He walks by the built-in closet, opens it quickly, and there he finds—hanging in a row, encased in transparent garment bags—her overcoats and the two trench coats that still fit her well, along with some of her berets and the same umbrella from the entryway. Jonás can remember walking hand-in-hand with her on a rainy day, filled with admiration; he would entertain himself with his rubber boots, stomping in every puddle that crossed his path and looking at his mother like the leading lady from one of the movies they would show back then on television, with that black and white mist and the clicking of her heels on the wet sidewalk. He also notes the empty side of the closet, once reserved for his father’s coats and suits, but all that’s left are a dozen clothes hangers; it’s understandable that his father would take his jackets and raincoats, but where could his mother have gone without hers, unless she decided to buy herself a new wardrobe when she got where she was going. This explanation is unconvincing, though, because she loves her things, she takes pleasure in seeing and touching them: his mother may go years without using them, but she knows they’re there. Her clothes look newly-purchased for decades, and she’s never given away a thing, not even what has gone out of style; she would run her eyes over them in her closet with the same admiration as when she had spotted them in some display window or store rack, and Jonás just can’t believe she would have left without taking at least one of her trench coats.
But she has: there they are, next to her overcoats, along with her scarves and hats. He delicately closes the doors, trying to control the growing mixture of rage and fear that grips his chest; he recalls his father’s expression as they leaned on the café bar, telling him how he had waited, his sleepless nights staked out in his car. Now Jonás feels that same restlessness inside him, above all as he enters his parents’ bedroom: the queen-sized bed with the embroidered, tasseled quilt, pulled perfectly even with the curve of the pillow at the turn-down, the small rugs to either side and the bedroom chair, the dresser and the armoire with its long mirrors inside. When he opens it, he confirms the same tendency he had observed in the hall closet: on his father’s side, the hangers and drawers are unoccupied, with the exception of three ties.
Jonás imagines his mother coming back to this deserted home with the bag from the dry cleaner’s: what was she going to do now with those ties; she wasn’t going to call the man she’d recently divorced just because she’d picked up three ties from the cleaner’s. After a rupture there continue to appear signs of that other person’s life for several months, even years: she must have merely walked over to the empty side of the closet and deposited them there with the same attentiveness as always. His mother’s side, on the contrary, continues to exhibit the same overabundance of blouses, sweaters, belts, skirts and pants, jackets, and nightgowns, all exquisitely ironed and folded on hangers and in drawers; he opens these with a slight sense of awkwardness and sees her underwear there too: there’s nothing missing, not even the silver-plated box where she keeps her gold bracelets and earrings, a necklace of diminutive pearls, and a couple old pendants with delicate emerald inlays, passed down from a wealthy great-grandmother who surely had the same ability to wear her clothing with attractive ingenuity—all of it is intact there next to her collection of handkerchiefs.
He crosses the bedroom and slowly draws back the curtains. He contemplates the façade across the street through the glass and wonders if someone in that apartment block might also be looking out the window, trying to find an explanation for a sudden absence, exploring in turn rooms which seem to show no recent signs of activity in their recesses, and yet appear to have been inhabited until just a few days ago: like two months hadn’t really passed since his father lost contact with his mother, like she’d even left there just today, if it weren’t for that inescapable and illuminating detail of the refrigerator, with no further signs of life than a tub of unopened butter.
He flips on the light in the green-tiled bathroom, and his journey to the past proves somewhat more prickly, like an obstinate nettle: he turns on the faucet and rinses his hands in the green sink, rubbing them across the nape of his neck and through his hair, drying his face with the towel that smells of fabric softener, folded in perfect proportions in the ring fastened to the wall. The mouthwash and dental floss remain on the same side of the sink’s rounded edge. The toothpaste is the one they always used, for sensitive gums; he opens it and waves it under his nose, contemplating in turn the toothbrush in a cup. He can’t find his father’s toothbrush or toothpaste, which could have been left behind out of forgetfulness or fatigue; his mother almost certainly wouldn’t have moved them. But when Jonás opens the small glass medicine cabinet on the wall, with its mirror doors and round handles held fast by a magnetized clasp, he is surprised to find—next to the leather case of the electric razor his father surely never once used—a transparent flask of aftershave, blue and half-full: he opens it and smells this too, and suddenly his father’s cheek presses against his once more as he picks Jonás up, holding him under his tiny arms while Jonás climbs from the pool after his first afternoon swimming lesson, back when it was torture to submerge himself and he only managed to remain in the water because he knew his father was close by, right there next to the edge.
