The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  He burned his tongue. The violet-haired women had disappeared, together with the pancakes and syrup. He looked at the steam rising from the kettle and wondered what the hell he was doing in Chipre if, deep down, all he really wanted was to get home, forget his classes, departmental meetings, reviews, conferences, and sleep for ten or twelve hours straight, and so driven once again by an irrepressible sense of urgency, he paid for his drink and, without waiting for the change, went out into the street.

  A timid, cold rain was falling, but he couldn’t stop sweating. He reached the next roundabout, and then his heart started quivering beneath his jacket for no reason. He sheltered under some eaves and began to mutter,“Laura, Laura, Laura,” without paying attention to the figures passing by or the random music produced by the line of cars rushing to leave the city at the end of a Friday. He said “Laura, Laura, Laura” while standing in the middle of the crosswalk, next to the VIPS restaurant and the young beggar woman collecting puppies whose shit he had just stepped in with idiotic precision, and carried on repeating “Laura, Laura, Laura” as he walked across the plaza, past the fountain, which added an unnecessary note of dampness to the evening, until the psalmody of “Laura, Laura, Laura” became incomprehensible, because it divested the name of any reference (face, smile, body), tearing Laura from Laura until she turned into a mantra that suddenly dissolved his anguish—Laura finally reduced to a sound as pure as the banging of a door, a car horn, a jet of water in a fountain; a loop of air, nothing.

  “Fucking Polanski,” he mutters, seated at the kitchen table opposite a glass of semi-skimmed milk and a column of María Fontaneda cookies stacked high like casino chips.

