They were light, soft massages given by skilled, invisible hands, that came, lingered, then left only to return again five or ten minutes later, or half an hour on his better days. Waves of pain that grew, rose up, then broke and fell back. He would moan faintly, softly, sometimes impatiently—like a strange form of background music. This was followed by a sigh and silence. He would wait for them to come back, those cruel, amorphous hands. He would half-close his eyes while he waited almost anxiously, and there was already an anticipatory grimace on his face. They never let him down; they always came back.
This process evolved slowly, until one day, he couldn’t even stand up. He sat in his big leather armchair with one leg bent and the other straight, staring glumly at the wall or into the street beyond the windows. Becoming used to this wasn’t easy for him or for those he lived with. He had been a cheerful, active man. However, his good humor, along with all activity, escaped from the room they chose for him, because it was lighter and had large windows, but that, nonetheless, had strictly limited, static horizons.
In the early days, friends would often visit, which helped make the long hours shorter. Little by little, though, those visits became less frequent and briefer too. His friends always, inevitably, had some urgent matter to deal with, and they genuinely did. To distract him, however, they would bring him the latest bestsellers—“really good and very interesting”—which he would leaf through briefly before adding them to the pile on the small table beside him, next to the radio.
His sons came every day, sometimes bringing with them their wives and crying babies in flowery bassinets. But his daughters-in-law only ever talked about children, and his sons’ sole topic of conversation was the office, which he, so to speak, had abandoned. Well, if they didn’t take charge of it… And Bernardo would say, “Yes, of course, you’re quite right. The office, yes…”
The truth is that the office had completely ceased to interest him. Just like that. From one day to the next. Then again, many things had ceased to interest him since he had become ill, and the office was one of them. When his sons came to ask his advice about matters they considered important, he would merely shrug and tell them, with the faint smile of someone who can’t quite believe what he’s saying, that he had absolute confidence in them and that they should do whatever they thought best.
“You should help them,” his wife, Augusta, said one day, looking up from her never-ending knitting, which she did now in order to sit with him and keep him company. “They’re just starting out, and they know nothing about certain traps that you must know well. They might fall into them.”
“Yes, they might,” he said, opening the newspaper.
“Is that all you have to say?” Her voice took on the slightly acidic tone she adopted on one of her bad days—a tone that, because she was basically a kind woman, she had set aside since he fell ill, although it still resurfaced whenever she felt the need to defend her sons from his indifference.
“It is,” he said.
His wife put down her knitting and asked:
“Why do you take that attitude? It’s as if you had something against us. Has anyone offended you? Is anyone to blame for your current situation?”
Bernardo said no, no one was to blame, and this seemed to reassure or at least soothe her. And she resumed her knitting.
The waves of pain were less frequent now and less intense, thanks to the honey-colored capsules and the various other pills he took, as well as an injection each morning. The days, though, were immense, and the room in which he sat from morning to night was becoming ever smaller and more devoid of mystery. He knew its every detail, details that had always gone unnoticed before. It was as if the inanimate objects were taking their revenge for the thirty years during which he had paid them no attention and were now obliging him to look at them, study them, then close his weary eyes, exhausted. However, he always returned to them; he had no alternative when he grew bored with the street and the things of the street and even with the binoculars he had asked them to buy so that he could see those things more clearly. He had his books, of course, and the newspapers, which he either read from first page to last or flung down angrily when he was only halfway through on those days that refused to progress, that paused absentmindedly, that never seemed to advance. On days like that, what did he care if the millionaire Kennedy and the proletarian Kruschev had reached an agreement? What use was such an agreement to him? Let them set off a bomb if they wanted; let them blow up everything, including him and his eternally immobile legs.
On such days, his wife carried on with her knitting—why would she not? And, as always, she did so serenely, her lips moving slightly as she counted the stitches, as if she were praying. And there was no reason why she shouldn’t count the stitches. She had never been a great talker—this had even been one of her virtues—but the misfortune, which is how Augusta usually referred to Bernardo’s illness, seemed to have deprived her of the power of speech. Her voice was only ever heard when there were important things to discuss, things that she considered important: for example, the fact that he didn’t draw on his experience to advise his sons (the poor things were so honest they could easily be deceived!) or when he occasionally forgot to take his medicines at the right time. The rest of the world seemed to have disappeared, and her hands moved nimbly in the vacuum, perhaps simply to prove to themselves that they existed. And she inundated the whole family with sweaters and pullovers.
Bernardo would close his book; throw the newspaper down on the floor or read every last word of it, including the ads; and escape from that small room cluttered with objects (he and his armchair, the sofa, three other chairs, the writing desk, the paintings). He would escape by closing his eyes. He had never been a man of great imagination, which is why, however hard he tried, he could never invent stories. He had to make do with what he had on hand and return to past events, long since forgotten. The chorus girl he had once set up in an apartment—a foolish fancy; the time he flew to the United States and one of the engines failed, and the Englishwoman sitting next to him started screaming; the sound of gunshots and a woman collapsing almost at his feet, covered in blood, at the door to the hotel on Rue Vavin. Things like that. Sometimes he would go even further back in time or perform a complete backflip that found him taking his first steps to happiness (and relative prosperity) to the tune of the wedding march, arm in arm with Augusta, looking fresh as a rose and with her veil trailing behind her. His father-in-law introducing him to the guests. And with great excitement, he found himself shaking various hands with blue (or blueish) blood in their veins, and even, from time to time, the condescending hand of a government minister. And everyone was smiling at him fondly, as if they loved him, and wishing them every happiness. His father-in-law had certainly helped him with his contacts (which was all he had), but he had gone on to make his own fortune and was now a rich man—a disabled rich man, to be more precise. Anyway, his sons would not be left wanting when he died. They could even, for now, allow themselves to make a few honest mistakes; it would do them good.
