He approaches the mailboxes, colored the same warm shade as the rest of the wood on the ground floor, and looks at the two names written on a small, clipped piece of paper in elegant, slanted letters: it is his father’s handwriting, that quadrature of professional exactitude. He finds the mailbox unlocked and opens it with a sharp tug, not too hard. It’s empty. This surprises him; his mother’s absence is one thing, but it’s quite another for an apartment to continue consuming electricity and water and receive no bills or any other correspondence. He closes it slowly, with care, until it clicks silently into place.
When he presses the button, the pilot light comes on, and the mute echo of the elevator, floor by floor, sounds like a bottomless industrial throat swallowing with difficulty. He steps in and hits 4. The rectangular interior seems much smaller, as if his shoulders and back have broadened, or the elevator has magically shrunk from use. The inside is still covered with a warm-colored, grayish wallpaper, comforting him during his trip up, under the metal plaque next to the door; the emergency instructions have been nearly erased beside the silhouette of a young woman, her outfit and hairstyle of a type favored thirty years back: long hair with a terry cloth headband, tight sweater, knee-length checkered skirt and high boots with kitten heels, holding the hand of a bright-eyed bounding child, dressed in short pants and a V-neck. One of the bottom corners is peeling slightly, and the few legible letters have been scratched at; Jonás remembers how when he was little he would imagine that those two figures were him and his mother.
When he reaches the fourth floor, he walks out of the elevator and is struck by the same sensation of narrowness. He inspects the door like a stranger, examining it as if this perception might alter his recollections. The circular reliefs inside long rectangles were surely striking three decades ago.
Next to the deadbolt, a small gold plaque informs potential thieves that an alarm system has been installed. There is probably an alarm bell in the living room window still, deactivated for some time now. And yet the little gold plaque is still there, stuck fast to the wooden door face as a deterrent. He takes out the key, capped by two asymmetrical protrusions, like a double-edged blade, inserts it into the slot, and turns it laboriously two times to the left, completing two full circles and steeling his wrist with a certain excessive force: after various break-ins were reported in the neighborhood, his father decided to armor-plate the door. This he remembers as he hears the lock click open, followed by the sharp squeal of the hinges as several successive bolts slide slowly out of their metal orifices, like an enormous rheumatic lockbox with rusted cylinders.
Chapter 26
He recognizes the odor: porous, penetrating, of diverse textures and worn-out wood. The plaster walls of the entryway haven’t been painted in ages, but they’re clean. To his right, in a corner, a green ceramic vase a meter high depicts a palm tree with its fronds hanging open. It’s hollow inside, and he recalls a time when he could still stick his tiny hand in there, trying to touch bottom. In the opposite corner is the umbrella stand with its square golden metal base, its ferocious reliefs, not so large, of lions’ heads; rings hang from their maws, and the whole of it stands on four ochre feet. All of his mother’s umbrellas are there: some with short handles, others more slender, one of them made of reeds, which Jonás especially liked, and another gray and long with a slightly pronounced curve in its undulation, like a quaver, simulating the trends of the twenties. His mother adored it. If she really has left, she isn’t headed for a rainy destination.
Above the umbrella stand, the intercom monitor. He picks up the plastic receiver and the image of the entrance and part of the sidewalk gradually surges forth from the opaqueness of the screen; it takes on a certain definition, blurry at first, in a black and white predominated more by liquid grays than well-defined shades. He puts the receiver back and looks at himself in the mirror that hangs from the wall above the file cabinet, where his mother used to keep all her important documents, the majority of them related to him: medical records, the first allergy exams (for dust and certain pollens), the infinite X-rays of his spinal column and the soles of his feet, all the doctors’ reports from those long years of perseverance, unexpected and difficult, in belatedly and delicately relocating a twisted back that could still be redirected.
