Chaparro pulls the finished sheet out of the typewriter with sufficient force to free the page from the platen without tearing the paper and then rereads what he’s just written, smiling at the last words. It’s a pleasure for him to exercise his memory. He thought he’d totally forgotten what Sandoval said, the sentence at the end of the chapter about “the day when the assholes of the world throw a party,” but now the words have risen to the surface, along with a whole string of other memories of Chaparro’s past and of the people with whom he lived it.
He stands up and makes a characteristic gesture: using the index finger and thumb of his left hand, he takes hold of the bridge of his nose at the top, almost at the level of his eyes, and squeezes until he feels a twinge of pain. He got in the habit of doing this during his years in the court, when he’d rise from his chair after a long stretch of time spent bending over his desk, and now he repeats the movement here, in his house, after hours and hours of putting together the memories he’s submerged in, both his own and those of others. Man’s a predictable creature, Chaparro thinks, grossly and perpetually equal to himself. He’s been making that gesture and many others he doesn’t even notice for more than half his life, and he’ll keep repeating it until he’s lying in his grave.
He thinks about Irene. Why is it he’s thinking about her just now, right after thinking about his own death? Does he perhaps associate it with her? No. Completely the opposite. Irene attaches him to life. She’s like a debt he owes life, or a debt life owes him. He can’t die while he feels what he feels for Irene. It’s as though he couldn’t be so wasteful as to allow that love to disintegrate and turn to dust like his flesh and his bones.
But he can’t unbury what’s in his heart, either. There’s no way. He’s thought and thought about it, but there isn’t any way. A letter? That method would at least offer the attraction of distance and thus a safeguard against the possibility of seeing her look incredulous—or worse, offended—or worse, sorry for him—as she reads his words. Presenting himself and speaking to her face to face doesn’t even figure among the options Chaparro considers. He thinks a “mature romance” sounds ridiculous, but declaring his love to a woman who’s been married for almost thirty years seems more than ridiculous; it seems offensive and degrading.
Common sense, which Chaparro believes he can occasionally locate inside his skull, tells him there’s no reason to be so solemn, so categorical. What’s so inconceivable about starting a love affair with a married woman? He wouldn’t be the first or the last to do that. And so? And so that’s just it. But then again, what he has to say to her is not that he wants to have an affair with her. What he has to say to her, what he needs to say to her, and what at the same time he’d be horrified if she knew, is that he wants to be with her, forever, everywhere, and at every hour, or nearly, because he’s sunk into such a state of adoration that he can make no sense of life without her. But when his thoughts reach this point, Chaparro stops in discouragement, and in his mind’s eye, the Irene whom he imagines receiving his desperate confession adopts the same expression she does when he envisions her reading the letter that in any case he’s not going to write: surprise, or indignation, or pity.
And after that, nothing. Because after the rejection, there will be no place anymore for even those brief moments he steals from her life, drinking coffee in her office, exchanging small talk with her, pretending he’s dropped in for nothing more or less than a simple chat between two colleagues—ex-colleagues—who always had a good working relationship. Irene seems to enjoy those sporadic encounters, but once he crosses the line, she’ll have no other choice than to ask him not to visit her again.
All of a sudden, while he’s fixing himself some maté, Chaparro is seized by the same guilty desire he’s felt so often before, but he immediately quashes it. If Irene suddenly became a widow … couldn’t she fall in love with him? He has no assurance of such a thing. So it’s best to leave the poor engineer in peace, let him keep on enjoying his life and his wife, damn him.
He puts the last typewritten page on the top of the pile and admires its thickness. Not bad for the first month of work. Or is it a month and a half? Maybe so. Thanks to this project, time passes more quickly. A recurring question nags at him: What’s he going to call his novel? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t have the slightest idea.
Chaparro thinks he’s no good at titles. At first he considered giving each chapter a title, but he’s given up that particular notion. If he can’t conceive a name for the whole thing, he’s not very likely to come up with one for every chapter. He’s already written sixteen, and he’s got many more to go.
He’s concerned about something else, too: the name under the title, his name, “Benjamín Miguel Chaparro.” He finds that it sounds somehow disagreeable. To begin with, didn’t his parents notice that the last syllable of his first name and the first syllable of his middle name make an unpleasant rhyme? Mín-mi. It’s frightful. And besides, at least two of his names have meanings beyond themselves, and that’s a problem. Take “Benjamín,” for example. In Spanish, a benjamín is a youngest son, like the Benjamin in the Bible; it’s a name not for an adult, but for a little boy, for the youngest of several brothers. Why was it given to him, an only son? And besides, it’s one thing to be a seven- or eight-year-old benjamín, and quite another to be a benjamín of sixty. Ridiculous. But that’s not all. Chaparro means “short and squat.” Calling a human being chaparro when he stands over six feet tall seems to be a contradiction in terms. A casual browser who comes across a book by “Benjamín Chaparro” (the cacophonous “Miguel” has to go) may well picture the author as a short, fat young boy. Or is that all just too convoluted? Won’t most people react more simply? Yes, but it could happen that at least some readers interpret the name literally. And then the author shows up, and the benjamín chaparro, the “stocky little kid,” turns out to be a big, bearish sexagenarian. Too absurd.
One solution might be to publish the novel under a pseudonym. The thought crosses his mind, but he rejects it immediately. No way. If he manages to publish the thing, and even if he has to pay for a cheap edition out of his own pocket, he wants his name, be it ever so ridiculous, to appear on the cover. He has a simple reason for wanting his name there: so that Irene can see it.