He starts to pick out his clothes when he is surprised to see, on the left side of the closet, among his overcoats, the bare hanger where he keeps his trench coat. The vision of the two turrets, gilded beneath the morning sun in a cloudless sky, soothes him as he finishes getting dressed.
Chapter 46
He leaves behind the elevator and takes a look in his mailbox. The doorman’s post is closed up. He walks outside and heads straight for the Hotel Ángel to get a coffee. The automatic glass doors whir and open, but the waiter is not inside. After sitting for several minutes in one of the blue armchairs by the table he usually shares with Leopoldo, he decides to get up. He has yet to run into anyone.
He walks down the escalator to the subway, completely alone. But when he reaches the platform, he spots a young woman, redheaded with a white coat, across the way. She is holding hands with a little girl, her hair the same color. The two watch him intensely for several minutes. Then she pretends to be looking at a magazine. Jonás considers saying something, but when he finally makes up his mind, she takes a step forward, lets the girl go, and starts to wave; just then two trains arrive and cross paths in the station. He loses sight of her. He hesitates before boarding the car. When it takes off, he catches sight of them, two rosy blurs.
He gets off the train halfway between Ingrid’s gallery and Sebastian’s hotel. From time to time he passes by some skittish pedestrian, always at a distance, on the opposite sidewalk of a broad avenue occupied by barely a car or two. When he encounters someone, he feels the inward desire to raise his voice and call out, to try and exchange a few words, express that same concern he supposes they have in common: Just where, exactly, has the whole world gone to? But in the end, his willpower succumbs to his desire to maintain an appearance of normalcy; after all, the stoplights are still working. His cell phone has battery power and reception. The city is simply half-empty, like any Sunday morning, except for the fact that it is neither Sunday nor a holiday, in spite of the sea blue sky.
He walks by the café where he occasionally meets up with his father. Although the lights are off he can see inside, particularly the tables closest to the picture window, but he can barely make out the ones to the back. He crosses the street and turns a corner that takes him to Ingrid’s. He is hoping to see Oliver’s composition in the window, perhaps as a presage of future days and a memory of those immediately past, with its fictional grayish reality. Indeed, he recalls the enormous photograph with perfect clarity, its mixture of crepuscular shades with encrusted objects that seem to have been lost at random, empty beer cans and pouches of tobacco lying in a solitary street, on pieces of newspaper: an empty street like the one Jonás now crosses, but with more violence beneath the surface, as if an abrasive wind were lurking behind the buildings, waiting for them to disappear before lashing the city like a great desert storm. When he arrives, however, he sees nothing: the shutter is closed, unusual for a gallery.
He leans his hand against the metal curtain, and he can see Ingrid’s beautifully pallid face, the blue-tinged kindness of her lucid and amiable gaze. He imagines her in that same doorway, waiting for Oliver to appear, with a week’s beard, an enormous overnight bag strapped to his back and a large cardboard cylinder from which he would remove, miraculously rolled up, his photographs for the new exhibition. He imagines her too on the phone with Sebastian, trying to calm him down like she would with her artists before their openings, her warm voice full of trust not only in them, but also in the possible goodness of a world she knew all too well, surely better than the rest of them, with its abuses and depravity. He imagines her stationed on an increasingly empty sidewalk, more and more a part of the photo, as if Oliver’s mise en scène, exhibited there in the window, was appropriating the entire city.
He crosses the square and comes to the street where Sebastian’s hotel is situated. He spots it from two blocks down: The Cappadocia. It’s funny, but he’s never been there in the morning. He’s walked along this street many times in the last few years, but not at this time of day; needless to say, the two of them never meet at this hour. He can hear behind him the echo of footfalls, but when he turns he merely glimpses a silhouette turn down another side street that branches off from the square. The construction works for the widening of the sidewalk have been completely halted. He walks in front of several restaurants; they’re normally closed before noon. The delivery trucks should be unloading, but there is no traffic. Suddenly he sees a car and feels the temptation to wave, but in the end he keeps his hands in his pockets.
