by jordi Nopca
I’m sleeping on this mattress because I’m being punished, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be forgiven. In the past month, I’ve lost practically everything: First, I got fired from the community center where I did the cultural programming; two weeks later, somebody stole my cell phone at a restaurant where I was having dinner with Desirée, an old friend from university; and then, the day before yesterday, I went grocery shopping, and on my way home, loaded down with half a dozen bags, I realized I’d lost my house keys. Ester was at work; I had to sit on the landing and wait for her, so preoccupied with my string of bad luck that I couldn’t come up with a good excuse. Once we were back inside the apartment, she vented all her rage at me. At first, it was just insults. Idiot. Loser. Moron. When she saw that they weren’t having much of an effect on me, she started in on the weak punches. I accepted them stoically, not knowing when my nightmare would end. While Ester hit me, if I closed my eyes, I could see the desk at the community center where I had worked until just recently. It was impeccably neat: On it, there were a tray with a few papers, a jar filled with pens, and the computer screen. Next to the mouse I could make out the cell phone that had disappeared during that dinner. Was it possible that Desirée had had a hand in it?
After the physical aggression, Ester made me go back to the supermarket. I had to try to reconstruct my exact route, along the street and inside the store. I even asked the supermarket employees—the checkout girl and two stock boys—about my keys, but their reactions were of no help whatsoever. When I returned home, defeated, Ester demanded I ring the doorbells of the neighbors on our floor. Maybe I had left my keys in the lock and some kind soul had found them and held on to them, so the person could return them to me as soon as he or she saw me. Nobody answered the door across the way, but there was someone home at the other one. The neighbor in 1A stuck his head out, dressed in a police uniform. I explained my situation while he looked at me suspiciously.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” he replied. “I’ve been out all morning, and my wife isn’t back from work yet.”
Ester forced me to continue my search on the second, third, and fourth floors. Only five neighbors opened their doors for me, and in every case their response was the same as the policeman’s. Nobody knew anything about my keys, either because they’d just gotten home or they’d been visiting a relative in the hospital or they’d been checking in at the unemployment office—the red tape is worse than recurring bronchitis—or they (pajama-clad grandparents with messy hair) had spent the day taking care of sick grandkids, who continued to demand their attention. The fifth neighbor opened the door in a robe and holding a pestle. It was pointing down but remained a threat.
“Whaddya want?” he said.
I quickly sketched out my problem. I’ll admit it: The story was harder for me to explain each time. The man held his thick eyeglasses in one hand, while with the other he surreptitiously played with the kitchen implement/weapon.
“No idea. Bye.”
The sound of the slamming door echoed through the entire staircase. It went down to the entrance, and from there led back up. It didn’t end on the fourth floor, but kept climbing to the highest stratum, the fifth floor, where there were only two apartments. In one lived a group of English literature students who threw parties on the weekend with their fellow Anglophile students. They were only noisy when Australians came over, loud and rude and focused only on their strictly carnal goals. On Saturday nights when those oceanic kangaroos were there, some bottle always shattered, the stairwell smelled of marijuana, and we had to put up with their exaggerated mating sounds.
In the first apartment on the top floor, a young woman came to the door, and after listening to my story, she snapped the elastic on her shorts, told me she’d just gotten up, and that the same thing had happened to her once, when she lived in the Old Quarter with four friends. They’d had to change both locks on the door, because the keys never showed up.
“It wasn’t cheap. I had to work at a bar every Saturday for two months to pay it off.”
The tenants in 5B were the most problematic ones in the whole building. For a while, it was just a couple in their thirties, like Ester and me. Their relationship was more complicated, though. Once, we saw them come to blows outside the supermarket; another time when they were in their apartment, a plate meant to clang against one of their faces ended up going through the window and shattering on our interior balcony. Among the shards we picked up there were traces of rice, tomato sauce, and fried egg. Ester got mad at me because I refused to go upstairs and complain. She was in a bad mood for two days. The neighbors meanwhile had had time to make up—the whole building could hear their moans of pleasure—and fight again. Luckily, that time it didn’t go any further than yelling.
I pressed their doorbell but couldn’t hear any noises from inside. The button was soft and emerged from a concentric circle of stiff, faded plastic. I pressed it hard, sinking my finger in as far as I could. It wasn’t a matter of strength—they’d disconnected it, perhaps that very day, or maybe three months ago. Those tenants were my last hope, except for the neighbors I hadn’t yet spoken to. I put my ear up to the door and thought I could hear scuttling footsteps.
“Excuse me? Hello. Hello,” I repeated, shortly after employing my knuckles against the damp wood that might be separating me from my keys. “Hello. Hel-lo!”
The neighbor in 5A opened her door again, just a few inches.
“It’s no use. I think only the grandmother is there today, and she can barely get out of her chair.”
As she spoke, I could see that she wasn’t wearing her T-shirt and shorts anymore but a scanty robe that invited me to glance at her thighs. She must have worked on them at the gym at least three times a week. Body pump. Spinning. BodyCombat. How had I not noticed them before?
