by Quim Monzó
Helena’s voice floats up to him:
“I’m leaving. See you later.”
It seems to him that, in the past, she would always tell him where she was going when she left, to the gallery or to do this or that, or to see this or that person. Or maybe she had never done anything of the sort, and now he just imagined she had. He hears the front door close. He puts on his jacket, and as he goes down the stairs he tries to calculate how many times he’s done that this year. On the table next to the door there are two brochures: one from Chevrolet and another from Ford.
This time he has no trouble spotting her. She’s standing in front of the windows of a shoe store. Heribert hangs back by a telephone booth and watches her out of the corner of his eye. There’s a drunk hanging onto a mailbox, and a girl (dressed like an old-fashioned secretary) is trying to mail a big stack of letters (and looking afraid that the drunk may attack her). The phone in the phone booth rings. Heribert looks at Helena, who’s still looking at shoes, but has gone on to another window. He’s afraid the constant ringing of the phone no one is answering will make her turn around. He goes into the booth, picks up the receiver, and says hello. On the other end, he doesn’t hear a thing: no breathing, no click to indicate the call has been cut off. The line was totally dead. He hangs up and turns around. Helena is walking down the street. “All this,” he thinks, “just to see her go shopping or to the gallery . . .” Helena signals, and a taxi jumps three lanes and stops right in front of her. Heribert has to stop another one, quickly, but feels ridiculous lifting his arm to flag it down. He will feel even more ridiculous, once inside, when he has to say, like in the movies, “Follow that car.” He remembers one where a taxi driver is thrilled when they ask him to follow another car, saying that he had been waiting all his long working life for that moment, like in the movies.
When he is in the cab and says it, the driver looks at him in the rearview mirror, gives a short laugh, and starts to talk. He talks nonstop the whole time, recklessly passing the other cars. Once, when Helena’s driver jumps a red light, Heribert’s steps on the gas and (between two lanes of traffic, almost scraping the cars on either side) shoots forward and crosses the street on the red just as a Cadillac Seville coming from the left makes the turn. They make such headway that, by the next red light, Heribert’s taxi is directly behind Helena’s. Heribert hides behind the driver’s head. If they keep up this pace, he thinks, soon they’ll take the lead, leaving the other car in their wake, turning this into the most original chase in history, in which they precede the pursued car instead of following it. They go across the bridge.
Fifteen minutes later, Helena’s taxi stops on a wide, solitary avenue, lined with houses.
“Park across the street, a little farther down.”
Having to come up with such stratagems exhausts him. The driver says something under his breath and smiles. Looking out the back window, Heribert watches as Helena gets out of the cab and goes into one of the houses.
•
A couple of children are playing with an enormous ball in one of the yards. Heribert tries unsuccessfully to figure out what they’re playing: sometimes it looks like soccer, then like baseball, then a minute later like handball. Then they laugh and take a rest, leaning on the fence. Once, he thinks they look at him, whisper about him, and laugh again.
He sits on the curb, and since he’s getting bored, he starts doing things. First he counts the seconds that elapse between one particularly loud shout from one of the kids and the first car to go down the street (another taxi): 634. Then he counts the minutes until the next car (a Mercury Cougar) goes by: 18. He adds the 634 seconds and the 18 minutes: 652. He finds it interesting to add up dissimilar things. In school they said you couldn’t add apples and oranges. If he adds the 652 to the 2 kids playing in the yard, he gets 654 seconds, minutes, and kids. He counts the cars parked on that stretch of street: 17. Added to the previous 654 that makes 671 seconds, minutes, kids, and cars on that stretch of street. He thinks of adding in the 4 stoplights, the two garbage cans he can see, the fire hydrants, the potholes. If he could add up all objects, all feelings, all ideas, all creatures, add them all up together, everything would be so simple. How easy it would be to face any situation, get out of any labyrinth, form a fairly accurate image of the world; the world (for example) would be exactly 78,345,321,834,042,751,539 things. If he could just diagram this feeling of perplexity! But how? Turning the canvas into a blackboard and writing down all those figures seems idiotic to him. And the mere thought of coming up with a more elaborate way to depict that morass wears him out.