There is nothing in the tray on top of the cabinet, where they habitually deposited the mail and the keys. He opens the drawers, one by one: he finds his old school records, flipping through the ID photographs with his changing classes and haircuts, expressions and attitudes, from that early easiness he’s seen only in photos to the distant introspection of adolescence. He recognizes the handwriting of some of his first teachers, his report cards; many other visions come to him suddenly, tempting him to look and distracting him from his true purpose. Beneath he finds his mother’s documents, the health insurance paperwork, her bank book and savings account statements, with transactions registered up until exactly two months ago; precisely since his father said she stopped calling him, there has been no movement in her account. Not that there were major transactions before, whether incoming or outgoing: from the figures he can infer an apparent normalcy, dependable and steady.
Jonás opens the other drawers with a certain parsimony: in the second is the linen tablecloth, a wedding gift he thinks, which he’s never seen unfolded. Perhaps it’s not unused, but it looks that way; his mother is unequaled in the conscientious care of objects, conserving them forever like a historian of the present.
He crouches down to open the final drawer, although he knows already what’s inside: his final drawings before he decided, at age fourteen, to exchange charcoal and paper for a camera, displaying his drawing skills at their height, together with previous works sketched always in the company of his mother; in the beginning she demonstrated a predilection for encouraging his inquiries into the visual arts—perhaps because she too had once possessed a notable talent, one she slowly abandoned, an early sensitivity to shapes and volume, wide angles and foreshortening, that refined skill in shading so essential to portraiture. Jonás made art with his mother until she seemed to lose all interest in drawing. Now he finds the fruit of those afternoons spent with pencil in hand, from the first scribbles to his most accomplished works, and he can’t recall his mother tucking those papers away, watching over these materials forgotten by time, fallen into ruin in that most fragile region of his past.
Next to the silver tray, his parents’ wedding picture: standing by a dark marble stairway, his father thin and sturdy in his groom’s suit, the dark black, abundant hair, bushy but straight, parted on the left, with that smile delineated by thick lips above the clipped and prominent chin with its slight cleft, the accentuated cheekbones astride his linear and resolute nose, beneath his brown eyes and long lashes, his pronounced eyebrows hinting at his demeanor, a sure expression of self-confidence but also self-control: as if a crouching, even unforeseeable and hardened presence were hiding in some remote point of those eyes which evince a complete sense of calm; and his mother, radiant and white in a dress crowned by a nearly-transparent veil, youthfulness tingeing her dainty features with dramatic beauty, inherited and serene, ensnaring the day’s luminosity with a barely-perceptible shadow on the placid surface of her eyes, the ingenuity of a new arrival to an unexplored perpetuity, given over now to the loyal and protective refuge of a man equally as young and inexpert but who flaunts an inner vigor, straightforward and strong, sufficiently impenetrable so as to sear all hint of tenderness.
He finds the kitchen impeccably kept: the white rustic tiles with their orange edges, some of them with a drawing inside depicting an old pantry; the fold-out table of dark wood, two stools tucked beneath it with their spartan seats and another two next to the refrigerator. At the back of the small laundry room, a built-in closet: inside he finds his father’s toolbox, plastic, gray, and very large, with different compartments that open up into successive steps in a reverse waterfall on either side; as soon as he opens the top, he f
inds the white drill with the different bits in their transparent cases; two monkey wrenches; the big flat-tip screwdriver with the yellow handle, the smaller ones, and another, orange with a Phillips head; the hammer with its wooden handle painted blue; the mallet; nails, nuts and bolts; pliers and hooks; the measuring tape; wedges; sandpaper rolled up with care; an extension cord; electrical tape; a pencil and eraser; the awl and file with which Jonás once injured himself; as well as a smaller hammer he would use to entertain himself while his father assembled canvases so he could paint them later, and which he once accidently dropped off the balcony. He was surprised at the time that his father didn’t scold him for it.
That enormous toolbox is a telling act of dignity, because it was his father who fixed the furniture, the picture frames, and the shelves, and the locks too when they broke; but also because his mother would find it there every time she opened the sliding doors of the closet, in the same place as always. If his father hadn’t taken that timeworn toolbox to his new house, it meant he expected to return; and that, along with the fact that his mother has kept his name on the mailbox, knowing that they talked each Sunday until two months ago, with a recent and surprising reciprocity, makes Jonás think they may have cherished the possibility of future reconciliation, a hard-fought return to that picture frame in the entryway.
