Rage

by Sergio Bizzio

  Maria was as breathless as a long-distance sprinter and his heart was pounding heavily. As he attempted to steady his breathing, he saw Rosa emerge from the room once more, looking about her to see if she could find something there on the landing floor... His scheme had worked. Rosa felt around in her trouser pockets, shrugged her shoulders, and set off downstairs in search of another adaptor. Maria slipped back into his room. The book he'd abandoned on one side of the bed now lay on top of it, so he decided it was better not to move it; obviously Rosa must have picked it up from the floor and placed it there, without paying it any heed. He took his bag out from under the bed, but couldn't see the chicken bone anywhere at all. He crouched, searching more and more desperately, here there and everywhere, thinking that Rosa must have trodden on it without noticing. He simply couldn't find it. Then he heard Rosa's voice saying:

  "Here I am, Senora, up here, cleaning!"

  Silence.

  "Yes, Senora, straight away!" Rosa replied, and this time her voice sounded much closer than before.

  Maria had no more time to continue looking for his bone. He left the room and hurried into the loft. He went inside, closing the door after him, leaned his back up against a wall, then let himself slide down it until he was sitting on the floor, clutching his rucksack to his chest. A moment later he changed position, or perhaps, more accurately, his attitude altered: he set the rucksack to one side and let himself slide still further, this time from drama into slumber. He imagined that Rosa had found the bone, that she had reported it to Senora Blinder, and that two or three policemen had come up to the attic and conducted an inch-by-inch search until they discovered him. No sooner had they done so than they clamped him in handcuffs and dragged him downstairs.

  On the landing on the first floor Senor Blinder, there waiting for him, immediately blocked his way and started punching him, without any of the policemen attempting to prevent him. He passed Senora Blinder on the ground floor, who backed off while staring him in the eyes. Rosa huddled in the doorway giving onto the street, silently shaking her head, her face wet with tears. Senor Blinder stopped them suddenly:

  "Not that way," he said. "Take him out through this door," and he pointed at the tradesmen's entrance.

  Rosa was obliged to go with them. She went ahead and throughout her ordeal kept turning back at every step, as if she couldn't believe what she saw.

  "Why?" she asked him.

  "How do I know?" he answered. "I could give you so many reasons... Are you well?"

  "Why?" repeated Rosa.

  He shrugged his shoulders. She opened the tradesmen's gate and let them through. In the second before they put him in the police patrol car, Rosa succeeded in asking him, tender as a mother:

  "What have you been eating?"

  He emerged from his daydream when the water in his jug ran out.

  The mate tea was his best acquisition in recent weeks. The truth was it was the same as a morning cup of coffee; he had found a number of mate gourds in a kitchen drawer, and he was sure that nobody would notice if one were missing. Rosa drank mate daily, so there was always an open packet of the tea lying around. For now, Maria had to drink his mate cold, although soon he would begin to heat up the water... He emerged from his dream at this point, and realized that this whole time he'd not heard a single sound emerge from the vacuum cleaner. He awoke properly and looked out at his room. The door was shut tight.

  Was Rosa still in there? It seemed highly unlikely that Rosa would shut herself in there in order to clean. Surely she must have finished the job and left. Just in case, he decided to hang on a little longer before returning to his room. He occupied himself by going through some of the boxes stacked up in the loft, which seemed to be filled with anything from straw hats to old crockery. Quite a lot of the stuff up there could prove useful to him, should occasion arise. He had already sniffed around inside a few of the cases, coming across various old shawls and blankets, and a mother-of-pearl card box with a deck of playing cards inside it (with which he'd played solitaire), but it was only now that he noticed the walkman. Manufactured by Sony, it had probably once belonged to one of the Blinder children, or possibly grandchildren. It didn't have any batteries, and although he searched high and low, he couldn't find the headphones. He decided to take it with him in any case. He put it in his bag and, for a brief instant, felt as if he were in the midst of a shipwreck, a Robinson Crusoe rescuing from what was left of his sea voyage whatever might prove useful to him. It was time to leave the loft behind him. He zipped up his bag and set off to return to his island.

