The car horn sounded. The Peruvian knew that I had to be to Santa Ana on time. But I was perplexed about what I had heard.
“And the dreaming...” I thought carefully about how to phrase the question. “Do you get them to dream? Do you get them to disconnect?”
He took my hands in his left hand. I noticed the texture of his palm; I had known him for years, but I had never touched him in such a personal way. With his right hand he closed my eyes.
“Today you dreamt of... deer and eagles... am I right?”
My heart skipped a beat and my esophagus turned. He was so spot on that I couldn’t believe it.
“How...?” I asked in surprise.
He didn’t answer, just as I wouldn’t respond if someone asked me that same question about my gift. He got up, went to a shelf and pulled down some wrapped canvases. He gave them to me.
“I thought you didn’t have any,” I said.
“There is always something left from the old business in the new one.” He smiled. “Besides the owner.”
“And my paintings, do you still have them?” I asked.
He shook his head. It pained me to know that. He kept the first two paintings of the trilogy: the childhood one and the one about death. When I showed them to him he fell in love with them, so I gave them to him, because I thought he would never get rid of them and I really liked how he looked at them. You need perfect adoptive parents who love your paintings, in order to let go of them.
“I gave them to your mother,” he said. “She wanted them so much that I couldn’t say no.”
I couldn’t believe it. She had never told me; I knew she liked my paintings but I thought she didn’t want to own them. She gave me advice, and affection when she liked what I’d done, she looked at them with interest, but I didn’t think she wanted to see them day after day. Besides, she never had a fixed residence where she could hang them.
I pulled out my wallet, but he put his hand over mine and kept me from opening it; again I felt his skin.
“It’s a gift, Marcos,” he whispered. “Listen to me, don’t quit sleeping.”
This time I was the one who gave him a hug. He accepted it gratefully. I left.
When I was in the car I felt more complete. I knew that I needed to have those canvases with me, I didn’t know if I would be able to paint the final painting but as the old Canadian said, ideas need materials.
We headed toward the Plaza Santa Ana. In three minutes, the audience would return to their reality. The Peruvian sped up.
14
LIFE IS TURNING DOORKNOBS
We reached the Teatro Español two minutes before the hour.
All the doors of the theater were wide open, yearning to welcome their public. I thought that if I touched the wood I will feel its impatience.
I got out of the car and the Peruvian parked on a corner beside the outdoor tables of a restaurant. I stationed myself beside the main door.
A bit further on there was a guy with sunglasses who was about thirty; I don’t know why I had the feeling he was spying on me. I guess that’s the result of meeting a stranger and a pederast security guard on the same day.
The guy in the sunglasses was also watching the door. I would say he was even more impatient than I was.
We could hear the faint whisper of the words the actors delivered to the audience. My mother always told me that the end of a theater performance was built from the first moment.
It’s like building a pyramid. You will never place the last stone expertly if the base isn’t stable.
She always told me about the thicknesses of silence, which were obvious in theaters.
She showed them to me many times, live and direct, from the last row of numerous theaters.
There were silences two centimeters thick that were equivalent to attention without passion.
Others were thicker; silences that neared forty centimeters, which are the ones broken by performers, making the magic of theater be felt in all its glory.
And finally those ninety-nine centimeters thick, as splendid as a triple laugh in unison with the entire audience. It echoes, it is heard, felt and experienced. It is the spectator’s complete loss of consciousness, just when as they forget any personal problems and their brain stops emitting the noise of worry; that is what makes silence supreme. Stopping thinking silences everything.
That night, I felt a silence thirty-four centimeters thick. My mother’s old habits that I still practiced.
The wait was seeming long, so I decided to enter the theater, to find out if inside the silence was thicker. And also to see her...
There was no one guarding the door. Some places are prepared to keep you from getting in at the beginning but just fifteen minutes before the end they are doing the opposite, taking great care to make it as easy as possible for you to leave quickly but doing nothing to keep you from coming in.
I went through the main door and into the theater’s vestibule. There wasn’t a single soul. I headed toward the door that connected the vestibule with the seats.
Curiously, the knob on that door was identical to the one on the room where the stranger was being held. Even though I knew that when I turned it I would find something radically different, I felt the same nervousness.
You never know what you’ll find behind a door. Maybe that’s what life is: turning doorknobs.
I turned it. The silence, which was forty-two centimeters thick, penetrated me instantly.
The salesman’s best friend was reciting his final monologue at the funeral.
Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there’s no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine.
It was still as good as I remembered it. I knew that play well; my mother had done a version in dance. In her visual creation, Charley recited the monologue while he took small steps on the coffin. Slight movements to the rhythm of his contained rage.
The play continued its monologues and I searched for the girl with my gaze.
