The man is walking unhurriedly along, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes he slows right down, almost stops, looks indecisively left and right, hesitating like someone unable to decide which road to take. It’s as if he were walking for walking’s sake, perhaps to kill time or because he has no alternative, but any of those reasons seem strange at that hour in the morning and on a very cold winter’s day, when the unemployed and the elderly are unlikely to be out wandering the streets. Apart from him, everyone else is walking quickly, urgently, heading for a particular place—each with their own destination.
He’s an ordinary-looking man, carrying a suitcase in one hand. Very pale—haggard—and ageless. Yes, it’s impossible to tell what age he is. In his thirties but old before his time? A well-preserved fifty-year-old? He’s wearing a strange outfit. A dark-blue overcoat, very long and slightly waisted; a pair of baggy trousers that come down almost over his heels; and a hat with a more than usually wide brim. The suitcase is a good-quality one, but time has taken the shine off the clasps and hardened the leather, covering it with dark stains.
The man’s hands must be frozen, because he suddenly stops, puts down the suitcase, and rubs his hands together for some time to get the blood moving. Then he looks around him and, on the other side of the street, beyond a passing vehicle, he spots a small café that is, just at that very moment, opening its heavy iron eyelids. After a brief expectant, or rather, meditative, pause, he crosses the road, slightly bent beneath the weight of the suitcase.
He has set it down beside him now, carefully, as if it were very fragile, then he sits and waits. He doesn’t snap his fingers or try to attract the eye of the waiter. He waits there placidly, like someone accustomed to long, infinitely long waits.
The waiter approaches slowly, opening his mouth to speak, but first wipes the table with a cloth. This is doubtless an automatic gesture, because, at that hour, no one will have had time to dirty anything. This is what is going through the man’s head as he hears the waiter commenting, “What weather, eh?” and as he answers, “Yes, terrible,” without even thinking about what he’s saying, although he says it with relative enthusiasm. The waiter goes on:
“It’s been like this for two weeks now. When will it change?”
The man says:
“Yes, when?”
“Anyway, what can I get you?” the waiter asks.
At first, he doesn’t know what he wants or if he wants anything. What he most wanted, when he went in, was to be able to sit in a quiet, warm place and talk about simple, real things like the weather. He ends up asking for a brandy and drinks it in slow, pensive sips. The taste brings back memories, and he allows himself to be drawn along by them, to be lulled by them. Then he gets up and goes over to the phone.
He dials a number but immediately hangs up. Then he dials another, and his heart beats faster. When he says the name of his old friend, he feels his voice tremble, and he has to repeat the question because the person at the other end doesn’t understand. A cheerful, slightly sleepy voice, which he knows well, even after all these years, says:
“The last thing I would have expected—the very last thing—is for someone to call up asking for him, just like that. Asking if he’s here… It’s just incredible. Who are you, anyway; what’s your name? I seem to recognize your voice… Are you a friend? If you are, what are you doing asking me if he’s here?”
The man avoids giving a direct answer and says that, no, she doesn’t know him, and his name will mean nothing to her.
The voice isn’t so sure: “Nothing?”
“No, nothing.” To be honest, he isn’t really a friend, more of an acquaintance who needs to speak to him urgently. Would that be possible?
The voice gives a short laugh. “Speak to him? That won’t be easy. Perhaps you should go to the lost and found.”
“You mean you’ve lost him?” says the man, slightly perplexed.
“You could say that. It’s a long story.”
“I don’t wish to be indiscreet; I merely wanted…”
There was a long sigh:
“Well, seeing that you’re a friend of his or an acquaintance… We got divorced, there you have it. Ten years ago. All I can tell you is that he’s in Africa. Leopoldville, Stanleyville, Brazzaville, or somewhere like that. I’ve always been useless at geography! As you see, I’m not much help.”
The man apologizes, and she laughs again, rather affectedly this time and not sleepily at all. “Don’t worry, I made a similar blunder once, when I asked a widower how his wife was. So you’re not alone.”
“No, you’re right.”
The man pays and leaves the café. The cold again descends on his body, and he allows it to enfold him. He’s thinking about that friend who just up and left, without even trying to see him or at least send word, asking his sister (or his mother, who was alive at the time) to pass on a message. He simply got divorced and left and now lives in an African town ending in -ville. “I’ve always been useless at geography!”
There isn’t a scrap of blue in the sky; it’s all gray clouds and a cold, harsh, cutting wind against which he has to fight, but he’s suddenly terribly tired and incapable of fighting, even against the wind. He feels he can’t take another step. He is also, and this is a strange sensation, very slightly tipsy, but he doesn’t know if it’s the brandy he drank—very little—or the gusts of air entering lungs unaccustomed to being out in the open, or in the midst of such agitated, unquiet air. Then he hails a cab and asks to be taken to his sister Maria’s house.
