Gasoline (8 page)

No sooner has he entered then he asks, in a loud voice, if they have Roman coins. He feels like a tourist in a strange land, proudly ordering paella with chocolate milk. He asks to see Roman coins because they seem like the biggest cliché in coin collecting.

They advise against Roman coins, because at present they are not a good investment. He could have asked for Greek coins, though. Or Egyptian ones. Was there any such thing as Egyptian coins?

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take Roman coins, if you have any. Do they come in series, like stamps?”

The woman is dumbfounded.

“Bring them out, bring them out. Did the Egyptians have coins?”

He leaves under the weight of two more bags, full of coins: Roman, Greek, medieval, modern
. . .
He had a continental dollar coin from 1776, made of pewter; an Augustus Humbert from 1851, a silver dollar from 1779, which had never been in circulation; two quarters from 1829, also never placed in circulation; a double eagle from 1886, which had hardly circulated; an eagle quarter from 1834, never circulated; two half eagles from 1829, never circulated; a double eagle from 1886, hardly circulated; a quarter eagle from 1834, never circulated; two half eagles from 1829, never circulated; a set of five gold pieces from 1866; a 1913-S Barber quarter, never circulated; a fifty-dollar Panama-Pacific commemorative gold coin, never circulated; a Peace dollar proof from 1921; many 1949-S Franklin half dollars with full bell lines; Standing Liberty quarters with full head; German medallions from the Hindenburg and Hitler period; medals from Panama and the Panama Canal; medals from William Penn and Pennsylvania; a complete set of Stellas; 1860-D and 1875 gold dollars; 1797, 1854-S, and 1875 eagle quarters; half eagles from 1827 and 1887; 100 ducat gold pieces from Ferdinand III, Archduke of Austria, dated 1629; several 1870-CC double eagles; 1794 large cents; an 1819 half eagle; an 1849 ten-dollar piece from the Cincinnati Mining & Trading Co.; Kennedy half-dollars; Susan B. Anthony dollars; and one five-shilling proof piece from Charles II of England, 1662
. . .
But he’s not satisfied. He wants Egyptian coins, Asian ones
. . .
He takes a cab. When the driver asks where he wants to go, Heribert asks himself why he got into a cab, and so as not to tell the driver that he doesn’t want to anywhere, he says to the corner. He pays the minuscule fare and tips him with a five-shilling piece from 1662 with the face of Charles III of England. He walks through the theater district; it’s full of couples dressed to the nines, in tuxedos and long gowns, with shining eyes. The corners are full of musicians, magicians doing tricks, and jugglers. In each of their hats he deposits coins of the Caesars, maravedis, Brazilian coins from the time of the Pedro the Emperor, rubles with the faces of the czars. He doesn’t see the point, though, in numismatism. What was it that moved people to collect things? On the corner, close to a police car with spinning lights, he sees a man stretched out on the ground. His eyeglasses lie a yard away, in pieces. There is a slit in his head from which a great deal of blood has flowed, leaving a stain on the ground. The bicycle, not far away, is as twisted as one an acrobat was using not long before. If only he felt something
. . .
He vows to leave the door unlocked when he gets home. If someone assaulted him, if someone robbed his apartment, if someone wounded him, if he had an accident, if he were murdered
. . .
Why was it always someone else who was robbed, wounded, or murdered? This question seems too tragic, though, and he keeps walking as he imagines that if the cyclist had fallen in the snow instead of on the asphalt, the red stain would have gained by contrast.

