The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  Saturday the 15th

  My grade on the final exams: 8.9. Everyone was very proud of me. It’s decided—I’m going to study biology. To celebrate, we went out for dinner in a restaurant. Óscar stroked my knee under the table. My parents let me drink white wine during the dinner. We made toasts. After dinner, we stayed out on the porch. The two of us were alone. I kissed him. Nobody saw it, except for Polanski. The blood drained from Óscar’s face. He almost died of fright.

  Wednesday the 24th.

  Summers before were long, never ending. Everything was like light reflected on the surface of the swimming pool—a sheet of gold devoid of history or promises. Now time moves away, things come and go, and one can’t do anything to stop it. Like sitting on a carousel. Even if I wanted to, would it be possible? Things move away from me—Polanski, evenings, my glass of milk, the blackbirds nesting next to the forest.

  Saturday the 3rd

  Óscar and I met up next to the stream. We spread a blanket out on the ground. The cicadas threshed the air. The air smelled of stalks of wheat. Our skin was a stalk of wheat. Lying there, naked, nobody could stop anything.

  Monday the 17th.

  They’ve bought me a car! Red, too, my favorite color. OK, to tell the truth, it’s for the three of us, but I have their permission to use it. I gave them both a huge kiss. My mother’s not very happy about it; it was Dad who insisted on giving it to me. I adore him. I’d love to run into that imbecile Antonio, so he could see me driving my car, with Óscar next to me and the music turned up really loud. I called Claudia and Sandra.The three of us will be able to make some amazing plans. Óscar gave it his approval and explained a whole bunch of things about the car to me. “Lo, you’re a real woman now. You don’t need anything else,” he said while kicking a tire with the tip of his shoe. Mom stared at the car like it was a UFO. She kept on saying,“You will be careful, won’t you, Laura?”

  Wednesday the 13th.

  I know what I’ll do when I don’t want to write in this diary anymore, I’ll hide it somewhere nobody will ever find it, in the garden, underground. I am happy.

  Thursday the 3rd.

  I like listening to Óscar’s stories. I’ve heard him tell some of them lots of times, but I don’t mind. I think he always exaggerates a little, I’m not saying he lies, but I do think he exaggerates. I like his voice. It’s not very deep, just a little metallic, but soft, almost soporific. It’s the voice of an oboe. On the phone, I could mistake him for Dad. They’re very similar in this way.

  Tuesday the 20th.

  I have a life, but now it seems to me I have two lives, or more: Laura out and about, Laura at home, Laura with Óscar. It’s strange. Like living in different, parallel worlds. I enter one of them, then come out and jump over to another, like passing through walls of water. The strangest thing is that in spite of everything, it’s still me; I see myself just the way I am. I know who I am, I know what I want. Why carry on writing?

  Thursday the 18th.

  Ever since college started, I’ve again had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. Óscar insists we should take care that nobody discovers us, but I love him, and he loves me, too. I wish I were ten years older so that I could go and live with him somewhere where it’s always hot, the two of us together forever.

  Saturday the 20th.

  Next week, we’ll go and spend Christmas up at the cabin. My ski clothes are ready, my boots and my parka. Óscar is coming on the weekend to have dinner with us. What else could I ask for?

  Champagne commercials on TV. In the garden, the snow falls slowly, like in a dream.

  He’d give his right hand for a cigarette. He searches in the closet, but only manages to salvage a few threads of tobacco from the pocket of his coat. He scours the drawers and then the liquor cabinet in the hope of finding a cigar, a dried-out, forgotten favor from some wedding, in a glass tube. Perhaps Jeremías could get him a pack of Ducados, or Bisontes, if that brand is still on the market, but he doesn’t remember the number of the gas station. Where can the phone book be? He probably threw it on the last bonfire he had in the garden. Perhaps he could wrap up warm and walk to the gas station. He looks at his watch. It’s absurd. It’s two thirty in the morning. The rest of the night is a vacant lot. He imagines a black canvas. He abandons the pages of Laura’s diary, resigned to the certainty of sleeplessness and anxiety. His depression does not pass unnoticed by the cat dozing in a ball on the kitchen counter. There are remains of anchovies scattered all over the floor; it’s not difficult to deduce why the animal hasn’t gone for its nocturnal outing.

