B0040702LQ EBOK (49 page)

Perhaps that is why he said nothing when, with much armwaving, they relieved him of a pearl necklace, a film projector,
a few packets of American cigarettes and a bundle of German
marks. By then, he could only speak to me; his life belonged
to me, but I could not enter the Customs area. When the
formalities were over, I approached him; he was crumpling up
the receipt for the confiscated items and putting it in the
pocket of that large camel hair overcoat that attracted the
attention of the station employees and the police. Even the
soldiers on station detail turned to look at him. I will have to
get rid of that overcoat. When I thought that, I went cold.

We sat down for a while in the station cafe. He confessed
that he had eaten nothing all day. We barely spoke. It was as if
everything had already been said, and we had set off into new
territory. It was pleasant looking out through the windows at
the bustle in the station, barrows piled with luggage, groups of
hikers returning home with their rucksacks fuller than when
they had arrived and carrying small pots as souvenirs. People,
passport in hand, queuing up at the various offices, for the
police, the bureau de change, the Department of Health. A
couple are desperately kissing, the young man is a soldier; my
companion looks at them, unsmiling, and says: Bah! People go
up and down the steps to the lavatories. A blind man, selling
lottery tickets, taps insistently on the wall with his stick. The
woman at the stall selling postcards and newspapers hands
over the accounts to a short, hunchbacked man who has
arrived for the night shift. The lights of six different trains
have come on simultaneously above the announcement
board. Six times there is the same crush of people, the same
weariness at the station exit and the same cries of `Taxi! Taxi!'
and `Do you need a hotel?F 'Looking for a cheap place to stay?' That is when I invited my guest to come home with me.
We will be alone, you can rest. I don't know what he said in
reply, because, as I was talking, the loudspeaker from the station cinema blared out its latest programme, including news of
the floods in Bavaria, and I couldn't hear what he said. I
noticed, though, when I looked at him, trying to guess at his
response, that his deep-set eyes were pale, in contrast to his
thick, black beard. I was afraid that he might die before I could
... I don't know what his answer was, but he came with me.

My house is not far from the station, but we took a long time
to get there. I've walked that same route several times a day for
years. It was the first time I'd counted the clocks as I passed:
five, excluding the station clock. The clock on the tower of
the Trinitarian convent, with its light still bearing traces of the
dark blue paint required by the civil defence, the clock on the
central lamp post at the Navas de Tolosa roundabout, where
the traffic policeman has his little hut, then the one at Winter's the clockmakers, on the corner, with words instead of
numbers on the face, the really ugly clock in the square and
the one outside Omega. Perhaps it only took the usual fifteen
minutes, but it seemed longer. He kept walking more and
more slowly, whilst I was walking faster and faster. I almost
had to drag him across the final junctions. We both knew
perfectly well what was going to happen. My anger was growing from my elbows down, and a distant, desolate night was
sprouting on his shoulders. Crossing the square - it was a
quarter past ten (he said twenty-two fifteen, which made me
think that he must speak a different language) - you could
hear the powerful thrum of the river. A group of students
emerged from a cafe along with a gust of cigarette smoke and
the voice of a female singer: `I go in search of death . . .' It
frightened me and, deep down, I cursed her. He continued
walking, his shoulders hunched, no longer daring to ask after
his suitcases, which we had placed in the left luggage office.

He was panting as we went up the stairs. The shadow of the
bannister imprisoned his breathing, a coming and going, an escaping and a sighing. I felt all my irritation crumble when I
turned and saw a confident sadness bloom on his lips. It
seemed to me that he was counting the steps. I was tempted to
encourage him, to offer him my arm, to say a few words of
consolation, We're nearly there, or It's the next floor, or You'll
be able to rest soon. I did not do so. It occurred to me that any
criminal would do his best to say nothing, to avoid meeting
one of the neighbours on the stairs, no ... no ... When I
turned the key for the second time, I still thought I could see
the ruin of a smile on his face, perhaps it was the light, or the
hot breath of the heating.