I thanked her for coming out to let me know, and I went back downstairs, the flash of what I’d seen still imprinted on my retinas, and stood in front of my door. Ester took her sweet time opening up for me.
“Any luck?” she asked, rubbing her face with both hands. She must have been crying, because her cheeks were red and the edges of her eyes were still damp.
I had to tell her that none of the neighbors I’d spoken to had my keys. That was the last straw. She veered her recriminations toward my inefficiency at work. From what she was screaming, it seemed the community center had let me go because I was frigging useless.
“You just keep pushing the envelope … pushing and pushing, and here we are.”
“Envelope? What envelope?”
“Not only are you useless but you seem to think I was born yesterday. You think I don’t know what’s going on with you and Desirée? I’m so sick of your lies. You know where your keys are? At her house. Why don’t you give her a call?”
“Listen, Ester …”
“No. I’ve had it with you. It’s over. Good-bye, Enric!”
“But …”
“I’m leaving.”
I tried to stop her with sweet words, but it was impossible. Ester filled up two suitcases and left.
“And don’t even thinking about touching any of my stuff,” she threatened from the doorway. “I’ll be coming back to get everything I need.”
In these last two days, confused and stunned by the solitude, I’ve still managed to muster up the strength to talk to five of the six remaining neighbors. I’m holding out the hope of getting my keys back from the one in 3A, Mr. Jacinto. The woman who lives next door to him told me last night that he’d gone out of town the same day the incident occurred.
“He works in a bank and sometimes has to meet with other branch officers. He goes to Asturias, La Rioja, and Santander mostly. If business goes well, he brings us a bottle of wine. We’ve known him for years. We invite him over for lunch fairly often. … He’s single, and very polite. He’s the only man in this building who wears a jacket and tie.”
The woman almost convinced me to stay and have a nice cold beer. I w
ould have accepted if I’d been a little less down. She seemed really nice, unlike the neighbors in 5B: A few hours earlier, a woman whose hair was dyed too light a shade of blond—the color of faded awnings on restaurants along the beach—had responded to my polite but insistent knocking, only to rudely brush me off. The message she ungraciously conveyed was that my set of house keys was irrelevant to the Somoza family. Then she slammed the door in my face. I stood there a few seconds before going back to my apartment, thinking that maybe the neighbor across the way would come out to console me, in shorts or that robe. She must have gone out, and I walked downstairs with my head bowed, worried because my chances of finding the keys were dwindling. Ester hadn’t picked up any of the times I’d called.
###
Tomorrow morning, I’ll call a locksmith. I make up my mind as I writhe on Aunt Hermínia’s mattress. My only option is changing the lock, whatever that costs me. It doesn’t matter if Mr. Jacinto comes back from his business trip, rings my bell, and hands me the set of keys, jingling them with a smile, proud of his good deed. He always wears a fetching tie. He works at a bank, since he earned his degree in economics. He’s a self-made man, a man with a future. A good catch: He’s not engaged yet, even though he must be forty. Had Ester ever spoken with him? His good job, his jacket and tie, that’s why everyone calls him Mr. Jacinto. At the community center, we all just went by our first names. Some of my coworkers would wear the same T-shirt three or four days in a row. The smell in the air would get denser as the week went on. Did that happen in banks, too? Did employees with erratic hygiene habits keep their jobs? Those people who leave the bathrooms at work all nasty, are they punished for it? My mind is flooded with questions. All I can do is wallow on the same sheets my aunt Hermínia had gotten old on, until she had to go to the nursing home.
I doze off but wake up again almost immediately. I’m tired, but haunted by the feeling I probably deserve this punishment. Why did they fire me? How could I have risked my relationship with Ester over a fling with Desirée? Where in the hell are my house keys? I open my eyes in the midst of absolute darkness. There’s no way a robber could get into the apartment without waking me up. Leaning against the door, the mattress would immediately warn me of any suspicious movements, or that’s what I think until a tense body falls on top of me. I leap up and get into position as I shout at the stranger, “Don’t move!” My voice seems to emerge from the depths of a black cave. At the same time, I feel around on the wall, searching for the light switch that will illuminate the burglar’s face.
“Enric. Relax. It’s me.”
I recognize Ester’s voice and my heart skips a beat. Instead of turning on the light, I sit down on the bed. I touch her hair with one hand.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came back.”
“Really?”
“I guess I’m that stupid.”
Ester seeks out my lips with hers. When I run my hand over her face, I realize she’s been crying. I tell her that I was the stupid one.
“I’m a frigging loser. I lost my job, my phone, my keys … and I almost lost you, too. I’m sorry, Ester, I’m so sorry.”
She pulls me off of Aunt Hermínia’s mattress, in an attempt to get me over to the bedroom. I resist a little. “Are you sure? It’s safer if we stay by the door. …”
She nibbles on my neck to convince me. We end up on our bed. In the dark. The sex is urgent and ends quickly, but we go at it again, something we don’t do very often.
I dream that I get up early in the morning to take a whiz. I hesitate between returning to our double bed or to Aunt Hermínia’s mattress. I opt for our bed. I watch Ester sleep beneath the light that comes in from the hallway. Her face gradually transforms into the face of my sister Marina, who died of pneumonia shortly after her sixteenth birthday.
