Time passed... I don’t know, maybe five minutes? It seemed like more to me, restless as I was. The unusual silence of my apartment, which was ordinarily submerged in music, heightened my senses. Maybe I imagined sounds. It was after three thirty. At that hour, the world becomes for me a kind of underwater concert, you know? Everything muffled, slow, majestic. I sensed a thumping in the ceiling: vibrations, like drowned thunderclaps, from the floor above me. One here, another there. It happens. It’s not rare in a condo, nor did it bother me. I turn on music, and that’s that. But that day, in the silence, combined with my anxious waiting, it attracted my attention. I looked around overhead, trying to find the origin of those sounds to decipher their pattern. They weren’t sounds that merited alarm, it was just a way to kill time. Eventually the thumps stopped, and yet I remained in suspense a few seconds more, my eyes lost in the smooth ceiling of my bedroom. Then I went back to the observation that mattered most to me: the scaffold’s descent. It came down one or two minutes later, and I felt freed from the prison of that day.
I turned on my music at full volume and had a party. You might understand what I mean when I say I had a party. Such was the celebration that I found it necessary to go down to the shop on the first floor an hour later. I entered the elevator and when I pressed the button for the lobby there was a stain on it, something with the opacity and texture of a relief. It seemed strange — not because I tend to focus on that kind of detail, nothing is more foreign to my personality. It made me remember the recent spectacle of the eclipse over the cattleyas. The buttons in elevators are illuminated, right? That circle of light had a half-moon of shadow in its interior, some imperfection that obstructed the glow. It took shape on the left and stole a piece of illumination from the upper part of the G. I stumbled closer and touched it, like a blind person reading Braille. I returned to the back wall of the elevator and reclined my head, humming a Brahms melody. When the doors opened, I bent forward and leaned against the call panel. With the light of the button now off, I could better study the stain. It was a dry streak of grayish or brown paint, nothing more. I scratched it with a fingernail.
Then I went out into the lobby and saw the commotion.
Everyone was congregating around something in front of the building. The lights of I don’t know how many police cars and ambulances spun rhythmically in reds and blues, creating a curiously festive air in the twilight. I went inside the shop and asked the clerk at the cash register what had happened. He told me about the painter, shattered on the pavement. I didn’t want go over and see the macabre spectacle that everyone seemed to be enjoying right there and then.
The return trip in the elevator was strange: I stood looking again at the button for the lobby, clean of paint this time. I must have cocked my head or made one of those gestures we make when something doesn’t fit.
It wasn’t until the next morning, sitting at ease in my living room armchair, that everything became clear. I carefully read the news in the online papers: the police were investigating the unfortunate incident of a painter who’d accidentally fallen from his scaffold. I vividly remembered the kid and I think I even felt bad about his death; at that hour of the morning it’s easy for me to feel empathy for the human race. But I imagined him just as I’d known him — sniffing around more than was appropriate, his hands forming a visor to look inside and judge the depths of other lives, our lives. What could there be on the floor above that would make him return when his workday was already over? What, in the windows above mine, would’ve awakened his need to look? I fixed my eyes on the ceiling of my apartment, and just so, like an epiphany, I knew. The threads knit themselves together and everything made sense, old things that you don’t even know you remember suddenly link together and create a choir, like the four instruments in the Haydn piece.
Early as it was (I think it wasn’t even eight yet), and in an outburst of heroism that, given my tendencies, surely wouldn’t last past ten, I decided to meddle. I already knew there was nothing of interest in the penthouse. The spectacle that had captivated the painter was in the apartment just above mine. That boyish voyeur, with his vertical advantage, had served as a periscope between my eyes and the window above. I went up.
I wasn’t sure what I would do or say once the door opened. I was impelled by the precarious sense of coexistence that’d begun with that brief, repugnant visual contact between me and the painter. Silly as it seems, he was the closest thing to a neighbor I’d had in my condo building. Someone familiar with my habits would understand.
I knocked one, two, three times. I knew I was being observed through the peephole; I managed to embody a kind of character by concentrating on synchronizing my heartbeats with my blinking. I suppose that this conferred on me the air of a battery-powered doll, innocuous enough that they’d venture to open the door. I had no idea who occupied that apartment: I was there because I needed to scratch the coat of paint with my fingernail. The rest would come later.
The door opened just a few inches, scarcely enough for me to glimpse a pair of eyes peering through the diagonal along the line of the threshold. This was all that was needed for the other to exist in me, as I suppose you might already understand. And those eyes said everything I needed to hear by revealing their dilated smallness, their suspicious turbidity. We were of the same species.
“Hello,” I whispered. And I smiled. I remember that I smiled.
“Yes?”
“I’m here on behalf of the committee. We’re calling an urgent meeting of all the residents.”
“Yes?”
“Because of the incident yesterday.”
“Yes?”
“Will you let me come in?” I didn’t want to go in. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go in. I just wanted to corroborate that he wasn’t ready to allow it. Already, for me, it was obvious.
“No. I can’t.”
“I understand,” I said. “We’ll be distributing the notice later on today. Have a good day.”
I turned around and hurried to the elevator. As I was walking with my back to that door, which had yet to close, I began to evaluate the risk I was taking in the deserted hallway of an unfamiliar floor, vulnerable to the paranoia of someone who probably knew that he’d been found out. Because he had been found out, there was no doubt about it. I could feel the heat of his gaze, his terror that was also my own. The elevator took an eternity; I had time to focus on the call button, perfectly clean, as if it had just been polished. Each additional second that passed without hearing that door lock into place threw more fuel on the invisible fire that devoured the distance between us. I never turned around to check, but I know he was about to jump on me and drag me inside his small hell, just like the rest of them.