On other occasions, when my family went off to stay in the
country, I would take advantage of being alone at home to
get together with friends until late at night, or to arrange a
romantic assignation. Tonight was different. I wanted to kill a
man. He was there already, sitting in the hall, asking me
where the bathroom was, with exasperating docility. I was
just beginning to think that it was all going to be too easy
when, suddenly, I felt afraid. The furniture blared, the curtains
filled up with grubby white shadows, a deceptive clamour
rippled in my ears. I made my way quickly to my bedroom.
He was in the bathroom and stayed there for some time. I put
on all the lights. How would I do it, who was he, and what
would happen afterwards. He's coming out, I heard the sound
of water, the bolt, footsteps, he's coming down the corridor,
he sneezed, he must have stopped to look at a painting and
wipe his nose, he's coming now, he appears in the doorway,
his coat over his arm and his trousers undone. He lets himself
fall onto the bed without saying a word. If only he had said
something.

There's no point strangling him. He stretched out comfortably on the hard mattress of my unmade bed, cleared his throat
twice, rubbed his shoulders as if settling down to sleep, and
then he died. I didn't need to kill him. Having nothing else to
hand, I covered him with the mattress from the other bed,
where my brother sleeps. The sadness that oozed out from
him when we were coming up the stairs was now penetrating the room, filling it with an all-pervading chill. I was just about
to sit down and think about him properly for the first time
when the telephone rang, Chonita was inviting me to an
improvised cold supper; then she could drive me out into the
country to join my family. I rushed out, forgetting completely
that it was Saturday and that I was alone in the house, forgetting that I had gone to the station and that in my bedroom a
man had, well, died, I didn't kill him, though I had wanted to.

I don't understand this feeling of anxiety. My arm hurts, both
arms do, I feel an enormous weight on one side, I'm gasping
for air and my breath is sour. I have woken in the middle of a
nightmare. Someone, in my apartment in the city, was going
through my papers, trying on my clothes, signing my name,
using my pen, addressing obscene remarks to Chonita's photo
and smashing the frame containing my school leaver's certificate. I woke up feeling ice cold and crying out because I saw
that he was about to turn over the mattress on my bed,
because then ... My God, what have I done. Three months
have gone by now, and I haven't given that man a single
thought. Whether I killed him. Or didn't kill him. I'm on the
verge of tears trying to work out whether I did this thing that
so shames and horrifies me, or if, on the contrary, it was a
dream, an hallucination that comes and goes, a painful, crazed
toing and froing, piercing my temples and my throat. I should
leave, I will. I look at the clock: it's stopped. I peer out of the
window: I cannot tell the time by the stars, which I can barely
identify, and, besides, sleep overwhelms me. I go back to bed
and ... Yes, there's no doubt about it: I can almost hear his
voice (`I haven't felt like eating all day'), his breathless gait ('do
you think the suitcases. . . ' `do you think they'll give me back
the necklace'?) I don't want to remember any more. He'll be
there. Perhaps his body began to stink as it decomposed and
someone has noticed it. The woman upstairs has a dog and
they say that dogs can sense when someone has died. It's
probably been scratching at the door, and ... Another
possibility is that my mother had someone go in and do the
cleaning one day and they will have found him there and removed him. Or the police will have, because he was a foreigner, that is, he came into the country with a passport. He
said twenty-two fifteen, rather than a quarter past ten and ...
Three months have gone by. I don't know if I killed him or
not. But I know that I took him home intending to kill him.

During the journey, I tried several times to start up conversations about a corpse being found in ... a foreigner who ...
Nothing. No one took any notice. Either no one knew anything about it, or else it was a frequent occurrence. When
silence falls, I smother my disquiet by reciting verses to myself.
`With ten cannon on either side, with a following wind and
sails unfurled . . .' or `Remember the sleeping soul . . .'. I also
count the beating of the wheels on the tracks, tata-tracata,
tata-tracata, ten, eleven, twelve ... eighty, eighty-one ... or I
watch the telegraph wires, in stiff parallel lines, rising and
falling. I vomited out of the window just thinking of the smell
in my room when I go in there.

