The Infatuations (2 page)

You could say that I wished them all the best in the world, as if they were characters in a novel or a film for whom one is rooting right from the start, knowing that something bad is going to happen to them, that at some point, things will go horribly wrong, otherwise there would be no novel or film. In real life, though, there was no reason why that should be the case, and I expected to continue seeing them every morning exactly as they were, without ever sensing between them a unilateral or mutual coolness, or that they had nothing to say and were impatient to be rid of each other, a look of reciprocal irritation or indifference on their faces. They were the brief, modest spectacle that lifted my mood before I went to work at the publishing house to wrestle with my megalomaniac boss and his horrible authors. If Luisa and Desvern did not appear for a few days, I would miss them and face my day’s work with a heavier heart. In a way, without realizing it or intending to, I felt indebted to them, they helped me get through the day and allowed me to fantasize about their life, which I imagined to be unblemished, so much so that I was glad not to be able to confirm this view or find out more, and thus risk breaking the temporary spell (my own life was full of blemishes, and the truth is that I didn’t give the couple another thought until the following morning, while I sat on the bus cursing because I’d had to get up so early, which is something I loathe). I would have liked to give them something similar in exchange, but how could I? They didn’t need me or, perhaps, anyone: I was almost invisible, erased by their
contentment. A couple of times when he left, having first, as usual, kissed Luisa on the lips – she never remained seated for that kiss, but stood up to reciprocate it – he would give me a slight nod, almost a bow, having first looked up and half-raised one hand to say goodbye to the waiters, as if I were just another waiter, a female one. His observant wife made a similar gesture when I left – always after him and before her – on the same two occasions when her husband had been courteous enough to do so. But when I tried to return that gesture with my own even slighter nod, both he and she had looked away and didn’t even see me. They were so quick, or so prudent.

During the time when I used to see them, I didn’t know who they were or what they did, although they were clearly people with money. Not immensely rich, perhaps, but comfortably off. I mean that if they had belonged in the former category, they would not have taken their children to school themselves, as I was sure they did before enjoying that brief pause in the café; perhaps their kids went to a local school such as Colegio Estilo, which was very close, although there are several others in the area, in refurbished houses, or
hotelitos
as they used to be called, in the swish El Viso district; indeed, I myself went to an infants’ school in Calle Oquendo, not far from there; nor would they have had breakfast almost daily in that local café or gone off to their respective jobs at about nine o’clock, he slightly before and she slightly after, as the waiters confirmed to me when I asked about them, as did a work colleague with whom I discussed the macabre event later on, and who, despite knowing no more about them than I did, had managed to glean a few facts; I suppose people who like to gossip and think the worst always have ways of finding out whatever they want, especially if it’s something negative or there’s some tragedy involved, even if it has nothing to do with them.

One morning towards the end of June, neither of them appeared at the café, not that there was anything unusual about that, for it did occasionally happen, and I assumed that they must have gone away
somewhere or were too busy to share that brief pause in the day which they both clearly enjoyed so much. Then I was away for most of a week, dispatched by my boss to some stupid book fair abroad, mainly to press the flesh on his behalf and generally play the fool. When I returned, they still did not appear, not once, and that worried me, more for my own sake than for theirs, because I was suddenly deprived of my morning fillip. ‘How easy it is for a person simply to vanish into thin air,’ I thought. ‘Someone only has to move jobs or house and you’ll never know anything more about them, never see them again. All it takes is a change in work schedule. How fragile they are, these connections with people one knows only by sight.’ This made me wonder if, after spending so long endowing them with such joyful significance, I shouldn’t perhaps have tried to exchange a few words with them, not with the intention of bothering them or spoiling their moment of togetherness nor, of course, with the idea of establishing some kind of social relationship outside of the café, that wasn’t what I wanted at all; but merely to show them how much I liked and appreciated them, so as to be able to say hello to them from that point on, and to feel obliged to say goodbye to them if, one day, I were to leave the publishing house and thus cease to frequent that particular area, and to make them feel slightly obliged to do the same if they were the ones to move on or to change their habits, just as a local shopkeeper would forewarn us if he were going to close or sell his business, just as we would warn everyone if we were about to move house. To, at least, be aware that we are about to cease to see people we’ve grown accustomed to seeing every day, even if only at a distance or in some purely utilitarian way, barely noticing their face. Yes, that’s what one usually does.

