The Plimsoll Line (17 page)

“Wet food again, Polanski,” he says. His voice retains a wiry consistency. He notices the cat has grown quite fat in the last few months, in fact, it has the hairy belly of a circus lion hanging off it; he, on the other hand, has grown a lot thinner. He forces himself to digest his meager lunch until he feels his blood flowing and his body acquiring a definitive consistency, similar to that of the wood of the table. Now his hand is his hand, his chest is his chest, his legs are his legs, his gums are his gums, too, Laura’s diary is Laura’s diary.

On the side table, the answering machine is blinking. The red light seems to demand his attention with a wink of urgency. He halfheartedly presses the listen button. Ana wants to talk to him, as soon as possible, she adds details concerning the arrangements for selling the house, some of which require his approval. The answering machine mechanism stops, but the red light keeps blinking, the recorded voice announcing another message, so he again presses the listen button. The machine reads out Óscar’s number. His voice does not conceal his concern or tiredness, though the tone is jovial. “Hello, Gabriel, I’m back. This trip was really worthwhile; you should see where I’ve been . . . to the promised land. Ana called me to say she’s been trying to talk to you for several days. It appears she’s on the verge of closing a deal to sell the house, but she can’t locate you. Where on earth have you been? I called the clinic, and a nurse told me you gave them a real fright. You just can’t be left alone. Are you all right? If you don’t return this call, I’ll come around to pick you up tomorrow at noon. We can have lunch together. My treat. Take care.”

He imagines Óscar tanned by the sun of Singapore or Timbuktu, with his camera still hanging around his neck, his plane tickets, his passport, his luggage still unpacked, sleepless and dirty in the middle of his room, collapsing into the armchair to have a snooze while images of deserted beaches, palm trees, and coral reefs peel away from his retinas like fish scales. He imagines him right now next to the phone, snoring loudly, crushed by the fatigue of his journey.

He climbs the stairs slowly, feeling calm at long last, as if the silence now filling the house had fallen lightly on his shoulders, oblivious to the presence of the anonymous observer who walks alongside him, accompanying him. He is grateful for the solitude of his bedroom. He turns his body to the wall, and the mattress groans beneath his hip. He folds his arm under the pillow. He is grateful for the proximity of objects, is calmed by the wall, the glass of water covered in bubbles, the pills, the alarm clock. Everything is there, within arm’s reach. He feels the warm shape of the cat nestling between his feet.

Perhaps everything consists in remaining very still in the light and, like a skin beneath the sheets, breathing in the air that comes with a slight fragrance of saltpeter, since the sea, though distant, can be felt here, reaching all the way from the other side of the mountains, the same direction from which storms choose to cover the valley. From that direction comes the air, movement, a desire for action, a panting for life that issues forth in bursts from the most isolated depths, but also from the closest vicinity. This certainty comes to him at times when everything around him takes on an elegance more real than reality itself, if such a thing is admissible or even imaginable once the moment has passed. When
that
happens, space takes on its exact, overwhelming dimension. Reality reveals itself with a smoothing of edges. And then something wonderful occurs. Radical surprise, the deepest Assumption. But
that
doesn’t happen right now.

If the succubus of his bad dreams were to say to him, “Make a wish,” he would ask to be able to mold himself to the geological quietude of stones. He manages to evoke the shape of a rock, like a tortoise shell, an eons-old stone, a smooth shape a passerby could lie down on in order to regain his strength. He would like to be a smooth, onion-colored rock, a rock that stays in the sun, on the other side of the undergrowth, hidden from the passerby who in order to discover it would have to leave the path and go in the direction of that sun glinting through the leaves and sparkling on the chalky surface with inclement whiteness—a rock. Quite simply. He can feel the morning light warming the lichen-covered surface, which is coated in frost from the cold of night, then the heat of that sun now turning in the vault of heaven, having warmed the earth in its ascent. He could feel around its rugged, prehistoric-animal surface, the first geological layer, until he reached its inner nooks and crannies where very primitive organisms move, articulated insects, tiny spiders the size of a pinhead, secluded wrinkles, cobwebs, crusts, acorn caps, fragments of pine nuts, brief putrefactions, microscopic excrescences of a hidden, silent life. Somewhere warm and dark, like a nest.

