When I got to the hospital, the first thing I did was to look for Emilia in the little room where she usually waited for me, but she wasn’t there. I waited a few minutes, thinking she might be in the restroom. Then I went into your room and sat on the chair facing you. Lucy had washed your hair and combed it back. Your uncovered forehead showed its furrows and creases. Your lips had a slightly pinkish tint. I’d brought some newspapers so that we could read them together, but I was unable to concentrate. I raised my eyes to look at the door about once a second, imagining it would open and Emilia’s dark head would appear. But Emilia didn’t come.
After I left to go home that evening, I was walking around the hospital’s underground parking garage, looking for my car, when I thought I spotted Dr. Calderón, the psychiatrist. I’d looked at photographs of him on the Internet, and I had a clear memory of his aquiline nose, his tiny eyes, and his long, thin face, features that made him look like an anteater. I tried to catch up with him, but the elevator doors opened and the man disappeared when they closed. I waited for the next elevator, went back up to your floor, entered your room, and there you were. I went out to the waiting room and then walked around the corridors. I called Álvarez, and he answered with his customary throat-clearing. I told him what I’d seen and asked him if he’d been able to verify Calderón’s departure date. The man was still in Chile, and the detective had already questioned him. Álvarez had nothing important to say about him but would get in touch with me when he did. Dazed, I sat in the waiting room. My amateurish investigations made me feel useless.
Instead of returning home directly, I drove to the nearest movie theater, which was in a shopping mall. My encounter with Calderón—if it had indeed been him—had left me uneasy, but above all, I didn’t much feel like seeing Gracia. Automobiles were zooming through the streets, some drivers sounding their horns, some thrusting a hand through their window and saluting a nonexistent multitude. The Chilean national team must have won a soccer match.
I ate in a joint on Luis Thayer Avenue. At the table next to mine, a couple of office workers were trying to seduce two girls who could have been their daughters.
Back in our neighborhood, I parked my car and took the dogs out for a walk. It was an unusually cold spring night. I got home past midnight and Gracia was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, which came to the same thing. We didn’t have to speak or explain ourselves.
I was hoping to see Emilia the following morning, sitting in the waiting room with her feet together and that smile on her face, waiting for me, but she wasn’t there. I went into your room. I couldn’t keep still. The hardest thing was the thought that Emilia lived in another world, a place unfamiliar even to her. I grabbed my jacket and went out. It had been two days since she’d shown up at the hospital.
There was little traffic at that time of day, and it didn’t take me long to reach Emilia’s building. I rang the doorbell, but no one answered. Nor was there a doorkeeper. I therefore decided to wait for someone to go in or out and give me a chance to slip inside. After a while, a woman wearing a kerchief on her head and wheeling a little shopping cart opened the door. Very fine blue veins, reminiscent of the venation of a leaf, hatched her face. I explained to her that I was there to visit the girl who lived on the roof, and the woman let me pass inside. I took the elevator to the ninth floor and then climbed the narrow steps that led to the terrace. Viewed from there at that hour, the city didn’t appear very attractive. The car horns, the exhaust fumes, and the leaden substance the sky was shedding transformed Santiago into a threatening place. Only the white canopy, rocking in the breeze, belonged to the world we’d shared a few days before.
The doors of the kitchen, the bathroom, and Emilia’s bedroom were locked. I knocked on her door a few times, but there was no response, nor could I detect any movement that might betray her presence inside the room. All of a sudden, however, I heard her voice: “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Daniel.”
I listened to her coughing and said, “May I come in?”
“I’ll open the door,” she said, the words barely audible.
Her face was pale and her hair disheveled. She was wearing a blue nightshirt and a scarf. Although it was already November, the last few days had been cold. She was barefoot. The room, dark except for a halo of dim light seeping in between the closed curtains, looked like a box filled with dust. Her bed was unmade, and some crumpled sheets lay in one corner. Emilia seemed not to recognize me at first.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. I noticed that she was trembling.
“Are you all right, Emilia?” I asked her in turn.
“I don’t know,” she said. She appeared confused.
