Gasoline

by Quim Monzó

  For a while, everything is quiet. Then the whispering starts up again, more placid this time. Humbert has another erection. He should have taken advantage of the chance to strike up an acquaintance with the girl at the bar. Maybe it isn’t too late: he could get dressed and go back down. But most likely she will already have left. Not knowing what to do, he frantically dials the desk and orders a double scotch, and when the same receptionist who had taken him up to the room delivers it, he pulls her into his arms and, between giggles and no-no-nos, drags her to the bed, pushes the wet sheet aside, and kisses her passionately.

  •

  The following morning he spends his breakfast in the hotel bar trying to imagine which of the couples who occupy the other tables had spent the previous night in the room next to his. He closes his eyes, trying to place the voices, without success. He pays for his breakfast and the room and, as he opens the door, sees two of the chambermaids whispering to each other, looking at him, and shrieking with laughter. He stops, takes out the little notebook, and sketches the hotel, with the two maids at the door, one whispering in the other’s ear.

  He drives without stopping. When he reaches the town where he had arranged to meet up with Hildegarda, he sees two cars totaled by a recent crash.

  He doesn’t have to look very far: the hotel is a gigantic skyscraper, boring and extravagant, on the only street in town. The receptionist greets him with a smile. He tells him his wife has already arrived, not fifteen minutes before. He tells him the room number. Humbert bounds up the stairs, two by two. He knocks twice on the door. He hears Hildegarda’s voice asking him to wait a moment. But the door had opened when he knocked; it must not have been quite shut. Humbert walks around the room, looking at the items of clothing Hildegarda has left scattered on the bed. He runs his hand over all of them, picks one up, and smells it. Hildegarda opens the bathroom door, wrapped in a towel, and takes little steps in his direction, leaving the floor full of wet footsteps. She hugs him gleefully as he scolds her for having left the door open, and he takes off her towel.

  •

  When they park by the bar, Humbert realizes that the gas tank is almost empty. They have coffee at a small table by the window. It is beginning to snow. The room smells of boiled cabbage. An extraordinarily fat black cat, like a balloon about to burst, saunters between the tables, rubbing up against the legs of the people sitting there. Humbert finds the animal so disgusting that, when it comes near, he gets up from the chair and goes to sit at another table. Hildegarda shoots the cat a ferocious glare. The cat turns tail and goes over to Humbert’s new table. Humbert gets up and goes to the other end of the room. The cat is so bloated that he think just touching it will leave his fingers slathered with lard. If he squashes it, he thinks, he will splatter the walls of the place with grease. When the cat comes over to him yet again, Humbert goes back to Hildegarda’s table, asks for the check, and pays, fleeing from the animal’s slow and constant gait, that trails him wherever he goes. When Hildegarda opens the door to leave, he closes it instantly, fearful it will follow them out.

  In the next town, he also parks on what appears to be the main street. They go into a movie house. In the vestibule, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a chocolate-covered cake. In the theater, once their eyes have adjusted to the dark, they realize there is no one else there. They talk about movies. Though Hildegarda hasn’t seen many of the ones he mentions, the few she has seen she really likes. Happy to be alone, they allow themselves to speak in a completely normal tone of voice, in a movie house.

  When they leave, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a sandwich and drinking orange juice. It is still snowing. He gets back into the car. Humbert announces that they have been running on empty for quite some time and that they should fill up as soon as they see a gas station.

  A little ways beyond the town, to the right, Hildegarda sees the lake. They veer off onto a little road and park lakeside. They kiss and embrace, isolated from the outdoors by the coat of snow that is blanketing them.

  •

  When they try to start the car, it won’t start. Hildegarda says they should have filled the tank. Humbert says, “Ah.” They have two alternatives: wait for the snowstorm to peter out or try to walk back. They opt for the latter. Humbert considers offering to go to the gas station himself, but he thinks she could also have offered. They pull up the collars of their coats, pull their hats down over their ears, give each other a hug, and start walking.

