"They say he killed the foreman on the site where he worked! How long is it since you last saw him? Why didn't you tell me the police had been round here? Rosa, are you listening to me?"
"It can't be..."
Rosa began to cry.
"Now what are we going to do? Everyone in this district is already gossiping about it. How long is it since you saw him?"
"Three or four days," answered Rosa.
"Why didn't you inform me the police had been round?"
"I got scared, Senora..."
"The police come round to my house to see me, and you don't tell me anything about it?"
"I was afraid, Senora..."
"Unbelievable. What am I going to do with you?"
"Forgive me Senora, please. I didn't know anything."
"You didn't know anything about what?"
"Anything about anything, Senora."
"What a shock, you going out with a murderer! He would come to see you and you'd open the door to him..." she went on. "I saw him on two or three occasions, at least in the distance, and didn't like the look of him. That's how he looked to me at least. So now what?"
"Now, I don't know, Senora. I think it's impossible, there must have been some mistake..."
"And you're telling me you never saw him again?"
Rosa swore on the cross of her closed fingers. Then she began crying again.
"So why didn't you see him again? Did he tell you something of what he'd done?"
"No, Senora."
"Didn't you know anything at all about it?"
"Nothing at all, Senora."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, Senora, but it can't possibly be true. He's incapable of swatting a fly, he's such a good man, he is..."
Senora Blinder paused a moment in silence, her head swirling with conflicting notions. Finally she seemed to banish them all; she uttered a deep sigh, and she left the room at a smart pace. Rosa sat down on the edge of an armchair and buried her face in her hands. Maria withdrew and began pensively to climb the staircase.
5
By the end of the second week he knew every sound in the house, much as if he'd always lived there. Something similar would also apply to the space and the position of objects within it, essential to his survival there. Concerning the noises he himself made, there remained something of his initial fear, however unjustified it had become, but which it was difficult to shed. For example, certain doors took more time to open than strictly necessary: he would open each one inch at a time, even when he understood that were it to creak, it still wouldn't be heard by anyone else. Even when asleep, he would only change his position in bed with extreme caution.
His precautions, combined with his natural agility, meant that he moved about in the gloom with the ease of a ghost. More than a ghost, in fact, he resembled a figure out of a silent film projected outwards from the screen, an image already familiar with distances, provided with an extraordinary radar, which at moments of distraction - like when he was about to knock a flower vase flying, or trip over the edge of a carpet - sharpened his extrasensory perception, allowing him to dematerialize or dissolve.
He knew he couldn't relax his guard to the point where he affected the slightest detail in the way in which things were positioned around the house. He was aware that nobody would notice whether a pair of scissors or the bathroom towel were in the same place as last week, but he paid scrupulous attention to leaving everything precisely as he found it. From time to time he would awaken suddenly in the middle of the night, and run out of his room in order to shut the bathroom door, which he had absent-mindedly left open, but on the whole he made no mistakes: he carried a detailed and exhaustive inventory of the place and position of every single object around in his head, and was scrupulous in respecting them, by now almost unconsciously.
In addition, his inventory had to be revised from top to bottom, on a regular basis: from time to time upstairs in the attic, weekly on the second and third floors, and daily down on the first floor and in the kitchen, following Rosa's cleaning rota around the house. The ground floor remained an utterly unknown territory to him. He avoided it: every night, he descended to the kitchen down the service staircase. He was absolutely certain that this way he wouldn't meet a soul, least of all Senor or Senora Blinder. In return, he could bet his life that neither Blinder had ever set foot in his part of the house. And every night, on his way down, he would pause an instant outside the door to Rosa's room. On the whole he would hear nothing, since he only went downstairs so very late at night, but occasionally he'd hear her cough, or walk up and down in a fit of insomnia, tidying up her room, or watching television. Once he overheard her masturbating.
He missed her. On more than one occasion, he considered the possibility of revealing himself to her, but he didn't dare believe that Rosa's love of him would reach such heights. She'd be scared, then no doubt decide he was mad. It would have put her in an impossible position, too difficult either to accept or assimilate, most of all in coming to terms with the fact that he was the principal suspect of a serious crime.
He started having imaginary conversations with Rosa. To begin with, they were brief dialogues, of the "question and answer" variety, generally involving people or situations of the most boring ordinariness. Later, when he had finally accepted that Rosa was not to blame for his inability to admit to her that he was in hiding there, and permanently eliminated the thought of making her his accomplice, the dialogues became longer and more amiable. He spoke often with her while he ate or while he read, or occasionally even when curled up near the window, as close as possible to fresh air and light, just to get a bit of warmth on his face.
In the second-floor library there were hundreds of books of every kind, from adventure novels to medical texts. Maria would lock the door to his room, cover the crack at the bottom of his door with his shirt, then switch on the night light and read until he fell asleep. Sometimes he needed to flick back through the pages and reread a passage again, since he had really spent the time in an imaginary argument with Rosa, while his eyes followed the lines on the page inattentively. It came to his attention that he had never seen Rosa reading, despite the quantity of books in the house. In her spare time, she never did anything except watch television.
