by Quim Monzó
Herundina watches as the gallery guard reprimands Heribert. As he apologizes, Heribert considers the thought of lying and telling Herundina he loves her. Where would that lead, though? If he had never lied, he could resolve to commence a new life, always lying without fail, firmly vowing never again to utter so much as a single truth. Even if it were completely false, he would make the woman very happy if he declared his love for her, and in point of fact, it wouldn’t be all that hard. That must be the solution. There can’t possibly be another. They leave the gallery. They walk through the museum without looking at a single painting. Heribert opens his mouth and says, very slowly:
“I love you.”
Herundina’s expression wavers between happiness and stupefaction. Is she not sure whether or not to believe him? All he needed now was for her not to believe him, after the effort he’s put into saying it. Her draws her close to him, takes her in his arms, and kisses her. Kissing is so easy, even if you don’t feel like it. As he kisses her, he sees a girl, who looks vaguely familiar, walk by The Paris Bit by Stuart Davis. “She looks like an Anna, or an Anne . . .” He remembers: she was the girl from a few days ago at the bookstore, the one he had involuntarily kept from stealing a book! It would be so easy for him to feel desire for her . . . It would be so easy, later on, to stop feeling desire for her . . . At that very moment he is feeling it, desire, a faint desire that (if he keeps looking at her much longer) will grow increasingly strong (or weak, or even disappear if he turns his head and looks at one of those paintings, or at the floor, or at the ceiling, and forgets her). What if everything were different with her, though? Maybe he will only be able to grab onto something when he no longer expects anything. He watches the girl vanish into another gallery. He makes a move to follow her.
“Answer me. Do you want to or not? Hey . . . you weren’t listening!”
He looks at the woman in his arms and steps back. He recalls her name, but can no longer form a single thought about her. She extricates herself from his embrace; furious, she strikes him and flees down the stairs. Heribert bursts out laughing, runs his hand over his stinging cheek, and thinks maybe he should follow her, tell her he was sorry, that he had been listening to her, or that he hadn’t, that all he heard was the mellifluous flow of her marvelously harmonious voice, as if it were music: that was how much in love he was. She would never buy it, though. Or would she? (And what about mellifluous? What exactly did it mean?) For a moment, the urge to know whether or not she would go for that story has him on the verge of dashing down the stairs after her. Instead, he heads toward the adjoining room. The girl from the bookstore isn’t there. He looks in all the other galleries until he sees her in front of The Brass Family, by Alexander Calder. Heribert positions himself by her side, slowly turns his head, and looks at her. The girl also turns her head and looks at him. Heribert feels an intense attraction to her, and he is certain she feels the same for him, so certain he feels they need not so much as say a word to understand what they feel for each other. Finally, there is someone with whom words will be superfluous, and perhaps nothing he has experienced till now would make any sense were it not for this encounter, which in contrast now gives meaning to everything. He moves close to her and smiles.
•
He caresses her thigh; he kisses her on the neck. She opens her mouth; she kisses his tongue. They were in a museum hallway, near the telephone booths. She suggests they go for coffee.
They sit at a table. They order coffee. The waiter brings it. The girl pays for it. She says she’s delighted to buy coffee for such a prestigious artist. He picks up the cup and pours the coffee over his head. She laughs and asks him again if he hasn’t been drinking. Heribert says no, and to prove it, he gets up from the chair and balances himself on his left foot while raising his right thigh until it is parallel to the ground. Then he places the thumb of his right hand at the tip of his nose while simultaneously stretching his palm and inclining his trunk until he almost touches his knee with the pinky of the same hand. Having stood like that for ten seconds without losing his balance, he salutes the girl and the customers in the cafeteria, who were staring at him, and sits back down. The girl laughs.
“Not drunk. You’re just crazy.”