I left the station hurriedly. I kept expecting someone to call
out to me, the police most likely. I didn't dare glance over at
the cafe. At the newspaper stand, the little hunchback was
putting on an overall and opening up the kiosk.

No one saw me come in. The concierge's room was closed. I
couldn't get the key in the lock because, in my haste, my pulse
was racing, a terrifying, disorderly tumult in my wrists. I put
all the lights on. Nothing has changed. No one has yet been
into my room. The two mattresses, one on top of the other. I
boldly removed the top one. And underneath, on the hard
mattress, the one on my bed, could be seen the hollow left by
a crudely human figure, blurred and imprecise around the
torso and the legs, precisely delineated around the impression
left by head and ears. Filling this hollow is a glittering, pearly
dust. It looks like mica. A dazzling, exfoliated mica which, in
the light, casts pink shadows. That was all that remained. I
carefully gathered up this sediment in order to dispose of it. I
brushed out the hollow left in the mattress. At least it didn't
smell. When my family arrive on the next train, they won't notice a thing. Everything has gone better than I expected. I
have four hours to check the house and do any tidying up that
may be necessary.

I have decided not to bother with supper. I need to remove
all traces from the house. I sat down to think what I should do
with this packet of human dust. Throwing it into the rubbish
could prove compromising. The rag and bone men poke
around in the rubbish with a stick, with a wire, and God
knows what else. They spend hours and hours in the warm
sun in the outlying areas, near where the main roads leave the
city, selecting and classifying the things they carry about on
their carts from day to day, a heavy, malodorous, dusty sadness.
I will not throw my package into the rubbish. I fear the erudition of rag and bone men. I will not burn it either. I don't
even know if it would burn. It's likely that heat would get rid
of it. But that would involve going down to the cellar, to the
boilers, and finding some excuse with which to deceive the
boilerman. It would be foolish to arouse suspicion unnecessarily. I could go out and, like someone aimlessly, distractedly
wandering the streets, throw it over the fence surrounding a
building site, to join stones, lost rubber balls, rusty tins, dented
basins, and cartons, lots of cartons, perhaps even the odd dead
animal. Or else scatter it in the area that's been cleared around
the new mental hospital. But that would be risky. I don't
know how it might evolve and probably ... I could sit down
now and study those fat tomes on Pathology, Economics,
Biology, and find out what, over time, happens to human
remains. But I don't much feel like it. I did leaf through one
once, but I didn't understand a word: too many formulae. I
haven't got time to mug up on it all now. And I have to finish
this business by midnight. I have to sleep and rest, in order to
be refreshed and cheerful in the morning, with all my muscles
in their proper places, like new. As if nothing had happened
and as if I hadn't gone to the station one Saturday as night was
falling and invited a traveller to come to my house. I must be
confident and calm about it: that's most important.

It would be best to go out to the New Bridge or to the
Roman bridge if there are fewer people there, and throw the package into the water. I can foresee many dangers, but for
the moment it's all I can come up with. Now, sitting in the
parlour, opposite a statue of Our Lady of Sorrows with real
hair and genuine silver brooches, sitting underneath the
enlargement of a photo of my sister Lolita's wedding, trying
so hard to look genteel, the poor thing, leaning dreamily on
her husband's shoulder. I can't come up with a better idea:
so off to the river and be done with it. I looked at my
father's graduation photograph, fifty-five lawyers from
Madrid University, all with beards, and it seemed to me that
all fifty-five of them were shouting to me, urging me on,
almost proud of my resolution: to the river, to the river.

Of course there are many occasions when one does not feel
comfortable at home. Today is one of them. I have secured my
package, painstakingly tying it up. Then I wrapped it again in
an old special edition of La Voz de la Region. It's a very neat
package. On the top there's the Queen of England at the
celebrations held when she crossed the equator and a spinechilling report of a plane crash. On the bottom there's the
society column. I remember now, as I pass the mezzanine and
glance through the weddings, that I forgot to get a present ...
The package, the wretched package, weighs a ton ...