Staying for dinner was the most natural thing in the world; also, at that hour of the night, the least reasonable. Rebeca had leaned out of the living room window (calling Enrique, with a mixture of authority and tenderness, she'd included me without mentioning me); and as soon as the old man took my arm to climb the stairs, and a whiff of sawdust and animal sweat reached my face, I thought that accepting the invitation would be reckless, because after dinner it would be too late to return to Bogota-that was obvious-but perhaps I could find a hotel. And then my head decided to do what it so often does: pretend it hadn't heard these last ideas. Curiosity, and the satisfaction of my curiosity, wasn't taking orders from any kind of cheap good sense (the danger of the road at night, the risk of not finding a room). I wanted to keep seeing, keep hearing, even when what I saw and heard during the meal was the elaborate accumulation of normality I'd expected. But nothing was normal in this man, I thought, and one would have to be especially dim not to notice that: this normal life, the prudent and bland happiness of his old age, was marred from within-I won't say poisoned, although that was the first word that occurred to me-and under the table with its lace tablecloth, and above the unbreakable plates on which the food looked like another decoration, moved the facts, the nasty facts, the facts that don't change even if everything else changes. Enrique wasn't from here; he'd fled here; by surname and by nature, though not by soil, Enrique was a foreigner. None of which prevented him from requesting with each of his gestures: be nice to them, forgive the triviality of their lives, their insignificance. And that's why watching him lift his fork to his mouth was fascinating: Enrique lifted a mound of ground beef, chewed a piece of onion, washed it down with a sip of lulo juice, smiled at Rebeca and took her hand, made banal remarks as she replied with equally banal ones, and for me it was as if they were reciting the Book of Revelation. If I blink, I'll miss a verse; if I go to the bathroom, I'll miss a whole chapter.
Sergio hadn't stayed for dinner. The disdain he felt for me (for my father, whose name I shared, for my dishonest book) had been so obvious that his parents didn't even insist when he began to say good-bye, without giving himself time to make up an excuse, and in two shakes he'd grabbed the jacket of his tracksuit and was gone. "His girlfriend's an artist, like you," said Rebeca. "She paints. She paints fruit, landscapes, you know better than I do what they call those pictures. They sell them on Sundays at Unicentro. Sergio's as proud as a peacock." While Rebeca prepared herbal tea for after the meal, Enrique went downstairs by himself to smoke a cigarette, just as he'd done, as I learned, every night for the last thirty years. "Habit's stronger than he is. If he doesn't do the same thing at the same time, his day's ruined. Like your dad." She looked at me as she said this; she didn't wink at me, but she might just as well have done. "You can't imagine what it was like watching him read your book, Gabriel. He'd suddenly close it and say, He's like me, Rebeca, Gabriel's like me. How funny. Or sometimes he'd say just the opposite: Just look at him, he's still such a bastard, look how he behaves."
"You never met him, did you?"
I already knew the answer, but I wanted her to confirm it.
"No, that one didn't want me to meet him," she said, pursing her lips, kissing the air in the direction of her husband. "He hid me away as if I had chicken pox, you know? The feeble one of the house. Look," she went on after a pause, "don't you take the blame for things he did, it's not fair. You forget that, you live your life." She wiped her hands on her apron and gave me an affectionate pat. It was the first time she'd touched me with her hand (that moment is always memorable). "You don't mind my meddling?"
"Of course not."
"Good, because that's how I am. Nothing I can do about it."
When Enrique came back up, I'd finished my tea and Rebeca had put the Yellow Pages (a brick of newsprint with card covers, the spine scratched, the corners bent with use) on my lap. "What's going on?" asked Enrique when he came in. "He wants to look for a hotel," said Rebeca. "Oh," he said, as if the idea of my leaving had never crossed his mind. "A hotel, right." I called the Intercontinental, although it was a bit expensive, because it was more likely I'd find a room available at this hour. I made the reservation, gave my credit card number, and when I hung up asked my hosts how to get there from where we were. "I'm going to draw you a little map," said Rebeca. "You have to cross the city," and she got down to work, biting her tongue while she drew streets and numbers and arrows on a piece of squared paper, putting all her weight onto the felt-tip pen. Enrique said to me, "Come here, I want to show you something while she finishes that. The poor dear takes her time with these things."
He took me to their room. It was a narrow space, so much so that there was only one bedside table; on the other side of the bed, the matching table wouldn't have fit (or it would have blocked the closet door, an unpainted particleboard, chip so flat and plain that it made me think of cartoon shipwrecks). In one corner, on a sort of drinks trolley that could be moved away from or near the bed, adjusted to the whims or myopia of old age, was a television, an old set with imitation wood grain, and on top of the television was a desk calendar with pictures of Paso Fino horses. I saw that the bedside table was Rebeca's dominion, even though the photo beneath the lamp was not of her husband, as matrimonial bedsides theoretically required, but of herself, somewhat younger but already without a trace of red left in her hair: the photo would be ten or fifteen years old, and had been taken beside a small swimming pool that didn't look too clean. "That's in Santa Fe de Antioquia," Enrique told me, as he took out of the drawer what at first appeared to be a photo album and turned out to be a ring binder. "We go every December. Some friends rent us their house." He opened the rings of the binder and took out a few pages, which weren't pages but plastic sleeves that contained the pages (or photographs, or cuttings), protected from sweaty fingers and the humidity of the atmosphere. "You already know this, although you don't know you know it," Enrique said to me. What was inside the sleeve was a typewritten, formal letter, without a single correction; to make out the letters I had to press the tip of my index finger against the plastic, and I felt like a child learning the difficult habit of following a line, interpreting it, connecting it to the next one.