"Where are you speaking from?"
"From a public phone box..."
"Why don't you come here? Why do you never give me an explanation for what happened?"
"I love you. That's the only thing which matters."
"I love you too, and that's why I want to see you. I swear, you're doing my head in, Maria... I don't know why... I don't understand any of it..."
"And?"
"And what?"
"Is the other guy still pursuing you?"
"What other guy?"
"Come on Rosa, let's not start that again... Who is he?"
"It doesn't matter to you."
"You see? See, I'm right, there is another guy. Who is he?"
"No one."
"Tell me who he is."
"First you tell me what has happened, why you're behaving like this, and I'll... In any case, it doesn't matter that you go on endlessly about the big guy when I still don't know why you left like you did. I thought you loved me..."
"So he's big, is he?"
"I don't rightly know about big. He's tall."
"Do I know him?"
"I'm going to hang up. You're hassling me."
"No -wait, Rosa, this is important! I love you too..."
"I don't believe you."
"I swear to God I do. Do I know him?"
"Who?"
"Big boy, tall guy, whatever!"
Silence.
"Listen to me, Rosa. I can't tell you too much. You have to trust me, and you have to believe me. I love you and that's the truth. It's true that I love you. I'd give my right hand - and half the other one - for a kiss from you, but I can't. Listen to me carefully, my love: I can't. I can't. You have to be patient, because at any moment it might be possible and... well, for now, that's just the way things are."
"Are you in prison?"
"I've already told you I'm not."
"So, what?"
"Who's the big guy you've been talking about? Do I know him?"
Silence.
"Rosa?"
"I can't believe you going on endlessly about this. He's totally unimportant to me. He pursues me, but I don't even give him the time of day. The only thing I do is think of you. I feel so lonely! Even more so now... Do you remember me talking to you about Alvaro, the Blinders' son, who drank like a fish? Well, this morning they found him dead in the living room."
"What happened to him?"
"In my opinion, they killed him."
"What?" asked Maria, after a pause.
"He choked on his vomit while asleep, so they said. He's just been buried, they didn't want to give him a wake or anything: straight into the ground. Bah - they'd said right in front of me, they'd give him a decent wake.. . I don't know where... but it seemed to me they couldn't wait to bury him. Nobody around here liked him."
"Why do you say he was killed?"
"I don't know... I'm afraid."
"Who would kill him here inside the house?"
"I don't know. But don't pay any attention to me. Who knows, perhaps it's more likely he really did choke and here's me saying otherwise, that he... My love?"
"Yes."
"Are you far away?"
"No...,,
"Do you sometimes come as far as here? Oh, I need to hang up!" said Rosa hurriedly. "Someone's coming. Call me later. And don't worry, I've never told anyone you've rung me... I've got to go. I love you."
And she hung up.
Almost directly afterwards Esteban came into the kitchen. He was dressed as if for church, in a bluejacket, grey trousers, white shirt, with a tie and soft shoes to match.
"Watch out," he told Rosa, "Grandfather is furious: he keeps on getting the engaged signal, all the time. And on top of that, the other line is also always occupied."
"Oh my God, I must have knocked it half off the hook... when I cleaned..."
Rosa went running up to the first floor. Maria, who'd caught the first part of the conversation, ran on ahead of her. He had several yards advantage over her, so could reach the phone before she did. He took it off the hook and, without thinking about what he was doing, hid it behind some curtains. But Rosa was so worried by the talking-to that Senor Blinder would give her when he arrived, she didn't notice the curtains still swinging.
She reconnected the phone and made the sign of the cross. Then she looked at the phone again. It was still warm.
16
There had been no remorse, but at the same time no relief. Quite the opposite: he was worried. He would have liked to talk to Rosa, to explain to her that he was the murderer, and that he'd done it for her. He hardly expected Rosa to pat him on the back, but he longed to see her face (even with an expression of shock on it), followed by a relief which he could not feel. It was an irrational fantasy rather than a hallucination, the product of his fantastical situation: deprived as he was of speech, of being seen, even of making a noise, his fantasies swept all before them. Were he not living hidden away in the villa, but had still murdered Alvaro, it would never have crossed his mind to admit that he did it. And now on top of it all, he would have to take care when he spoke to her on the phone: it simply hadn't occurred to him that someone would want to use the spare line if the main one was constantly engaged.
For the time being, there was little to be done. For the two or three days after their return from the cemetery, the Blinders suspended their city walks and imposed a limit on the number of times they left the house. Had Senor Blinder scolded Rosa for blocking the first telephone line, and for leaving the second one disconnected? Probably not, although it was hard to be sure, given that the near-constant presence of the Blinders in their villa obliged him to stay away from the ground floor and even, at certain times, to keep off the first floor, where the Blinders had agreed to let the youngest kids have full rein to play - mostly, it seemed, at hide-and-seek.
In any case, he conducted a couple of reccies at various hours of the day, and could detect no sign whatever of grief among the Blinders. Instead of affecting them, Alvaro's death seemed to have brought them together: they went around in a band, always more than one at a time, as though the space had drawn them in. Until some kind of spontaneous and sudden accord returned them to their normal routines - and as if the period of mourning were a formality with which they were obliged to comply - the thing they did most was to spend hour after hour seated in the living-room armchairs staring at the television set, seemingly both absent and pensive. Nobody spoke, apart from the children.
