What We Become (57 page)

She is standing next to the bed and lights another cigarette. The flame from the match illuminates her bony fingers and manicured nails, her eyes that are fixed on Max, the lines on her forehead beneath her cropped gray hair.

“My God. You only had to touch me and I'd tremble.”

She extinguishes the flame so that only the glowing tip of the cigarette remains. And, like a twin spark, a soft, coppery glint in her honey-colored eyes.

“I was just a young man,” he replies. “A hunter intent on sur
vival. You were what I said before: as beautiful as a dream . . . one of those marvels which we men only have a right to when we're young and daring.”

She is still standing next to the bed, silhouetted in the semidarkness, facing Max.

“It was astonishing . . . and you're still doing it.” The red end of the cigarette glows twice. “How do you manage it, after all this time? . . . You knew how to cast a spell with your words and gestures, as if you were wearing a mask of intelligence. You'd make some remark that was doubtless not your own, something you'd read in a magazine or overheard someone else say, but which gave me goose bumps all the same. And although twenty seconds later I'd forgotten it, the goose bumps remained . . . And nothing's changed. Here, feel my arm. You're a weak, battered old man, and yet you still have that effect on me. I swear.”

She has stretched out her arm and is feeling for Max's hand. Her skin, he confirms, it is still warm and soft. In that half-light, her tall, willowy figure looks the same as it did when he first knew her all those years ago.

“That smile of yours, tranquil and treacherous . . . and daring, yes. You've held on to that, despite everything. The old smile of the professional dancer.”

She lies down beside him. Once again the proximity of her smell, her warmth. The red tip illumines her face, so close Max feels the heat from the cigarette on his own face.

“Every time I caressed my son, when he was little, I imagined I was caressing you. And that still happens when I look at him. I see you in him.”

A silence. Then he hears her laugh quietly, almost blissfully.

“His smile, Max . . . Can you honestly say you don't recognize that smile?”

With this, she sits up slightly, and, feeling for the night table, stubs out her cigarette.

“Rest, take it easy,” she adds. “For once in your life. I've told you, I'm watching over you.”

She has curled up very close, nestling beside him. Max screws up his eyes, contented. At ease. For some strange reason, which he doesn't try to analyze, he feels compelled to tell her an old story.

“I was sixteen the first time I went with a woman,” he recalls slowly, in a hushed voice. “I was working as a bellhop at the Ritz in Barcelona at the time. . . . I was tall for my age, and she was one of the guests, a refined older woman. In the end, she contrived to get me into her room. . . . When I realized what she was after, I did the best I could. And when we'd finished, while I was getting dressed, she gave me a one-hundred-peseta note. Before leaving, I went over to her, naively, to give her a kiss, but she recoiled, irritated. . . . And later, when I bumped into her in the hotel, she didn't even condescend to look at me.”

He falls silent for a moment, searching for a nuance or detail that will enable him to place what he has just told her in a precise context.

“In the space of five seconds,” Max says at last, “while that woman recoiled, I learned lessons I've never forgotten.”

A long silence ensues. Mecha has been listening very quietly, her head on his shoulder. Finally, she stirs, coming closer still. On her skinny, almost frail body, her breasts feel small and skimpy through her blouse, not at all as he remembers them. For some strange reason, this affects him. It moves him.

“I love you, Max.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

Gently, instinctively they seek out each other's mouths, almost wearily. A melancholy kiss. Tranquil. Afterward they remain motionless, in each other's arms.

“Have the last years really been that difficult?” she asks after a while.

“They could've been better.”

A succinct way of putting it, he thinks, having scarcely finished the sentence. Then, in a quiet, dispassionate voice, he launches into a sorrowful litany: physical decline, the competition from young blood adapted to the new world. And finally, to top it all, a spell in an Athens jail—the result of a series of mistakes and disasters. Not a lengthy one, but by the time he got out he was finished. His experience only enabled him to live off petty crimes and poorly paid work, or to hang around places where he could make a living out of swindling people. For a while Italy was a good place for that, but in the end even his looks went. The job with Dr. Hugentobler, comfortable and secure, had been a real stroke of good fortune. Now that was ruined forever.

“What will become of you?” Mecha asks after a brief silence.

“I don't know. I guess I'll find a way. I always have.”

She stirs in his arms, as though about to protest.

“I could . . .”

“No.” He restrains her, clinging to her more tightly.

She stops moving. Max's eyes are open in the half-light and she is breathing slowly, quietly. For a while she seems to be asleep. Finally, she stirs again, just a little, and brushes his face with her lips.

“Anyway, remember,” she whispers, “I owe you a coffee if you ever pass through Lausanne. To see me.”

“Good. Perhaps I will pass through one day.”

“Please remember.”

“Yes . . . I will.”

For a moment, Max—astonished by the coincidence—thinks he can hear the familiar strains of a tango. Possibly a radio in an adjacent room, he thinks. Or music coming from the terrace below. It takes a while for him to realize that he is humming it in his own head.

“It hasn't been a bad life,” he confesses in a hushed tone. “Most
of the time I lived off other people's money, without ever having to despise or fear them.”

“That seems like quite a good outcome.”

“And I met you.”

She lifts her head off Max's shoulder.

“Oh, come on, you old fraud. You met a lot of women.”

Her tone is good-humored. Knowing. He kisses her hair softly.

“I don't remember those women. Not one. But I remember you. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.” She rests her head on his shoulder once more. “Tonight I believe you. Perhaps you have loved me, too, all your life.”

