Gradually you become familiar to the stranger watching you, though no words are exchanged, only a glance from balcony to balcony, or a moment when you brush against each other on a narrow sidewalk of the barrio: the man, the woman, the boy, the dog, the workmen who completely emptied the house across the street, erasing all traces of those who lived in it for years, the trash bin by the door, then the new walls painted soft, luminous colors, to eliminate efficiently the marks of the previous neighbors, the way the pavilion of a hospital is painted white for reasons of hygiene.
You are neither your consciousness nor your memory but what the stranger sees of you. Who was the neighborhood drunk whose name no one knew, though we saw him constantly and were no longer afraid of him, who was suddenly there when you turned a corner one night, with his filthy lank hair all tousled and his heavy bearlike body wrapped in rags stinking of piss and vomit? At times his small, watery blue eyes would seem to focus, but he never spoke to anyone or asked for charity, wandering through our streets like the hide-clad Robinson Crusoe depicted in old lithographs, and just as alone. He fashioned his shelter from cardboard, newspapers, and plastic bags in the entry of a building or slept stretched out in the middle of the sidewalk like a Calcutta beggar, his territory marked by the stench he emitted. What are the episodes of one’s life seen through the eyes of an indifferent but attentive witness? Every afternoon the man in pajamas on the balcony watched the new boy go into his building carrying his schoolbag, then come back outside a few minutes later, eating a snack and leading the dog, pulling him or trying to hold him back, never able to control him, this outlandish puppy that must have been as new to his owners as the recently painted house, as the new barrio and the new life and the school the boy was attending for the first time.
Things repeated every day seem to have been happening forever. The boy with the schoolbag, the yips of the dog in the house where the balcony doors are always open, the boy tugging at the dog’s leash, undoubtedly taking him to Vázquez de Mella Plaza, which is the only open space in the barrio, a large, ugly concrete expanse, nothing but a large platform built above a parking lot, where the locals walk their dogs while neighborhood boys play soccer and the girls jump rope and play hopscotch and the junkies shoot up and none of the groups seems to see the other, although how can you not see the bloody syringes carelessly tossed aside, the squeezed-dry lemon slices, the scorched squares of silver wrap? The plaza is ringed by buildings occupied by questionable hostels and very elderly people who haven’t been able to leave. At night, high above the rooftops, the most visible landmark is the telephone tower, its enormity reminiscent of a Soviet skyscraper, topped with the yellow sphere and scarlet hands of a clock that on foggy winter nights emits a gold-and-red phosphorescence.
One afternoon the boy comes running home and doesn’t have the dog, and even from his balcony on the second floor the man in pajamas sees that the boy’s face is covered with tears as he pushes the button on the intercom panel. The door opens, but the boy doesn’t go in, the man and the woman come down, and the boy throws his arms around his mother, barely waist high and crying as if he were much younger; he points toward the corner and wipes his nose with the handkerchief his mother has given him.
The man’s entire life is watching and waiting. He monitors his breathing, fearing a blackout, where he would lie motionless on the balcony in his flannel slippers and pajamas, the mandatory uniform of the terminally ill, perhaps already excluded from the realm of the living like the pale shadows that slip along the street, always hunched over in pain, always worried and hurrying after a scornful dealer.
The man, woman, and boy disappear from view at the end of the street at the corner of Calle San Marcos, which is the limit of his field of vision. After a few minutes the man returns alone, calling a name that must be the dog’s, trying, inexpertly, to whistle. The puppy is so little it’s probably lost forever, run over by a car. But they don’t give up, they go back and forth all afternoon, passing beneath his balcony, and go inside only when it grows dark, while at the corner of Augusto Figueroa, the pink neon sign of the Santander Bar has been turned on, a pink as soft as the blue sky above the roof tiles, as the dusk reflected in the windowpanes of the highest apartments when it is already night down in the street.
It’s too cold to stay out on the balcony, but the man with the mask over his mouth keeps watch through the window, his back to a room of which all that can be seen from across the street is murky lamplight and occasionally the bluish wink of a television through sheer curtains that have the same fatigued look as the man’s pajamas or the neck of his T-shirt. What would it be like to go into that house? Half behind the curtains, the man breathes through his mask and watches the lit balconies of the house across the way, which still have no curtains, and the now nearly dark sidewalk filled with passersby both living and prematurely dead, each seeing what the other cannot. Someone stands in the middle of the street, but the watching man can’t see who it is, so when he hears the sharp, short barks of the puppy, he pulls the curtains back and presses his face to the glass to get a better view.
It’s the drunk, huge, his face turned up toward the balcony of the new neighbors, weaving slightly as he holds the black-and-white dog, who is barking hoarsely and struggling to escape from the suffocating rags and hands. The drunk does not approach the door or the intercom, he stands waiting for something to happen with the dull patience of an animal. The sickly man knows that one of those balcony doors will open and reveal a recently painted pale yellow interior, that the boy will come out, the first to hear and recognize the barking, and that the vestibule light will go on.
Father and son come down, and the young woman runs out to the balcony, so focused on the street that she doesn’t glance once at the building across the street. The boy, containing his impulse to run to the dog, holds tight to his father’s hand. The drunk does not walk one step toward them. Slow and bulky, he bends to the ground and sets down the puppy with great delicacy, without a word, and already the boy is hugging his dog and the man is saying something to the drunk and offering him something in an extended hand. The drunk’s eyes are very light, colorless like certain Slavic eyes, his round face is purple with bruises and sores, and though he is less than a meter away, he looks at them from a much greater distance. He is like a castaway who has forgotten the use of language and ended up mad. It occurs to the father that when his son is a little older he will help him read the novels about shipwrecks and desert islands that inspired him in the best years of his own childhood.
THERE ARE OTHER FIXTURES on the street corners of the neighborhood, their faces as familiar as that of the woman in the bakery or pharmacy, or the woman-man at the newspaper kiosk; the police from time to time force one of them to put his hands against the wall and frisk him, or they’ll ask a Moroccan dealer for identification and take him away in a patrol car, and he might be back in the barrio shortly afterward, or disappear and never be seen again in this squatter’s city on the outskirts of Madrid.