  When they arrive, over an hour later, they are completely soaked. They buy a can of gasoline and ask the person in charge if he knows anyone who can drive them back. He knows someone who lives in the next town over and runs a taxi service. He arrives twenty minutes later. He takes them on a search that seems unending because in that snowstorm all the roads look alike, and at each fork in the road they end up choosing one side practically at random, only, in the end, to have to turn back and try the other. It is hours before they find the car.

  Exhausted and aggravated, they go back to the hotel. They go up to their room and get into bed. Humbert turns over to embrace Hildegarda. She says not right now.

  Feeling restless, Humbert tries to figure out if he can get any notes out of all that. Finding nothing, he tries to sleep. Hildegarda asks him if he’s sleeping. He says no. Then she starts talking non-stop: somehow out of context, he feels; she tells him that years before she had been involved with a stage actor, precisely at the same time she was a member of a mime troupe. And now she has the same feeling she had when she started losing interest in the opera: she feels she isn’t going anywhere with her painting. She asks him if he really thinks she isn’t any good. Humbert alleges that he hasn’t seen her work and thus has no way of judging. Hildegarda says that the same thrill of satisfaction she had once got with mime, and then with the opera, she was now getting (more and more strongly) with jazz. She asks him his opinion as to what instrument she should try. Humbert, acting as if he were thinking it over, wonders how to evade this monologue that doesn’t interest him in the slightest. In his little notebook (which he had left on the night table, just in case) he manages to write: “Woman tells boring story that doesn’t interest me at all.” He continues to listen until he falls asleep and dreams that he is going out with a girl who had been Heribert’s girlfriend but isn’t Hildegarda. Since Helena is at his house, they go to hers, but when they open the door, they find it full of cockroaches. Humbert then proposes that they go to his house, where there have never been any roaches, and they would find some pretense for Helena. They go there and the house is a hotel, which greatly reduces the danger of their being found out by Helena. They are so certain that no cockroach has ever entered that house that they are taken by surprise when, upon turning on the lights in their room, a roach appears right in the middle of the bed. When he immediately proceeds to crush it, the juice that oozes out is like thick semen, which obliges them to take off the sheet. They lie down without touching. They fall asleep. Humbert, in the dream he is dreaming in the dream, dreams that he is in a car at Hildegarda’s side. She is driving, and she announces that something is wrong with the car. In what appears to be the ideal solution for such cases, she has connected the car with wires to a (disgusting, fat, enormous) dead cat. But Hildegarda tells him that they have to massage the cat; otherwise, the contraption doesn’t work. Humbert goes to massage the cat; when he touches it though, its flesh, soft and putrid, disintegrates and falls off. Humbert realizes that this is only natural, because they hadn’t boiled it first. In cases like this, you had to boil the cat so the car could keep going. So they boil it, then, as all these people look on. Thousands upon thousands of roaches start to stream out of it. A spider appears and approaches. The spider is laughing. It goes up to the pot, looks in, and rests a leg on the rim. The people bat it away. It goes off, but remains within eyeshot. From there it observes the scene with disdain. Then it comes close again: dozens of hairy legs in motion, that stupid laugh . . . It sticks its head in the pot again, to s
ee the dead cat (which, dead and all, is surreptitiously laughing) boiling and the roaches streaming out. The people bat it away again, and it exits laughing. Then, in the dream, he awakens from the other dream because the weight of the woman’s body (who has rolled over on top of him in her sleep) is smothering him. He gets up to have a drink of water, and a red roach comes up out of the drain of the sink.