“Yes. And perhaps I love you now. . . . How can I tell?”

“Of course . . . How are you to tell?”

A ray of sunshine wakes up Max, and he opens his eyes to the light warming his face. A bright, narrow beam of sunlight is streaming through the curtains drawn across the windows. Max moves slowly, laboriously at first, lifting his head from the pillow with a painful effort, and he realizes he is alone. On the bedside table, a travel clock tells him it is ten-thirty in the morning. The room smells of tobacco. Next to the clock is a glass of water and an ashtray containing a dozen or so cigarette ends. She must have spent the rest of the night with him. Watching over him as she promised. Perhaps she had sat there, quietly smoking as she gazed at him asleep in the early dawn light.

He gets up, dizzily, running his hands over his creased clothes. Unbuttoning his shirt he sees that his bruises have acquired an ugly, dark hue, as if half his blood had seeped between his flesh and his skin. He aches from his groin up to his neck, and each step he takes toward the bathroom, until his stiff limbs begin to warm up, is almost agonizingly painful. The image he discovers in the mirror doesn't exactly correspond to that of his good days: an old man
with bleary, bloodshot eyes stares back at him from the far side of the glass. Turning on the tap, Max puts his head under the stream of cold water. He leaves it running for a long while to wake up properly. Finally he lifts his head, and, before drying himself with a towel, he once again studies his aging features, the water trickling into the deep furrows that line his face. He walks slowly across the bedroom to the window, and when he draws back the curtains, the light outside bursts over the crumpled coverlet, the navy-blue blazer draped on the back of a chair, the suitcase by the door, Mecha's belongings strewn about the room: clothes, a bag, books, a leather belt, a purse, magazines. Dazzled at first, Max's eyes slowly become accustomed to the brightness, and he focuses now on the azure sky and sea fused together, the coastline and the dark cone of Vesuvius in misty blues and grays. A ferry, setting out with hesitant slowness toward Naples, sketches the brief white line of its wake across the cobalt blue of the bay. And three floors below on the terrace, at a table (the one next to the kneeling marble woman looking out to sea), Jorge Keller and his mentor Karapetian are playing a game of chess, while Irina watches them, sitting slightly apart from the table, bare feet on the edge of her chair, arms hugging her knees. On the margins, now, of the game and their lives.

Mecha Inzunza sits alone, farther away, next to a bougainvillea, near the balustrade surrounding the terrace. She is wearing her dark skirt, and her beige cardigan is draped over her shoulders. There is a coffee set and some newspapers open on the table, but she isn't looking at them. As motionless as the stone woman behind her, she appears to be contemplating the view of the bay. As Max watches, forehead pressed against the cold windowpane, Max sees her move only once, lifting her hand to touch her hair, and tilting her head to the side with a pensive air before sitting upright once more and continuing to gaze out to sea.

Max turns his back to the window and walks over to the chair to pick up his jacket. While he is putting it on, his gaze lingers upon
the objects on the chest of drawers. And there, where he couldn't help but see it, placed deliberately on top of a long, white woman's glove, he discovers the pearl necklace, glowing softly in the intense brightness filling the room.

Standing there facing the glove and the necklace, the old man, who moments ago was contemplating his reflection in the bathroom mirror, feels memories, images, and previous lives float to the surface, his mind ordering them with astonishing clarity. His own and others' lives suddenly join together in a smile that is at once a painful grimace. Although perhaps it is the pain of lost or impossible things that is behind this sad smile. And so, once more, a small boy with grubby knees walks, arms outstretched, along the rotten boards of a boat abandoned in the mud of La Boca; a young soldier climbs a hill strewn with corpses; a door closes on the image of a sleeping woman, enveloped in moonlight as hazy as regret. Then, in the weary smile of the man looking back over his life, there appears a whole succession of trains, hotels, casinos, starched bib fronts, naked backs, and jewelry glinting beneath crystal chandeliers, while a handsome young couple, impelled by passions as urgent as life itself, gaze into one another's eyes while they dance an unwritten tango, in a silent, empty room on an ocean liner steaming through the dark night. Unknowingly, as they circle in their embrace, the pattern of an unreal world whose weary lights are about to be snuffed out forever.

But that isn't all. As the old man stares at the glove and the necklace, in his mind's eye he sees palm trees, their fronds bowed beneath the rain, and a wet dog on a misty, gray beach, opposite a hotel room where the most beautiful woman in the world is waiting, on disheveled sheets that smell of moist intimacy and a serenity that is oblivious to time and to life, for the man at the window to turn toward her to plunge once more into her warm, perfect flesh, the only place in the universe where its strange rules can be forgotten. After that, on the green baize, three ivory balls click gently while Max stares intently at a young man in whom, astonishingly,
he recognizes his own smile. He also sees up close two dazzling eyes, like liquid honey, looking at him as no woman has ever looked at him before. And he feels a moist, warm breath tickle his lips, while a voice whispers old words that sound like new and pour a soothing balm on his old wounds, absolving all the lies, the doubts and disasters, rooms in boardinghouses and squalid dwellings, fake passports, police stations, prison cells, the humiliation of recent years, loneliness and failure, the dim light of endless bleak dawns that erased the shadow that the boy on the banks of the Riachuelo, the soldier climbing the hill beneath the sun, the handsome youth who danced with beautiful women on luxury liners and in grand hotels, had firmly attached to his feet.