Leopoldo Alas, ‘Clarín’*

Duet for Two Coughs

The Aguila Hotel casts its enormous shadow over the sleeping waters of the harbour. It is a huge, square edifice, a rambling, rather graceless five-storey building, an accidental utopia, a shelter for travellers, a joint-stock company of indifference, a joint-stock company with an ever-changing team of managers and a staff of twenty who are different every week, along with dozens and dozens of guests who don’t know each other, who look straight through each other, who are always ‘other’ and yet whom every guest assumes to be whoever was there the night before.

‘You’re more alone here than you would be in the street, or in the desert,’ thinks a ‘shape’, a man wrapped in a loose summer overcoat, as he smokes a cigar, elbows resting on the cold metal balustrade of his third-floor balcony. At that height, and in the darkness of that cloudy night, the light from his cigar looks like a glow-worm. That sad spark sometimes moves, dims, disappears, then blazes forth again.

‘A traveller smoking,’ thinks another shape two balconies along to the right, on the same floor. And a weak chest, a woman’s chest, breathes out as if sighing, taking some small consolation in the uncertain pleasure of finding unexpected company in her solitude and sadness.

‘If I were suddenly to feel very ill, if I were to cry out so as not to die alone, that smoker would hear me,’ the woman thinks, clutching a thick, perfumed winter shawl to her delicate, fragile breast.

‘There’s a balcony between us, so that must be room 36. This morning, when I had to get up to call the maid because she didn’t hear the bell, I saw an elegant pair of boots in the corridor outside that door.’

A distant light suddenly vanished, with an effect like lightning, which you only notice when it’s gone.

‘That’s the beacon at the end of El Puntal beach going out,’ thinks the shape in room 36 rather glumly, feeling even lonelier in the night. ‘One less person to keep watch, another one falling asleep.’

The steamships in the harbour, the big-bellied barges at the dock, just near the hotel, now resemble shadows among the shadows. In the darkness, the water takes centre stage and glitters faintly, like an optical illusion, like the glow of an extinguished light retained by the retina, an illusory phosphorescence. In the gloom, all the more painful for being incomplete, it seems that both the idea of light, and the imagination struggling to make sense of the vague shapes, need help in making out what little can be seen below. The barges move only slightly more perceptibly than the minute hand on a big clock, but now and then they bump against each other with a soft, sad, monotonous thwock, accompanied by the sea in the distance, like the clicking cry of a barn owl trying to impose silence.

The town, a town of businessmen and bathers, is sleeping; the whole house is sleeping.

The shape in room 36 senses an anguish in that silent, shadowy solitude.

Suddenly, as if he had heard a great explosion, he’s shaken by the sound of a dry cough, repeated three times like the gentle call of an early-rising quail; it comes from his right, two balconies along. Room 36 looks over and notices a shape that is only slightly darker than the surrounding darkness, the same shade of black as the barges down below. ‘The cough of someone ill, the cough of a woman.’ And room 36 shudders and thinks of his own situation; he had forgotten that he was engaged in a rakish act of folly, namely, smoking a cigar and standing in the cool air gazing sadly out at the night. A rather funereal orgy! He had been forbidden to smoke or to open his balcony door at that hour, even though it was August and there wasn’t so much as the breath of a breeze. ‘Inside! Inside! To your tomb, to your horrible prison cell, to room 36, to bed, to your niche in the cemetery wall!’

And without another thought for room 32, room 36 disappeared, closed the balcony door with a sad, metallic squeak, a sound that had a melancholy effect on the shape to the right, much as the disappearance of the light near the beach had had on the shape smoking the cigar.

‘Entirely alone,’ thought the woman, who, still coughing, had remained where she was while she had company, a ‘company’ that was rather like that of two stars, which, seen from below, appear to be close together, like twins, but which, out there in the infinite, can neither see each other nor know of each other’s existence.

