“Satisfied?” she asked.
I didn’t laugh. “Well, actually, no.” My voice faltered.
“Would you like to continue?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“Really?”
“Yes, stupid, really!”
I stood behind her and ran my hands over her neck, her back, her legs, which she spread cooperatively, and finally over her buttocks and the inside of her thighs.
“Satisfied now?”
I didn’t say anything. Feeling slightly dizzy, I stood up with a difficulty that wasn’t affecting my body so much as my will, and came round to face her again.
She gave me a slap, a fairly gentle slap.
“You like to take advantage, don’t you?” She smiled and I understood that I had been given permission to kiss her. So I did.
“Stop,” she said. “Let’s stop.”
“Why?”
“That’s enough,” she laughed joyfully. “You’re insatiable.”
“In this particular case, I am.” I ran my hand over my stomach. “And really hungry too. Will you have dinner with me?”
“Sure. I haven’t been to a restaurant for ages.”
We went up from the basement into the street, where a cold wind was blowing as if from above, like a very fine drizzle.
“Shall we walk?” I took her hand.
“You make me laugh,” she said. “Sure, let’s walk.”
When I saw her shivering, I gave her my jacket.
She stopped and said: “You’re very kind, or you seem to be. But life is shit. We better get the car so you can take me back to the pensión.”
“But why? Why do you say life is shit?”
“Because it’s so complicated.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Will you take me back?”
“Do I have a choice?”
We walked to the parking lot in silence and drove slowly, in silence, to the pensión. When I was dropping her off, I said: “I’d like to meet your father, if I can.”
A bitter smile twisted her mouth. She stood there for what seemed a very long time without speaking. “I don’t think it’s appropriate,” she finally replied.
We didn’t set a date to meet. It was as if we had come to a tacit agreement that we would see each other again. I didn’t know how many days I’d have to wait; I really didn’t think it would be many — and it wasn’t, but they seemed endless. One Saturday afternoon in mid-October, after a long debate with myself, I made up my mind to knock on the door of the Pensión Carlos. I’d been obsessed by the thought of her father for some time, and I expected to find him there. At first I imagined a frail and sickly man, perhaps to make sense of the fact that he was living with his daughter in a rented room. He’s an invalid, I thought. A sad case. A nobody. Then it occurred to me that he could also be a shady character, someone whom caution or shame had driven into hiding. A washed-up politician? A defrocked priest? A drug boss on the run? An artist?
It was one of those old-fashioned doorbells: a little white button in the middle of a tile. It made a sound that opened passages in my memory, all the way back to a long-forgotten place from my childhood.
A maid in uniform came to the door.
She was still a child, but there was a hardness in her face, which reminded me of the ugly look that country kids take on when, from one day to the next, they become soldiers. Beyond the garage, which was empty, I could see a modern, single-story house, with wrought-iron bars in the windows.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“Is the pensión open?”
She nodded curtly.
“The rooms are rented by the week.”
I stood there for a moment looking at the little front garden, with its big pots of Mexican geraniums, sword ferns, aspidistras, and aloe vera.
“Can I see a room?”
“Come in,” said the girl, and opened the door that she had been keeping half closed.
The tiles on the floor of the little vestibule, decorated with the signs of the zodiac, the little sitting room with its old sofas and weary armchairs, the wrought-iron bars in the big window that looked onto a shady patio: all this reminded me again of my childhood. Beyond the sitting room, a dimly lit corridor led to the bedrooms and, at the end, a bathroom, from whose open door emerged a powerful odor of household disinfectant scented with apple and eucalyptus, a combination that also triggered early memories. The girl opened the door of the first bedroom and invited me to inspect it. It was a medium-size room, with a window looking out into a garden densely shaded by an old rubber tree. The bed, made of dark wood with carvings of hunting scenes, was high and narrow. I tested the mattress; to my surprise, it was firm. Against the wall opposite the window there was a camp bed, whose presence intrigued me. The maid must have noticed my surprise, because she explained:
“There’s an extra charge if you want bedclothes and a pillow for the camp bed.”
There were thick Momostenango rugs on the floor, which was tiled, as in the vestibule, but here the tiles were decorated with birds in flight. The only modern object in the room was a chrome-plated reading lamp on the cheap pine bedside table. I switched it on, saw that the light was good, and switched it off again.
“How many rooms do you have?”
“Six.”
“How many are free?”
“Just this one.”
“I’ll take it, then.”
She told me the price, which seemed reasonable. After paying a deposit and putting away the receipt she handed me, I said I’d be back that night or the following morning with my things.
It wasn’t the first time I had let a bookish impulse carry me beyond the bounds of reason. On the way home I kept laughing at myself, thinking of Flaubert. I had been impetuous before: when I got together with my friends to set up a bookstore; when I decided to become a writer; when I ran away from the family home; when. . but this was different: for the first time in my life, I was embarking on a purely sentimental adventure.
The Pensión Carlos, which I moved into that afternoon, was a quiet place — except at dusk, when a multitudinous flock of grackles darkened the sky and filled the air with their cries. Lying in the darkness I could tell by the electric clock flashing on the bedside table that it was nine. I heard the heavy steps of a man in the corridor, then a woman’s heels, a door opening and closing. With my heart beating slightly faster than normal, I got up from the bed and went to the door to listen, but I couldn’t hear anything more.
I went back to bed and reread a couple of poems by Darío.
Executioners of ideals have afflicted the Earth, mankind is imprisoned in a well of darkness along with the violent mastiffs of hatred and war.
At midnight I switched off the lamp and closed my eyes.
I woke up very early. There wasn’t much light in the sky, but birds were beginning to stir in the rubber tree outside the window; it took me a few seconds to recognize the room. I lay there for a while, watching the shadows play over the translucent folds of the curtain, as it swayed in the morning breeze. I remembered the dream I’d had a few minutes before — I was being chased by a snake with a body as thick as a horse’s — and noticed a strange yet familiar taste in my mouth. “The extra-temporal essence of our lives,” I said aloud.
I spent a few more minutes in bed, in a position that favors and symbolizes indolence: hands clasped under my head, feet crossed, ears at once occupied and idle.