With one cold, white, bloodless finger he presses the metal button of the doorbell, and the door opens. Through the growing crack, which stops growing at a certain point, he sees her face, the middle section only—eyes, nose, mouth half-open in amazement—and hears a muffled cry, which becomes her voice, hoarse with emotion and amazement.
“Good heavens, it’s you!”
“Yes, it’s me,” says the man. “I wanted to surprise you. I called earlier from a café, but then changed my mind. I wanted to surprise you, Maria.”
The door opens wider, and she says, “Come in. Quickly.”
The man enters a broad hallway where the atmosphere is warm and the décor welcoming and cozy. Her plump arms encircle his neck and her hands draw down his head, and he feels on his cheek the gentle pressure of her cool lips. Then she leads him into the living room and invites him to sit down in an armchair. His suitcase is still in the corridor.
“What are you going to do now?” he hears her ask.
“I don’t know yet. It’s early days.”
“Ah.”
“You probably think…”
She interrupts him:
“What?”
“That I must have had plenty of time to make plans and to ponder the pros and cons of all of them,” the man says. “Well, yes, I did. But I still don’t know.”
There is a silence, and the man takes the opportunity to look around; he recognizes the circular table with the marble top, the rocking chair, and the photo of a woman, where his gaze stops.
“She suffered a lot, didn’t she?” he says.
Maria nods. “How happy she would have been today though,” she says. “She was never the same afterward, you know.”
He bows his head. “Of course,” he says. That’s what he always says when he doesn’t know what else to say. Of course. Finally, he finds a few words. “She never understood…”
Maria interrupts again:
“You couldn’t really expect her to, could you?”
“No, probably not. There will always be a gap between parents and their children. Sometimes there’s only a twenty-year age-gap, but it makes no difference. The gap is still there, just from the fact of being parents and children.”
“I never noticed it,” says Maria.
“Of course,” says the man again.
She is staring at him hard, then looks away as if embarrassed. What about? thinks the man, smiling rather sadly. However, he sees her clasping and unclasping her hands, her small childlike hands, and his smile disappears, because he knows that, in her, this is a sign of genuine distress.
“I would love you to stay,” she says in a tremulous voice. “I would love that. I never understood either, but I would love…”
“It’s your husband, isn’t it?”
The man sees her glance at the clock and hears her say, “We still have time. He never gets back before noon. Tell me about you.”
He gives her a long, weary look. He is neither irritated nor hurt. The smile lifting the corners of his mouth is simply a smile, nothing more. He is sitting in a familiar armchair in the home of his sister, who is all the family he has left, and he looks at her long and hard as if he were only now really seeing her. When it happened, she was a child, and he was, as their mother would say, in the first flower of youth. Afterward, he saw her several times, not often and never alone. He knew that she had finished high school, then that she had met a very nice young man, then that she was going to get married, and later, that she had married. He had never noticed, though, during those visits—infrequent and growing ever rarer—he had never noticed, even though he knew she was married, that she had become a grown woman, and he is now amazed to find her so female, so blossoming, so sensible that she is asking (indirectly of course) her newly arrived brother to leave before midday, so as not to trouble her husband’s peace of mind with his unwanted presence.
“But you’re happy, aren’t you?” he asks.
“Yes, I’m very happy.”
“That’s good, Maria. That’s what matters.”
He asks after various mutual acquaintances, but they have all pretty much disappeared from her world. And she has little to do with those who remain.
“What about Dina?”
“She has three children, and she’s put on a lot of weight.”
“Ah.”
“Tell me about you,” she asks again.
“Me? There’s nothing to tell. Really nothing. I got out today and dropped by to say hello, that’s all. And now I must be going.”
She is almost crying and still desperately wringing her hands.
“I’d love you to stay. If it were up to me…”
“I know, Maria. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.”
He stands up and stoops a little to kiss her.
“It’s still so early,” she says.
“It’s time. I have things to do.”
“Really? I hope that now at least…”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you need anything. I can lend you some money. Not much, because we’re not exactly rich…but…”
“Thank you, that’s not necessary. See you again some time.”
He kisses her again, picks up his suitcase and goes down the stairs.
Once more that sharp, penetrating cold piercing the flesh, along with the rain that has just begun to fall. The man starts walking, again with no specific goal, and he thinks of other people from his youth who it also won’t be worth seeking out. Dina, his former girlfriend, who married two years later; his colleagues, who perhaps have good jobs and are doing well, who knows? And who may well be living quiet, problem-free lives, enjoying the almost sacred peace of good digestion. Big bellies and gentle laughter. Buddhas, in short. He will seek them out anyway. He needs to eat and therefore to work.
He glances at a ragged woman selling plastic rainhats and who is grinning from ear to ear. She’s laughing at him. What a sight, eh? And that hat! The kind of hat a clown would wear…
The man is smiling at nothing at all and he walks on, battered by the rain, weighed down by the suitcase, uncertain as to where he’s going.