"Listen, Rosa, I'm in a phone booth, and they're going to cut me off at any moment. Wait until I can put in another coin... Oh - but what did I do with all my change? Ah, here it is. Hello?"
"Yes."
"Hang on a second, I still can't find any change... Ah, here it is... What were you saying?"
"You were about to tell me something..."
"Oh yes. I..." There was a pause and then he said: "Have you grown cold towards me or is that my imagination? What's going on? Don't you love me any more?"
"Why on earth do you ask me that?"
"That's the way it feels."
"No... well, Maria... so much water has gone under the bridge since..."
"Didn't it make you happy to think of meeting me today, as we'd arranged?"
"Sure! I kept watching the clock every few minutes but..."
"Now, what time is it?"
"I can't come out now."
"I know. All the same, what time is it?"
"Ten past eleven."
"What did the doctor make of you?"
"Fine, all well. Oh, Maria!" Rosa suddenly exclaimed. "If for once and all you'd only tell me something real, like why you disappeared, why today we could have met up but tomorrow we can't... why you couldn't ever before! At the end of the day, all this is your fault!"
"What's all my fault?"
"You upped and left me... you never came back... left me to take the rap, and I paid it with my heart! There are times when I swear I hate you! Yes, I hate you, I swear it! And today when I was finally going to see you, I hated you more than ever, Maria. Will you forgive me all this one of these days?"
"You're asking me if I could forgive you?"
"Yes..."
"There's nothing for me to forgive you, Rosa! Today I wanted to see you precisely because I needed to tell you that the only thing I want is to be near you and care for you, and..."
There was a silence.
A bird flew overhead. Maria couldn't avoid following it with his eyes. The rarest of things: a white bird, at least five yards up in the skies over the Avenida Santa Fe, at eleven o'clock at night, flying in the same direction as the one-way traffic...
"Are you really never going to come back?" asked Rosa.
"One of these days..."
"I knew that was what you were going to say..."
"You need to understand..."
"I knew it..."
"What is it that I need to forgive you for, Rosa?"
At that instant the line went dead.
In the kitchen, inside the villa, with the telephone still in her hand, Rosa said:
"I'm pregnant..." knowing that Maria couldn't hear her.
"I forgive you," he said, his eyes filled with tears, and hung up.
28
Finally, here he was again, stopped outside the villa. A few blocks back he'd again asked for the time: three in the morning. The villa was in darkness. There was nobody out on the street. Very occasionally a car slipped by. That was when he saw a policeman heading towards him.
He felt a shiver run up his spine. He stuck his hands into his pockets, moved on, and doubled back on his tracks to take a turn around the block. Getting inside again was going to be far harder than getting out. How come he hadn't thought of this? As he walked past Israel's building, on his way back into the villa, he saw the lights illuminated on the fourth floor... The cop was no longer on the corner: he walked on up the street to kill his hunger and cold.
He felt an impulse to run for the corner and make use of the cop's absence to reach the door and get inside without being spotted: he controlled himself with difficulty. The key was already in his hand. There were about ten yards between the corner and the barred gate of the tradesman's entrance: he ran them looking over his shoulder, towards the street the cop was disappearing down, hands clasped behind his back.
He was on the point of putting the key into the lock when all of a sudden a man and a woman emerged from the shadows, with their arms around each other. They came along the road chatting, gazing at the ground, and didn't seem too startled when they bumped into him. Maria rapidly regained his posture and the pace of a normal walk he had adopted up until his brief delay beside the gate, and set off in the opposite direction to the couple.
He paused another fifteen yards further down the road. He was sweating. The man and the woman crossed the street... The policeman was about to reach the corner; another second and he would turn on his heel and start walking downhill towards Maria again. He got to the gate in the blink of an eye, inserted the key into the lock and turned it. He pushed at the gate, went inside, and shut it again. He completed the moves very slowly, muffling its creaking from the start, and eliminating them as he went through.
Then he hid himself behind the wall. Crouched there, he waited until the cop got to the corner and set off up the street once more, in order to feel safe in crossing the side garden and entering the villa at last by the kitchen door. That was the most dangerous part of it. The lights were out, but he couldn't be sure whether Senor or Senora Blinder - or Rosa - were just on the other side of the door, for whatever reason they might have (even in the dark) to be there: he had to avoid making the least sound, because the house trebled the intensity of any noise and someone could have overheard. At the same time he had to do everything as swiftly as possible: someone could pass by on the street at any moment and catch sight of him between the bars on the gate. Dozens of worrying risks occurred to him, but he managed to overcome them all, and reached the kitchen safe and sound. He leaned his back against the wall and stayed there a moment in silence, waiting for the beating of his heart to quieten, and for his sight to become accustomed to the darkness. Then he opened the fridge, drank a large swig of white wine, removed his shoes, and set off for his bedroom. It was a success story. All except for one tiny detail.
That afternoon the gardener had mowed the lawn and watered the garden plants. And Maria had covered one shoe in mud while he was crouching beside the wall, to avoid being seen by the police.
