

As soon as he said it he thought he’d been unfair to Branstyne, who’d undoubtedly not meant to irritate him. As he began to apologize, Scanlan, Ginger and Berkowickz came out to the garden. There were jokes and greetings. Mario reflected: I can’t stop talking, I can’t stop thinking: it’s like a nightmare. Now Berkowickz was talking again slowly, enunciating carefully. Scanlan, Ginger and Branstyne were listening to him wide-eyed. Looking at Ginger, Mario thought he was in love with her. He thought: I’ve always been in love with her. Then he heard: ‘You must know that Mario and I are neighbours.’

Scanlan and Branstyne made comments on the coincidence; Ginger looked at Mario through narrowed eyes. After a moment Branstyne returned to the living room; Scanlan and Berkowickz walked to the back of the garden, where the hammocks were.

Ginger spoke. ‘You didn’t tell me Berkowickz was your neighbour.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t tell me Berkowickz was your neighbour,’ Ginger repeated.

‘I forgot.’

Ginger spoke again. ‘He’s offered to supervise my thesis.’

‘Who?’

‘Berkowickz.’

‘I’m delighted for you,’ Mario lied, feeling all his bitterness towards Berkowickz, towards Scanlan, towards Ginger, towards Branstyne, towards everything and everyone welling up in his throat. As if trying to free himself of something, he said in a rush, ‘Why don’t we see each other later at my place? I’d like to talk to you on our own.’

‘I can’t,’ Ginger hurried to answer. ‘I still have to prepare tomorrow’s classes.’

Back in the living room, he looked for Joan.

‘Could I use the telephone?’

‘Of course,’ said Joan.

She took him into an interior room. Mario dialled a number and asked for a taxi. Then he went back to the library with Branstyne and Tina.

‘I’m going,’ he said.

‘Do you want us to give you a lift?’ asked Tina.

‘That’s OK,’ Mario said. ‘I’ve already called a taxi.’

‘Tomorrow I’ll come and pick you up before ten,’ said Branstyne. ‘You don’t want to spend your whole salary on taxis.’

‘The way things are going, it wouldn’t be too difficult,’ Mario admitted.

There was a silence.

‘Sorry about what I said earlier,’ Branstyne apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to annoy you.’

‘You didn’t annoy me.’

‘We’ll see you on Thursday,’ said Tina.

‘See you on Thursday,’ repeated Mario.

Joan accompanied him to the door. Before he left, Mario looked for Olalde among the swarm of guests, but didn’t find him. Scanlan’s wife said, ‘I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.’

Mario didn’t recall having said he’d enjoyed himself.

‘Yes,’ he said, nevertheless, ‘great party.’

When he was installed in the back seat of the taxi, waving goodbye to Joan, who was standing in the doorway of the house, Scanlan appeared at his wife’s side, waved his hand and rushed down the slate path, shouting something that Mario didn’t hear because the car windows were all wound up tight.

He unenthusiastically prepared Tuesday’s classes when he got home. Then he opened a bottle of Chablis, sprawled out on the sofa and drank and smoked and watched television for a while. At eleven he got into bed.

He slept fitfully. Towards dawn a nightmare woke him. He tried to retain it, not to let it be dissolved by wakefulness, but he couldn’t. The only thing he managed to recall was Berkowickz’s voice. ‘Excellent bibliography,’ he was muttering. ‘Excellent bibliography.’




XII


Immediately after his divorce from Lisa, Mario felt as though he’d been freed from a crushing burden. Soon this initial relief turned to unease. At first he felt inconvenienced at having to assume all the responsibilities he’d left to Lisa; later he realised he’d got used to trusting her and loving her in his way, and that her absence left a hole, not in his feelings but in his affections, which he had nothing to cover with. Solitary living became unbearable: he came to detest the house he’d shared with Lisa (they agreed when they separated that he would stay there; she chose to move to an apartment on the outskirts of the city). To all that was added the increasing agitation of seeing Lisa almost daily in the university, since the history and linguistics departments were located in the same building. The peaceful course her life seemed to take, her fabulous appearance and the infinite vitality she radiated and that hadn’t been diminished, but perhaps the opposite, by the shock of the separation, the news of her constant professional successes, which Mario always heard from someone else, never Lisa, and the growing academic prestige she derived from them: this series of circumstances, along with his own state of moral neglect, contributed to convincing him he’d fallen back in love with Lisa.

He decided to speak to her. He arranged a date. At length he explained his point of view. He asked Lisa to move back in with him. She smiled sweetly.

‘Mario,’ she said slowly, as if caressing the words, ‘your problem is you confuse love with weakness.’

Two months later Lisa married one of her students, who was five years younger than her. By then Mario had decided to leave Brown University. He again thought of returning to Italy. In the meantime he applied for jobs at various North American universities. When he received the offer from the University of Illinois he didn’t doubt for a second before accepting it.

In August he took up his new position. He didn’t like the university or the department to which he was assigned. Nevertheless, since he knew he’d be staying there for a while, he hastened to make friends, something he managed almost immediately, thanks more than anything to the open and congenial disposition of the rest of the professors in the department.

On one of the first days of the semester a graduate student burst into his office. She was of medium height, with long straight hair, dishevelled in an orderly manner, blue eyes and fleshy cheeks. She was wearing a lilac T-shirt that strove to contain the vigour of her full breasts, and a white miniskirt, which trimmed her hips and revealed her pale, somehow childish legs. Her name was Ginger Kloud. They spoke for a while; Mario noticed her eyes shone and guessed she was about twenty-five years old. When she left his office, Mario had agreed to supervise her thesis.

Ginger attended one of Mario’s classes. They chatted often. He treated her in a slightly off-hand but flirtatious manner: he was aware of being rather attractive to her, and this fact, perhaps paradoxically, flattered him at the same time as it made him feel uncomfortable.

At the beginning of October Ginger invited him to a party at her house. They drank whisky, danced, smoked marijuana, chatted.

The next day, when he woke up, Ginger was still at his side.

From then on they saw each other frequently outside of class. Mario, in spite of that, still kept a certain distance between them. At first that attitude came naturally to him: he did not want to fall into another emotional dependency. Later he cultivated it consciously, because he observed that distance was an instrument of domination: Ginger would continue to be dependent on him as long as he kept it up. He also discovered that the situation afforded him a constant well-being and brought back the balance he’d lost when he separated from Lisa: he enjoyed all the benefits of Ginger’s devotion and withdrew from all the concessions and subjugation that investing his affection in her would have entailed. At the beginning Ginger readily agreed to the tacit conditions Mario had imposed: she declared that she didn’t want their relationship to go any further than close friendship. Later, although she still told him about the occasional affairs of the heart she found herself involved in, she began to complain of the scant attention Mario paid her and the inconsiderate way he treated her. Finally, since she was unable to overcome the barrier he’d placed between the two of them, she became obsessed with Mario: in a single evening, with barely a transition, she would sleep with him, get annoyed, cry, contradict herself, insult him and leave the house slamming the door behind her, while Mario took refuge behind an indifferent silence. Hours later a telephone call from Mario would reconcile them.

This went on for almost a year.

The night before Mario left for Italy on vacation, they went out to dinner. He thought as they said goodbye that he was going to miss her.

During the month-long vacation he missed her: he wrote her a postcard from Nice and another from Amsterdam, where the airplane made a stopover, as well as several letters from Turin. In one of them he wrote: ‘It’s as if I’m condemned always to want what I don’t have and never to want what I have. Managing to get something is enough to make me lose interest in it. I suppose that ambition is born of things like this, but I’m not even ambitious: I lack the energy to desire constantly.’ In another letter he confessed: ‘I’m only capable of appreciating something once I’ve lost it.’

By the second week in Turin he wished Ginger had come with him. At one moment he thought he was in love with her. Another time he told himself he’d soon be thirty and, if he were to get married again, Ginger was undoubtedly the right person.

By the time he landed in Chicago, back from his vacation, he’d decided to propose to Ginger.




XIII


The next morning Branstyne came by his house at nine-thirty to pick him up. Mario heard a car horn, looked out the window of his study, saw a car and went out.

‘How’s the ankle?’ asked Branstyne, turning left from University Avenue on to Goodwin.

‘Fine,’ answered Mario. ‘Sometimes I get the impression that when they take the bandage off and the crutch away I won’t be able to walk.’

Branstyne smiled. ‘When does it come off?’

‘They told me to go back on Sunday,’ Mario explained, ‘but I’ll probably go before that. I think the swelling’s gone down.’

Branstyne dropped him off at the door of Lincoln Hall. Mario thanked him for bringing him that far.

‘If you want, I can come by your place at the same time tomorrow,’ said Branstyne. ‘I’ve got another class at ten.’

Mario accepted. They said goodbye.

He went into Lincoln Hall. The corridors were crammed full of students. He went up to the second floor and into Room 225: some students were already waiting for the class to begin. Mario sat down behind the teacher’s desk, which was on a wooden platform, leaned the crutch against it and took some papers out of his briefcase. When the bell rang, twenty-four pairs of eyes were upon him.

He introduced himself. In a confusing way he explained the course outline he proposed to follow and the evaluation methods he’d be using. Then he opened the floor to questions; since there weren’t any, he concluded the class. The students began to leave. As he was putting the papers he’d taken out of his briefcase back into it, he noticed a young woman with bulging eyes and red hair was looking at him mockingly as she passed his desk. For a second he was sure he’d seen her somewhere before, thought he was about to recognise her, but couldn’t. By the door the young woman joined another student, shorter and thicker-set than her, and both of them burst out laughing. He couldn’t help feeling slightly ridiculous. He finished collecting his things and left.

In the Quad (a vast square of grass enclosed by the university buildings and criss-crossed by cement paths that joined one building to another), under a hard, brilliant sun, reigned the usual quiet of class time: just here and there the odd student, dressed in shorts and baggy T-shirts, sat in the sun or talked with eyes half closed. Others read leaning up against tree trunks; others threw baseballs or plastic disks that glided lazily just above the lawn; very few walked along the cement paths. These last, however, as soon as the bell marking the end of class rang, turned into a heaving throng of students hurrying towards the building where their next lecture was: then the air filled with shouts, music, conversations, greetings. When the bell rang ten minutes later, this time marking the beginning of the next class, the Quad went back to being like a millpond.

Mario entered the foreign languages building. He went up to the fourth floor, picked up his mail from the main office and went to his office. Neither Olalde nor Hyun were there. He arranged books and papers in the desk drawers, on the shelves, in the filing cabinet. Then he went to Ginger’s office and knocked at the door: no one answered. In the main office he found Swinczyc, who offered to drive him home. Mario accepted.

He phoned Ginger from his apartment. He suggested they have lunch together. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he said. Ginger came to pick him up half an hour later. They went to Timpone’s.

‘What did you want to talk to me about?’ asked Ginger, her eyes glued to the menu.

‘Nothing special,’ Mario admitted. ‘I just thought we could chat for a while. It’s been quite difficult lately.’

‘Yes,’ Ginger agreed. ‘The truth is I’ve been pretty busy. The start of term is always like that.’

The waiter came over; they both ordered steak and salad. Ginger was wearing a brown leather skirt and a very loose-fitting pink shirt; her shiny hair flowed over her shoulders. Mario thought: She looks lovely. He went on with the interrupted conversation, saying without resentment, ‘Me, on the other hand, I’ve got more free time than ever.’ He paused, then added, ‘Scanlan has taken two of my courses away.’

‘And he’s given them to Berkowickz,’ Ginger continued for him. ‘Branstyne told me, but it didn’t take a genius to predict it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’

Since he didn’t want to argue, Mario changed the subject. Ginger was soon talking about the party at Scanlan’s house, about the possibility of finishing her thesis that very year, of the interest Berkowickz had shown in her, the suggestions he’d given her. Then she brought up the possibility of applying to the department for a grant; if she got one she could give up the classes she was teaching and devote all her time to her research. When they finished eating, Mario tried to take her hand; she pulled it away.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mario, looking her in the eye. ‘Everything’s been going wrong since I got back.’

‘As far as I remember it was never going well.’ Ginger’s voice sounded different now, thinner.

‘In one month you’ve changed.’

‘I’ve changed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said it.’

‘Why don’t you leave off the verbal fencing and tell me once and for all what’s the matter?’

‘I’ve changed,’ Ginger said again. ‘I don’t love you any more.’

There was a silence.

‘I don’t love you,’ she repeated with more conviction, as if urging herself on. ‘And I don’t want to go back to things as they were.’

‘Everything will be different now.’

‘It’ll be exactly the same,’ she said. ‘And even if it were different it doesn’t matter. I don’t love you any more. And I don’t want to talk about this again.’

They paid and left.




XIV


Wednesday after class (he’d finished before time because he felt tired, weak and maybe a bit uncomfortable or embarrassed by the bandage and the crutch leaning against the blackboard), he went home by bus. When he alighted on West Oregon he noticed a young woman with bulging eyes waving to him from a parked car on the other side of the road. At first he thought it was the redheaded student whose attitude had disconcerted him the previous day, at the end of class; as he crossed the street he realized it wasn’t her.

‘Sorry,’ the young woman apologized when Mario was a few feet from the car. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

Mario thought he’d experienced a similar situation that week, but he couldn’t remember when. He thought: Everything repeats itself.

After lunch he took a nap. He woke up with his mouth feeling furry and a faint buzzing in his temples. In the bathroom a face criss-crossed by pillow lines looked back from the mirror. He washed his face and brushed his teeth, then made coffee. In the dining room, he tried to read, but soon realized it was futile: he couldn’t concentrate. He went to the kitchen, opened a can of beer, turned on the television and stretched out on the couch. He switched from one channel to another with the remote control, without spending much time on any of them. At about six he thought he heard footsteps and voices on the landing. He turned the volume on the television down as low as it could go, got up off the couch, held his breath and pressed his eye against the peephole in the door: he didn’t see anyone, but he heard a hushed noise, of music or conversation, coming from Berkowickz’s apartment. He went back to lying on the couch, turned the television back up, and went back to switching from channel to channel. After a while he got tired of the TV. He went to his study and pushed one of the armchairs over to the window at the front of the building, on West Oregon: pouring through the window came a clear light, not yet rusted by the setting sun.

He tried to read. A while later, lifting his eyes from the book, he saw David and Joan Scanlan parking their car in front of the building. Instinctively he moved the chair back from the window and hid. Scanlan and his wife entered Mario’s building. He thought: They’re going to Berkowickz’s place. He went to the dining room carefully, taking a little weight on the injured foot, so as not to make a noise with the crutch. He looked out through the peephole and saw Scanlan and Joan knocking on the door across the hall. Berkowickz opened straight away and invited them in. Later he saw Swinczyc and his wife arrive, Branstyne and Tina, Deans, Wojcik and several other professors; he also saw a couple of graduate students go in.

It was completely dark when he guessed that all the guests had arrived at Berkowickz’s party. Mario went to the kitchen, opened a bottle of Chablis, stretched out on the couch and turned the TV back on; for a while he sat there smoking and drinking. He thought that at some point it might occur to Branstyne, or to Swinczyc, or to Berkowickz himself, to knock on his door and invite him to join the party. Then he sprang up, turned off the television and the lights in the kitchen, his study and the dining room. He sat back down on the couch, in the dark, glass of wine in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. A faint grey light came in through the windows; each time he took a drag on his cigarette the ember lit up his face momentarily. Some time passed, after which he heard voices on the landing, maybe recognising Tina’s. They knocked on the door. He held his breath, kept still. He heard Branstyne’s voice: ‘He must’ve gone out.’ Someone whose voice he didn’t recognise made some comment. He thought he heard laughter, and then a door slamming. Almost immediately he heard noise on the landing again. He stealthily sneaked over to the door, looked out through the peephole: he saw Phyllis, Swinczyc’s wife, and Tina carrying glasses and bottles; Ginger was carrying a tray behind them. For some reason he wasn’t surprised to see her. I bet she was the first to arrive, he thought.