When he reaches the glass door, he’s afraid to push on it, but he does: the light in the lobby is shining, though there’s no one in the reception. The computer is on, though. He walks by the bar, with a drink list he’s never looked at and a cocktail shaker they’ve always suspected was mostly for decoration. What do they even have it there for, if there are no cocktail glasses? Sebastian exclaims, and his voice resounds inside Jonás like the projection of physical vigor. Usually they reserve the same room for Sebastian: 307. Jonás reaches the elevators. He pushes the button and the door opens. He is overpowered, however, by a sudden fear of being trapped and having nobody to call, and so he decides to take the stairs.
Chapter 47
When he walks by the school door, he finds it wide open, like any other day. Yet there isn’t a single child standing by the iron bars. The pathway, with its cobblestones and grassy slopes to either side, snakes its way up to the building’s main entrance, as if in a garden absent of all visitors. The parking lots around the stadium, normally occupied, are mostly free, with exceptions spread few and far between. A little further up, in front of the door to the sports complex, he can make out a bronze minivan. Sergio gets out of the driver’s seat, with the knot of his tie loosened. His hair slightly unkempt, he doesn’t bother to shut the door behind him. Along the broad avenue, several lanes wide, not a single other automobile goes by.
They stop in their tracks and stare at one another in silence. Then Sergio laughs.
“I can’t believe you’ve come to swim.”
Jonás adjusts the backpack on his right shoulder.
“I just spent the morning in the office,” he runs his hands over his temples again, suddenly serious, mussing his hair once more, “trying to understand how I can be the only one, in a forty-seven-story building, 157 meters high, that has come to work. As far as I know, today is a workday, right? Anyway, if it was a holiday I wouldn’t have been able to get in.” He pauses and breathes deeply. “I called some colleagues from other companies and no one picked up the phone. There’s been no news on the internet since yesterday. I’ve only gotten spam mail for the past few days.”
A cold wind stirs the dry leaves heaped on the sewer grate next to the sidewalk. Sergio sweeps his blond bangs from his forehead.
“I’m leaving.” His voice is clear and distant, like a memory spoken out loud.
“Where are the girls?”
“Waiting for me at home. I talked with them both before I left for the office. Martina said she’d be calling me every five minutes.” A smile flits across his lips again. “But I told her I had to come… To get you.”
“To get me?”
“I figured you’d be alone… If you want, you can come with us.”
Jonás steps down off the sidewalk and sinks his left foot into the eddy of leaves, focused now in his tranquility. He looks at the open complex door.
“Did you go inside?”
“Of course not. Jonás, I came to find out how you’re doing and take you with me.”
“I’d like to.” He lowers his voice and stretches out his hand. “Really. Give them both a kiss for me.”
Sergio drops his gaze and clenches his jaw slightly. He fidgets with his keys.
“Of course.” He shakes Jonás’s hand, turns to his vehicle, and before getting in, looks back again rapidly. “Have you talked to Ada? Has she called you? Have you seen her?”
Jonás shakes his head. Sergio gets in and r
olls down the passenger-side window.
“Can you do me a favor?”
Jonás leans on the door. He perceives a slight trembling in the nape of his neck. As he stands over the passenger’s seat, he feels a tremendous magnetism, the enormous temptation to reach out and grab the door handle, open it, get in, and take off with his friend.
“Promise me you won’t leave your house tonight.”
“Sure. Hey—” Sergio listens attentively, sitting at the wheel. “Thanks for coming.”
He nods and takes off, making a wide left turn. Sergio drives slowly, observing Jonás closely in the rearview mirror, waiting several minutes for a gesture—any sign that he’s changed his mind. He circles, less slowly now, around the empty avenue. Then he stops. He waits. Finally, he accelerates and disappears up the street, until Jonás can no longer hear the sound of the engine.
He remains motionless for a while, without lifting his soles from the ground. He looks around: the ice cream shop on the other side of the street, the toy store on the corner, and the florist’s on the same side, a little further down, are all closed. Up the street, he can see no particular signs in the building windows. He submerges his eyes in the street where Sergio has disappeared, thinking he may spot a car coming in the opposite direction. When he is certain of the prevailing silence, he turns and heads toward the entryway to the pool.
