For whatever reason (and Chaparro has no intention of investigating whether that reason is just an old friendship or something deeper, more encouraging, more personal, and more a great many other things), Irene takes pleasure in his company, and not solely in his descriptions of the fledgling writer’s trials and tribulations. And so, for some reason, they’re face to face again, with her desk between them. For some reason, she’s smiling a smile different from her common, ordinary smiles, which in fact, Chaparro thinks, are never either common or ordinary. But they’re not like this, not like these, which she bestows on him when they’re alone together in her office and evening is coming down.
Because he fears he’s dreaming uselessly again, he gets nervous, looks at his watch, and starts to stand up. Irene proposes another cup of coffee, and he, with the utmost awkwardness, points out that they’ve already drunk all the coffee, that the pot in the electric coffeemaker is empty, and that the machine itself is off. She offers to go into the kitchenette and make some more and he says no, although in the next instant he regrets being such an imbecile. He could have said, “Sure, thanks, I’ll go to the kitchen with you,” but he didn’t, and he reproaches himself so fervently for missing his cue that he sits down again, as though that might be a method of undoing the gaffe. But then he thinks there may be no harm done; maybe she simply wants more coffee, that’s all, maybe there’s some piece of gossip she wants to pass along, that’s all, because when you consider it, there’s nothing unusual about drinking coffee with a friend and colleague of many years in the court, nothing unusual whatsoever.
But as it happens, they both sit back down, and their conversation revives, a piece of flotsam he can cling to in the midst of all these uncertainties. Without knowing how it happened, Chaparro finds himself remarking to Irene that he spent the other day reading and correcting his drafts; it was raining outside, he tells her, and he was listening to Renaissance music, which he very much enjoys. He stops in embarrassment precisely when he’s on the point of saying, as he looks her straight in the eyes, that the only missing element, the addition he needed to consider himself saved and in a state of perpetual grace, was her, her in the armchair next to his, or maybe reclining and reading at his side, and his hand, his fingertips, gently caressing her head and leaving shallow furrows in her hair. Although he didn’t say that, it’s as if he did, because he knows he’s turned as red as a tomato. And now she gives him a look, an amused or affectionate or nervous look, and finally she asks him, “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, Benjamín?”
A fainting sensation comes over Chaparro, because he’s just noticed that this woman asks one thing with her lips and another with her eyes. With her lips, she’s asking him to explain why he’s blushing and squirming in his chair and looking up every twelve seconds at the tall pendulum clock that stands against the wall near the bookcases; but with her eyes, besides all that, she’s asking him something else. She’s asking him what’s wrong, what’s wrong with him, with him and her, with him and the two of them, and she seems interested in his answer, she seems eager to know, maybe anxious, and probably undecided as to whether what’s wrong with him is what she supposes is wrong with him. Supposes, or fears, or hopes, Chaparro’s not sure which, because that’s the mystery, the great mystery of the question in her gaze, and Chaparro suddenly panics, he springs to his feet like a maniac and tells her he has to go, it’s getting very late. Surprised, she rises as well—is she surprised and nothing more, or surprised and relieved, or surprised and disappointed?—and Chaparro practically flees down the hall, flees past the tall wooden doors of the other offices, flees across the diagonal checkerboard of black and white floor tiles, and catches his breath again only after climbing into a 115 bus, miraculously empty at that peak hour of early evening. He goes home to his house in Castelar, where the final chapters of his story are waiting to be written, one way or another, because he’s beginning to find the situation intolerable, not Ricardo Morales’s or Isidoro Gómez’s situation, but his own, which has nearly ruined him, which has bound him to that woman, that woman sent to him from heaven or hell and now lodged inextricably in his heart and his head, that woman who’s still, even at this distance, asking him what’s wrong, with the loveliest eyes in the world.