‘Is it now! As good as romance, adventure, a journey or freedom?’
‘I’m talking about literature.’
‘Oh, right! And how would it improve my supposed novel if I started noting down the symptoms of bunions, gastric reflux, hay fever or fatty liver disease? What would the novel be for, inspiring pity? We can do that on our own, we don’t need books!’
‘Disease is the perfect metaphor for death, decadence, the finite nature of everything human.’
‘You mean instead of asking medical questions we should be asking rhetorical questions?’
‘You’re just like a child. Why do you act the enfant terrible? You’re running away from reality, just look at the state you’re in — do you think I don’t know about all your ailments?’
‘Since when does reality matter? I feel stronger than a horse.’
Her face flushed with colour, even though the zip had just finished its ascent: the lift doors were opening. As we went our separate ways, I took advantage of the bulb that had blown on the landing to give her bum a squeeze. It was firm yet soft, a most agreeable revelation. The slap echoed around the walls of the corridor until the end of time.
~ ~ ~
One of the daily battles in the building was keeping the main door closed so we didn’t get any old Tom, Dick or Harry coming in. If anyone forgot, Francesca would call an immediate extraordinary general meeting of the Residents’ Association, which no one could get out of until the culprit had been found. She took disciplinary measures that ranged from simple tellings-off to fines that wound up in the jar where cash for unexpected building repairs was kept. The woman would have given both Breton and Stalin a run for their money. Following the famous Mormon incident, the discussion got as far as debating the need for a doorman. Everyone referred to it the same way: the day the Mormons got in. It even became a temporal reference point. People would say: a week before the Mormons got in. Or: two days after the Mormons got in. Things happened before or after the day the Mormons got in.
It had happened one Wednesday afternoon, while I was drinking a beer and doggedly pressing a little button on the TV remote after I’d come across the shock of mad-scientist hair and mischievous face of Sergei Eisenstein. That’s when someone knocked at the door. They knocked, I mean, at my door, not the main door to the building, and that could only mean one thing. Actually, one of many things, which in the end came down to the same thing: Avon ladies, hungry children, drug addicts asking for change, phone company salespeople, talking mutes, seeing blind people, door-to-door kidnappers and shameless scroungers who hadn’t even bothered to come up with a story to inspire pity. The only ones who had disappeared, as a symbol of humanity’s progress, were the encyclopaedia salesmen. Knowing this perfectly well, I had no plans to open the door, so I ignored the knocking and carried on watching my programme. The knocking didn’t stop and I didn’t stop ignoring the knocking, either. The ads came on and the pounding on the door continued. Whoever it was was displaying the determination of a zealot.
I opened the door and saw a tall blond young man, transparent as a grub. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, a pair of black trousers and had a little badge at the height of his heart with his name on it, a name that sounded like a Dutch painter of still lifes: Willem Heda. Very appropriate: as the hall light wasn’t working, he loomed up out of the chiaroscuro. Judging by his appearance I guessed he couldn’t be more than twenty, and was carrying out the mission of having doors slammed in his face in a poor country before going to university. In the unlikely event, that was, that going to university wasn’t a sin.
‘I bring yuh the word of the Lard,’ he said.
‘Great,’ I replied. ‘How much per ounce?’
He raised his blond eyebrows in surprise and they almost reached his hair. Then he looked down at the Bible in his right hand. I reached out my left one and rescued the Aesthetic Theory from the shelf by the door, where I kept it like a shotgun, just in case. He looked at the tome pulsating in my hand and his eyebrows reached the back of his neck.
‘Are yuh a perfessor?’
‘As if.’
‘I ask becuhse of the book.’
We both looked down at my left hand. He looked at the book as though it were a dog that needed a lead, as though it were a sin to have a book loose in the house.
‘This? It’s from the library, but don’t worry, it doesn’t bite.’
‘I bring yuh the word of the Lard,’ he said again. ‘D’yuh have five minutes t’spare?’
I could hear that the ads had finished and my programme was starting again. I held up the Aesthetic Theory, opened it at random and began to read: ‘To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality.’
He held up his Bible, opened it at random and began to read: ‘I have seen all the warks that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity’n vexation of sperit. Ecclesiastes 1:14.’
I started reading again: ‘Advanced art writes the comedy of the tragic: Here the sublime and play converge… Important artworks nevertheless seek to incorporate this art-alien layer. When, suspected of being infantile, it is absent from art, when the last trace of the vagrant fiddler disappears from the spiritual chamber musician and the illusionless drama has lost the magic of the stage, art has capitulated.’
And he read: ‘An’ I gave my heart t’know wisdom, and t’know madness and fawlly: I purceived that this also is vexation of sperit. Far in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sarrow.’
I looked from one book to the other: his was bigger. On the TV the programme was still on and I was missing it. I backed up so he could come in.
‘Come in, quickly. What’ll you have to drink, Villem?’
‘It’s pernounced “Will-em”.’
‘Thanks for correcting me! A beer, Villem?’
‘A glass of wahder. Beer is a sin.’
‘No shit! Sit down, there’s a really good programme on.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Scheming and affairs and how to get money for old rope.’
He took off the rucksack he had on his back and sat down on a folding chair, an aluminium one with the Corona beer logo on it. Thief robbing a thief. I sat down on the little armchair I had in front of the TV.
‘What’s yoah name?’ he asked.
‘Teo.’
‘Mateo?’
‘As if.’
‘Jus’ Teo?’
‘Teodoro.’
‘Like the awthor of the book?’
‘No, the guy who wrote the book’s called Theodor.’
‘It’s the same.’
‘It’s not the same. He’s got an extra “h” and he’s missing an “o”.’