I got home early in the evening. Emilia and I had worked outside on her roof terrace all day long, organizing our Transatlantic dinner party. I made myself some tea and went into my studio. I’d been sleeping there, in the bed we’d set up for eventual guests, ever since the night when Gracia and I made love like two strangers. That had been almost two weeks ago. There was still no peace between us. What remained was a dry crust, as on one of those dead stars Emilia had described, ready to break off and expose the death of our relationship. Gracia must have felt the same, because she didn’t ask me to return to her bed and went on with her days as if, given the circumstances we found ourselves in, that was the best option. Would I have wanted Gracia to put up a fight for us? I don’t know. It was hard for me to look at her without thinking about her talking to the detective. It was hard for me to see her anymore as the Gracia I knew and had confided in.
Until then, nothing had happened in our romance terrible enough to justify the place where we now found ourselves, nothing more than an accretion of silences, of oversights, of indifference, of exigencies, of little annoyances, which was settling on our lives from day to day, like an invisible, inoffensive dust. Maybe our big mistake had been to let that dust gradually cover everything, to the point where we couldn’t make each other out with any clarity. It was painful to think that my betrayal and hers were the result of an accumulation of little wrong moves.
I was sitting at my desk, pondering these matters while simultaneously answering a few emails, when I recognized, among the sounds coming in through the window, the barking of Charly and Arthur, who were giving tongue with much greater intensity than usual. I went out into the garden and entered yours through the little gate.
“Charly, Arthur!” I shouted, but they kept on barking.
I circled your house, and in the front yard I could hear the sound of the tin cans the bum usually carried, clattering against the sidewalk as he went off. I pushed the grilled gate open and went out onto the street. The tall, thin figure of the vagrant, walking away fast, disappeared around the corner. I remembered that Detective Álvarez had asked me to get in touch with him if I happened to see the bum, but three weeks had passed since then, and they’d probably questioned him already. Charly and Arthur were moving in circles around me, restless, baring their teeth. It was a good opportunity to take them out for a walk. I put on their leashes and we started up the street, toward the hill. A little before we reached the barrier that gives access to vehicles going up the hill, I saw the bum again. He was sitting under a tree and smoking a cigarette. The Borsalino hat on his head had a broken brim. A tabby cat with a blotched ochre coat was prowling around him, but when the cat spotted Charly and Arthur, it sprang behind some bushes.
“Good evening,” I said, greeting him as I got close.
“Good evening,” he replied, without looking at me. His voice was hoarse, and something arrogant in his tone revealed his bourgeois origins.
Ever since I’d first seen him prowling around our neighborhood, I’d tried to imagine how a man who must have known better days had wound up living on the street. Alcohol, drugs, some kind of psychotic break, abandonment. Despite his destitution, he maintained a haughty attitude, as if he was proud of having detached himself from worldly cares in order to live his life as he saw fit. I stood still in front of him. Charly and Arthur, quiet and expectant, sat down beside me. I longed to broach the subject that was bothering me, but I didn’t know how to go about it. In the end, he was the one who broke the silence.
“How’s the lady?” he asked, still without looking at me.
“Are you referring to Vera Sigall?” I asked. He assented with a nod, simultaneously extracting a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers from one of the pockets of his threadbare overcoat. The sour odor he gave off reached me in waves.
“Who else?” he replied.
There was a power relationship in this whole scene that made me uncomfortable. There he was, sprawled against a tree on the sidewalk, and there was I, standing with the two dogs at my side, securely leashed and looking down on him. I could have sat down beside him, but I immediately saw how false that particular gesture would seem, and so I opted to remain where I was. The disparity of perspectives didn’t seem to bother him any. In fact, despite his position, which was inferior in every way, it was the vagrant who directed the course of our conversation. He wielded a power over me, the power of one who has nothing to lose. Without looking at me, he calmly started to roll himself a cigarette.
“She’s in a state that the doctors call ‘locked-in syndrome.’ It’s as if she were in a coma, but she’s not,” I explained. It was hard for me to talk about you in those terms, all the more so to a stranger.
“It’s been three months,” he said, after lighting the cigarette he’d just rolled with the stub of the one that had been in his mouth. He raised his head, and I saw his dun-colored eyes, which seemed immobile, his chapped lips, his awful teeth.
“Three months,” I repeated. I had the impression that much more time had passed since that August morning. While we’d been awaiting your return, things had changed. My marriage had fallen apart; I was ready to launch the project we’d talked about so often; and Emilia had appeared.
“She was a great lady,” said the vagrant, shaking his head from side to side. “She used to give me books. I’ve got one with me. I lost the rest,” he added, reaching into a decrepit bag and taking out a copy of Un año by Juan Emar.
He gazed at the cover of the book for a while, puffing on his cigarette with a sardonic smile on his face, and then put the volume back in the bag. He did everything slowly, as if time had another dimension in his impoverished universe.
“I don’t know if you’ve had an opportunity to talk with the police,” I said, and my words sounded absurd to me. A man like him didn’t have the “opportunity” to do anything at all; life happened to him, and he had no alternative but to face up to it.
“With the bald detective?”
“The very same,” I said with a smile.
After a long silence, he replied, “He wanted to know if I saw anything.”
“And?”
“My memory’s not too good,” he observed, taking another drag on his cigarette.
“That morning you and I ran into each other in the Costanera. You remember?” I asked cautiously.
“We did? I don’t remember,” he answered indifferently.
I had a feeling he was lying. My muscles tightened. Charly and Arthur sensed my tension and got up from their places, groaning and shaking themselves.
“Stay calm,” I said, pulling hard on their leashes.
The bum didn’t bat an eye, as if he was certain that, in the final analysis, nothing and no one could do him harm. Or that the harm already done was so great, it didn’t matter what happened next. He took off his hat and with one hand threw back some long, thin locks of his gray hair.
