She turned around slightly, discreetly (or was it just her custom to turn around like that?), and her large greenish-yellow eyes, the color of a dried leaf, very lightly brushed his, only to withdraw at once, perhaps surprised or summoned by other more interesting things, fluttering here and there, lingering over a passing hat, before alighting once more on his eyes as if still uncertain: Was it or wasn’t it him; could it be? It could. He felt like cupping his mouth with his hands like a megaphone and bellowing: It’s me, it’s me, or else getting up and running over to the table where she was sitting sipping her drink through a straw, and holding out his hand to her, just like that, frankly and openly. How have you been since that dreadful day, that dreadful hour? How are you, Rosa?
Her name was Rosa. Rosa. It couldn’t be anything else. Could she possibly be called Maria or Berta or Ana? No, it had to be Rosa! He enjoyed slowly turning the name over in his mind, and sometimes, when he was alone, murmuring it to himself, savouring it in leisurely fashion, whispering that name in duple time, Ro-sa. A name of which she was sole owner, that belonged to no one and nothing else. She was Rosa, and the word, even in the middle of a sentence—any sentence that referred to rose blossoms—would immediately evoke her image as rose-woman.
And there were, of course, endless images of Rosa. Rosa swimming in the tranquil, almost-blue waters. Rosa asking at reception if there was a letter for her, a letter that never arrived. Rosa having lunch in her corner of the dining room, looking serious, almost absent. But the image that appeared most often on his private screen was not, alas, one of the best, even if it was definitely the clearest, simply because he had focused on it for longest. In that image, he was free to observe Rosa because she was utterly defenseless, lying, eyes closed, on a faux rustic bed, with, to her right, on the bedside table next to the lamp with the round yellow shade, an empty glass and a tube containing some sedative or other with a name suggestive of belladonna.
He had been the first to enter the room, since he had priority—he had after all deserved it—pushing aside the very nervous owner of the guesthouse, and the chambermaid, who had set down on the carpet in the corridor a tray of empty bottles in order to open the door with her pass key.
“I knew it! You can see now that I was right. See? See?”
Of course they could see—they could see nothing else—but neither of them said, yes, he had been quite right, because they had more urgent things to do: most important of all, calling for the doctor. Or perhaps the Red Cross. This was why the owner had gone clattering down the stairs, closely followed by the chambermaid, who had now picked up her tray and urged him, amid all the excitement, to stay there and keep an eye on Rosa.
At that point, he still didn’t know her name was Rosa, nor, in retrospect, that he loved her. He had been discreetly courting her, with meaningful glances and the occasional vague murmured “Good morning,” but as for loving her… He knew only what everyone else knew about her, and he wasn’t particularly impatient to know more. He knew that she had been alone for nearly two weeks at the small guesthouse, that she appeared not to know a soul, spent all her time swimming or lying in the sun, and had lovely pale eyes. No, that wasn’t all. He knew too—and this was the most important thing of all—that on that same morning she had gone into a drugstore—where he happened to be buying some toothpaste—and, in a soft, embarrassed voice that seemed to stumble over invisible obstacles, she had asked for a tube of Veronal.
“You can only get that on prescription.”
He had seen her hesitate, like someone who hadn’t been expecting to find the road ahead blocked and cannot immediately think of an alternative route. She could perhaps have asked for something to help her sleep or an ordinary painkiller like Saridon, just to do something. Instead, she had turned and left without saying another word.
The pharmacist was the one who had sown the seed of doubt in his mind when, as he was wrapping up his toothpaste, he muttered something along the lines of:
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was planning to do something foolish.”
“Not necessarily…but why do you say that?”
“Because she asked for Veronal. There are other equally strong substances, of course, but she specifically asked for that, which makes one think… Then there was the look on her face…”
“What look?”
He had only been aware of her voice. He had seen from the side, seen her flattering outfit—flowery slacks and black blouse—and nothing else.