After a few minutes, having lost all hope that room 36 would come back out onto his balcony, the woman who coughed also went inside, like a corpse in the form of a will-o’-the-wisp breathing in the fragrance of the night and returning to earth.

One hour, then two hours passed. On the stairs, in the corridors, the footsteps of a late-returning guest could occasionally be heard; rays of light came and went, slipping in through the cracks in the doors of those luxurious cells, horrible in their vulgar uniformity.

A few clocks in the town sang out the hour; solemn tollings preceded by the light infantry, less lugubrious and less significant, of the quarter hours. In the hotel, too, there was a clock that repeated the same warning note.

Another half hour passed, again noted by all the clocks.

‘I know, I know,’ thought room 36, tucked up beneath his sheets now; and he imagined that the solemnly tolling hour was like the signature on the IOUs being presented to life by life’s creditor, death. No more guests would arrive now. Soon everyone should be asleep. There were no more witnesses; the skulking beast would not come out now and would be alone with its prey.

And, as if beneath the vault of a crypt, room 36 began to echo to a rapid, energetic cough, which carried within itself a hoarse wail of protest.

‘The clock of death,’ thought the victim, that is, room 36, a man in his thirties, familiar with despair, alone in the world, with, as sole companion, the memories of his childhood home, lost in a distant past of misfortunes and mistakes, and with a death sentence pinned to his chest like an address label on a parcel on a train.

And, like a lost parcel, he travelled around, from town to town, in search of healthy air for his ailing chest; from inn to inn, like a pilgrim of the grave, and every hotel he chanced upon now looked to him more and more like a hospital. His was a terribly sad life, and yet no one pitied him. He did not even find sympathy in the serialized stories in the newspapers. The Romanticism that had shown some compassion for the consumptive was long gone. The world had no time now for mawkish sentimentality, or perhaps those feelings had moved elsewhere. The people that room 36 envied and rather resented were the proletariat, who were now the object of everyone’s pity. ‘The poor worker, the poor worker!’ everyone said, and no one gave a thought for the ‘poor’ consumptive, the poor condemned man ignored now by the newspapers. If someone’s death was of no importance to the news agencies, then why should the world care?

And he coughed and coughed in the grim silence of the sleeping hotel, as indifferent as the desert. Suddenly, he thought he heard a kind of distant, tenuous echo of his cough … An echo … in a minor key. It was coming from room 32. There was no one staying in room 34 that night. It was an empty grave.

Yes, the woman in room 32 was coughing, but her cough was, how can I put it, gentler, more poetic, more resigned. Room 36’s cough protested and sometimes roared. Room 32’s cough was almost like the response in a prayer, a miserere; it was a shy, discreet complaint, a cough that hoped not to disturb anyone. To be honest, room 36 had not yet learned how to cough, just as most men suffer and die without ever learning how to suffer and die. Room 32 coughed with a degree of skill, with a wise, ancient, long-suffering pain usually to be found in women.

Room 36 began to notice that her cough accompanied him like a sister watching over him; she seemed to cough in order to keep him company.

Gradually, half-asleep, half-awake and slightly feverish, room 36 began to transform room 32’s cough into a voice, into music, and he seemed to understand what she was saying, just as one can vaguely understand what music is saying.

The woman in room 32 was twenty-five and a foreigner; she had come to Spain out of hunger, to work as a governess to the nobility. Illness had driven her from that particular haven; they had given her enough money to be able to wander alone through the world, from hotel to hotel, but they had taken her pupils from her. Of course. They feared contagion. She didn’t complain. Initially, she thought of returning to her own country. But what was the point? No one was waiting for her there; besides, the climate in Spain was – quite unwittingly – more benign. This place seemed very cold to her, though, the blue sky sad, a desert. She had travelled north, where the landscape was more like home. All she did now was move from town to town and cough. She was still clinging to the mad hope that she might find some town or village whose inhabitants had a fondness for dying strangers.