He realized the party was moving out on to the porch. Hopping on one leg he reached his study, opened the window that gave on to West Oregon — beneath which, covered by a wide overhang, was the porch — and raised the screen. He sat in the armchair and got ready to listen. At first the voices mingled together indiscriminately. Later, listening more closely, he distinguished, or thought he distinguished, Scanlan’s voice, then Berkowickz’s: unanimous laughter blended them all again. A moment later he made out some of what Berkowickz was saying about a conference. He mentioned some well-known names, joked at the expense of a professor with an unpronounceable surname, then a lump of different voices cancelled out Berkowickz’s. Mario went to the dining room, grabbed the bottle of Chablis, a glass, an ashtray and his cigarettes. When he sat back down by the window, an absolute silence reigned on the porch, broken only by the occasional cars that passed by on the road. Then he began to hear Scanlan’s voice clearly: with a sort of friendly conviction he spoke of the efforts he’d been making to raise the level of the department. He said he was confident he could count on everyone’s support, for everyone would benefit from the department becoming a centre of excellence. He affirmed that the only way of achieving this was to raise the level of the teaching staff, selecting rigorously and subjecting degrees of competence, one way or another, to periodic tests that would oblige everyone to remain at a high level. He assured them that, in spite of the fact that contracts currently in effect required professors to deliver a series of publications before the department would renew their contracts or offer a permanent position, they all knew this proceeding had up till then been discharged with an undoubtedly excessive tolerance, which was ultimately as prejudicial to the department as to the individual involved. Finally, he declared that at the next committee meeting he intended to present a concrete project reflecting all those demands. From here on in, he concluded, he hoped to begin a new era.

Mario heard Berkowickz and Swinczyc enthusiastically supporting Scanlan’s proposal; he also heard Branstyne doing so. Then other voices joined these. The conversation split in two, multiplied into meanders, until he could only catch unconnected snippets of it. At one moment (but later he thought he really couldn’t be sure), Mario heard Berkowickz say his name, and then Swinczyc’s nervous laugh.

At ten-thirty the guests began to leave; Ginger was the last to go.




XV


The next day he woke up at eight. He shaved, took a shower with his left leg wrapped in a plastic bag and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. Branstyne came to pick him up at nine-thirty.

‘How’s the ankle?’ he asked, turning left from University Avenue on to Goodwin.

‘Better,’ answered Mario. ‘It’s just a couple more days now.’

‘Last night a bunch of us got together at Berkowickz’s house,’ said Branstyne. ‘We called on you, but you weren’t in.’

‘I went out to run some errands and didn’t get back till late,’ Mario claimed. Then, as if to shake off the uncomfortable silence that had settled over the car, he asked, ‘How was it?’

Branstyne talked about the party until he stopped the car in front of Lincoln Hall. Mario thanked him for bringing him that far. Branstyne said, ‘I’ll come and get you at seven tonight.’

Mario looked bewildered. Lifting his left hand off the steering wheel and raising his eyebrows, Branstyne added, ‘We’ll sample Tina’s fettuccini and have a bit of a chat while we’re at it.’

Mario tried to hide the fact that he’d forgotten about the dinner invitation.

‘Come by whenever you like,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere this afternoon.’

After giving his lecture (once again he couldn’t fill the fifty minutes, and before the bell sounded, he’d dismissed the class) he went to the department office. In his cubbyhole was a note signed by Scanlan, who wanted to speak to him as soon as possible.

He was just about to knock on the boss’s door when he heard Joyce’s voice behind him. ‘Professor Scanlan’s busy.’

Mario turned around. The secretary smiled. Her lips were painted an extremely bright red, which stood out against the whitish pallor of her face and the straw-coloured blonde of her hair; a blue silk ribbon, with white polka dots, held her hair almost at the top of her head, in a sort of ponytail; her hairless brows contributed to giving her a vaguely fishy or reptilian air. Without giving him a single chance to interrupt, answering the questions she herself was posing, gesturing slowly but copiously, Joyce asked about Mario’s ankle and told him about the case of a friend of Winnie’s who’d suffered a similar mishap. Then she changed the subject. She talked openly about Winnie: how she’d been accepted at the University of Iowa, how very young she was to be going to university, that she had a boyfriend called Mike. At some point she assured him that, even though it wouldn’t be necessary until winter arrived, they were already making arrangements to get the heating fixed in Mario’s office. Only when she asked about Olalde did he get the impression that the secretary was waiting for an answer. He could not, however, be certain: just then Scanlan’s office door opened. Berkowickz came out, his face glowing with energy. His lips widened into a smile of solid satisfaction. Under Scanlan’s gaze he greeted Mario with a sportive gesture.

‘You missed a party at my place yesterday,’ he said with an air of cheerful or fake annoyance. ‘It was my fault: I forgot to tell you ahead of time. We knocked at your door, but we didn’t find you in.’

‘I went out to run some errands and didn’t get back till late,’ Mario apologized. Suddenly he thought that wasn’t what he’d meant to say and tried to add something. He couldn’t because Berkowickz beat him to it.

‘See you later,’ he said. And to Mario he added, ‘Let’s see if we can get together for a bit of a chat one of these days.’

Perhaps for no precise reason, Mario thought: Just like a nightmare.

They went into the office. Scanlan sat behind his desk, Mario in one of the leather chairs lined up in front of it. Gently stroking his goatee, Scanlan made some innocuous, perhaps friendly, comments with a cloying smile. Mario got distracted for a moment looking at a poster tacked up on the back wall: it announced a retrospective of the work of Botero. He heard Scanlan clearing his throat.

‘I’m just going to take up a moment of your time: I prefer to inform you personally of the situation,’ he declared. The cloying smile had disappeared. After a brief pause, he continued in an official tone, ‘Next week the departmental committee is meeting. I intend to set out your case there to see whether all together we can find a solution, not for this semester, of course, but maybe for the next or for next year. I can’t promise you I’ll manage it, but of course we’re going to make an effort. For my part, I’m already working on it.’ He paused, cleared his throat again and leaned back in his chair. ‘On the other hand, and this is closely linked to what I’ve just said, I suppose you’re as aware, if not more so, as the rest of the staff, of the effort I’ve been putting into raising the level of this department since I took charge of it. I don’t think I’m talking nonsense if I imagine that everyone is committed to the same goal: it is most definitively to convert the department into a centre of excellence, and that cannot but benefit us all. But, of course, applying for budget increases to enable us to contract new professors is not enough, we also have to be much more demanding of those who are already here, starting with ourselves. And, as I’m ready to see that all these good intentions translate into practical measures, I’m going to put to the committee a new project of departmental regulation. If I’m not mistaken, there should be nothing standing in the way of its approval. The idea behind this new regulation, in substance, is that we fulfil more rigorously what up till now hasn’t been worth the paper it’s written on; that is: the contract of a professor who has not demonstrated the level of intellectual and professional competence the department considers adequate will not be renewed. I know such measures can seem threatening; in reality they’re only intended as a stimulus to everyone. Now then, Mario,’ Scanlan went on, clearly making an effort to adopt a less impersonal or more urgent tone, ‘your contract, if I’m not mistaken, expires in June. I imagine that the committee will meet in the spring. Which leaves you six months, more than enough time to prepare something or finish polishing something up that you’ve been working on all this time: three years is a long time not to have published anything at all. And I must insist this is not a threat, Mario, I’m just stating facts; take it rather as advice from a friend who appreciates you. Work, Mario, get something prepared, anything, and send if off to some journal or present it at some conference, and that’ll be that. Either way, write something, and quickly: I have to tell you that otherwise it’ll not be easy for me to stand up for you to the committee.’




XVI


Branstyne came to pick him up at seven. They took Lincoln Avenue, turned left on University and carried on towards the suburbs north of the city. They barely spoke during the drive. They parked in front of Branstyne’s house, a single-storey building, with white walls, big windows, a smooth green roof, crowned with two chimneys (one very small and metal, the other larger, rectangular and made of stone), above which swayed a willow. A gravel path across the garden led to the garage, whose silhouette stood out against a dense mass of vegetation.

They went into the dining room. From the kitchen they could hear the clinking of glasses, cutlery and saucepans, as well as a delicate smell of pasta. Tina soon appeared wrapped in a brown apron, her hair dishevelled, her smile radiant. Mario thought she looked lovely. They kissed hello.

‘Dinner will be ready in a minute,’ said Tina. Looking at Mario with shining eyes she added, ‘It’s going to be absolutely delicious.’ And she went back into the kitchen.

‘We’ve got time for a drink,’ said Branstyne. ‘What would you like?’

‘A dry Martini,’ answered Mario.

Branstyne prepared two dry Martinis with ice. He handed one to Mario and sat in an armchair, facing him.

‘So, how’s the situation, then?’ he asked as if picking up a recently interrupted conversation where they had left off.

‘What situation?’

‘Your position in the department.’

Mario was annoyed by Branstyne’s brusqueness, by the way he’d almost rushed to raise the issue, as if he’d only been invited to dinner to talk about it. What for? he wondered, in confusion.

‘Bad,’ Mario admitted, suddenly feeling like talking. ‘How would you expect it to be? In reality things couldn’t be any worse since Berkowickz arrived.’ And as he said this he was also thinking it for the first time.

‘What’s Berkowickz got to do with it?’

‘He’s practically fired me,’ said Mario as if to himself, without intending to answer Branstyne’s question.

‘Berkowickz fired you?’

‘No,’ said Mario, returning to the conversation. ‘Scanlan. I spoke to him this morning: now I know that in June they won’t renew my contract.’

‘That can’t be,’ Branstyne declared with conviction. ‘Those kinds of things are decided by the committee, and the committee can’t rescind a contract just like that. They’d have to wait at least until Christmas.’

‘Whether at Christmas or in the spring, it doesn’t matter,’ said Mario. ‘The main thing is the decision’s been made. Scanlan dominates the committee, and it’ll do what Scanlan wants. Today he told me I’m a mediocrity, that I don’t publish enough, basically, that I don’t measure up. He called me in to humiliate me, Branstyne, and also to cover his back, to be able to fire me with impunity, almost with a clear conscience. . What gets me is that he’s such a cynic’

‘It’s his job.’

‘To be a cynic?’

‘To make the department function according to regulations.’

‘And for that he has to fire me?’

‘For that he has to make sure those regulations are respected.’

‘Now you’re starting to sound like him.’

There was a silence.

‘Everything’ll work out,’ said Branstyne at last, in a conciliatory tone.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Branstyne,’ said Mario, no longer repressing the fury pounding in his temples. ‘Nothing’s going to work out here because there’s nothing to work out. At this point I’ll be happy just to make it to June without them cutting my salary again.’

Tina came into the dining room, made herself a Martini and went to sit on an arm of the chair where Branstyne had fallen silent. Since the silence persisted, Tina asked, ‘What were you talking about?’

‘A mutual friend,’ answered Mario. ‘Daniel Berkowickz. Since he arrived here the whole world’s been smiling on me. First it was my ankle, and from then on it hasn’t stopped. I used to be paid a salary; now I get a third of a salary. I used to think I had a secure job; now I know I won’t last long in it. I used to have an office; now I’ve got a sort of stable that can only be called an office so as not to offend the Chinaman and the nutcase I share it with.’ He paused. He looked at his Martini, the pieces of ice floating in the liquid. He added, ‘I also used to have a girlfriend.’

‘But it was just as if you didn’t,’ said Tina softly. ‘You never paid her any attention.’

Mario didn’t say anything; he kept his gaze fixed on his glass, swirling it gently to move the ice around. Branstyne, sunk ever deeper into his armchair, seemed unwilling to emerge from the silence in which he’d enclosed himself. Tina drank a sip of her Martini without taking her eyes off Mario. She asked, ‘What’s happened with Ginger?’

‘I suppose she got fed up,’ said Mario. ‘The truth is she didn’t give me much explanation.’

‘And don’t tell me you’ve decided to fall in love with her now.’

‘I probably already was before,’ Mario ventured, raising his eyes and looking at Tina with a malicious or ironic expression that she didn’t understand. ‘Only I didn’t know it.’

Tina stood up from the arm of the chair and went to sit down on the sofa, beside Mario’s armchair.

‘Look, Mario,’ she began in possibly an admonishing tone. ‘Forgive me for being direct, but someone has to be with you. What you’re saying is fine for someone under twenty years of age. After that it’s pathetic, if not worse. Only adolescents and idiots insist on wanting what they don’t have and not wanting what they have. Only adolescents and idiots are incapable of appreciating something until they’ve lost it.’ She stopped for a moment; then she went on. ‘You know perfectly well you made Ginger suffer terribly. What she’s done is only sensible: I confess in her place I would have done the same thing myself, except much sooner.’

‘You seem to think people are conspiring against you or something,’ Branstyne intervened in support of Tina, sitting up a little in his armchair and crossing his legs. ‘It’s ridiculous. Tina’s right: only a teenager thinks things like that. As for Berkowickz, I’ll tell you one thing: he does appreciate you. As for the rest (and I’m telling you this because I appreciate you as well), you should follow his example, but not just from the academic point of view: Berkowickz is a lively, energetic, enterprising guy who knows how to see the good side of things and get the best out of them. I’m being sincere: I’m delighted that he’s here, it’s as if a breath of fresh air has come into the department. And as for Scanlan, you already know my opinion: he’s only trying to do the job he’s taken on to the best of his abilities. Scanlan’s the boss and he has the right to raise the level of the department; everyone would be harmed if he didn’t. That’s the way things are, Mario,’ Branstyne concluded emphatically, ‘and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

Mario contained the urge to leave. He gulped down the last of his Martini. For a moment he thought he was appearing before a tribunal that couldn’t or didn’t want to tell him what he was accused of. He thought: Just like a nightmare.

‘In any case,’ Branstyne continued, perhaps made impatient by Mario’s silence, ‘I don’t think the situation’s all that serious, at least not yet. What you have to do is buckle down, Mario, get to work. Tell me: how long’s it been since you published something? A year, two, three?’

‘Three years,’ said Mario. ‘Three years and two months, to be precise.’

‘Three years,’ Branstyne repeated, shrugging his shoulders and looking at Tina. He turned back to Mario. ‘Frankly, I don’t understand how you can complain about Scanlan. What you should do instead is get something together and try to publish it somewhere.’

‘I don’t have anything ready,’ Mario admitted.

‘The Association Conference isn’t till January,’ said Branstyne. ‘You’ve still got four months: more than enough time. And whoever gives a paper at the Association Conference can speak anywhere else. It’s just a question of goodwill, Mario, of making a gesture. I’m sure that if you do Scanlan will find a solution; the only thing he’s asking is that you give him a reason to look for one.’

Tina stood up and went to the kitchen. After a moment she returned and sat back down on the sofa.

‘Mario,’ said Tina to break the silence. ‘We’re all trying to help you.’

Mario talked very little during dinner; he barely ate, he was a bundle of nerves and his throat felt restricted. Branstyne regarded him with a mixture of compassion and affection. Tina kept the conversation going: she talked about mutual friends, Italy, a grant the biology department had given her, their vacation.

At the end of the meal Mario complimented Tina on her fettuccini. He also promised to come back again another day.

Branstyne dropped him off in front of his house at ten.

‘I can’t pick you up tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a morning class and I’ve got a few things to do around the house: you know how it is, having a family is like running a small business.’

Mario nodded. He said, ‘Don’t worry. The bus stops right there.’

He opened the door to get out, then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around: Branstyne was saying goodbye in a way that said, ‘Come on, we’re all trying to help you.’ Mario held back a violent urge to punch him in the face.

When Branstyne’s car turned the corner, Mario lit a cigarette and walked down West Oregon with faltering steps, leaning on the crutch. It was hot, humid and clammy; the bulbs of the street lights, filthy with mosquito corpses, spread a weak, yellowish light over the pavement. He got to Race, turned left and headed towards Lincoln Square. He went into the Embassy.

It was a small bar, dark and narrow, the walls and floors covered in wood. On the right a succession of wooden tables traversed the room, bathed in the light from the lamps that hung above each one. The bar stretched along the left with metal and wood stools that grew out of the floor like mushrooms. Behind the bar a mirror reproduced the smoky atmosphere of the bar, almost deserted at this hour. A young couple were talking at one of the tables near the door, several husky-looking men were throwing darts at a board, another two men were drinking at the bar, alone.

Mario leaned the crutch against the bar, sat on a stool and ordered a whisky. When it arrived he lit a cigarette. At twelve-thirty, after three whiskies and half a pack of Marlboros, he noticed there was no one else left in the bar, except the bartender. He paid and left.

When he got back to his building he saw a light on in Berkowickz’s apartment. He went carefully up the stairs, making sure they didn’t creak. He paused on the landing, listened closely, held his breath: he heard music, and voices he didn’t recognise.

When he got into bed he realized he was drunk.




XVII


The next day he woke up with a dry mouth, his temples pierced by a slight stab of pain. He swallowed two aspirins with a glass of orange juice, shaved, showered with his left foot wrapped in a plastic bag and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast.

He left the apartment. As he was turning the key he heard the door of the apartment opposite open. He turned around: astonished, without understanding at first, he faced Berkowickz and Ginger. They smiled. They said good morning, exclaimed over the encounter with a disproportionate effusion that at first struck Mario as malevolent, later as simply unthinking. Flustered, he stammered something. Berkowickz kept talking as the three of them went down the stairs. They stopped on the porch.

