"What's wrong with them?"
"They're weird. They're…" And she let the stigmatizing adjective slip out: "unknown."
When they'd gotten to that point, Sr. Adria opened the door of the apartment and waited impatiently for the buttocks of Andromache from the Cambridge edition to step onto the landing.
"Maybe I'll explain it to you someday," he said as she was descending, posing as Raquel for a few steps. When Victoria turned, hopeful, the door had already silently closed.
For a few days Victoria thought that Sr. Adria would never explain the why of those books, and that made her frustrated, she who considered herself to be somewhat cultured, with fairly good English and a little French and a high pass on the college entrance exam. In any case, when she left work, she made a point to forget all about Sr. Adria, since the thing she really wanted to find out was why Toni was at Lourdes's house every Monday, if according to him he didn't even know her, and how Lourdes, who claimed to be her friend, could do something like that to her. If anything was going on, which she couldn't be sure of. Or why her mother kept getting sadder and sadder. Sr. Adria could go to hell, when she wasn't there. But she thought about him.
Six hundred twelve books later, Victoria was able to verify that Sr. Adria had learned to be even stingier with words, and he didn't mention the conversation on the landing even once, and she admired him more and loved him in an open but intangible way. They had begun, with various quotes, some three or four thousand new cards, which he went over patiently on Saturday mornings as if he intended to memorize them. Saturday and Sunday were his favorite days because he was alone in the house, without Victoria's unpredictable presence. During this period of books, she, making an effort to get to know him better, had tried to find out how long it had been since the last time he went to the movies or the theater, how long it had been since he was in a bar, and important things like that. As a result, she was slipping a few points in his ranking. And because they didn't talk, Sr. Adria had no way of knowing that Victoria's wedding had been postponed a couple of times: the first time because the explanations for the presence of Lourdes in Toni's house hadn't been satisfactory at all and the second, once they'd made up, because of her mother's sudden death. In fact, because of not knowing, Sr. Adria didn't even know that Victoria had a boyfriend. But now he looked more insistently at Andromache's buttocks and had begun to notice, with surprise, Ariadne's breasts. Victoria had a prominent and well-structured bust, which he'd always ignored. But all that dust, all that going up ladders next to Sr. Adria, all those cards, all that leaning over the paragraph he was pointing out with his finger, had ended up making Ariadne's breasts available for observation, and he imagined that he was Ponquiello about to caress the torso of the shepherdess Fida in Pastorale by Campdessus (Anvers, 1902).
One stifling day, Sr. Adria fell ill. Sr. Adria, in bed, in pink pajamas. This was certainly a novelty. He almost seemed to be a different man, except that he had five or six books spread out on his wide bachelor's bed. Had his beard gotten whiter? Maybe it was because of the light. Sr. Adria invited her to sit on the side of the bed, because now there would be time to do cards. And he stuck out his arm for a few seconds, in silence, and then said, Don't get too close, 1 don't want you to catch anything. Just like Toni, she thought, the day he had a little cold he spent the whole afternoon telling her to get in bed with him, to help him warm up because he was freezing.
She could only remember one time she'd felt sick at Sr. Adria's house. She was up on the tall ladder, dusting BALTIC NOVEL, 19th cent., and thinking that what connected her to Sr. Adria was an intangible link. This moved her so much that her hand froze above the spine of a little book by Lautanias and she was overcome with dizziness. Sr. Adria, who officially was reading Cobra by Marcel Gibert (Montreal, 1920), was observant enough to notice the girl's hesitation and to keep her from falling, practically by grabbing her. He made her lie down on the sofa, fixed her tea, and ordered her to take a taxi and not come back until the next day. In fact, the fainting had been produced not by the discovery of an invisible link between two noble souls, but by getting her period all of a sudden. She spent two days in bed with a hot water bottle on her stomach, and Toni didn't even drop by because he said she looked so weak that it killed him, he couldn't take things like that. In fact, he had tickets to a basketball final. He went with Lourdes, 1 think. What a difference: Toni didn't have pink pajamas. He didn't wear pajamas.
"Do you know why?" asked Sr. Adria from inside his pink pajamas, taking up the conversation that had foundered on the landing six hundred and twelve books ago.
"No. 1 have no idea."
"Because I'm searching for wisdom… Because wisdom is shy and it likes to throw up smokescreens so people will leave it in peace. 1 pursue the unknown wisdom that always hides…"
"Where?"
He had fallen silent, his mouth open. For at that moment, laid low by fever, he had become aware of Victoria's real presence, as if a goddess had been sitting on the side of his bed for the last two centuries. And he started thinking she was beautiful, because her eyes had sparkled with curiosity as intensely as if they were wellcut diamonds. Sitting on the bed, her head bent towards him, her body turned sideways, emphasizing her splendid bust and the curve of her hips. He'd read over and over that there's an age at which everything comes together, when life seems pleased with you and all things enhance your beauty, for example in Guinizzelli's song in 11 ragno e la farfalla (Milan, 18oo). Victoria was at that age. Sr. Adria tried to concentrate.
"In apparent mediocrity. Look."
He picked up one of the books on the bed and she, reacting professionally, couldn't help but notice that there was a dark patina of ancient dust on the front cover. It was Pauvre Dido by Abbe Renouaud.
"An epico-lyric poem made up of three thousand alexandrines."
"Is it good?"
"It's terrible." He opened it thoughtfully. "No matter how you look at it, it's awful."
"So why do you waste your time reading it?"
"And what's a good use of time, do you think? Going to the movies with your boyfriend?"
He said the thing about her boyfriend for rhythmic reasons, so as not to end the question too abruptly, not because he thought that a virgin like Andromache was interested in sexual matters. And he heard himself say, without meaning to: "Because you have a boyfriend, right?"
"Yes, sure."
So what did you think? That Ariadne wandered through the world alone, desolate, virginal, trembling at the memory of Theseus?
"Going to the movies with your boyfriend is a good use of time for you?"
"I don't know. But you said that Pauvre Dido is a terrible poem…
"Worse than terrible. But 1 didn't say that I'm wasting my time by reading it. What's your boyfriend's name?"
"Toni. He's an EMT, an emergency medical technician."
Envy has changed the world; it has moved crowns from one head to another and taken heads from bodies. They say that, at bottom, Macbeth and his wife were moved not by ambition but by envy. Envy has made the rich unhappy, the poor wicked and the apathetic sinful. Envy has stirred up the basest passions and has affected every human activity, as demonstrated by Saint Alonso Rodriguez S.J. and documented in Leven, doorluchtige Denghden ende Godturchtige Offeninghen von Alphonsus Rodriguez by L.Jacobi S.J. (Antwerp, 1659). Despite these recorded precedents, for the first time in his life Sr. Adria felt envy. Envy that was dark, hard, twisted, acid, cruel, bitter — the same adjectives that Clemenceau used to describe Virginie's rage in Terre de Feu (Orleans, 1922) when he discovers that the boat with Colette on board has just left. Envy because when Toni caressed his Dido from top to bottom, his fingers came away, in the words of Anuat lbn Al Bakkar (Trois gazelles, Paris, 1858), filled with dahlias and scented roses. He too could go over poor Dido from top to bottom as many times as he wanted. But his fingers came away dark, blackened by the accumulated dust. And Sr. Adria wished to be Toni the EMT.