Once he’s got the general outline of the work designed, Álvaro writes an initial draft. He aspires to construct a mechanism that works like clockwork: nothing must be left to chance. He makes a file on each of his characters in which he meticulously records the course of their hesitations, nostalgia, thoughts, attitudes, fluctuations, desires and errors. He soon realizes it is essential — although most arduous — to suggest the process of osmosis by which, mysteriously, the writing of the novel that so absorbs the protagonist modifies the lives of his neighbours to such an extent that it is in some way responsible for the crime they commit. Voluntarily or involuntarily, dragged by his creative fanaticism or by his mere thoughtlessness, the author is responsible for not having realized in time, for not having been able or willing to prevent that death.
Álvaro immerses himself in his work. His characters accompany him everywhere: they work with him, walk, sleep, urinate, drink, dream, sit in front of the television and breathe with him. He fills hundreds of pages with observations, notes, episodes, corrections, descriptions of his characters and their surroundings. The files get more and more voluminous. When he thinks he has a sufficient quantity of material, he undertakes to write the first version of the novel.
III
The day Álvaro was going to start writing the novel he got up, as usual, at eight on the dot. He took a cold shower and, when he was about to leave the house — the door was half-open and he grasped the doorknob in his left hand — he hesitated, as if he’d forgotten something or as if the wing of a bird had brushed his forehead.
He left. The clean, sweet light of early spring filled the street. He went into the supermarket, which at that hour appeared almost deserted. He bought milk, bread, half a dozen eggs and a bit of fruit. As he joined the tiny line by the cash register, his attention fell on the slight, unpleasant-looking old man in front of him. It was Señor Montero. Señor Montero lived in an apartment on the top floor of the building where Álvaro lived, but up till then their relationship had been confined to customary salutations and uncomfortable lift silences. As the old man set his items on the counter so the woman at the till could punch them in, Álvaro considered his stature, the slight curve of his body, his hands scored with thick veins, his evasive brow, wilful jaw and difficult profile. When it was his turn at the checkout, Álvaro urged the woman to hurry, put his purchases in plastic bags, left the supermarket, ran down the sunny street and arrived panting at the door. The old man was waiting for the lift.
‘Good morning,’ said Álvaro with the most encompassing and friendly voice he could muster while trying to hide his rapid breathing.
The old man responded with a grunt. There was silence.
The lift arrived. They stepped in. Álvaro commented, as if thinking aloud, ‘What a beautiful morning! You can really tell spring’s arrived, can’t you?’ and gave the old man a wink of perfectly superfluous complicity, which was received with the barest hint of a smile, a tiny wrinkling of his forehead and a slight clearing of the darkness from his brow. But he immediately enclosed himself back into surly silence.
When he got home, Álvaro was convinced that the old man from the top-floor apartment was the ideal model for the old man in his novel. His edgy silence, his slightly humiliating decrepitude, his physical appearance: it all tallied with the attributes his character required. He thought: This will simplify things. Obviously reflecting a real model in his work would make it much easier to endow the fictional character with a believable, effective incarnation. He could simply use the features and attitudes of the chosen individual as props, thus avoiding the risks of an imaginary somersault into the void, which could promise only dubious results. He would have to become thoroughly informed, about Señor Montero’s past and present life, all his activities, sources of income, relatives and friends. No detail was unimportant. Everything could contribute to enriching and constructing his character — sufficiently altered or distorted — in the fiction. And if it was true that the reader should do without many of these details — which, therefore, there was no reason to include in the novel — it was no less true that Álvaro was interested in all of them, given that in his judgement they constituted the basis for the precarious and subtle balance between coherence and incoherence on which a character’s believability is founded and that supports the incorruptible impression of reality produced by real individuals. From these considerations naturally followed the expediency of finding a couple who, for the same reasons, might serve as a model for the innocently criminal couple in his novel. Here it would be necessary to obtain the greatest possible quality of information on their life. Proximity to this couple would enormously simplify his work, because then he could not only observe them in more detail and more continuously, but also, with a bit of luck, he might be able to manage to listen in on conversations and even hypothetical marital disputes. He might then be able to reflect these in the novel with a high degree of verisimilitude, in greater detail and with more ease and vigour. The conversations of his immediate neighbours (those in the apartment above his own and those who lived next door on the same floor) filtered through the thin walls of his apartment, but only reached his ears dimly or during moments when silence reigned in the building or when the shouts of his neighbours rose above the general murmuring. All this put in doubt the very possibility of carrying out any espionage.
There was yet another inconvenience: Álvaro hardly knew any of his neighbours in the building. And of the three apartments that he might have had a chance to spy on — being adjacent to his — at least two could be discarded out of hand. In one of them lived a young journalist with a face covered in boils who, with nocturnal assiduity and undeclared intentions, interrupted him regularly to ask for untimely cups of sugar or flour. Another apartment had remained empty since a widowed mother and her unmarried grown-up daughter, in love with her dog, had moved out about five months earlier, without paying their rent. Therefore, only one apartment could possibly house a married couple that might meet the demands of his novel.
Then he remembered the little ventilation window, in the bathroom of his apartment, which opened on to the building’s narrow courtyard. Many times, when answering the call of nature, he had overheard his neighbours’ conversations, which came in clearly through the open window. So, in taking advantage of this new resource, not only would the task of spying be simplified and the listening difficulties reduced, but the pool of available candidates would increase, given that he’d have the chance to hear the conversations of all the tenants on his floor. Apart from the apartment left vacant by the two women, the other four were all occupied. And it was not impossible that in one of them might live a couple who, to a greater or lesser degree, might bend to the demands of his fictional couple. He just needed to seek information and, once he had chosen the hypothetical model, devote all his attention to them.