by Quim Monzó
“Helena?”
“Yes, Helena. Weren’t you having dinner together?”
“Dinner? Yes! We’re having dinner, but . . . she’s not here yet and . . .”
It is so obvious that Hipòlita is not expecting Helena for dinner that for a moment Heribert feels like going on with the conversation, forcing her to add facts and details she can’t know in order to contrast them later with the facts and details Helena will give him when he subjects her to a similar interrogation. But he prefers to say goodbye to Hipòlita and hang up the phone.
•
As he shaves, his face masked with white soap, Heribert reflects over and over on whether it isn’t strange that he’s never been jealous. He’s never doubted that Helena must be going out with other men. In the end, what does “going out with other men” mean? What does it mean that he goes out with other women? That he embraces another person, caressing her occasionally between sheets that are different from the usual ones? What he finds disconcerting is her telling a lie so flimsy that it falls apart right away. Is Helena having an affair? Of course she is. Who isn’t? What is it he finds surprising? That he hasn’t ever seen the signs? Why hasn’t he ever thought about it before? Is it because he thinks maybe it’s too petty to worry about? Or is it because now he’s so bored . . . ? “I’m so bored that . . .” As he repeats this phrase he thinks of his easel, and the big white room where he paints, and he sees it all through a very fine dust, gold, or gray, like a fossil.
Whom was she having the affair with? An innocent adolescent? What if it was a tough guy, a sweaty truck driver with a three-day beard? Or a milquetoast? Or a priest? What if it was a girl? A salesman from a clothing store? A Mafia capo? What if it was Hug? He bursts out laughing. If it was Hug he’d buy them a bottle of champagne, if only for the show they put on pretending they can’t stand each other.
He changes his shoes. He puts on his gray jacket and his black overcoat. Out on the street, he raises his fist to hail a cab. Between the curb and the cab a river of slush is running. The driver opens the door for him. From the curb, Heribert tries to jump into the cab, but his left foot slips and he steps into the slush.
In the restaurant, everyone’s having drinks at the bar. Hilari introduces them: Hilda, Herundina, Heribert. Heribert can see that Hilari’s after Hilda by the way he takes her arm as they sit. So as he unfolds the napkin before putting it on his lap, Heribert looks at Herundina: she has brilliant eyes and fleshy lips, painted soft red. She has short hair, like so many women this winter, and she’s wearing enormous black and white plastic earrings. Hilari says:
“Even if you don’t know Herundina, you should recognize her.”
The waiter brings the menus and distributes them.
“Why?”
Herundina laughs.
“No,” says Heribert. “Why would we know each other, Herundina?”
“It’s not that you should know her,” Hilari persists, “but you should recognize her. Though I’m not sure you would actually have seen her.”
“So why should I recognize you?”
“You used to go out with my sister.”
“Don’t you see the resemblance?” says Hilari.
“Are you Henrietta’s sister?”
“No.”
“Heloise’s?”
“No, silly. I’m Hannah’s sister!”
Any other day, both to break the ice and to try and cover up for the gaffe of mentioning two names that have no connection with her, he would literally have banged his head on the table, which would have made everyone laugh and got the situation flowing to a point that would have allowed for some serious courting. How many times hadn’t he seen her! So many. Often, when he had gone to pick Hannah up and once when he had seen the two of them walking down the street together. Any other time, he would have found the perverse detail of going out with the sister of an old girlfriend exciting.
“She had to kill her sister to come to dinner with us today,” says Hilari. “She didn’t want her to come. When she told Hannah you were going to be here, too, it awakened old passions.”
Heribert usually finds Hilari’s repartee pretty clever, but today it seems old and tired. How he had always laughed at the guy’s constant jokes, his unending stream of lies and stories; now they make him sick. Hilari asks him if something is wrong. He shakes his head. The girl looks at him. Heribert feels incredibly old, and the feeling grows stronger and stronger until, at the end of the meal, he gets up from the table very slowly, hunched over, as if carrying the weight of a century on his shoulders. Hilari thinks he’s joking and congratulates him on recovering his good mood. He takes Heribert’s arm, takes him aside, and inquires—sincerely—as to how he’s feeling, and if there’s anything wrong. That’s what friends are for, he says. He also says that he’s been acting distracted and touchy for days, as if he were having problems. He goes on for quite a while about the problem thing, repeats his offer of help, and reminds him that it is precisely in these situations where you discover who your friends are because, often, the very people you thought were irreproachable friends, turn out, when push comes to shove, to be selfish bums incapable of helping someone who would have done anything for them. Heribert stoically puts up with this rant, but when Hilari puts his hand on his shoulder and pats him a few times on the back, he’s had enough: he looks him straight in the eye and in all seriousness stamps on his foot with all the strength he can muster.
•
Herundina smiles.
“So . . . ?”
“So what?”
“So what? Oh, nothing. I thought you were going to say something.”
“Not me.”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Beats me.”
“Want to go for a drink?”
“A drink?”
“No, not if you don’t want one.”
“No, no. A drink would be just fine.”
“No, not unless you want one. It’s up to you.”
“I can’t think of anyplace to go.”
