The Tenant and The Motive

by Javier Cercas

  II

  Álvaro conceived a disproportionately ambitious project. Examining several possible plots, he finally chose the one he judged most tolerable. At the end of the day, he thought, the choice of theme is a trivial matter. Any theme is good for literature; what matters is the manner of expressing it. The theme is just an excuse.

  He decided to narrate the unprecedented deeds of four insignificant characters. One of them, the protagonist, is an ambitious writer who’s writing an ambitious novel. This novel within the novel tells the story of a young couple, suffocated by economic difficulties that are destroying their life together and undermining their happiness. After many hesitations, the couple resolve to murder an unsociable old man who lives very austerely in the same building. Apart from the writer of this novel, Álvaro’s novel features three other characters: a young couple, who work from morning till night trying to make ends meet and an old man who lives modestly on the top floor of the same building where the couple and the novelist live. While the writer in Álvaro’s novel is writing his own novel, the peaceful coexistence of the neighbouring couple is marred and upset: the mornings of fond frolicking in bed give way to morning feuds, arguments alternate with tears and fleeting reconciliations. One day the writer meets his neighbours in the lift. The couple are carrying a long object wrapped in brown paper. Incongruously, the writer imagines that this object is an axe and makes up his mind, when he gets home, that the couple in his novel will hack the old man to death with an axe. Days later he finishes his novel. The very next morning, the concierge discovers the corpse of the old man who lived modestly in the same building as the novelist and the couple. The old man has been murdered with an axe. According to the police, the motive for the crime was robbery. Shocked, the novelist, who knows full well the identity of the murderers, feels guilty of their crime because, in some confusing way, he senses that it was his novel that induced them to commit it.

  Once he’s got the general outline of the work designed, Álvaro writes an initial draft. He aspires to construct a mechanism that works like clockwork: nothing must be left to chance. He makes a file on each of his characters in which he meticulously records the course of their hesitations, nostalgia, thoughts, attitudes, fluctuations, desires and errors. He soon realizes it is essential – although most arduous – to suggest the process of osmosis by which, mysteriously, the writing of the novel that so absorbs the protagonist modifies the lives of his neighbours to such an extent that it is in some way responsible for the crime they commit. Voluntarily or involuntarily, dragged by his creative fanaticism or by his mere thoughtlessness, the author is responsible for not having realized in time, for not having been able or willing to prevent that death.

  Álvaro immerses himself in his work. His characters accompany him everywhere: they work with him, walk, sleep, urinate, drink, dream, sit in front of the television and breathe with him. He fills hundreds of pages with observations, notes, episodes, corrections, descriptions of his characters and their surroundings. The files get more and more voluminous. When he thinks he has a sufficient quantity of material, he undertakes to write the first version of the novel.

  III

  The day Álvaro was going to start writing the novel he got up, as usual, at eight on the dot. He took a cold shower and, when he was about to leave the house – the door was half-open and he grasped the doorknob in his left hand – he hesitated, as if he’d forgotten something or as if the wing of a bird had brushed his forehead.

  He left. The clean, sweet light of early spring filled the street. He went into the supermarket, which at that hour appeared almost deserted. He bought milk, bread, half a dozen eggs and a bit of fruit. As he joined the tiny line by the cash register, his attention fell on the slight, unpleasant-looking old man in front of him. It was Señor Montero. Señor Montero lived in an apartment on the top floor of the building where Álvaro lived, but up till then their relationship had been confined to customary salutations and uncomfortable lift silences. As the old man set his items on the counter so the woman at the till could punch them in, Álvaro considered his stature, the slight curve of his body, his hands scored with thick veins, his evasive brow, wilful jaw and difficult profile. When it was his turn at the checkout, Álvaro urged the woman to hurry, put his purchases in plastic bags, left the supermarket, ran down the sunny street and arrived panting at the door. The old man was waiting for the lift.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Álvaro with the most encompassing and friendly voice he could muster while trying to hide his rapid breathing.

  The old man responded with a grunt. There was silence.

  The lift arrived. They stepped in. Álvaro commented, as if thinking aloud, ‘What a beautiful morning! You can really tell spring’s arrived, can’t you?’ and gave the old man a wink of perfectly superfluous complicity, which was received with the barest hint of a smile, a tiny wrinkling of his forehead and a slight clearing of the darkness from his brow. But he immediately enclosed himself back into surly silence.