  The air inside his room now seemed fresh and new. The book still lay on the bed. While Maria had been in the loft, he had waited every moment for Rosa to discover the chicken bone and, beside herself, go and show it to Senora Blinder. Presumably the truth was that she had not found it at all. Otherwise - as it was a "bone of recent provenance" that no one could believe was some old thing brought there and forgotten who knows when and by whom - his dream would have become reality. So the first thing he did on getting back into his room was to search for the bone, going back and forth on his knees, criss-crossing the room. But he was just as unable to find it as she was.

  He decided to open the window. It was a good opportunity, given that Rosa had been there only minutes earlier, and could always assume she had failed to close the thing properly. Light flooded into the room as Maria peered outside. The sky looked uncertain whether to clear or to cloud over. The citizens' habits appeared to be running to form for the time of day: he estimated it must be around two in the afternoon. On the building site, his former workmates must be just about finishing their lunch break. Was there anything about that world outside he still missed? A good roast beef. Three days earlier he had eaten it straight from the oven. And a cigarette. He had never smoked heavily, but ten yards below him, down on the pavement, he saw a man pass by with a cigarette between his lips and he longed to have one. That was when he realized that what he most missed was using his sense of smell. To be able to smell a roast, inhale a cigarette. And the scent of Rosa.

  Ever since he'd been living in the villa, he'd smelled nothing except the odour of damp. Did Senor or Senora Blinder smoke? In the villa, cooking took place both at midday and again in the evening, yet the smell of it never penetrated as far as his upstairs attic. Why would they, then, be able to sniff out the smell of his tobacco, had he any? He determined to undertake a reconnoitre, on one of the very next evenings, down to the living room on the ground floor, with the intention of finding out whether Senor or Senora Blinder were smokers and, assuming that one of them was, rob them of one or two of their cigarettes. In his own room, perhaps anywhere on the top floor, he could smoke without fear of discovery. Maybe he could even try it out right next to the window, open just a crack, looking out on the street, just like now.

  He spent the afternoon reading. When the daylight began to give out, he did his gymnastics exercises. Then he went to the bathroom, washed, and returned to bed to take his siesta. At two in the morning, he went downstairs to the kitchen to get his dinner and, bearing in mind that Rosa gave no sign of having noticed any change in the quantity of food there, decided to help himself to breakfast as well. That way he ate better and risked less.

  After dining, he set off on his walk around the house. He undertook it completely naked. He'd decided henceforth to leave his rucksack in the loft, where it would be hard to distinguish from the mass of other bags and boxes, and in order not to have to carry it around with him wherever he went. He had learned to move about in such a stealthy fashion that he seemed almost motionless, or as if the floor itself were transporting him. Like a man on a moving walkway. The same thing applied when he did his athletics. He didn't jump like a ballet dancer, in the sense of becoming suspended in mid-air, but did the opposite: he took large leaps, allowing the weight of his body to catapult him in a long jump, just above floor level. He was capable of jumping more than three yards from his starting point, virtually without
having lifted off. At the end of the leap, one of his feet would just skim the floor's surface, in order to kick off on the next leg of his trajectory. His body thus described a succession of interconnected curves, each one propelled forwards by sheer force.

  He returned an hour later. The window into his room was still open. The sky was clear, and cars passed only intermittently; there were no pedestrians. The moon shone like a radioactive rock. He lay down. He was about to fall asleep when he heard some faint noises from on top of the cupboard. He refrained from moving. It didn't even seem to matter to him that the rat hadn't emerged, that it was, after all that had happened, still in his room. Now he knew where the bone had gone.

  "Goodnight," he said to the rat.

  He heard himself and was shocked. It was a long time since he'd listened to the sound of his own voice.