"It's because reading is harder work than watching television," she told him.
"Why? All you need to read is to sit or lie down, just like when you're watching television."
"But you need to use your brain."
"That's a lie! You can read perfectly well without thinking at all."
Rosa masturbated often. Not during the early weeks of his disappearance, while she was distraught, but from the time when she seemed to accept that Maria wasn't going to come back. In one of his mental discussions with her, Maria "understood" that Rosa still loved him, even though she now no longer held out any hope of seeing him again. Rosa told him she did not consider him capable of killing a fly, and he kissed her silently, then, without letting her go from his embrace, explained that on that day, when the Blinders came home, he did exactly what he told her he would: he waited for the Blinders to come indoors, he came out of his kitchen hiding place, then opened the gate onto the street, before realizing he had no idea where to go, so he closed the gate again, leaving the key in the lock, as if someone had opened it from outside, and went back into the house.
"What do you mean, you had nowhere to go?" Rosa asked. "Why didn't you go home?"
"Home, Rosa... I got on really badly with my foreman. Nobody would believe me if I said I wasn't the one who killed him... The police would've come to my house looking for me; I'd be in prison now, who knows how long for. I'd prefer to spend the rest of my life here."
Silence.
"I love you," Rosa said, and dissolved into thin air.
She masturbated thinking of him. And he took to spying on her. Rosa masturbated in her room or in the bathroom, any time between ten o'clock at night and one o'clock in the morning, almost
daily. (On one occasion Maria caught her masturbating at dinner time, having just served the Blinders their soup, and just before they would call her to serve the main course.)
Masturbation occupied a good part of Rosa's free time, almost as much as watching television. She could spend an hour or more just on foreplay; she would even sometimes start playing with herself in the bathroom, in the shower, then finish off in the bedroom. Maria, his eye glued to the keyhole, would masturbate in rhythm with her. He was intrigued by the variety of techniques and utensils Rosa employed. On occasions she'd soap and caress herself until the foam took on the consistency of cream; then she'd seize a bottle of deodorant with a rounded head, crouch down in the bath, turn on the shower (Maria couldn't quite keep her in sight, however hard he tried) and insert the end of the bottle between her legs as the water beat down on her back, rinsing her off. Sometimes she'd do no more than sit over the spout on the bidet, without even pausing to remove her clothes, her pants tugged down around her ankles and her uniform apron hurriedly hoiked up, as if she had almost no time for all this.
Maria thought often of Rosa's effrontery. The first time they had ever made love, in that hotel down on the Bajo, Rosa had already behaved in a way utterly strange to him, with a total and unexpected abandon. Maria had been to bed with many whores in his life (and he'd also had previous experiences with so-called virgins), but no one had ever offered him the combination of ardour and innocence that Rosa presented. Everything was permitted, from the most gentle tenderness to the most degraded lasciviousness.
Rosa took such delight in sex that she could cause him sudden consternation. She'd crack jokes, as if sex were above all else a joke; she'd unexpectedly poke his balls with her finger, or grab his cock and work it back and forth as if it were a car gearstick, going so far as to make engine noises with her mouth. And she'd laugh like an (adorable) idiot when Maria held her down by her wrists and glowered fiercely at her.
So he wasn't at all surprised when he found Rosa masturbating so often. What did seem strange to him was that sometimes they'd reach orgasm in unison, each of them on their own side of the door. At which point Maria would hurriedly depart, holding one hand cupped... A moment later, Rosa would emerge from the bathroom, go into her room and start watching television. Maria would wipe his hand underneath his pillow, and lie on his back for hours, thinking of her. It was this or prison. There wasn't really that much to think about after all.
6
He established a routine of gym exercises. Stretches, flexes, stomach crunches, squats, the works. His abdomen, already naturally muscular, now resembled a washboard. He had doubled the strength in his arms. Working out was now the only form of physical exertion he had undertaken since incarcerating himself in the house; it became essential to him to maintain his routine, partly because his body was now the only tool he had to work with. He cultivated every muscle in his body as carefully as if it were a magnolia.
You could say that reading, masturbating and working out "in his spare time" could sound like a load of nonsense, but the premises were perfectly reasonable: he genuinely had to work hard in order simply to eat and fulfil his basic biological needs. These were the activities that consumed most of his day. It was an adventure to go up and down from the attic to the kitchen in order to steal something to eat: on every trip he played Russian roulette with life and liberty. To be able to do it, he had to learn to have complete control of himself and of his environment.
Before ever going downstairs, he would do breathing exercises in order to obtain the necessary degree of relaxation; this would last for only a few minutes, before his state of heightened alertness would reappear, and then return renewed at every step. His excursions to the bathroom or the third-floor library were equally risky, as were the "leisure walks" he undertook. On the latter occasions, he would lean over the banister of the first-floor stairwell, to see if he could hear the sound of voices on the ground floor, while he picked his teeth with a straw taken from a broom, or basked in a moment of sunlight from the adjacent window. But basically he felt little anxiety over having nothing to do: he now lived outside any system of production and he enjoyed the lack of demands on his time. He was answerable to no one, he had no orders to follow, and his one and only worry was to remain out of sight and remain undiscovered.