A wish, no more. And no less. Perhaps everything consists in allowing oneself to be swayed by the to-and-fro of a comfortable insensitivity, rocked by a halfhearted melody that presumes, and no doubt anticipates, the worst forms of abandonment, though at first sight this is all it seems, a dull ballad protecting but anaesthetizing one’s last defenses, the rock-a-bye baby of a distant voice that rings again in the ears after one abandons oneself to the weight of one’s body, and how pleasant it is then to settle into the law of gravity and to unresistingly witness one’s own sinking on a surface already molded to the shape of one’s body; the rock-a-bye baby on the treetop, the voice of the sirens, a sweet tidbit dissolved in the serum of memory, because deep down it’s a question of forgetting one’s own impulses, the hidden springs of resistance, the forgotten first school notebook, the teatime of rewards and punishments, the self-esteem, until, at a certain point of abandonment, it is no more than the precarious melody of a children’s song reduced to nonsense, something that ends up disappearing and leaving in its place the sound of vulgar hammering, syncopated life.

He half-opens his eyes. Within arm’s reach, the lamp pours soft devastation over the pearly gray wall, whose surface is reminiscent of the surface of a very distant planet. There is the glass of water covered in bubbles, like a reminder, the pills patiently counted out, one by one, some thirty barbiturates and sedatives in all different colors and sizes, rescued from the psychiatric pharmacopeia Ana kept in the bathroom cabinet; there are white ones, pink ones, yellow ones, green and blue ones, all in a pile he would be incapable of picking up in the palm of his hand without provoking the predictable, penultimate scene, ridiculous, a little pathetic for any inexperienced suicidal individual—bending down, on all fours, feeling around on the carpet, then beneath the bed skirt, to recover half a dozen colored pills. To say goodbye against nothing and nobody, just an act confirming the impossibility of continuing to heed the exhortation of the wind coming from the north, that longing, that remote jubilation that chooses the same direction as storms. Because that is the point: not to return. He gazes at his bare feet, a sky-blue color. The feet of a dead man. The cat doesn’t realize it’s resting between the feet of a dead man who is considering shoving a fistful of pills down his throat to ease the passage and washing them down with a swig of water. The purpose of this act is not to recover the lost object of desire, since there is no desire, just a pure act carried out from the very heart of desire, just as right now he feels the heat coming off the cat’s body between his feet. That’s what this is about. He hates psychiatric superstitions. Objects are superfluous, and he hates his feet. He has always hated them. His hands, as well. Is this a speck of desire? But he’s been down this tunnel, there and back, too many times, he is familiar with the nooks and crannies, the false doors, the mirrors, games, fragments reflecting a light that only exists in a desire that is about to run out; they are only grimaces putting off the revelation, the definitive proof that this is everything. Desire makes its appearance, and it leaves. He has rehearsed the comedy of departure so many times that were it not for the fact that he loves the light, just the idea of reaching a genuine door would seem childish to him. This is clearly paradoxical when his hand is hesitating between sorting the pills by size—perhaps the smallest first, then the large ones—or by color—first the pink and yellow ones, then the green, lastly the blue—and he only has to stretch out his hand, empty the bottle of pills onto his palm, and shove the pills down his throat; there is no desire, just an act that should leave no room for doubt, and certainly not for the luminous nightmare of regret once the pills are heading down his esophagus, the succubus doubled up with laughter, clinging to its sides, on seeing his gesture of fright, so grotesque. It is just an impulse that neither seeks a solution nor aims to—that handful of colored pills, that glass of water. A capitulation. He recalls the sentence spoken so many times at Laura’s funeral, and later in the cemetery. “We are nothing,” they said. It has to be a willful, affirmative gesture, because in the end it’s about doing away with doubts that equate light with that trivial, ultimately melancholic gesture. For this, a well-aimed desire like a stone or a handful of wet earth is necessary, something concrete that does not belong to the world of mist where everything is comfortable, vague, and uniform, an impulse that is defined in opposition to light and shadow, something real, consistent, a yes, or a no, a stone, a shout, a gesture of disillusion, since deep down, in the end, everything shelters a direction. And yet he loves golden sunlight, that light that brightens wine in bottles, the green, unmoving ray like a piece of fruit in a still life, a cracked lemon, the wrinkled skin of a quince, the light that brings out the quality of earth, or toasted sand, in the skin; he loves the slightly old light of 25-watt bulbs, the milky light of wintry skies turned orange by that other light coming from the street lamps, which bounces off the wet pavements like mandarin segments, the light emerging from the coldest, humblest puddles, inhabited by invertebrates; he loves the jovial light of spring, which is a luminous river of promises lit on the green of gardens and on the hips of girls who allow themselves to be kissed in those gardens, that light that falls on the heads of all the pedestrians in the street—whom he sees and others may not see, or perhaps they do, it’s impossible to know—and ignites a tremulous light on their crowns, the same light that cleans the March sky with the glint of a frozen prism, and the sapphire light of May on a clear sky like a worn piece of blue silk that anticipates the arrival of summer, when the light will absorb the pale lime of all walls and solitary stones and abandoned rocks in dried riverbeds, the whitewashed light in eyes that chars memory or fixes it forever in a childish gesture, such as throwing a stone onto the surface of a river, or seeing the first steps of a girl in a garden surrounded by little dots that look like pollen or motes of dust or tiny insects flying over the lawn; he loves the polar light of winter that illuminates effortlessly from behind an overcast sky while under the sheets of that same winter there’s a candle that glimmers on the inflamed lips of sex. Perhaps, in reality, everything can be summed up with a principle it is necessary to assume in all its radical simplicity: how could one not love light.