‘Are you going to the department?’ asked Ginger. Her mouth had frozen into a perfect smile. ‘If you want we could give you a lift.’

Mario looked at her with incredulous eyes, almost agonising behind the lenses of his glasses. Ginger didn’t register, or didn’t want to register, Mario’s look, and might have repeated the offer, because he replied, ‘No need.’ Then he lied. ‘Branstyne’s going to pass by to pick me up in a minute.’

Berkowickz took advantage of the silence Mario’s answer had opened up to lament amiably that, despite being neighbours, they still hadn’t found a moment for a quiet chat. ‘I have an idea,’ he said, passing a possessive arm along Ginger’s neck and resting it on her left shoulder. ‘Why don’t you come by my apartment this evening and we’ll have a drink together?’

Mario clumsily looked for an excuse to turn down the invitation. He didn’t have time to find one.

‘OK,’ said Berkowickz, undoubtedly thinking that by saying nothing Mario was consenting. ‘Come by whenever you like: I’ll be home all evening.’

‘See you later, Mario,’ said Ginger, still smiling. ‘We’ll see you at the office.’

He watched them walk hand in hand to Berkowickz’s car. Trying not to think about what he’d just seen, he noticed it had rained overnight: the air was clean and smelled of damp earth, the nine o’clock sun, encrusted in a pure cloudless sky, twinkled on the lawn. Berkowickz and Ginger turned back to wave to him, their hands reaching out of the car windows, as they drove down West Oregon.

Mario took the bus, went into Lincoln Hall, gave his lecture, crossed the Quad, got to the department, picked up his mail, said hello to Joyce, to Wojcik, to Hyun, talked for a while with Olalde, caught the bus again, had lunch and then a nap. None of these activities, however, managed to stimulate his brain enough to stop ruminating over his meeting with Ginger and Berkowickz, nor the engagement, for that very evening, he had with the latter. The first event was easy enough to interpret: since it was now irreversible, he tried to forget it (he couldn’t: Ginger’s smile floated on the lips of the red-headed student, on Joyce’s, on Wojcik’s and Hyun’s, on Olalde’s). Not so the second: in a confusing way he sensed that Berkowickz, perhaps unconsciously, was offering him an opportunity he shouldn’t waste. An opportunity for what? he wondered.

He tried to reflect in an orderly fashion.

Should he show up? He guessed that Berkowickz wanted to talk to him about Ginger, or about the relationship that, to judge from the scene he’d witnessed that morning, linked them or was beginning to link him to her, or about what Ginger had told Berkowickz about him, or about all those things at once. He discarded the idea: he hadn’t noticed the slightest sign of concern or vexation in Berkowickz’s attitude when surprised with Ginger this morning on the landing, nor when saying goodbye to him. Furthermore, if he had any knowledge of the bond that up till then had linked Mario to Ginger — which seemed fairly improbable — it was almost certain he’d prefer to forget it or, more reasonably, that it held no interest for him. At other moments (walking into Lincoln Hall, during class, while crossing the Quad) he envisioned the possibility that Branstyne might have told Berkowickz or insinuated that he, Mario, absurdly attributed the whirlwind of misfortunes that had befallen him to Berkowickz’s presence. Berkowickz would have felt somehow responsible, and perhaps wanted to give him some explanation, or simply make it up to him, gain his sympathy. He also discarded this hypothesis: Either I don’t know how the world works, he thought, or guys like Berkowickz don’t know the meaning of guilt. On the other hand, what interest could the new tenant have in winning his friendship, if he can’t even imagine him as a potential enemy. .? Later he thought that Berkowickz wanted to crush him definitively, humiliating him with an exhibition of curriculum vitae and amiability, intellectual energy and exuberant vitality.

After his nap he tried once again to put his ideas in order. He reconsidered the hypotheses he’d formulated, ventured some more. They all led to a curious operation: each of the motives he managed to ascribe to Berkowickz’s thinking in arranging the meeting metamorphosed into another set of reasons not to go. This led him not to discard the possibility, which at one point had seemed remote, that Berkowickz, just as he’d declared on the porch, wanted to get to know him, to talk to him: after all, it was true they had not yet had a chance to exchange opinions. In any case, he concluded, with a resolution not exempt from satisfaction at the implacable logical rigour with which he’d linked his ideas, what’s sure is that, if I don’t show up, Berkowickz is going to think I don’t dare confront him alone.

Just after eight he knocked on the door of the apartment across the hall. Berkowickz took a while to open. When he did (wearing dun-coloured drill trousers, a T-shirt scribbled with signatures of famous artists and an anagram of the Art Institute of Chicago, canvas espadrilles, in his left hand a folded newspaper), Mario realized from the look in his eyes that he’d forgotten the arrangement. Perhaps to hide this fact, or just as a greeting, Berkowickz smiled excessively.

‘Come in, Mario, come in,’ he said, making room for him to pass through. He admitted straight away, ‘The truth is I’d forgotten we were getting together. With so many things to do my head gets muddled. But it doesn’t matter. .’

Berkowickz kept talking. Mario wasn’t listening to him: as soon as he entered the apartment he was overtaken by a visceral discomfort that translated into a kind of vertigo, something like a hollow in his stomach. He sat down on a sofa leaving the crutch on one side. Berkowickz handed him a glass of whisky he didn’t remember asking for; he held it weakly and squirmed on the sofa. He saw his host gesticulating, smiling and arching his brows, but he was unable to concentrate on what he was saying: Berkowickz’s words slid through his ears without leaving any trace whatsoever. He rubbed his eyes, the bridge of his nose, his forehead. Only then did he begin to recognize the pale wood, the metal chairs, the vaguely cubist paintings, the advertisement for a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in a gallery in Turin; he recognized the television beside him, the record player, the double-decker transparent table, the Hockney reproduction hanging from a hook on the wall, the cream-coloured sofa he was sitting on, the two armchairs of the same colour. He recognized the minute cluster of things that packed the glass cabinet: the Algerian pipe, the antique pistols and the hourglass, the frigate imprisoned in the Chianti bottle, the clay figures, the marble elephant.

A chill shot up his back.

Bewildered, abruptly gullible, he realised that Berkowickz’s apartment was an exact, though inverted, replica of his own: the perverse reflection of it in an atrocious mirror. He was frightened: he felt his hands drenched in sweat; his heart pounded wildly in his throat. He tried to control his nerves, to pull himself together. To tackle the situation, he constructed a phrase: ‘Bravery does not consist in not being afraid: that’s called temerity. Bravery consists in being afraid, struggling against it and winning.’ Comforted and strengthened by this reflection, he forced himself to listen to the monologue that Berkowickz, sitting in the armchair in front of him, continued delivering amid gesticulations. At some moment, hazily, he thought he understood that Berkowickz was setting out a problem related to the configuration of the syllable in Italian. Mario nodded in agreement. After a while he realized he couldn’t take any more: with the excuse of a sudden headache, he stood up from the sofa without looking at Berkowickz (on the table, the glass of whisky remained untouched) and headed for the door.

‘Here: read this when you have a moment,’ he heard Berkowickz say with an impeccable smile, thrusting a sheaf of photocopied pages into his hand. ‘If you like, we can talk it over some other time.’ Then, resting a fraternal hand on Mario’s shoulder, he added, ‘And take care of that headache: sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

When he lifted the telephone receiver he noticed his hands were trembling; it took him several attempts to dial the number.

‘Mrs Workman? This is Mario Rota.’

‘What do you want?’ Mrs Workman’s voice sounded deep, drenched in sleep.

‘I’m calling about the new tenant.’

‘What about the new tenant?’

Mario answered with a thread of a voice: ‘He has the same furniture as me.’

There was a silence.

‘Mrs Workman?’ Mario enquired. ‘Are you there?’

‘Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to call me at this hour to tell me such a thing?’ mumbled Mrs Workman as if talking to herself.

‘Pardon?’

‘Don’t you think it’s a little late to be phoning me?’ said Mrs Workman in a friendly tone. She continued in a tone of gentle scolding: ‘I believe I’ve told you many times that I go to bed very early, to try to call me at reasonable times. Or have you been drinking?’

‘No, Mrs Workman, I assure you I haven’t,’ Mario hurriedly swore, his voice shrunken with anguish. ‘But it’s horrible, can’t you see? Berkowickz has the same pictures as I do, the same sofa, the same armchairs, everything the same.’

‘And what do you want me to tell you?’ the old woman croaked in annoyance. ‘He must have the same taste as you, which would be a shame. Or you bought them at the same place. What do I know, man, how should I know?’

‘But it’s that they’re exactly the same,’ Mario almost shouted. Immediately he begged, ‘Mrs Workman, something must be done.’

‘That’s for sure,’ answered Mrs Workman. ‘Get into bed and sleep it off.’




XVIII


During the night he woke up several times bathed in sweat, the sheets twisted. One time he imagined he’d just dreamed the visit he’d made the previous evening to Berkowickz’s apartment; another time, as he smoked a cigarette of insomnia looking out the window of his study (outside the bulbs of the street lamps projected a weak light over the street), he wished vehemently for that whole week to have been a nightmare. At some point he managed to get to sleep, comforted by the hope that the next day everything would be different.

The next day he woke up with the certainty that nothing was going to be different. It was seven in the morning; filtering through the curtains, the skeletal light of dawn lit up the room. Although overwhelmed by the prospect (a Saturday without a single activity to occupy his time), he got up immediately, shaved and showered, and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. He tried to banish from his mind the ominous proximity of Berkowickz’s apartment, on the other side of the landing. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. Morbidly he leafed through the sheaf of photocopies that Berkowickz had given him the day before: it was an article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz. He left the sheaf of photocopies on the sofa and went to his study where he spent a while putting papers in order. By nine-thirty he didn’t know what to do with himself any more. If only I could at least go out for a run, he thought, lighting a cigarette. That was when he remembered that it had been almost a week since they bandaged his ankle. He remembered the doctor’s words: ‘Come back in a week.’ He called a taxi and, while he waited for it on the porch, he was happy to have found something to occupy the morning. He was also happy at the mere possibility of getting rid of the bandage, crutch and limp that had been humiliating him all week.

The taxi stopped on the expanse of pavement surrounded by grass where Mario had parked his car the previous week: the old second-hand Buick was still there; Mario felt a sort of tenderness towards it.

He went into the hospital. At the end of the corridor with very white walls he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy hands was entrenched. Mario recognized her. Leaning his crutch and his elbows on the counter, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone she turned to Mario and handed him a form.

‘I don’t know if you recognize me,’ said Mario, smiling, because he was sure the nurse recognized him and could perhaps save him the paperwork. ‘I was here last week and —’

‘Be so kind as to fill in the form,’ the nurse parried curtly. Then she added in a quieter voice, ‘That’d be great if I had to remember everyone who came through here.’

Mario filled in the form, handed it back to the nurse. She pointed him towards the row of chairs opposite the counter and asked him to wait. Mario sat down in a chair and set down in the one beside it a bag in which he’d taken the precaution of putting the shoe and sock that matched the ones he was wearing on his right foot. He leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. On a couple of occasions he noticed distractedly that the nurse was leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He heard her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. Almost in disgust, he thought: There’s no getting away from him. He again felt a ball of anguish in his throat; his hands sweated again. Then he thought that since he’d entered the hospital he hadn’t seen anyone except the crimson-faced nurse: no doctors, no patients, no other nurses. He shuddered. Absurdly, he thought of going home and taking the bandage off himself. An instant later he heard a nurse, at the other end of the foyer, calling him by his name and motioning him to follow her.

They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room; she removed the bandage from his ankle and examined it. Under the oblique light that illuminated them, Mario noticed the thick shadow that soiled the nurse’s upper lip; he realized she was the same one who had attended him the week before. He sat up a little, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her anxiously, as if searching for a sign of recognition in her eyes. The nurse smiled coldly. She said, ‘The doctor will see you straight away.’

After a moment the doctor came in: pale, Oriental, small, nervous. Mario was no longer surprised that it was the same doctor as the previous week. He lay back down on the table while he felt the pressure of investigating fingers on various parts of his foot. He tried to relax, not to think of anything. Bent over Mario’s ankle, the doctor squinted; his eyes thinned into slots.

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the doctor, gently squeezing his instep.

Mario sat up again: he noticed that the swelling around his ankle had completely disappeared. The yellow pallor and stains of dirt that darkened his skin revealed the recent presence of the bandage. The nurse watched them smilingly from a discreet distance.

‘Does it hurt?’ the doctor repeated.

‘No,’ Mario assured him. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

‘Hmm,’ murmured the doctor.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘The ankle is fine,’ the doctor said, straightening up and looking at Mario: the two slots turned back into two green ovals. He smiled, walked over to the sink that was on the other side of the room and washed his hands.

‘Completely?’ asked Mario.

‘Completely,’ the doctor answered, turning around as he dried his hands on a towel.

Perhaps stupidly, Mario asked, ‘Could I go out for a run tomorrow?’

The doctor looked him in the eye again, this time maliciously. Then he looked down to his dirty, naked ankle against the white of the sheets.

‘You could,’ he ventured. ‘But it might be better to leave it till Monday.’

In a rush, wanting to get out of the hospital as soon as possible, Mario washed his foot before the nurse’s immutable smile, and put on his sock and shoe. He crossed the foyer accompanied by the nurse, walked down the corridor and reached the door. When he was about to leave, the woman stopped him by grabbing his arm. She looked up and down the corridor, stared at Mario in a strange way, and smiled.

‘I recognized you,’ she whispered. ‘I knew you’d be back.’

Before the nurse approached to kiss him, Mario thought: Now I’ll wake up.




XIX


Mario went out for a run at eight o’clock on Monday morning. He immediately noticed the street was suffused in a halo of mist: the houses opposite, the cars parked by the sidewalk and the globes of light from the street lamps seemed to shimmer with an unstable and hazy existence. Trying not to strain his ankle, he did a few arm and leg stretches on the tiny rectangle of lawn in front of the house and thought: Fall’s here already. Then he remembered something; he almost smiled. He went back inside and came out again a moment later, this time with his glasses on. The mist having dissolved, Mario began to run along the path of greyish flagstones between the road and the meticulous gardens, enclosed by flowerbeds and wooden fences aligned in front of the houses. At first he ran with care, almost fear, barely putting any weight on his left foot; then, as he noticed his ankle wasn’t suffering, he quickened his pace.

The streets were deserted. The only person he saw during the first five minutes of his run was a young woman crouched down beside an anemone bush in the back garden of the First Church of Christ Scientist, as he was turning right on McCollough. The girl turned: she bared her teeth in a devout smile. Mario felt obliged to return the greeting: he smiled. Later, by then on Pennsylvania, he crossed paths with a grey-haired man in shorts and a black T-shirt, who was jogging in the opposite direction. The man’s expression seemed concentrated on a buzzing emitted from two earphones fed from a cassette player strapped to his waist. After that came a postal truck, an old, bandy-legged black man, who supported his decrepit steps with a wooden walking stick, a young woman with diligent Oriental features, a family having a boisterous breakfast on the front porch, complete with laughter and parental warnings. When, on the way home, he turned back on to West Oregon, the city seemed to have resumed its daily pulse.

That’s when he saw the bed of dahlias where he’d twisted his ankle last Monday. He didn’t think anything.

Panting, sweating and almost happy, he arrived home. He took a shower, made some breakfast (peach juice, scrambled eggs with bacon, toast, coffee with hot milk) and ate hungrily as he listened to the news on the radio. As he left the house he told himself that the physical exercise had done him good, banished his anxiety and perhaps the fear as well: he felt spirited.

At a quarter past nine he parked the Buick in front of the foreign languages building. He picked up his leather briefcase from the passenger seat on his right and went into the building. The hall was half empty: just a few young people, sprawling on the carpeted floor, leaning against the walls, studying or dozing while waiting for the next class.

He went up in the elevator alone. When he got to the main office of the department Branstyne and Swinczyc were speaking in low voices. They stopped talking as soon as they noticed Mario’s presence: they turned to him, said hello. After a few innocuous comments on the weather or the tedium of weekends (or maybe about the Conference of the Association of Linguists), to which he barely paid any attention, Mario got to his cubbyhole. He picked up an envelope, he opened it: Scanlan asked to speak to him right away. Resigned, he thought: This is it.

Since he didn’t see Joan, he knocked directly on Scanlan’s door.

‘Come in,’ he said.

