When he got home, Jose Antonio rehearsed a routine which complemented his routine on the bus: he went down the side passage, towards the terrace, left his seat cushion on a chair and washed his hands, soaping himself up to his elbows, as meticulously as a surgeon. He thought it the only way to get rid of the dangerous dirt from the buses, where everybody gets on, the sick and infirm, the dirty and healthy, the infected and the newly born smelling of eau-de-cologne. He picked up his cushion, whistled as he went through the back door, and met his wife, as always at this time of day, between laundry sink and kitchen. He kissed her on the cheek, was kissed by her, asked whether Tonito had come back from school and greeted the smell of fried onion and garlic, while she asked him how it had gone and he said all right. They ate, talked about the usual – the money that was never enough, the bad state of public transport, the unrelenting heat, the possibility she might go back to work in the factory – then he slept his two hours of siesta. He got up, put on his rubber sandals, drank the coffee his wife had just prepared and sat on the terrace to read the newspaper, and thought about that damned woman once again and tried to forget he would definitely kill her.
The following morning the woman didn’t appear. Jose Antonio Morales remembered he’d picked her up on his third round (left garage: 8.16 a.m.) at the stop on San Leonardo and 10 de Octubre (8.29 a.m.). However, he wasn’t relieved or too worried by her absence, for he knew he wouldn’t forget her and was determined to kill her. The woman didn’t show for another six days, until Tuesday – the same day he’d seen her the week before – she appeared, inelegant, without make-up, carrying a folder brimming with books and papers which Jose Antonio hadn’t seen on their previous encounter, and she threw her coin in the box, didn’t even glance at the driver who’d decided he was going to kill her. He looked at her, as he looked at all his passengers, shut the door and drove off, entering the huge, rather dirty thoroughfare of 10 de Octubre, previously dubbed Jesus del Monte.
That night, as he was watching the television news, Jose Antonio told himself that the idea he’d met her before, which was why he wanted to kill her, made no sense. In fact, until last Tuesday he’d never seen her, and perhaps he’d have lived his whole life without seeing her if, three weeks earlier, in the last settlement of routes for the second half of the year, he hadn’t taken the unexpected decision – for him, his wife, and the rest of the bus drivers – to change his route 4 for route 68, which began two minutes before his usual shift, and finished three minutes later, at 1.27 p.m. The decision was as spontaneous as it was irrevocable, and Jose Antonio then sought out explanations: he would earn thirty-two cents a day more, perhaps he was bored by the roads on route 4, the people who travelled on the 68 were slightly different, the minutes spent crossing the Apollo building estate were very pleasant… Perhaps on the day of decisions it had been very hot in the meeting-room and he’d felt very uncomfortable with his dirty hands. Or could it be he was growing old? Yes, he was now forty-seven and when he’d begun as a bus driver, just out of military service, he’d been barely nineteen, and all that time he’d been driving on route 4: ever since, every day five drives round Havana for eleven months in succession, driving through the same streets, at the same times, with the same stops and even picking up the same people who came to be his friends over the months and years, and he went to weddings, hospitalizations, some birthday parties and even several burials of his usual passengers, and he’d never thought of killing any of them. Nothing had interfered with the predictable routine and much less with what was logical for such a period: at twenty-one he’d got married, had a son whom he’d given his name, his own mother died peacefully, in her sleep, just after her sixty-second birthday, and they never called on him to fight in Angola, despite the fact that one day in 1975 he’d been summoned and, because of his military aptitudes, been told he belonged to the artillery reserve for unit 2154 and been asked if he was ready to fight as an internationalist soldier wherever the Revolution sent him, and he’d said he was. That night Jose Antonio slept peacefully, after making love with his wife, in the position they always adopted: she mounted him, put his penis in and her vagina rode the length of his member, Jose Antonio’s spine, mistreated by years of driving, resting flat on the mattress. The remainder of the week he also slept peacefully, although on Monday night he thought he felt a certain anxiety over the encounter he expected to have the following morning. But he shut his eyes and in four minutes fell, like the extravagant pigeon, into a dizzy sleep.
When you work for twenty-eight years as a bus driver you master, almost unthinkingly, all the tricks necessary to survive in the job: the lies you can tell the inspector when he catches you running several minutes ahead of time; the way to respond to irritable passengers, knowing when you can take the offensive or when you need to apologize or even pretend you didn’t hear the insult, how to ask for a coffee at some point on the route without having to join the queue: or begin a relationship with someone, according to your own sex, age and interests.
Jose Antonio saw her under the sign for the stop, carrying her folder, next to three other passengers. He stopped the bus ten yards before reaching the group and forced them to walk towards him. She was the last to get in and, when she went to put her money in, no doubt annoyed by him braking before the stop, he said: “I think we’re going to have to change buses.” If he’d said something concrete like: “The brakes are in a bad state,” or, “There was a pothole,” or something like that, the conversation would have taken off, if she’d been a very talkative person. But the riddle he’d set was unassailable. She stopped next to him, supported herself on a vertical bar and asked: “Why?” As he explained that the front right wheel brakes weren’t working properly, he asked her for her folder so he could place it on the bus rack and finally discovered she was an English teacher in an elementary secondary school in Luyano and that day she started her classes on the second shift at 8.55, and the bus left her there at 8. 42, giving her just enough time to arrive and get to her classroom, and if he switched buses…
The rest of September and the whole of October, she got on his bus on a Tuesday; he asked her for her folder, and they chatted thirteen minutes, which enabled him to find out she was Isabel Maria Fajardo, thirty-three years old, divorced, childless, and had been a teacher for some time, and considered herself a boring individual. What’s more, she gave him her address, and the third Tuesday in October invited him to drop by some day for a coffee. I’m always there after six, she said.
Although he’d thought of going to a psychiatrist, Jose Antonio discarded the idea straight away: he wasn’t in the least mad, and his decision to kill Isabel Maria wasn’t even a sentence he’d personally adopted, but a mandate he’d received. The only problem was that he thought himself a complete atheist, with no expectations of a life beyond. What most worried him, nevertheless, was grasping why it had to be Isabel Maria and nobody else. Really, if it was necessary to kill someone, he could perhaps choose someone better, a person he hated or disliked, or someone infirm who’d even be grateful for his act of mercy or, better still, someone harmful to society whom society would be overjoyed to see executed by a voluntary, anonymous avenger. He knew several undesirables of that kind. So why her? After seven Tuesdays and approximately ninety-one minutes of conversation that woman hadn’t managed to arouse any special feeling in him: hatred, love, desire, repulsion, anything to justify the need (the mandate?) to kill her. Like him, she was one of those millions of anodyne beings peopling the earth, who lived in the country, right now, spent their days honourably, without excessive euphoria or ill-feeling, not in major dispute with society or the times, without well-defined political ideas or ambitious individual projects. She worked, ate, slept, suffered slightly from loneliness but wasn’t visibly tormented and, as she’d already confessed, loved spending hours listening to classical or popular music. Why? Perhaps that was it, he thought: because she represented nothing… But did he know that before meeting her?