They embrace again. Heribert puts his hand under her skirt, and when she protests, he stays still. But when she can no longer stifle her laughter, finally bursting out, Heribert tries to caress her pubis. The young woman finishes her coffee, they get up from the table, and begin to run after each other from room to room, going up and down the museum stairs and playing a combination of tag and hide-and-seek. At last, exhausted, they rest against Standing Woman by Gaston Lachaise. Little by little they slide down until they are sitting on the floor. They are caught in such a feverish embrace that when Heribert notices that the sculpture is moving he thinks for a moment that passion can make even the most immutable works kinetic. When he lifts his head, he barely has time to register that the guard’s gestures are not reprimands and the astonishment on the museum visitors’ faces is not censure, before, a tenth of a second later, he feels all the bronze of that larger-than-life and generously-proportioned woman crashing down on him and begins to understand what is really happening.
•
When he opens his eyes he doesn’t know what day it is, or what time, or how many days, hours, and minutes have gone by since the last time he opened his eyes, nor how many more will go by from the moment in which he closes them again.
•
Sunlight streams in through the window and lights up the wall at the foot of the bed. The first thing he sees is the flower arrangement. Then he looks down at his body, vaguely convinced it will be shorter than it was before. One of his legs, the right one, is in a cast. And one arm, also the right.
He feels comfortable in that bed. He turns his head. To one side there is a night table with water, bottles, and small objects whose functions are unknown to him. His whole body hurts. He looks up. He sees a small panel with buttons. One of them shows an outline of a light bulb with rays of light. The other shows a female silhouette with a skirt, a cap, and a line in her hand; it must represent a tray. He concludes that this is the button to call the nurse. He presses it. A half a minute later a young woman appears. “What if I can’t speak?” he thinks. Perhaps as a result of the accident he won’t be able to articulate a single sound. He’s afraid to put it to the test and discover it’s true. What if his tongue has been cut off? Or if he severed it himself, on impact? Impact . . . He imagines his tongue on the ground, like a lizard’s tail. With a life of its own. And what about his face? Maybe his face is deformed. Maybe a terrifying scar has turned him into a monster. The nurse looks at him understandingly and tells him a slew of things. So he can hear, then; he’s pleased. He makes an effort to understand what the woman is saying. She is saying soothing things. She’s speaking to him as if he were retarded. Maybe the blow has turned him into an idiot. But an idiot wouldn’t think such a thing. Or would he? Maybe he has been an idiot all his life and the blow brought him to his senses. He opens his mouth and manages to utter one word, then two, then three: a whole sentence. He can talk, too. He closes first one eye, then the other. He has two, then. He asks for a mirror and details about his condition. The woman says he has broken an arm and a leg, and that the museum administration is astonished that such a thing could have happened. Technically it was quite impossible for the sculpture to fall. Heribert doesn’t find it so strange: everything is impossible until it happens, above all such bizarre events as this.
What if he can never paint again? Perhaps he is crippled, or will be an invalid for life. He requests a diagnosis. The nurse doesn’t know. He will have to ask the doctor. Maybe that’s what he needs, something to grab onto: the struggle to overcome an infirmity. He asks what day it is. Friday the 8th. He was admitted the day before. He’s only been there for one day? If she had said it was a month he would have believed it all the same. He can still decide, sick as he is, to make a heroic
gesture and do the paintings for the exhibition: a feat worthy of a Greek demigod.
•
Helena arrives with a bouquet of flowers. Heribert recalls that just a short time before he had seen another bouquet of flowers. He looks around the room and quickly locates it, in a corner. Someone must have moved it. What a coincidence: two bouquets of flowers. Life is full of coincidences. One bouquet and another bouquet are a coincidence. He tries to find more. Helena has two feet, and so does he: voilà, another coincidence. He looks for more. A window with a blind and, next to it, another window with a blind: another coincidence. Looking for more is harder for him. He thinks that he has come up with quite enough for the first try: no need to overdo it.
“Who brought the other bouquet?”
“Humbert. You remember him, don’t you?”