“I certainly can’t. It was you who didn’t want to go out dancing with the others.”
“Did you want to go?”
“No. I don’t care one way or the other. But I thought you had another place in mind.”
“Like where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, neither do I.”
“Want to go for a walk?”
As soon as he says it, he sees that it’s a ridiculous proposition. He doesn’t know how to behave. Suddenly he feels entirely unschooled in the art of flirting. He feels as if he had amnesia, as if he were an adolescent again. Worse, because at least as an adolescent he had desire, which egged him on, even though his cheeks always got red and gave him away. What does one do with a woman? Chat her up? If only one could chat without saying anything . . . Or if one could only come up with a fake language, made up of exotic sounds, and say: “Babatoo infrechemina, sadafa nogra ptsu allirà?” And if only she, to all that, were capable of responding, “Troc atodrefa mimenyac! . . .”
He doesn’t know how to behave. Should he start kissing her right off and, if she resists, force her right then and there? He seems to remember it doesn’t quite go like that. They’ve been in the taxi for quite a while. They haven’t decided where to go, and the driver is showing signs of impatience. Heribert says the first thing that comes into his head:
“Drive straight ahead.”
The taxi drives up the avenue. Heribert wonders what to do. Stick his hand under her skirt, right now? Kiss her first? Talk to her about things that will seduce her? How contrived! It all seems hypocritical. In truth, he is so certain (from the way she’s looking at him; from the way she agreed not to go dancing with Hilari and Hilda; from the way she’s putting up with him, boring as he is; because he can feel it on the surface of his skin) that she likes him as much as he likes her (and realizing this is even more disconcerting) that it all makes him feel even more inhibited.
“You’re awfully quiet. Am I boring you?”
He’s caught in a bind. To say yes is a lie, and to say no seems ridiculous. The dilemma forces him to choose the middle road: he looks deeply into her eyes, as if he were so much in love that her question was absurd and not deserving of a response. When he can no longer maintain her gaze without betraying its emptiness, he kisses her on the cheek imagining that the girl must consider this style of courting to be senile. How old is this girl? Eighteen, at the most? As long as he doesn’t become very aroused, it will be fine. If he manages to look at her coldly, dispassionately, as if contemplating a particularly beautiful porcelain dish, he’ll get by. Maybe he should ask what she does. Is she a student? Does she live alone? Does she live with her parents? These are the things one is supposed to ask.
“Are you a student?”
“Yes. Interior design. Did you know that your paintings are perfect for filling up a sparsely furnished space?”
“Oh.”
Now what should he do next? He thinks they’ve gone quite far up the avenue. He tells the driver:
“Turn right at the next corner, and keep driving straight ahead.”
He looks at the girl again. She studies interior design.
“Do you work? I mean, do you have a job somewhere as a decorator?”
“Yes, with my father. My father is an interior decorator. Don’t you remember? My father: Hannah’s father.”
“Oh. Of course.”
He has absolutely no recollection of what Hannah’s father did for a living.
“Do you live with your parents?”
“No, I live with my mother. My parents are divorced and now I live with Mom. I see Dad in the studio whenever I go to work there.”
How do eighteen- and twenty-year-olds behave nowadays? Do they have the same attacks of shyness that he had, fifteen years ago? The taxi is still driving straight ahead; if he keeps going much farther they’ll end up right in the water.
“Listen,” the driver says, “if I keep going straight we’ll end up right in the water.”
Heribert tells him to turn right, and go down the avenue. He suddenly feels very tired. He decides to wrap things up: he asks Herundina for her phone number. She gives it to him, in exchange for his. He promises to phone her.
“Please do. I’d like very much to see what you’re painting now.”
He leaves her at the door to her mother’s house. What must she look like now? He remembers her from a few years back when he picked Hannah up at home. Every so often while he was in bed with the daughter he would fantasize about the mother.
Then the taxi starts up and takes him home. Heribert pays the driver, who has a sympathetic look on his face, for which Heribert gives him an excessive tip, so that he will realize that if either of them should feel sympathy for the other, it is he for the driver. At home, in the bedroom, he hears the door as he’s undressing. Helena. He hurriedly shuts off the light, gets into bed, and pretends to be asleep.
Heribert looks at the new, totally blank, canvas he’s placed on the easel. He’s put the paint, brushes, and solvents on a small table. He runs his hand over his cheek. What if, really and truly, he cannot paint another stroke, never again? In his current state of mind, even to entertain a doubt about it seems a sign of valor. This gives him confidence. But when he touches the canvas with the charcoal pencil, he doesn’t know what to draw. Downstairs the phone rings twice. Helena picks it up. He hears her speak: it is such a distant whisper that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had to take a train, a subway, and a bus to get downstairs.
To break the spell, all he has to do is yawn. When he was a child he would endow some gesture with an shamanic power, so that he would get what he was wishing for if he carried out the ritual, like tracing three circles over his belly before going into the classroom where he had to take an exam. He yawns halfheartedly.
Helena calls out to him.
“I’m going shopping. I’ll be back later.”