Scanlan was sitting behind his desk; he didn’t stand up. With a gesture he indicated that Mario should sit down across from him. Mario sat down. The morning sunshine lit up the office: the white walls, the leather chairs, the desk covered in papers, the poster advertising a retrospective of the work of Botero, Scanlan’s eyes, dark and intelligent behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

Scanlan stroked his beard and blinked.

‘Well, Mario,’ he said softly. ‘I suppose you can give me an explanation.’

Mario looked him in the eye without understanding.

‘Of what?’ he asked.

Scanlan stared back for a moment, blinked again, sighed. Then he opened a drawer in his desk, took out a piece of paper and handed it to Mario. He read it: the students from the first and second sections of phonology informed the head of the department that the professor in charge of the courses had not shown up for any of the lectures since term began.

‘What do you want me to say?’ said Mario, handing the paper back to Scanlan and feeling a slight tingle of satisfaction in his stomach. ‘Ask Berkowickz.’

‘Who?’ asked Scanlan, wrinkling his brow slightly.

‘Berkowickz,’ Mario repeated. ‘He’s in charge of those two sections.’

‘Have you gone crazy, or what?’ bellowed Scanlan, beside himself, standing up and pounding on the desk. ‘Who the hell is Berkowickz, might I ask?’

Confused, not knowing what to answer, almost asking, Mario declared, ‘The new phonology professor.’

Scanlan stared at him incredulously.

‘Look, Mario,’ he said at last, containing the rage that was making his hands tremble, ‘I assure you that I can understand your attempts to shift the responsibility to someone else: it’s petty, but I can understand it. What I can’t get through my head is you taking me for an idiot. You really think I am, or what?’ He paused, took a deep breath, pointed at the door with an admonishing finger and added, ‘And now listen closely: if you don’t get out of my office this instant and go and teach those two classes, or if I receive one single further complaint about you, I swear I’ll tear up your contract right here and now and throw you out on the street. I hope I’ve made myself clear.’

Mario stood up and left the office. Scanlan stood staring at the door, visibly shaken. Then he sat down, stroked his beard gently, looked at the papers he had on his desk, signed a few of them. After a few minutes he raised his eyes and blinked. ‘Berkowickz,’ he murmured, staring off into space, abstracted. ‘Berkowickz.’




XX


Mario walked quickly down the corridor, without saying hello to anybody. He got to the office; with trembling hands he took out a bunch of keys, chose one, tried to open the door but couldn’t. He tried to stay calm; he looked for the key engraved with the number 4024, which corresponded to the number of the office, in vain: the key did not appear. He immediately noticed the door opening from within. Olalde’s hunchbacked silhouette stood out against the insufficient light of the office; he smiled with a grimace that ploughed his forehead with lines and allowed a glimpse of his nicotine-stained teeth.

‘This time you were lucky, young man,’ he said, still sneering. ‘But watch out: next time you might not be.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Mario said hastily, without thinking what he was saying, almost in fear.

‘You know perfectly well what I’m talking about,’ said Olalde. ‘But that’s your problem: you’re old enough to know what suits you. At least you’ll have realized that sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

Mario didn’t say anything; he walked back up the corridor. When he passed in front of Berkowickz’s office he stopped, scanned the corridor left and right, examined the bunch of keys, found the one engraved with the number 4043. He opened the door: he recognized the open books squashed on the desk and the shelves, the portable fridge, the cardboard boxes crammed with papers, the dirty ashtrays, the general disorder and closed-up smell; he understood that all his things were there.

He gave three lectures.

When he got home he dialled a telephone number.

‘Mrs Workman?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is Mario Rota,’ said Mario. ‘I’m calling about a delicate situation.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s about the new tenant.’

‘The new tenant,’ Mrs Workman repeated with a tired voice.

‘Mr Berkowickz, I mean.’

‘Mr Who?’

‘Berkowickz,’ repeated Mario. ‘Daniel Berkowickz. The linguistics professor, my colleague, the tenant who moved into Nancy’s old apartment.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m going to be frank with you, Mr Rota. I hope you won’t take it the wrong way,’ Mrs Workman said at last. ‘You know better than anyone that when Nancy spoke to me about your. . eccentricities, shall we call them, I chose to be tolerant. She acted like a good tenant should, and I’m not going to consent to you bothering her, not her or any of the rest of the tenants, as you certainly did me the other day calling me at an unreasonable hour, probably drunk.’

‘Mrs Workman —’

‘Don’t interrupt me,’ Mrs Workman interrupted him. ‘You were lucky I was half asleep and don’t really remember what you said. Or I probably don’t want to remember. Anyway, let me tell you something: I accept that you and Nancy don’t get along, you’ve had problems, but although I don’t blame you entirely, Nancy has been a tenant here longer than any other and has more right than you to stay here; furthermore, she’s never given me any reason to worry. I’d rather my tenants got along, but I assure you if I have one single further complaint about you or you start behaving strangely again I won’t have the slightest reservation about throwing you out.’

‘But Mrs Workman,’ Mario complained weakly. ‘It was you yourself who introduced me to Mr Berkowickz and —’

‘Look, Mr Rota,’ said Mrs Workman in a final-sounding tone of voice. ‘Stop talking nonsense. I don’t know who Mr Berkowickz is, nor do I care. I don’t want to discuss the matter further; it’s all been said. But I repeat for the last time: I hope I don’t have another complaint about you. And my advice to you is to give up drinking.’

Mrs Workman hung up. She went to the bathroom, washed her face and hands, looked in the mirror, put a bit of colour on her cheeks and lips, brushed her hair, then she dabbed a bit of perfume behind each earlobe. She returned to the room and picked up a beige handbag and a linen jacket that she put on in the kitchen as she took a last look around the house.

She drove out of the garage and took Ellis Avenue up to Green. At the intersection she stopped at the traffic lights. Then, as she waited abstractedly for the lights to change, she murmured, ‘Berkowickz.’




XXI


Sitting on the sofa in the dining room, Mario lit a cigarette; he inhaled the smoke contentedly. Then he dialled a telephone number.

‘Ginger?’ he said when a feminine voice answered. ‘It’s Mario.’

‘How are you, Mario?’ said Brenda. ‘Ginger hasn’t come home yet. Do you want me to give her a message?’

Mario hesitated, then he said, ‘Tell her I called and that. .’

‘Oh, you’re in luck,’ said Brenda. ‘Ginger’s just coming in. I’ll put her on, Mario. See you.’

Mario heard an indistinct murmur down the line.

‘Mario?’ said Ginger a moment later. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ said Mario. ‘I was just wondering if you were doing anything this evening.’

‘Nothing special,’ said Ginger. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mario. ‘I thought you might like to come over here for a bite to eat.’

‘Sounds like a great idea,’ said Ginger. ‘What time do you want me to come over?’

‘Whenever suits you,’ said Mario. ‘Right now, if you want.’

‘I’ll be right over,’ said Ginger. And hung up.

Mario took a last puff of his cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. He looked at all the books and papers in a disorderly pile on the arm of the sofa; he thought about sorting them out, taking them through to the study to fill the time till Ginger arrived.

Then he got an idea. He stood up and stealthily opened the apartment door; he crossed the landing. Pressing his ear to the door opposite, he held his breath, listened in silence.

‘I’ve had it up to here with you, you Italian pig!’ he heard thundering behind his back. ‘Up to here!’

Weighed down with shopping, Nancy dragged the mass of her body up the stairs laboriously. Mario held out his hands, apologized clumsily while retreating into his apartment, then offered to help Nancy with her bags.

‘You little turd,’ answered Nancy, dropping her packages on the floor. She breathed heavily as she hunted around in a pocket of her very ample dress that in vain sought to sow confusion with respect to the true dimensions of what it hid. She took out a bunch of keys, adding, ‘That’s far enough, you Italian swine. I’m phoning the old lady right now.’

‘No, Nancy, please,’ begged Mario, stepping towards her, his arms outstretched in an almost imploring manner. ‘Not Mrs Workman.’

Nancy had opened the door. She turned to confront Mario: he noticed the drops of sweat pearling on the woman’s brow.

‘But what the fuck were you doing there?’

‘The new tenant,’ Mario mumbled. ‘I just wanted to see if Berkowickz. . was. . um.’

Mario smiled without finishing his sentence. Nancy regarded him with resignation, almost with pity.

‘You’re not just a pig,’ she diagnosed, shaking her head gently from left to right. ‘You’re also going crazy.’

Nancy slammed the door. Mario returned to his apartment, closing the door softly.

After a short time Ginger arrived. She was wearing a blue sweater with red buttons, a black miniskirt and slightly worn black shoes; her eyes shone. Mario thought: She looks lovely. They sat down on the sofa in the dining room. Mario offered a whisky. Ginger accepted. Mario poured whisky over ice in two glasses in the kitchen and went back into the dining room.

They talked animatedly, laughing and drinking.

‘I’m pleased,’ said Ginger at one point, after a silence, looking at Mario with serious, blue, love-struck eyes.

‘What about?’ asked Mario, sipping his whisky.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ginger. She smiled weakly. She added, ‘You’ve been so strange this week.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Mario.

There was a silence.

‘I thought we were through,’ declared Ginger after a while.

‘Me too,’ said Mario.

He set his glass of whisky down on the floor, he moved closer to her, put his arm around her neck, stroked the nape of her neck and her hair, kissed her softly on the lips. Lengthening the kiss they slid over to rest against the right arm of the sofa, and laughed as they heard the books and papers heaped there fall on to the floor: an Italian — German dictionary, outlines for lectures, notes, a phonology manual and a photocopied article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz.




The Motive


Il y a une locution latine qui dit à peu près: ‘Ramasser un dénier dans l’ordure avec ses dents’. On appliquait cette figure de rhétorique aux avares, je suis comme eux, je ne m’arrête à rien pour trouver de l’or.

    

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT








I


Álvaro took his work seriously. Every day he got up punctually at eight. He cleared his head with a cold shower and went down to the supermarket to buy bread and the newspaper. When he returned he made coffee and toast with butter and marmalade and ate breakfast in the kitchen, leafing through the paper and listening to the radio. By nine he was sitting in his study ready to begin the day’s work.

He’d made his life subordinate to literature: all friendships, interests, ambitions, possibilities for professional or economic advancement, days or evenings out had been displaced in its interest. He disdained anything he didn’t consider an impetus to his work. And, since the majority of well-paid jobs he could have had with his law degree demanded almost exclusive dedication, Álvaro preferred a modest position as consultant in a modest legal agency. This job allowed him to have the whole morning at his disposal to devote to his labours and freed him from any responsibility that might distract him from writing; it also gave him indispensable economic peace of mind.

He considered literature an exclusive lover. She must either be served with dedication and devotion or she would abandon him to his fate. Tertium non datur. As with all arts, literature is a matter of time and toil, he’d say to himself. Remembering a severe French moralist’s celebrated maxim on love, Álvaro thought it was with inspiration as it was with ghosts: everyone talked about it, but no one had seen it. And so he accepted that all creation consisted of one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. The reverse would mean leaving it in the hands of the amateur, the weekend writer; the reverse would mean improvisation, chaos and the most despicable lack of rigour.

He felt that literature had been left to amateurs. Conclusive proof: only the least eminent of his contemporaries devoted themselves to it. Frivolity, the absence of any authentic ambition, traditionally conformist commerce, indiscriminate use of obsolete formulas, myopia and even disdain for anything that diverged from the tracks of narrow provincialism ran rampant. Phenomena alien to actual creation added confusion to this panorama: the lack of stimulating and civilized social surroundings, of an environment suitable for work and fertile in truly artistic expression; even the petty social climbing, the advantage taken of cultural promotion as an access ramp to certain political positions. . Álvaro felt partly responsible for such a state of affairs. For that reason he must conceive an ambitious work of universal reach that would spur his colleagues on to continue the labour embarked upon by him.

He knew that a writer recognizes himself as such by his reading. Every writer must be, first and foremost, a great reader. He swiftly and efficiently covered the volumes published in the four languages he knew, making use of translations only for access to fundamental works of classical or marginal literatures. However, he distrusted the superstition that all translations were inferior to the original text, because the original was merely the score from which the interpreter executed the work. This — he later observed — did not impoverish the text, but endowed it with an almost infinite number of interpretations or forms, all potentially valid. He believed there was no literature, no matter how lateral or trifling, that did not contain all the elements of Literature, all its magic, all its abysses, all its games. He suspected that reading was an act of informative indolence: the truly literary thing was re-reading. Three or four books contained, as Flaubert believed, all the wisdom to which man had access, but the titles of these books also varied for each man.

Strictly speaking, literature is oblivion encouraged by vanity. This verification did not humble, but ennobled it. It was essential — Álvaro reflected during his long years of meditation and study prior to the conception of the Work — to find in the literature of our predecessors a seam that expresses us fully, a cypher of our very selves, our most intimate desires, our most abject reality. It was essential to retake that tradition and insert oneself into it, even if it had to be rescued from oblivion, marginalization or the studious hands of dusty scholars. It was essential to create a solid genealogy. It was essential to have fathers.

He considered various options. For a time, he thought that verse was by definition superior to prose. The lyric poem, however, struck him as too scattered in its execution, too instinctive and gusty. As much as he was repelled by the idea, he sensed that phenomena verging on magic, and therefore removed from the sweet control of a tenacious apprenticeship, and given to arising in spirits more festive than his own, clouded the act of creation. If what the classics romantically called inspiration was involved in any genre, it was the lyric poem. So, since he knew himself incapable of bringing one off, he decided to consider it obsolete: the lyric poem is an anachronism, he decreed.

Later he weighed up the possibility of writing an epic poem. Here undoubtedly the intervention of momentary rapture was reduced to the order of the anecdotal. And there was no shortage of texts on which to base his claim. But the use of verse involved an inevitable distancing from the audience. The work would remain confined to the sphere of a secret circle, and he thought it advisable to avoid the temptation of enclosing oneself in a conception of literature as a code only suitable for initiates. A text is the author’s dialogue with the world and, if one of the two interlocutors disappears, the process is irredeemably mutilated: the text loses its effectiveness.

He opted to attempt an epic in prose. But perhaps the novel — he said to himself — was born in exactly this way: as an epic in prose. And this put him on the trail of a new urgency: the necessity to elevate prose to the dignity of poetry. Each sentence must possess the marmoreal immutability of verse, its music, its secret harmony, its fatality. He scorned the superiority of poetry over prose.

He decided to write a novel. The novel was born with modernity; it was the instrument most suited to expressing it. But could one still write novels? His century had seen its foundations undermined by determined spade-work; the most esteemed novelists had set out to ensure that no one would succeed them, had set out to pulverize the genre. Before this death sentence, there were two appeals successive in time and equally apparent: one, in spite of trying to preserve the greatness of the genre, was negative and basically complied with the sentence; the other, which did nothing to challenge the verdict either, was positive, but willingly confined itself to a modest horizon. The first agonized in a super-literary experimentalism, asphyxiating and verbosely self-devouring; the second — intimately convinced, like the other, of the death of the novel — took cover, like a lover who sees his faith betrayed, in lesser genres like the short story or the novella, and with these meagre substitutes renounced all intention of grasping human life and reality in an allencompassing totality. An art encumbered from the outset by the burden of its lowly lack of ambition was an art condemned to die of frivolity.

Despite all the century’s swipes, however, it was essential to keep believing in the novel. Some had already understood this. No instrument could grasp with more precision and wealth of nuance the long-winded complexity of reality. As for its death certificate, he considered it a dangerous Hegelian prejudice; art neither advances nor retreats: art happens. But it was only possible to combat the notion of the genre’s death throes by returning to its moment of splendour, in the meantime taking careful note of the technical and other sorts of contributions the century had afforded, which it would be, at the very least, stupid to waste. It was essential to go back to the nineteenth century; it was essential to go back to Flaubert.




II


Álvaro conceived a disproportionately ambitious project. Examining several possible plots, he finally chose the one he judged most tolerable. At the end of the day, he thought, the choice of theme is a trivial matter. Any theme is good for literature; what matters is the manner of expressing it. The theme is just an excuse.