I needed to keep the conversation going. “So what did you tell him, then?”
“Nothing much. We talked about what I do every day, my routine, so to speak.”
“I see. I’m glad the police haven’t been picking on you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, they always have a tendency to imagine things,” I pointed out, and my voice, despite my efforts to sound casual, had an inquisitive tone.
“Now that I think about it…,” he muttered between his teeth, and stopped. He threw his cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it out with his shoe. He was wearing fingerless gloves, but even so, he was good with his hands.
“Did you say something?” I asked, with badly dissembled curiosity.
“Nothing important.”
Then the man shut up and spoke no more.
“But you said something,” I insisted.
“Your wife. The lady that’s on TV.”
“What about her?” I demanded impatiently.
“She went into Mrs. Sigall’s house that morning.”
My whole body tensed up.
“Are you sure?” My words came out like shotgun pellets.
“I slept on the sidewalk across the street, but then I went away. A friend had tipped me off to a place where they were giving out soup.”
“So your memory’s not so bad, after all.”
“Not when it comes to food and the temperature. Those are things I remember.”
“And my wife?” I asked, returning to the charge.
“Nothing else. What I told you. Your wife went into the lady’s house.”
“Are you sure it was her?”
He looked at me with an expression of mingled irony and rebuke, as if he thought I was making fun of him.
“Well, how long was she there? Did you hear anything?” In spite of my efforts to appear calm, my voice must have sounded desperate. I was dying to ask him if he’d told the detective about Gracia, but that was a way of giving the matter even greater importance. I thought about giving him money, but when I put my hand in my pocket to do so, I realized that it could look like a kind of blackmail to ensure his silence. He must have been aware that what he’d told me about Gracia entering your house that morning was serious enough to get me agitated. There was no point in my trying to hide it.
“I don’t know. Like I said, I went off.”
Charly and Arthur had started to get restless again. The man remained impassive.
“Did you talk to the detective about this?” I asked, unable to restrain myself.
“It’s none of his business.”
“But what about you? What do you think?” I felt like a child looking for an adult who could assure him that the earth was round and he wasn’t going to fall off of it.
The man gave me a sidelong glance and smiled ironically, displaying his mistreated teeth. “What I think isn’t important. What’s important is what you think.” He wiped his mouth on his overcoat sleeve and looked across the street. He considered our conversation over.
I was left with no alternative but to take my leave of him and continue on my walk. I looked back and saw him digging in his bag with the same calm indifference he’d brought to our little chat. He was back in his world.
I made a little tour of the neighborhood with Charly and Arthur. The vagrant’s information had left me perplexed and confounded. I wondered if all investigations suffered the same fate as my own, if at some point in the search the investigator always realizes that he’s been conducting an inquiry into himself and his story and his place in the world. Like Oedipus, who after seeking his father Laius’s murderer in every corner of his kingdom returns to the initial site, to the starting point, to himself. What appeared before my eyes wasn’t you, but the receptacle Gracia and I had thrown our trash into, day after day.
I quickened my pace. It was the hour when the depths of the sky turn dark again and the low-lying evening sun lights up walls and facades. I gave Charly and Arthur some water and went back home. As soon as I entered, I knew that Gracia was there. I remembered that she was going to Lima that evening to do a news story. She was surely upstairs, packing her suitcase. I went up close to the landing and told her I’d fix us a light supper.
“That won’t be necessary. I’ll eat on the plane,” she said.
I went into the kitchen and made myself some tea. I didn’t want to go upstairs and have to look her in the eye. I was afraid of what I might find. Then I went back to my desk and, out of pure inertia, turned on the computer.
After a while, Gracia appeared in my doorway. She wore a sand-colored dress, simply and elegantly tailored, high heels, and a gray overcoat. She was looking at me with the restrained, distant expression I knew well, the same one she showed the TV cameras, the one she’d been displaying, more and more often, to me. A kind of disguise that hid her true nature.
“After I do the story, I’m going to stay with some friends in Lima. I’ll be at their house until Tuesday. I asked for a few days off—I’m really tired.” She sighed, transferring her weight from one foot to the other.
“Will you sit down for a minute?”
It was imperative that I ask her about her visit to you. If she’d seen or sensed any particular detail that might have foreshadowed what was to happen later, I needed to know what it was, and I needed to hear her repeat to me the words you and she exchanged. The urgency I felt to know those things was almost painful. Maybe Gracia held the keys to clarifying the mystery. She looked at her wristwatch, and her hair fell over her face.
“The taxi’s already outside.”
She faced me a fraction of a second longer, the suitcase at her feet, her arms and legs crossed. Go on, say it, say it, ask her! I was paralyzed in body and mind, and nothing at all issued from my mouth. It was too late. Why was I defeated in advance? Was I possibly afraid of being confronted with something I didn’t want to see? Or was I afraid the truth would destroy us definitively? Talking about her visit to your house meant opening the sluice gates and letting the “Teresa matter” come flooding in.
“Well, then, good-bye and good luck.” I took a sip from my teacup, looking at her raised eyebrows, her tense lips, her ironic half smile. This unpleasant expression, which she assumed deliberately, communicated both resentment and indifference.
“Ciao, Daniel,” she said, and she was off.
I heard the echo of her heels and then the front door closing.
I got up. My legs were heavy. I felt sorry for her, for us. Beneath the armor of her meticulous appearance, I saw that she was trapped, the same as me. There was no going back. Gracia had entered your house, and the fact that she hadn’t mentioned her visit was of a piece with her earlier betrayal.
I’d reached a point where it was impossible for me to go in any direction at all. A dead end. I should have expected something would happen. You had taught me that: when you wait patiently, soon something moves in the darkness.