  He lifts the day’s newspaper and opens it energetically. The cat chews unenthusiastically on the dried biscuits the man, having shaken the box of Whiskas with gratuitous insistence, has deposited in its plastic bowl. This sound, typical of pet food commercials, has instantly replaced the olfactory image of a slice of boiled ham with a texture of compressed food that will never conquer a palate like the cat’s, educated no doubt for greater gustatory heights. It longs for the days when its mistress used to prepare exotic dishes. She would always set aside a taste of things, especially raw seafood—the tail of a prawn, the tender tonsil of a hake—but since she departed, the quality of food has been reduced to a war-economy diet of Whiskas and milk. The biscuits condemn it to chewing noisily, like a homeless dog. “Biscuits for you today, Polanski,” says the man with an insidious chuckle while smoothing out the newspaper on the table, and the animal senses in his tone of voice the old rancor of solitary males forced to share the same territory, and in his chuckle the irrefutable proof of an old offence. And so it abandons the Whiskas with a gesture of contempt, shakes a paw, and leaps up onto the kitchen counter, on a level with the man’s chest; another jump, this one more calculated, and it reaches the summit of the fridge, a watchtower that affords it a kind of superiority, safe from risks, where it indulges in a superficial toilet befitting of the menu. Through its skin, it can feel the vibrations coming from the insides of the appliance. This hum consoles it. It purrs. Through its eyelids, the man down below is a silhouette doubled over the newspaper, an atmosphere of shadow vibrating in unison with the evening light and the hum of the fridge, something the man does not appear to notice, absorbed as he is in reading the newspaper. Without looking up from the pages, he dips a cookie in the milk and holds it in the air, between his fingers, and half a soggy cookie is on the verge of breaking off and falling onto the floor. The man resembles his own frozen image now, bent over the newspaper, his hand raising the cookie like a baton, as a drop of milk detaches itself, foreshadowing the imminent domestic disaster of a María Fontaneda colliding with the kitchen floor. The cat observes a smile, or at least an amused state of mind, in the silhouette of the observer, who now sits down next to the man. But it closes its eyes and remembers the man staring at the strip of photo-booth pictures his wife had just discovered in Laura’s toiletry bag. Some photos hidden away among pencils, lipsticks, a yellow hair clip, and other cosmetics his daughter was just beginning to use, with, in his opinion, scant skill and excessive daring. He thought it was a strange place to keep photos, or maybe his daughter had taken a portrait of herself in order to try out a new style of makeup. That must have been it, she hid behind the curtains of the booth, the toiletry bag on her lap and her entire range of cosmetics in front of a hand mirror until she was satisfied with the result. She kept the photos in her toiletry bag so that every Friday evening, she could copy the same distribution of eye shadow, mascara, and blush, the model from the photo booth tucked into one corner of the bathroom mirror. He felt a strange disposition, somewhere between curiosity and fear, when Ana picked up the photo strip with the tips of her fingers. His wife came out with a gesture of disgust just like the one she used whenever she discovered one of the offerings Polanski insisted on leaving on the porch as proof of his nocturnal skirmishes—a mouse, a baby bird, or a lizard. She looked at him from the bathroom door with an expression that suggested exasperation, sadness, or simply disgust, a look that seemed in recent months to have occupied not only her eyes but her whole countenance and erased any previous traces, as if the muscles in her face had all agreed at once to forget the facial disposition required to convey affection, laughter, or pleasure. He was afraid Ana would keep the photos, but she put them back, closed the zipper, and hid the Chinese-red toiletry bag in the cabinet in Laura’s bathroom, because everything had to remain the same as it was before the night of the accident—the clothes, the sneakers with air cushions in the heels, the alarm clock, the coffee cup with a picture of the Tasmanian Devil, the plastic-wrapped textbooks . . . This obsession with keeping everything in place as though it were some provincial museum, safe from the passage of time, also included the old domestic habit of the lemon-scented air freshener. That’s why, every morning, his wife would continue to spray the aerosol, and thousands of particles would float like an ether between the hallway and the room of his dead daughter, a space he always crossed while holding his breath in an attempt to avoid the nauseating invocation of Laura floating in a cloud of lemon air freshener. And in this same fashion, holding his breath, one afternoon when his wife decided to take a break in front of a cinema screen in the city where they were showing “one of Woody Allen’s” (the man is unable to differentiate between Woody Allen’s movies, they all strike him as the same, “one of Woody Allen’s”), he recovered Laura’s Chinese-red toiletry bag and carried it up to his study in the attic. He sat down at his desk and lit the halogen lamp. Far from illuminating his daughter’s face, which was repeated with slight variations in four passport-sized photos, the fluorescent tube made it look blurred, giving it a cold, flat aura, an impression that was mysteriously enhanced by the sudden barking of the stray dog jumping around outside, on the other side of the garden fence, opposite Polanski. It couldn’t have been a fleeting impression, because the ficus with the strong, dusty leaves in a corner of his study also seemed to shrink back for a moment, and encouraged by this semblance of an exhortation, the man undertook the morbid task of a physiognomist, trailing his index finger over Laura’s four-times-repeated face—the oval chin, the very white skin, a little too pink around the cheekbones because of the hastily applied makeup, the beauty spot on her cheek, which gave her adolescent face the strange appearance of a woman painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, the medium-length hair the color of dead leaves, the large, catlike eyes displaying a disproportionate sense of expectation lighting up a young face whose features had yet to be defined, a coat that implied an unpleasant winter’s afternoon just outside, on the other side of the photo booth curtains. The sequence reproduces Laura’s face with only slight variations, but the man, driven by an imperious need to clarify the details, as if the hidden meaning to his daughter’s life were encoded in these variations, took care to identify them—a slight turn to the right, another to the left, further to the left in the second-to-last photo, as if she had be
en practicing in front of the camera to determine the angle that best suited her features. Finally, Laura returned to her initial hieratic state, but on this occasion she allowed herself a half smile that stretched her skin and revealed a dimple in her cheek, under the cabaret woman’s beauty spot. His attention was drawn to a detail—her eyes did not match her smile but remained open, frontal, oblivious to the position of her mouth, and here the man thought he glimpsed a lack of symmetry, an imbalance that belied the daring of the half smile, as if she realized that she was simply playing to the gallery and shouldn’t accentuate the gesture with a look that might foreshadow a premature death. For this reason, the man concluded, her eyes grew hard, frank and honest, without a hint of fear, in static awe before the camera’s final flash.

  “Fucking María Fontaneda.”