He only noticed all this the following morning. Alarmed, he ran downstairs and approached as near as he could to the kitchen.
Rosa was sitting there on a chair, looking pensive. In one hand she held the floor cloth and was staring at the muddy footprints over by the door. A moment earlier, on seeing the footprints, she had automatically picked up the floor cloth and was on the point of wiping clean the mud when something attracted her attention. It was this she was now thinking over.
She couldn't fathom who might have left those footprints behind, still less why they went from the door to the fridge, where, all of a sudden, they stopped.
29
Only a few hours earlier, Rosa was on her way down from the attic washroom with a heap of clothes over one arm. Her belly, which had grown substantially in the last couple of months, along with all the clothes she was carrying in her arms, prevented her from properly seeing the steps, so she was descending slowly and taking care. Suddenly the hand with which she had steadied herself on the banister moistened, and she unleashed a squeal as she stopped in her tracks. The clothes fell to the floor, Rosa grabbed her belly and screamed for Senora Blinder.
For an instant, Maria was on the point of going to her rescue himself. He restrained himself with great difficulty. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Rosa and Senora Blinder flew out of the house at high speed.
Now Maria began pacing nervously, not the traditional "to and fro" pacing, but more like a constant "up and down"... In recent months, he had been closer than ever to Rosa; it was incredible he hadn't actually trodden on her heels. He phoned her every week. He had come across a book called My First Child in the library, which he had read from cover to cover, and he'd taken to giving her advice on what forms of exercise were still suitable, and what kind of diet she'd do best to adhere to. But it hadn't exactly been easy getting Rosa to admit that she was actually pregnant.
In the course of a number of phone calls, starting with the one in w
hich he had invited her to meet up with him in the little hotel down on the Bajo, Rosa kept insisting that they meet up, until the matter simply dropped out of the conversation, as if she'd forgotten all about it. It didn't escape Maria's attention that Rosa had wanted to meet up while her belly was still flat and had dropped the subject - he even thought he saw in her a kind of fearfulness, now it was he proposing a new rendezvous, which she found difficult to know how to refuse - when her belly became obvious, something which seemed to occur from one month to the next. Eventually one afternoon a ruse occurred to Maria, as obvious as it was effective: he would tell her he had just seen her in the street by chance.
"When?"
"The day before yesterday."
"Tuesday? But on Tuesday I had to spend the whole day in the house."
"Well, then it was Monday. You were just coming out of..." Maria paused, hoping that Rosa would complete the sentence for him. But wherever it was he saw her was something that Rosa couldn't have cared less about at that point in time.
"And you didn't call me?"
"I thought about it, but no I didn't. You were with the Senora."
Maria knew that Rosa had been out with Senora Blinder.
"So..." Rosa said meaningfully, lowering her voice.
"Yes, I know."
They both allowed for an interval.
Maria was under the impression that Rosa had stopped breathing.
Then he asked her:
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because... Maria, I..." answered Rosa, and started to cry.
"Don't worry, everything will be fine," said Maria, to calm her down. "How many months are you?"
"Five months."
"And the father?"
"Oh my God..." said Rosa.
"Who is he?" persisted Maria.
It had been a while since Maria had known all about it, and he managed to sound serene, even in a way relieved.
"The Senores' son..." replied Rosa. "He raped me... one time..."
That came as a surprise to Maria. It had never occurred to him that the child could belong to Alvaro... Then, while Rosa told him the history (the harassment, the rape), he processed a million figures, at the end of which he realized that Rosa couldn't be saved: she was completely incapable of stopping herself from lying to him.
He further realized that to her it was easier to say (or to say to him) that the pregnancy was the consequence of a rape than of her relationship with Israel. But this was no longer a matter in which he had the slightest interest. In any case, to contradict her would be to reveal himself. All the same, he did his utmost to sound indignant:
"The bastard, I'll kill him!"
"He's dead," intercepted Rosa.
"I know, I know, you already told me... What a bastard!"
"There's no point in getting all worked up about it now... are you all worked up?"
"I swear to you, I'd kill the bastard."
"I'm asking you if you're angry with me?"
"How do I know? You've told me so many things all at once that..." he began. And he observed he wasn't at all angry, only anxious to elicit a response.
Maria noted a grain of gratitude in Rosa's reaction. He was as good as certain that Rosa was reproaching herself inside for having hidden her pregnancy from him all this long time. She might as well have confided in him (he heard, in her voice). The mystery of his disappearance would soon be transcended by the discovery of a new man, absent but generous, a man without a body, whose voice would caress her more than anything else could.
From that day onwards, Maria kept her company wherever she went. Not perhaps every moment of the day, but in a general way. Cooking, washing and ironing, watching television, whatever Rosa was doing, he would be close beside her. Every night, when he came and went in search of food, he went out of his way to be there outside her room, and watched her for a long while through the keyhole, monitoring her position as she slept, the rhythm of her breathing.
