When he walks into the bedroom at home he is surprised to find Helena already there, asleep. It’s been days since she has beaten him home! As he gets undressed and into bed, he wonders if she is pretending to be asleep, as he has so often done.
A weak sun shines in through the picture window, outlining the contours of things, bringing them into relief in a way that disturbs Heribert, who is sitting on a stool before a canvas, his head resting on the hand of the arm whose elbow is propped on his thigh. On the ground lies a torn canvas. He can hardly believe that just five minutes ago he stomped it to pieces. On the calendar he calculates how many days are left until the opening. Eighteen. He can do twenty paintings in three days, if he wants to. All he needs is a bit of will and a little courage. Has be become so demanding that he no longer approves of work that just months before would have satisfied him? Maybe that’s it. Maybe, two days before the show, the pressure will make him prolific. It wouldn’t be the first time that urgency had made him prolific. Maybe in the end it’s just that he isn’t anxious enough yet, and the calm was boring him. Maybe if he tries now. . He picks up the charcoal pencil. He touches the tip of it to the surface of the canvas. He keeps it there for a while, struggling mightily to make even a stroke. Not a single one. He lowers his arm in exhaustion. He sits down in a chair, gasping for air, so tired he thinks he won’t be able to do another thing for the rest of the day.
He looks out the window. He moved into this house about a year ago. He chose to work by that window because of all the light it gave him. For almost a year now, he has been there each day, painting, and observing the turn-of-the-century brick building across the street when he takes a break. The first figure to become familiar was a young man who lived on the third floor. At first he had been surprised to see him at the window so often. He soon understood that the guy was pacing, along one invariable route: He walks purposefully from one end of the room to the window and, once there, stops, looks out at the street, turns on his heel, and walks back to the other end of the room. . Over and over, for the space of a minute, for minutes on end, for an entire hour, all morning and all afternoon, every day of every week of every month. For how many years?
In time, Heribert has come to recognize all his sweaters. He has one very loud one, yellow and blue, and he seems happier on the days he wears it. In the summer, Heribert has seen all his t-shirts. Once, at the peak of August, he saw him in a bathing suit. He often smokes a pipe as he paces. Sometimes he pretends to read a book. Once he stayed at the window for a long time, hugging a record cover to his chest. Often, when the window is open, he shouts things down to people on the street. Heribert has only seen him outdoors once, on his way home with two older women. He was on the corner, arguing with a lamppost. Now he is at home, going through his daily paces. How many miles must he clock in a year? “Crazy as he is,” thinks Heribert, “any minute now he could take a shot at me. Maybe even the next time around!” He can see him now, approaching the window as he always does, but this time he’s not holding a book, or a pipe, or a record cover, but a revolver, which he aims at Heribert. As he pictures this, Heribert closes his eyes, the better to imagine that perhaps at this precise moment the guy is aiming a gun at him. “What will I do if he shoots and misses?” Would he throw himself to the ground? Could he go on living there, knowing that the madman might attack again? Would this finally force him to look for a new apartment or, more to Helena’s liking, a house in the suburbs? How exhausting, though.
Heribert opens his eyes again and sees the guy pacing the room, coming up to the window, and looking out, as always. He hears the phone ring, hears Helena pick up the receiver, hears her say it’s for him. He picks up the phone. Helena hangs up the other extension. Heribert leans up against the window, certain that, as always, nothing will happen. It’s starting to snow. Herundina is apologizing for having been late for their date the day before. A meeting. Do twenty-year-olds have meetings? Herundina says it had to do with school. She asks if he waited long.
“Two minutes. When you didn’t show up after two minutes, I left.”
“You could have waited a little longer.”
“What for, if you didn’t get there for another hour and fifteen minutes?”
“How do you know, if you weren’t there? I don’t get it.”
If he were a writer, he would write about fear of the blank page. . Maybe he could paint something like that. A painter in front of an easel with an empty canvas? An empty canvas painted white?
“I don’t think you’re listening to me,” Herundina breaks in.
“Sure I’m listening.”
“You’re very strange.”
Heribert hears Helena say she’s going out. He thinks, “Who did she think this was on the phone?” He starts making excuses into the receiver. Says he has to leave right away, promises to phone, accepts her apology for being late the night before, agrees to her being the one to call, on Wednesday, hangs up the phone, picks up his coat.
•
This time, the wait is more tedious. It doesn’t amuse him to count the parked cars, the time elapsed between the passing of two cars, the potholes, the windows of a house, the windows of all the houses on the street, the trees in the yards, the trees that grow on the sidewalks, the number of the house Helena went into. . And the children aren’t there, either, perhaps because snow is falling softly the whole time. With his lapels up high and wearing a wide-brimmed hat (when he saw that the snow was sticking, he picked up a hat; could that bit of precaution be a sign of recovery?), Heribert sits on the curb, thinking that if he’s there much longer they’ll find him under a good layer of snow, turned into a snowman, a sculpture for the show that will be opening on the twenty-second. From the time Helena goes into the house until the time she comes out, accompanied by greenglasses, exactly two hours, forty-eight minutes, and nine seconds elapse. As he follows them, he turns the hours into minutes in his head. He has been waiting 168 minutes and nine seconds. He turns the minutes into seconds: 10,080, which (with the nine remaining seconds) comes to a total of 10,089 seconds. The snowstorm is thinning.
The couple stops at a corner. Heribert also stops, acting nonchalant. He pulls his hat down over his ears. If they hail a taxi now, he’ll really be screwed, because in that neighborhood it will be hard to find another one right away. If the man has a car parked nearby, he’ll be in the same fix. And, even if he’s lucky and finds a cab, he feels nauseated at the mere thought of telling another cab driver, “Follow that car.”
It has stopped snowing. Helena and glasses were strolling along, laughing, their arms around each other. Heribert thinks that when he gets home he’ll have to get the operator to tell him the name of the person who lives at that house number. But, what if the phone is in someone else’s name? Or he doesn’t have a phone? The couple stops from time to time for a kiss. Heribert pretends to be checking out a shop window or waiting for a bus, sinking lower and lower into his lapels and hat. If only he had a disguise. . He realizes he’s in front of a drugstore with wigs in the window. He rapidly calculates his chances of losing them if he stops for, say, fifteen seconds, to make a purchase. Impossible: they are right at the beginning of the block and there isn’t another corner for at least a minute. He goes into the shop and orders the big blonde wig with the curls; he pays; he tells them not to wrap it, takes off his hat, puts on the wig, puts the hat on over it, and goes out, indicating with a gesture to the salespeople and the two customers that they shouldn’t follow him out, which of course they do immediately, ignoring his pleas in their amazement.