He decided to narrate the unprecedented deeds of four insignificant characters. One of them, the protagonist, is an ambitious writer who’s writing an ambitious novel. This novel within the novel tells the story of a young couple, suffocated by economic difficulties that are destroying their life together and undermining their happiness. After many hesitations, the couple resolve to murder an unsociable old man who lives very austerely in the same building. Apart from the writer of this novel, Álvaro’s novel features three other characters: a young couple, who work from morning till night trying to make ends meet and an old man who lives modestly on the top floor of the same building where the couple and the novelist live. While the writer in Álvaro’s novel is writing his own novel, the peaceful coexistence of the neighbouring couple is marred and upset: the mornings of fond frolicking in bed give way to morning feuds, arguments alternate with tears and fleeting reconciliations. One day the writer meets his neighbours in the lift. The couple are carrying a long object wrapped in brown paper. Incongruously, the writer imagines that this object is an axe and makes up his mind, when he gets home, that the couple in his novel will hack the old man to death with an axe. Days later he finishes his novel. The very next morning, the concierge discovers the corpse of the old man who lived modestly in the same building as the novelist and the couple. The old man has been murdered with an axe. According to the police, the motive for the crime was robbery. Shocked, the novelist, who knows full well the identity of the murderers, feels guilty of their crime because, in some confusing way, he senses that it was his novel that induced them to commit it.

Once he’s got the general outline of the work designed, Álvaro writes an initial draft. He aspires to construct a mechanism that works like clockwork: nothing must be left to chance. He makes a file on each of his characters in which he meticulously records the course of their hesitations, nostalgia, thoughts, attitudes, fluctuations, desires and errors. He soon realizes it is essential — although most arduous — to suggest the process of osmosis by which, mysteriously, the writing of the novel that so absorbs the protagonist modifies the lives of his neighbours to such an extent that it is in some way responsible for the crime they commit. Voluntarily or involuntarily, dragged by his creative fanaticism or by his mere thoughtlessness, the author is responsible for not having realized in time, for not having been able or willing to prevent that death.

Álvaro immerses himself in his work. His characters accompany him everywhere: they work with him, walk, sleep, urinate, drink, dream, sit in front of the television and breathe with him. He fills hundreds of pages with observations, notes, episodes, corrections, descriptions of his characters and their surroundings. The files get more and more voluminous. When he thinks he has a sufficient quantity of material, he undertakes to write the first version of the novel.




III


The day Álvaro was going to start writing the novel he got up, as usual, at eight on the dot. He took a cold shower and, when he was about to leave the house — the door was half-open and he grasped the doorknob in his left hand — he hesitated, as if he’d forgotten something or as if the wing of a bird had brushed his forehead.

He left. The clean, sweet light of early spring filled the street. He went into the supermarket, which at that hour appeared almost deserted. He bought milk, bread, half a dozen eggs and a bit of fruit. As he joined the tiny line by the cash register, his attention fell on the slight, unpleasant-looking old man in front of him. It was Señor Montero. Señor Montero lived in an apartment on the top floor of the building where Álvaro lived, but up till then their relationship had been confined to customary salutations and uncomfortable lift silences. As the old man set his items on the counter so the woman at the till could punch them in, Álvaro considered his stature, the slight curve of his body, his hands scored with thick veins, his evasive brow, wilful jaw and difficult profile. When it was his turn at the checkout, Álvaro urged the woman to hurry, put his purchases in plastic bags, left the supermarket, ran down the sunny street and arrived panting at the door. The old man was waiting for the lift.

‘Good morning,’ said Álvaro with the most encompassing and friendly voice he could muster while trying to hide his rapid breathing.

The old man responded with a grunt. There was silence.

The lift arrived. They stepped in. Álvaro commented, as if thinking aloud, ‘What a beautiful morning! You can really tell spring’s arrived, can’t you?’ and gave the old man a wink of perfectly superfluous complicity, which was received with the barest hint of a smile, a tiny wrinkling of his forehead and a slight clearing of the darkness from his brow. But he immediately enclosed himself back into surly silence.

When he got home, Álvaro was convinced that the old man from the top-floor apartment was the ideal model for the old man in his novel. His edgy silence, his slightly humiliating decrepitude, his physical appearance: it all tallied with the attributes his character required. He thought: This will simplify things. Obviously reflecting a real model in his work would make it much easier to endow the fictional character with a believable, effective incarnation. He could simply use the features and attitudes of the chosen individual as props, thus avoiding the risks of an imaginary somersault into the void, which could promise only dubious results. He would have to become thoroughly informed, about Señor Montero’s past and present life, all his activities, sources of income, relatives and friends. No detail was unimportant. Everything could contribute to enriching and constructing his character — sufficiently altered or distorted — in the fiction. And if it was true that the reader should do without many of these details — which, therefore, there was no reason to include in the novel — it was no less true that Álvaro was interested in all of them, given that in his judgement they constituted the basis for the precarious and subtle balance between coherence and incoherence on which a character’s believability is founded and that supports the incorruptible impression of reality produced by real individuals. From these considerations naturally followed the expediency of finding a couple who, for the same reasons, might serve as a model for the innocently criminal couple in his novel. Here it would be necessary to obtain the greatest possible quality of information on their life. Proximity to this couple would enormously simplify his work, because then he could not only observe them in more detail and more continuously, but also, with a bit of luck, he might be able to manage to listen in on conversations and even hypothetical marital disputes. He might then be able to reflect these in the novel with a high degree of verisimilitude, in greater detail and with more ease and vigour. The conversations of his immediate neighbours (those in the apartment above his own and those who lived next door on the same floor) filtered through the thin walls of his apartment, but only reached his ears dimly or during moments when silence reigned in the building or when the shouts of his neighbours rose above the general murmuring. All this put in doubt the very possibility of carrying out any espionage.

There was yet another inconvenience: Álvaro hardly knew any of his neighbours in the building. And of the three apartments that he might have had a chance to spy on — being adjacent to his — at least two could be discarded out of hand. In one of them lived a young journalist with a face covered in boils who, with nocturnal assiduity and undeclared intentions, interrupted him regularly to ask for untimely cups of sugar or flour. Another apartment had remained empty since a widowed mother and her unmarried grown-up daughter, in love with her dog, had moved out about five months earlier, without paying their rent. Therefore, only one apartment could possibly house a married couple that might meet the demands of his novel.

Then he remembered the little ventilation window, in the bathroom of his apartment, which opened on to the building’s narrow courtyard. Many times, when answering the call of nature, he had overheard his neighbours’ conversations, which came in clearly through the open window. So, in taking advantage of this new resource, not only would the task of spying be simplified and the listening difficulties reduced, but the pool of available candidates would increase, given that he’d have the chance to hear the conversations of all the tenants on his floor. Apart from the apartment left vacant by the two women, the other four were all occupied. And it was not impossible that in one of them might live a couple who, to a greater or lesser degree, might bend to the demands of his fictional couple. He just needed to seek information and, once he had chosen the hypothetical model, devote all his attention to them.

Where could he gather information on old man Montero and the other tenants on his floor? There could only be one answer: the concierge was perhaps the only person in the whole building who knew all the comings and goings in the lives of all the tenants. But it wouldn’t be easy to get information out of her without arousing suspicion. He needed to win her confidence no matter what it cost him, even if it meant overcoming his instinctive repugnance towards that tall, thin, bony, gossipy woman with her servile, saccharine manners and a disconcerting hint of horsiness in her face.

There were all sorts of rumours about her around the neighbourhood. Some mysteriously affirmed that her dubious past was something she would never be able to live down, others, that this past was neither past nor dubious, for everyone knew how assiduously she visited the caretaker of the building next door, as well as the local butcher. All agreed that the real victim of her picturesque tendencies was her husband. He was not as tall as her, a weak, greasy, sweaty man, whom the concierge treated with condescension and unlimited disdain, in spite of the fact that, according to many, he’d been her authentic redeemer. The best informed (or perhaps the most malicious) attested that, although the concierge’s husband’s usual attire — a worn-out pair of trousers and a bricklayer’s shirt — and his permanent air of exhaustion or boredom might indicate the contrary, he was incapable of fulfilling his conjugal duties, which increased his wife’s malaise to extremes of violence. Even though he ignored these rumours as he ignored everything to do with his neighbours, Álvaro could not keep from thinking of one fact that might provide a short cut to intimacy with the concierge: it was obvious she found him attractive. This was the only interpretation of the way she’d looked at him and brushed up against him on more than one occasion, to Álvaro’s embarrassment, surprise and shame, when they happened to meet in the lift or on the stairs. On more than a few mornings she’d invited him in for coffee, while her husband — whose bovine faith in his wife’s fidelity was a guarantee of stability for the tenants — was at work. Far from feeling flattered, these obvious insinuations had increased the repulsion she inspired in him. Now, however, he must take advantage of them.

So, the following day, once he’d made sure her husband had left for work, he rang the bell of the concierge’s flat. At that very moment he realized he hadn’t even prepared an excuse to justify his visit. He was about to run away up the stairs, but then the mare opened the door. She smiled showing a mouthful of orderly teeth and offered him a hand, which, despite its thinness, felt strangely viscous. It was cold and somewhat damp. Álvaro thought he had a toad in his hand.

She invited him in. They sat on the sofa in the dining room. The concierge seemed nervous and excited. She removed a vase and a figurine from the table beside the sofa and offered her visitor a cup of coffee. While the woman was in the kitchen, Álvaro told himself that what he was doing was sheer madness: he would drink the coffee and go home.

The concierge returned with two cups of coffee. She sat down a little closer to Álvaro. She spoke non-stop, answering her own questions. At one point, she nonchalantly rested her hand on Álvaro’s left thigh; he pretended not to notice and gulped down the rest of his coffee. He stood up abruptly and jabbered some excuse; then he thanked the concierge for the coffee.

‘Thanks again for everything,’ he said, already at the door.

And then, thinking he was lying, he added, ‘I’ll come back another time.’

When he got home he felt relieved, but his relief soon turned to anxiety. The vast repugnance the woman caused him was not sufficient reason, he told himself, to endanger a project so arduously and protractedly elaborated. The value of the information he could obtain from the concierge far outweighed the price he’d need to pay with the sacrifice of his stupid scruples. Furthermore — he concluded, to instill himself with valour — the differences that, on all fronts, distinguished one woman from the next were merely adjectival.

The next morning he returned to the concierge’s flat. This time there was no need for formalities. Resigned, Álvaro carried out his mission with phoney enthusiasm in an enormous, rickety old bed, with a wooden headboard from which hung a crucifix, which, in the midst of adulterous euphoria and from the effect of the corresponding jolts, fell off its hook and landed on Álvaro’s head. He refrained from making any comment whatsoever and tried not to think at all.

Now the room was in semi-darkness: only a few lines of yellowish light striped the floor, the bed, the walls. The smoke from their cigarettes thickened as it floated through the rays of light. Álvaro talked about the various tenants in the building; he said that the one who most intrigued him was Señor Montero. The concierge explained (her voice momentarily acquired a slight pleasantness to Álvaro’s ear) that the old man had lost his wife a few years back and had then moved into the flat he now occupied. She didn’t know for certain, but suspected he was close to eighty years old. He’d fought in the civil war and, once it was over, stayed in the army, although he never rose from the ranks. The new military regulations caught up with him and he’d had to take early retirement. That’s why he hated politicians unwaveringly. As far as she knew he never had visitors; she didn’t know if he had any relatives, although every once in a while he received letters with South American postmarks and feminine handwriting. His only acknowledged passion was chess. He unashamedly declared himself to be an excellent player. He had been one of the founders of a chess club, which was quite far away from where he now lived, and that had forced him to space out his matches because at his age he was no longer up to great excitement. This had contributed to embittering his character even further. It was not impossible that she was the only person he had any dealings with, as she went up to his flat daily to clean, prepare a little food for him and take care of other domestic matters. But she’d never become too friendly with him — something which didn’t interest her — nothing beyond the trust that could be implied from her knowledge of those superficial details. She admitted to treating him with a certain deference, but she recognized that he was harsh and mistrustful with the rest of the tenants.

‘Imagine,’ continued the concierge, whose brisk transition from the formal to the familiar form of address instigated a verbal intimacy between them that, for some reason, bothered Álvaro even more than the physical one. ‘He pays me each week from money he keeps in a wall safe hidden behind a picture. He says he doesn’t trust banks. At first I didn’t know where he got the money from, but since he’s so proud of the safe, he ended up showing me.’

Álvaro asked if she thought he kept a lot of money in it.

‘I doubt his pension stretches very far.’

Against the perfect whiteness of the sheets, the concierge’s skin looked almost translucent. Her gaze was fixed on the ceiling and she spoke with a tranquillity Álvaro had never seen in her, the tree of veins at her temple barely showing. She turned towards him, resting her cheek on the pillow (her eyes were a sickly blue), and kissed him. Making a supreme effort, like a long-distance runner who feels his legs weaken within sight of the finishing line and, pulling himself together, with one last disproportionate exertion, Álvaro complied.

The woman sank her satisfied face into the pillow. Álvaro lit a cigarette. He was exhausted, but soon began to talk of the other occupants of his floor. He said he was curious about them: it was almost a crime that after two years of living in the same building he barely knew them by sight. The woman turned over, lit a cigarette, stated the names of his neighbours and talked about the two women who’d had to leave the building a while ago for not paying their rent. She told anecdotes she thought were funny but which were actually just grotesque. Álvaro thought: ‘On veut bien être méchant, mais on ne veut point être ridicule’. He felt satisfied at having recalled a quote so appropriate to the moment. These trivial satisfactions filled him with pleasure, because he thought that all of life could be reduced to an indeterminate number of quotes. All of life is a cento, he thought. And then he immediately wondered: but who would undertake the critical edition?

A smile of beatific idiocy illuminated her face as the concierge chattered on. She spoke of the Casares family, who lived in flat C on the second floor. A young couple from the north who seemed moderately happy, with a moderate, friendly manner, and moderately healthy finances. They had two children. Álvaro sensed that they were the kind of people whose normality kept them immunue to gossip and exasperated concierges. He assured her he remembered them and urged the woman to go on talking about them. The concierge explained that the husband — he wouldn’t be more than thirty-five — worked at the Seat plant, on the afternoon shift, so he started around four and finished at midnight. The woman took care of the house and children. The concierge reproached them (she spoke of all the tenants as if she were a decisive part of their lives) for educating their children above their means and social status. Perhaps living in the upper part of the city made them feel obliged to make undoubtedly excessive extravagances. Álvaro thought the concierge’s voice sounded like it was infected with the kind of rancour happy people inspire in resentful, mediocre people.

Álvaro stood up abruptly, got dressed without a word. The concierge covered her naked body with a robe; she asked him if he’d be coming back tomorrow. While adjusting the knot of his tie in front of the mirror, Álvaro said no. He peered out through the peephole to make sure the entrance hall was empty. The concierge asked him if he’d be back another day. Álvaro answered: ‘Who knows?’ He left.

He waited for the lift. When it arrived and he was about to step in, he noticed Señora Casares, weighed down with packages as well as her shopping trolley, struggling with her key in the lock of the main door. He rushed to her aid. He opened the door and picked several of her bags up off the ground.

‘Thank you so much, Álvaro, I’m so grateful,’ said Señora Casares, almost laughing at the situation she found herself in.

Instead of it making him uncomfortable, Álvaro was flattered by her informal way of using his first name, although he couldn’t help but be surprised by it, given that it was the first time they’d ever spoken. By the time they got to the lift, it had gone back up. Señora Casares joked about being a housewife; Álvaro joked about being a housekeeper. They laughed.

Irene Casares is slight, of medium height and with a neat, meticulous appearance. Her manners seem studied, but not false, perhaps because her naturalness comes from a sort of delicate discipline. The features of her face seem strangely toned down, as if softened by the sweetness that emanates from her gestures, her lips, her words. Her eyes are clear, her beauty humble. But there is within her an elegance and dignity that her somewhat vulgar appearance doesn’t quite disguise.

Álvaro acted kind. He asked questions and received replies. On the landing they stood a while chatting. Álvaro bemoaned the impersonal relations among the residents of the building, launched into a fervent defence of neighbourhood life, which he admitted to having always avoided; to win the woman’s sympathy, he joked maliciously about the concierge. Señora Casares claimed she had to go and make lunch and they said goodbye.

Álvaro took a shower, made some lunch and ate. After three, he waited by the peephole for Señor Casares to leave for work. Shortly, Enrique Casares left his apartment. Álvaro left his apartment. They met in front of the lift. They said hello. Álvaro began the conversation: he said that very morning he’d been chatting with his wife; he bemoaned the impersonal relations between residents of the building and launched into a fervent defence of neighbourhood life, which he admitted to having always avoided; to win the man’s complicity, he joked maliciously about the concierge. Señor Casares smiled soberly. Álvaro noticed he was a bit fatter than he seemed at first glance and that it gave him an affable air. He asked him how he got to work. ‘By bus,’ Casares answered. Álvaro offered him a lift in his car; Casares turned him down. Álvaro insisted; Casares eventually accepted.