  8

  One evening he heard "new" voices inside the house. Leaning over the second-floor banister, he could catch intermittent glimpses of a man in a dark suit and a woman who, from his vantage point, seemed to consist in little else but a bright yellow wig balanced on the points of two stiletto shoes which came and went almost hysterically beneath full white skirts, and which made her appear like an energetic fried egg. The date was 30th October, and it was Senora Blinder's birthday. Maria couldn't manage to overhear exactly what Senora Blinder was celebrating, but he did manage to gather that the new visitor's name was Rita, and that the couple were perhaps the Blinders' only close friends.

  Rosa went back and forth, in and out of Maria's field of vision, carrying trays of canapes. She made the trip with frustrating frequency, as if instructed only to serve one canape at a time, no doubt annoying and interrupting the guests as well, in spite of the fact that their voices couldn't have sounded more cheery.

  At a given moment, everyone vanished; Rosa went into the kitchen and the Blinders, together with their guests, went to take their places at the dining table. Maria managed to catch odd snatches of conversation, before he began to hear retching sounds coming from behind him. He retreated to an alcove which looked out onto the avenue, and opened the window. A young - or at least relatively young - man was vomiting outside the front door to the villa.

  He closed the pane and, as if the pane were the viewfinder of a camera, ran the image past his retina again: there could be no doubt, the man was the same as the only photo of a stranger on the table of family portraits. The bell began ringing insistently.

  Intrigued, Maria crept down to the first floor. The tone of the mutual greeting was kept to one of welcome and false conviviality.

  "Alvaro!..." said the father.

  "How did you get here?" enquired the mother.

  "Sit down..." (The father.)

  "Have you eaten?" (The mother.)

  "See, I remembered it after all." (Alvaro.) "Many happy returns... Doctor... Sara... how are you? Hi there, old man. I promise I'll bring you your present tomorrow, Mum. And what about Peru, Doctor, have they decided? Are we selling them arms or not?"

  "Alvaro, please..." (The mother.)

  They then spent over an hour discussing football. Nothing could interest Maria less than football. In any case, he stayed put just to listen in on the conversation: he was hardly ready to leave the parry just because the topic they were chatting about didn't interest him overmuch; he didn't get that many opportunities to listen in on something that, while phoney, at least sounded agreeable.

  It was obvious that the alcohol was flowing. The voices... their subjects... even the silences... had grown denser. Someone had put on a CD. How long had it actually been since music played in that house? Maria had never heard as much as a single chord, not even from a neighbouring villa. He had the impression that this was the first time in generations that music had made itself heard here. He had already drawn his own conclusions as to what kind of people the Blinders were, so the wholly unlikely and inappropriate sounds now emanating (from a CD by Cristian Castro) confirmed his assumption that music was about as relevant to the Blinders as literature to a boxer. It wasn't even one of their discs: it belonged to Rosa.

  Maria repeated with the CD what he'd done with the conversation: he stopped to listen to it. The difference between the two was that whereas the topic of football hadn't interested him in the least, at least he really liked Cristian Castro's songs. Better still: if he weren't mistaken, he himself had made a present of that very CD to Rosa. At least, he was sure he'd given her a disc by Cristian Castro, but he hadn't had time to copy it before giving it to her - nor, as a result of all that had happened, to listen to it on his own, when he got in from work - so he couldn't be entirely certain whether or not this was the same one. The fact of the matter was that Cristian Castro's voice caused him to drop his guard, even to drop off to sleep.

  This was when something extraordinary happened.

  (This isn't what follows. What follows is merely an infidelity.)

  Made drowsy as he was by the music, Maria didn't notice that Senora Blinder had escaped from the table, or from the dinner party, still less from the dining room, and that she'd just hooked up with her male guest halfway up the staircase, in the shadows.

  There was nothing in principle to suggest, from the attitudes adopted by either party, that the two of them were lovers. Quite the opposite, in fact: it was evident that they had been good friends for many years, to the point where they had almost nothing left to tell one another, but it was also plain that they were fed up with longing for each other in secret. Desire and its repression were such a powerful force between them that when they met halfway upstairs (one going up and the other coming down), it was as if they were strangers.