He draws back the curtain and passes his hand gently along the supple green bath mat, where he can suddenly see his father’s powerful feet as he steps out of the shower, firmly settled on the floor through the comfortable cloth beneath his soles. Jonás peeks inside the tub: the plug is fitted into the round drain just like his mother would leave it in the summer, to avoid the dreaded irruption of insects from the plumbing. He turns on the faucets and switches the jet of water to the detachable shower head, letting it run. On the shelf sit bath sponges, pink and yellow, and a loofah glove.
He takes a closer look at the collection of jars lined up on the edge of the tub; he’s particularly taken by two, smaller, one orange and one white. When he picks them up, something in his memory stirs, as if returning from a region so profound it has been forgotten, or was never known: they are filled with a special gel for newborns and its accompanying body lotion. He can cup each tiny receptacle in his palm, the letters of the brand name almost illegible; his mother apparently preferred to save them.
There’s only one room remaining: his own. Did he really grow up there? His bed on the left, near the built-in closet, underneath a set of three shelves. Next to it a nightstand, with two drawers and a lamp, and opposite that the window and a dresser with eight drawers, where he’s surprised to still find a great white cat, a stuffed toy with long straight whiskers and violet eyes, its tail curved upward, like a sudden sphinx who offers no answers. Next to the dresser is a green foam chair, somewhat deformed, where he never once sat after his sixth birthday. It still has the same colorful letters stitched across the front. The shelves are the very same mess he left when he moved out. On the top edges, pointed tips have been screwed on, from which there hang two strange dolls at each corner: a yellow soldier with red helmet and a mouse with great big eyes. Jonás starts them up, pulling their strings as far as each will go, and listens to those same melodies, intertwined and indeterminate, somewhat slowed, like sinister music boxes.
On the shelves a few books, mostly about art, with a couple introductions to photography: The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. He decides to salvage them and takes them down. There are also some comics and a collection of action figures. The same posters still hang there, tacked up and pale from the sun reflected off the white wall of the patio during the noontime hours, blasting the bedroom with its light. He opens the window and the nighttime cold enters his room.
He then grips the security bars outside and attempts—as he can recall doing countless times, and likewise without success, straining his forehead against them—to look down, to glimpse the mysterious world of the patio, the jungle plants he had always imagined amidst the shouts and laughter of the children on the ground floor, though n
ow only skeins of silence rise up: a silence gray as the bars, and equally corporeal, immovable. He draws the curtains closed and looks at the comforter, white with cartoon animals; he opens some of the drawers and recognizes towels, swim caps, and many, many bathing suits, the majority worn out, some with holes: when he was little he had to replace them continually, the chlorine would corrode even the best eventually. Inside the closet he sees several pairs of goggles, some decayed and rudimentary, others relatively modern and less worn; he thought his mother had thrown them out, but there they all are, on a wooden shelf, next to a plastic yellow robot with two black fists that can still shoot out like harpoons and a blue head bedecked with two golden horns, like an android-minotaur crossbreed. He can’t believe his mother has kept all of this, even his red toy telephone on the nightstand—he remembers the receiver appearing in a photo of him. The floor is an archetype of aseptic order, and yet this same room maintains such an unclassifiable mixture: it’s still the room of a boy, his cradle not long outgrown, his bed recently debuted; that of an adolescent with its walls covered in images of his athletic idols, an enormous Mark Spitz slicing through the water with ferocity; and also the room of a quiet kid engrossed in his plans to leave there: that bedroom divided by age group, as if never completely finished, belongs equally to each of them, but it is no longer Jonás’s.
