There Senor Blinder watched almost nothing but football matches. On one occasion, Maria gathered that the United States had attacked Iraq, and that a woman in a country house somewhere in Buenos Aires province, an upper-class woman, had been murdered, possibly by a family member, although an extensive investigation had thus far failed to find the assassin. The war and the rural crime - with all the interminable discussions and conjectures they elicited - were the only subjects which, in the course of many years, had proved substantially more attractive than football.
Perhaps Senor Blinder was a lawyer, or a doctor, and read the paper in his office or his surgery. If that were not the case, you might conclude that Senor Blinder had turned his back on the world, reducing it to a series of football stadiums. On whom was he turning his back, then? On the house and on Rosa.
He spent the greater part of the day (and all night) locked in his room. With the penknife he had stolen from Ricardo, he began to carve and construct boats and planes and some animals, using matches and soap. They were tiny sculptures measuring three to six inches in height, which took him days to complete, and which he hid in the attic when he had finished them.
He let his beard and his hair grow long, as well as the nail on the index finger of his right hand, which he used to make the soap sculptures. From time to time he went out to get some light and air on his face - a pyramid of glass in the middle of the floor - and there he lay down with his eyes closed, as if on a sun lounger. Susceptible, dumb, naked.
After months of nudity, without the constant friction of the rough, poor-quality materials he had worn throughout his life, his skin was softer than it had ever been. Nor had his fingers ever been more sensitive. How many millions of blows and small cuts to the hand had he endured in the daily tasks which he now set himself? How may pounds of chalk dust and earth had he inhaled? When he was wearing boots or shoes his heels were covered in a tough layer of skin, almost like a slipper. Ever since he had been going barefoot, forever walking on marble, polished wood or on carpets, the hard patches had diminished and almost disappeared.
He repressed the imaginary conversations with Rosa, yet she reappeared frequently in his dreams. One night he dreamed they were both off to the Mar del Plata, and on another that they were on their way home, as if in dream worlds there could also be a continuity between one thing and the next, one dream and the next, until the holidays vanished in smoke and only the travel remained. In the same way, his sexual life had reduced to the maximum degree. One night he dreamed he was making love with Rosa, but in later dreams she only appeared making love with Israel. Israel was tattooed with the image of a life-sized eagle on his back, the tips of its spread wings nudging the backs of his thighs.
Gradually rage gave way to disappointment, and finally disappointment stopped pressing the magic button of desire, extinguishing it: he stopped masturbating, either in his dreams or in reality. (Only once did he dream he was masturbating. Such an image had never previously entered his dreams).
However much against his will, it was inevitable that a certain amount of information would filter through to him about what was going on in the house. These were really more in the way of references or signs, and fairly minor ones too - the slam of a door, long hours of total silence, someone calling a name in a loud voice - permitting him to form an overview - however little he intended to do so - a bird's-eye view, really, of the course the Blinders' marriage was running (from bad to worse) and the state of Rosa's spirits (good). This information irritated him, for the least amount of it evoked awkward questions. Was Rosa seeing Israel every day of the week now? Was she in love with him? Didn't it count that Israel was a poor little rich kid, who probably just wanted to take her to bed, but with whom there was no future relationship, and who was bound to make her suffer? Didn't she realize that no doubt Israel was laughing at her behind her back, in the club with his other crude friends from the barrio, telling them every last detail of "the titbit I've nibbled"?
The same applied to her future at work. One morning he had overheard a shouting match between Senor and Senora Blinder: they were in deep financial trouble. The villa had been up for sale for years now. But, unless some country wanted to buy it up in order to install their embassy there, it was, given its incredibly high value, virtually impossible to sell. Did Rosa realize her workplace was up for sale? One time long ago, when they had visited a bar after a trip to the cinema, they had talked about the number of new countries appearing on the world map. Rosa failed to understand how it was possible for a country to arise out of nowhere, with territory, inhabitants, a judicial system and a flag, a national anthem and a president. "It's not out of nowhere," he had told her, "they're becoming autonomous. The land and the people are already there, all they have to do is to compose an anthem and elect a president." Was Rosa aware that at any moment someone could turn up and buy the villa as the ambassadorial residence of one of these new countries? What would then become of her? Or of him?
He had already been over this question a number of times. Whenever he started thinking of her, he ended up thinking of himself. But Rosa would have good references, that was beyond doubt; she could obtain a job in some other grand mansion, or maybe even here in fact, the embassy of that new country, only in this case she would have become a foreigner in her own country. Could foreigners work in the embassy of another land? And what would happen if they took on and employed Israel's parents? That would be terrible. Rosa might become pregnant by Israel and repeat his own personal history...
Over four decades earlier Maria's mother had worked as a domestic servant in the house of Governor Castro's intendant. And people muttered under their breath - although their whispering had reached as far as him - that her son was really fathered by the intendant.