The door is ajar and all the lights are on. As he walks down the short ramp with its rubber mat, he tries to discern, at the end of the corridor, whether there’s anyone in the reception: it too is illuminated. He comes up and looks through the glass, studying the inside. A sea blue waist jacket hung from the seat back. The computer connected, with the record sheets of several swimmers on the screen. The goggles and caps on sale, next to the bathing suits with the school’s logo, and the towels piled up in a closet to one side, are all in their place. On the counter, several pens and the ticket book are bundled together with an elastic band. There is a strong odor, perhaps of scented bleach. He discovers that the tiles at the bottom of the steps to the observation point upstairs are wet, as if freshly mopped. He feels reassured by the thought that one of the janitors might suddenly appear at any moment. When he looks at the board with the water conditions, he sees it is dated two days ago. He opens the locker room door and a soft, humid vapor caresses his face.
Chapter 48
The floor is completely dry. Neither here nor on the other side, by the showers, does he see a single drop of water. The sinks are spotless and the mirrors shine with an immaculate clarity. At least thus far today, no one has come in from the pool or turned on a faucet. The coat racks by the bench are completely bare. The lockers, open and empty. All except one: he walks over and inspects it, in case a draught of air has blown it half-closed. But it is shut. Someone has been there, has put their things inside, inserted a coin in the slot and locked it with a key. Someone who then, it seems likely, walked out to the pool, and must be swimming there this very instant. Jonás does the same, but with parsimony. He selects another locker along the opposite wall, sets his backpack inside, and stands there in his bathing suit. He puts on his flip-flops, pulls down his cap, and walks out of the locker room.
When he enters he is taken aback by the enormous emptiness. In the opposite corner, the lifeguard's chair. Just as he had expected, there is only one swimmer in the water. He walks toward the edge, but he doesn't need to get any closer to recognize, in one of the two middle lanes, the far-reaching stroke, prolonged and rapid, of Aquaman. He stands on the edge, stretches his neck, and warms up his shoulders with a few rotations. He jumps in: it seems to him a degree or two cooler than usual, as he tightens his goggles and starts swimming.
His body responds, as soon as he kicks off, with ease. It's been a long walk from the Hotel Cappadocia, and his muscles feel invigorated enough to start at a good pace. He's not worried about catching up with Aquaman; he knows he'll equal him within a few laps. As always, the water reserves for him the ability to immerse within himself, a cellular withdrawal, the compression of his consciousness to a bare minimum. As he strings together strokes and kicks, in that oneness of movement extolled by Leopoldo, he walks back up that broad ancestral staircase of the old aristocratic manor, later restored, that's been converted into a hotel. Sebastian told him about it once: he had managed to see the ancient palace in its final days of splendor, when it was the residence of an old merchant, still influential in her youth. You have no idea what that woman was like, Jonás hears his friend's distinct voice, the most charming person I've met in my life, still beautiful then, let there be no mistake, and those soirées, sometimes a bit wild, of initiation into the arts and to life… Who would have thought, so many years later, that the palace would be turned into a hotel and all that would be left was this staircase. Faced with doubts about the elevators, he opts for the certainty of the stairs up to the third floor. Anyway, he feels like walking up, recalling Sebastian's outsized voice, its warm sonorousness. With a broad wooden bannister of lacquered oak, he ascends the marble stairs as he admires, from below, the old coffered wooden ceiling, carved with Mudejar motifs that depict a corolla enveloped by concentric, circular petals.