  •

  He wakes up because the weight of Hildegarda’s body (who has rolled over on top of him in her sleep) is smothering him. He’s thirsty. He remembers woolly fragments of his dream: the weight of a body, a man with the face of an arachnid. He gets up, goes into the bathroom, turns on the faucet, lets the water run a little, looks at himself in the mirror, and, in the silence of the night, hears the sound of the stubble when he runs his hand over his chin. When he lowers his head to drink from the faucet, he sees a cockroach hiding behind the bowl of the sink. He tries to kill it, but can’t. Using all his might he manages to separate the sink a bit from the wall (fearing that the tiles, or the sink itself, will crack) forcing it to flee down the tiles to the floor. There he crushes it and stands immobile, looking out of the corner of his eye, expecting a vengeful coalition of hotel roaches to appear. What if he gets into bed and one of those repugnant creatures decides to stroll across his pillow and his face? He gets into bed, covers his whole body with the sheets (cotton sheets, still smelling of detergent), so fresh that no cockroach would ever dare come in contact with them, he thinks, to reassure himself.

  Three quarters of an hour later, he deduces that this edginess that is keeping him from sleeping must be insomnia, which he has heard so much about, but never suffered from, and which has so often been said to be an ailment favorable to creative fertility. Is he, then, having insomnia for the first time? He’s pleased: new experiences always interest him. Perhaps if he becomes an insomniac he’ll be able to devote those long hours of silence and the snoring of others to a deep meditation upon the meaning of his work, to the structuring of a theoretical framework. He walks around the room. He’s doesn’t want to touch anything, because a cockroach might have skittered over it (except for the sheets, and he doesn’t know why he’s so sure about the sheets). He can only bring himself to drink water from his hands (not from a glass!) if he tries not to think that a roach could also have strolled down the faucet.

  Humbert sits down in a chair at a table against the wall, on which he had left the room key and Hildegarda her pocketbook. He runs the index finger of his right had over the edge of the table and checks it for dust. He hears Hildegarda pull the sheet over her, blow a raspberry, and say what may or may not be a word:

  “Budalowkey.”

  Humbert stops looking at his finger, gets up, goes over to the bed, and sits down. Hildegarda is fast asleep, gripping the edge of the sheet with both hands. What was that “budalowkey” about? What could she be dreaming about? He wishes he could penetrate Hildegarda’s dreams . . . And not just Hildegarda’s, but anyone’s, and learn what everyone is dreaming, see the images they saw, contemplate the combustion of ideas that takes place behind each pair of shut eyes. Humbert brings his face down to hers. He whispers:

  “Budalowkey.”

  She doesn’t budge. If only he could get inside the dream, be part of it, answer and ask without bringing down the whole structure in which the other person momentarily lives . . . And “budalowkey,” what does that mean? Maybe she said “barliqui-barloqui” in Catalan; no, it was very unlikely she would know the word. In English, “budalowkey” could be something like “but a low key” or “but I locked it.” But why? What could these phrases mean? And maybe it wasn’t so clearly “budalowkey” after all, but more of a “badalecky” or “battle-hockey” or “Bore a locket.”

