This feeling grew exponentially. I had the brilliant idea of telling Mom about it. My rashness was breathtaking. At first she paid no attention, but I insisted just enough to get her worried, before backing off. So many dreadful things had been happening … She asked me if I’d seen who was following me, if it was a man or a woman … I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t like that, I was talking about feelings, subtleties, “instructions.”
“You’re not going out any more unless I’ve got you by the hand!”
Around that time the gutter press was feasting on the bloodless cadavers of boys and girls, found raped in vacant lots … They had been completely drained of blood. A vampire plague was sweeping the land. Mom was a village girl, and though not completely ignorant (she had done a year of secondary school), she was naïve, easily taken in … So different from me! She not only believed what she read in the gutter press (if it came to that, I probably did too), but applied it to her own real life. That was the key difference, the abyss that separated us. I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs …
Anyway, once, during one of our outings … I had completely lost Mom, and I didn’t know whether to keep going straight, or turn, or go back home (it was only two blocks away).
The thing was, we had just set out; Mom wouldn’t be back for a good half hour, and she’d be nervous and worried about me, and maybe cross because she couldn’t finish her shopping …
A strange woman accosted me. “Hello, César.”
She knew my name. I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me. Where was she from? Maybe she lived in the tenement, or worked in one of the stores where Mom did her shopping. To me all ladies looked the same, so she could have been anyone, and I wasn’t too surprised not to be able to recognize her. The really strange thing was that she had spoken to me. Because it wasn’t just a question of her identity, but also, and above all, of mine. I was so convinced of my own invisibility, of the utter ordinariness of my features, that I felt this could only be a miracle. It must have something to do with the marks on my nose, I thought, raising my hand to touch them.
“What happened to your little nose?” she asked with interest, smiling.
“I got bitten,” I said, without going into details, not because I didn’t want to tell her the whole story (I promised myself I would, eventually), but to be polite, not to bore her, not to waste her time.
“How awful! Was it a friend, a naughty boy? Or a doggy?”
Her insistence annoyed me. It showed that she hadn’t appreciated my politeness. I was impatient to change the subject, to get things clear between us; then I would be able to tell her the story of the bite in graphic detail. I shrugged my shoulders impatiently, with a faint smile.
As if she had read my mind, she changed tack. “Do you remember me?”
I nodded, with the same smile, but a little more relaxed and charming now. She gave a visible start, but regained control immediately. She smiled again, more broadly. “Do you really remember?”
I had said yes simply to be polite, to reciprocate, since she knew me.
I nodded again, but this time the nod had a totally different meaning. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meaning was, though I could make a vague guess at it. This woman didn’t know me at all, in fact. She was lying. She was a kidnapper, a vampire … But guessing always involves a margin of uncertainty. And operating from that margin, politeness and polite circumspection took control of everything. Even if I had believed that vampires really existed, they wouldn’t have scared me as much as the prospect of upsetting the status quo. Politeness was a kind of stability or balance. For me, life depended on it. Giving it up would have to be worse that being preyed on by a vampire. Anyway, I didn’t believe in vampires, and this lady wasn’t one. So by nodding, what I meant was that nothing had changed.
“No, you don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. I’m a friend of your mother’s, but I haven’t seen her for a long time. We knew each other in Pringles … How is she?”
“Very well.”
“And Don Tomás?”
“He’s in jail.”
“Yes, I heard.”
She was an ordinary woman, a bottle blonde, rather short and stout, very smartly dressed …
There was something hysterical and delirious about her. I could feel it in the intensity of the scene. It wasn’t how someone would normally talk to a little girl they had met by chance in the street. It was as if she had rehearsed it, as if, for her, a fundamental drama was unfolding. It didn’t worry me too much because there are people like that, women especially, for whom every moment has the same tragic intensity, without any kind of emotional relief.
“What are you doing out on your own? Are you running an errand?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me in surprise. My yeses shattered all her preconceptions. Then she went for broke. “Do you want to come to my house? I live just nearby; you can have some cookies …”
“I don’t know …”
Suddenly reality, the reality of the kidnapping, hit me. And I wasn’t prepared for it. I couldn’t believe it. My politeness was sheer idiocy. For the sake of manners, I was giving up everything, even my life. From that moment on I was seized by an immense fear. But the fear remained hidden beneath my manners. Wasn’t that typical? Any other reaction would have amazed me.
“I’ll take you back home afterwards. I want to say hello to your Mom, it’s so long since I’ve seen her.” She anticipated my answer with an intensity multiplied a thousandfold.
“Ah, all right then,” I said theatrically, exaggerating my willingness. It was the least I could do, to thank her for making an effort to clear away the impediments.
She took me by the hand and dragged me briskly along the Avenida Brown. She talked all the time but I wasn’t listening. Anxiety was suffocating me. When she looked at me, I smiled at her. I fell in with her step and returned the pressure of her hand on mine. I thought that by stressing my willingness, I was making the hypothesis of a kidnapping too far-fetched. In no time at all we were on a bus, going down unfamiliar streets. The bus was half empty, but she spoke up so all the passengers could hear; she kept cuddling me and saying my name: César, César, César. I loved it when people said my name; it was my favorite word.
“Do you remember when you were little, César, and I used to take you for ice cream?”
“Yes. ”
I was lying. I was lying. I had never eaten ice cream in my life!
I played along with her act, anticipating, waiting … I took politeness to the clearly absurd extreme of supposing that she had mixed me up with another girl, who had the same name as me, had been born in Pringles and whose father was in prison … In which case, she would be so disappointed when she found out the truth … she might even get angry, because my yeses would turn out to have been lies, excesses of politeness.
We got off in a distant, unfamiliar neighborhood, and walked a couple of blocks, holding hands all the way … But her mask was beginning to crack, the madness she had been laboriously keeping under control was rising to the surface, tinged with violence and sarcasm. I felt obliged to accentuate my politeness, to guard against an imminent collapse.
“Mom’s going to be so happy to see you! ”
“Yes, she’ll be thrilled.”
“What a lovely neighborhood!”
“Do you like it, Cesitar?”
“Yes. ”
Her voice had become so sinister! My diagnosis was incontrovertible: this woman was crazy. You would have to be crazy to give up an imaginary status quo. You would have to be crazy to prefer brute reality. I tried not to think about being at the mercy of a crazy woman. Anyway, what could she do to me?