I ran my eyes over all the napes of necks in the theater conscientiously. I don’t know why, but I imagined that I would recognize hers; it was just a feeling I had.
I didn’t find her, I thought that maybe she had left, disappointed at having been stood up by her date.
The impulse to enter a theater is one thing and deciding to stay is quite another. Or maybe the play didn’t fulfill her; there are people who don’t relate to Death of a Salesman, they find it outdated. I don’t understand them, it speaks about the great subject: parents and children.
But soon my doubt vanished. I was sure that she wasn’t one of those girls who leaves a theater before the play has ended.
My mother said that leaving a theater is one of the unforgivable deadly sins. The sadness it produces in the actor or dancer is dramatic. They usually take five minutes to recover their concentration. And the audience needs twice that time.
Suddenly, the sounds of my cell phone, which are quiet barks (I don’t have a dog but I’ve always wanted to have one, so my telephone barks affectionately like a friendly mutt), mixed with the monologue by the salesman’s wife.
The entire audience turned simultaneously. I had committed the second deadly sin that my mother hated, only forgivable in the case of a sick relative or the birth of a first child. The latter no longer counts as mitigating circumstances.
The audience’s napes turned into faces in shadow. I could barely see their eyes.
And that was when I saw her, in the sixth row, on the extreme left. She didn’t recognize me. Of course, she didn’t know me. But I wished she had recognized me.
When I managed to turn off the call from my boss all the eyes without gleam were focused back on the stage. Except hers, hers lagged two seconds before returning to the widow’s monologue.
When she looked at me I noticed that I
still had my gift connected. I switched it off, but an image slipped through.
Her with a dog. Her with a lot of dogs. She loved them; they were her favorite animals. She trusted them more than any person. I saw her at six years old petting a dog; I think he was named Walter. She was happy, completely happy in that memory. I don’t know where that emotion was located on the scale, but I loved it.
Although I didn’t like stealing that emotion from her.
I went slowly toward her row, and saw that the seat next to her was empty. The idea that she had been stood up seemed more likely.
I sat beside her, she was so focused on the play that I think she didn’t notice my presence.
I observed her out of the corner of my eye. I realized that her face did not only thrill me as she waited in the plaza, but also when she listened carefully.
I was falling in love with each of her features, with each one of her gazes in pause.
I focused on the play; I remembered those last three minutes perfectly. I had seen the version my mother did of Death of a Salesman more than fifty times, although I almost always enjoyed the ending. I always went into the theater just as it was about to finish. The final phrase is genius: “We’re free... we’re free...”
I noticed that as we reached the end the girl’s breathing began to match the rhythm of mine.
The emotion as we breathe, the sound of her inhalations and exhalations, the air that she decided to take in and let out was identical to mine.
We were two people who vibrate in such a way with the play that we were breathing in sync. We were keeping in step with each other without looking at each other, with just the words of an epic ending.
I felt as if a relationship was beginning. As if by being the only two people in the theater who were breathing in sync we were having our first kiss, our first caress, the first sensual moment and as if we were even having sex. And I’m not just saying that, since as I felt it, my breathing increased and hers superimposed itself on mine.
Before we were able to consummate anything the play ended and the applause filled everything.
There were up to five minutes of uninterrupted applause. Again our clapping was in unison. My heart and my esophagus were in sync with hers. Although maybe it was all in my head.
The last clapping ended suddenly. The audience got up at once. She remained seated; I did too.
Everyone in our row left on the far side, since they saw we weren’t inclined to moving.
There were less and less people in the theater; she continued mesmerized by what she had seen on stage and I pretended to feel the same way.
I knew that in a few seconds she would get up or the ushers would shoo us out. I wanted to find the perfect phrase to start a conversation but nothing came to me.
I didn’t want to resort to something about dogs; it didn’t seem ethical.
Suddenly, I discovered that her head was bowed because she was looking at a text message and not because of the play she had just experienced. That message had her paralyzed; she read it over and over.
My mother believed that cell phone text messages contained much truth in few characters. People took great pains to tell their feelings without spending too much money. The conciseness of emotions.
She kept many of the ones she received. She never transcribed them, she never transferred them to other formats. She believed they lost their magic that way.
She saved messages that were over ten years old. She told me that in them there was extreme pain, sincere passion and pure sex.
According to her, SMS stood for “sex more sex.” She told me that everyone had a sexual message saved on his or her cell phone.
And sometimes only the person who received it knows that it was; anyone else reading it wouldn’t realize. Since they would have to know what time it was received, what had happened beforehand and its intensity.
She said that fantastic messages were the perfect epilogue to a great meeting. How many times after a good date, when you leave, a few minutes after separating from the other person, have you received an SMS confirming your perception of those shared moments?
Sometimes the message is more important than the date itself.