One day, a friend visited him and, when they were alone, spoke to him about a woman named Sofia. Bernardo blinked, perplexed, because he had always avoided, as being too unpleasant, any mention of that woman, and all his friends knew this and respected his wishes. They had been married many years before, but it hadn’t lasted, and they had each gone their separate ways. So widely had their paths diverged that they had never met again. Bernardo had always regarded that first marriage, fortunately a registry office wedding hastily arranged, as a youthful error. The real marriage had been the second one, years later, with the bride all in white, high-class guests, and solid plans for the future. Now that his friend was talking to him about Sofia—“Do you know who I met yesterday? Sofia, your first wife”—now that his friend was talking about her, he remembered the terrible arguments they used to have, the passionate reconciliations, and even the evening when he arrived home for supper and found the apartment empty and, in a prominent position on the bed, the letter in which his wife, in her hasty scribble, full of spelling mistakes, told him that she had finally—finally!—found the love of her life.
“She must have found many more,” said Bernardo’s friend. “That’s what she made me to understand. One hell of a life. Now, though, she’s old and lives alone, with two cats.”
“I find it hard to imagine her old,” said Bernardo thoughtfully. “Well, that’s only natural. I haven’t seen her for over thirty years, because I’ve been married to Augusta for thirty years. I can’t imagine Sofia living alone either.”
“The reason I’m talking to you about Sofia is because I have a message to give you. She asked me to tell you…”
“What?”
“That she would like to see you. That she would love to see you.”
“And why not?” murmured Bernardo unthinkingly. “Why not? That’s just like her,” he went on. “She always loved parties as well as visiting the sick and attending funerals. She’s coming to see the invalid, to distract him. Let her come then.”
“What about Augusta?”
“Tell Sofia to come on Monday afternoon. That’s the day Augusta goes downtown. It’s an old habit of hers apparently, but I’ve only just realized it. Can you imagine anyone going downtown every single Monday afternoon?”
The friend left, and Bernardo climbed up the hills blocking his view and ended up a long way away, at Sofia’s side, at the point where that wall had started to rise up between them, an invisible wall that grew higher and thicker with each day that passed. She talked (a lot) and he talked (a little), but they never listened to each other; they only heard their own voices, but, at the time, they didn’t see this. Then the fights began, perhaps because she would arrive home late (or was it for some other reason?), and she would have an absent, slightly mysterious look on her face, the look of someone happily installed in some faraway place. One day, she didn’t come home at all because she had found the love of her life, or thought she had. They were both twenty-three at the time.
On Monday afternoon, a lady with white hair, immaculately dressed and wearing a black felt hat—an old lady making no attempt to conceal her age, doubtless because she had realized one day that this simply wouldn’t work—anyway, this lady confidently rang the doorbell and told the maid that she was expected.
The maid showed her into the living room and shut the door. For the next two hours, the visitor’s strident voice and loud, liquid laugh could be heard coming from the room. Then there was a whispered conversation, and the visitor left.
“Who came to see you today?” Augusta asked that evening, as she began work on a pullover for one of her two sons with wool she had bought that afternoon.
“A former secretary of mine.”
“It seems she was very old,” said Augusta, whose face was still fresh as a rose.
“Very,” he said. Yes, very. Who would have thought it?
Then a week passed, and the following Monday, Sofia again rang the doorbell. This time, however, she didn’t come alone. She was accompanied by two men carrying a stretcher. Bernardo was ready and even impatient to leave. The two male nurses picked him up, and the maid was just about to open her mouth and scream hysterically when Sofia shoved her inside the pantry and locked the door. Then they left. Bernardo had placed his letter on top of the radio. He had written it the night before and it read as follows:
My dear Augusta,
It is the custom—as I know from personal experience—to leave a farewell note. Putting my feelings into words has never been my strong point, but I hope you will believe me when I say quite simply that I love you and our sons, and always have. This indisputable truth has nothing to do (and I want you to be quite sure of this) with the decision I have made. The fact is that I have been terribly bored. I had never realized before—I didn’t have the time—how very bored I’ve always felt in your company. Now, though, I have had more than enough time to think, and I realize that what awaits me are more hours of silent knitting and tedious conversations about baby bottles, baby food, and the office. I also realize, Augusta, that the (painful) days I have left are few in number, and that I ought to spend them in the most pleasant way possible, as long, of course, as it doesn’t harm you in any way. I repeat that what I am doing in no way diminishes the love I feel for you all, and that love remains unchanged. I carry you all in my heart. Tomorrow, I will write a business-like letter to our sons, as I know they would like that. I intend to arrange things so that everyone is happy. I don’t need much. I need only enough to pay for my care and my accommodation with the lady friend who has so kindly agreed to take me in.
With much love from your husband,
Bernardo