He lets himself fall back. It feels wet. He looks at the white sky. It’s cold out. He thinks it’s strange that the two children are playing outside on such a cold day. He thinks, “If I start to imagine that the sky is empty, I’ll fall upwards, I’ll fall into the clouds.”
After a wait that seems interminable, Helena appears arm in arm with a tall man, with brown hair and a broad mouth, wearing a very long, gray raincoat and glasses with apple green, almost fluorescent, frames.
Thinking that he has to get up to follow them, he lies down again and keeps trying to convince himself that gravity will suck him up into the sky, but he doesn’t quite manage to believe it. When Helena and her escort catch a cab at the corner, he gets up, brushes off his pants, and starts walking home.
•
He opens the door, turns on the light in the foyer, and then, one by one, he turns on all the lights in all the rooms of the house. Upstairs, he turns on the light in the studio, and the radio, as he gazes with infinite estrangement upon all the cans, paintbrushes, portfolios, pencils, canvases, and easels. He goes back downstairs. He turns on the other radio, the television, the record player, and leaves them all at full blast. He can’t turn on the radio and the cassette player at the same time because turning one on automatically turns the other off. This annoys him. He will never again fall for one of these outlandish models that claim to be a radio and a cassette player at the same time; at the moment of truth they cannot be both radio and cassette player at the same time, and hence it is a lie. He remembers that he has a small transistor radio, which must be in some corner of the house. He looks through all the rooms, until he finds it next to the picnic baskets. He also turns it on. In the kitchen, he turns on all the burners, the oven, the toaster, the blender, the coffee grinder, the mixer. For a moment he’s afraid the circuit breaker will blow. He puts the teakettle on the stove, with a little water. The whistle soon joins all the other cries, songs, melodies, conversations, noises, and lights that fill the house. He feels at home, in a house full of life. He goes out to the door, opens it, and keeps pressing the buzzer over and over again. The din produced by all those appliances working at once is delightful. “If in this precise moment the telephone rang, I’d be a truly happy man.” He could phone a friend and ask him to call, but that would ruin the fun.
Just then the phone rings. He listens for a good while, one more sound among all the screeches, squawks, and whistles bubbling up from every corner of the house. Then he thinks maybe he should answer. He stops ringing the doorbell, closes the door, and picks up the telephone. He can’t hear a thing over the racket. At the top of his lungs he asks the person on the other end, whom he isn’t able to identify, to give him a moment, and one by one he shuts off the record player, the radio, the cassette, the toaster, the lights, the blender, the burners, the oven, the transistor radio, until the house is plunged into absolute silence and darkness. He sits on the floor and feels his way (because his eyes, dazzled by the previous brilliance, take a while to adjust to the absence of light) over to the telephone. It’s Herundina, who asks him what all the ruckus was. Heribert tries to explain, and when the girl seems to have understood, he is surprised because not even he understands it very well; he even has to ask her to repeat the question, “What are you doing this evening?” because he hasn’t the foggiest notion what he’s doing that night or what he ought to answer.
; •
He has taken off his wristwatch and placed it on the table in front of him. For fifteen minutes (when he’s already been waiting a half hour) he has silently been following the progress of the second hand. He has interrupted this contemplation three times, each time to order more rum. Now the waiter is filling his glass again. He takes a swallow and quickly goes back to studying the second hand. He is surprised to have lived so many years with watch hands before him and never to have been aware of the obsessive life they led. Now he perceives them all, the agile second hand, the slow minute hand, and the lumbering hour hand, as unsung comrades. He kisses the face of the watch.