I stepped into the room, even though she hadn’t invited me to come in. The room was cold, as though the winter had taken up residence in there to wait for its next opportunity. The place smelled like Emilia, a flowery scent without the sharp edge perfumes have. Books were piled on the nightstand and the table. On one wall was a row of postcards. Among them, the classic photograph of Virginia Woolf and another of the English poet Rupert Brooke. I pulled a blanket off the bed and handed it to her so she could cover herself. She took it and threw it over her shoulders. She pressed her lips together, rubbed her eyes with one sleeve of her nightshirt, and sat on the bed.
In another corner, I saw a small, smoke-blackened gas heater and a box of matches. I lit the wick, and a thin blue flame glowed in the semidarkness.
“I’m going to fix you a cup of tea. Have you eaten anything?” She shook her head and tried to smile, without complete success. “We’ll start with the tea,” I said, and I went out onto the roof.
There were some sheets of paper lying on the terrace in front of the kitchen door, apparently carried there by the breeze. The pages were handwritten, in French. I folded them in half and put them in my jacket pocket to give to Emilia. After putting the teakettle on to boil, I opened the refrigerator to see if there was something I could prepare for her, but it was empty. I remembered the impression she’d made on me when I hardly knew her, the feeling that she could vanish at any time. I also remembered what you often told me: it’s through details that we can see the essence of things. Now, looking into her empty refrigerator, I understood. Emilia was in transit, not through this country, nor through this time, nor through this geography, but through a much vaster one.
She drank the tea in little sips, sitting up on the bed with her feet tucked under her and the blanket on her shoulders. Her dark straight hair fell over her eyes, which seemed to be contemplating incommunicable subjects. She’d changed in the days since I’d seen her. From underneath her defenselessness, a cutting edge had emerged, like a ridge.
“You’ve stopped shivering. Do you think you have a fever?” I asked, knowing I couldn’t touch her forehead and find out for myself.
She shook her head, and then, looking at me for the first time, she asked, “What day is today?”
Hearing her speak and seeing her pupils fixed on me once more calmed me down. I said, “Friday.”
“I must have acquired a cold,” she said, using language like what you heard in dubbed films. This, along with her slight accent, made me recall that she had never lived in Chile.
“You have to eat something, Emilia. I’m going to go out and see what’s available.”
I returned with a couple of chicken-and-avocado sandwiches, a carton of orange juice, and some yogurt. Emilia had put on a pair of jeans I’d never seen before and a checked shirt, and she’d put her hair in a tiny braid that was visible on one side of her neck. She had also opened the curtain. The light drew shapes on the floor. Despite her efforts, she still looked dreadful.
I fetched some plates and put them on her desk. She sat on the edge of the bed, and I took the only available chair. She moved slowly. It was hard for her to bear the weight of her own body. Although I wasn’t hungry, I ate to keep her company. I watched her and made useless comments, pointing out how salty the avocado tasted or how delicious the orange juice was. A cold breeze streamed through the half-open window, which I closed. I couldn’t get closer to her. Her self-absorption was so deep, her effort to remain seated there so great, that she seemed about to succumb at any moment.
“Would you mind if I lie down again?” she asked, still eating her sandwich.
A fire truck sped down a nearby avenue, its siren vibrating the windowpanes. Emilia stretched out on the bed and stared at the window facing her desk. The pale down on her arms sparkled in the sunlight.
I stayed in my chair, knowing that the only thing I could do was to wait and to take care of her insofar as she allowed me to do so. She turned and gave me a sad smile.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I found this.” I reached into my jacket pocket, took out the sheets of paper I’d picked up from in front of the kitchen door, and handed them to her. Emilia took the pages without looking at them and laid them on the night table.
“Did you read them?” she asked, leaning forward.
“No!” I exclaimed. “I’d never do anything like that. Besides, my French wouldn’t be up to it.”
Emilia smiled and pulled on her braid. “It’s a letter from my fiancé, Jérôme,” she said, smiling again, without conviction. “Or from my ex-fiancé, to be precise.”
“I see,” I said.
“You’re probably wondering how it is that I have a fiancé,” she said, rubbing her nose with the palm of her hand, up and down, several times.
“Yes, I was wondering about that.”
“It’s a complicated story. I’m not sure you want to hear it.”
“I’d be delighted.”
Emilia settled herself on the bed, bent her legs, clasped them in her thin arms, and rested her chin on her knees. She stayed like that for several minutes. Without speaking, without making the smallest movement. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. The fluctuation was very slight. I felt an urge to put my arms around her.
“His name is Jérôme,” she said, breaking the silence. “I already told you that, didn’t I?”