•
The doctor seems like a good man. He jokes with him the whole time. He asks what the paintings he does from now on will be worth in the event they can’t save his leg and they have to amputate it, or if one arm ends up a bit shorter than the other? Will they be worth more or less than the ones he had done before? He also tells him not to mess with the nurses, and he smiles to show that it is only a joke. Heribert finds him charming and intelligent and makes a firm pledge to speak with him at length, some day.
•
There is a knock at the door. Heribert says to come in. Hug comes roaring into the room, telling him that Helena has decided to put on the exhibition any way she can, that they are all casting about for an idea that can save them. Heribert closes his eyes, hides his head under the pillow, and when Hug doesn’t leave, he calls for the nurse and asks her to escort him out.
•
The doctor’s comments lead him to think he has not devoted much attention to the nurses, which he proceeds to do from that moment on. The nurse on the night shift is more attractive than the one on the day shift. Maybe now that he’s all banged up he’ll start feeling passionate again. What’s more, nurses have always been a persistent part of popular erotic mythology, leading one to foresee miracles. At one point, when the night nurse is picking things up from the bedside table, Heribert lifts his hand to caress her thigh, but then lowers it. He concentrates on counting the tiles, the bars on the bed . . . He could add them all together . . . but what a bore! If here were in a ward, with a lot of other patients, he could watch them, make fun of them, listen to their conversations. He would have company. But no sooner does he have this thought than he realizes it would be horrible to have to put up with all that half-dead, skinny, pale, sick riffraff and their crying and moaning. Let them all die! He doesn’t want to see them! How glad he is to be in a room by himself!
•
He reads an article in the newspaper about the creative crises many painters, filmmakers, and musicians are going through nowadays. “Is there anything left to say?” the journalist asks. “Lately, the speed with which new fashions and cultural tastes succeed each other leads one . . .” He drops the paper. He picks up a novel Hilari has lent him, in which there are no dead bodies. He used to think they were boring. Now he thinks the ones with dead bodies are phony.
•
The doctor comes in, with traces of blood on his gown and in need of a shave. There is a nurse with him. They are standing by the side of the bed, looking at him with a smile Heribert finds hard to categorize. The doctor announces that they will be releasing him that evening. He is much better. Soon, the doctor says, if he puts his mind to it he will be able to paint again. Heribert’s blood boils. What is this fool saying? How dare he insinuate something like that? What does he know about it? He had thought him to be an intelligent man, and now he comes out with this nonsense! He musters all the strength he has and spits at him. The arc of the sputum is weaker than he had intended, and it falls on the sheet on top of him. The expression on the doctor’s face changes and gets serious. The nurse wipes the spittle off with a Kleenex. There is a knock at the door. Helena comes in. She speaks with the doctor. Heribert studies the two of them, one right next to the other: Helena and the doctor, observing him. “Is she also getting it on with this quack?” Then the doctor and nurse leave the room. Helena has brought another bouquet of flowers. Why so many flowers? Heribert tries to think of some vulgar phrase that will annoy her, like: “Bring me a nice little eleven-year-old girl, and don’t bring me any more flowers,” but it seems like a cheap shot. For some time now (ever since the doctor and nurse had left), Helena has been telling him that the following day there will be a business lunch at their house, and that Hug will be there, along with other people who have money in the gallery, and Humbert. They have to fill the gap he has left them in, and they can’t do it just any old way. There were just a few days left, and they had to find an artist whose work was so good that this deplorable incident would not have lasting consequences for the gallery. They have to create a brilliant success, turn this error into a new leap forward, convert a debit into an asset. They have to use this opening to fly higher. This is why they can’t use a vaguely-familiar, second-rate artist—it would be like admitting defeat. There is only one possible move: they must introduce a complete unknown, someone whose body of work would amaze the critics, the public, and collectors alike. Humbert has the stuff. Tomorrow, all of them, together, will discuss what has to be done, and she’s telling him now so that he doesn’t think they’ve been plotting behind his back. But Heribert has been thinking the whole time about the “leap forward.” About how perfect metaphors, and strings of metaphors, were for whiling away the hours at play. Why can’t he just stay forevermore in that place, where, as if by a secret pact, everything is white and everyone is dressed in white, juggling similes and metaphors like a circus performer?
