He decided to begin his investigation at the employment agency, and immediately realized how ridiculous or suspicious he must have looked walking into the place and asking about a person whose name he didn’t know who fit such-and-such description. After recovering from this momentary embarrassment, he snuck a peek at all the women working there, another waste of time, since they were all wearing uniforms, and the woman he was looking for wasn’t wearing one when he saw her enter the building the day before. They told him that a lot of people came by the office every day to drop off photos and resumes, looking for work. Could he possibly see the applicants’ photos? he dared to ask, and immediately regretted it when they answered, with some disdain, that it was impossible: That information was confidential.
He limited himself to a few timid glances at the female employees working in the offices and waiting rooms next to the employment agency. And with a heavy heart, he realized that this method was getting him nowhere. Describing a woman’s physical appearance fifty times over in every office in the building was complete idiocy.
After work that day, while sitting in his armchair by the picture window staring at the cold, flickering light outside and pondering the situation, he remembered that when the police are looking for an unidentified suspect they sometimes use an Identi-Kit or a sketch artist. That could be the answer. The next morning he impatiently went about his normal routine, but at lunchtime he didn’t go to his usual pub, he went to the park where all the street artists go who specialize in drawing portraits of the passersby. A skinny guy with long hair who was making a charcoal drawing in the shade of a tree seemed just right for the job. He approached the artist and told him what he wanted. The guy ran his hand through his long, stringy hair and said that it would be a bit complicated, but he’d give it a try. The man had to pay in advance for the portrait of the mystery woman, and spent the next half-hour trying to recall her features as accurately as possible. The artist sat there patiently changing the details that didn’t square with the man’s memory, until he ended up with a drawing of a face that only looked a little bit like the woman he was looking for. Out of curiosity, the artist asked if this was a case of a missing person, or if the subject of the drawing had died. No, it was just for sentimental reasons, the man answered with a lazy smile that he figured must have looked phony to the other man. He took the portrait and went back to work.
Have you seen this woman? He repeated the question over and over on each floor of the building he had seen her enter. The answers were always vague. Some of the people he questioned even tried to avoid speaking to him and quickly moved away. They must think I’m from the police, he thought. A few shook their heads doubtfully: They thought they might have seen a woman who looked like the one in the portrait, but that was it. Even the doormen and janitors couldn’t offer more specific details. A drawing isn’t as good as a photo, one of them said to him. He looked at the portrait for the millionth time and saw that it was true. The portrait captured the features of someone he had brought forth from his imagination. Frankly, it could have been anybody, or nobody.
But the failure of the people in that building to recognize the sketch didn’t discourage him completely. Maybe somebody else would recognize her, and so — his hope surging like the brief, weak flame of a single matchstick — by some stroke of luck he might still meet her, and he wasn’t going to miss that opportunity.
He had the portrait laminated in plastic so it wouldn’t get damaged, and started to carry it with him wherever he went, along with the folders containing his professional documents. Sometimes, in some of the places he went, he ventured to show them the portrait to see if any of his business contacts might know the woman. He would explain that it was a distant relative who had disappeared, but the family hadn’t given up hope of finding her. A photo would be much better, they invariably told him. Didn’t the family have a photo of her? Sometimes when he showed the portrait to people he had already talked to, their reactions were more confused: They looked at him as if he were touched in the head, an eccentric old fool who wandered around showing everybody a woman’s portrait and asking if they knew who she was.
But his determination never wavered. And when a successful business deal brought in some extra money, he decided to spend the money on a bunch of classified ads in all the big newspapers, reproducing the woman’s portrait along with a brief notice asking anyone who could provide information about her to contact him by phone. He used his office number because he wanted to be absolutely sure that he wouldn’t miss any calls, and he started to neglect his work, staying glued to the phone in case the next ring brought some news that would finally bring him face-to-face with the mystery woman.
And it worked. He started getting calls. But to his great disappointment, most of them came from liars and jokers. Some of them even tried to wheedle money out of him in exchange for some supposedly useful piece of information. He dismissed them out of hand. Others provided him with a street address where they said he would find the woman, and he went to the places in question, taking the laminated portrait with him. At one address, he came across a half-crazy woman who claimed that she was the woman in the portrait; she also thought that he was a theatrical agent offering her a contract. In the remaining cases, people gave their opinions about how this neighbor or that acquaintance looked something like the woman in the portrait. They treated him like someone important, someone trying to solve a mystery that was worthy of column space in the newspapers because of an urgent need to identify the person in the enigmatic portrait. Holding on to a slim hope, he followed up on all their suggestions, but nothing came of it: The women in question didn’t look anything like the one he was looking for. And so the sketch proved useless. He had wasted his money trying to find her with it.
Time flowed on, and coming to grips with this reality, he gradually resigned himself to the fact that he would never see the mystery woman again. He had tempted fate by trying to find her, given that all of his encounters with her had been the result of pure chance; although it had happened many times, in the end each one was by pure chance. He couldn’t bring himself to tear up the portrait or get rid of it, which had been his intention when the search he had undertaken led him nowhere. He simply left it in a drawer and forgot about it. He had been obsessed with that woman, but in the end he understood that there was no possibility of having any kind of relationship with her. She would remain forever what she was: a mystery.
But the unexpected happened, and how. He bought a car, which he was driving one rainy afternoon on a busy street. His brakes failed and he started to skid and before he knew it he felt the shock of crashing into a smaller car that had swerved out of its lane and come zooming towards him. His car was knocked sideways by the impact. It spun around several times before coming to a halt, leaving him bruised by the impact, with an absurd, otherworldly feeling that he couldn’t possibly be alive. Although his seat belt was still attached, he let himself be carried off by a lazy indifference to his fate. He closed his eyes, took stock of the situation, and, gradually realizing that the various injuries he felt from the multiple impacts were actually minor, he let someone help him out of the car. Then he heard the wailing sirens of several ambulances rushing to the scene of the accident. And he realized that he had been sitting there, dazed but calm, for quite a while. Supported by the person who had helped him out of his car, he saw in the leaden twilight and the slashing rain that the paramedics were carrying stretchers from the car that had crashed into his, which had been reduced to a twisted pile of scrap metal giving off the pungent odor of leaking gasoline. Then the stretchers passed by and he was thunderstruck: In spite of the semidarkness, he recognized the unmistakable face of the woman he had fruitlessly searched for after having so many chance encounters with her throughout his life. It was her. Still slightly dazed, and trembling, he approached just as the stretcher was about to be loaded into an ambulance. One of the paramedics asked if he knew the victim.