“They can know all about you, but you don’t know anything about them.”
I was thinking: that’s what our relationship is like. “You’re right.” Again, I felt she was reading my mind. “It’s what happens when a relationship is based on necessity,” she said.
“Yes, when it’s like that, there’s nothing you can do.”
We laughed breezily.
“I hope it’s not a bother for you, Papa occupying that room.”
“Papa? No, not really.”
“I used to call him Papa sometimes,” she said, and then looked thoughtful. “We’re making your life complicated, aren’t we?”
“Just a bit. But I’m not complaining.” Yet, I added silently.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Your father, sorry, your grandfather can stay here as long as necessary or until you decide otherwise, all right?”
Señor Blanco was lying still, his face relaxed, his mouth slightly open, as the mouths of the old often are when they sleep, and the slow, gentle rise and fall of his chest as he breathed seemed normal.
“Señor Blanco?”
Nothing.
I approached the bed. Very gently, I prodded his shoulder.
Nothing.
I leaned over him and blew on his face, slightly disgusted by the greasy odor he gave off, but feeling a certain tenderness toward him.
Nothing.
After carefully examining that enigmatic, defenseless body once again, I reached out and gave him a quick, hard pinch below the nipple.
Nothing.
I stayed there for a while, looking at the transparent bag of serum. “Dextrose solution,” I read. I examined the little tube, the dropper.
I flopped back onto the divan to read and smoke, but not as calmly as before.
“Maybe the real problem,” I found myself thinking, “would be if Señor Blanco opened his eyes.” The thought had crossed my mind before, but never quite so vividly.
In a way, though, I would have liked him to wake up, because my greatest fear was that his disappearance would upset the balance of my relationship with Severina, which, I was ashamed to admit, depended to some degree on the old man’s state of unconsciousness. The last thing I wanted was any kind of change.
Although it would have been easy to end his life, I persuaded myself that I shouldn’t: I might never find another source of information like him. And such a man, I thought, is more needful in this world than in the other, as Georg Christoph would have said. I couldn’t go on reading. I smoked a cigarette or two. I fell asleep. I was woken by the sound of the door opening and Severina’s silvery voice calling out, “I’m home.”
No way am I going to kill her grandfather, I thought. I got up to greet her and gave her a kiss and a welcoming hug.
She showed me the afternoon’s haul of books.
La española inglesa
Flight from a Dark Equator
The Way of All Flesh
Carnets d’Afrique
Le Poisson-scorpion
“You’ve brought me luck,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Do you realize, since I’ve been with you, I haven’t got caught once?”
“Let’s hope it continues that way.”
I wondered how the conversation would have gone if I’d decided to kill her grandfather.
Later, while we were having dinner, she said, “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
I denied it.
“You look worried,” she insisted. “Is it my grandfather?”
“Well, yes.” I was convinced that she could read my thoughts.
“Are you fed up?”
“No. But I am worried.”
She was quiet for a while.
I thought: It’s strange. From her expression, I can tell what she’s about to say. She’s going to suggest that we let her grandfather go.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said a moment later. “Maybe the best thing for everyone, including him, would be for us to let him die.”
We looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Maybe,” I said finally.
She nodded and went on eating.
La Entretenida was flourishing. But I had begun to feel that there was something crass about simply trading books for money. I was increasingly bored at the store, even when there was a reading, in spite of the new grouplets of poets organizing more or less provocative events for the benefit of a more or less demanding public. Severina, of course, refrained from attending.
The idea of selling my share of the bookstore became more and more attractive, especially since I had borrowed money to pay Señor Blanco’s hospital bill, and the interest was accumulating rapidly. In order to test the water with my partners, I said I was thinking of traveling for a few months. They wanted to know where and why.
“I’m not sure. Somewhere calm and not too expensive. Costa Rica? Ecuador? I want to try my luck at writing a novel. If I don’t do it now, when will I?”
They began to tease me and I realized that they knew about Severina and her unconscious grandfather staying in my apartment. I didn’t try to discover the source of the leak.
“You’ve really fallen for her; come on, admit it.”
“But who could blame you? Such a pretty name: Severina.” I tried to laugh with them. “Well, like I said, I’m ready to sell whenever you want.”
One afternoon, when I returned to the apartment, I found her sitting at the kitchen table. She had her head in her hands and didn’t look up when I greeted her. I leaned down to kiss her on the back of the neck; she didn’t react.
“What’s up?”
With a movement of her head she indicated the servant’s room, and I understood that Señor Blanco had died. Without saying anything more, I went to the door and saw what I knew I would see: his old lifeless body. “I’m going to miss him,” I thought. And then: “Am I really?”
I went back to the kitchen, and it was only then that I saw a plastic bag from the supermarket scrunched up on the table. Suddenly the image of Severina suffocating her grandfather appeared before my eyes. Letting him starve would have been much worse. “She did the right thing,” I thought.
“I’m sorry.” I sat down at the table opposite her; she still hadn’t said anything. Then she looked up with a strange grimace on her face: a smile twisted by sorrow, but only on one side. She shut her eyes and opened them again.
“Thank you,” she said. “You understand, don’t you?”
“What do you think we should do now?”
“I don’t know.”
I stood up, walked around the table, leaned over Severina, and put my arms around her from behind. She was stiff. She stood up slowly. We hugged each other hard.
“We have to notify someone.”
She didn’t respond.
I took her to my bedroom. I laid her on the bed and put a blanket over her.
“Don’t call anyone, please,” she said softly.
“No?”
“I’m scared. I’m scared.”
I lay down beside her and there we stayed for a long time, kissing and caressing each other as we had never done before. It was as if both of us knew at each moment exactly the kind of caress that the other needed or desired.
When I woke up it was already dark. She was asleep. With my gaze fixed on a little crack in the ceiling, I began to think about the future, first the immediate, more or less foreseeable future, which can — or so we think — be controlled; and then the further future, distant and mysterious, which no one can foresee, but only dimly and vaguely intuit. I thought of Señor Blanco, Señor Blanco’s corpse, no doubt already stiff with rigor mortis. I understood Severina’s fear. But what, I wondered, were we going to do now? If we didn’t report the death to a doctor, or the police, or a lawyer, we’d be creating what at that point I saw as unnecessary problems. We had to call an undertaker to come and get the body. . unless we got rid of it ourselves.