He’s disconcerted at Herundina’s not yet having arrived. What if it’s all his imagination, and she hasn’t called and, consequently, they haven’t arranged to meet at all? What if he dreamed it and now, in a waking state, he is fruitlessly awaiting a meeting that will never take place? Or what if he’s dreaming now and fretting about a date that can’t take place unless he wakes up? He feels so disinclined to think about the possible reasons why the girl hasn’t shown up that, when he finishes the last glass of rum, he gets up, pays the bill, leaves the restaurant, and heads down the street.
A few steps farther on, he leans against a telephone booth, waiting for a taxi. Three of them go by, all occupied. The fourth, also occupied, stops in front of the restaurant and, to Heribert’s surprise, Herundina gets out, smoothes out her leopard-print miniskirt, unwraps a piece of gum, and puts it in her mouth. For a moment, Heribert considers going back into the restaurant, running into her, scolding her a bit for arriving late, accepting whatever excuses she offered, sitting down at a table with her, and searching for things to talk about over dinner, only to find himself at a loss as to what to do with her afterwards. When the taxi she had gotten out of starts up and the signal light goes on, Heribert hails it, opens the door, and gets in, with time enough to watch through the rear window as Herundina pushes open the restaurant door.
When he walks into the bedroom at home he is surprised to find Helena already there, asleep. It’s been days since she has beaten him home! As he gets undressed and into bed, he wonders if she is pretending to be asleep, as he has so often done.
A weak sun shines in through the picture window, outlining the contours of things, bringing them into relief in a way that disturbs Heribert, who is sitting on a stool before a canvas, his head resting on the hand of the arm whose elbow is propped on his thigh. On the ground lies a torn canvas. He can hardly believe that just five minutes ago he stomped it to pieces. On the calendar he calculates how many days are left until the opening. Eighteen. He can do twenty paintings in three days, if he wants to. All he needs is a bit of will and a little courage. Has be become so demanding that he no longer approves of work that just months before would have satisfied him? Maybe that’s it. Maybe, two days before the show, the pressure will make him prolific. It wouldn’t be the first time that urgency had made him prolific. Maybe in the end it’s just that he isn’t anxious enough yet, and the calm was boring him. Maybe if he tries now . . . He picks up the charcoal pencil. He touches the tip of it to the surface of the canvas. He keeps it there for a while, struggling mightily to make even a stroke. Not a single one. He lowers his arm in exhaustion. He sits down in a chair, gasping for air, so tired he thinks he won’t be able to do another thing for the rest of the day.
He looks out the window. He moved into this house about a year ago. He chose to work by that window because of all the light it gave him. For almost a year now, he has been there each day, painting, and observing the turn-of-the-century brick building across the street when he takes a break. The first figure to become familiar was a young man who lived on the third floor. At first he had been surprised to see him at the window so often. He soon understood that the guy was pacing, along one invariable route: He walks purposefully from one end of the room to the window and, once there, stops, looks out at the street, turns on his heel, and walks back to the other end of the room . . . Over and over, for the space of a minute, for minutes on end, for an entire hour, all morning and all afternoon, every day of every week of every month. For how many years?
In time, Heribert has come to recognize all his sweaters. He has one very loud one, yellow and blue, and he seems happier on the days he wears it. In the summer, Heribert has seen all his t-shirts. Once, at the peak of August, he saw him in a bathing suit. He often smokes a pipe as he paces. Sometimes he pretends to read a book. Once he stayed at the window for a long time, hugging a record cover to his chest. Often, when the window is open, he shouts things down to people on the street. Heribert has only seen him outdoors once, on his way home with two older women. He was on the corner, arguing with a lamppost. Now he is at home, going through his daily paces. How many miles must he clock in a year? “Crazy as he is,” thinks Heribert, “any minute now he could take a shot at me. Maybe even the next time around!” He can see him now, approaching the window as he always does, but this time he’s not holding a book, or a pipe, or a record cover, but a revolver, which he aims at Heribert. As he pictures this, Heribert closes his eyes, the better to imagine that perhaps at this precise moment the guy is aiming a gun at him. “What will I do if he shoots and misses?” Would he throw himself to the ground? Could he go on living there, knowing that the madman might attack again? Would this finally force him to look for a new apartment or, more to Helena’s liking, a house in the suburbs? How exhausting, though.