  When he got home, Álvaro was convinced that the old man from the top-floor apartment was the ideal model for the old man in his novel. His edgy silence, his slightly humiliating decrepitude, his physical appearance: it all tallied with the attributes his character required. He thought: This will simplify things. Obviously reflecting a real model in his work would make it much easier to endow the fictional character with a believable, effective incarnation. He could simply use the features and attitudes of the chosen individual as props, thus avoiding the risks of an imaginary somersault into the void, which could promise only dubious results. He would have to become thoroughly informed, about Señor Montero’s past and present life, all his activities, sources of income, relatives and friends. No detail was unimportant. Everything could contribute to enriching and constructing his character – sufficiently altered or distorted – in the fiction. And if it was true that the reader should do without many of these details – which, therefore, there was no reason to include in the novel – it was no less true that Álvaro was interested in all of them, given that in his judgement they constituted the basis for the precarious and subtle balance between coherence and incoherence on which a character’s believability is founded and that supports the incorruptible impression of reality produced by real individuals. From these considerations naturally followed the expediency of finding a couple who, for the same reasons, might serve as a model for the innocently criminal couple in his novel. Here it would be necessary to obtain the greatest possible quality of information on their life. Proximity to this couple would enormously simplify his work, because then he could not only observe them in more detail and more continuously, but also, with a bit of luck, he might be able to manage to listen in on conversations and even hypothetical marital disputes. He might then be able to reflect these in the novel with a high degree of verisimilitude, in greater detail and with more ease and vigour. The conversations of his immediate neighbours (those in the apartment above his own and those who lived next door on the same floor) filtered through the thin walls of his apartment, but only reached his ears dimly or during moments when silence reigned in the building or when the shouts of his neighbours rose above the general murmuring. All this put in doubt the very possibility of carrying out any espionage.

  There was yet another inconvenience: Álvaro hardly knew any of his neighbours in the building. And of the three apartments that he might have had a chance to spy on – being adjacent to his – at least two could be discarded out of hand. In one of them lived a young journalist with a face covered in boils who, with nocturnal assiduity and undeclared intentions, interrupted him regularly to ask for untimely cups of sugar or flour. Another apartment had remained empty since a widowed mother and her unmarried grown-up daughter, in love with her dog, had moved out about five months earlier, without paying their rent. Therefore, only one apartment could possibly house a married couple that might meet the demands of his novel.

  Then he remembered the little ventil
ation window, in the bathroom of his apartment, which opened on to the building’s narrow courtyard. Many times, when answering the call of nature, he had overheard his neighbours’ conversations, which came in clearly through the open window. So, in taking advantage of this new resource, not only would the task of spying be simplified and the listening difficulties reduced, but the pool of available candidates would increase, given that he’d have the chance to hear the conversations of all the tenants on his floor. Apart from the apartment left vacant by the two women, the other four were all occupied. And it was not impossible that in one of them might live a couple who, to a greater or lesser degree, might bend to the demands of his fictional couple. He just needed to seek information and, once he had chosen the hypothetical model, devote all his attention to them.

  Where could he gather information on old man Montero and the other tenants on his floor? There could only be one answer: the concierge was perhaps the only person in the whole building who knew all the comings and goings in the lives of all the tenants. But it wouldn’t be easy to get information out of her without arousing suspicion. He needed to win her confidence no matter what it cost him, even if it meant overcoming his instinctive repugnance towards that tall, thin, bony, gossipy woman with her servile, saccharine manners and a disconcerting hint of horsiness in her face.

  There were all sorts of rumours about her around the neighbourhood. Some mysteriously affirmed that her dubious past was something she would never be able to live down, others, that this past was neither past nor dubious, for everyone knew how assiduously she visited the caretaker of the building next door, as well as the local butcher. All agreed that the real victim of her picturesque tendencies was her husband. He was not as tall as her, a weak, greasy, sweaty man, whom the concierge treated with condescension and unlimited disdain, in spite of the fact that, according to many, he’d been her authentic redeemer. The best informed (or perhaps the most malicious) attested that, although the concierge’s husband’s usual attire – a worn-out pair of trousers and a bricklayer’s shirt – and his permanent air of exhaustion or boredom might indicate the contrary, he was incapable of fulfilling his conjugal duties, which increased his wife’s malaise to extremes of violence. Even though he ignored these rumours as he ignored everything to do with his neighbours, Álvaro could not keep from thinking of one fact that might provide a short cut to intimacy with the concierge: it was obvious she found him attractive. This was the only interpretation of the way she’d looked at him and brushed up against him on more than one occasion, to Álvaro’s embarrassment, surprise and shame, when they happened to meet in the lift or on the stairs. On more than a few mornings she’d invited him in for coffee, while her husband – whose bovine faith in his wife’s fidelity was a guarantee of stability for the tenants – was at work. Far from feeling flattered, these obvious insinuations had increased the repulsion she inspired in him. Now, however, he must take advantage of them.

  So, the following day, once he’d made sure her husband had left for work, he rang the bell of the concierge’s flat. At that very moment he realized he hadn’t even prepared an excuse to justify his visit. He was about to run away up the stairs, but then the mare opened the door. She smiled showing a mouthful of orderly teeth and offered him a hand, which, despite its thinness, felt strangely viscous. It was cold and somewhat damp. Álvaro thought he had a toad in his hand.

  She invited him in. They sat on the sofa in the dining room. The concierge seemed nervous and excited. She removed a vase and a figurine from the table beside the sofa and offered her visitor a cup of coffee. While the woman was in the kitchen, Álvaro told himself that what he was doing was sheer madness: he would drink the coffee and go home.

  The concierge returned with two cups of coffee. She sat down a little closer to Álvaro. She spoke non-stop, answering her own questions. At one point, she nonchalantly rested her hand on Álvaro’s left thigh; he pretended not to notice and gulped down the rest of his coffee. He stood up abruptly and jabbered some excuse; then he thanked the concierge for the coffee.