###
I writhe on the mattress again. Usually, if I were having this much trouble sleeping, I would take something to help release the anxiety of losing my keys and my girlfriend almost simultaneously. I have bad thoughts trapped in a corner of my brain, and I can’t rid myself of them without some pharmaceutical assistance. I’m sure I can pay for the locksmith, but it’s a waste, and will screw up my delicate financial balance, sending me into the red. Thinking about money makes me think about unemployment, and that leads to thoughts of the most terrifying headlines in the papers and the most desperate minutes of the TV news. A little newscaster voice reminds me that unemployment rates haven’t stopped rising in three years, and that they’ve just broken a new record. Finding work isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to be almost impossible. I imagine going back into the community center. Burning it down or bursting into tears at the front desk. My thoughts travel to the Congress of Deputies. Politicians from one party accuse those of another of not doing enough to solve the joblessness. At the end of the session. a regional coalition spokesperson appears. The historical grievances are untenable: In times of recession, the deputy declares, they’re even harder to bear. His gaze is empty. The complaints he tenders bounce off the shells covering the major parties’ politicians. Some look at their watches. If this goes on much longer, they won’t have time to get home before the Champions League game starts. The spokesman continues complaining about historical grievances. Suddenly, the human figure is replaced by a pig. All the other deputies around him are pigs, too. Even the majority leader has turned into a pig, and he watches the session with his two front hooves resting on the desk. He scratches at the wooden surface before which his illustrious colleagues have sat. He brings his snout to the microphone and lets out clouds of onomatopoeias that scatter through the chamber like curses.
I decide I can’t take any more, when Ester’s enraged face appears, screaming that she’s leaving me. I’ve had it with you. It’s over. Good-bye, Enric! I can’t find what I need on the bathroom shelf. I have to go to the kitchen. I locate the pills in the same cabinet where we have half a dozen pans piled up. I eat a little salami to reduce the effects of the drug. Otherwise, I’d wake up with significant heartburn. Once you’re over thirty, you need to start thinking about these things, right? I’m still in the kitchen when I hear a sound in the entryway that gives me goose bumps. I put the pill in my mouth, swallow it down with a bit of water, and a second disquieting sound—someone pushing aside Aunt Hermínia’s mattress—keeps me from going to see what’s going on. Now I hear footsteps in the darkness and then the voice of the man who two days earlier had opened his door dressed as a cop.
“Go into the living room and start unplugging the TV and the stereo.”
“The stereo isn’t for us.”
“It’s not? Who gets it?”
After those words, there is silence. I manage to take a couple of steps toward the kitchen door. From my new position, I see the glass door in the hall reflecting the distended figure of the policeman. He is looking around, pointing a flashlight at various parts of the apartment, without moving at all. It looks like his pajamas combine navy blue and fluorescent yellow, just like his uniform for work.
“Got it,” says the woman from the living room.
The policeman heads into the living room and I lose sight of him for a few moments. I should do something, but I don’t feel I can. The couple again appears reflected in the door glass, this time with a television—ours, mine—in their hands. Before leaving, she says something I can’t make out. Since I haven’t heard the door close, I wait a few seconds, in case they’re coming back. I was right: Soon the woman whose parent is in the hospital appears, also with a flashlight. I peek out of the kitchen to see where she’s headed. Now she’s in our bedroom, going through drawers until she finds Ester’s jewelry box. She stops looking; she’s found her haul.
She disappears before I make any decision. When the neighbor from the apartment next to Mr. Jacinto arrives, I screw up my courage, go out into the hallway, and confront her.
“Hey!” I shout. “That’s enough!”
The woman goes into the l
iving room and takes the stereo from the shelf.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said that’s enough!”
She walks past me without skipping a beat, and when I try to stop her, my fingers sink into her flesh, invisible. I go to the entry-way. The door to the apartment is wide open, and the neighbors are waiting for their turn to steal. An old dude takes everything in the fridge, even an open package of turkey that stinks. I’m indignant and I insult them, but it does no good. While a man in pajamas with little horses on them takes my computer, I observe my cadaver lying on Aunt Hermínia’s mattress, its skull smashed in by a blunt object. I touch my forehead. It doesn’t hurt. Mr. Jacinto, who is fourth in line, is wearing a jacket and tie.
###
I can’t say when I opened my eyes, awakened by some very familiar reggae. Its tranquil but insistent rhythm, tempered by a marijuana-sedated voice, comes from somewhere far off, at an undoubtedly excessive volume. I mutter some curse words and get up. From the bathroom, the song is even more unbearable. I stick my head out the window and look up. The lights of 5A are on. The English lit students are celebrating something. I have two options, I tell myself as I take a sip of water: I can either lie back down on Aunt Hermínia’s mattress and do my best to get back to sleep or I can get dressed and join the party. Not having Ester in the house, feeling too awake, and, most of all, the agitation I’ve felt since I lost my job all push me to put on a clean shirt and the first pair of pants I can find. I grab the last bottle of red wine in the pantry and head upstairs.