I have a message saved on my phone from a long time ago, a very sexual one, one of those that, as my mother used to say, no one would imagine was. It merely said: “Are you coming?”
A girl I was in a relationship with sent it to me. When I received it, I read it and got aroused. For weeks I would reread it and it kept arousing me.
I never went where she wanted me to, maybe that’s why I still keep that SMS and it still excites me.
I also kept one from my mother; she sent it to me the first time I traveled abroad without her. It said: “Don’t get lost, Marcos, the world’s limits are where you decide they are.”
But the truth is that my limits were increasingly smaller: the Teatro Español, the Plaza Santa Ana and its few bordering streets.
Suddenly, the girl beside me looked at me and spoke.
“Can you do me a favor?”
That was incredible. Sometimes life solves your problems without asking for anything in return.
“Yes. Yes.” I replied with two yeses, out of extreme nervousness.
“My boyfriend, who was supposed to see this play with me but didn’t show, is waiting outside for me and I don’t want him to think I watched it alone, so I wanted to ask you if you could pretend that...” she asked, embarrassed, letting her words trail off.
“It would be my pleasure to have taken you to the play,” I said.
I got up and we left the theater together. I know that our relationship wasn’t real, it was just a fiction for a stranger, but I lived each second that it took us to leave the building as if it were.
15
THREE SIPS OF COFFEE AND A SUITCASE FULL OF MEMORIES
We went out on the street. It turned out that the guy who I thought was watching me, the one with the dark glasses, was her boyfriend. Power to the imagination. She was very close to me, there was barely enough distance between our bodies to perspire. She didn’t hold my hand or anything like that; I just felt her very near. I sensed her presence and her scent.
The boy in the dark glasses didn’t come over, he stormed off angrily, almost offended. She pretended she wasn’t looking at him, although I think she didn’t take her eyes off of him.
I noticed that he was no longer watching us and that he had left the plaza, because she decided to move a bit further away from me. Very little, just a bit.
Then she stopped, I would say we were again in the middle of the plaza, right where I had seen her for the first time. I stopped too.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I answered.
I didn’t know what else to add; I knew that she would leave if I didn’t come up with something quickly. She turned to go.
“Will you let me buy you a drink?”
She looked at me in surprise.
“I mean in case he comes back. I wouldn’t go far if my girlfriend was out with someone. I would come back to see if it was someone she had happened to meet in the theater or someone more special,” I added.
She hesitated.
“Okay,” she said.
I headed toward the outside tables of my usual spot. I don’t know why it seemed less touristy to me. The waiter had known me for more than ten years, although I don’t know his name and he doesn’t know mine. I liked him because he remembered what I usually ordered. He even guessed the days when I didn’t feel like having my usual and wanted a change.
That waiter, on a day when we got talking, told me that he had been born and fallen in love in the Plaza Santa Ana, and that he still lived here. Everything important had happened here. That plaza was his life and he wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It was strange, I had been raised in a thousand different places and I felt the same way.
We sat down. The waiter came over quickly.
�
��Finally some customers, today with this whole E.T. thing nobody’s coming by.” He looked at me. “What’ll you have today?”
He knew that it was a special day and I didn’t want my usual. I liked that.
“E.T.?” she asked.
The waiter laughed and asked, “Haven’t you heard about the alien?”
“We were in the theater,” she replied.
The waiter seemed surprised; he must have seen me entering the theater at the end of the performance. But he didn’t say anything.
“They say they’ve captured an alien. Although now they are denying it. Whatever it is, people haven’t been going out for a drink. What can I get you?”
She didn’t seem to put much stock in the news. I feigned interest. We ordered the same thing: both espressos with milk. I find it amusing when someone invites someone to have a drink and they end up ordering coffee or vice versa.
The waiter headed off.
“Do you think it’s true?” she asked.
Her question struck me as funny. If only she knew... Suddenly, a woman passed by with a German shepherd and she moved aside a bit. It seemed she was afraid of the dog.
But that didn’t make sense. According to the gift, she loved dogs.
The dog sniffed her and started barking. She turned very pale.
Soon the dog ran off and she regained her natural color.
“Are you afraid of dogs?” I asked.
“Ever since I can remember.”
It couldn’t be. The gift had never failed me. It didn’t make sense. Maybe there was some magnetic interference in the theater. But it was strange because I had seen her as a girl, it was her face and she had a dog in her lap and I felt her love toward those animals.
The waiter brought us our coffees. But he didn’t leave the bill; that was his way of not rushing regular customers. He left right away, because I think he could tell I needed privacy.
“You’ve never had a dog?” I insisted.
“Never.”
She drank a sip of coffee and then another. I did the same. I realized that she was the first person I had shared a coffee with since my mother died.
Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I Page 8