Fifteen minutes later, Helena’s taxi stops on a wide, solitary avenue, lined with houses.
“Park across the street, a little farther down.”
Having to come up with such stratagems exhausts him. The driver says something under his breath and smiles. Looking out the back window, Heribert watches as Helena gets out of the cab and goes into one of the houses.
•
A couple of children are playing with an enormous ball in one of the yards. Heribert tries unsuccessfully to figure out what they’re playing: sometimes it looks like soccer, then like baseball, then a minute later like handball. Then they laugh and take a rest, leaning on the fence. Once, he thinks they look at him, whisper about him, and laugh again.
He sits on the curb, and since he’s getting bored, he starts doing things. First he counts the seconds that elapse between one particularly loud shout from one of the kids and the first car to go down the street (another taxi): 634. Then he counts the minutes until the next car (a Mercury Cougar) goes by: 18. He adds the 634 seconds and the 18 minutes: 652. He finds it interesting to add up dissimilar things. In school they said you couldn’t add apples and oranges. If he adds the 652 to the 2 kids playing in the yard, he gets 654 seconds, minutes, and kids. He counts the cars parked on that stretch of street: 17. Added to the previous 654 that makes 671 seconds, minutes, kids, and cars on that stretch of street. He thinks of adding in the 4 stoplights, the two garbage cans he can see, the fire hydrants, the potholes. If he could add up all objects, all feelings, all ideas, all creatures, add them all up together, everything would be so simple. How easy it would be to face any situation, get out of any labyrinth, form a fairly accurate image of the world; the world (for example) would be exactly 78,345,321,834,042,751,539 things. If he could just diagram this feeling of perplexity! But how? Turning the canvas into a blackboard and writing down all those figures seems idiotic to him. And the mere thought of coming up with a more elaborate way to depict that morass wears him out.
He lets himself fall back. It feels wet. He looks at the white sky. It’s cold out. He thinks it’s strange that the two children are playing outside on such a cold day. He thinks, “If I start to imagine that the sky is empty, I’ll fall upwards, I’ll fall into the clouds.”
After a wait that seems interminable, Helena appears arm in arm with a tall man, with brown hair and a broad mouth, wearing a very long, gray raincoat and glasses with apple green, almost fluorescent, frames.
Thinking that he has to get up to follow them, he lies down again and keeps trying to convince himself that gravity will suck him up into the sky, but he doesn’t quite manage to believe it. When Helena and her escort catch a cab at the corner, he gets up, brushes off his pants, and starts walking home.
•
He opens the door, turns on the light in the foyer, and then, one by one, he turns on all the lights in all the rooms of the house. Upstairs, he turns on the light in the studio, and the radio, as he gazes with infinite estrangement upon all the cans, paintbrushes, portfolios, pencils, canvases, and easels. He goes back downstairs. He turns on the other radio, the television, the record player, and leaves them all at full blast. He can’t turn on the radio and the cassette player at the same time because turning one on automatically turns the other off. This annoys him. He will never again fall for one of these outlandish models that claim to be a radio and a cassette player at the same time; at the moment of truth they cannot be both radio and cassette player at the same time, and hence it is a lie. He remembers that he has a small transistor radio, which must be in some corner of the house. He looks through all the rooms, until he finds it next to the picnic baskets. He also turns it on. In the kitchen, he turns on all the burners, the oven, the toaster, the blender, the coffee grinder, the mixer. For a moment he’s afraid the circuit breaker will blow. He puts the teakettle on the stove, with a little water. The whistle soon joins all the other cries, songs, melodies, conversations, noises, and lights that fill the house. He feels at home, in a house full of life. He goes out to the door, opens it, and keeps pressing the buzzer over and over again. The din produced by all those appliances working at once is delightful. “If in this precise moment the telephone rang, I’d be a truly happy man.” He could phone a friend and ask him to call, but that would ruin the fun.
Just then the phone rings. He listens for a good while, one more sound among all the screeches, squawks, and whistles bubbling up from every corner of the house. Then he thinks maybe he should answer. He stops ringing the doorbell, closes the door, and picks up the telephone. He can’t hear a thing over the racket. At the top of his lungs he asks the person on the other end, whom he isn’t able to identify, to give him a moment, and one by one he shuts off the record player, the radio, the cassette, the toaster, the lights, the blender, the burners, the oven, the transistor radio, until the house is plunged into absolute silence and darkness. He sits on the floor and feels his way (because his eyes, dazzled by the previous brilliance, take a while to adjust to the absence of light) over to the telephone. It’s Herundina, who asks him what all the ruckus was. Heribert tries to explain, and when the girl seems to have understood, he is surprised because not even he understands it very well; he even has to ask her to repeat the question, “What are you doing this evening?” because he hasn’t the foggiest notion what he’s doing that night or what he ought to answer.
•
He has taken off his wristwatch and placed it on the table in front of him. For fifteen minutes (when he’s already been waiting a half hour) he has silently been following the progress of the second hand. He has interrupted this contemplation three times, each time to order more rum. Now the waiter is filling his glass again. He takes a swallow and quickly goes back to studying the second hand. He is surprised to have lived so many years with watch hands before him and never to have been aware of the obsessive life they led. Now he perceives them all, the agile second hand, the slow minute hand, and the lumbering hour hand, as unsung comrades. He kisses the face of the watch.
He’s disconcerted at Herundina’s not yet having arrived. What if it’s all his imagination, and she hasn’t called and, consequently, they haven’t arranged to meet at all? What if he dreamed it and now, in a waking state, he is fruitlessly awaiting a meeting that will never take place? Or what if he’s dreaming now and fretting about a date that can’t take place unless he wakes up? He feels so disinclined to think about the possible reasons why the girl hasn’t shown up that, when he finishes the last glass of rum, he gets up, pays the bill, leaves the restaurant, and heads down the street.
A few steps farther on, he leans against a telephone booth, waiting for a taxi. Three of them go by, all occupied. The fourth, also occupied, stops in front of the restaurant and, to Heribert’s surprise, Herundina gets out, smoothes out her leopard-print miniskirt, unwraps a piece of gum, and puts it in her mouth. For a moment, Heribert considers going back into the restaurant, running into her, scolding her a bit for arriving late, accepting whatever excuses she offered, sitting down at a table with her, and searching for things to talk about over dinner, only to find himself at a loss as to what to do with her afterwards. When the taxi she had gotten out of starts up and the signal light goes on, Heribert hails it, opens the door, and gets in, with time enough to watch through the rear window as Herundina pushes open the restaurant door.