Obstinate Observer

Rubén, aged seven, returns from school at lunchtime. He eats and disappears. He ignores the order to take a nap and the summons to play with the boys from the neighborhood.

He plants himself a block from home, alone. Sitting on the sidewalk, on the edge of the ditch, he stares, long and intently, at the building before him, on the other side of the street.

It’s a one-story home, squat and decrepit. No one enters or leaves through its doors, no ladies peek through the windows, there are no cages with darting canaries. It’s sat vacant a long time.

It offers nothing especially distinct, squeezed between the grocer and the tailor’s shop. The façade is unfaded, of a light, celestial blue, and Rubén likes the color, though it is not the cause of his coming here.

In mid-afternoon, he leaves his watch for a mug of milk and homemade pancakes. Not too clear on the duration of his absence, his mother complains: “Where were you?” But what absorbs her are the vicissitudes of her demigods on the radio play.

Rubén repeats his escapade, his abstract contemplation, day after day.

“Where’d you go off to, lazybones? What time are you going to do your homework?”

Later, the boy senses that the situation could get worse: his mother shoves the problem off on his father; his father talks about conduct and issues vague threats.

It’s not rebellion that makes Rubén stretch out the hours: he’s held there as though captive before the mute wall on the other block, until the crepuscule clears away the powder blue of day. He suffers, in succession, censure, shouts, and slaps; then he gets them all at once, or in a jumble.

One morning, he senses he can’t take his route to school, but must instead turn toward his observation post. He takes up his place on the sidewalk pavers and sets down his unused notebooks beside him, along with his school supplies, his spinning top. He watches, unguarded, but expectant; he knows he has to wait.

A neighbor lady notices him and shakes her head on her way to the grocer.

A schoolmate, one from the afternoon class, stops on his way to buy bread and asks him:

“Did you go to school?”

Rubén lies brashly, to run him off, because he prefers to tend to this matter on his own.

“Yeah, I went, but they kicked me out.”

He leaves the meddler stupefied and abashed before a delinquent of the kind that could merit such a punishment.

Rubén ignores him.

Around eleven in the morning, while the people wander past indifferently, he discovers, on the front wall of the house that draws him there, a crack opening noiselessly, like a black bolt of lightning hurtling downward. A rumbling begins, and behind the wall, raining down amid the scudding dust, the beams tear loose then disappear, along with the panels of corrugated zinc: the roof has caved in.

While the pedestrians shout and flee, Rubén takes a step back, in dread, but without averting his eyes.

Then the sky-blue wall collapses and the catastrophe comes to an end.

Rubén, now nine, can’t follow his history lesson.

In other subjects, his grades are satisfactory. Not in this one. Not that he dislikes it: to the contrary, the heroes and their exploits excite him, but, being passive and ill-inclined to any strenuous activity, he never dreams of being like them.

He doesn’t get distracted on purpose; but there’s something forceful in that teacher’s allure. Not what she teaches, not what she says, but her, simply her. It doesn’t happen with the other ladies who instruct him. Just with this one, who lacks any special charms beyond her head of hair, and isn’t even nice to him. Her severity and sternness don’t bother him since he’s given up being a good student.

As soon as she enters the classroom, Rubén is filled with doubts. Something demands he remain anxious, vigilant, throughout the forty-five minutes. Why? Is he afraid of her? No. Something outside her upsets him. What?

Every day, he yearns for class to end, for the year to come soon to a close, for the cold to lift, at least.

When he returns from recess, if she doesn’t show immediately, he clings to the hope that she won’t: that she’s sick, that they’ve hired another teacher in her place…Her appearance portends another forty-five minutes of agony. Even if nothing happens.

Lately, he feels the tension rise when she moves to a certain corner of the room, explaining the day’s chapter or quizzing one of his classmates.

He asks himself why she ends up there. Why? For what?

What is there in that place…? It must be that it’s the intimate corner, with no doors to let the chill filter in, whether badly shut or flung open at odd moments, or for any other reason; because there is the stove radiating its heat, warming them all up, more or less. Rubén understands. Nonetheless…

Today the teacher has unfolded maps over the blackboard. She shows them the routes of the armies in the mountains. On the far right, the point closest to the cozy corner of the room, she shows something on one of the posters. She stands there in her white smock, holding a long pointer that glides over the brown, blotchy illustrations; she stands there, making reference to something, something Rubén can’t grasp because his mind is beset, he doesn’t know by what; but whatever it is, he feels it’s about to explode.

Then a long flame shoots up behind the instructor. It’s her white smock, which has brushed the stove and caught fire. There are tears and cries of fear, and the terrified teacher flees to the schoolyard while the flames grow, fed by the air, spreading to her clothes and now to the long mane of hair falling over her back.

Rubén, aged seventeen, questions himself.

Friends his age, his fellow students, boast of their flair for courtship, or else fall seriously and demurely in love. He hasn’t, not yet.

There’s a girl he finds charming, the daughter of a soldier, who has come to live in the neighborhood; his attitude toward her is contemplative, not heated. Indecisive, his attraction shifts between her and one from the teacher’s college who has danced with him on the occasional Saturday at the high school parties.

He doesn’t believe he’s in love: neither inspires that rapture or tenderness he imagines is borne of of true infatuation.