The man whom Maria had always called "dad" was blond, freckled and short; nothing about one of them resembled the other. Nor did he in any way resemble his mother. When the rumour reached him, he was already grown, and the intendant had died years earlier, so he could hardly go and meet him and make the comparison. For years the subject had gnawed away at him, but he had never dared to mention it. From time to time in the village he'd meet an elderly and aristocratic lady, who would look at him oddly: she always went about with a vacant expression until she set eyes on him. Then she would seem to pull herself together and wake up. She was the intendant's widow.
The very same day his mother went off with another man, Maria went into his father's room and put the question to him. Well, he didn't put it directly: first he went in and hung around awhile, saying nothing.
A few minutes later, his father - who was stretched out on a couch staring at the television set - averted his gaze and looked at him:
"What are you crying for?" he asked.
Maria was crying because his mother had left. But he answered that he was crying because he'd heard he wasn't really his son.
The father raised himself up on his elbows.
"Who told you that?" he asked angrily.
"The kids. They say I'm the son of the intendant... Is that true?"
"No."
"So why do?..."
"You tell those kids to stop talking rubbish," interrupted his father, rolling over onto his back on the couch once more.
He hadn't thought about it again since then. He remembered the incident because of Rosa, but also because it was his birthday: his forty-first birthday.
He wasn't sure of the precise date. He had taken up residence in the villa on the 26th or 27th September, so today could as well be the 9th or the 10th April....
He uncorked the champagne he had stolen over Christmas, and had concealed in the attic, and drank about a third of the bottle in tiny sips, without ceremony, his eyes fixed on the wall across the room.
It began to turn cold. He remembered what he had told Rosa about the sea temperatures... It was already two weeks since the cold had descended on the city. People were going out dressed in their overcoats and were hurrying on their
way. The trees down in the garden were starting to shed their leaves. The lawn had stopped growing and, all along a lane which extended like a long black thread, the ants were hastening along with their enormous bundles of sky-blue, yellow and red.
He hadn't seen anything of all this. Yet he knew it was exactly like this.
22
Love wears a woman's face... The Catwoman... The Fugitive... Combat... View over Biondi... those were some of the programmes which, in another era, his parents had fought over. These weren't merely arguments over who would watch which, but actual fights. They always started with an argument; then, almost always, they'd turn into shouts and, more than likely, sessions of pushing and shoving. His father listened to records by Perez Prado. His mother to Leonardo Favio. His mother smoked. His father didn't. His mother worked. His father didn't. One point in his father's favour: he cooked. But his mother disliked the stews on which his father expended such considerable efforts.
Television, music, work, cooking, anything could become the pretext for a fight. The drawback (if one could call it that) was that the fights weren't a means of staying together, as in those relationships where love has transmuted into a permanent safety valve. His parents' battles were born of nothing more than mutual intolerance, mutual antipathy. They hated one another, full stop.
His father slept an enormous amount, by day or night. His mother was an insomniac...
It was years since he'd last seen either of them, but at least he knew where to find his... if he truly was his father. What on earth did this matter to him now?
Then his eyes glazed over - with loathing, not with pain - and he saw the rat.
Was it the same rat, his friend, his companion?
Maria stayed stock-still, as though made of air and light, one cheek resting against one of the glass walls. He widened his eyes when he felt someone (something) looking at him, and saw it. The rat was three or four yards away from him. It maintained a certain distance from the wall, and as if no longer needing to hug the skirting board, as if in the very act of looking at him it had evolved - or leaped - into an intermediate state somewhere between that of its own species and of his.
In fact the rat was regarding him as a dog would. Maria could even see that now it was gently waving its tail. But - was it the same one?
Had it survived the dose of poison? Or had it died and this was its wife, who came to resume the friendship? They looked at each other for a long time, both of them utterly immobile. Until all of a sudden the rat took a step towards him. The tiny step forwards of a humanized rat.
"Yes, it's me," it seemed to be saying.
Maria thought it would have to be far easier for a rat to recognize a man than for a man to recognize a rat.
He let one arm drop to his side, quietly extending his hand along the floor, inviting the rat to approach him. Then the rat made a half-turn and fled at full speed.
Maria closed his eyes again.
Yes, in the end it was a stroke of luck that his mother hadn't wanted to see him again. Neither him nor his fake father, or however much of a real father he might have been.
23
"Rosa?..."
Silence.
He hung up.
24
He had never imagined a winter indoors, inside a villa, could be that tough. He retrieved his work clothes from his knapsack, and wore them all at once: two shirts, two pairs of trousers, pants, socks, and he added a jumper, belonging to Senor Blinder, that he'd stolen one afternoon from the top shelf of his wardrobe.
The walls were literally freezing. The metal slats of the venetian blinds, however, had gone to the other extreme: they were so cold they were burning. Sometimes in the mornings, but most of all at night, the wind made a noise like a raging banshee, inserting fine blades into the narrowest cracks which the air - its brother - would have been unable to penetrate.