•

Humbert sits exactly where Heribert tells him too. His docility leads Heribert to think that he has sat in the precise spot where the imaginary line stretching from his index finger to the sofa ends. He thinks that if he had told him to sit on the floor or jump out the window, he would also have done that. Or is it that he had imagined him so conceited that now, in contrast, he seems humble, overly humble? The collections of stamps and coins sit on the table. As Humbert rattles on, Heribert wonders if it would be appropriate to ask him if he likes collecting things, if he had ever collected stamps and, if he had, why; if, as a child, he had collected coins or trading cards or, as an adult, movie listings, match boxes, key chains, pencils, exotic cigarette packages, palindromic train or tram tickets. Oh, how he loves palindromes! He would have asked if collecting things made him feel anything special, if it was exciting, if he knows what other people who collected things felt about it. In the meantime, Humbert is asking him for advice about opportunities for exhibitions, about the possibility that he might,
in some way
, take him under his wing. He asks him to stop by the studio where he lives and works, to see his paintings. Heribert vaguely says yes to everything, trying not to listen too hard to what he’s saying. As for taking him under his wing, Humbert says, Helena (who has seen his paintings and has found them very interesting) thinks that if he (Heribert Julià) were to offer the slightest gesture of support, then he (Humbert Herrera) could get off to a good start, a, shall we say, respectable start, in this shady art world
. . .

Heribert looks closely at him: green glasses! He has seen those green glasses, and the face behind them, not very long before, somewhere, and not just once. As soon as he remembers where, he is surprised at having taken so long to recognize him: this is the man who is seeing Helena! He is astonished. He smiles. Pleasantly astonished, because, in some way, to have discovered him and have him right there must give him a certain advantage. Over what? What kind of advantage? Why? He is suddenly very interested in seeing Humbert’s paintings. Right away.

They have long since fallen into an uncomfortable silence, which Humbert can’t seem to break, and which Heribert is unaware of because he is trying to think, and thinking requires a great deal of concentration. When he finally notices, he tries to correct the bad impression and smiles again.

“Can we go see your paintings now?” he asks, quite sincerely.

“Now? The light is terrible
. . .
It would be better in daylight.”

Heribert looks out the window. The sky is dark. If, before seeing the sky, someone had asked him what time of day it was, or even if it were day or night, he wouldn’t have known what to say. He then tries to deduce whether it is early evening or already well into the night. He seems to remember that he has arranged to see Herundina this evening. When he searches his memory, he even recalls the time and place. He couldn’t say whether he was pleased or not at having remembered.

“Tomorrow would be better,” says Humbert, “if that’s all right
. . .
”

“Sure. In any case, I have to catch up with a girl for dinner now,” he says, smiling the whole time, all the while thinking that he is smiling and saying this to put the young man at ease, letting him know that (in the event he ever finds out that Heribert knows he is Helena’s lover) he shouldn’t worry, as the fact that he is going to bed with her not only doesn’t bother him but is (and this is the proof) the only thing that could have made him take an interest in him.

He shows him to the door. When he says goodbye, he shakes his hand effusively, taking it between both of his own, and is on the verge of giving him a kiss on the forehead. He gathers up the coins and the stamps, puts them in plastic bags, and leaves them in the closet where (the day before? that same day? a week ago?) he stored the wig, the heart-shaped glasses, the plastic ball, and the flowered pants. As he takes his jacket off the hanger and goes outside, he wonders if he has made a good impression on Humbert.

He
has dinner with Herundina in a quiet restaurant, where everyone speaks softly amid white tablecloths in an overheated roof garden with ivy-covered brick walls. The table they are sitting at is a bit wobbly. They ought to prop it up, but since they don’t, Heribert spends the whole time making it wobble. They order chocolate mousse for dessert. Heribert paints a mustache on his face with it. When Herundina laughs, Heribert glares at her and bangs his fist on the table. The other diners turn their heads to look at them. Herundina, half amazed, half frightened,
blushes in embarrassment, on the verge of tears.

“You’re very strange.”