For a moment, his mind wanders to the tiny attic apartment with its blue walls; he wonders if Ada too has kept the pictures he hung, and the shelves, and the bolt in the door with a slide he bent into shape with his bare hands and the reluctant assistance of an old pair of pliers. Maybe his mother has left the toolbox there this whole time merely out of convenience, because she’s found no better place for it: just because his father didn’t take it with him doesn’t mean she’d throw it out or give it away; who was she going to saddle with a collection of tools that has also been, in some ways, a life’s work? She may have acted out of such indifference, though he doubts it, because in truth it isn’t like her; she loves people through their things.
He opens the trashcan lid, pressing down on the pedal; not only does he pick up a faint odor of disinfectant, of wildflower meadows, but he finds no bag inside, not even an empty one. If not for the fact that he knows that bone-colored trashcan with its brownish-gray lid, that he’s pressed on that pedal a thousand times, he might think it was new. He opens the first aid kit, in the small white metal cabinet, and checks the roll of gauze, unused since the last time he fell off his bicycle, set next to the merbromin and hydrogen peroxide. The electric kettle is disconnected.
He looks out at the segment of sky above the fifth floor. He catches sight of the junk room window, where he or his father would pop out when his mother called them to dinner; or the other way around: he would stand looking out at the light shining inside up there on winter nights. He stands absorbed by the window and lets his gaze wander again to a firmament in flux, with mauve and reddish tones oscillating like an earthquake of color, a respiration foretelling the onset of deepest night.
Jonás turns back to the closet. On a shelf that’s been firmly fixed to the white-tiled wall inside, he finds the cleaning products just as he remembers them: his mother has always performed a balancing act of the most diverse order, a prodigy of harmony and combinatorial analysis even in the arrangement of everyday elements such as detergent, fabric softener, descaler, and furniture polish; she can find in them a certain aesthetic, as if her former artist’s eye, with its visual intuition, had essentially been put to use in the orderly appearance of things, her expertise as an interior designer bent on ensuring the perfection of her décor.
No one would have suspected the apartment had been deserted for the last two months. Everything seems so spotless, even sparkling; that layer of dust on the stove is so superfluous it’s imperceptible; one would have to have extraordinarily acute vision or know (as he does) the untiring excellence of his mother in all aspects of domestic hygiene to believe that nobody’s inhabited this house for sixty days. For any witness alien to such willpower in the service of strict and conscientious cleaning, the kitchen would appear exemplary, without a mote of dust or a single particle unaccounted for, ready to be photographed for a thirty-year-old kitchen store catalogue.
He opens the cupboards where the dishes are kept: all the plates set out in their usual alignment, with the glasses up above, on the highest of the shelves. He spots the red plastic cup, the top of a thermos which his father would take to his bedside table each night filled with water; he had forgotten it by now, the way it felt against his lips. He turns on the faucet in the kitchen sink, lets the water run, and then drinks: almost frothy, frozen, with a sweet metallic aftertaste.
He walks to the refrigerator and opens it. With the exception of an untouched tub of butter, there is nothing, not even an odor; it’s so clean it seems recently purchased. He feels as if he’s come back from vacation, not only because he’s been absent for ten years—apart from a pair of sporadic occasions, accompanied by Ada on one of them—but because the few times he and his parents went away for the summer, always to the coast, back when he was very young, they would find the apartment exactly this way when they came home: with the refrigerator empty and the prevailing order left in place by his mother, as if the furniture and its wooden respiration were forced to maintain an impeccable presence during that absence.