I nodded.
“The problem is, I don’t know how to begin. Supposedly, you begin at the beginning, but where do things really start? Jérôme, Jérôme,” she repeated, bringing her hand to her chin in a pensive gesture. “I well remember the day he arrived in our class. We were all eleven, and the school year had begun four months before. He was small for his age. The expression on his face was both serious and indifferent, like someone who already knows how hard life can be and has decided to ignore it. The teacher had him sit in the back row, and while he walked to his desk, everybody looked at him. He was wearing corduroy trousers and a jacket several sizes too big for him. Ours was a private school, the most expensive one in the city. We didn’t know it that first day, but we soon learned that Jérôme had a scholarship. I’d started going to school there the previous year.
“In the second week, disobeying the teacher’s instructions, Jérôme sat at the desk next to mine. Nobody had ever shown any interest in sitting there before. I don’t know how he knew, but he saw immediately that we had both run aground in the same harbor. Neither of us belonged to the world where we had wound up. But the truth is, he chose me. He made up for everything he lacked in inches and social status with his determination and his demonic intelligence. Every time we took up some new subject, he’d quickly learn it better than all of us, and in class he’d ask questions that stumped the teachers. Most of the time he was bored, and while we were all following the lesson attentively, he’d be writing songs. His idols were Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. The lyrics of Jérôme’s songs seemed to come from the mind of an adult. They spoke of lost loves, of betrayals, of alcohol and drugs. But I’m running on too much…”
She stopped and rubbed her eyes with the tips of her index fingers.
“No, no,” I said. “Please go on. If you want, I’ll make you some more tea.”
“That would be nice,” she said, and smiled at me.
Back in her room, I noticed that the light had changed, and instead of the shapes on the floor, the reflected rays of the timid springtime sun glimmered on the wall. The color had returned to Emilia’s face, and her movements were no longer as languid as they’d been a little while ago.
“So we started to spend more and more time together. I’m repeating myself—I already told you that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“My father recognized his intelligence immediately. He enjoyed talking to him. Jérôme made him laugh, which was something my father didn’t do much. Jérôme practically began to live with us. When the school day was over, we’d walk to my house together. He lived at the other end of Grenoble, and just when it was starting to get dark, he’d set off for home. On many occasions my father offered to give him a ride in his car, but Jérôme always refused. His life was split in half, and he’d decided that the two parts would never meet.
“I remember the first time I caught him looking at me. We must have been around fourteen, doing our homework on the dining room table. I always took longer than he did, and while he was waiting for me to finish, he’d entertain himself with solving the complicated mathematical equations my father would leave for him. But that time, when I looked up from my notebook, Jérôme’s eyes were fixed on me. His grown-up’s eyes. He didn’t blink when I caught him, and the way he was staring at me made me think of his songs, the ones about broken loves and betrayals, and I looked back down at my notebook.
“That fixed stare was repeated more and more often, and the only way I could think of to ward it off was to ignore it and distance myself from him. I knew I was hurting him, but I wasn’t able to deal with the feelings his eyes aroused in me. This is where things get complicated, Daniel. That’s why I said it’s hard to define where stories really begin. Because mine had started long before.”
Emilia sighed and undid her little braid. Her hair, always smooth and lustrous, now looked slightly wavy, which gave her face a more mature appearance. The heater gave a click and went out. I lit it again, a task that required several minutes; when I’d finished, Emilia looked ready to go on. It was then that she told me about her “affliction.” It was a confused account, which included a playground slide, blood springing from a head wound she’d suffered, and the concussion this had caused.
“That year and those that followed, I went through a series of therapies, one after another. According to the accepted, official version of my case, my head injury had provoked a rare kind of phobia in me. But there was something more. Something I never mentioned in any of my therapies. At first I kept it hidden in the back of my consciousness so I wouldn’t have to see it or face up to it again. And later, I guess, I didn’t mention it because I knew if I did it would only cause more pain and complicate things between my parents even more.”