  Hildegarda is stirring; she emits throaty sounds, as if she were carrying on a whole conversation inside. That white expanse of sheet wrapped around a flesh-colored burst of shoulder, and the light shade from the night table, an obsessive greenish blue . . . Humbert gets up, takes the little notebook from the night table, opens it, and begins to sketch: the bed, the night table, the wall, the painting of a snow-covered landscape, the drapes, the door . . . Then he draws the same composition, replacing each object with another: the bed is now an enormous pack of cigarettes; the door, a loudspeaker; the painting, a stamp; the night tables, a pair of dice on either side of the pack of cigarettes; the wall is gone; the drapes are a forest in flames . . . He draws the same scene again: the bed is a dark black spot; the door a soft stain that spreads and spreads until it fills up the whole page. In one corner a boy (a boy or a girl?) plays with a pail. A girl, clearly. Humbert recognizes her at once. It’s Helena, from one of those photographs in the album she had first shown him a couple of weeks before: Helena as a little girl, playing on the beach; as a young woman in a little dress, with tacky high-heeled shoes, and a hairdo drenched with spray; with friends on a camping trip; or, now older, with that mysterious Henri, the artist—not French, just an American snob—about whom he knows only that they had been engaged, and from whom some time back he had discovered letters, bound with a rubber band, in her stocking drawer . . . Humbert flips through the little notebook and on a blank page begins to write: “A whole series of brides—in the appropriate gowns—without makeup. Another series of brides with too much makeup. Brides with beautiful faces and fake mustaches. A lame bride, with a crutch. Brides against a backdrop of factories. Brides with their skirts lifted, showing their bushes. A bride leading a dog on a leash. A series of paintings of brides in tuxedos with carnations in their lapels. A groom with a limp penis coming out of his fly. A groom with the bride’s bouquet in his hand, striking a serious pose. A group of gentlemen in tuxedos trying to catch the bouquet the bride has tossed as it floats in mid-air. A groom in a tuxedo with high heels. A groom smoking a corn cob pipe, making so much smoke it hides his face. Two men smoking pipes and fistfighting, neither of them dropping the pipe (in pure primary colors in which red predominates). A transatlantic steamer navigating in a sea of blood, with merrymaking on deck: colored lights, streamers, an orchestra . . . Modern warships and aircraft carriers full of soldiers dressed as gladiators. Variation: two aircraft carriers, one next to the other, the guys on one of them, dressed as pirates, going after the guys on the other. A stereotypical pirate, drinking scotch from a bottle of Cutty Sark, with the label in clear view. The bar of a bar: a whole slew of men standing there drinking and in the middle, as if it were absolutely normal, two pirates. The bar of a bar: a whole slew of boys drinking cognac right out of the bottle. A ballroom: a couple dancing, him in a skirt and her in running shoes . . .”

  Humbert cannot fathom how some critics can demand—in the name of some sacrosanct consistency—that he amputate part of his imagination. Even if he worked constantly, without a moment’s interruption for years and years, he would not have enough time to produce all the things boiling in his head, because each idea is a magician’s hat from which new ideas pop up in the form of magicians’ hats from which new ideas pop up . . . (He adds the bit about the hats to the list.) What about the idea he had been toying with for days now? Making movies. Not video, no: conventional cinema. He has so many stories to tell . . . For this film he himself would write the script, build the buildings (ah, architecture, how often it, too, had tempted him!), and compose the score, as Charlie Chaplin did. Like Charlie Chaplin, he would act in it, too, because who, if not he, would be able to sense the precise gesture, so subtle that words could not convey it, that each moment of the film would require? And what about the symphonies that course through his head? And current dance, how blah it seems in comparison with all the dances he imagines! And novels: if he ever has time to write one (between painting and painting, symphony and symphony, film and film . . .), how he will shame all the other writers! They will be so mortified that they will have to go home and hide and never show their faces again. And theater: he will set up colossal productions with thousands of actors who will overflow with emotion in amphithe
aters and sports stadiums (because his productions will draw such crowds that not even the biggest theater will be big enough to contain the multitudes who will clamor to see this new facet of his art). And poetry? If he ever decides to write a poem, it will be exceedingly brief, containing only the essence: the whole of life condensed in a single phrase; a poem after which no one else will ever be able to write another line. But his activity cannot be limited to the arts; the entire world will be his field of action: he will have all of humanity interpret one sole performance: three or four billion beings, each playing a role in a work that will outlive him and will bring happiness to humankind . . . Perhaps, some day, he’ll have to consider politics?

  •

  Sketch upon sketch, he fills up all the sheets in the little notebook. He is distressed to be left with no working materials. He scratches his neck, goes to the bathroom, and pulls out a paper hand towel. He draws a horizontal line on it. He shades in the bottom. He looks at it. It doesn’t please him. He crumples it up into a ball, which he throws into the wastebasket. He pulls out a second paper hand towel . . .