During the drive conversation flowed easily between them. Álvaro explained that he worked as a consultant in a legal agency and that his job only took up his afternoons. With a profusion of gestures that betrayed an exuberant though perhaps rather fragile vitality, Casares described his work at the factory and, not without pride, revealed certain knowledge of motors to which he had access, thanks to the relative responsibility of the position he held. When they got to the Seat plant, Casares thanked him for taking the trouble of driving him there. Then he walked away, towards the huge metal premises, through the full car-park.

That night, Álvaro dreamed he was walking across a green meadow with white horses. He was going to meet someone or something, and felt as if he were floating over the fresh grass. He was going up a gentle slope with no trees or shrubs or birds. At the top a white door with a golden doorknob appeared. He opened the door and, despite knowing that what he was looking for lay in wait on the other side, something or someone tempted him to turn around, to stand at the crest of the green hill, turned back towards the meadow, his left hand on the golden doorknob, the white door half open.




IV


Over the following days his work began to bear its first fruits. The novel was advancing steadily, though it diverged in parts from the outline arranged in the drafts and the previous plan. But Álvaro let it flow freely within that precarious and difficult balance between the instantaneous pull that certain situations and characters imposed and the necessary rigour of the general design that structures a work. As for the rest, if the presence of real models for his characters facilitated his task and provided a point of support where his imagination could rest or derive fresh impetus, at the same time it introduced new variables that would necessarily change the course of the tale. The two stylistic pillars upon which the work was being raised were nevertheless intact, and that was the essential thing for Álvaro. On the one hand, the descriptive passion, which offers the possibility of constructing a fictive duplicate of reality, by appropriating it; moreover, he considered that, while the enjoyment of sentiment is merely a plebeian emotion, the genuinely artistic enjoyment comes from the impersonal pleasure of description. On the other hand, it was necessary to narrate events in the same neutral tone that dominated the descriptive passages, like someone recounting incidents he hasn’t entirely understood himself or as if the relationship between the narrator and his characters was of a similar order to that which the narrator maintained with his toiletries. Álvaro frequently congratulated himself on his immovable conviction of the validity of these principles.

He also checked the efficiency of his listening post in the bathroom. Although on several occasions his neighbours’ conversations got all mixed up together, they came through clearly through the little ventilation window that gave on to the courtyard, and it wasn’t difficult to distinguish those of the Casares, not only because in the mornings the other apartments remained plunged in silence, barely disturbed by the sounds of saucepans colliding or glasses clinking, but because — as he soon realized — the Casares’ little ventilation window was located right next to his own, so their voices always came through clearly.

Álvaro would sit down on the lid of the toilet, hold his breath and listen. Mixed in with the rest of the general morning buzz of the building, he’d hear them get up, wake the children, wash and fix themselves up in the bathroom, get breakfast ready and eat it. The man took the children to school and returned a little while later. Then the two of them would put the house in order, do the domestic chores, joke around, go shopping, get lunch ready. In the silence of the nights, he’d hear her pleased laughter, conversations whispered in the quiet darkness of the room; later, agitated breathing, moaning, the bed’s rhythmic creaking and soon silence. One morning he listened to their giggles as they showered together; another time Señor Casares pounced, in the middle of the housework, on Señora Casares, who, in spite of protesting feebly at first, gave in almost immediately without offering the slightest resistance.

Álvaro listened attentively. He was annoyed that all these conversations were of absolutely no use to him. He’d purchased several blank tapes in order to record, plugging the machine into the bathroom socket, everything that came through the neighbours’ ventilation window. But why should he record all this useless material? He would hardly be able to use any of it in the novel. And it was a shame. Álvaro surprised himself — at first slightly perplexed — at regretting the lack of disagreement between the couple next door. All couples go through difficult periods every once in a while and he didn’t think it much to ask that they too should abide by this norm. Now that the book was going well, now that the knots of the plot were beginning to get nicely tied up, was when he most needed a real fulcrum that would spur him on to take the story line firmly in hand to the denouement. The tension of one or two arguments, provoked by some trivial domestic or conjugal event, would be enough to simplify his task extraordinarily, to help him continue with it fearlessly. That’s why he was exasperated to the point of paroxysm by the laughter and whispers he heard through the neighbouring ventilation window. From the look of things, the Casares were not willing to make the slightest concession.

One day he went back to spying on the hallway, waiting for Enrique Casares to leave for work. Once again they met by the lift. They chatted, and Álvaro offered him a lift to the factory. The sticky heat of four in the afternoon didn’t keep them from carrying on a conversation in between the abstract protests of honking horns and the dun-coloured clouds of smoke escaping from exhaust pipes. They talked of politics. Casares criticised the government with a bitterness Álvaro thought out of character within his affable corpulence. He confessed to having voted for them in the previous elections, but now regretted it. Álvaro thought his neighbour’s vitality had turned into an almost agitated resentment. Casares said it was incredible that a left-wing government could play such rotten tricks on workers, the very people who’d voted them into office. Álvaro agreed, paying close attention to his words. There was a moment of silence. The car stopped in the factory car-park. Casares didn’t get out immediately and Álvaro realized he wanted to add something. Wringing his hands nervously, Casares asked him if he would mind, seeing as he was a legal adviser as well as a neighbour, if he consulted him about a personal problem that was worrying him. Álvaro said he’d love to be able to help. They agreed to meet the following day. Relieved and grateful, Enrique Casares said goodbye and Álvaro watched him walk away across the car-park under the burning afternoon sun.

At twelve noon the next day, Casares turned up at Álvaro’s apartment. They sat down on the sofa in the dining room. Álvaro asked him if he’d like something to drink; Casares politely declined. To assuage the tension his neighbour had written all over his face, Álvaro spoke of the happy proximity of the summer holidays. Casares practically interrupted him, no longer hiding his embarrassment.

‘It’d be best if we got straight to the point. I’m going to be frank with you.’ Álvaro said to himself that, although he still addressed the couple with the formal usted, they had both now definitively adopted the friendlier tú. The fact did not make him feel uncomfortable. ‘If I’ve resorted to this it’s only because I find myself in a bind and because I think I can trust you. The truth is I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t inspire confidence.’

Casares looked him frankly in the eye. Álvaro cleared his throat, prepared to offer all of his attention.

Enrique Casares explained that his company had begun a process of downsizing. This restructuring of the workforce affected him directly: they were now processing his redundancy. As he would have read in the papers, the workers had gone on strike, the union had broken off talks with the company and the ministry. For the majority of workers affected by these measures, the situation was hopeless. His own case, however, was different. Casares outlined the details that made his situation special. He said he wondered whether it might be possible to appeal against his dismissal with some chance of success and that, to avoid getting lost in a jungle of unfamiliar laws and decrees, he was going to need the help of a lawyer.

He added, ‘Of course, I’ll pay whatever it costs.’

Álvaro remained silent in his armchair, without the slightest gesture of assent or refusal. His visitor seemed relieved of a terrible burden. He said that he’d now gladly accept the beer Álvaro had offered earlier. Álvaro went to the kitchen, opened two beers, which they drank together. More relaxed, Casares said he couldn’t exaggerate the importance of the matter, since his salary from the factory was his family’s only source of sustenance. He begged him not to mention the matter to anyone: he’d been keeping it secret so as not to worry his wife unnecessarily. Álvaro promised he’d investigate the case thoroughly and assured him he’d communicate any concrete result as soon as he had one. They said goodbye.




V


For some time, the writing of the novel was put on hold. Álvaro spared no effort in studying Enrique Casares’ case. He obtained all the relevant information, examined it carefully, studied it, revised it several times, checked the case against other analogous ones. He arrived at the conclusion that, in effect, it would be possible to appeal against the redundancy, with a virtual guarantee of success. In the worst case, the severance pay the company should be obliged to provide if the dismissal was carried out was almost double the paltry sum his neighbour had been offered.

Once the situation was clarified, he reflected cautiously. He considered two options:

a) If he appealed the dismissal it was very likely Casares would manage to keep his job or, at least, that the damage would be far less — on the hypothesis that the company might choose to resort to a paragraph of the law which stated that they had no obligation to readmit a dismissed employee to his post. In this case — Álvaro continued — I will have won Casares’ gratitude, but I will also have lost time and money, since I have no intention of sinking so low as to charge him a fee.

b) If he allowed events to take their natural course, without intervening in them, he would still gain his neighbour’s friendship and appreciation, given that he would understand and respect all the disinterested attention Álvaro had devoted to his problem. Besides, Álvaro wouldn’t charge him a cent for all the time generously spent on it. On the other hand, it was certain that the loss of his job — their only source of sustenance — would have repercussions on the couple’s relationship, which might deteriorate in such a way as to make possible that he, Álvaro, might be able to expect to hear, from his surveillance post by the ventilation window, the vicissitudes of that process of deterioration, which he’d undoubtedly be able to use in his novel. This would facilitate his work enormously as he would enjoy the possibility, so long nurtured, of obtaining from the couple the material he needed to proceed with and conclude his work.

He arranged to see Casares. He explained the steps he’d taken, his investigations at the ministry and the union, illustrated the situation with analogous examples, clarified various juridical details, added data the factory had supplied. Finally, he invented interviews and lied coldly.

He concluded, ‘I don’t think there’s the slightest chance they’ll accept the appeal.’

The expression on Enrique Casares’ face had passed from expectation to despair. He loosened his tie, knotted his hands together, rested his elbows on his knees; his breathing sounded laboured. After a silence during which Casares’ eyes stung, Álvaro offered him all his support and, although theirs was only a recent acquaintance, all his friendship at such a difficult time. He told him he must, now more than ever, keep calm, that a man’s measure is revealed on occasions like this, that no good would come from losing hope. He also assured him that everything in life had a solution.

Casares looked out the dining-room window. A pigeon landed on the sill. Álvaro noticed that his neighbour was stunned. Casares stood up and walked to the door, apologizing for all the trouble he’d caused and thanking him for all that he’d taken. Álvaro modestly brushed aside his words and said don’t mention it, that’s what friends are for. By the door, he rested a friendly hand on his shoulder and reiterated his support. Casares left with his head hanging.

Álvaro immediately took a chair, a little table and a microphone into the bathroom. He set up the microphone on the table, where there was also a notebook and pen. He sat in the chair. Whenever he began a listening session, the building swarmed with indistinct noises: his ear had to adjust to that murmuring to be able to distinguish between them. Now he clearly heard the voices of the couple next door. He was explaining the situation to her: he said he now had no solution, they’d just have to accept it. At one point, the roar of a cistern interrupted the dialogue. Álvaro stopped the tape and swore. When silence was restored he turned the tape recorder back on and heard the woman reassuring the man, comforting him affectionately. She said, ‘Everything in life has a solution.’ He mumbled that Álvaro had tried to comfort him with the very same words. The woman asked what Álvaro had to do with all this. He confessed that he’d consulted their neighbour because he knew he was a lawyer, and begged him for help. The woman didn’t reproach him; she said that Álvaro inspired her confidence. The man praised his generosity, the sincere interest that he’d shown in his case, all the trouble he’d taken. Besides, he hadn’t charged him a single cent for all the work. From the next flat came a blast of music: the spotty-faced journalist was listening to Bruce Springsteen at full volume.

Álvaro didn’t get annoyed. For the moment he was satisfied. He thought he’d be able to take full advantage of the dialogue he’d just recorded for his novel. With a few details modified, others improved, the conversation could sound extraordinarily energetic and lifelike, with its eloquent silences, pauses and hesitations. Spurred by his initial success, he considered the possibility of installing a permanent recording device in the bathroom to pick up the conversations from the neighbouring apartment, especially since, starting from next week, they would also talk to each other during the hours when he was absent.

The next day he resumed work on the novel. He stitched up the plot concerning the married couple without difficulty: events were now practically writing themselves. As for the part concerning the old man, however, there weren’t too many reasons for optimism. Unlike what was happening with the young couple, here Álvaro felt he hadn’t a leg to stand on or any reference from which to continue with the story. Without them, his imagination wallowed in a hesitant swamp of imprecision: the character as much as his actions lacked the solidity of real life. It was urgent, therefore, to establish contact with the old man as soon as possible. This would smooth out the difficulties that part of the novel was posing. But the problem lay in how to strike up a friendship with him. Because although it was true that their paths crossed in the supermarket almost daily, it was no less true that they barely exchanged a laconic greeting: the old man’s surliness wouldn’t permit a whiff of affability.

The doorbell rang. The mare appeared in the doorway. Álvaro said he was very busy. The concierge neighed, and he couldn’t keep her from getting in as far as the dining room.

‘We haven’t seen each other for so long,’ she said, as if sighing. She screwed up her face in what might have meant to be a saucy smile or an affectionate reproach. ‘You’ve been neglecting me a bit, haven’t you?’

Álvaro concurred with resignation.

The woman asked in a sickly sweet voice, ‘How’s everything going?’

‘Badly,’ Álvaro replied harshly.

The concierge had stopped paying attention to him and looked distractedly around the room. She continued mechanically, ‘And why’s that?’

‘Smells like a stable,’ Álvaro croaked.

He remained standing, restlessly shifting his weight from one leg to the other. As if she hadn’t heard Álvaro’s incongruous answer, the concierge, who seemed to return from an abyss to trivial domestic concerns, went on with an air of surprise, ‘Hey, your apartment is an absolute mess. I think what’s needed here is a woman’s touch.’ She paused and immediately added solicitously, ‘Would you like me to lend you a hand?’

‘Nothing would displease me more, Señora,’ Álvaro answered, like a spring recoiling, in a tone of voice that blended in identical doses false and excessive kindness, mere insult and perhaps even a deer-like fear at any possible double meaning the phrase might contain.

The woman looked at him strangely. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, don’t be like that, man, tell me,’ she entreated with a flourish worthy of Florence Nightingale.

‘I’ve fucking had it up to here with you!’ he shouted.

The concierge regarded him first with surprise, then with a vaguely equine indignation.

‘I don’t think I deserve such treatment,’ she said. ‘I’ve only ever tried to be nice to you and help you as far as possible. If you didn’t want to see me again, you had only to tell me so.’

She started to walk out. Hand on the knob of the half-open door, she turned and said, almost begging, ‘You’re sure you don’t want anything?’

Gathering his patience, Álvaro suppressed an insult and whispered, ‘I’m sure.’

The concierge closed the door noisily. Álvaro stood in the middle of the dining room; his left leg was trembling.

He returned to his desk in an agitated state. He took several deep breaths and quickly recovered from the shock. Then he remembered that, during their second encounter, the concierge had told him about old man Montero’s fondness for chess. Álvaro told himself that was the flank he must attack. He had never been interested in the game and barely knew its rules, but that very morning he went to the nearest bookshop and bought a couple of manuals. For several days he studied them fervently, requiring yet another delay in the writing of the novel. Then he immersed himself in more specialized books. He acquired a certain theoretical command of the game, but he needed practice. He arranged to meet friends he’d given up some time ago. They accepted readily, because chess seemed no more than an excuse to renew a friendship broken off for absolutely no reason.

Álvaro would arrive with a briefcase containing notes, annotated books, blank sheets of paper, pencils and pens. Despite his friends’ best efforts, he barely conversed or drank during the matches. They couldn’t listen to music either, because Álvaro insisted it kept him from concentrating. A few brief words that also served as a greeting preceded without more ado the commencement of the game. As soon as it was over Álvaro would use some pressing engagement as an excuse and leave immediately.

When he had proved to his satisfaction that he could quash almost all the feeble resistance his opponents might muster, he dispensed with them and, to complete the perfection of his game, bought a computer against which he would play long, obsessive matches that kept him up till the small hours. During that time, he slept little and badly, and got up very early to resume feverishly the game abandoned the night before.




VI


The day he considered himself ready to face the old man, he got up, as usual, at eight on the dot. He took a cold shower and went down to the supermarket, but the old man did not appear. He loitered around the fruit counter, looking at the oranges, the pears, the lemons piled in wicker baskets. He asked the fruit seller when the strawberries would be arriving this year. Then he saw the old man. As the answer died on the edge of the shop assistant’s lips, Álvaro rushed off in pursuit of his neighbour, who was now heading for the checkout. On the way out of the establishment, he held the door open and let the old man go first. He walked beside him all the way home. He talked of the weather, of how dirty the steps were, of the number of door-to-door salesmen that had been pestering them in the building; to win his complicity, he made a malicious joke about the concierge. The old man looked at him with eyes of cold crystal and praised the concierge, who helped him with his housework; besides, he always thought their steps were the neatest in the neighbourhood. When they got to the front door, Álvaro changed the subject. He mentioned the computer he’d just bought: he used it principally to play chess.