Emilia stopped talking for a moment, took a sip of her tea—which must have been cold by then—and went on: “I can still see my mother’s tight dress, her voluptuous body, and him, with his arms around her bottom. My father was on one of his trips to an observatory in another city and wouldn’t return until the weekend. I froze on the stairs and watched the man free her breasts from her dress, bend down, and suck them. It’s an image I can still see clearly, my mother’s white breasts, the man’s brown hands fondling them, his avid eyes, his lips. But it’s like an old photograph, without a background, without light. A dead image. This happened a week before the accident on the slide. But in the end, if you ask me what happened, I don’t know. In therapy, they tried to make me believe that the mind is like a ball of yarn you can untangle by pulling on one end of the thread. But that’s not how it is, Daniel. There’s not a single thread, but hundreds, thousands; every day, every endeavor has its own. I figure the reasons why you do one thing or another, or why something inside you breaks, are never definitive. I believe that experiences add up, they accumulate, they interweave. One gets carried over to the other, a wound starts to close or becomes bigger. But ultimately, I don’t know. I don’t know what it was that triggered my affliction, or exactly when it happened.
“The point is that when Jérôme looked at me that way, my whole body tensed up, and his presence alone started to change me in a way that eventually became unbearable. He continued to come home with me after school, but as soon as my father arrived, I would slip away to my room. And I’d often excuse myself at dinnertime, saying I was tired or I didn’t feel very well.
“At the end of that year, I went to Paris with my parents for the holidays. We stayed with some friends of theirs. And when I came back, nothing was the same anymore. Jérôme kept on sitting in the desk next to mine, but he stopped coming home with me.
“I found it shocking that my parents never mentioned his absence, as if it was perfectly natural for him to disappear overnight after being part of our family for three years. Although I never asked them, as time passed I began to suspect that my father, maybe because he was aware of what was going on with me, had spoken to Jérôme. He started to skip school, and eventually we learned that he’d flunked the year.
“Soon summer vacation came, and for two long months I heard no more from or about Jérôme. I never stopped thinking about him. He stayed in the center of my memory. It was something that happened naturally. While I was reading, while I was listening to my parents’ conversations or going out with them, my mind would play back the moments I’d spent with him. There were hundreds of memories, and every one of them had left a warm imprint on me, a sense of myself, of my existence and my worth. I started invoking them more and more frequently, and for the rest of the summer, my only wish was to see him again. I’d also thought about the effect that his gaze had produced in me, and I wanted to regain his affection so much that I was even ready to let him touch me. But then the school year began, and Jérôme didn’t show up for a single class. According to a rumor that was going around, not only had he failed the year, he’d also lost his scholarship. The phone call came in the middle of the third week. It was a Wednesday.”
Emilia swept a lock of her hair behind one ear and fell silent. In the window, two jet trails left behind by an airplane rose high in the sky, in parallel lines, like the two uprights of a ladder.
“Yes, it was a Wednesday. The person talking to me on the telephone was his big brother. He was six years older than Jérôme, and he worked as a mechanic in a car repair shop. He and his girlfriend were going to get married. That was all Jérôme had told us about him. He shouted at me and insulted me, using hard, ugly words. He said I was to blame for what had happened, but I just couldn’t understand what he was talking about. When Mama got home that evening, I was sick. Like I am now. But much worse.
“My father managed to find out that Jérôme was in the Grenoble University Hospital. He had tried to commit suicide. But my father didn’t tell me that until a few days later, after my fever had gone down and I’d started eating again.
“Jérôme was in a life-or-death struggle for a week. His brother had found him in the garage, inside their father’s car with the engine running. His family blamed us and wouldn’t allow us to get near him. But every day after class, I’d go and sit in the hospital gardens and look up at the hundreds of windows and imagine that one of them had to be the window in his room. He was released after three weeks. He’d lost weight. I saw him leave the hospital with his brother and their parents. A gray couple, both of them pretty elderly-looking to me, maybe because they’d been aged by what had happened. The brother looked like one of those boys who are always on the point of starting a fight. I went home with conflicting feelings. I felt relieved that Jérôme was out of danger. But at the same time, a heavy, new sorrow had settled over me. A feeling I couldn’t give a name to, because it was too painful. In the following days and weeks, my insomnia returned and my appetite went away. I was incapable of concentrating on anything but the idea of seeing Jérôme again. I had no way of reaching him. Jérôme had succeeded in keeping each of his two worlds incommunicado with the other. I took up wandering around the streets of Grenoble after classes and on the weekends. I visited the center of the city, the parks, the record shop—the places we’d gone together. On one of my rambles, it occurred to me that I could leave a trail, so that if Jérôme ever went back to those places, he’d know I’d been there too. I talked to the clerk in the record shop, to the cashier in the supermarket, to the alcoholic beggar Jérôme used to have conversations with whenever we’d happen to run across him, and to the young waitress who’d served us in the café. I asked the people I didn’t know so well whether they remembered us, the little short guy and me, and most of the time they said yes, they remembered us, and they inquired about Jérôme. Then I’d ask them to tell him I was looking for him if he should ever turn up there. Also, sometime later, I began to leave notes in the places we’d frequented, our bench in the plaza, our table in the café, some tree we used to stand and talk under. I’d hide the notes in some barely visible nook. As was to be expected, when I went back a few days later to see if they were still there, many of them had disappeared, but many others were untouched and waiting for Jérôme.