He acquired the habit of checking the expiry dates on tinned products for fear lest Rosa might consume something past its sell-by date, and helped himself to the least fresh fruits and vegetables in order to leave only the best for her. Each time a new issue of Selections arrived, he would use his ingenuity to smuggle it up to the attic for awhile. He conspicuously left self-help books out for her edification, like My First Child, and any time he got the opportunity he would add to the shopping list drawn up by Senora Blinder items like yogurt or chocolates, meticulously copying her handwriting, in order to satisfy Rosa's possible cravings. Naturally enough, Rosa attributed all of these stupendous delicacies to Senora Blinder's kindness. Maria observed this through the change in the relationship between the women, as it became more like that of friends, or even of family members. In his role as an invisible spy, he never discovered the true cause of the change in Senora Blinder's attitude towards Rosa. But the result was spontaneous and, at times, very moving. All thanks in some part to him.
They left behind them the chats in which nothing mattered as much to Rosa as knowing why he had disappeared in the way that he did, or where he was and when he would return. It was good luck (for him, who hated evading her questions). Nonetheless, nothing stopped him going over things in his mind. And every time he did so, he came up against fragments (moments) in a love which he savoured in his triple role as husband, father and phantasm. In fact he had taken his relationship with Rosa to a stage where his physical presence had ceased to be what mattered: what obstacle was there now to his being her husband? And if he were the husband who loved her and Rosa loved him and was expecting a child, why should he refuse to be its father?
For example:
"I read the book you told me about, Your Erroneous Zones."
"Did you like it?"
"I gave up on it."
"Because?"
"Because it bored me. I read the first part... I don't know, it didn't seem to apply to me... The first bit is all about... Hang on a minute, I'll go and find it, it was lying around here somewhere... Wait for me, eh?" She returned a few seconds later.
"It says..." she began, and started reading aloud: "Look over your shoulder. You will find you have a companion who accompanies you wherever you go. I liked that bit. I remember reading it, and it made me think of you, I swear. Do you know what crossed my mind the other day? Look, this is what crossed my mind: that you were here inside this house. Believe me. The other day I found some footprints in the kitchen and I swear on my mother's life that I went around the house with a finetooth comb - to every point on the compass - at the end of which I felt so utterly empty..."
It was true. Maria had watched her go through every inch of the entire house, going in and out of one room after another, as if she'd suddenly gone mad.
"It goes on to say: For lack of a better name, call your companion Your Very Own Death. You can choose to be afraid of this visitor or to make use of him. The choice is yours. That's where I started losing the thread..."
They were chatting like an old married couple, like a workman and a maid, a married couple of the future transported to work on different planets - without resentment, without even questioning the fact - at a time when relationships within the working class simply "happened like that".
They never mentioned Israel. Maria was certain that Senora Blinder must have been aware of the fact that Israel had been killed, so it was safe to assume that she would have told Rosa everything (rubbing her hands while Rosa suffered the impact of such news, and wearing a wide if near-imperceptible smile), in the same way that she could have sworn that Rosa knew (but in too indistinct a manner to catch him out) that he had been the murderer.
They had reached the perfect pitch of mutual understanding. They were at this point when Rosa's hand squeaked and paused on the banister.
From this moment until the one when Maria came to know his son, nothing more or less than three years flashed by: that was the true duration of the three subsequent days for him. In fact, Rosa went in on a
Tuesday and didn't return until the Friday, quite late at night. And the first thing they did (Senor Blinder was engaged on a telephone call, conducted while staring at the television) was to settle the baby down in Senora Blinder's bed.
"Are you serious?" asked Maria, when he next called Rosa. "It seems to me that this is something you need to change right now. The kid can't sleep in the Senora's bed, the kid needs to sleep with his mother, and that's you. Settle him down in your bed, so he can smell your own scent, and make sure you really look at him, do you hear what I'm saying?..."
The second matter was to find him a name. They left the bedroom, sat themselves down one beside the other on the sofa and (while Senor Blinder, who had just broken off communications, went off into the bedroom to give a compromising look at the little creature) they began reviewing the first names.
Anyone could see that Rosa was tired, and that the one thing she longed for was to go to sleep - if at all possible, beside her son - that she was making an exceptional effort to quell the Senora's anxieties, all the while she was attempting to resolve the queries around the sleeping arrangements. Should she also lie down in Senora Blinder's bed next to her son, or was the Senora waiting for her to tell her she needed to rest and spend a while alone with her son, in order for the two of them immediately to rise to their feet, to go and fetch him, and to bring him to his room?
While Rosa was mulling all this over, Maria learned which gender the baby was.
"What do you think of the name Gonzalo?" enquired Senora Blinder.
(A boy!)
"Oh no, Senora, pardon me for saying so, but," Rosa lied, "my cousin is called Gonzalo and I could tell you stories about him you wouldn't begin to want to hear..."
"Or what about Federico? Federico sounds very nice..."
"Do you know which name I like the best?" asked Rosa.
Maria bent his ear.
At that moment Senor Blinder left the bedroom with an air so resoundingly indifferent to Rosa's new son it was deafening. But Maria failed even to notice. All his attention was fixed on what Rosa would say next.
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