A drama occurred every time a new typist joined the office. She had never met any of the girls. She always said, “My place is at home. I’m not one of those women who follow their husbands around.” But she always managed, subtly, to extract descriptions of the typists from him, and she would agonize as she imagined them.
“Serves her right, losing seven files! All these girls who work with men, it’s because they’re looking for something. She had it coming. Now she’s seen that you’re a man of character.”
She placed the steaming soup on the table and served it.
“What’s her name?
He raised his head, his mouth full, the spoon motionless in midair.
“Who?”
“The typist.”
“Ah, Freixes.”
“No, I mean her first name.”
“Eulàlia or Elvira. I don’t know.”
“Is she very young?”
He swallowed the mouthful of soup.
“I think so.”
“What do you mean, ‘I think so?’ It must be obvious that either she’s young or she isn’t.”
“Oh, you know me, I don’t pay much attention.”
“Is she engaged?”
“I don’t know.”
She had only joined the office the week before, a little shy but candid. She had sat down in front of the typewriter and waited to be given work. The next day she took one of the drinking glasses, filled it with water, and placed some violets in it. By the third day she was laughing.
While he was drinking his coffee, his wife entered the boy’s room and came out immediately.
“He’s sleeping like an angel. Better not to disturb him. You’ll see him this evening. Come home early, you hear me?”
What a beast I was. Such a young girl, probably not yet twenty, I shouldn’t have said. . her hair’s like silk and when she laughs. . I shouldn’t have said anything.
He decided to walk back to work; he didn’t feel like talking to Senyor Comes.
It’s curious. I’ve walked along this street for years, yet today it all seems new. He noticed a shop window with crisp curtains, a budding rosebush by the gate to a house, some blades of fresh grass springing up between two slabs of pavement. Beyond the hedge of boxwood shrubs at the Tennis Club he could hear two girls chattering; they must have been standing right there. He stopped for a moment in front of the Garatge Internacionaclass="underline" “Important things are taking place in Barcelona now, no doubt about it.” A wave of youthfulness surged through him.
There was a flower shop near the office. He deliberated for a moment, then with an effort to overcome his embarrassment he strode in with resolve. He bought a bouquet of tiny roses surrounded by green, russet-tipped leaves.
“They look like porcelain,” the florist said kindly.
Standing on the stairs to his office, he wrapped the bouquet in a newspaper. When no one was looking, he would throw away the violets, change the water, and place the roses in the vase. Perhaps. . Perhaps in the afternoon he would say: “Elvira, would you like for the two of us to go out this evening?” He could already imagine the color of the sky, the evening’s perfume.
NOCTURNAL
A plaintive moan filled the room. It continued for a while before suddenly dying, as if it had passed through the walls. It sounded like a whimper from a wounded animal that had not yet lost any blood or energy. The dense silence again invaded everything. A moment later a body moved beneath the sheets as if, rather than a moan, the mysterious echo of a moan had awoken him from a deep sleep. The meowing of a cat on the stairs rose in tone and volume, becoming sharp and urgent. Another moan silenced the cat. A shadow jumped out of the bed, followed by an arpeggio of springs. The sound of bare feet on the floor, two or three coughs, a switch being flipped, and the room was flooded with light.
The man who had turned on the light returned to the bed, racked with worry, and asked: “Are you saying it’s time?” The tiny kitchen, just three meters away, had permeated the sheets with the smell of boiled vegetables and a sauce of tomato and onion. A tired voice rose from beneath the sheets: “First put some water on to boil, then go knock on the druggist’s door and ask if he’ll let you phone the doctor.” She looks so pale, the man thought to himself. He had never seen her so pale, with such sunken eyes. On the stairs the cat resumed, his meows filled with desire. Order, order, order, he told himself, in an attempt to stop the trembling in his hands. He wished he could control them. He used half a dozen matches before he could finally light the gas stove. By the time the orange-blue flame ignited, the atmosphere was unbreathable. I should have turned on the gas after I lit the match, not before. Using a blue jug he filled a pot with water and placed it on the stove.
“Maybe you should open the window a moment.” Another moan followed. He walked over to his wife, took her hands to encourage her. He didn’t know what to say. She looked anxiously at him, her face covered with drops of sweat. “Four children.” He could feel how tense her hands were. “At our age,” she stammered. All of a sudden, he felt the need to move more quickly: open the door, run down the stairs, knock on the druggist’s door, pick up the telephone, and implore the doctor to come right away. But he didn’t budge. It was almost as if the three children in his life were holding him back. One in Madrid, a member of Franco’s Falange party; another a left-wing exile in Mexico; the third — a daughter — in Reggio, seduced by an Italian officer. My interior contradictions expressed in the flesh, he often thought. The last child now eighteen and the fourth about to be born. A feeling of anguish, the kind that precedes nausea, ran though his body. He felt grotesque. During the day, the gas flow was gentle, but now, in the heart of night, it streamed out, making a buzzing sound. The straight flames reached up the sides of the pot, wavered, creating blue reflections. The water was beginning to rumble. Coat, stairs, telephone. . order, order, order. “I’m going now. I’ll be right back,” he said, but before leaving he went over to the table and cleared away his books and papers. The Terrible Consequences of Truth. He had been a geography teacher in a lycée in Barcelona before going into exile, where he had begun writing. When he got off work — he was a dish dryer in an exclusive restaurant — he would surround himself with books and submerge himself in his writing. When he resurfaced he felt entranced. The original title of the book was The Terrible Consequences of the Desire to be Truthful. But then he had decided on the other. Truth as the dissolution of all human relations. Truth as the negation of all authentic values. Salvation achieved through systematic deception, applied with a radical spirit, could be transformed into truth. Man could become truthful by means of a lie, in a way that was more real than sincerity. These somewhat confusing ideas nevertheless possessed a coherence: “Order, order, order.” His rather verbose study had led to another, entitled “Toward Freedom by Means of Dissimulation.” I simulate ergo I am free. This was the point of departure for his thesis. “Order, order, order.” He cleared away his papers and books, put his coat on over his pajamas, walked over to the bed, glanced sadly at his wife, and went out onto the landing.
The stairs gave off a sickening stench of garbage, the sour odor of something rotten. He felt his way down the stairway in the dark. To save electricity the light hadn’t been turned on since the war began. The wooden steps were worn and creaked beneath his feet. The silence of night made the creaking resound, much more than during the day, when children and neighbors coming and going filled the stairs with life and a noisy bustle. “This is what France is,” a Frenchman had told him once. “Not Paris or the luxury of the few. But unhygienic houses, streams of dirty water in the streets, water closets — a euphemism — under the stairs at the entrances to buildings, for the use of neighbors and passers-by, chamber pots. . running water a luxury. Voilà.”