‘I know it’s not for me to say, but the truth is I’m a better than average player,’ said Álvaro, feigning a cloying petulance.

The old man’s face sketched a hard smile.

‘You don’t say!’ he replied sarcastically.

Álvaro briefly recounted a few of his victories, in the most precise and technical terms he could think of, proposed a few variations he hadn’t used at the time and assured him that his computer had seven levels of difficulty and only after the fifth did it pose any challenges. Less surprised than irritated by his neighbour’s vanity, the old man announced that he too played chess. Álvaro seemed delighted. They arranged to play the following day in old man Montero’s apartment.

As he closed his door, Álvaro felt both satisfied and anxious. Satisfied because he had finally achieved his objective of getting inside the old man’s apartment and would now have at least the possibility of getting friendly with him. Anxious because perhaps he had gone too far, maybe he had seemed too sure of himself, he’d boasted excessively and may have put the whole operation at risk, given that, as was not rash to presume, if the old man played more brilliantly than he did and finished him off with ease, it would all be put down to the mere bluster of a neighbourhood braggart, and not only would he have wasted the enormous amount of time he’d invested in studying the game, but all possibility of forming any kind of relationship with the old man would practically disappear into thin air, which would endanger his chances of ever finishing the novel.

Troubled by the fear of failure, he began to go over openings he knew by heart. That’s when someone knocked at the door. Since he suspected it was the concierge, he didn’t even get up from his armchair. Ten minutes later the bell was still ringing. He opened the door in a rage without first looking through the peephole.

‘Hi!’ said the journalist with the granulated face. ‘Look, sorry to bother you, but I was just making some lunch when suddenly I realised I’d run out of potatoes and, since it’s so late, I’m sure the supermarket’s closed. So I said to myself, “Surely Álvaro can lend me a few. He’s so organized!”’

Álvaro remained sunk in impatient silence. He noticed his stomach hurt. Angst always seized him in the stomach.

‘Álvaro!’ demanded the journalist again. ‘Have you got a couple of potatoes?’

‘No.’

‘Any oil?’

‘Nope.’

‘OK, then give me a bit of salt.’

The journalist pushed into the dining room. Álvaro came back from the kitchen with a little bag filled with salt, offered it to her without handing it over and walked to the door. With a hand on the knob of the half-open door, he looked at the girl, who remained in the centre of the dining room with the air of someone visiting Roman ruins. For a moment she seemed much younger than he’d previously thought: in spite of her decisive manners and her false adult air, she was barely an adolescent. Where had he got the idea she was a journalist? In that case, she must still be studying for her degree, because she could hardly be twenty. ‘On veut bien être méchant, mais on ne veut point être ridicule.’ Ridiculing her would be an efficient antidote against the impertinence of her visits.

‘Hey,’ he said in an ironic tone, ‘you’ve really grown lately, haven’t you?’

The girl let out a sigh and smiled with resignation.

‘Whereas for you time stands still.’

Álvaro couldn’t help but blush. She helped him open the door the rest of the way and said goodbye. Álvaro stood with the door half closed, his left hand on the doorknob and in his right the bag of salt. He slammed the door closed and felt absolutely grotesque with the bag of salt in his hand. He hit himself on the head with it, then he threw it into the toilet and flushed. As he sat back down at his desk, he abruptly reflected on the coincidence that he and the concierge, at the most ludicrous point of their two most recent phenomenal performances, had both stood gripping the doorknob in their left hands while holding the door half closed. A cold shiver ran up his spine as he remembered the dream of the green hill with the white door and its golden doorknob; he smiled to himself and decided he should put all those symmetries to use in some future novel.

The bell rang again. This time he sneaked up to the door and, holding his breath, spied outside through the peephole. Irene Casares was standing outside with her shopping trolley. Álvaro glanced in the hall mirror, smoothed his chaotic hair and adjusted the knot of his tie.

He opened the door and they greeted each other warmly. Despite her protests, her insistence that she didn’t want to disturb him and that she still had to get lunch ready, he invited her into the living room. They sat down opposite each other. After an expectant pause, the woman declared that she’d come to thank him for all he’d done for her husband. He’d told her about his conduct and was full of gratitude. She said she didn’t know how they’d ever repay him (Álvaro made a vague magnanimous gesture with his hand, as if indicating that such a concern had never even entered his head) and that he should count on their friendship for absolutely anything. He then noticed the woman’s gentle serenity: her eyes were bright and blue, her voice clear, and her whole body emanated a freshness barely in keeping with her pauper-princess clothes.

Álvaro thanked her for the visit and for her kind words, played down the importance of his role, insisted that anyone in his place would have done the same. He offered her a cigarette, which she politely declined; he lit one. They talked about the dangers of smoking, about anti-tobacco campaigns. He assured her he’d tried several times, with the results she saw before her, to give up the vice. She declared she’d overcome it five years earlier and, with the excessive passion of the convert, listed one after another the unquestionable benefits such a success brought with it. Then she claimed her duties at home prevented her from enjoying his company any longer. When they were standing in the dining room, Álvaro said his job allowed him to keep abreast of developments in the labour market and he would not hesitate to use his influence, slight as it was, to help her husband find a job. She looked him in the eye with disconsolate candour and mumbled that he could not imagine how much that would mean to her family and, as her tremulous hands clutched the handle of the shopping trolley, she admitted their situation was desperate. She opened the door, gripping the doorknob in her left hand, and held it half open while she turned towards Álvaro as if trying to add something. He hurried to reiterate his promises, practically pushed the woman out the door and suggested that one of these days (this elastic expression would allow him to fix the date at the time best suited to his objectives) they must come over for dinner. Señora Casares accepted.

That night, when he got back from the office, Álvaro felt tired. As he was making something for dinner, he said to himself that perhaps he’d been working too hard lately, maybe he needed a holiday. He ate a meagre supper and sat down in front of the television. Around midnight, when he was getting ready for bed, he heard, amid the silence populated by nocturnal breathing, a key scrabbling at a neighbouring lock. Then a bang revealed an interior chain that prevented the door opening from the outside. Álvaro crouched behind his and spied through the peephole. The Casareses were quarrelling, one on either side of the slightly opened door. Despite the conversation being carried on in very low voices, Álvaro hoped the complicit silence of the building would allow him to record at least a few snippets of it. He ran to get the tape recorder, plugged it in near the door, put in a blank tape, pressed record and added all five of his senses to the mechanical memory of the recording.

The woman whispered that she was sick of him coming home so late and that, if he wasn’t able to behave like a decent person, it would be better if he found somewhere else to sleep. In a wine-soaked, imploring voice, her husband begged her to let him in (his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and his words were just a muffled murmur). He admitted he’d been out with his friends, that he’d been drinking; with a surge of vaguely virile indignation, he asked her what she expected him to do all day at home, idle and impotent, whether she wanted to watch him turn into an idiot from sitting through so much television, whether she wanted to see him get even fatter than he already was, eating like a pig all day. After a silence tinged by the husband’s heavy breathing, his wife opened the door.

Álvaro unplugged the tape recorder, ran down the hall with it, plugged it in again in the bathroom, sat down on the lid of the toilet, pressed record. His tiredness had disappeared; all his limbs were tense.

The man had raised his voice, grown bolder. The woman told him not to speak so loudly, the children were sleeping, and besides, the neighbours could hear them. The man shouted that he didn’t give a damn about the fucking neighbours. He asked his wife who she thought she was, she wasn’t going to tell him what to do, it had always been the same, she was always giving him stupid lessons and advice and he was fed up, that’s why he was in a situation like this, if he hadn’t married her, if she hadn’t reeled him in like an idiot, things would be very different now, he could have done what he really wanted, he wouldn’t have had to come to live in this city that sickened him, he wouldn’t have had to take whatever job he could find to earn a shitty wage in order to support a damned family. .

The man shut up. In the silence, disturbed only by the faint hum of the cassette recorder, female sobbing could be heard. Álvaro listened attentively. He feared they could hear the buzzing of the cassette and covered it with his body. The woman was crying silently. Through the little window came the signature tune of a night-time radio programme. Someone else was sobbing: it was the man. He was also mumbling words that Álvaro could only make out as an incomprehensible whispering.

He sensed caresses and consoling words from the other side. It was the end of the session.

He unplugged the tape recorder stealthily, carried it into the dining room and rewound the cassette. A rumble in his stomach reminded him that he was ferociously hungry. He went to the kitchen, made some ham and cheese sandwiches and took them into the living room on a tray along with a can of beer. As he wolfed them down avidly, he listened to the tape. He thought the quality of the recording was tolerable and its contents magnificent. With the satisfaction of a duty fulfilled, he got into bed and slept solidly for seven hours.

That night he once again walked across a very green meadow with neighing horses who were so white it frightened him a little. In the distance he made out the gentle slope of the hill and imagined that he was enclosed in an enormous cavern, because the sky looked like steel or stone. He effortlessly walked up the slope where there were no birds, or clouds, or anybody. A sharp wind began to blow and his extremely long hair swept across his mouth and eyes. He noticed that he was naked, but he didn’t feel cold: he felt nothing but the desire to reach the green crest of the hill with no birds, the white door with the golden doorknob. And he willingly accepted that on the damp grass at the top rested a pen and blank piece of paper, a dilapidated typewriter and a tape recorder emitting a metallic hum. And when he opened the door he already knew he wouldn’t be able to get through it, and despite the fact that what he was looking for lay in wait on the other side, something or someone would tempt him to turn around, to stand at the crest of the green hill, turned back towards the meadow, his left hand on the golden doorknob, the white door half open.




VII


The next day he went up to the old man’s place. On the table in the dining room with its faded wallpaper, a board bristling with bellicose figures showed that Montero was waiting for him. For a moment Álvaro lost the certainty with which he’d shaken that decrepit rival hand as he came in. The old man offered him something to drink: Álvaro graciously declined.

They sat down at the table.

He knew it was necessary, in order to achieve his aim, to maintain a difficult balance. On the one hand, his play should reveal enough ability so as not to bore the old man — a premature victory would throw all Álvaro’s expectations overboard — but also to keep him under pressure for the whole match and, if possible, make his own superiority evident, in order to stimulate the old man’s desire to battle him again. On the other hand — and this condition was perhaps as indispensable as the former — he must lose, at least this first confrontation, to flatter the old man’s vanity, to break through his gruff hostility and perhaps lead him to become more communicative and allow for a relationship between the two of them that would be closer and more durable than that granted merely by combat over a chessboard.

The old man’s opening didn’t surprise him. Álvaro responded cautiously; the first moves were predictable. But Montero soon spread his pieces in an attack that seemed hasty to Álvaro and for that very reason disconcerting. He tried to defend himself in an orderly fashion, but his nervousness intensified by the minute while he observed that his opponent proceeded with ferocious certainty. Totally disconcerted, he left a knight in an exposed position and had to sacrifice a pawn to save it. He found himself in an uncomfortable situation and Montero didn’t appear prepared to cede the initiative. The old man commented in a neutral tone of voice that his last move had been unfortunate and could cost him dearly. Spurred by the tinge of scorn or threat he thought he’d recognized in the words, Álvaro tried to pull himself together. A couple of anodyne moves from the old man gave him some breathing space and he was able to stabilize his position. He took a pawn and evened up the match. Then old man Montero made an error: in two moves, the white bishop, surrounded, would be at Álvaro’s mercy. He thought the advantage he’d gain from taking this piece would oblige him, if he didn’t want to win the game, to play very much below the level he’d been playing up till then. This would allow for the possibility of awakening suspicions in the old man, who wouldn’t understand how Álvaro could lose in such favourable conditions, with his level of skill. He manoeuvred his way out of taking the bishop. The match evened out.

Then Álvaro tried to begin a conversation; old man Montero answered in monosyllables or evasions: he’d realized that Álvaro wasn’t going to be easily defeated and was entirely immersed in the match. Evidently, some time would have to pass before the old man would let down his guard, before the relationship between the two of them could progress to anything more than a matter of rivalry. In any case, there was no sense in rushing: if his host, with his unhealthy mistrust, sensed a suspiciously premature attempt at friendship, he might react by fortifying his defences, precluding any viable future relationship.

The old man won the match. He could not conceal his satisfaction. Affectionate and expansive, he discussed the layout of the board at the moment of check for a while, put the pieces back into the positions they’d been in when he conceived his final assault, discussed a few minor details, proposed possible variations. Álvaro declared that he wouldn’t be exaggerating if he described the move as perfection. The old man offered him a glass of wine. Álvaro said to himself that wine loosens the tongue and leads to confidences, but remembered he’d opted for prudence on this first visit and decided, for the time being, to leave old man Montero with his appetite for conversation. Feigning resentment at the defeat — which would obviously feed the old man’s vanity even further — he made an excuse and, once they’d set up another match for the following week, said goodbye.




VIII


From that day on he devoted himself entirely to writing the novel. His feverish work was interrupted only by the Casareses’ regular confrontations. The arguments provoked by drunkenness and evenings out were unfailingly followed by caresses and reconciliations. Álvaro had acquired such prowess in his recording skill that he no longer needed to witness — unless a passing setback in the rhythm of his work suggested he draw on this crudely real stimulus — the often wearisome and always repetitive arguments. He had only to turn on the tape recorder at the right moment and go straight back to his study and carry on calmly with his work. On the other hand, the deterioration of their relationship had begun to have repercussions on the external appearance of the Casareses: the slight tendency to corpulence that used to give him a confidently satisfied air had now turned into an oily and servile obesity, her almost Victorian pallor to a whitish and withered skin that revealed her fatigue.

Álvaro did not regret that the journalist hadn’t returned to ask for potatoes or salt. He recognized, however, the danger involved in the state of relations with the concierge. No one could ever exaggerate the power of concierges, he told himself. And openly confronting his own was a risk he should not take: so he tried to make up with her.

He went down to visit her again. He explained that there are moments in a man’s life when he is not himself, when he flies off the handle and is unable to control himself. In those ill-fated instances, nothing he does or says should be taken as representative, but rather as a sort of malevolent manifestation of a momentary wretched temper. For this reason he begged her to excuse him if, at any time, his conduct towards her had not been as gentlemanly as she had every right to expect from him.

The concierge accepted his apology with delight. Álvaro hurried to add that he found himself at a particularly delicate point in his career just then, something which not only might explain his possible bursts of bad temper, but also demanded his total and exclusive commitment to his work, making it absolutely impossible for him to cultivate and enjoy her company for some time. Nothing was more disagreeable to him, but he was obliged to postpone their friendship until circumstances became more favourable. This, of course, should not prevent their relationship, despite developing on a strictly superficial level, being ruled by an exemplary cordiality. Bewitched by Álvaro’s florid self-exonerating rhetoric like a snake by the sound of the charmer’s flute, the concierge willingly agreed to everything.

The chess games continued in old man Montero’s apartment. Álvaro was pleased to note they always remained under his control: he decided the exchanges of men, foresaw the attacks, dictated the mood of play and doled out a calculated alternation of victories and defeats that kept up the rivalry and invited intimacy between the two adversaries. Gradually the pre- or post-match conversations grew longer until they began to take up more time than the game itself. He was initially surprised to observe that the old man consumed startling quantities of alcohol for a man of his age, which gave him a disordered and obsessive loquacity. Álvaro awaited his moment.

Old man Montero spoke mostly about politics. He had always voted for the far right and thought democracy was an illness only weak nations suffered from, because it implied that the ruling elite had declined their responsibility and left it to the amorphous masses, and a country without an elite was a country that was lost. Furthermore, it was based on a fantasy, universal suffrage: a concierge’s vote could not be worth as much as a lawyer’s vote. Álvaro nodded and the old man was soon bitterly criticising the government. His darts, however, were mainly directed at the right-wing parties. He felt they’d backed down from their principles, had reneged on their origins. Álvaro was occasionally moved by the emotional rancour of his reproaches.

He also talked about his military past. He’d fought in the battle of Brunete and at the Ebro, and he recounted moving tales of memorable deaths, bombardments and heroism. One day he told how he’d seen General Valera in the distance; another, he described a provisional ensign dying in his arms, bleeding to death as they took him to a first aid post far from the front line. Once in a while tears would fall.

Álvaro understood the old man’s mistrust wasn’t directed at concrete individuals, but was a general animosity against the world, a sort of festering reaction of generosity betrayed.

His only daughter lived in Argentina; sometimes she wrote to him. For his part, he was keeping his life’s savings to leave to his grandchildren. One day, in the midst of alcohol-induced exaltation, and after a mention of his heirs, he assured Álvaro with pride that he had much more money than his modest life might lead one to suspect. With similar pride, he declared his distrust of banks, mean inventions of usurious Jews. Then he stood up (there was an intoxicated sparkle in his viscous eyes) and revealed a safe built into the wall, hidden behind an imitation of a neutral landscape painting.