“You said that the other day. Repeating oneself is a symptom of death
. . .
”

A half hour later they are one their way out of the city in Herundina’s car. Heribert hasn’t driven in a while, and when he steps on the accelerator everything around him accelerates. But he looks at the speedometer and he’s not speeding. What’s more, if he speeds up noticeably, the girl will surely protest. For a moment, he closes his eyes, and he feels a landslide, the propeller of a small plane gathering speed, an intermittent whistling that grows louder and louder. When he opens his eyes, the highway is still in place. He closes them again. He counts to five seconds. He opens them. Everything in order. He closes his eyes again. He counts to ten seconds. He opens them. There’s a van a short distance ahead. He accelerates and leaves it behind. He closes his eyes again. He counts to ten seconds and doesn’t open them. He counts to fifteen in all. He imagines the sound of the car crashing into a truck and being crushed, of being crushed himself. When he opens his eyes, though, he isn’t even close to the ditch. They have left the city behind, and on either side of the road there is nothing but one-story homes and cemeteries, and an occasional empty lot.

After about forty-five minutes, they see a hotel close to the road, half-hidden between the trees, the lights on the ground floor lit. They turn onto the gravel path that leads to it. They park out in front. Heribert hastens to open the door on the young woman’s side.

It is a little wooden hotel painted white with tables set up on the verandah. On each table a red candle is burning. Heribert finds it strange that they have set up tables outside in that cold. Herundina declares that she is about to freeze. Heribert sits down anyway. Herundina does, too; her breath forms clouds. The door creaks. A kindly old man comes out to serve them. They order a bottle of champagne. He brings it out, with two glasses. Herundina says once again that she’s cold. The man tells them they can go inside. Heribert says it doesn’t matter. Herundina looks at him, taken aback. The man struggles to uncork the bottle, and just before he does, they hear his spine crack. They down the champagne, and it goes right to their heads. Herundina laughs and tilts back and forth on the legs of her chair. An old woman spies on them from the window, drawing the curtain back with a bony head. When Herundina says the champagne has warmed her up, Heribert gets up and suggests going inside. The old woman moves away from the window. The proprietor is running a dishcloth along the countertop. The room is empty.

They order another bottle. He brings it over. As he opens it, Heribert asks if they have any rooms available. He says it suddenly, without thinking, and once he’s said it he thinks it’s an excellent idea. He decides that if Herundina makes a fuss or looks outraged, he will smack her. But Herundina smiles, gazing at him with enormous eyes. The old man tells them that at this time of year the hotel is never full, though in the summer it’s another story since they’re right on the beach.

“All the other hotels (as you must already have noticed) are closed. There’s no business in it. We only open because if we didn’t, what would we do? Our children are all grown, they live in the city, and if we stay open, someone always happens along, like you folks
. . .
”

He gives them the key. They go up to the room with the bottle and the glasses. From the window you can see an endless stretch of woods, blacker even than the sky above it, and to the left, points of light. They must be houses. The place is silent, but the floorboards creak. Heribert fills both glasses with champagne and locks the door from inside. Herundina embraces him. Heribert would have been irritated if Herundina hadn’t wanted to come upstairs, but now that they’re there he feels rather annoyed by the embrace. Too weary to come up with a convincing excuse, he indolently lets her proceed.

•

The heat is up so high that Heribert is sweating and the sheets are sticking to his skin. The sound of a television reaches him from the ground floor. The couple must be watching TV. Heribert glances at the clock. It’s 1:00
a.m.
What should he do now? Go right home? Wait for her to wake up? He could grab the cars keys, take off, and leave her there, fast asleep.

At 1:30 he looks at the young woman’s broad back. At 1:57, her slender waist. At 2:07, the shadowy crack between the cheeks of her ass. At 2:30, the whiter triangle that (he thinks at 2:45) must be the negative of the panties she wears when she tans herself under infrared lights or in the snow (he thinks at three o’clock). At 3:45 he thinks that, in fact, all he had felt for Herundina was desire.

It had taken him hours to formulate this thought. When Herundina wakes up, it’s 4:00
a.m.
She sees Heribert looking at her. She smiles at him. He isn’t sure whether or not to smile back. She puts her arms around him, and brings her mouth close to his.

One hour later, the old couple waves goodbye from the verandah. Heribert and Herundina take the road back to the city. Herundina wants to go with him to see the two paintings he’s had at the Whitney for a few months now.

