He got off at Uribiru and walked to Paraguay. He crossed the entrance and the large hallway and mechanically walked up to the brown door on the left where, on a golden plaque, was written ‘Computer Centre’.
He pushed the door open and walked in.
It wasn’t the first time he had been aware of this feeling. He had felt it one night, two or three years ago, on his way to the Lorraine cinema. From the moment he had climbed onto the bus he had begun to create and polish, as in a daydream, a program that would allow one to write soap operas through computers. He had gotten off at a stop, which, according to gut feeling, was Parana Street. (His gut had been mistaken; the street was Ayacucho.) He had crossed the road while at the same time going back over his program to see whether he hadn’t fallen into a dead-end loop. Only when he was at the point of entering the cinema had he realised that no cinema was there at all, no bookstore to the right, no theatre across the road. He was in a totally unfamiliar place. For several seconds he had borne the unbearable impression that reality had shifted, that everything he believed in was false, that his points of reference suddenly made no sense.
The same thing happened to him again at the Computer Centre. But this time he had made no mistake. When he left, sixty seconds later, he had found out something of the utmost importance: no Nicolas Broda worked there. No Nicolas Broda had ever worked there.
Another important fact came to him in front of a yellow apartment building. He had gone there to retrieve his briefcase and to confide his tribulations to Segismundo Danton. He had carefully thought out how to explain all of this to Segismundo, but when he reached for the intercom phone to call apartment 10B, he realised that there was no tenth floor nor Bs of any kind. The building was eight stories high and the apartments were numbered from 1 to 27.
He walked for a long while. He had told himself, somewhat compulsively, that his only hope was not to spend the eighty pesos he had left. But shortly after midday it began to drizzle, and Nicolas was forced to admit that, even though the very idea of going back to that house filled him with anxiety, for the time being there was no other place to go. So he picked out six ten-peso coins and took the bus. Just as he was about to reach his destination, he saw through the window, leaning against a doorway, a large, red-faced man who seemed thrilled at seeing the bus. The man whistled, waved his arms wildly, made a circular gesture with his finger in his ear, indicating that Nicolas should phone him, winked an eye and nodded his head. Nicolas felt himself blushing up to the ears. He tore his eyes away from the window. The lady sitting next to him smiled back a tender and happy smile.
As soon as he got off the bus, a problem occurred to him. Should he go into the store and buy the things the blonde woman had asked him to get, or should he ignore her request? He imagined that if he arrived without the parcel and if the woman saw him, not only would she burst into a rage but she’d probably have him go back into the street to fulfil his duties. To save himself the fuss, he decided to buy the things now.
The shopkeeper looked like the same one he had always known, but he couldn’t be certain.
‘Just put it on the bill, would you?’ he asked, a little anxiously, as the man handed him the parcel.
‘No problem, my friend,’ said the shopkeeper.
Before leaving, Nicolas undertook one final task.
‘Has the vaseline come in?’ he asked.
It hadn’t. Nicolas hurried to tell the woman when she opened the door, as she was taking the parcel from his hands. He was worried about the possibility of having to touch her. Large women had always frightened him. He felt great relief — too much relief, he thought — when the woman told him it didn’t matter. ‘It doesn’t matter, Alfredo baby,’ the woman said. ‘Go and sit down to lunch.’
Nicolas went into the dining room and knew them all at a glance. The man at the head of the table, skinny in his striped pyjamas, was the gentleman suffering from gout. To his left was Chelita. To his right was an empty chair in which the blonde woman had been sitting. Next to the blonde woman’s place, the Fifth Toothbrush. And next to Chelita was another empty chair in which he sat himself. They were having soup.
The gentleman with the gout tapped his index finger on the edge of the table and turned towards Nicolas.
‘Would you be kind enough to tell us where you’ve been?’
Nicolas tried to think up an appropriate answer, but didn’t manage to voice it because the Fifth Toothbrush leapt to his defence.
‘Come on, it’s good for him to air himself a bit, Rafael,’ she said. She had the voice Nicolas had expected from someone wearing those little round glasses. She let out a sigh. ‘It’s such a nice day out there.’
She winked tenderly at Nicolas by raising one of her cheeks and bending her neck towards the side of her closed eye.
‘Fine, fine,’ muttered the gentleman with gout. ‘In this house everything’s fine. If someone spits in the shoe polish, that’s fine. If we’re overrun with ants, that’s fine. If that slut over there comes home at six in the morning, that’s also fine. In this house everything’s fine.’
The expression on the Fifth Toothbrush’s face changed from tender to insidious.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I certainly don’t know how come a decent girl doesn’t spend the night under her own roof.’
Nicolas sneaked a look at Chelita and couldn’t help admiring her. She was eating her soup like a princess sitting among pirates. He thought that the image had been conjured up by her hair, long and red. Briefly, he saw himself biting it, lying with her in bed. This is an abomination, he thought. And then he had a shock. He had just realized that what he had found abominable was what he had been on the point of thinking: This is an abomination, she’s my sister.
‘What I don’t know,’ the blonde woman said, ‘is why you don’t stick that tongue of yours up your ass.’
With this, the group became sullen. From time to time, the Fifth Toothbrush would pull out a handkerchief and blow her nose. When she did, the blonde woman would grunt briefly and stare at the gentleman with gout. Finally, it seemed that the gentleman with gout could bear the tension no longer. He told Nicolas to go and turn on the TV. Nicolas understood the role that he (or his other) played in this household.
He undertook a minor experiment: he asked Chelita to pass him the salt. Thanks to a mental effort he had managed (he thought) to recover an ordinary air of ‘ironic and aloof man of science.’ He felt handsome. Discreetly uninterested he waited to see what would happen. He was disappointed: when Chelita turned her head to reach the salt, she didn’t show the slightest recognition of any change in his appearance. All she managed was a quick grimace, as if she were fed up with something. Then she carried on eating. Nicolas felt — never before had he felt anything like it — that Chelita despised him.
After this failure, he refrained from trying to charm anyone. He behaved just as the others expected him to behave, and this spared him any more bother. The truth is that he had very little chance to behave in any way whatsoever, because as soon as he finished his meal he locked himself away in his room. (If it could be called his room, this room without a single book or a single number jotted down on paper; not even the slightest secret cigarette burn that Nicolas could recognize as his own.)