Apart, that is, from what the pharmacist said. And this was why he noticed when Rosa (who wasn’t yet Rosa) failed to come down to supper. He had eaten his meal with some difficulty, his eyes fixed on her empty table. The guesthouse steak, like all beef steaks, had rolled up into a ball in his mouth and, when he tried to swallow it, had become a hard, dry lump, which, for some reason, his saliva refused to soften into something edible. He had left his table before coffee was served and gone over to the door where Senhor Costa was sitting in a wicker chair whistling to himself as he gazed out, enraptured, at the night.
“Has the lady who usually sits at the table in the corner already left?”
“No, she asked not to be called. She’s not feeling well and doesn’t want any supper.”
He told Senhor Costa about the scene in the drugstore, but Costa’s response had been an outright refusal to believe that anyone could possibly do a thing like that to him, Costa. That anyone could be so inconsiderate as to cause such trouble for a poor man who relied on the guesthouse for his living. Especially with the sea so conveniently close.
“Besides, given that he didn’t sell her the stuff…” he had concluded in a feeble, semi-acquiescent voice.
But couldn’t she have bought it elsewhere? It wasn’t far into town. Or perhaps she had thought it through, as would seem logical, and bought something else, even aspirin. Or even slit her wrists…
The idea of a room spattered with blood made Senhor Costa leap up. He still hesitated though. What if she were simply sleeping?
“Then she probably wouldn’t even notice you going into the room.”
And she hadn’t. She was lying across the bed, still in the same slacks and black blouse she’d been wearing that morning. Between her lips, from which all trace of lipstick appeared to have fled, was a very unpleasant bubble of saliva. Her breathing was labored and she was moaning softly.
He had been left alone with her—to keep an eye out—and he was wondering what could have led to that situation. Loneliness, of course.
It was always loneliness. Almost always. She looked healthy enough.
Only once they had taken her away had he discovered her name. Rosa Lima. He had discovered, too, that he loved her, but this knowledge arrived more slowly, little by little, so very slowly that, by the time he realized it, he had already lost track of her. She had gone home, the hospital told him, but they didn’t know—or didn’t want to tell him—where she lived or even in which city. Besides, when he thought about it, what was the point of him knowing where to find her? He couldn’t just turn up at her house and say, “It’s me, the man who saved your life on such and such a date…” Who knows, she might curse the person who had saved her.
It was a problem that could lead to many questions, and he didn’t shy away from them. Now that he loved Rosa, he welcomed everything that this brought with it, even the—perfectly plausible—idea that occurred to him from time to time that she would have come to hate the person who had thought to open the door of her hotel room. For, by saving her, he had implicitly become the person responsible for her death, not the one she herself had sought, but the other death that would inevitably arrive one day. What would that death be like? When? The sad death from old age of a poor woman grown senile or paralyzed? Cancer? A car accident? Heart disease? Whatever it was, even another suicide attempt, he was responsible, he was to blame, as he was for all the sorrows and all the pain she might one day feel, for those moments of loneliness too, those very difficult moments that (as she well knew) make us almost cry out, perhaps simply in order to have someone look at us and actually see us and think about us, just for a moment. Yes, he was the person responsible.
And now, months later, exactly eight months later, there she was sitting outside a café in the Avenida, where he happened to stop for a beer, and her eyes lingered pensively on his. Someone must have told her what had happened. It didn’t matter who.
Somehow or other, he found himself standing beside her table, his glass of beer in his hand.
“You probably don’t remember me…”
She smiled and responded immediately, unhesitatingly, that of course she remembered him, remembered very clearly… He always had a book with him, didn’t he? On the beach, he was always reading. In her mind, he was the young man with the book. It was poetry, wasn’t it? No? She had thought… It had seemed to her… She asked him to join her, and she spoke about the weather. He, however, wasn’t listening. He was still thinking about something she had said earlier. “In my mind…” He had been in Rosa’s mind.