They leave the car in a nearby parking lot. They walk arm in arm through the first few galleries. Herundina asks him if he’s been a citizen for long. He says for twelve years. She asks how long he’s lived here. He says since he was four years old. They go up to the second floor. Before two adjoining rooms, Herundina pulls in one direction and Heribert in the other. As he pulls Herundina, without really knowing why, toward the room she doesn’t want to go into, Heribert feels that the building reminds him of the cemeteries he had seen from the car the night before.

“You’re not very nice. Why don’t you want to come see your paintings with me now?”

Eyes closed, as if blind, he accompanies her till she comes to a halt. Then he opens his eyes and finds himself before two walls at an angle. There are two canvases; he finds it hard to identify them as his. When Heribert hears the girl say she’s in love with him, no matter how obtuse, stubborn, and distant he wants to appear, a chill runs up his spine. Feeling lost, he goes over to the corner formed by the two walls and rests against it. What should he say to her? He can tell her that there was a time when he liked her, that, at times, when he was in bed caressing her sister, he would pretend he was caressing her. When he looks up, a figure too dark and mustachioed to be Herundina is standing before him. “Good thing I didn’t think of hugging her with my eyes closed,” he thinks.

Herundina watches as the gallery guard reprimands Heribert. As he apologizes, Heribert considers the thought of lying and telling Herundina he loves her. Where would that lead, though? If he had never lied, he could resolve to commence a new life, always lying without fail, firmly vowing never again to utter so much as a single truth. Even if it were completely false, he would make the woman very happy if he declared his love for her, and in point of fact, it wouldn’t be all that hard. That must be the solution. There can’t possibly be another. They leave the gallery. They walk through the museum without looking at a single painting. Heribert opens his mouth and says, very slowly:

“I love you.”

Herundina’s expression wavers between happiness and stupefaction. Is she not sure whether or not to believe him? All he needed now was for her not to believe him, after the effort he’s put into saying it. Her draws her close to him, takes her in his arms, and kisses her. Kissing is so easy, even if you don’t feel like it. As he kisses her, he sees a girl, who looks vaguely familiar, walk by
The Paris Bit
by Stuart Davis. “She looks like an Anna, or an Anne
. . .
” He remembers: she was the girl from a few days ago at the bookstore, the one he had involuntarily kept from stealing a book! It would be so easy for him to feel desire for her
. . .
It would be so easy, later on, to stop feeling desire for her
. . .
At that very moment he is feeling it, desire, a faint desire that (if he keeps looking at her much longer) will grow increasingly strong (or weak, or even disappear if he turns his head and looks at one of those paintings, or at the floor, or at the ceiling, and forgets her). What if everything were different with her, though? Maybe he will only be able to grab onto something when he no longer expects anything. He watches the girl vanish into another gallery. He makes a move to follow her.

“Answer me. Do you want to or not? Hey
. . .
you weren’t listening!”

He looks at the woman in his arms and steps back. He recalls her name, but can no longer form a single thought about her. She extricates herself from his embrace; furious, she strikes him and flees down the stairs. Heribert bursts out laughing, runs his hand over his stinging cheek, and thinks maybe he should follow her, tell her he was sorry, that he had been listening to her, or that he hadn’t, that all he heard was the mellifluous flow of her marvelously harmonious voice, as if it were music: that was how much in love he was. She would never buy it, though. Or would she? (And what about mellifluous? What exactly did it mean?) For a moment, the urge to know whether or not she would go for that story has him on the verge of dashing down the stairs after her. Instead, he heads toward the adjoining room. The girl from the bookstore isn’t there. He looks in all the other galleries until he sees her in front of
The Brass Family,
by Alexander Calder. Heribert positions himself by her side, slowly turns his head, and looks at her. The girl also turns her head and looks at him. Heribert feels an intense attraction to her, and he is certain she feels the same for him, so certain he feels they need not so much as say a word to understand what they feel for each other. Finally, there is someone with whom words will be superfluous, and perhaps nothing he has experienced till now would make any sense were it not for this encounter, which in contrast now gives meaning to everything. He moves close to her and smiles.

