“If you’re waiting for the train, you’ve got a while yet. No express train passes through till the early morning.”
He lit a cigarette and held up the match to her face.
“You the girl from this afternoon? If you stay out in this damp, you’ll be full of aches and pains.”
On the other side of the river the sky had turned dark orange, as if burnished by the air. Higher up, it was a dense black velvet. The motor in the distance was beginning to sound tired.
“Me? It got me in the knee.”
In the flickering flame of the match, his eyes looked shiny and pale, his beard and mustache white. His cigarette shook. He removed it from his lips, glanced at it to see if it were lit, and tossed the match away. It circled as it fell, blazing for an instant in the grass. An impenetrable darkness separated them.
“You better be getting home. That baby of yours must be having a screaming fit, what with you here. You think I don’t know what you’re waiting for?”
The old man took a few steps and disappeared. The moon rose, round, blood red, like a large red-hot metal disk on the point of disappearing, sharply defined, ripe, dead. The frame of the bridge turned blacker as it emerged from the shadows. The river flowed with a russet shimmer.
Her chest hurt; it felt like it would burst. She slipped a hand under her blouse. Her breasts were hard as rock and her handkerchief soaking wet. The wind had cleansed the night, and the moon had scattered phosphorescent pink dust across the sky. A moment before there had been only a great wall of darkness, but now it had grown transparent. Dark shadowy objects materialized, and the insidious sounds of the night became audible. A piercing anguish overcame her, causing her to moan. Her pulse throbbed. The sporadic sound of wings came from a nearby low-lying shrub. The shadows, the glimmering water, the muted sound of animals in the grass, the pink lakes in the sky — everything seemed like incomprehensible signs meant for someone else. Like the cries of the man at the arbor, the taste of the wine, the rose petals that fell onto the table. Like the strange words of the old man. Signs from some other place. She propped an elbow on the ground and leaned forward. A violent shudder ran up her arm, and her eyes bulged. She bit her hand with rage. She heard a splash, sharper than before. There are fish that jump and fish that devour. Where was she now? A tiny shape at the bottom of the river, surrounded by swift, silent shadows that approach, causing a ripple, halt for an instant, then move away. The current must have swept her downstream. But the rock was large. If her breasts didn’t hurt so much, she might still be able to rest, lie down, rest. With great difficulty she stood up, panting. She felt as if her legs had turned to soft clay that only hardened little by little. When she reached the edge of the water, a branch scratched her hand. She tore some leaves from the shrub, then frantically closed her palm. It burned, as if she had hurt herself. Her feet sank into the mud, the cold water climbing up her legs, driving them forward, like a slow wind, glacial and thick. A black nightmarish wind. She hesitated a moment. A dreadful terror quickened her breathing, and a muscle tightened around her neck like a rope. She took two more steps. An icy tongue licked her stomach and breasts. Then the water carried her away. For a moment she thrashed about, her mouth and eyes closed. Above her she could feel something closing, forever. Water, cold, shadow. All at once she ceased struggling.
THE BEGINNING
He couldn’t have told you how he had gotten the ink stain. As he waited for the tram, he glanced down at his trousers in despair. They were his only reasonably decent ones. There were three spots of blue-black ink on the right knee, two small ones and one the size of a cherry. No, much larger than a cherry. As large as what? An apple, he thought anxiously. The trousers were the color of café amb llet, and as the ink dried, the spot turned darker and seemed to spread.
“So, I see you stained your trousers?”
Senyor Comes was an old acquaintance. They rode the tram together in the morning and afternoon.
“You should have put water on it right away. There’s nothing that stains quite like ink. I had to have some trousers dyed once. Maybe they weren’t as light as the ones you’re wearing, but even so, there was no other solution.”
He wasn’t listening. All he could still see were Senyoreta Freixes’s eyes. She was the typist. He had been so irritated when she lost the files, seven files, that he had snapped at her: “Nothing depresses me as much as having to work with imbeciles.” She had looked at him in surprise, her eyes welling up. “Oh!” was the only thing she had mustered the courage to stammer.
“Here it comes.”
The obese and cordial Senyor Comes had gestured at the tram with his head. It was crowded, and people were huddled on the running board. As always, Senyor Comes was the first on. It was a specialty of his, elbowing his way through, using his belly, his childlike smile. No one protested.
The tram started with a jerk. Houses, windows, balconies drifted past. The Garatge Internacional, the Cooperative, the Tennis Club. Everything passed in the same order as each day, fated, draining. The tram emptied out slightly, and they sat down.
“I’ve already bought the ticket,” Senyor Comes said with a mysterious air, giving his friend a little slap on the thigh.
Once a month, for close to five years, they had bought and shared a lottery ticket. They had never won anything, but every month Senyor Comes would say to him with a smile, “We’re getting closer.”
When Senyor Comes noticed his friend reaching for his pocket, he stopped him. “Don’t bother. We’ll work it out at the first of the month. How’s the boy doing?”
“The boy? Better, thanks.”
When he reached home he headed straight to the dining room. The sun streaming in from the gallery made the furniture look older, the corners more dusty, the curtains grayer. Everything looked aged, had lost its freshness.
He wife moved back and forth to the kitchen. She had just set the table. She had gained weight. He kissed her perfunctorily on the forehead, sat down, and opened the newspaper.
“What did you do to your trousers? What’s that!”
“I know. . Senyor Comes said the only solution was to have them dyed.”
“Everything always happens at the same time. Why this month, when we have the boy’s medicine and the doctor?”
“How’s he doing? Anything new?”
“No. Doctor Martí says tomorrow we can let him get up. But, what is it with you?”
Here we go. She’s realized something’s troubling me. His wife’s knack for grasping his moods had seemed like a blessing when they were courting. It had been reassuring to feel himself understood, to know she could read his state of mind, anticipate it, and he could say, “I’m feeling down, though I don’t really know why. Maybe I’m just worried about the exams.” But more and more that infallible intuition of hers caused him anguish. He felt naked, defenseless. He would have wished to have a bit of a secret life. The thing that most irritated him was that he would begin explaining everything he didn’t want to disclose at her slightest allusion. Occasionally he would decide to keep quiet, his silence an act of discipline, but his will always faltered. He was incapable of keeping anything from her.
“Something upset me this morning. That’s how I got the ink stains. I got nervous and knocked over the ink pot.”
He explained to her about the seven lost files.
“I said every disagreeable thing one can say to a person.”
He saw her face light up. Her large eyes, usually expressionless, shone, and her tallowy, rather sunken cheeks turned rosy. His wife had the thin lips of a blunt, worried person.