Heribert opens his eyes again and sees the guy pacing the room, coming up to the window, and looking out, as always. He hears the phone ring, hears Helena pick up the receiver, hears her say it’s for him. He picks up the phone. Helena hangs up the other extension. Heribert leans up against the window, certain that, as always, nothing will happen. It’s starting to snow. Herundina is apologizing for having been late for their date the day before. A meeting. Do twenty-year-olds have meetings? Herundina says it had to do with school. She asks if he waited long.
“Two minutes. When you didn’t show up after two minutes, I left.”
“You could have waited a little longer.”
“What for, if you didn’t get there for another hour and fifteen minutes?”
“How do you know, if you weren’t there? I don’t get it.”
If he were a writer, he would write about fear of the blank page . . . Maybe he could paint something like that. A painter in front of an easel with an empty canvas? An empty canvas painted white?
“I don’t think you’re listening to me,” Herundina breaks in.
“Sure I’m listening.”
“You’re very strange.”
Heribert hears Helena say she’s going out. He thinks, “Who did she think this was on the phone?” He starts making excuses into the receiver. Says he has to leave right away, promises to phone, accepts her apology for being late the night before, agrees to her being the one to call, on Wednesday, hangs up the phone, picks up his coat.
•
This time, the wait is more tedious. It doesn’t amuse him to count the parked cars, the time elapsed between the passing of two cars, the potholes, the windows of a house, the windows of all the houses on the street, the trees in the yards, the trees that grow on the sidewalks, the number of the house Helena went into . . . And the children aren’t there, either, perhaps because snow is falling softly the whole time. With his lapels up high and wearing a wide-brimmed hat (when he saw that the snow was sticking, he picked up a hat; could that bit of precaution be a sign of recovery?), Heribert sits on the curb, thinking that if he’s there much longer they’ll find him under a good layer of snow, turned into a snowman, a sculpture for the show that will be opening on the twenty-second. From the time Helena goes into the house until the time she comes out, accompanied by greenglasses, exactly two hours, forty-eight minutes, and nine seconds elapse. As he follows them, he turns the hours into minutes in his head. He has been waiting 168 minutes and nine seconds. He turns the minutes into seconds: 10,080, which (with the nin
e remaining seconds) comes to a total of 10,089 seconds. The snowstorm is thinning.
The couple stops at a corner. Heribert also stops, acting nonchalant. He pulls his hat down over his ears. If they hail a taxi now, he’ll really be screwed, because in that neighborhood it will be hard to find another one right away. If the man has a car parked nearby, he’ll be in the same fix. And, even if he’s lucky and finds a cab, he feels nauseated at the mere thought of telling another cab driver, “Follow that car.”
It has stopped snowing. Helena and glasses were strolling along, laughing, their arms around each other. Heribert thinks that when he gets home he’ll have to get the operator to tell him the name of the person who lives at that house number. But, what if the phone is in someone else’s name? Or he doesn’t have a phone? The couple stops from time to time for a kiss. Heribert pretends to be checking out a shop window or waiting for a bus, sinking lower and lower into his lapels and hat. If only he had a disguise . . . He realizes he’s in front of a drugstore with wigs in the window. He rapidly calculates his chances of losing them if he stops for, say, fifteen seconds, to make a purchase. Impossible: they are right at the beginning of the block and there isn’t another corner for at least a minute. He goes into the shop and orders the big blonde wig with the curls; he pays; he tells them not to wrap it, takes off his hat, puts on the wig, puts the hat on over it, and goes out, indicating with a gesture to the salespeople and the two customers that they shouldn’t follow him out, which of course they do immediately, ignoring his pleas in their amazement.