  The cat opens its eyes. It didn’t hear the soft thud of the cookie meeting the ground, a barely audible splat, but it did hear the voice of the man squatting under the table on all fours, holding the disintegrated cookie in his fingers while wiping the tiles with a wet cloth. It endeavors to remove the particles of Whiskas from its taste buds and replace them with the image of the mole boring through the earth in the garden, the promise of some living, leathery flesh. It guesses everything, with feline exactitude of time, while the humming of the fridge merges with its own purring—the man will sit back down at the kitchen table, turn the pages of the newspaper, and then smoke one of those disgusting black-tobacco cigarettes, the smoke of which will reveal the tubular rays of light coming in through the window. He will spread lotion on his left arm and not look at the clock on the wall, the hands of which stopped at twenty past ten five months ago. He will then squeeze a blue rubber ball for fifteen minutes, drop it onto the floor, and get up from the kitchen table with an autistic’s assuredness in order to open the window to the garden. He will only close it when the cat is back from its nocturnal outing, the next morning, but on opening it he will say, by way of farewell, while stroking the cat’s back the wrong way, “Come on, Polanski, time for a little exercise.”

  The moonlight will force it to dilate its pupils. But if the night promises nothing good or the forest air comes wrapped in strange silence—and it will only know this once it jumps off the windowsill and sniffs the night air—it will return before morning without any mole corpses to deposit on the porch, or traces of fights, youthful conceits it no longer gives in to even when the weather would allow it but which have left one ear calloused and a scar on its skull, old wounds it links to the image of a cross-eyed, orange cat whose territory forms a natural border between the ravine and the gas station. It will return home when the sparrows start chirping on the eaves. There are times the window is closed, and then it will knock on the glass with its paw, tap, tap, tap. That’s what the girl used to do to make herself heard whenever she was late coming home, she would knock on the kitchen window with her knuckles, tap, tap, tap, until her mother came down to open the front door. Then it will drink water from its plastic bowl and go up to the bedroom to sleep at the man’s feet. The succubus will wink, but the cat will ignore it, satisfied at having completed its rounds and marked the surroundings of the house with its diluted, neutered-cat urine—an unaltered timetable that is never broken and must be followed again today, despite the silhouette that is still watching everything without disturbing anything, confused by the light, the shadow, the monotonous, horizontal movement of the eyes of the man reading the newspaper.

  He wets the pad of his thumb on the tip of his tongue. Turns the pages anxiously. One might say he is not motivated by the informational content of the news but by the desire to fulfill a certain set, daily ritual. The repetition of actions affords him a primitive sense of security he is aware of but clings to superstitiously. Small goals that open or close circles, petty tasks whose purpose is to shore up his routine, like jotting down notes on small pieces of paper he then sticks to the door of the fridge—things he must buy, things he must do, phone calls he must make: Visit the university department; Go to the bank; Buy surgical tape; Return Ana’s call; Buy boiled ham . . . To do lists he imposes upon himself and doesn’t follow through on, and then scribbles out only to write them again on another sticky note, this time accompanied by asterisks and exclamation marks that make them more pressing and urgent. It is with this same obsessiveness that he now turns the pages of the newspaper. His glance slides over the photograph of an Arab boy posing with his fists on his hips and a Kalashnikov across his chest. He is wearing a soccer jersey. He smiles against the backdrop of an open field covered in rubble and glistening dust. Another article reports that an explosion has seriously wounded a woman walking along a beach. In the same section is a photo of two politicians. From their posture, they appear to be sharing a secret, the younger one, with a long face, bowing his head and the other, with bushy eyebrows and white hair, moving his lips next to his colleague’s ear. The man pays no attention to the caption under the photo, drawn by an article on the human genome and the possibility of reproducing organs in the laboratory. For a moment, he imagines a new kidney, the size of a fist, glistening like a stone recently pulled from a river, a dark red pebble, covered in a network of tiny veins, a fruit throbbing inside his abdomen, but the text explains that experiments carried out on laboratory mice will take decades to produce results. He contorts his face at the news that interest rates are due to go down. He can hear the ringing of the phone in the living room and his ex-wife’s voice informing him that she has found a buyer for the house,“a wonderful couple, he’s a Catalan architect, she’s a yoga teacher, a young couple that’s decided to get out of the big city, just what we were looking for; a serious, cultured couple who, according to my lawyer, are very creditworthy, will respect the house and its surroundings, and are expecting their first child, don’t you think it’s wonderful there will be children in the house again? It’ll be like a kind of liberation.” Or else it may be a retired German couple,“they loved the place when they came two years ago, on their way to the beaches in the south, but they’ve decided they’d like to live in the north of Spain, in a house like this, it’s not so cold as in Westphalia, and the summers are warm, that’s what he told me, a ruddy-complexioned retiree with the strength of an ox, you wouldn’t believe how much he reminds me of your father, he even has the same glasses . . . isn’t that amazing?” Or, in the worst-case scenario, the future buyer is a man of independent means, a representative of one of the capital’s old families, a hick who will pay in cash and is all set to redo the house and turn it into a papier-mâché replica of a Tennessee mansion, complete with Doric columns, stuccowork, a spiral staircase, and wisterias on the porch. “My lawyer’s ready to draw up the necessary paperwork, all we have to do is make up our minds. We could start by putting up a for-sale sign. What do you think?”

