And yet Maxi felt that what he had done had grown out of the most patient and careful deliberation. Even though he had improvised.
Either this was a contradiction or the term “improvisation” would have to be redefined. People always assume that to improvise is to act without thinking. But if you do something on an impulse, or because you feel like it, or just like that, without knowing why, it’s still you doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it’s not really a thoughtless act, far from it; you couldn’t have given it any more thought: you’ve been thinking it out ever since you were born.
VII
Maybe it was still very early — with all the back and forth between “early” and “late” Maxi had lost track of the time — or maybe it was because of the storm; in any case, when he got to the gym, it was empty. He wasn’t surprised; he was usually the first to arrive. The members started turning up around eight-thirty, and the instructors and receptionists came at nine. Saturno, the man who worked at the bar and usually opened up, was nowhere to be seen. Still, he must have come, because the place was open and the lights were on. Maxi guessed that he’d gone out, as usual, to buy fruit for juicing and milk and croissants. . He must have been a very early riser because Maxi had never beaten him to the gym. And there was another minor or maybe not-so-minor mystery that Maxi had never been able to fathom: when he arrived, the cleaning would be already done; the place had been swept and mopped and tidied up. He would have assumed that it was done at night, after closing time, except that when he got there, first thing in the morning, the dressing-room floor would still be wet from being mopped. And he was sure that Saturno was the one who opened up. That’s what he’d heard people say. But his puzzlement never lasted longer than the few minutes it took him to change and begin his exercise routine; once he was pumping, he thought about nothing else.
So he went into the gym and headed for the dressing room, but as he was walking past the little curved bar, something behind it caught his eye. It was Saturno, lying on the floor. Maxi dropped his bag and kneeled beside him, unsure what to do. The recumbent body was not quite still, indicating that Saturno was, at least, alive. “Don’t move him,” Maxi thought, remembering instructions that he had once heard; but he also remembered that those instructions applied to people injured in accidents, which didn’t seem to be the case here. Anyhow, he had to call an ambulance.
Looking more closely, he realized that the movement he had noticed was concentrated in Saturno’s lips: he must have been trying to speak. His eyes were closed. Maxi bent down but still couldn’t hear anything. Maybe the movements were twitches or spasms. Even so, he wanted to be sure, so he bent further down, turned his head and put his ear to the mouth of the fallen man. Then he did hear something: a few words or phrases that seemed very clear and distinct, but so faint that only someone with auditory superpowers could have understood them. It was like what happens when you have the impression that a switched-off radio is still transmitting, but even if you put your ear right into the speaker, you can’t hear a thing. Luckily, the gym was absolutely quiet, otherwise Maxi’s experiment would have failed straight away. He concentrated as hard as he could. Finally he recognized or thought he recognized a word:
“. . Maxi. .”
He recoiled and looked at Saturno in amazement. The barman’s face was still inert, except for the twitching of his lips. Maxi lowered his ear again, and resumed his concentration.
“. . don’t be scared, it’s nothing. It’s my heart again. Sit me up.”
“What?” He had meant to whisper, but it came out as a shout because he couldn’t control his thundering voice.
“Are you deaf or just pretending? Sit me up, I said.”
Maxi was so stunned he couldn’t react. A dialogue was possible, it seemed, but it was a dialogue with a dead man, whose voice was separated from his body. This impression was reinforced by the nature of Saturno’s command, because Maxi had always heard the verb “to sit” used intransitively, referring to a position that you adopt for yourself — “I sit,” “you sit,” “he sits” — and this “sit me up” sounded like an impossible cross between the first and second persons. In spite of which, he understood. But in order to understand he had to imagine the person who had spoken as dead and yet react as if he were alive. This reminded him of something that often happened at home. When his parents were watching TV chat shows with showbiz personalities, and some old actor came on, they would always say: I thought he was dead! Me too! I could have sworn he died ages ago! And even though the actor would be talking about his current work and projects for the future, they kept seeing him as a dead man, at once historical and forgotten, a ghost from their childhood or further back still, from the age of silent cinema or the traveling theaters of the nineteenth century. Maxi had no idea who these actors were, but he would get caught up in the parental reminiscing, and in the end they came to seem familiar.
He kept his ear to Saturno’s mouth. Not because he wasn’t convinced, but because he’d begun to enjoy it. But if he had to sit him up, that was what he had to do. The logical solution would have been to sit him on the floor and prop his back against the fridge; as well as being easy to do, it would have left him in a comfortable position. But Maxi didn’t think of that. Instead, he lifted Saturno up and sat him on the high stool behind the bar. His legs dangled, and since the stool had no back, Maxi had to keep hold of him. The barman’s body felt as heavy as a mass of solid lead. Maxi took Saturno’s hands and placed them on the bar, like a pianist’s hands on a keyboard.
“Shall I call an ambulance?”
He put his ear to Saturno’s mouth again. It was more awkward now.
“No, leave me like this. I’ll be right in a minute.”
Maxi tried letting him go, to see if he was stable. He had to shift him a few inches so that his center of gravity was in line with the middle of the stool, but then he stayed put. His eyes were still closed.
“I’ll get changed and come straight back,” Maxi said.
He picked up his bag and headed for the dressing room, but before going through the door, he turned to take a last look at Saturno. The bartender was still there, in exactly the same position, with his eyes closed. He looked very fragile, perched on that high stool, and was liable, Maxi had to admit, to fall at any moment. Saturno was a middle-aged man. Not old — he wouldn’t have been sixty — but jaded, worn down by a routine job and a pessimistic character. His life had not been happy. Starved of love, his heart was rebelling against its owner.
There are so many people like that! thought Maxi. Life feeds on life, it has no choice. Life stokes its furnace with life, but not with life in general; it burns the unique and particular life of the individual, and when there’s nothing left to feed to the flames, the fire goes out. And yet. . no one is alone in this. There are others, many, many others, each living his life or hers, and on it goes. The little voice that he had heard, so distant or rather. . so tiny — a miniature voice, a dollhouse voice, to be studied under a microscope — that little voice was conveying a message from another dimension. An echo, miniaturized by distance, but a distance that was neither spatial nor temporal. And yet that miniature interval could make all the difference in the world, as when a minute’s delay prevents an encounter that might have changed the course of a life. . In fact, thought Maxi, a marginal shift with respect to the time or the space of others — a minute, a second, a inch — could mean that you end up living in a different reality, where any kind of magic might be possible.