That meant two long and very tedious days. He was prevented from reading by his anxiety... Why had Rosa said that she believed they'd killed Alvaro? He did his gymnastic exercises... Who was the big guy who called her up on the phone? He'd discovered that the Walkman couldn't be made to work... He was overwhelmed with an impulse to smash it on the floor, but he put it down on the bed and got up.
He pulled one slat of the venetian blinds down a couple of inches, applied an eye to the gap and took a look outside. That calmed him down. Every time he looked out, he was surprised to find that within this scrap of reality, as he called the outside world, he could see all of reality. A panorama of no more than thirty yards across, from the building with its yellow acrylic balconies to the corner on the opposite side of the street, was enough to give him a sense of the general mood, at least that of the upper classes; do the same with the unemployed, in accordance with the growth or decline in the number of cardboard collectors and street traders; learn about the latest developments in the car industry; get up to speed with news of the fashion world; know the time and the temperature and even to know all about whatever was happening on the ground floor - who came in, who went out, if another delivery of Disco shopping had arrived... At night, in the windows of cars parked in front of the house, he could see the reflections of the kitchen lights. The temperature inside the house was always lower than on the street, but an approximation of the "real" temperature was provided by the way in which people were dressed, and to gauge the time you only had
to follow the haste they were making and the attitudes they assumed. Occasionally, he caught sight of Rosa: she was crossing the kitchen garden and heading towards the gate giving onto the outside street.
He liked to see her. He could feel her come alive: her face became illuminated as if she had just swallowed an air bubble, like an infant. But there was something wrong with the way Rosa looked now... She was walking slowly and pensively, with her arms folded...
That's the right word: pensively. Rosa leaned her forehead on the bars, and scarcely moved her head to left and right to look out onto the pavement. She didn't seem to be waiting for someone, rather to be looking for them. Possibly, bearing in mind her pensiveness, perhaps all this was Maria's own fancy. Rosa herself had shrugged her shoulders. A gentle, constant breeze was wafting her apron, without lifting it. It had to be six or seven o'clock in the evening: the shining gold of the evening made her hair look blacker than ever.
And then, out of the blue, Rosa spun round and stared upwards, towards the window. Maria had no time at all in which to take a step back. He stood there, paralysed, his mind working at the speed of light. If he moved away from the window, Rosa would notice the movement, and he'd be discovered.
For the space of a few seconds, which to Maria seemed like hours, Rosa kept her eyes glued to the gap between the slats on his venetian blind. Had she seen him and was she watching him? From her expression, he gathered that she was not: she stayed where she was, with her arms crossed. Her face showed not the faintest flicker of surprise. Surely, he thought, she wouldn't be able to see him in the darkness of the room, and instead was reproaching herself over a window she hadn't properly shut. Nonetheless, Rosa's look was directed at his eye... Not above nor below his eye, but directly at it.
Rosa ran her tongue over her lips, let her arms fall to her sides, as if she'd just noticed something dreadful, and ran into the house at full speed.
Maria cast a glance about the room: no change there, everything looked exactly the same as it did on the first day he entered it. He grabbed the Walkman, the headset and Dr Dyer's book. Then he left the room again, closing the door after him, and ran to hide himself in the loft.
Rosa reached the attic a minute after him. She had run upstairs and was out of breath and agitated. She went straight to Maria's room. But the same impetus which had brought her thus far did not carry her over the threshold: she took the final yards leading up to the door with faltering steps (indoors, up until now, no gentle breezes blew, yet her apron remained stuck to her body), as if she wanted to stop but was unable to.
She rested one hand on the handle and opened the door exceedingly slowly. She paused. For a moment it looked as if she was sniffing the air in the room, doing no more than craning her neck to peer inside. Then, still standing on the landing outside, she looked behind her, as if she knew someone were watching her from that side. Finally, she entered.
She went over to the window, one step at a time, looking to left and right, and up and down, until eventually she closed the venetian blind. Maria noted a rush of urgency - a rush without fear, a rush of relief, a return to normality. "It was nothing." She was on the point of leaving when, all of a sudden, something made her scream. She let out such a piercing shriek that it was heard all the way down to the ground floor.
Senor Blinder's voice reached the attic with only a few seconds' delay:
"Something up?"
Rosa emerged from the room in a series of bunny hops. She looked as if she was stepping on hot coals.
"A rat!" she squealed as she raced towards the staircase. Next Ricardo appeared, closely followed by the children. It was the first time they had been up as far as the attic. Ricardo looked disconcerted, as if he hadn't the faintest idea of where Rosa might have seen this rat, nor what on earth he'd do were he unlucky enough also to catch sight of it, but the children, egged on by the revulsion of the older members of the family - and most of all by their father, now that neither Senor or Senora Blinder showed the least sign of life - ran to and fro like a horde of banshees.
