Finally, exhausted, he fell into a deep slumber, only to be awoken by a great screeching of brakes. At first, still trapped in the web of a bad dream, he thought the train had arrived at his native country and that gray-uniformed guards would arrest him because he was not carrying the proper identification, his old passport, which he also showed me, a relic of a dark past.
He got off the train, tightly clutching his travel case in one hand and in the other his Spanish passport. He had been told earlier to have all the documents relating to his naturalization easily available in his pocket, in case he needed to produce them. He took his place in the line, on the Spanish side of the border, in front of the guard post manned by two guardias looking bored or sleepy. “My legs were trembling, and when I tried to say good morning, my mouth was so dry I could barely speak.” Then, as he walked toward their booth, his palms sweaty and his knees weaker by the minute, something happened that he still remembers with amazement and gratitude. One of the guards came toward him, and he thought the man was returning his gaze with suspicion and distrust. But he summoned his courage, as he had the time he jumped out the window of the washroom, and, as naturally as he was able, held out his passport, carefully opened to his photograph, prepared to explain the discrepancy between his nationality and his name and to produce all the necessary papers. But the guard, without even glancing at the passport, without looking at his face, waved his hand and told him with a Spanish obscenity to move on, and that rude gesture and word seemed to the pianist the most beautiful welcome he had ever received. For my benefit he imitated the guard’s wave with his slender, white, musician’s hand, still stunned by a gift that none of the other weary passengers appreciated, repeating like a spell the guard’s expression, “for shit’s sake,” joder with a strong aspirated “j,” which he pronounced precisely and with pride.
THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE in the waiting room, or on the other side of the desk in my office, came and went, and I paid little attention to them, half listening to their petitions or demands for things that weren’t in my power to grant and that meant nothing to me, although I had learned to pretend to listen carefully, professionally, sometimes taking notes while I gave information about the necessary forms or explanations about delays of payments or the suggestion that a timely word to the manager might help, busy as he was with larger responsibilities. I was waiting, sheltered in my parenthesis of space and time as in a lair, but what I was waiting for beyond the next letter was unclear to me, and I made no effort to dispel the mist of my indecision. I sat quietly and waited, as one who has heard the alarm clock and knows he must get up but allows himself a few minutes more before he opens his eyes and jumps out of bed. Would the woman writing me come back or not? When she lived on this side of the ocean and in the same city, her interest in me did not last very long. I never felt more distant from her than those few times I held her in my arms. If I sought her out, she fled from me, but if I grew discouraged and gave up the chase, she came to me, always full of promises, erasing the resentment and uncertainty from my soul and making me want her again.
The truth is, she was no more tangible to me than the women in the black-and-white movies who seduced me into a kind of hallucinatory love: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Tierney, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth. In Gilda, which I saw many times, Rita Hayworth runs away from Glenn Ford and Buenos Aires, and in a cabaret in Montevideo, dressed in white, she sings and dances a song called “Amado mío.”
Amado mío
Love me forever
And let forever
Begin tonight.
In the film, Montevideo is just a name, not even a set or one of those false panoramas they use when the actors are pretending to drive a car. But the woman who showed up one morning in the waiting room of my office with a child in her arms and a large bag filled with puppets had fled from Montevideo to Buenos Aires in 1974, and four years later from Buenos Aires to Madrid, pregnant, though she didn’t know that yet, carrying the child of a man who had been taken away one night by the military or the police and was not heard from again. As we were talking, the child sat on the floor of my office playing with his mother’s wooden dolls. She watched him out of the corner of her eye with an uneasiness that never lessened. A little over thirty, she had very dark hair and eyes; the hair was a silky mane, the eyes large and heavily outlined with kohl. Her nose and mouth suggested Italian blood. Her strong, slightly masculine hands were perfect for manipulating the puppets, a few of which she unexpectedly took and began to maneuver in front of me, after first starting a cassette player she also pulled from her peddler’s pack. On the gray metal of the desk and atop the confusion of my papers, Little Red Riding Hood, skipping to the rhythm of the music on the tape, entered the forest where the Wolf lay in wait behind a pile of documents, and in her strong River Plate accent the woman narrated the story and reproduced all the voices, the high voice of the little girl, the big deep voice of the Wolf, the quavering, grumbling voice of the Grandmother. The little boy, as if mesmerized, got up and came over to the desk, which was about at his eye level. Bewitched but terrified, as if the Wolf were also waiting for him, he was completely unaware of his mother’s hands or the strings dangling from her fingers.
The demonstration lasted only two or three minutes, and when the music reached its final flourish and the tape stopped, the puppets made a great bow together and collapsed, lifeless, upon my papers, but the boy kept looking at them with dazzled eyes, waiting for them to come back to life. “You saw,” said the woman, “that I can set up my little show anywhere.” She stowed the puppets and cassette player in her bag, but the boy immediately took them out again, one by one, and examined them slowly, as if to solve the mystery of their extinguished vitality, so absorbed in them and himself that he didn’t see me or his mother or the rather shabby office, though it probably was not as dreary as the boardinghouse where the two of them had lived since they came to the city. She had the constant worry, she told me, of not knowing how long they would be able to pay for it, and therefore she wanted me to organize a series of bookings for her in elementary schools and kindergartens.
She, too, had brought her dossier, and she spread out her photocopies and clippings, the credentials from another country that were of so little use here, diplomas from drama schools in Montevideo and Buenos Aires that wouldn’t have helped her get a job scrubbing floors in Spain. I reeled off the usual explanation about applications and forms and waiting time. She stared at me with disbelief and possibly sarcasm in those dark, kohl-rimmed eyes, as if to let me know that she didn’t believe what I was telling her but that it didn’t matter. She asked for an appointment with the provincial commissioner, put her dossier on my desk, and on the first page wrote the telephone number of her boardinghouse, which I knew to be a gloomy place, since I had lived there in my poorer days as a student. She knew as well as I did that there was absolutely no point in her leaving her telephone number, that she would have to come back many times, fruitlessly, but we both also knew that there was no other way, she had to persevere and hope to maintain her dignity. Every day she called to see whether I knew anything, whether there had been any decision; every day she pushed open the door of my office and took a seat again in the dark waiting room, always carrying the child or holding his hand because she couldn’t leave him alone in the boardinghouse and had no one she could trust to look after him.