Chapter 28
The night has fallen decided, dense, and cold. Jonás looks at the sky, overcast with a spark of electricity in the air. The first thing he does after he walks through the door, gray with the number 1 spray-painted with a stencil on the thick sheet of steel—after ascending to the fifth floor and on down the hall—is to open the junk room window: it always made him happy to look up and see the light on. He plugs in the lamp and is confronted with the same décor, that soft shiver in the objects when the high afternoon wind blows through, that panorama of the city with its waves of rooftops. As opposed to his bedroom, with its limited view of the white patio walls, the junk room window is the highest point in the entire building, a sort of private lookout over the whole city: its rooftops tiled, garreted, or flat, with satellite dishes and TV antennas, lightning rods and unending cables, in an infinite cascading profusion of terraces with faded blue sun tents. In the summer, they are at the vertical mercy of the elements; the sidewalks are scalded and grow almost bubbly, the roofs boiling and burnt, reflecting a crepuscular light when Jonás would stand in the window, contemplating the city spread out to the west, like a reddish ocean in which he could discern the cupolas of buildings like blurry flotsam in that dusky hour, as the sun sank beneath the horizontal and sweltering line, simulating the tides of night rolling in.
Above the door, in the angle of the roof, is the same white metal bar from which they both would hang: his father now has an adjustable, compact bar in his new apartment, more to stretch his spine than for pull-ups, although he’s retained enough muscle in his sides, shoulders, and biceps to let his body go limp and then lift it up, bringing his chin level with the bar again. Jonás, on the other hand, was capable of ten sets of fifteen pull-ups on his best days, his arms crossed and bent at the elbows, raising his abdomen with the force of his back, broad and powerful after all that swimming. He looks for his gym gloves and discovers them on the stool, with the same holes caused by chafing and the accumulation of force in the knuckles: made from rough cloth, coarse on the inside, with rubber palms. He puts them on again, and though they fit well, they maintain the closed position of fingers gripping a dumbbell; then he grabs the bar overhead—at first it takes some effort, a split second of difficult indecision, as if gravity had suddenly become more tangible to Jonás, as if it took more work to overcome—and tenses his limbs; his legs curl spontaneously, he bends them behind him and crosses his ankles, and his back curves during the ascent; he feels the pressure in his wrists, but before he knows it his head is higher than the bar. His body feels much heavier than he remembers, and he’s surprised he managed on the first try; he lets himself fall again and repeats the movement, twice more: he’s got barely a quarter of an hour until he has to pick up Sebastian and there he is, doing pull-ups like he was fourteen. How good it feels though when he drops down and lets go, his forearms forceful, his back muscles inflamed, as if he’d just spent an hour doing the breaststroke in the pool, his abdomen painfully contracted and his neck stiffened. He regains that old sensation of levity, of subtle weightlessness out of the water, protected by those inner walls, with the window open upon the dark city splashed with thousands of polyhedral fireflies.
Against the wall, next to the door, is a gym machine made of pulleys and two towers of weights: the red ones Jonás bought, but the green ones have been part of his father’s athletic equipment since his early youth, after he gave away his old dumbbells, tin cans filled with cement. In front of him, Jonás recognizes two picture frames: the first holds his father’s class photo with the other psychology graduates, while the second contains a diploma from the Police Academy Officers’ School. During his adolescence, each time Jonás sat down on that stool, after placing the discs on their circular support, he would grab the horizontal handle and allow the set of pulleys and metal cables to lift them little by little, always with his eyes on those two pieces of paper, especially the photograph, with his father beside his college classmates.
As the platform slowly rises, it reproduces the same sound, a sort of agonizing squeal which he and his mother could hear from downstairs when his father would come up to the junk room to get some exercise; instinctively, he takes up the spray bottle filled with lubricant to apply it to the pulleys: as he suspected, they won’t turn, they’re paralyzed, preventing the cable from running smoothly over them. The bottle is empty, though, like the refrigerator, like everything he’s found there; surely it’s the same bottle as last time: he remembers his mother telling him shortly after the separation that when Jonás left his father stopped coming up to the gym.