•

He caresses her thigh; he kisses her on the neck. She opens her mouth; she kisses his tongue. They were in a museum hallway, near the telephone booths. She suggests they go for coffee.

They sit at a table. They order coffee. The waiter brings it. The girl pays for it. She says she’s delighted to buy coffee for such a prestigious artist. He picks up the cup and pours the coffee over his head. She laughs and asks him again if he hasn’t been drinking. Heribert says no, and to prove it, he gets up from the chair and balances himself on his left foot while raising his right thigh until it is parallel to the ground. Then he places the thumb of his right hand at the tip of his nose while simultaneously stretching his palm and inclining his trunk until he almost touches his knee with the pinky of the same hand. Having stood like that for ten seconds without losing his balance, he salutes the girl and the customers in the cafeteria, who were staring at him, and sits back down. The girl laughs.

“Not drunk. You’re just crazy.”

They embrace again. Heribert puts his hand under her skirt, and when she protests, he stays still. But when she can no longer stifle her laughter, finally bursting out, Heribert tries to caress her pubis. The young woman finishes her coffee, they get up from the table, and begin to run after each other from room to room, going up and down the museum stairs and playing a combination of tag and hide-and-seek. At last, exhausted, they rest against
Standing Woman
by Gaston Lachaise. Little by little they slide down until they are sitting on the floor. They are caught in such a feverish embrace that when Heribert notices that the sculpture is moving he thinks for a moment that passion can make even the most immutable works kinetic. When he lifts his head, he barely has time to register that the guard’s gestures are not reprimands and the astonishment on the museum visitors’ faces is not censure, before, a tenth of a second later, he feels all the bronze of that larger-than-life and generously-proportioned woman crashing down on him and begins to understand what is really happening.

•

When he opens his eyes he doesn’t know what day it is, or what time, or how many days, hours, and minutes have gone by since the last time he opened his eyes, nor how many more will go by from the moment in which he closes them again.

•

Sunlight streams in through the window and lights up the wall at the foot of the bed. The first thing he sees is the flower arrangement. Then he looks down at his body, vaguely convinced it will be shorter than it was before. One of his legs, the right one, is in a cast. And one arm, also the right.

He feels comfortable in that bed. He turns his head. To one side there is a night table with water, bottles, and small objects whose functions are unknown to him. His whole body hurts. He looks up. He sees a small panel with buttons. One of them shows an outline of a light bulb with rays of light. The other shows a female silhouette with a skirt, a cap, and a line in her hand; it must represent a tray. He concludes that this is the button to call the nurse. He presses it. A half a minute later a young woman appears. “What if I can’t speak?” he thinks. Perhaps as a result of the accident he won’t be able to articulate a single sound. He’s afraid to put it to the test and discover it’s true. What if his tongue has been cut off? Or if he severed it himself, on impact? Impact
. . .
He imagines his tongue on the ground, like a lizard’s tail. With a life of its own. And what about his face? Maybe his face is deformed. Maybe a terrifying scar has turned him into a monster. The nurse looks at him understandingly and tells him a slew of things. So he can hear, then; he’s pleased. He makes an effort to understand what the woman is saying. She is saying soothing things. She’s speaking to him as if he were retarded. Maybe the blow has turned him into an idiot. But an idiot wouldn’t think such a thing. Or would he? Maybe he has been an idiot all his life and the blow brought him to his senses. He opens his mouth and manages to utter one word, then two, then three: a whole sentence. He can talk, too. He closes first one eye, then the other. He has two, then. He asks for a mirror and details about his condition. The woman says he has broken an arm and a leg, and that the museum administration is astonished that such a thing could have happened. Technically it was quite impossible for the sculpture to fall. Heribert doesn’t find it so strange: everything is impossible until it happens, above all such bizarre events as this.