His face changed; now he seemed distant and wary.
“I don’t know if she’s slept with you. If she has, you’ve reason to be proud. And now, if you’ll excuse me. .” He got to his feet and so did I. “I would have liked to be able to say mon frère,” he said. “Goodbye.”
I sat down again and stayed there, perfectly still, as if I’d been hit on the back of the neck with a blunt instrument, while the unlikely grandfather of Ana Severina Bruguera Blanco receded into the distance and disappeared.
Our unexpected and implausible encounter was to be continued that night in a dream. We were traveling on a mountain road in a rickety old bus.
“But tell me,” I said to the old man, “where is she?”
“You won’t see her again. Forget her. She’s dead. Dead! Do you understand? She was killed by some kids in Montevideo.”
I woke with a feeling of emptiness in my chest, and a deep and pervasive sense of ill-being. I thought I was going to vomit.
I managed to get to sleep again around midday and woke at dusk, feeling hungry, with a vague memory of the previous evening and just a few loose threads of what had happened that night. After my conversation with Señor Blanco, I had gone back to the store, and a few hours later, tired of waiting for customers, I closed up.
I went to one of the few old-fashioned cantinas left in the part of the city where I lived. It was in a little street from another epoch, made for carts not cars, which sloped down to a wide, modern avenue where the traffic was hindered by street vendors and stands selling fruit and candy along one of the sidewalks. Narrow steps led from the avenue up to the cantina’s tiny terrace, where all sorts of drunks congregated. At that hour of the afternoon, the concrete around there gave off a powerful odor of urine, a reek of liquor filtered through the bodies of those nameless men, irresistibly drawn or driven to drink. Sad cases. Old friends of mine, distant relatives, and in-laws had done time in that place.
I walked into the cantina thinking I was no different from the rest of them and drank so much I can only just remember the faces of the men who lurched around me, and a few of their tall tales, and the queue of drunks waiting to piss in a filthy corner where a hole in the wall, barely concealed by a dirty little curtain, had been turned into a urinal.
Somehow I ended up in another place downtown. Night had fallen, and I was sitting at the bar in a very dark room, with grotesque figures daubed on the walls in fluorescent paint. A bald man with a big gut was drinking next to me; he had a mustache and a long thick beard the color of ash, and he was wearing clear spectacles with large round plastic frames.
“I know you. But do you know me? Of course not!” he said and started laughing.
From the little I can remember of our conversation, he was an artist. I think his next project was going to be the production of a “living necklace.” He was thinking of making it with street dogs or cats. The idea was to attach a little honey-smeared rubber sphere to a fishing line and get an animal to swallow it. When the sphere, still attached to the line, emerged several hours later from the anus, it would be washed, smeared with honey again and given to the next dog or cat; each animal would become a bead, a “living bauble.” This word seemed to amuse him greatly. I don’t know how many times he repeated:
“A self-threading bauble, un bibelot. . Brilliant, isn’t it?”
I left that dive with the artist and a friend of his who was bragging about being a thief. He specialized in stealing art and antique furniture from old houses in the city center, which he could get into — so he claimed — thanks to his knowledge of a system of sewers that dated back to colonial times. He came from an aristocratic family; he tactfully declined to reveal his surname, but offered his fair skin and light eyes as a guarantee. In his youth he had wanted to be a historian. I can’t remember if we took a taxi or walked to the red light district. We went in and out of various clubs where there were girls performing. In one, I watched an acrobatic dancer: she was hanging head down in a metal tube, stripping to the rhythm of a catchy, schmaltzy tune. She looked so like Ana Severina that I asked the waiter to bring her over to our table when she finished her number. I bought her a drink.
She’s dead. Dead! Señor Blanco had said to me. I woke with a jolt, and it took me a few seconds, sitting on the bed, to convince myself that he had said it in the dream.
It turned out to be one of those black days. Afflicted with a headache and a mood of heavy melancholy, both of which lasted till late afternoon, I couldn’t think clearly about anything. I told myself, once again, to forget that elusive woman. At dusk I wrote a note to her supposed grandfather, explaining that I didn’t expect any payment for the books she had taken from La Entretenida. All I wanted, I said again, was to stay in touch with his granddaughter. My feelings for her, I assured him, were affectionate but disinterested, and I stressed that I was writing to him in a spirit of the most sincere friendship. Since it wasn’t too late when I finished writing the note, I put it in an envelope and set off for the pensión.
It was already dark, but the weather was mild for December and there was no wind, so I went on foot. I walked quickly, propelled by a strange optimism, wondering how many times I had passed that way, thinking of her, telling myself that this story had gone on long enough already, that it was time to bring it to an end, but with no sense of what the future might hold regarding affairs of the heart.
It’s not an expression I’d normally use, like the words never and infinite. But in the course of that walk, it occurred to me that the origin of the term infinite must have more to do with the heart than with the rational mind. One can conceive of an “infinite desire” or an “infinite longing,” but the logical consequences of the notion of infinity are devastating; we are not mentally equipped to grasp the idea of an infinite object, be it infinite in time (eternity) or in space (a limitless physical universe), or even, strictly speaking, in the abstract realm of numbers.
The pensión was in a state of chaos. Two men — traveling salesmen, I presumed — were waiting at reception, but there was no one to serve them. The telephone was ringing in vain on the desk. The cleaner was going back and forth with huge piles of dirty sheets and towels, and a few seconds after I came in, an ambulance, siren blaring and lights flashing, pulled up outside the front door with a screech of tires. Instead of leaving the note for Señor Blanco on the desk, I put it away and discreetly took up a position next to the salesmen.
Two paramedics in green uniforms came in with a stretcher, and the cleaner pointed to the door of a guest’s room, which had been left ajar. One of the paramedics pushed the door open, and that’s when I saw her. I leaned on the counter with one hand, overcome by a dizzy spell and seized by a strong impression of déjà vu. Ana Severina, framed by the door, was facing away from me. She was wearing a violet-colored dress, cut low in the back, almost down to the waist. Her hair was loose, resting on her shoulders. Sensing that the door was opening behind her, she turned. She would have been able to see me, I think, but maybe she didn’t recognize me. She spoke to the paramedic who had entered the room and stepped aside so that the other man in green could bring in the stretcher. Then all three of them disappeared behind the door.
“The old guy must have pegged out,” said one of the salesmen. “You could tell he wasn’t in good shape, and with a babe like that. .” He looked at his colleague mischievously.