  He wets the pad of his finger with the tip of his tongue. A pilot whale stranded on a beach. A man in a raincoat covers his face with a handkerchief while two seagulls walk along the rotting cetacean’s vertebrae. There are footprints in the sand, and a leaden sky. The sports section opens with a lengthy report on the recent European Cup champions. The players shout while perched on the head of a statue. They’re wearing the same shirt worn by the Arab boy posing with an assault rifle in the international section, but he forgets this coincidence as soon as he notices he has reached the TV listings: Cartoons at 9:00; Nature documentaries: “Tree-Kangaroos” (Part Two) at 15:00; Matters of the Heart at 18:00; Game show at 18:30; Soap opera at 19:30; News at 22:00; It Happened Here (Crime Report) at 22:30; Report: Mothers for Hire at 23:00; Late-night cinema: Nosferatu at 1:30; Teleshop at 5:00.

  Today he won’t watch television, he thinks, today he won’t have dinner, and the cat notices from up on the counter that the man won’t watch television and won’t have dinner, as always when he is due to get up early the next day and go to the clinic. On days like this, he eats little more than an afternoon snack—a piece of fruit, perhaps, a kiwi with excessive v
itamin C, or a fat-free yogurt—because a block of anxiety has installed itself in his stomach and seems to be writhing, following the twists and turns of his intestines, as if an exhausted intestinal parasite were making its way through his insides. He doesn’t find it easy to explain his symptoms, which is why he simply says “my stomach is sad,” and the nephrologist nods without surprise, as if he understood the cause of this sadness destroying his abdomen. He believed this melancholic fatigue was the result of Laura’s death, the divorce process, or both things at once, perhaps he had overestimated his strength and was now going into a tailspin, falling into a pit of depression. He decided to go in for a medical checkup following a night when Óscar, visibly drunk after a trip that had taken him to New Zealand to do a photo-essay on urban Maori communities, dragged him to a bar downtown. He wanted to talk to him, to go over his doubts, his romantic conquests, his professional successes, at least that’s what he thought in the beginning, though after a couple of drinks it wasn’t difficult to detect a trace of nostalgia in their meeting, for a shadow seemed to have come between them, to have occupied the empty stool where they’d left their sheepskin jackets. He didn’t want to talk about her, he couldn’t talk about her, but Óscar appeared possessed by one of his unstoppable fits of alcoholic verbosity and talked to him without seeing him, over the rim of his glass, searching with his eyes for something that seemed to be scurrying along the bar top, a grimace, a glint in the bottles. “You’re like a character from some Gothic novel, shut away up there in your house, I bet you don’t even talk to your cat anymore, it was named after a movie director, wasn’t it? Or was it a writer? Tarkovsky? Nabokov? What was its name?” he said, ordering another drink from the girl behind the bar. “Look at it like this. You’re fifty-two, you have an enviable job, an impressive art collection, and a neutered cat. That’s certainly a lot more than I can hope for in another ten years . . . Ten years. What a strange thing time is. When I think about time, I imagine threadbare innerlinings, I don’t know, something like a dream. That’s the only revolution it would be worth fighting for. The revolution of time. A photographer supposedly freezes moments. To tell the truth, all I freeze are landscapes, outfits, customs, little animals in danger of extinction, traditional costumes, ancestral habits, a collection of full-color photographs, covers for National Geographic. That’s what I’m paid for, local color and anthropological flavor, I’m no Juan Rulfo or Robert Capa, but I am number one at photographing Bedouins, orchids, seals, and Maoris. That’s not nothing. My work forced me to give up accident and crime reporting, coverage of swollen women, Colombian burials, waiting lines outside of police stations, just awful, and become a photographer oxygenated by Nature and adventure trips. But I’m also aware, don’t think I’m not, that to take a photograph is to stir up something of death, like the dust that comes off butterfly wings and gets stuck between your fingers. Pure necrophilia.”