I spent the spring, summer and autumn in this dead-end tightrope-walking state, and it wasn't until one night at the beginning of last winter that, thanks to the providential alliance of a disagreeable incident, a chance discovery and a revived memory, I suddenly had a flicker of a hint that I wasn't condemned to endure forever the underground life I'd been leading for months. It all started in Tabu, a nightclub on the lower part of the Rambla frequented by tourists, who go there to see local porn shows at an affordable price. It's a dark and threadbare place, with a bar off at an angle to the right of the entrance and a stage surrounded by metal tables and chairs with silvery sequined lampshades suspended above them, to the left of which a curtain hides the booths reserved for paying couples. I'dalready been there a couple of times, always very late, and, as I'd done on my previous visits, that night I ordered a whisky from the slight, old woman plastered in makeup who seemed to be in charge of the place and who stayed at one end of the bar, drinking and smoking and watching the show from a distance. It must have been a weekday, because although among the clients there was a conspicuous group of loud, frenzied youths fraternizing effusively with the artistes and climbing up on stage as soon as they hinted at it, the rest of the bar was almost deserted, and there were only two couples leaning on the bar not far from me: one halfway down, the other a bit further along. I'd already had my first whisky and was just about to order a second when, just as a naked woman began fellating a man dressed as a Roman soldier on stage, I felt something abnormal was going on beside me; I turned and saw that the couple halfway down the bar were arguing violently. I'm lying: I didn't see that;what I saw, in a few flashing seconds of stupefaction, was that the man and the woman were shouting at each other wildly, the man slapped the woman across the face, the woman tried unsuccessfully to retaliate in kind, and, seized by a blind fury, the man began to hit the woman, and he kept hitting her and hitting her until he knocked her to the floor, from where she tried to defend herself with tears, insults, punches and kicks. I also saw the couple that were further down the bar move away from the scene, fascinated and terrified; the volume of the music prevented the audience over by the stage from noticing the fight, and the only person who seemed determined to stop it, shouting herself hoarse behind the bar, was the old woman who ran the place. As for me, I stood stock-still, paralyzed, watching the fight with my empty whisky glass gripped tightly in my fist, until, undoubtedly alerted by the manager, two bouncers appeared, subdued the aggressor with quite a bit of difficulty and took him outside with one arm twisted up behind his back, while the manager took the girl backstage escorted by other prostitutes. It was also the manager who, once she was back in the room, took care of calming the worries of a clientele who, for the most part, had seen only a confusing glimpse of the end of the altercation, and it was also she who, after making sure the show was going on, as she passed me on her way back behind the bar, spat out without even looking at me, as if I were a regular customer and she could give vent to the accumulated tension with me: 'And you could have done something too, don't you think?'
I didn't say anything; I didn't order a second whisky; I left the place. Outside it was bone-chillingly cold. I went up the Rambla towards the plaza de Catalunya and, as soon as I saw an open bar, went in and ordered the whisky I hadn't dared order in Tabu. I downed it in a couple of hurried gulps and ordered another. Comforted by the alcohol, I reflected on what had just happened. I wondered what state the woman was in, since at the last moment she'd stopped resisting her aggressor's kicks and lay defenceless on the floor, exhausted or maybe unconscious. I told myself that, had it not been for the last-minute intervention of the two bouncers, there was nothing to indicate that the man would have stopped beating his victim until he ran out of steam or killed her. I didn't ask myself, however, what the manager of the place had asked me — why had I done nothing to stop the fight — I didn't ask myself because I knew — out of fear, maybe out of indifference, and even out of a shadow of cruelty — it's possible that some part of me had enjoyed that spectacle of pain and fury, and that same part wouldn't have minded if it had gone on. That was when, as if emerging from a centuries-old chasm, I remembered a parallel and reverse scene to the one I'd just witnessed in Tabu, a scene that happened more than thirty years before in a bar in a distant city I'd never seen. There, some place in Saigon, my friend Rodney had defended a Vietnamese waitress from the boozed-up brutality of a Green Beret NCO; he hadn't been indifferent or crueclass="underline" he'd overcome his fear and his courage hadn't failed him. Exactly what I hadn't done a few minutes earlier. More than shame for my cowardice, my cruelty and my indifference, I felt surprise at the fact of remembering Rodney at precisely that moment, when it had been almost two years since I'd forgotten him.