  He collapses on the sofa, and the sound of the TV muffles the laughter of the succubus, which he senses somewhere in the room, perhaps under the carpet, or in the hollow of the sculpture in the shape of an ostrich egg. He is grateful for the hypnosis of the news bulletin on an international channel. It takes him a while to realize he can’t understand any of what the presenter is saying. She must be speaking Czech or something.

  The screen is showing several images from a war. The greenish flares of tracer bullets replace the image of Laura and her car concertinaed like a beer can. A group of soldiers creeps along a dune, their eyes illuminated in the darkness, like hares dazzled by a car’s headlights, but the images are as unreal as the car on the alfalfa field seen through his binoculars, as unreal as Laura’s own car, which he always imagined discarded on the hard shoulder of a mountain road, coated in frost. He stopped looking through the binoculars, in the conviction that the image of the bodies under the thermal blanket would illuminate Laura again, bring her back to life from out of the frozen iron, an inexpressive, blind, but desirous figure as alive as the voice that seems to rise from the pages of the diary now abandoned on the kitchen table.

  He changes the channel, and the picture of a dark, young woman appears on the screen, a girl with a prominent bone structure and hair dyed platinum blond. Then a portrait, and a phone number. He deduces that the woman has gone missing. The TV presenter explains something in her incomprehensible language. He changes the channel, and the girl’s face disappears, to be replaced by a car advertisement. On French Television 1, a weatherman predicts frosts across southern Europe. He focuses on the atmospheric symbols scattered all over the map. One symbol forecasts snow on either side of the Pyrenees. The resorts are working at full capacity, there are many miles of powder, perfect for skiing. He remembers the cottony sound of virgin snow, his leg sinking in up to the knee.

  He huddles on the sofa without paying attention to Polanski’s mewing, an abrupt, prolonged mewing, an alarming complaint that doesn’t make sense at that hour of the morning. It’s about to grow light, he thinks, or dreams, overcome by tiredness, relaxed by the lack of nicotine. Only the animal senses the movement of the anonymous observer toward the closet where Laura’s red parka is hanging, the waterproof material still retaining the dewiness of snow and the artificial, slightly sickly smell of the car’s almost brand-new upholstery. These smells evoke Laura’s profile in the car window as she drives in the direction of the cabin near the ski resort where, like every year, they were going to celebrate Christmas Eve, and her hands clinging to the steering wheel, the skin on her knuckles turned white, tense and happy at the prospect of dinner, presents, Óscar’s proximity, and then fun with her friends. They had allowed her to take the car for a spin on those narrow, steep roads, which is why she is smiling as she recalls her mother’s look of stupor after her father agreed to her request, on the condition, however, that she return before eight to help Mom poach the lobsters for dinner. It may have been the music on the radio, or her anxiety over the cigarette that was forbidden inside the car—one of the many clauses of the paternal contract she had had to agree to in order to sit down at the wheel—because she was happy and nervous, and that may have been why she didn’t see, or failed to make out, the cab of the truck coming over the brow of the hill and descending out of control and invading
her lane, with its trailer and the drawing of a fish facing the car, a huge tail that sent up a spray of the dirty ice piled up on the roadside, like the wedge of a snowplow, so she didn’t have time to get out of the way, she had barely come around the corner when its slightly rusty bumper was already sinking into the windshield. She caught a glimpse of the blue and white drawing of the truck’s logo—a swordfish—an image that merged with the imprecise pain in her abdomen, something giving way at the height of her sternum just as she was assailed by the idea that this couldn’t be happening, not that exact day, at that time, when she was only five minutes away from reaching home and helping her mother prepare dinner and laughing at Óscar’s dirty jokes, perhaps meeting up alone somewhere in the snowy valley, and laughing with her friends, going for drinks with them, proud of her own silence, of how she was maturing harmlessly and the winter wasn’t rough, but soft, happy, like a lemon vodka cocktail. Now, however, there was only silence around her and the oppression in her chest wouldn’t cease. It was later, on the other side of the iron and the glint of glass, that she felt a shape moving, as if stroking her chin. She heard panting, and it took her a while to realize this was the sound of her own breathing. A hoarse sound, as of strangled cattle. She felt the shape shaking, moving in time to her head, forward and backward, on the passenger seat. But the impression was fleeting, and then the movement stopped. She saw her hand still clinging to the wheel, emerging from the red sleeve of her red parka. The noise of the blowtorches, followed later by the bluish gleam of a helmet, struck her as distant details, quite clearly out of reach of that hand, which was hers and yet insisted on clinging to the steering wheel. She heard orders or entreaties and then became unstuck. She stopped feeling the wheel when the chin of a man peered through the car chassis. He slipped in beside her. Other shadows maneuvered outside. When she emerged from the iron, the cold reached up to her hips. She heard more voices, imperative, solicitous, then more hushed. Somebody took her hand, and again she was surrounded by silence, until another voice, on the other side of the window, belonging to somebody not wearing a uniform or a reflective jacket but just a gown spattered with drops of blood as tiny and glistening as those of the birds Polanski abandons on the porch, said something, leaning over her. This shadow had been very near, moving around her, and was now reflected in the window of the room with the persistence of an old dream. Other silhouettes shook, too, and talked hurriedly. Now, however, it wasn’t a voice, but a lament saying,“Oh, please . . . oh, please,” on the other side of the blinds in that white place, where there were only tubes, saline bags, and respirators. And then nothing, a faint impression of being abandoned that started from the feet and climbed slowly, unavoidably, and yet with a smile.

