Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  But, of course, the ordeal could be even more exhausting when actors and directors were old friends: the mandatory pilgrimage to the dressing room to cover them with kisses and hugs and regale their ears with praise and compliments, adulation and congratulations, flattery and reverence. “Rubbing down the horses,” that’s what Gloria sarcastically called the need to adulate at regular intervals insecure creative types who thought themselves stars.

  But on occasion it was impossible to avoid those hateful premieres: the people who sent you the invite could get offended if you dared decline it; they didn’t understand your not coming, they took your rejection as an insult and as a clear lack of interest. That day, for example. When Gloria was about to show her creature to the public, Diego had no option but to attend the premiere, even though he knew she would take refuge in the Boulevard’s cocktail lounge for the length of the play, knocking back the gin and tonics, reliving an ancient ritual.

  He hadn’t been able to escape the occasion, especially since he had translated the script himself and had systematically rejected every single one of Gloria’s requests to attend rehearsals.

  He tried to appear as late as possible, pushing time to the limit. He regretted not having left his coat in the coat check. Although it was cold outside, he felt slightly overheated inside the theater, he had no other alternative but to rest the folded, thick item of clothing on his knees.

  He diverts his eyes toward that proscenium to avoid acknowledging the president of the Basque Writers’ Association, and it is then that he spots Gloria smoking a cigarette in the semidarkness, exactly where smoking is strictly prohibited, ready to head to the cocktail lounge: she greets him, waving the smoke with her hand, and Lazkano raises his, imitating a gesture that looks a lot like the raised fists that populated the demonstrations of their youth. “Forza, Gloria, I believe in you”; or “be brave, Gloria, soul sister, dearest, crazy friend.”

  There are only two empty seats on his row, the two to his left. While he is sitting there, with his coat on his lap, before he is even able to take a glance at the program at hand, the last bell rings and the lights start gradually dimming. In that precise moment, as if to prove to Diego that other people cut things even thinner than him, a couple join the fifth row. The couple come to sit on the only two free seats next to him. Lazkano smells the woman’s sweetish perfume, hears her apologetic whispers to the others in their row. Without raising his eyes from the program in his hands, he steals a glance toward the woman’s lap, but he can’t confirm his intuition, he only catches a glimpse of her white hands.

  When the woman addresses a few words to the person who must be her husband, sitting in the next seat, Diego finds the voice familiar. He almost stops breathing when he thinks he’s recognized her. He foresees what is about to happen: the woman he hasn’t seen in more than twenty years will break his stupor with “Diego, it’s been so long,” her perfect teeth, the shiny puddles of her green eyes, her raven hair framing the tunnel of her pale face, Ana’s face; they will kiss, awkwardly, giving each other kisses rather than dispensing them, and, revealing a certain surprise whose agreeableness or disagreeableness is hard to ascertain, she will introduce him to her husband, “this is Fernando,” or “Fidel,” who the hell knows what’s the absurd name of that hateful husband who’s most certainly not good enough and certainly too common for a woman of her category. She will ask him if he’s there alone, and Diego, in a slightly pathetic way, will answer that he is, he’ll have no other option but to say that “yes, I’m here alone,” highlighting not his solitary autonomy, not his entrenched and interesting bohemian life, but each and every fold of his painful, grim loneliness; “more than twenty years have passed and I have no one to bring to the theater, there you have the heartbreaking breakdown of the two long decades we’ve spent without seeing each other,” a synopsis that could be offered without a need to resort to the program at hand. “You were the vanishing point I turned my back to, my only choice, I’ve spent ten years thinking you were the woman of my life, and another ten thinking that I spent ten years thinking you were the woman of my life, and I no longer know what to think, what conclusion to derive from all this.” He won’t tell her any of that, of course, but he hopes that she will be able to read it in his eyes. In the brief lapse of lightening that illuminated nothing, Lazkano had the chance to rewind his memories up to that point, to get ahead of what might happen but hasn’t happened in the end, because no lightening is good enough and all the theater lights are switched off now and, since there isn’t an orchestra in the pit either, the bloodred curtain has risen not to the clash of cymbals, but to the speedy drum of his own heartbeat.