Next, a wooden cupboard with drawers and two glass doors. He almost doesn’t need to check, because he already knows what he’ll find: all his school notebooks. In the upper half, his textbooks, stored away by his mother each year until he graduated. But what makes him crack a smile is the sticker with a pot-bellied cartoon policeman, his eyes two tiny x’s, with a purplish nose and stubby legs, the scales of justice in one hand and a truncheon in the other. Beneath him is inscribed the same year as the diploma: with the funds raised from the sale of these stickers, his father and several friends paid for their graduation party after finishing the Academy. Jonás distinctly recalls the day his father came home, hauled him up by his armpits, as he also did after swimming lessons, and said to him, looking into his eyes: I’m a police inspector now. Then he gave him a stack of stickers. Several months later, while his father pored over some papers at the back table, Jonás took one of the stickers out of his pocket, peeled off its backing, and stuck it on the glass.
Next to the built-in closet sits his mother’s easel, covered with a bed sheet. He opens the closet doors: nothing special in the left compartment, his mother’s summer clothes, colorful and lightweight, protected by transparent bags; but on the right side, when he opens it, he is struck by a familiar smell: dried paint. As he suspected, he finds several canvases. They must be his mother’s, but he doesn’t remember them. He picks one of them up: it shows a swimming pool with the water’s surface so still, so calm and transparent, that the spaces between the tiles can be distinguished quite clearly.
Disquieted, he takes a look at the rest. All of them are variations on the same theme: pools with rippling water, murky and melancholy like an untouched pond beneath the open sky on a stormy day; covered in lily pads, clean and empty, completely abandoned; another glimmering in the summer sun, with bathers seated along the edge under temperate palm trees, their suits coming up to their chins, concealing the rest of their bodies, with merry embroideries on their thighs and elbows; and one with artificial waves, like the water park he’d seen just minutes before in the
video. The majority of the pools are lashed by a wind that has made them inhospitable, rainfall featuring more frequently than clear-skied sunrises; they are scratched by sand and pebbles, eroded by filth, with tiles shattered into fragments and trash bags piled in their bottoms, while the lawn outside has been converted into a nearly impenetrable jungle of weeds, as if the one-time garden, now barely perceptible, had served as pasture for the most merciless kind of desolation: that which refuses to grant beauty even the shortest stay of relief, knowing its appointment with annihilation is near, flouting in the end man’s every effort. The subject of all those canvases, in which his mother has tested out several different pictorial styles, is the pool, yes, but also the stark passage of time, the tenuous otherness of happy days seen from the exile which every existence guarantees.
Chapter 29
The taxi stops a hundred meters from the hotel. The street runs uphill and is currently under construction, with the pavement and sidewalk torn to pieces, preventing the car from covering that final stretch. Jonás pays quickly and gets out; he’s ten minutes late. He walks up the dirt path, cordoned off in the middle of construction materials, mountains of cobblestones on wooden platforms covered by great green tarps, mounds of steel rebar gathered up and knotted with wire, and a cement mixer sitting by the sliding glass door of the hotel. Just as he arrives, he runs into Sebastian, clad in a black trench coat with his hat pulled down to his brow, which slims his face and gives him the expression of a traveller who’s continually in transit, his flesh-colored scarf leaving his chin uncovered. Once again Sebastian seems—just like the first time Jonás saw him—ageless, as if at some indefinite moment of his biography the years had ceased to pass: not only in his face, with the milky smoothness of its features, linear and accentuated, but also in his playful temperament of intellectual enthusiasm, forged from personal experience, emotional, capable of accumulating exhibitions and dragging luggage, expensive suits, and overcoats through airports with the tireless passion of a twenty-year-old boy, but with the wisdom of someone who has lived several successive existences in the constant exploration of not just great avenues, but every nook and cranny, the hidden margins, the fissures. Or perhaps he has simply viewed life through an enchanted lens; and thus, despite the fact that Sebastian is twice his age, Jonás has always thought of him—at least in terms of his contagious brio, unaltered by any worldly order—as the youngest man he knows.
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