In fact, the adrenalin rush arising from the risky situations in which he could find himself gave him a degree of pleasure, giving him the sensation that even a vital necessitywas transformed into an adventure... Take washing, by way of example. He had now spent nearly three weeks in the house without washing. Formerly, whether at work or at home, he took a daily shower; here it was unthinkable. Yet he still had to find a way of keeping clean; his entire body was itching, to the point where some nights he could scarcely sleep.
The central heating system only had radiators on the ground and first floors. Still, the second floor remained more or less warm thanks to the fact that warm air rises; by the third floor the air was cooler, and in the attic it was freezing. He decided to wash himself in one of the downstairs toilets. That night, as every night, he obtained his supper from the kitchen, took it up to his room, then descended the flight of stairs to the bathroom in the north wing (done out in black marble, coated in lime scale). He stripped off, got into the bathtub, wet the sponge, and rubbed himself from top to toe. The water was icy, and he'd been unable to find a bar of soap anywhere, but once he'd finished, he felt much better: shivering but renewed.
He wiped out the bath using the sponge, then put it back where he had found it, dressed and went back up to his room. A minute later, as he was eating, he realized that he hadn't the faintest idea what day it was. He simply hadn't kept daily tally. This realization left him feeling somewhat lost. As of that night, he vowed to keep track of the days. He had murdered the foreman on Tuesday 26th - or was it the 27th? - September. He estimated he had spent at least twenty days in the house, which made it now around the 13th or 14th October. The next day, he stole a pencil and a sheet of paper, to keep a record.
He ate a chicken leg, a roll and a tomato, before flinging himself onto his back on the bed, arms akimbo under the coverlet. Without emotion, he considered the fact that three days after killing the foreman, he should have been in receipt of his fortnight's wage packet (also of the fact that on the same day he had left his Rolex hanging from a nail in the work hut) when he was suddenly aware of a noise in the room. He froze to the spot.
For an instant, he considered the possibility he might have moved one of his legs without being conscious of doing so, and it was therefore him making a noise. But then he swiftly noticed that the sounds were coming from over by the door. He became alarmed, still frozen in position. Perhaps there was someone on the other side of the door. He heard the sound again. It sounded most like the noise made by someone turning the pages of a book, one after another. Most probably Senor or Senora Blinder had come upstairs to look for a book, or an old notebook, in the loft and, whichever of the two it was, had paused there to leaf through the book just outside his door. He decided to get up and listen more closely: it was something inside his room.
It must have been two or three in the morning. He opened the blinds a crack and by the street lights he could see a rat, running to hide underneath the cupboard. Maria stopped stock-still, his hand on the blind, thinking. How had it got in? Maybe he hadn't properly shut the door when he went to get washed, and the rat had found a way into the room. He closed the blind, opened the door ajar, knelt down beside the cupboard, and gently patted the floor with the palm of his hand. But the rat didn't make a move until Maria rolled up his pair of trousers and, as if he were wielding a whip, directed a couple of blows to the bottom of the cupboard.
Then the rat emerged from its hiding place, running everywhere as hard as it could, but it didn't head for the door; it made a couple of laps round the bed, went behind Maria, and hid itself again under the cupboard. It was a gigantic rat, the size of a man's shoe. And it was petrifie
d.
Maria repeated the operation. He saw it come out. This time it didn't look quite as big, but was even faster. Maria stayed another minute on his knees beside the cupboard, looking and listening. Nothing. Finally he gave up, shut the door, and went back to bed. Let the rat do what it will.
Later that night, properly clean and no longer hungry, he recognized that at least he now had time to think. And the first thought he had was that he had never thought before. The next minute he was soundly asleep.
7
The next morning, when he returned from the bathroom carrying a glass of water to prepare his mate herb tea, he noticed the door of his room was wide open. His blood froze in his veins. He retreated across the loft, ten or a dozen yards in front of the door to his room. From this position he could see Rosa opening the window. She wasn't wearing her maid's uniform: instead she was in jeans and a T-shirt, with a cloth thrown over one shoulder. A vacuum cleaner stood in the doorway.
He felt as if all was lost. He had made the mistake of leaving the room without taking his bag with him - as he always did, except when he went out at night. The bag was underneath the bed, and as soon as Rosa started vacuuming there, she would be bound to discover it. That wasn't even the worst of it: he'd left a book lying on the floor too. Not to mention the bone from his chicken leg!
He had to prevent Rosa from running the vacuum cleaner under the bed. For now, she was still busy with cleaning the windows. Maria didn't think twice about it: he left the loft and ran on tiptoes over to the vacuum cleaner, removed the adaptor from its socket, and returned to his place in the loft again. He had barely got back to base before Rosa left the bedroom.
If Rosa had had the least suspicion that Maria was hiding somewhere in the villa, she would have to have spotted him then. Clearly she did not. Instead she picked up the vacuum cleaner and took it into the room without registering what had passed before her eyes for a fraction of a second: a hand holding the doorjamb at the edge of the loft, and the profile of a face with one eye glued to her and what she was doing.
Rage Page 5