  An hour later, when he sticks his hand into the dispenser, he finds there are no towels left. He then moves on to the spare roll of toilet paper in the medicine chest, and when he has used that up, he goes on to what little there is left on the roll. He sketches silhouettes of fleeing men on the bathroom tiles; simple geometric forms on the ceiling; a big face with no features on the mirror; arrows on the floor . . . He goes back into the bedroom. He fills the walls with a spectacular desert landscape: three UFOs are about to land and there’s a laughing moon in the background. Then, unsatisfied, he scratches it all out. When his felt-tipped pen runs out, he searches through all his pockets: his shirt, his jacket, his raincoat . . . When he doesn’t find a single pen, he opens Hildegarda’s purse and empties the contents onto the night table. With her eyebrow pencil he draws the shadow of a woman on the bathroom door and, taking no time to look for another surface, on top of that he draws a pyramid and shades in the volume. On top of that he draws the corner of a room and the figure of a girl studying a boring book, crying shiny tears of silver or mercury, whose brilliance he represents with a multitude of tiny rays. On top of all these figures he draws a horse on fire, a skyscraper with oval windows, a shoe without a sole . . . until the door is nothing but a huge black spot, a tangle of doodles, a mess. Halfway through drawing a hat on the lampshade of the table lamp, the eyebrow pencil runs out on him. He finds a lipstick among Hildegarda’s things on the night table. He finishes the hat and decorates the windowpanes with a drawing of what can be seen through the window: the night and a mastodontic building. On top of that, he draws what might be going on in each of the rooms. The lipstick doesn’t last long, though, but he keeps on drawing, now scratching on the glass with the metal rim of the lipstick case. When he can’t get any more use out of it, he throws it on the floor, puts on his pajamas, and goes out into the hall, which is long and carpeted in gray, with cream-colored walls and dozens of doors on either side. Humbert is surprised: the whole hall is full of pairs of shoes lined up outside the door, waiting to be cleaned. At the door to room 1030, there is a pair of brown men’s shoes, with traces of mud. He bends down, picks them up, and deposits them in front of door 1034. At the door to 1035, he gathers up a pair of black men’s shoes and takes them to door 1030. At the door to 1022, he finds one pair of women’s green high heels and one pair of men’s gray shoes. He takes the men’s shoes and puts them in the wastebasket next to the elevator. He sniffs the women’s shoes and leaves them at door 1028. At the doorway to room 1033, he turns his head, looks back at the wastebasket, and finds that it doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. He lifts it up and goes down the stairs to the next floor. At the door to 904, he sees a pair of navy blue women’s flats. He picks them up and leaves the wastebasket in their place. In exchange, he leaves the shoes at door 909 and, as he does, hears a conversation inside: a man and a woman talking, but, hard as he listens, he can’t make out the words. The shoes from 910 he leaves at 914 and the shoes from 914 at 920. He hasn’t got many steps farther when he hears a door open. He doesn’t dare turn around until he hears the door close again. Then he turns slowly and discovers that the shoes he left at 920 have disappeared. But the ones he left at 914 are in the same place. Is it possible that the people in 920 opened the door and took the shoes in without realizing that they weren’t theirs, not remembering that they hadn’t even left any shoes outside the door? In front of 932, he hears a door open down the hall. He stands still. He sees a man stick his head out of room 936, look from side to side, and, on seeing him, quickly close the door. Humbert finds it so strange that he stands right there, motionless, on the spot. About a minute later, the door to room 936 opens again, and the same man sticks his head out again; seeing him still there, he quickly closes it again. Humbert is trying to decide whether to knock on that door (he doesn’t quite know why: perhaps to have a little chat) or draw a phenomenal fireworks display on it, when he sees a man come out of the door to room 943, clinging to a woman who is kissing him all over. He says goodbye to her softly, closes the door, and, out in the hall, looks uncomfortable when he sees Humbert. Even so, he goes on to door 936, knocks, and when (after quite a while) it opens (Humbert can’t see who opens it), he goes in. Ten minutes later, Humbert sees how, without making the slightest bit of noise, the man who previously stuck his head out twice appears, silently closes the door, looks at Humbert out of the corner of his eye (and acts as if he weren’t there), and knocks on the door to 943. The same woman, who had just taken such effusive leave of the man who had then gone into room 936, opens it.