  When Maria had realized how close they were to him, he had moved back. Now he decided to advance a little again. He couldn't see them, but he could hear them absolutely clearly.

  She gave the impression of being somewhat agonized.

  "All of a sudden, I felt such a vast emptiness, so very vast, that it made me feel as if I was entirely swallowed up by it," Rita Blinder was saying. "I don't know if that makes it like a religious experience, most likely it does. I feel as if I exude the symptoms of religious withdrawal. First I feel utterly empty, then utterly filled, but with a longing to enter a retreat. I keep thinking of something which Epictetus said... you do know who Epictetus is, don't you?"

  A silence.

  Maria visualized the man nodding vaguely.

  "Epictetus," Rita Blinder went on, "said that when God is no longer able to supply us with faith, or love, or anything else, he gives us a sign of retreat. He just opens the door and invites you in with: `Come'. And you reply: `Where to?' Then He tells you: `Nowhere in particular. Only back to where you have come from, to things you warm towards and places you have an affinity for, back to the elements."'

  Another silence.

  Maria imagined Senora Blinder fixing the man with her gaze, anticipating some kind of a response from him. He could as good as see the man casting about desperately for something to say. He could hear the man clear his throat.

  Finally he heard him say:

  "Sometimes I think I know everything, and at others nothing. My dearest, this is one of those occasions when I feel I know nothing. Believe me. The honest truth is that I don't know what to say to you."

  There was a pause and then what followed was a deep sigh, emanating from Senora Blinder. She sucked air into her lungs as if her head had only just surfaced above the water - and she started to descend the staircase. The man, despite the fact she had met him on his way up, followed her down.

  That was when Maria heard the sound of shattering glass. He looked right, towards the stairs going down to the service wing, from where the noise had reached him as if echoing from a tomb. He followed the sound, and heard a slam, the sounds of a struggle, then the sound of another slam. Again, silence. Maria was now on the bottom step of the service stairs, at the start of the corridor. He leaned his face forwards and Alvaro just entered his line of vision.

 
; The door to Rosa's room stood open. Alvaro, his back turned towards Maria, was propping himself up against the wall with one shoulder. He was struggling to unstick the shoulder but his legs weren't helping. In fact, his knees were buckling. Finally he managed to achieve lift-off and, making the most of his sudden success, he zigzagged his way to the kitchen, where another struggle erupted.

  Maria could hear Rosa's voice saying:

  "Alvaro, enough. Stop!"

  "Come here a minute... Just a little minute..."

  "Leave me alone!"

  "Don't be naughty..."

  Maria didn't dare to approach any closer to spy inside the kitchen, but it was hardly necessary: Alvaro was bent on abusing Rosa, that much was obvious. He clenched his fists. He even tightened his toes against the edge of the step. What could he do if Rosa didn't manage to get the guy off her? Had he already abused her previously, abused her, his girlfriend, on previous occasions?

  Rosa left the kitchen, smoothing down her uniform, and ran to the end of the passage, where she hid herself behind a door. Alvaro came out a second later.

  "Rosa!" he called.

  His feet described a large circle, and the rest of him followed in a surprisingly straight line behind Rosa, as if he were bent on drawing the outline of a helium balloon on the floor.

  Maria remained rooted to the spot, paralysed with rage. Then he returned upstairs again, in order to take up his position above the living room, but although the music had stopped, he couldn't hear anyone inside talking; he leaned forwards again to get a better look and saw Rosa setting off in the direction of the kitchen carrying a tray. An instant later he saw her again. This time Rosa was bearing four glasses on the tray (rather than five, leaving him to think that Alvaro had been excluded from the toast), along with a bottle of brandy. Maria could hear her leaving the room.

  He went up to the second floor, ran into the east wing, and peered between the curtains and through one of the windows looking out onto the garden. The Blinders and their friends were seated around a little white table; Rosa deposited the glasses on the table and went back indoors. No sign at all of Alvaro.