This doesn’t particularly sadden him, because of his placid nature, unenterprising, unenergetic, or his habit of waiting, in thrall to vague intuitions, for things, finally, to happen.

But with a certain woman, his behavior dismays him – and consequently, he upbraids himself. She’s barely more than a girl, beaming, simple, with a pleasant face, even a pretty one, it could be said. She’s tired, she’s pregnant. She’s the wife of an electrician, not much older than she, and they live nearby, so he runs into her often.

Rubén doesn’t recognize in himself any feeling that he could call love. He respects her, and his principles, which he examines with thorough anxiousness, would forestall the least attempt to get something from her, to expect something.

But why is it, lately, when she goes to the square, to sit in the sun and knits things for her baby in the offing, that he chooses to take a walk along that very path?

Inevitably, he blushes when they exchange a timid greeting, from afar, though the girl shows no sign of discomfort or suspicion.

Rubén wonders whether he shouldn’t fear – as happened before, especially when he was a boy – that what he senses, indistinctly, is the presentment of disaster.

He doesn’t give in to his incomprehension, nor does he manage to perceive any message he could pass along to the woman or her husband to keep them safe, if danger is looming. They would think him ridiculous.

Today he has left home without remembering her, without a single thought that alludes to her. But then he sees her on the corner and feels he shouldn’t go on downtown, as he had planned. He stops.

She’s waiting for a bus, she is in the right place. He will follow suit. He greets her with a smile, barely nodding. She responds with the same delicacy, and Rubén can see she favors him. He finds the moment touching.

A bus pulls forward. He doubts she will step forward rashly. She doesn’t.

Once she’s in the bus, a man politely offers her his seat, deferent before her evident pregnancy. Rubén stands up, grasps the rail while the passengers press in on him, and curses himself for obeying his destiny.

Suddenly, the young lady bursts into worrisome cries, saying something like Oh my God, help me! and he understands, now the dread has passed, the baby will be born in the bus. This is neither exceptionally untoward or strange, you see it in lots of cities…The passengers can help (they already are), and he will call for an ambulance and medical assistance and alert her husband and tell him to run, to run…and that everything will be all right.

That is why – he discovers, pleased that this time, it’s been to do good – he had to be there.

Against custom, Rubén leaves his office just past 6:30 in the evening: he is distracted by the burning city streets, and glad that the sun still shines golden above it, it’s summer and the shop doesn’t close till eight.

Nonetheless, he recalls, he has not gone out for recreation. For what, then? There’s no mystery, inside him or out. All he wants is to return home. Why, if his home will be empty? At that hour, the maid has left; his daughter will be out shopping, his son-in-law still at the office…

Well, that is why he’s returning at this instant: to be alone, in his widower’s solitude, for an hour or two, until his daughter shows up to start dinner.

The neighborhood seems changed, more animated, he notices. Ordinarily, he doesn’t pass through until close to nine, when the little shops and garages in that residential zone have lowered the rolling blinds and turned off their neon signs.

Where he turns onto the block, the Fiat and Volkswagen workshops are humming. He sees, tied to a tree in the courtyard, visible from the street through the gate, the source of the persistent barking he’s heard through his bedroom window for days now. It’s the first chance he’s had to lay eyes on the guard dog, he must be new at the job.

He’s a yellow dog, of medium height, and when he sees Rubén making his way slowly up the sidewalk, he stops his barking and commotion and stares at him raptly, at him alone, with mournful eyes.

Rubén watches calmly, lamenting the situation of that sensitive animal bound by a chain.

He can’t shake the impression. He knows it’s only natural, given his condition, that the dog has a certain mournfulness in his eyes. Yet he feels that stare has been prepared for him.

Back at home, he looks toward the roof to see if there is a flag there. A flag…? he wonders. Why am I looking up there for a flag or some fluttering fabric? He is perplexed, and he goes on questioning himself. What color then…? Should it be dark? After a slight hesitation: Why am I asking myself about the color of a flag that isn’t there, that doesn’t exist…?

He puts the matter aside, choosing to leave it in the street no sooner than he enters his home.

He can have his solitude as he wished, free from the voices of others, free from upsets, without any thought in particular.

They eat dinner, the three of them.

His daughter leaves afterward to clean up the kitchen, and the men move to the living room, where the television is.

“Papa, do you want a coffee? Want me to make it…?”

“No, honey, thanks. It keeps me up, and I want to sleep tonight.”

But when he retires, though the night is calm, rest refuses him its sanctuary.

He recalls the yellow dog, perhaps because he doesn’t hear it. He, at least, must have gotten some sleep.

Around one – the cuckoo in the dining room has just announced the hour – Rubén turns in the sheets, cross at his sleeplessness.

Just then, he comprehends, without impatience, without bother, that he has to wait until five. To wait…for what?

He resigns himself to ignoring the question, to waiting. He spends the remaining time shuffling through his memories, ploughing the night in stretches marked off by the chirp of the cuckoo: three, three-thirty, four, four-thirty…In a few minutes, it will be five.

When he senses there’s almost no time left, he gets up, without turning on a light: the light coming through the window suffices to dilute the shadows. He settles in the most comfortable chair, the one reserved for reading, turns to face the bed.

This comfort gratifies him, he stretches out his body: his wait is as lucid and serene as his gaze.

Then, when the cuckoo calls out five, he observes, from the chair he has sat in, himself, dying in his bed.