He leaves the kitchen, crosses the entryway again, and turns on the light; it’s growing dark. He’s made plans to pick Sebastian up at his hotel within the hour and he must hurry. He enters the living room, verifying at a glance that normalcy still reigns here: the coffee table with its rug beneath, the two leather armchairs beside the sliding glass door leading to the terrace, the green sofa and a display case with his swimming trophies, the medals and diplomas, with a few honorable mentions for his father over his forty years of service. He opens the doors of the TV stand only out of habit and discovers a video tape inside the VCR: it’s the first sign of life he’s encountered. He plugs in the television and takes a seat in one of the armchairs, the one closest to the low white table with the telephone. As he presses play on the remote control, he notices two photographs, framed, between the lamp and the phone: the first shows the three of them at the beach, with an expression of ease and informality so serene that for a moment Jonás thinks it must be some other family; the other repeats the same scene against a different background, this time the water park in the west end, the outskirts back then, which the ongoing real estate boom has gradually integrated into the city; he remembers reading in the paper, over two years ago now, that the park has since closed down.
His mother appears on the screen in a red bathing suit, walking along the edge of a pool with artificial waves. He barely comes up to her waist, running in circles about her. Both of them laugh, high-spirited in the sun. Children shout and splash non-stop off-camera. In the background, a gigantic blue flume slides into a starfish-shaped pond. The wind crackles alongside the voice of his father, who holds the camera; he sounds amiable and assured, rested and cheerful. The final glimmers of day settle on his mother’s tresses, as if particles of light, unstable and pure, had adhered to her lustrous and extremely long hair. He doesn’t remember this video. He doesn’t remember any of them; his father bought a camera and used it only twice, once on the beach and once at the water park: it was one of the first to come out and proved more unwieldy than expected. He watches his mother, charming and beautiful, maybe even younger than he is now. There is another life on this tape, the possibility of another existence, stranded beneath the outward shine of that woman, tall, pretty, and assertive, not yet familiar with the voids and shadows of an empty house.
Chapter 27
Jonás pauses the video on the image of his mother at the pool. He gets up from the chair, pulls back the curtains, and opens the sliding glass doors to the terrace. The flower boxes are almost lush, despite the recent cold spell. In the corner, the old poinsettia tree—which started out as a plant in a pot with just a few flo
wers, some red petals, and those short-lived leaves—now reaches to the roof. He remembers how his mother picked it up off the street, a skimpy, nearly-wilted stem, and gave herself over to caring for it, recovering it slowly and with great fuss; and so those few flowers became a tree, its trunk so thick they had to buy an enormous pot, until the roots ruptured that one too and they had to find an even bigger one. Then the branches began to extend along the brick wall of the terrace, with the slow, horizontal shade of its myriad members, thin and hungry, occupying volumes of light like a creeping vine with myrtaceous fortitude and flexibility.
There is no trace of his mother from what he’s seen so far. He feels moved, in some remote way, after watching that day at the water park. If someone is about to leave her life behind, he wonders as he leans over the balustrade, is there any sense in first plunging back into her fondest memories? Surely there is. And then there are those Sunday phone calls with his father, although the most plausible explanation is that his mother has left, on her own or accompanied; she still possesses an ample attractiveness, despite the acute and lacerating sadness submerged in her eyes: she’s more than capable of using her charm to expunge from her features, still delicate and pretty, all traces of misfortune, of that elegant indifference.
He once again contemplates the static screen, with his mother in her bathing suit, youthful and ruddy. He turns it off and then thinks of the phone book: maybe he’ll find something there, his mother often notes down numbers on the first several pages. He opens the third drawer of the trophy case, confirming that all is in order, and he picks up the phone book; he finds, on the first few pages, various numbers scribbled in pencil. He shivers on seeing the number to his old apartment in large block writing, with a rectangle around the words “Son/Ada.” Just beneath is his cell phone number, in a blue circle, and he recalls those occasions over the last few months when she called him at random hours to start conversations that went nowhere, though after hanging up he noted the timid effort to get closer to him. He imagines her with the phonebook open on her knees, sitting in that same chair, picking up that same phone and dialing his number; something tightens in his throat when he thinks—and this is the first time he’s done so—that he may never hear her voice again.
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