The hotel, more modern in the reception, maintains on its other floors a certain concordance with the original décor. Jonás crosses a great carpeted hall, with enormous mirrors in tumid frames covering the walls. He looks at himself and sees his body multiplied in the depths of infinitely repeated scenes, and another tiny Jonás observes him from within that multiplicity, progressively reduced until he is lost in a microscopic remoteness. He heads down the hallway, and the lights turn on automatically as he passes. All the doors appear closed; Room 307 also. He turns the knob and opens, his back arches much more as he increases the radius of his strokes, side-by-side now with his only companion, both of them marking that same pace, their arms opening in harmony, seemingly coordinated for the last several minutes: Jonás's body feels lighter than other days, and his legs barely weigh on him now, as if they're made of air, and yet they let fly a more powerful kick, effortless, his shoulders pulling hard to open the way for his upper body; he still swims with power, but now he has learned to channel it. The closet contains his black trench coat and three suits with ironed shirts, all still in their clear plastic garment bags from the hotel drycleaner's, the hat on an easy chair and the suitcase inside the closet, empty; on the night table, with the lamp turned on and the blinds pulled down, a book of poems by Verlaine, who Sebastian can recite by heart, as well as a novel, Time Regained, with the green cloth bookmark near the end, his shiny shoes next to the door and pajamas carefully folded under the pillow, he notices he can slightly augment his rhythm while keeping his breathing fluid and dilated, as if his chest had increased its lung capacity: after seeking out all possible remedies for his breathlessness, he made an appointment with a physiotherapist, the only thing wrong with you is an impingement in your T7 vertebra, I'm going to free it and you'll feel like you're two centimeters taller, you're walking around hunched over when you should be standing straight up, lie down and relax, don't move, now I'm going to lift your left leg and bend it at the knee, I'm going to push it against your belly and put all my body weight on it; then, with that weight there, falling on you, I'm going to grab you by the shoulders and give you a little tug: don't worry, you won't feel a thing, but when you get up you'll have a sensation of freedom in your chest, the way the air flows through and your lungs fill up, you've spent months living with much less oxygen than your average person needs, your panic attacks were real but the impingement aggravated them; it's much more common than you might think, the symptoms are very similar to a heart attack, I've even had patients come to the emergency room thinking that's what's happening and it was their darned T7 vertebra—with that muscle strain on the lungs, they end up getting strangled and it seems more serious than it really is; from now on all you have to do is a few stretches, and you'll see how your lung capacity increases. He doesn't know why he closes the
door behind him as he walks out with the book of poems in his backpack, later he'll put it in a bag so it doesn't get wet from the towel, but who cares now whether or not the book gets wet; he's just walked back through the hotel, and by the time he makes it out to the street, he still hasn't seen anyone. Who turns on the lights, and who turns them off during the day? How is it that Sebastian's bed was perfectly made?
Jonás feels stronger than ever. On occasion, he even overtakes Aquaman, but meters later the distance is once again shortened. They swim in unison, settled into the comfort of two parallel bodies cutting lines in the water, the slightly listing penetration which then describes a circular extension of the arms; when he finally abandons Sebastian's hotel, the entire way on foot to the pool flashes through his mind, the sequence with Sergio in front of the door and then his car, accelerating with a din all the fiercer in the absence of other sounds, and his passage through the locker room up to this precise instant, matching Aquaman's rhythm and pulling ahead, only to be overtaken in turn by the horizontal flexibility of the other's elastic kick, and that is when Jonás discovers, after losing sight of him for a few strokes, that he is alone in the pool.
He floats for a couple minutes with his back against the wall, his elbows propped on the edge. He breathes deep as his wet face begins to cool off. He remembers how Aquaman doesn't usually rest afterwards, as he does, leaping instead from the water as soon as he's done. Surely he's gone directly to the locker room, and Jonás will find him there. What would they say to one another, if they've never exchanged a word? Meanwhile, he lifts up his gaze. It must be an optical illusion caused by his perspective, still in the pool—perhaps the light reflected in the great picture windows on the upper floor, chopped up by the water—but again Jonás sees those figures stationed there, vigilant and not quite still, with measured movements, changing positions, a slight cocking of the head or a nod, with the sunshine entering through the dormer windows in the opposite wall: an invisible halo submerged smoothly in the water, a vector of shredded rays beneath the surface, and also on the glass wall, like the shadows of flickering flames.
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