  ‘Thanks again for everything,’ he said, already at the door.

  And then, thinking he was lying, he added, ‘I’ll come back another time.’

  When he got home he felt relieved, but his relief soon turned to anxiety. The vast repugnance the woman caused him was not sufficient reason, he told himself, to endanger a project so arduously and protractedly elaborated. The value of the information he could obtain from the concierge far outweighed the price he’d need to pay with the sacrifice of his stupid scruples. Furthermore – he concluded, to instill himself with valour – the differences that, on all fronts, distinguished one woman from the next were merely adjectival.

  The next morning he returned to the concierge’s flat. This time there was no need for formalities. Resigned, Álvaro carried out his mission with phoney enthusiasm in an enormous, rickety old bed, with a wooden headboard from which hung a crucifix, which, in the midst of adulterous euphoria and from the effect of the corresponding jolts, fell off its hook and landed on Álvaro’s head. He refrained from making any comment whatsoever and tried not to think at all.

  Now the room was in semi-darkness: only a few lines of yellowish light striped the floor, the bed, the walls. The smoke from their cigarettes thickened as it floated through the rays of light. Álvaro talked about the various tenants in the building; he said that the one who most intrigued him was Señor Montero. The concierge explained (her voice momentarily acquired a slight pleasantness to Álvaro’s ear) that the old man had lost his wife a few years back and had then moved into the flat he now occupied. She didn’t know for certain, but suspected he was close to eighty years old. He’d fought in the civil war and, once it was over, stayed in the army, although he never rose from the ranks. The new military regulations caught up with him and he’d had to take early retirement. That’s why he hated politicians unwaveringly. As far as she knew he never had visitors; she didn’t know if he had any relatives, although every once in a while he received letters with South American postmarks and feminine handwriting. His only acknowledged passion was chess. He unashamedly declared himself to be an excellent player. He had been one of the founders of a chess club, which was quite far away from where he now lived, and that had forced him to space out his matches because at his age he was no longer up to great excitement. This had contributed to embittering his character even further. It was not impossible that she was the only person he had any dealings with, as she went up to his flat daily to clean, prepare a little food for him and take care of other domestic matters. But she’d never become too friendly with him – something which didn’t interest her – nothing beyond the trust that could be implied from her knowledge of those superficial details. She admitted to treating him with a certain deference, but she recognized that he was harsh and mistrustful with the rest of the tenants.

  ‘Imagine,’ continued the concierge, whose brisk transition from the formal to the familiar form of address instigated a verbal intimacy between them that, for some reason, bothered Álvaro even more than the physical one. ‘He pays me each week from money he keeps in a wall safe hidden behind a picture. He says he doesn’t trust banks. At first I didn’t know where he got the money from, but since he’s so proud of the safe, he ended up showing me.’

  Álvaro asked if she thought he kept a lot of money in it.

  ‘I doubt his pension stretches very far.’

  Against the perfect whiteness of the sheets, the concierge’s skin looked almost translucent. Her gaze was fixed on the ceiling and she spoke with a tranquillity Álvaro had never seen in her, the tree of veins at her temple barely showing. She turned towards him, resting her cheek on the pillow (her eyes were a sickly blue), and kissed him. Making a supreme effort, like a long-distance runner who feels his legs weaken within sight of the finishing line and, pulling himself together, with one last disproportionate exertion, Álvaro complied.

  The woman sank her satisfied face into t
he pillow. Álvaro lit a cigarette. He was exhausted, but soon began to talk of the other occupants of his floor. He said he was curious about them: it was almost a crime that after two years of living in the same building he barely knew them by sight. The woman turned over, lit a cigarette, stated the names of his neighbours and talked about the two women who’d had to leave the building a while ago for not paying their rent. She told anecdotes she thought were funny but which were actually just grotesque. Álvaro thought: ‘On veut bien être méchant, mais on ne veut point être ridicule’. He felt satisfied at having recalled a quote so appropriate to the moment. These trivial satisfactions filled him with pleasure, because he thought that all of life could be reduced to an indeterminate number of quotes. All of life is a cento, he thought. And then he immediately wondered: but who would undertake the critical edition?

  A smile of beatific idiocy illuminated her face as the concierge chattered on. She spoke of the Casares family, who lived in flat C on the second floor. A young couple from the north who seemed moderately happy, with a moderate, friendly manner, and moderately healthy finances. They had two children. Álvaro sensed that they were the kind of people whose normality kept them immunue to gossip and exasperated concierges. He assured her he remembered them and urged the woman to go on talking about them. The concierge explained that the husband – he wouldn’t be more than thirty-five –worked at the Seat plant, on the afternoon shift, so he started around four and finished at midnight. The woman took care of the house and children. The concierge reproached them (she spoke of all the tenants as if she were a decisive part of their lives) for educating their children above their means and social status. Perhaps living in the upper part of the city made them feel obliged to make undoubtedly excessive extravagances. Álvaro thought the concierge’s voice sounded like it was infected with the kind of rancour happy people inspire in resentful, mediocre people.