Álvaro shuddered.

After a few seconds Álvaro reacted and said that for some time he’d been kicking around the idea of withdrawing his money from the bank and putting it in a safe, but he hadn’t made up his mind to do so because he wasn’t entirely convinced they were secure and he’d been very lazy about going to a shop and finding out. With as much enthusiasm as if he were trying to sell it, the old man extolled the virtues of the strongbox and took his time over an explanation of the workings of its simple mechanism. He claimed it was much safer than a bank and said he only closed his when he left the house.

That very day, Álvaro invited the Casareses to dinner.

At nine on the dot they arrived at his door. They had dressed up for the occasion. She wore an old-fashioned violet-coloured dress, but her hairstyle was elegant and the shadow of make-up darkening her lips, eyelids and cheeks paradoxically enhanced the pallor of her face. He was stuffed into a tight suit, and his enormous belly only allowed one button of the jacket to be done up, leaving exposed the flowered front of an Asturian baptism shirt.

Álvaro was about to laugh to himself at the Casareses’ pathetic appearance, but he quickly realised that this dinner represented an important social occasion for them and he felt a sort of compassion towards the couple. This filled him with great self-confidence, and so, while they had the aperitif he’d prepared and listened to the records he’d recently acquired, he found topics of conversation that alleviated the relative initial awkwardness and relaxed the stiffness that gripped them. They talked about almost everything before sitting down at the table and Álvaro couldn’t help but notice that the woman nervously smoked one cigarette after another, but he refrained from making any comment.

During the meal, the man talked and laughed with a booming cheerfulness that seemed excessive to Álvaro and, in spite of her haggard appearance, the woman was visibly pleased at her husband’s contagious vitality. Álvaro, nevertheless, conscious of the respect he inspired, did not release the reins of the dialogue, and although he tended to be inhibited when faced with a personality more vigorous or excessive than his own, he succeeded in bringing the conversation on to his terrain. He talked of daily life in the neighbourhood, of the strange relationships that grew up between neighbours, invented some dubiously diverting discord among the concierges. Then he concentrated on his relationship with old man Montero: their long chess matches, the conversations that preceded and followed them, the taciturn initial mistrust only gradually mellowed by time and with difficulty. He also took his time enumerating the many details that made the man eccentric. Over coffee and cognac, he enquired discreetly about his neighbour’s employment situation. The couple turned gloomy. The husband said it was all still the same and he still didn’t know how to thank him for all the trouble he’d taken. Álvaro said he considered himself paid by the satisfaction he received from fulfilling an obligation as friend and neighbour. He said, for his part, he’d made enquiries within his limited sphere, but without results. In his view, the situation didn’t look set to improve, at least not in the short term. In any case, he would continue with his enquiries and, as soon as he heard of any job, tell him immediately.

They carried on chatting for a while, arranged to get together again on the following Tuesday and said goodnight.




IX


He threw himself into feverish activity that week. Now he also wrote at night: when he got home from the office he took a shower, ate a light supper and shut himself back up in his study. As the novel approached its end, the rhythm of his writing slowed down, but at the same time his certainty grew that the chosen path was the right one. In order not to waste the two mornings a week he went upstairs to the old man’s place, the previous evenings would find him in bed very early, so he could get up at five the next morning and have almost five working hours at his disposal before confronting the chessboard. The Casareses’ arguments were getting worse and it wasn’t difficult for him to detect, the next time they came to dinner at his place, that the hostility between them had increased. That day they didn’t arrive dressed as if for a religious celebration. This presupposed a greater level of trust, which not only allowed him to conduct and express himself more naturally, but also permitted the resentment the two of them had been harbouring lately to eventually rise to the surface. Álvaro again dominated the conversation and it hardly took any effort to centre it, now almost without pretence that it was merely a chance turn in the wanderings of the dialogue, on old man Montero. He again mentioned his eccentricities, explained in great detail the location of the wall safe, described its simple mechanism and assured them it contained a great fortune. Later, he spoke about the old man’s poor health and absolute isolation; he made a special point of emphasizing the almost mathematical exactitude of his comings and goings each day, the unwavering nature of his daily routine; lastly, he said that he only closed the safe when he was about to leave the house.

In vain he awaited a reaction from the couple. They would change the subject as soon as a silence opened in Álvaro’s monotonous obsessive talk. At first he thought it was just a matter of time but, as they dined together repeatedly and he gradually constrained the conversation to this single theme, the Casareses’ indifference turned into irritation and impatience. One day they jokingly begged him to talk of something else for once and Álvaro, smiling and annoyed, asked for their forgiveness: ‘It’s just that it strikes me as a fascinating subject,’ he said, sounding fascinated. Another time they alluded to the theme as his ‘persecution mania’ and he, feeling they were trying to ridicule him, replied harshly, as if repelling unexpected aggression. On another occasion, the couple took the liberty of inviting the journalist with the eruptive face to introduce an element of variation to their gettogethers, but Álvaro practically ignored her, and that day insisted on talking about the old man more than ever. As they left, the Casareses stood chatting with the journalist for a few minutes on the landing. They confessed they were worried about Álvaro. For a while now he hasn’t seemed well; so much solitude couldn’t be good for anybody.

‘Solitude borders on madness,’ said the man, as if repeating a sentence prepared in advance for that moment.

There was silence. The girl’s eyes — two blue, attentive apples — opened wide.

‘Something will end up happening to him,’ the woman added, with that fatalism that passes for wisdom among the humble.

Álvaro was worried, not only because the couple didn’t react as he’d expected, but also what really exasperated him was that their relationship had improved markedly: the fights had stopped, the dinners at his place seemed to reconcile them even further and their physical appearance had regained its lost vigour. But there was something worse: he was unable to find a fitting finale for his novel, and when he thought he had hit upon one, the difficulties of execution eventually discouraged him. He needed to find a solution.

But it was the solution that found him. He’d been trying to write all morning without any results. He went out for a walk in the autumn light and dry leaves. On his way back, he met the Casareses in the entrance hall, waiting for the lift. They were carrying several bags and, wrapped in brown paper, a long object that widened at its bottom end. Álvaro thought incongruously that it was an axe. A shiver ran down his spine. The Casareses greeted him with a cheerfulness that Álvaro judged incomprehensible or perhaps only artificial; they told him they were coming back from the city centre where they’d been doing some shopping; they commented on the nice weather and said goodbye on the landing.

After a brief tussle, he managed to unlock the door. Once inside he collapsed in an armchair in the living room and, with trembling hands, lit a cigarette. He had not the slightest doubt about what the Casares planned to use the axe for, but nor did he doubt — he thought with a start of euphoria — the ending he’d give to his novel. And then he wondered — perhaps due to that insidious intellectual habit that led one to consider every objective a deception once it’d been achieved — if finishing it was really worth the old man’s death and almost certainly the eventual imprisonment of the couple, because amateurs would commit errors that the police could not fail to notice. He felt a terrible pressure in his chest and throat. He thought he’d call the Casareses and persuade them to abandon their project; he’d convince them it was madness, that the idea hadn’t even come from them: only he, Álvaro, was responsible for these atrocious machinations. He’d convince them they were going to destroy their lives and those of their children because, even if the police didn’t find them out, how would they be able to live with themselves with the weight of this crime on their consciences, how could they look their children in the eye without shame? But perhaps it was already too late. They had made their decision. And he, had he not made his as well? Had he not decided to sacrifice everything to his Work? And if he had sacrificed himself, why should he not sacrifice others? Why be more generous to old man Montero and the Casareses than he was to himself?

Then there was a knock at the door. It was almost midday and he wasn’t expecting anybody. Who could be looking for him at this time of day? With a shiver of fear, with resignation, almost with relief, he thought he understood. He’d been mistaken: the Casares weren’t going to kill the old man, they were going to kill him. In a flash of lucidity, he thought that maybe his neighbours had found out that he could have appealed the dismissal letter and secured Enrique Casares’ job for him, but for some reason unknown to them — although no less despicable for that — had refused to do so, ruining their lives and then amateurishly inciting them to murder old man Montero. But if they killed him, they’d not only get revenge on the one responsible for their disgrace, they could also keep his money — money that perhaps legitimately belonged to them — because now he sensed, through the uncertain fog of his derangement, that it was not impossible, during their latest obsessive encounters, that he would have told them that he himself had recently decided to keep all his savings in a wall safe similar to the old man’s.

He looked out through the peephole. His neighbour was indeed waiting on the landing, but his hands were empty. Álvaro opened the door. Enrique Casares stammered, said they were fixing a window and needed a screwdriver; he asked if he’d mind lending them his for a while; that evening, at the latest, they’d bring it back. Álvaro asked him to wait in the living room and a moment later returned with the screwdriver. He didn’t notice that Enrique Casares’ hand was shaking as he took it from him.

His wife returned it that night. They chatted for a few moments in the dining room. When she was about to leave — the apartment door was half open and the woman grasped the doorknob in her left hand — she turned and said, like someone saying farewell, in a tone that struck Álvaro as perhaps too solemn, ‘Thank you for everything.’

He’d never wondered why there were no smells or sounds, and perhaps that’s why he was even more surprised at their presence, although it was not impossible that they’d been there the other times as well; but the strangest thing was the vague certainty that now no one would keep him from reaching his aim. He was walking across a very green meadow with the smell of grass and fruit trees and manure, although he couldn’t see any trees or manure, just the green, green ground and the neighing horses (white and blue and black) against the stony or steely sky. He was climbing the gentle slope of the hill as a dry wind covered his naked skin in goose bumps, and he turned almost nostalgically towards the valley he was gradually leaving behind like a green wake filled with petrified neighing. And at the top of the green, green hill grey birds fluttered, coming and going and emitting little metallic cries that were also frozen needles. And he arrived at the crest panting, knowing that now nothing and no one would keep him from glimpsing what lay in wait on the other side of the door, and he clutched the golden doorknob in his left hand, opened the white door and looked through.




X


The next day he wasn’t surprised when the old man didn’t turn up at the supermarket. They were supposed to play chess that morning, but Álvaro didn’t leave his apartment. He smoked cigarettes and drank cold coffee until, towards noon, someone knocked at his door. It was the concierge: the blood had fled her face. It wasn’t very difficult to deduce from her whimpering and exaggerated gestures that she’d found the old man’s corpse when she’d gone up to do her daily cleaning. He sat her down in an armchair, tried to calm her, and called the police.

Soon an inspector arrived accompanied by three officers. They took them up to old man Montero’s apartment. Álvaro preferred not to look at the corpse. The concierge would not stop talking and whimpering. An older man with a very thin moustache, who arrived not long after the police, took photographs from various angles of the room and of the inert body; then they covered it with a sheet. The neighbours milled around outside the door; some went in as far as the entrance hall. Álvaro was stunned. The concierge had calmed down a little but she kept talking; she thought the old man had been stabbed to death. Álvaro searched for Casares among the group of onlookers, but found only the frightened eyes of the journalist, who was looking at him in a strange way. One individual pushed his way through as far as the entrance, where he was stopped by the officer posted there. The individual — a young man with prescription glasses and a grey raincoat — stated that he was a journalist and demanded to be allowed to enter, but the officer argued that he had strict orders not to let anyone through. Other colleagues of the journalist arrived later and, after he told them what was going on, settled down to wait for the inspector to emerge, sitting on the steps or leaning against the banister on the landing, smoking and chatting in loud voices. The group of neighbours still hadn’t made up their mind to disperse and behaved as if they were at a wake.

After a quarter of an hour, the inspector came out of the apartment; the journalists pounced on him. He said they’d soon be allowed to go in and take photographs, described the type of injuries to the victim and declared that they’d been inflicted with a screwdriver. Judging by the state of the old man’s body, the crime could have been perpetrated any time between yesterday afternoon and last night. The motive? He didn’t want to hazard a guess but a wall safe hidden behind a picture had been opened and emptied of anything it might have contained. This circumstance left little room for doubt: yes, it was possible that the motive had been robbery. Might the fact that the corpse was found in the dining room not indicate that the murderer was known to his victim, given that he’d let him into his house? The inspector repeated that it was not advisable to discount any hypothesis in advance; in his judgement, however, all were premature. For the moment he had nothing more to add.

Álvaro went home. Leaning against the big dining-room window, he stared down at the empty square. He lit a cigarette and rubbed his eyes with his right hand. He had a bit of a headache but he’d calmed down. He foresaw with ease the course the police investigation would take. As the journalist had suggested, it was obvious that only a neighbour or someone the victim knew could have got in as far as the dining room. All the tenants knew old Montero’s taciturn character, but they all knew as well — the concierge, the Casareses, the journalist, perhaps the rest of the tenants — that only he had managed to befriend the old man, that only he spent long mornings playing chess and talking in his apartment. The concierge would realize with horror that he’d been plying her for information by resorting to a ruse she dare not confess; the Casareses would reveal his unhealthy fixation, the perseverance of his obsessive chatter about the old man, their own suspicions about Álvaro’s mental balance; and the journalist (now he understood the strange way she’d looked at him among the crowd of onlookers!) would undoubtedly confirm the couple’s statement. And then there was the screwdriver. No one would believe that Casares had borrowed it in order to implicate him; the idea was too far-fetched. All the evidence would point to him; he would pay for a crime he had not committed. It was ridiculous, yes, grotesque. With benevolent irony he recalled: ‘On veut bien être méchant, mais on ne veut point être ridicule.’ But no: if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he would not be the one to denounce the Casareses. Perhaps for that very reason, because they knew he wouldn’t give them away, they’d asked to borrow his screwdriver (‘Thank you for everything’): they’d discovered his scheme, the machinations with which he’d managed to ruin their lives, and now they were going to pay him back with interest (and that was also why they hadn’t asked recently about the supposed enquiries he was making about finding Enrique Casares a job). He then understood that should he pay for this murder it would be a secret justice: in reality, the couple were only superficially responsible for it, merely the executioner’s hand. He was the one who was truly guilty of the death of old man Montero. Irene and Enrique Casares had been two puppets in his hands; Irene and Enrique Casares had been his characters.

But that no longer mattered. Sooner or later the police would end up accusing him of the crime; that was just a question of time. What was urgent now was to finish the novel before they interrogated and arrested him. How much time did he have left?

He looked back down at the little square. A child was playing on the swings under the clear midday light. As he turned, Álvaro thought he recognized the Casareses’ younger son. He thought he was staring at him.

The next day he re-read everything he’d written up till then. He deemed that first draft to be riddled with errors in the choice of tone, point of view, the vision offered of the characters; indeed, the plot itself was faulty. But he said to himself that, if he was able to recognize his errors, perhaps not all of his work had been in vain: identifying them was already, in a way, to have rectified them. He revised the accumulated material and found it was vast and could be of great use. For that reason, despite the fact that it would be necessary to rewrite the novel from the beginning, not only could he use a large proportion of his notes and observations, but even whole pages from the original version. Certain fragments (for example the theoretical introduction) now sounded so pedantic that he’d barely need to retouch them, because a new context would endow them with a farcical air; the insufferable presumptuous tone that emanated from other passages should also be preserved, as a retrospective comic attraction. Finally, he understood that out of the material he’d written for the novel he would be able to construct its parody and refutation.

Then he began to write:

Álvaro took his work seriously. Every day he got up punctually at eight. He cleared his head with a cold shower and went down to the supermarket to buy bread and the newspaper. When he returned he made coffee and toast with butter and marmalade and ate breakfast in the kitchen, leafing through the paper and listening to the radio. By nine he was sitting in his study ready to begin the day’s work.




A Note on the Author and Translator


Javier Cercas was born in 1962. He is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist, whose books include El vientre de la ballena (The Belly of the Whale, 1997) and Relatos reales (True Tales, 2000). In the 1980s he taught for two years at the University of Illinois, and since 1989 has been a lecturer in Spanish Literature at the University of Gerona. He writes a regular column for El Pais. His novel Soldiers of Salamis 2001) was published to acclaim in Spain, has been made into a film by David Trueba, has been published in twenty languages so far and sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. It was translated into English by Anne McLean and published by Bloomsbury in 2003. Author and translator were awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2004 for Soldiers of Salamis.




Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by authors including Carmen Martín Gaite, Ignacio Padilla and Orlando González Esteva. She is currently working on books by Tomás Eloy Martínez and Julio Cortázar. She was awarded the Premio Valle Inclan for Literary Translation 2004 for her translation of Soldiers of Salamis.