Only the cat notices the presence of the observer, who remains in the doorway. The man showers slowly. He puts anti-inflammatory cream on his arm—the black color has given way to an aubergine purple with small yellow islets. He draws back the curtains. He spends the rest of the afternoon cleaning the house. He tells himself the next occupant should find a place that is tidy, or at least devoid of the remains of his clumsiness and neglect. He applies himself to this task with rare determination. He opens the windows, cleans the furniture, shakes out the carpets, disinfects the bathroom. The worst part is the kitchen. He fills three garbage bags with cans of expired food and grease-stained rags. The cat watches his efforts with surprise, especially when he moves the wardrobe to clean the balls of fluff. The cat doesn’t fail to notice the sluggish walk of the succubus, which, ousted from its hiding place, moves toward the porch. It tries to hide and follow the line of the floor, clinging to the wall. The afternoon light illuminates it with the consistency of cartilage. It reaches the fence with the tired flapping of a chicken that has fallen out of its nest. It tries to propel itself up to the lowest branches of the trees, unsuccessfully. Lying in wait, the cat dilates its pupils. It doesn’t hesitate when the time to jump comes, and the succubus knows it is dead before the animal traps it in its claws. Encouraged by this successful outcome, the cat feels an irrepressible desire to mark a territory that has recently been tarnished by too many visitors. Its old, neutered-cat’s pride causes it to arch its tail and expel a jet of urine onto the garden fence in the knowledge that the odorous molecules of its urine will be transported far away, further even than the ravine and the gas station, by that pleasant wind coming from the north and refreshing its hindquarters.

The mess in the garden is still visible. He wonders whether he should recover the hydrangeas. He doubts the new owner will waste his time experimenting with grafting plants. He may not even like the country, and live with his back to the forest. He imagines a man aged about forty-five who has made his fortune on the stock market and buys without asking too many questions, having weighed above any other consideration the likely return on his property investment. Perhaps his family will occupy the house for a time, and in the living room there will be conversations, children’s cries, a rubber ball bouncing on the floor upstairs. This option strikes him as less gloomy than the image of bare walls and the dirty silhouettes of picture frames that have been removed, a desolate room that would appeal to nothing and nobody. A place that nobody sees, that therefore does not exist, and that nobody redeems with their gaze. A forgotten place.

He sweeps the leaves covering the porch and piles them up in the middle of the garden. He gathers the pages of Laura’s diary and lets them fall, one by one, onto the stubble. He examines his heart and the pile of leaves at one and the same time. There is no gesture that indicates mourning, only relief and affirmation. He wonders when he last made a bonfire. He doesn’t remember. He brings the flame of the lighter closer, and the fire quickly ignites. A gray smoke smelling of tinder rises through the vents of the leaves. The combustion emerges in lively flames, accompanied by merry crackling, and a slightly bitter air lifts up small sparks and very thin fragments of charred paper. The bonfire spreads an ancient fragrance over the garden. He sits down on the deckchair. He still has a few things to do—take down the for-sale sign, for example, clean the fridge, take out the garbage bags, buy a loaf of bread, perhaps—but he decides to wait for the bonfire to go out completely.