The Enmity of Things

His lips curled as his gaze settled on the blue, hand-knit cardigan he was wearing. Over the past few days he’d begun to feel vastly and unaccountably apprehensive about the things around him. Sometimes it was a tie, other times it was a sweater or a suit that seemed to provoke his misery. He had made up his mind to distinguish the facts from the coincidences and put an end to his doubts.

Since that winter morning when he left Buenos Aires, barely three days ago, a void had opened and begun to spread, exposing betrayals reaching all the way back to the day of his birth. An absence had been weighing on him for the past few months like an unpredictable destiny. He could not escape fate; he would have to go check on the country estate, and so he obediently boarded the train that, from one station to the next, was killing him.

He ran his fingers through his hair and, feeling scruffy, sensed that he had arrived in the countryside. Until then he had been deaf to the silence of the trees around the house, deaf to the brilliance of the sky, deaf to everything except the anxiety that had taken hold of him. He could barely remember the time when he was a boy on this ranch, how he had loved the walk he had to take at night: with only a kerosene lamp or the light of the moon to guide him from the dining table to the room where he slept, a certain joy would take him by the hand, leading him across the courtyard.

Suddenly he understood that he lived surrounded by things that were his enemies. It became clear when he first put on that blue cardigan with the gray pattern (which his mother had ordered for him): his girlfriend had been distant that day, her unreachable eyes traveling through mysterious, secret eras of her life that made her smile a tender smile, which to him seemed hard as the stone beneath a supplicant’s knees. “What are you thinking about?” To which she replied with an impatient wave of her hand, and that impatience ballooned, spring-loaded, from contact with his gestures, from contact with his words. From then on he could no longer walk without stumbling or swallow without making a strange noise, and his voice flowed freely in the moments when silence was most needed. The hatred or indifference awakened that day loomed before him, solid and palpable as a stone wall.

Later, when he returned home, he remembered that when he undressed it had felt like being set free. The telephone rang, and his girlfriend’s tenderness was for him alone—a bed to sleep in when exhausted.