So, in the end, I asked the waiters. They told me that, as far as they knew, the couple had already gone on holiday. This sounded to me
more like supposition than fact. It was still a little early to go away, but there are people who prefer not to spend July in Madrid, when the heat is at its worst, or perhaps Luisa and Deverne could allow themselves the luxury of spending the whole two months on vacation, they certainly looked wealthy enough and free enough too (perhaps they were self-employed). While I regretted having to wait until September for my little morning stimulant, I was reassured to know that they would be back and hadn’t disappeared from the face of my earth for ever.

During that time, I remember happening upon a newspaper headline about a Madrid businessman who had been stabbed to death, and recall that I rapidly turned the page without reading the whole item, precisely because of the accompanying photo, which showed a man lying on the ground in the middle of the street, in the street itself, without a jacket or tie or shirt, or with his shirt unbuttoned and the tails hanging out, while the ambulance men were trying to revive or save him, and with a pool of blood all around, his white shirt drenched and stained, or so I thought from that one quick glance. Given the angle from which the photo had been taken, you couldn’t see the man’s face clearly and, besides, I didn’t stop to look properly, I hate the current mania in the press for not sparing the reader or viewer even the most gruesome of images, as if the verbal description were not enough – or perhaps the ones who want those images are the readers and viewers, who must, by and large, be disturbed individuals; why else insist on being shown something you already know or have been told about – and with not the slightest consideration for the person who has been so cruelly mistreated and who can no longer defend or protect himself from the kind of prying gaze to which he would never willingly have submitted when fully conscious, just as he would not have appeared before perfect strangers or indeed
acquaintances in dressing gown and pyjamas, considering himself, quite rightly, to be unpresentable. Photographing a dead or dying man, especially one who has died a violent death, seems to me an abuse showing a gross lack of respect for someone who has just become a victim or a corpse – if he can still be seen, that means he’s not quite dead or does not belong entirely in the past, in which case, he should be left to die properly and to make his exit from time with no unwanted witnesses and no audience – and I’m not prepared to be a part of this new custom being imposed on us, I don’t want to look at what they urge or almost oblige us to look at, and to add my curious, horrified eyes to the hundreds of thousands of others whose minds will be thinking as they watch, with a kind of repressed fascination and, no doubt, relief: ‘The person I can see before me isn’t me, it’s someone else. It’s not me because I can see his face and it’s not mine. I can read his name in the papers and it’s not mine either, it’s not the same, not my name. It happened to someone else, but whatever could he have done, what kind of trouble must he have been in, what debts must he have incurred, what terrible damage must he have caused for someone to want to stab him to death like that? I never get involved in anything and I don’t make enemies either, I keep myself to myself. Or rather I do get involved and I do cause my own kind of damage, but no one has yet caught me. Fortunately, the dead man they’re showing us here is someone else and not me, so I’m safer than I was yesterday, yesterday I escaped. This poor devil, on the other hand, didn’t.’ At no point did it occur to me to associate the item of news, which I merely skim-read, with the pleasant, cheerful man whom I watched every day having his breakfast, and who, quite unawares, along with his wife, had the infinite kindness to raise my spirits.

For a few days after I got back from my trip, I still somehow expected to see the couple, even though I knew they wouldn’t come. I now arrived punctually at the office (I ate my breakfast at the café and left immediately, with no reason to linger), but I did so reluctantly, half-heartedly, it’s surprising how much our routines resent change, even when those changes are for the best, which this was not. I found it harder to face my various jobs, to have to watch my boss preening himself and to be on the receiving end of the unbelievably tedious calls or visits from writers, which, for some reason, had become one of my designated tasks, perhaps because I tended to take more interest in them than did my colleagues, who openly avoided them, especially, on the one hand, the more conceited and demanding among them and, on the other, the more tedious and disoriented variety, those who lived alone, the complete disaster areas, the inappropriately flirtatious, the ones who used any excuse to phone us up as a way of starting their day and letting someone know that they still existed. Writers are, for the most part, strange individuals. They get up in exactly the same state of mind as when they went to bed, thinking about their imaginary things, which, despite being purely imaginary, take up most of their time. Those who earn their living from literature and related activities and who, therefore, have no proper job – and there are quite a few of them, because, contrary to
what most people say, there’s money to be made in this business, although mainly by the publishers and the distributors – rarely leave their houses and so all they have to do is go back to their computer or their typewriter – a few madmen still continue to use these, which means that their typewritten texts, once delivered, have to be scanned – with an incomprehensible degree of self-discipline: you have to be slightly abnormal to sit down and work on something without being told to. And so I was neither in the mood nor feeling sufficiently patient to give my almost daily advice on what to wear to a novelist called Cortezo, who would call me up on the flimsiest excuse and then say: ‘While I’ve got you on the phone,’ and ask my advice on the collection of hideous old tat he was wearing or thinking of wearing, and which he would then describe to me:

‘Do you think a pair of argyle socks would go with these fine-pinstripe trousers and a pair of brown tasselled moccasins?’