“A few days later, as I was leaving school with my backpack on my shoulder, I saw him on the other side of the street. He’d gained back a little weight. He was wearing dark jeans and a blue jacket that weren’t two sizes too big for him and made him look handsome. I crossed the street, and he greeted me as if nothing had happened. Like so: ‘Hi.’ And that was it. He walked home with me, we drank tea in the kitchen, we talked about some of the latest music albums and about the movies that had come out that season, and after my father came home, the four of us sat at the table and had dinner. I never asked him whether he’d found his way back by following the trail I’d left. He’d come back, and that was enough for me.
“After high school, he enrolled in the university to study astronomy, like my parents, and I opted for literature. I never again felt his eyes on me, never again felt that gaze of his that had caused us so much misfortune.”
Emilia’s face tightened. I felt a heavy weight on my chest. I thought, for the first time, that your own sorrow never seems as intense as what you feel with and for someone else.
She picked up the letter she’d left on the night table and handed me the handwritten pages. I took them without knowing what to do with them.
“Can you read French a little?” she asked me.
“A little.”
“Jérôme has very clear penmanship, like a diligent schoolboy,” she said with a smile.
I read the letter, and although many words escaped me, I managed to understand its gist. When I raised my eyes, Emilia was looking at me.
“The heavy sorrow you felt after Jérôme left the hospital was guilt, right?” I asked her. She answered by nodding her head. We remained silent for a while…and then: “I’m not certain of what I’m going to tell you, Emilia, nor do I know whether it will seem very important in the end, but I don’t think Jérôme has another girlfriend. What tells me so is a kind of male intuition, if I can put it like that. I believe his intention in writing you this letter was to set you free from that guilt.”
“Do you really think so?”
The indifferent tone she used to ask this question made me realize that the reasons for the letter, whatever they might have been, weren’t what had affected her so much; it was the fact that now she was alone before her life, that she would have to start looking at it from a different viewpoint, and that she had no idea where to start. She looked tired but peaceful, like someone who’s gone through a quagmire and come out pretty muddy but has the relief of knowing that now, at least, she’s on the other side.
She laid her head on the pillow and pulled up the bedcovers. “You know what?” she said, without looking at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever talked so much all at once.”
Her smile was different from all her other smiles. Her sorrow, shut up inside her for so long, had found a way out through words, and now that it was outside, it had changed its form. I took the blanket she’d left hanging on the back of the chair and put it over her, on top of the others. Neither of us said anything for a long time.
“Daniel…,” she murmured.
“Yes?”
“Would you sit here, next to me?”
“Of course,” I declared, and I moved the chair closer to the bed.
“No. Here, with me.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and clasped my knees. She placed her hand on mine. She ran her fingers over the back of my hand, a light touch, but at the same time much more intense than a squeeze. I wished, in that moment, for your clarity; I wanted to be able to speak the right words—the mot juste, as you used to say—or to make precisely the right gesture to turn that moment in the proper direction, whatever that might have been. But I remained as I was, without moving, absorbing her body heat, yielding to the emotion produced in me by the thought that her hand had barely ever felt the warmth of another’s touch. She settled in under the covers and closed her eyes.
The knowledge that she’d decided to touch me made me feel unexpectedly free, as though I’d been pardoned for everything I’d said and done up to that point. Her virginity made me long to be a part of her awakening. Before long, her breathing became regular. She’d fallen asleep, her head resting on the pillow, her delicate features tranquil in repose. I slipped out of the room and went out on the terrace. A slight breeze had come up, and the first streetlights were afloat in the dusk.