The lights on the ground floor were always left on. Sequestered in his room, Maria did his daily exercises: a hundred arm flexes, a hundred abdominal crunches - slowly, one after the other, giving each equal weight, equal concentration, just as much as he would have bestowed on every kiss he gave Rosa.
He no longer missed her, yet not a minute went by without his thinking of her.
And he no longer wanted to see her. At times he even turned his back on her, when she came upstairs to clean the room, wash out the toilets, run the vacuum cleaner over the floors or wipe the windows (occasions on which she always, like any other woman doing the same thing, seemed so utterly absented). The phantom desired only to remain a phantom. Wherever it had hidden itself away, each time Rosa came upstairs to clean the attic, he (religiously) turned his back on her, as if it were some part of his feng shui. Maria's adoration for her was so great that he had had to become a mystic in order to deny her without dying himself.
25
This "relapse" (the telephone call during which he could manage no more than to say her name and, after a silence which said no more than "?...", hang up) took place on 7th June. From then on, nothing more occurred to encourage him to ring her. Rather, it would have been a distraction.
He was truly in an altered state of being. His body still expressed it better than his soul or his psychology: his very fibres were as stretched as if they were all nerve endings, absorbed within an aura of contained force, with the briefest of shivers here and there, from top to toe, resembling nervous tics or miniature explosions. The contrast between his appearance and some of his pastimes (reading best-sellers, carving soap sculptures) could not have been greater. Intellectually, he was light years behind an average child, even in terms of wisdom: he existed as if in a glove whose extremities both touched and were touched (the butterfly and the petal). This was he, who a year earlier would have boasted that he was all streetwise...
All his artistry was concentrated in the shape of a soap canoe (without either oars or rowers). Despite this, he had constructed a double invisibility for himself and for everyone else, and all out of (he could hardly bring himself to write the word) spite. His crime obliged him to hide himself away, but his spitefulness made a monk out of him.
26
"Hello, Rosa?"
How long it had been since he had spoken her name! Not even he could believe it.
Rosa, at the other end of the line, was as surprised as he was.
"Maria?"
"Yes, it's me."
"Oh my God..."
"How are you?"
"Where are you?"
"Forgive me for not ringing you in so long, but I wanted to suggest something to you..." he said. There was a pause, and amid the silence in the house you could hear Rosa's irregular breathing from both ends of the line, sounding like a gasp.
"Would you like to meet me?"
"What happened?" asked Rosa.
For an instant, Maria was unsure whether her question referred to his invitation, as if the fact of his wanting to see her would necessarily mean that something bad had happened, or whether it was no more than the old question, born of anxiety, which she had repeatedly posed him from the beginning.
He decided it must be the latter and a fragile hint of sadness rippled delicately up his spine: why, in spite of all that had happened, did Rosa still appear to be stuck in the same place? Was this really the only thing that mattered to her?
"Look Rosa," he said, "first of all there's been something I've wanted to say to you for a long time and, for one reason or another, I've kept on forgetting. There's a book called Your Erroneous Zones. I want you to read it. Look it out in the villa's library, I'm sure your employers will have a copy. It's called Your Erroneous Zones. On the cover there's a picture of a man half-leaning forwards, made up of words. I kept wanting to tell you. It has to be good luck that I've finally remembered it. Now let's get on with talking about ourselves..."
"Maria? Are you well? Your voice sounds different..."
"Did you hear what I told you? Would you like us to meet?"
"Are you serious?"
>
Maria nodded.
But Rosa couldn't see him, so she repeated the question:
"Are you serious?"
"Yes," said Maria. "Would you like us to meet up?"
"What happened?"
They had come back to their starting point. At this point, Maria could observe the usual circularity of their dialogues, and use it to revise his plan.
Which he did from the beginning.
His resistance to assimilating what had been going on in the house was so great that he knew even less about what by nowwas impossible to ignore. But one afternoon, five days earlier, he had heard Senora Blinder exclaim:
"Rosa, oh my God!"
That expression awoke his curiosity.
He went downstairs. It was months since he had descended to the first floor in daytime.
Ten minutes later he came back upstairs again. He shut himself in his room and stayed there crouched in a corner. His heart was thumping heavily. Those ten minutes had been sufficient for him to accumulate a sequence of facts and indicators (visual fragments, odd sentences) for him now to create a panorama of the main events of the most recent period, like someone putting their hand in the water and taking out a fistful of earth or sand in order to later analyse the composition of the subsoil.
What he discovered meant that the protective wall he had erected between himself and the house fractured at a stroke:
a) Rosa was pregnant;
b) Israel didn't want to know.
The second point filled him with loathing. The first with pain. Rosa pregnant...
Now he had seen for himself. Senora Blinder was standing in front of Rosa. He saw Senora Blinder come in, but Rosa was bisected vertically by the door frame and the only part of her in his line of vision was precisely her abdomen: she was stroking it at a speed more fitting to that of a satisfied customer than of a mother. Maybe it made her ashamed, or maybe she was afraid of what the Senora was about to say... It was a small bump, but it was definitely there. Of this there was absolutely no doubt.
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