December
“Where to, kid?”
“Where?”
“Yes, where. What else?”
“Oh, I thought you meant it figuratively.”
—Francesc Trabal, L’any que ve
He is dreaming of a swimming pool like the one he is sitting beside: white, spotless, blurred as if drawn in pencil and watercolors; or like a Hockney: lots of colorful awnings and tables with tall glasses. A woman with dark glasses is lying in a white hammock, sunbathing. It’s Helena. When she realizes he’s watching her, she smiles, raises her sunglasses until they are resting on the top of her head, looks back at him, and opens her mouth as if she were speaking, without emitting any sound. And, even though her voice can’t be heard, she is saying: “I’m upset you don’t want to make love with me.” “Make love!” Humbert snorts, and dives into the pool, where everything is warm and light blue, and he can swim for ages and ages underwater without having to come up to the surface for air. It was so easy to breathe underwater . . . You just had to open your mouth like a fish out of water, but unlike a suffocating fish (for whom air is a foreign medium), he can breathe perfectly. “What a shame,” he thinks, “that this pool is only a drawing, so the sounds from above can’t reach me. Though sound wouldn’t reach me in a real pool, either.” When his head comes to the surface, Helena, who is sitting on the edge of the pool and splashing her feet in the water, is looking at him from behind her dark glasses, set against a desert background filled with singing Berbers. She has a straw sun hat on. “Do you love me?” she asks. In response, Humbert simply bites her foot, and everything goes into slow motion. Helena says, “Sometimes I think you’ve never loved me, and I mean nothing more to you than that diving board.” “What a great image,” Humbert thinks, “the diving board. As if it had all these different registers and levels of meaning . . .” He hears someone laugh. He looks at the diving board, but the sun hurts his eyes, and he is now back in the water, his lungs full of air. He contemplates the bubbles that come out of his mouth. He thinks, “When I get out now, there’ll be a beer by the side of the pool.” When he gets out, a smiling Helena hands him an icy mug of beer with a snow-white head which drips and falls into the water, leaving patches of color that shouldn’t . . . As he drinks the
mug down, Helena kisses him on the forehead. “If only it could always be like this . . .” He plunges back into the water and thinks, “When I get out, I want this house surrounding us, the house I live in, to be gone. I want to be on a beach.” He gets out and opens his eyes: he is on a beach. Wincing at the sunlight, he goes under again. “When I get out, I want to see the signature of the Hockney I’m in, in a corner somewhere.” When he gets out, in a corner of the sky (a cardboard sky right over his head) he sees Hockney’s signature, fading away as if written in smoke. Every time he gets out the sun pierces his eyes. If only he could always live under water . . . “I could live there forever if it weren’t for the fact that every time I come up the sunlight hurts my eyes, and the longer and longer I stay under, and the longer and longer I take to come out again, the more it will hurt, until the times comes when I will bleed like a Christ figure, like a menstruating woman, like a wounded soldier, like a fish in a basket . . .” A man jumps out a window and falls onto a tumbling mat. He runs down the street. Death is so sad. If he could only hide in a shadow . . . To hide in a shadow is like not being there at all; he can only be touched or nabbed if he is in the sun, but then he has to stop, surrounded by the sands of a desert in the center of the world, under a red sun wearing dark glasses with frames the color of the girls riding down the highway on bicycles, on their way home, never arriving because they get lost on dirt trails, beyond the fences, rolling up the mountainside, those girls in the pictures of Helena as a teenager, sitting in meadows, wearing short skirts and high-heeled shoes, always smiling, wearing short pants and socks, with those flaming lips that scorch you as you die with pleasure.