And so, at the beginning of this week (Monday, to be precise), I was startled by the presence of a man at my window. I had completely forgotten that they would be painting the condominium. Yes, an assembly had been called. Yes, overages had been approved. Yes, notices had been left under the door. I always consent to the nonsense that others occupy themselves with. Laissez-faire.
I was sitting in my armchair, with my back to the window, which is what I generally do early in the morning. The living room reverberated with one of Haydn’s major quartets. It wasn’t quite nine yet and I was enjoying the iridescence that radiated on my orchids during their morning sunning. That’s why I was surprised by the sudden shadow. When I say sudden I should probably say unexpected, because to be honest, I clearly remember that it was gradual. It was a curious spectacle, more worthy of nature than of man: the rest of the apartment in shadows; a sphere of light, like a tracking bulb, on the flowers; and in the heart of the light, like an inverse sunrise or a celestial body entering an eclipse, a sliver of shadow rising little by little, until it projected itself across the cattleyas. I don’t know if you can appreciate the strangeness of that vision — a circle of the absence of light, in the middle of a circle of light, in the middle of half-light. I sat observing this phenomenon with that hypnotic attention we give to something that seems like a delusion or fruit of the imagination, when we know ourselves susceptible to such visions. And I wouldn’t have turned around if it hadn’t been for the head of the shadow, which at first appeared so perfect that it seemed celestial; as it ascended, it began to reveal a body made of flaps and adornments sprouting out of it. Then I did turn around, and I saw him. He saw me too.
He was just a kid, couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was wearing a T-shirt wrapped around his head like a Palestinian kaffiyeh, and over it the crown of earphones that — whatever they were transmitting — had him nodding frenetically, hyperbolically. He startled me — like I said, I admit it — but my reflexes are so slow that I didn’t even try to hide what was already, without a doubt, obvious to him, mostly because of the several seconds of advantage he had, watching me from behind.
Then there were a few — I don’t know how many — seconds of a sustained and knowing look. He was climbing at the speed of a turtle on his motorized scaffold, and pressing the button that activated the mechanism, with nothing else to do as his vertical world slowly ascended. I remember that when he saw what I was holding in my hand (because his eyes did stray from mine for a moment, a fraction of an instant), he gave a hint of a smile. I suppose you understand what I’m referring to, right? That intention of a smile we sometimes see in the corners of someone’s mouth who’s definitely not smiling, no, but holding a smile back. Farther back than the lips, even farther inside, perhaps behind the teeth or on the cupola of the pallet, shaped like an arch, waiting for that solitary moment when at last it can peel itself off the roof of the mouth and be pushed out with the tongue, free now. So it was. He saw me and I saw him. It was done.
Tuesday was another thing entirely because it was anticipated. I’ve never had curtains because at this height, frankly, privacy ceases to be a consideration. But now that for a brief time I’d been exposed to the gaze of an intruder, now that this foreign coexistence with the painter had been initiated, I had to stay shut in my bedroom. Since I don’t have stereo equipment in there, I was able to hear the soft screech of the pulleys as the scaffolding ascended. From the threshold of my bedroom’s half-open door, I saw him look inside, feigning disinterest at first and then, assuming no one could see him, scrutinizing the interior of my apartment with such intensity that he even made a visor of his hands and stuck his face against the glass — searching. This time he let himself grin, of course, because he thought he was alone. He made some gesture of sarcasm or criticism. And he kept ascending slowly, histrionically, as noon does.
By Wednesday I had an itinerary of his ascents and descents: he went up initially at a quarter to nine; he came down at twelve like clockwork; he went back up after one; and at three, or maybe three thirty, he came down and didn’t return until the following day. I deduced that they painted condominiums from top to bottom, and he must have started with the penthouse on Monday, which is two floors above mine. So that day it was time for him to paint my floor. It was a long Wednesday, shut away in my room without music. I had to leave the door ajar, because the living room windows give a clear view to the back of the bedroom. I crossed into the kitchen a few times, of course. I passed by without looking at him and returned with my ice tray. At five after two (I remember because the digital clock on my stereo, which I contemplated nostalgically in its silence, showed the time) I perceived out of the corner of my eye that he was gesturing to me with his hand, like he was waving. I pretended not to have seen him and shut myself in again.
At three o’clock, desperate for the workday to end so I could retake dominion over my house, I positioned myself at the crack in the door to spy on him. The platform of his scaffolding went way beyond the width of my apartment, so there were long periods when I couldn’t see his movements. I watched his torso cross in front of one of my windows and disappear behind the adjoining wall, then reemerge in my field of vision. It took him fifteen or twenty more minutes to complete the day’s work. Since he tended to place his equipment on a segment of the scaffold outside of my big living room window (the one out of which I had seen him the first time), I was able to observe when he started to get his things ready to go. He sealed the bucket of paint and began to clean his hands with a cloth from the back pocket of his overalls. Instead of focusing on what he was doing, he entertained himself by looking into my empty living room. He smiled through clenched teeth as if remembering, reliving that Monday morning, and peered into every corner his eyes could reach. It’d been like that since Monday: him, just a boy, inhabitant of a still vertical life; us, old residents of horizontal universes, where there was space for our vices to scatter themselves around. Maybe he was too young; now I’m not even sure he was twenty. He still had a desire to see, and that’s no longer of interest after a certain age.
When he felt satisfied that he had devoured my slice of the world, he returned to his hands. Then I saw him make an expression of disgust, curse, throw the cloth furiously down on the scaffold floor, and look with despair at the fronts and backs of his fingers, which, judging from his rage, had been left more covered in paint than before — probably because he’d used the same cloth too many times. Then, with his elbow he activated a switch that I’d not seen him use yet, and with the same elbow he pressed the button of the motor for a second and pulled back his arm. The scaffold began its automatic descent, while he rubbed his hands against his chest, butt, and thighs, as if determined to soil himself as much as possible.
Not even ten seconds had passed — I barely had time to take three steps into the living room — when I again heard the screech of the pulleys and saw that the painter was returning. I scurried quickly back toward my room and I saw him pass by my floor on his way up. I was surprised, because he should’ve already finished painting the upper floor the day before. I slipped timidly into the living room and went up to the glass, but my vantage only revealed the bottom of the wooden platform. I opened a window — the windows here are sash windows — and stuck my head out as far as I could, but I didn’t see much. A swaying, nothing more. Observed from below, that platform was transformed into an iron curtain, perfect for concealing the intimacies committed by those on top of it (a real advantage over my apartment, I remember thinking). I noted how the mechanism was flanked by metal brackets, cables, cords, and pulleys that stuck out like tentacles from the condominium’s rooftop down to the first floor. I closed the window and returned to my observation point behind my cracked bedroom door, resolving not to enter my living room during the day until the scaffold had definitively descended.