Then Wheeler stopped playing. I saw him tense his jaw, I noticed him clenching his teeth, lining up top teeth with bottom teeth, like someone summoning up enough composure so that his voice won't break when he speaks again.
Ah…'he said. 'Do you mind if I tell you another day. If that's all right.' He seemed to be asking me a favour, every word was painful.
I did not insist. It occurred to me to whistle the melody I had just heard on the piano, a particularly catchy tune, to see if I could dissipate the mists that had suddenly wrapped about him. But I still had to answer him, silence here was not a reply.
'Of course,' I said. 'Tell me about it when you want to, and if you don't want to tell me, don't.'
Then I began my whistling. I know how infectious whistling is, and so it turned out: Wheeler immediately joined in, probably without even thinking about it; no wonder he knew the piece by heart, he probably played it too. Then he suddenly stopped short and said:
'One shouldn't really ever tell anyone anything.'
Wheeler said this standing up, as soon as he got to his feet, and I immediately followed suit. He grasped my elbow, held on to me to recover his strength. Mrs Berry was waving to us from the window. The music had stopped, and now all that could be heard was our whistling, thin and out of time, as we turned our backs on the river and walked up to the house.
, It was still raining and I had not yet grown tired of watching it from my window overlooking the square, it was a steady, comfortable rain, so strong and sustained that it alone seemed to light up the night with its continuous threads like flexible metal bars or endless spears, it was as if it were driving out the night forever and discounting the possibility of any other weather ever appearing in the sky, or even the possibility of its own absence, just like peace when there is peace and like war when war is all that exists. My dancing neighbour opposite had performed a few ridiculous square dances with his partner, such anodyne moves and measured steps after the machine-gun fire of those Gaelic feet, and both had put on cowboy hats for this disappointing end-of-party dance, the mad or very fortunate fools. They had just turned out the lights and, given the rain, the mulatto woman would surely be staying the night, but before I could sit thinking warmly of her for a while, I had to be sure, and so for a few minutes, I looked down, beyond the trees and the statue, I watched the square in the unlikely event that she would emerge and leave. And it was then that I saw the two figures coming towards my front door, the woman and the dog, she with her umbrella covering her, and the dog, uncovered, wandering here and there – tis tis tis. As they approached the front of the building, they almost entirely disappeared from my field of vision, by the time they stopped at the door, they were immediately below me, and I could see only a fragment of the cupola of the open umbrella. The bell rang, the downstairs bell. I again looked vainly out for a second, with the window open, leaning out, bending over (my neck and back got wet), before going to pick up the entry-phone: everything except that fragment of curved cloth remained outside my perpendicular line of sight. I picked up the phone. 'Yes?' I said in English, a literal translation from my own language in which I had been thinking, and it was in Spanish that the other person spoke to me: Jaime, soy yo,' – 'Jaime, it's me' – said a female voice. 'Can you open the door, please? I know it's a bit late, but I must talk to you. It'll only take a moment.'
The kind of people who, on the phone or at the door, say simply 'It's me' and don't even bother to give their name are those who forget that 'me' is never anyone, but they are also those who are quite sure of occupying a great deal or a fair part of the thoughts of the person they're looking for. Or else they have no doubt that they will be recognised with no need to say more – who else would it be – from the first word and the first moment. And the woman with the dog was right about this, even if only unconsciously and without having stopped to think about it. Because I did recognise her voice, and I opened the front door for her from upstairs without wondering why she was entering my house that night and coming upstairs to speak to me.
Javier Marias