  7

  The ringing of the phone sounds too shrill in the semidarkness of the house. The day has not begun yet, and the phone call adds a note of unnecessary urgency. The anonymous observer is not oblivious to this acoustic interruption that forces the room to disturb its internal order with a succession of imperceptible acts, beginning with the portrait of the woman, who blinks one, two, three times, accustoming her eyes to the light. Beneath her perhaps somewhat perplexed gaze, the beetle takes off from the telephone and flies over the living room with the soft hum of a fan. It leaves behind the silver cutlery, the sculpture in the form of an ostrich egg, the pages of the diary still spread out over the kitchen floor, and goes up to the second floor. It flies over the dirty pajamas, the alarm clock that has stopped at half past six, then, maneuvering like a fighter jet, dodges the cat that is dozing on the radiator and suddenly awakes and takes a swipe at it. The beetle zooms through the hallway, but nobody answers the call, so it goes up to the attic. It glides around the study, past the book-filled shelves, the discarded papers, and the open laptop, on whose plasma screensaver hangs the weightless image of an astronaut. With mechanical tenacity, the insect swings around and repeats the journey in the opposite direction. Foreseeing the cat’s ambush, it stays up at the height of the lamp and, as the phone continues ringing insistently down below, passes through the bedroom, crosses the hallway, and dives down to the living room. Before folding its forewings, it mounts to the ceiling in a display of aeronautical skill that does not go unnoticed by the woman in the portrait. She squints as the beetle flutters on a level with her eyebrows. Like a helicopter, it descends toward the phone just as the red light of the answering machine starts blinking—“I can’t come to the phone right now. If you’d like to leave a message, please do so after the tone . . .” The beetle folds its wings, and there is a beep to indicate the beginning of the message.

  “I imagine you’re on the way to the clinic, but if not, forgive me for calling so early. I suppose you remember . . . today is Laura’s anniversary . . . There’s something else. I spoke to my lawyer yesterday. The real estate agent called him to say there’s someone very interested in buying the house. They assured him that if we can reach an agreement, we should be able to resolve the matter very quickly. My lawyer will take care of all the paperwork. We need to see each other and talk. OK, I’ll try and catch you later.”