I refrained from saying that I had a horror of argyle socks, fine-pinstripe trousers and brown tasselled moccasins, because that would have worried him no end and the conversation would have gone on and on.

‘What colour are the argyle socks?’ I asked.

‘Brown and orange, but I’ve got them in red and blue and in green and beige too. What do you reckon?’

‘Brown and blue would be best, isn’t that what you said you’ve got on?’ I replied.

‘No, I haven’t got that particular combination. Do you think I should go out and buy a pair?

I felt the tiniest bit sorry for him, although it irritated me intensely that he should ask me these things as if I were his widow-to-be or his mother, and the guy was so vain about his writing, which the critics loved, but which I found just plain silly. Anyway, I didn’t want to
send him off into the city in search of yet more ignominious socks, which, besides, would not solve his problem.

‘No, it’s not worth it, Cortezo. Why don’t you cut the blue diamonds from one pair of socks and the brown ones from another and stitch them together? You can make a “patchwork”, as we say in Spanish now. A patchwork work of art.’

He took a while to realize that I was joking.

‘But I wouldn’t know how to do that, María, I can’t even sew on a button, and I have to be at my appointment in an hour and a half. Ah, I get it, you’re pulling my leg.’

‘Me?! Not at all. But you’d be better off with some plain socks, navy blue if you’ve got any, and in that case, black shoes would go best.’ I did usually help him out in the end, insofar as I could.

Now that I was in a far less sanguine mood, however, I would rather irritably fob him off with some vaguely ill-intentioned ‘advice’. If he told me that he was going to a cocktail party at the French Embassy wearing a dark grey suit, I would unhesitatingly recommend a pair of Nile-green socks, assuring him that these were all the rage and that everyone there would be amazed, which wasn’t so very far from the truth.

I found it equally hard to be nice to another novelist, who signed himself Garay Fontina – just that, two surnames and no first name, which he may have thought was original and enigmatic, but in fact made him sound like a football referee – and who considered that the publishing house had a duty to solve every and any possible problem or difficulty, even if it had nothing to do with his books. He would ask us to go to his house to pick up an overcoat and take it to the dry-cleaner’s, or else send him an IT person or some painters or find him accommodation in Trincomalee or in Batticaloa and make all the arrangements for what was a purely private trip, a holiday with his
tyrannical wife, who occasionally phoned or turned up in person at the office and who didn’t ask, but ordered. My boss held Garay Fontina in high esteem and did his best to please him – through us – not so much because Garay Fontina sold lots of books as because he had led my boss to believe that he was frequently invited to Stockholm – I happened to know that he always went there at his own expense in order to plot alone in the void and breathe the air – and that he was in line for the Nobel Prize, even though no one had publicly put his name forward, in Spain or anywhere else. Not even in his home town, as so often happens. In front of my boss and his subordinates, however, he would present it as a fait accompli, and we would blush to hear him say such things as: ‘My Nordic spies tell me that I’m a dead cert for this year or the next’ or ‘I’ve memorized the speech I’m going to give to Carl Gustaf at the ceremony – in Swedish! He’ll be flabbergasted, it will be the most extraordinary thing he’s ever heard, and in his own language too, a language no one ever learns.’ ‘And what’s in the speech?’ my boss would ask with anticipatory glee. ‘You’ll read it in the world’s press the next day,’ Garay Fontina would tell him proudly. ‘Every newspaper will carry it, and they’ll all have to translate it from Swedish, even the Spanish newspapers, isn’t that funny?’ (I thought it enviable to have such confidence in a goal, even though both goal and confidence were fictitious.) I tried to be as diplomatic as possible with him, I didn’t want to risk losing my job, but I found this increasingly hard now, when, for example, he would ring me up early in the morning with his overblown desires.