Maria was terrified they might discover the loft. If they did, it'd be hard to contain them. Luckily, Ricardo waved his arms energetically and made jokes, ordering them to be quiet. The children obeyed.
"It was here," said Rosa, who had just come back in.
She sounded calm: the incident no longer affected her to the least degree. Once the initial shock had passed, she had come back upstairs again, because either Senor or Senora Blinder had asked her to do so, or because she was intent upon rat-catching. In any case, it was highly likely that this wasn't the first rat she had ever seen in the house.
"Where?" asked Ricardo.
Rosa waved in the direction of the bedroom.
"But it's gone now..." she said deceptively, "it left thataway..."
"Children, children," summoned Ricardo, calling his kids, now heading in the direction Rosa had indicated: it afforded a good pretext to flee.
Maria had closed the door, and was following the scene through the keyhole. The perspective meant that he had too wide a field of vision, but he was able to discern Ricardo and Rosa speaking to one another:
"Fine, if that's the way it is..." said Ricardo, shrugging his shoulders.
"It will soon put in another appearance..." said Rosa.
Ricardo didn't say another word. He signalled to the kids, and the three of them set off down the stairs in single file. In the midst of all this Ricardo, suddenly animated, stretched out his fingers, let out a grunt, then ran after his kids, who accepted his little game, and rapidly got away from him: they ran far faster than he did.
Rosa locked the bedroom door, pocketed the key and followed them down.
17
Up in the attic there was a passage in the shape of an L. Opening off it there were seven bedrooms, a study, a playroom (converted into a loft), an ironing room, a bathroom and two toilets, as well as an enormous open garret, so deserted that Maria had once nicknamed it "Africa". All in all, it was no trouble for him to set himself up in a different room (even though, when Rosa locked the door and took the key with her, for an instant he felt as if he had been "left out on the street").
He selected the last bedroom on the left-hand side. He could scarcely summon the courage to part the venetian blinds once more: if he had, he would have been able to see that he was much closer to the street corner than before. For the time being, however, he devoted himself to analysing his room: it had the same measurements as the last, an identical bed, situated in the same position as before, and with a similar mattress. He sat himself down, tried it out, looked around him... There was no wardrobe, just a cupboard, and an occasional table, positioned against a wall next to the bed, with three empty drawers and an old round sticker with the rubric Apple (referencing the Beatles) stuck to the door. Surely a maid's former bedroom, hip for her times...
If the rat had behaved in the same manner with Rosa as it had the first time he saw it (racing around in a circle, giving the impression that it was on the point of escape, then returning to its point of departure) it was now most likely that it was locked up in the room. Why had Rosa taken the key away in her pocket? None of the remaining six bedrooms were under lock and key. Why had she locked that one in particular? During the final months of their marriage, his parents had slept in separate rooms, and any time one or other of them left the house, they locked their bedroom door and took the key away. They had nothing to hide: most likely they did it to underline their rejection of the other party. The problem there was that they only had two bedrooms in the house, his parents' and his own, which his mother had moved into, meaning that whenever she left the house he couldn't get back into his own room. On some occasions, she would only return late at night. Maria would wake up in the morning in his own bed only because his mother would carry him up there in the small hours, gathering him up from the cane armchair in the dining room where he had fallen asleep. At other times, if it got too late, his father would take pity on him and invi
te him to come and wait in his bed, but that happened only on rare occasions, and he was always woken up and moved on as soon as his father heard the front door open.
18
It was on 3rd January, while Ricardo and Rita were packing the cases and the youngest children were staring at the television screen, that Esteban tiptoed into Rosa's room.
Rosa's reaction on seeing him come in was one of surprise. She asked him to leave, but Esteban said something in a low voice, a long sentence which resonated like a hiss, and which seemed to convince her to let him stay there. A silence followed. Then, whispers interrupted by odd eruptions of giggles, and the sound of footsteps pattering across the floor, as if Esteban had run over to Rosa and had just caught her in his arms...
For a moment, only Rosa spoke. She seemed to be speaking in chorus:
"Esteban!"
"No, Esteban, someone might come in!..."
"Be quiet..."
"Quiet now, Esteban..."
"No!"
"I told you already, no!"
"Look at you now, eh?"
Now it was Esteban's turn to speak while Rosa remained silent.
"I'm leaving."
"I thought that... perhaps..."
"OK. I'm sorry."
Silence.
"Are you cross with me?" (Esteban.)
"No..." (Rosa.)
"Are you sure?" asked Esteban.
Rosa nodded, yes.
"But I'm cross with you, really cross," Esteban said. Rosa raised her eyes to look at him. Esteban added: "Do you really think I don't know you're going out with that stupid fat guy with the dimpled flesh?"
"That has nothing to do with it, Esteban. In any case..."
Silence.
"In any case, what?"
"Nothing."
"Come on, out with it, out with it! I'm too young for you? Is that what you were going to say? Well, it didn't seem that way to you last year..."
"That was a game."
"Sure."
"Honestly, I mean it."
"My therapist doesn't happen to think it was a game."
"You told your therapist about it?"
"Obviously. And you've no idea how hard I had to plead to stop him from telling my parents everything too."
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