I’ll be back “later”? One is always back “later” when one goes out. Later than what, then? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have said, “I’ll be right back?” Of course she will buy something so as not to come back empty-handed, but what he’s sure about is that she’s not “going shopping.”
He hears the front door close. He quickly puts on his jacket and coat, leaves the brushes dirty and the paints uncovered, and goes down the stairs.
Once in the street, he’s taken aback: he doesn’t see her anywhere. Then he spots her off in the distance: one very blond head among all the others. He picks up the pace. He runs until she’s a reasonable distance ahead. Then he thinks that that distance isn’t, in fact, very reasonable. He slows down. He thinks: “Now I’ll find out who her lover is. Now this is something I find interesting.” But in his heart of hearts he realizes that it doesn’t really interest him all that much, and he’s sorry. In truth, he doesn’t really care if he never learns what the guy who’s going out with Helena looks like, how he dresses, whether or not he’s a nice guy. Helena turns a corner. Heribert follows her.
•
Carrying three shopping bags, Helena takes the same path in reverse. Heribert follows her at a distance. She’s gone to a pastry shop, a boutique, and a bookstore, and she spends so little time in each place that it would be impossible for her to have been with a lover, no matter how efficient the two of them might have been.
Helena searches in her coat pocket for the keys. Heribert watches her from a distance, and when he sees her go in, he goes for a walk so as not to get home right away. He wonders whether to go into a bar. He does. It’s half empty, with wooden paneling and mirrors. Not exactly dark, but lacking in light. He sits down on a barstool, leans on the bar, and when it’s time to order he remembers that not so long ago (today? yesterday? he doesn’t feel like wracking his brain to remember exactly when) he had had trouble in another, different, bar choosing what to drink when the time came. He doesn’t want the situation to repeat itself now, so when the bartender asks him what he’ll have, he looks for something to latch on to. When he sees the beer taps, he feels he’s been saved.
“Draft beer. A pint.”
Later on, when he spies the whisky bottles aligned before the mirror facing him (there is a mirror directly in front of him: he’s been seeing his face reflected in it for a while and hasn’t recognized himself until now), he thinks that if he had seen them first he would have ordered whisky. The waiter serves him the pint. He pays up. He licks off the foam.
•
Heribert opens the door to the house and goes in. Helena is in the kitchen, and she looks up from the carrots she’s chopping.
“I didn’t know where you were.”
“I went out for a walk. I didn’t think you’d be back for lunch.”
“What about you, are you eating at home today?”
“Yes.”
As she prepares the carrots and spinach, Heribert cleans the mushrooms and celery. The morning call must have been Hipòlita, he figures, to warn Helena that he had called last night and she hadn’t known how to answer the questions she wasn’t expecting. Could Helena have thought it didn’t matter? If she has spoken with Hipòlita, she must imagine he has suspicions. Why doesn’t she come up with a lie so good he’ll even have to doubt his own suspicions? Or doesn’t she care? Or does she think that she doesn’t have to cover things up? And why hasn’t she asked him what he’s been working on today? With every hour that goes by he sees more clearly that either he has to begin painting, without stopping, and with an energy that clearly he neither possesses nor desires to create, or when the day comes to hang the canvases, he won’t have a single one, and he will not be opening a single bottle of champagne at a single opening.
•
“You know what?” says Helena as they peel oranges. “I went to the theater with Hester yesterday, and we saw a show that was so good that even you, who claim not to like theater, and never want to go, even you . . .”
He�
�s put off by the way she’s pulled Hester out the hat to let him know that she didn’t go with Hipòlita. It’s as if she were taking him for a fool. Heribert supposes that now Helena is waiting for him to say, “Hester? Weren’t you going out with Hipòlita?” And then she would say, “Hipòlita? No.” And then if he continues to question her, she will act surprised and say, “Did I say I was going with Hipòlita? I meant Hester.” Considering how clever Helena is, he can even foresee a more detailed ending, to make it more believable. “I always slip and mix up one name for another, and I say Hester when I mean Hipòlita or Hipòlita when I mean Hester. I do it all the time.” But Heribert has another idea: not to act surprised at all, and calmly to ask her, “Oh, what did you see?” If she doesn’t realize he’s caught her in a lie when he says this, at least she’ll be intrigued. Or does she think he’s forgotten the whole episode? Or believed the story? It’s no use calling Hester on some pretext and subjecting her to subtle questioning because she’ll have been tipped off that she is last night’s alibi. What outcome is he really interested in? Not knowing what to say, and not yet having said anything, he sets the knife and the peeled orange on the table, gets up from the chair, and says he’s going to the bathroom.
•
He lines up all the blank canvases he has in the studio and examines them. What if he showed just that: white canvases, without the slightest trace of a human hand? It’s been done. Minimalism. And anyway, if he signs them he will have placed a few strokes of his own. He could not sign them. Someone must have done that, too. Is there anything original left to do? Even halfheartedly filling up all the walls of an exhibition isn’t new. Do you really have to do something new? Why? What is more important, to be honest or to be original? Out of honesty, people often refused to be original. And out of honesty people often fall silent rather than open their mouths only to hear their own voices. Will he be able to tell when he opens his mouth and nothing interesting comes out?