Her eyes—her hazel eyes, no, what was he saying, they were as green as the leaves on the trees—would touch him fleetingly then glance away as if afraid. Rosa opened her handbag and took out a pack of cigarettes. With nervous, incoherent gestures she lit one—he was too busy gazing at her face to offer to light it for her—raised it to her lips, put it down, then looked vainly for an ashtray, before tapping the end of the cigarette so that the as-yet non-existent ash fell to the ground.
“Did you stay for much longer?” she asked suddenly.
“Only two or three days—yes, I think it was three.”
He felt himself blush, which was most disagreeable, like being a child. Rosa would laugh at him. No, perhaps she wouldn’t: she wasn’t, she couldn’t be the sort of person who would do such a thing. Nevertheless, it annoyed him that she might notice his confusion.
“You were the one…yes, I think you were the one…”
The one who had found her, making it possible for her to be there now, in that muslin dress, sipping a honey-colored drink; or the one who had obliged her to go on suffering, to continue her lonely life, smiling wanly, saying words she didn’t mean, pretending, existing? For which of those things had he been responsible by saving her from death?
“Yes, that was me. I saw you in the drugstore, you see, asking for a tube of Veronal…”
She sat very still, slightly stunned. Then she gave a short, unnaturally nonchalant laugh, only to immediately grow serious again.
“Such strange things happen to people,” she said then. “You mean you were in the drugstore…fancy that! I didn’t see you. I have absolutely no recollection of your being there. I was having a very difficult time. Too much work, I think. I couldn’t sleep, even on vacation, even at the beach. It’s terrible not being able to sleep. Do you sleep well? You can’t know what it’s like then… I managed to buy something else in town, but I think I took too much of it. I can’t remember now how many pills I took. It seems that the dose wasn’t fatal, though, far from it, but I slept for hours and, when I woke up, I was in the hospital. It was all most unpleasant…”
She shuddered like someone who has just made some terrible blunder and then started talking very quickly:
“Please don’t think, though, that I’m not grateful, on the contrary. You were just amazing. It’s so rare for someone to feel any concern for other people, for someone they don’t even know… I even tried to find your address so that I could thank you, but Senhor Costa had lost it.”
“He seems to lose everyone’s address. I tried to get in touch with you through the hospital…”
She gave another brief laugh:
“How lucky, then, that we should meet now. I wasn’t sure, but it did seem to me that…”
There was a silence, during which Rosa eyed him anxiously, but he was too absorbed in his own thoughts to notice that look.
“You mean that it wasn’t…that you weren’t attempting…?” he asked at last.
“No, of course not. Is that what you thought? Did you really? Why would I have done that? There was no reason… Really, there was no reason. I just wanted to sleep. Please, believe me, I’m telling you the truth. Why would I lie to you?”
Yes, why? And yet he still found it hard to believe her.
“You mean…you mean…”
He was standing up now, without even realizing that he was, and then she, still a tad anxious, held out her hand, clasped his hand tightly, and, without the flicker of a smile, suddenly strangely serious, suddenly older too (where had all those lines on her face come from?) asked him to drop by and see her one day, so that they could have a more leisurely talk. They were old acquaintances after all…
“I’m in the phone book. Under Rosa Lima.”
Her voice was again soft and uncertain, stumbling, falling, then getting up again, as it had been on that morning when she went into the drugstore.
“I’m at home most afternoons.”
He bowed slightly, then looked at her without really seeing her, feeling suddenly weary:
“See you again soon then, Rosa.”
He spoke her name, and it was a perfectly ordinary name—no, worse than that, it was positively banal (he remembered that, when he was a child, their cook had been named Rosa), and it left no lingering taste in his mouth. Then he walked away between the other tables, unaware that her large, anxious eyes were following him, once again disillusioned and bewildered. He didn’t see her eyes because he didn’t look back. It didn’t even occur to him to do so, what was the point? He remembered then that he hadn’t introduced himself, and this fact bothered him because it seemed so rude. But perhaps it didn’t really matter. A faint, distant thought was making its slow approach: He never would go and visit Rosa; indeed, she had, at that very moment, already begun to fade in his heart.