  The woman in the painting returns to her initial hieratic state, fixes her gaze on the shadow of the anonymous observer, who now withdraws from the space where the pages of Laura’s diary are. It could be said the text seems to have been written recently, despite the traces of humidity, faded ink, and other signs of decay, and this gives the diary a fertile elegance, as if the author of these sentences were breathing through the paper. A breath is gently expelled into the air of the living room in a combustion of oxygen only witnessed by the objects there, now silent and still, and the cat, which, sensing the movement of the observer, moves off the radiator and stealthily descends the stairs. It walks lazily, indolently, toward the kitchen, hops up onto the table, and closes its eyes. The flame of the memory of the girl writing at the living-room table one afternoon three years earlier, a blond-tobacco cigarette between her fingers, still glows green in its pupils.

  She wrote with a concentrated, nervous air. She lifted her eyes from the notebook, as if seeking inspiration in the view of the garden, then in the dining room ceiling. She bit a piece of skin stuck to the nail of her thumb, then carried on writing. As she exhaled the smoke of her cigarette, the doorbell rang. She jumped in her chair. Waved her arms around in front of her face to dispel the smoke. Stood up with athletic agility and opened the window to the garden. “I’m coming!” she shouted, throwing the cigarette butt outside. Through the peephole, she recognized the silhouette of her uncle Óscar, somewhat deformed by the fisheye lens, on the doormat. She arranged her hair before opening the door.

  “How’s it going, Lo? Is your father in?” asked Óscar, having kissed his niece on the cheek.

  “He’s not back yet, and my mother’s in town, shopping. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

  “Do re mi, do re fa,” crooned the man jokingly.

  His tanned skin heightened an impression of adventure or risk in his appearance. He wore a photographer’s vest with lots of pockets. Under his arm, he carried a motorcyclist’s gleaming, black helmet. The helmet reminded Laura of the head of a large, outer-space beetle.

  “Were you studying?” he pointed at the notebook open on the table.

  Laura hesitated for a moment, went around the table, and closed the notebook.

  “No, actually I was just writing,” she gestured vaguely, “things of mine.”

  The man smiled with interest. Sat down on the blue sofa.

  “Are you not going to invite your uncle to a beer?”

  Laura left the room for a few moments, her walk attracting the man’s gaze. She returned with a Keler beer, an iced glass, and a bowl of peanuts. She let her uncle serve himself. She drank from a carton of pineapple juice.

  Óscar sipped the beer while contemplating his niece. He thought she was getting much older, but this distance, far from separating them, brought them closer together, since age
does not divide people but in the end draws them together—Laura was a woman. He wondered whether to adopt a paternal or confidential tone with her. He opted for the latter. It went better with his theory of age, and it was time to treat Laura like she deserved, as an equal.

  “Were you really writing? When you feel bad, it’s good to write. I used to do it, you know. Before I got into photojournalism, I mean. I also wrote things of mine, as you say, dreams, desires, stuff like that, in these tiny, spiral-bound notebooks, with cramped writing . . . I wrote most of all when I felt bad. They’ve probably gotten lost during some move or other. But it’s good to do it, really it is. I even wrote poems, can you believe it? Your uncle Óscar, a poet . . .”

  Laura smiled in disbelief.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Really, I swear,” said Óscar, kissing his thumb. “I was a very shy boy, you know, and fell in love with all the girls my age, all of them. I wrote them the most heartfelt, sincere poems.” He gazed at the ceiling in a gesture of concentration. “I wonder if I can remember . . . ah, yes! I wrote these verses with a blond girl in mind. See what you think.” He raised his beer glass and recited in a stifled voice,“And you will return forever to your fields of oblivion / and I will be left with the ashen smell of your hair / how slow and piercing your footsteps echo in my heart / I wonder what moon I will lick my wounds under now . . .”

  He forced a declamatory silence.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  Laura observed him, a little lost in thought.

  “It’s nice . . . ,” she looked at the window to the garden and allowed the words to sound again in her head. “I like that bit about the ashen smell of your hair, and the moon and wounds . . . I don’t know why I write. It makes me feel good, I suppose that’s all . . . it gives me some relief,” she said, perching on the armrest of the sofa. “I could never write something as pretty as that.”