Room 36’s cough filled her with pity and aroused her sympathy. She realized at once that he, too, was a tragic case. ‘We’re singing a duet,’ she thought, and even felt slightly ashamed, as if this thought were indiscreet on her part, like a night-time assignation. She coughed because she couldn’t help it, but she had tried to suppress that first bout of coughing.

Room 32 was also drifting off into a slightly feverish half-sleep, verging on delirium. She, too, ‘transported’ room 36’s cough into the land of dreams, where all noises have words. Her own cough seemed less painful if she ‘leaned’ on that manly cough, which protected her from the darkness, the loneliness and the silence. ‘This must be what it’s like for souls in purgatory.’ By an association of ideas, natural in a governess, she went from purgatory to the inferno, Dante’s inferno, and saw Paolo and Francesca embracing in the air, borne along by the infernal hurricane.

The idea of the couple, of love, of the duet arose not in room 36, but in room 32.

Fever prompted in the governess a certain erotic mysticism. Erotic? No, that’s not the right word. Eros represented healthy, pagan love, and there was nothing like that here. Nevertheless, it was still love, the tranquil love of an old married couple, finding companionship in grief and in the solitude of the world. So what room 32’s cough was saying to room 36 was not so very far from what room 36, in his delirium, had sensed:

‘Are you young? So am I. Are you alone in the world? So am I. Are you horrified by the idea of dying alone? So am I. If only we could meet! If only we could love each other! I could be your shelter, your consolation. Can’t you sense in the way I cough that I am kind, delicate, discreet, home-loving, that I would make of our precarious lives a soft, warm, feathered nest, so that we could approach death together while thinking of something else – affection. How alone you are! What good care I would take of you! How you would protect me! We are two stones dropping into the abyss and which, knocking together as they fall, say nothing, see nothing, don’t even pity each other … Why must it be like that? Why shouldn’t we get up now and unite our twin griefs and weep together? Perhaps out of the union of two griefs there might spring a smile. My soul is crying out for that, yours too. And yet, as you see, you don’t move, nor do I.’

And the ailing woman in room 32 could hear in room 36’s cough something very similar to what room 36 was wanting and thinking:

‘Yes, I’ll go over there. It falls to me, after all. I may be ill, but I’m a young man, a gentleman. I know my duty. I’m going over there. You’ll see, despite our tears and the prospect of death, how delightful it will be, the love you know only from books and your imagination. I’m going, yes, I’m going … if only my cough will let me, oh, this wretched cough! Help me, protect me, console me! Your hand on my breast, your voice in my ear, your eyes gazing into mine …’

Daybreak. These days, not even consumptives are consistent in their romantic longings. Room 36 woke up, having forgotten all about his dream and about the duet.

Room 32 had not perhaps forgotten, but what could she do? She might be sentimental, but she was neither mad nor a fool. She did not for one moment think of making her night-time illusion – the vague consolation of that accompanying cough – a reality. She had offered herself up in good faith, and even when awake, in the harsh light of day, she still approved of her intention; she would have devoted the rest, the miserable rest of her life to tend to that man’s cough. Who could he be? What would he be like? Bah! Probably the same as all those other Russian princes from the land of daydreams! What would be the point of trying to meet him?

Night fell again. Room 32 heard no one cough. She could tell from various sad signs that no one was staying in room 36. It was as empty as room 34.

And so it was: forgetting that to change position is merely to change discomforts, the consumptive in room 36 had fled that particular hotel, where he had suffered so gravely, just as he had in all the others. A few days later, he left the town too. He didn’t stop travelling until Panticosa, where he encountered his final hotel. It’s not known if he ever recalled that duet for two coughs.

The woman lived on a little longer, two or three years. She died in a hospital, which she preferred to the hotel; she died among the Sisters of Charity, who were of some consolation when the fateful hour came. Psychology makes us wonder if, one night, unable to sleep, she ever thought wistfully of that duet for two coughs, but she wouldn’t have done so in those final solemn moments. Or perhaps she would.