  His cardiac rhythm hasn’t settled yet, and much as he tries to focus on what’s happening on stage, his thoughts meander to the woman sitting next to him over and over again; to keep his neck straight and look ahead to avoid the shiny green puddles of Ana’s eyes requires a superhuman effort from him. Has she seen me? he asks himself repeatedly, Did she see me in that moment when the lights went off and the curtain started to rise? Did she notice, could she have realized that it’s me? And, if that’s the case, could she have recognized me after so many years? And, if she did, could she have really recognized me, without the shadow of a doubt, or only half recognized me, like when we think we detect someone’s resemblance in someone but are not able to specify who it is that they remind us of, and doubtfully wonder is-it-or-is-it-not? She has plenty of reasons to hate me, but, does she still hate me from the bottom of her heart, because I left without saying a word, because I disappeared from her life from one day to the next? He guesses and neurotically second-guesses that she must have recognized him, that she’s doubtlessly aware of his current looks through seeing his photographs in newspapers, that she must have decided to ignore him to avoid the awkwardness of the situation, because women are good at detecting such things, women know when to leave a party in time, they are absolute masters of the art of the disappearing act. But, on the other hand, he thinks it’s ugly to behave like that, they are so close, they could hold hands if they wanted, they could smell each other; maybe that’s what it is, it’s about the awkwardness and about the fact that she loves him and hates him still; otherwise she would greet him openly, introducing him to her husband, “this is Fernando” or “Fidel”, whatever the absurd name of that undeserving and hateful husband of hers was. Could he put his hand on the fire? Is he absolutely certain of the identity of the woman sitting next to him? Is it all a cruel joke of fate? Could it all be a perverse mirage? It could well be that the woman next to him wasn’t who he thought she was, maybe the combination of his deranged desires and deepest anxiety had betrayed him, maybe his prejudices and his fears of meeting someone unexpectedly in the theater had fooled his subconscious mind and were teasing him mercilessly. But no, he’s completely certain: she is Ana.

  Under the bluish and almost watery light of the stage, a man and a woman – La Bella Ines herself – open and close windows in silence, and change the sheets of an unmade bed, and although Diego keeps his eyes locked on the stage, his mind is very far from there, the shifts he hardly distinguishes on the boards are clearly displaced by another play, an old performance, from his youth, which overlaps and gets confused with what he’s seeing. Who would have told him that he was going to encounter the great love of his life sitting in the seat next to his on the precise day in which his translation of Gloria’s damned play was being premiered?

  Those happy, those fragrant days, thanks to Ana: touching each other and trying to make things different each time, one caresses the other’s face, for example, after peeling an orange with his fingers, it doesn’t matter if his fingers are cold between her legs, and later against his nose, cold and smelling of orange. It’s all Diego needs. They are one of those couples people envy when they see them walk down the street; so attuned to each other they even smile in the same way: they’re like loving siblings, and should disguise their happiness to dampen the disgust they induce in
jealous pedestrians. They’ve infected each other not only with their gestures, but also with each other’s reasons to be happy. Impossible not to remember how, when they started living together, they used to compete to see who could do the dishes first, who could make the bed first, to surprise the other and see their smile when they realized that the job they were about to do had been completed by the other; and to make love then, tearing the sheets from the bed, unmaking the bed that had just been made.

  Those moments seemed condemned to become an eternal loop; however, they’re abruptly interrupted. Or perhaps not completely, nothing has been interrupted in that regard: everything is a helpless, repeating loop, but his attention turns completely from the disconcerting unease he breathes in that seat toward, now for sure, what is taking place on the stage. One of the actors who’s joined the scene is to blame, his face, the first few words he pronounces when he sits at the piano and plays a few notes, the broken timbre of that voice when he says: “It’s hot!”

  It’s Vengerovich. The actor who plays Vengerovich, the member of Gloria’s father’s stamp collectors’ club. “This heat, like the Jew that I am, reminds me of Palestine. They tell me that it’s very hot there.” Vengerovich tries to describe hell, and Diego Lazkano’s heart freezes.

  Old Vengerovich, vengeful Vengerovich, Abram Abramich Vengerovich the detector of plagiarisms. “Only, you didn’t write that article yourself, Doctor, but Porfiri Seminovich…Everything can be known, it’s a matter of finding out things.”

  Lazkano swallows saliva and his stomach takes a leap, a double somersault.

  There he was. It was him.

  “He’s so into theater, you know. He used to love the stage, but had to give it up because he wasn’t making enough to live on. Now he doles out the parts. Se encarga del reparto.”

  “Get it? Do you know what he means when he says I dole out the parts? Soy yo quien reparte.”

  That voice hadn’t aged one bit. Although he’d never seen his face at any point, he knew it was him: his hunched walk had become more marked with the years, and the chisel of two decades had made his husky voice even huskier. But, what was that man doing in that theater ensemble? How could that be? He started pulling at the thread, trying to unravel the ball of yarn in his head. Gloria, her conflictive relationship with her father, “you know that my father is a facha, he’s going to try to provoke you, just go along with him. It’s easier that way”; what she had to agree to in exchange for his making her bail, because nothing is for free and there are some things one cannot say no to: “He also wants me to include an old friend of his from his stamp collectors’ club in the cast…Ever since he’s been sick, I submit to all his blackmail.”

  Fabian and Fabian.

  Fabian is Vengerovich.

  As the minutes pass, Lazkano feels he’s levitating. Even though every now and then a loose sentence from some other character, like Petrin, manages to get through his ears and get into his brain (“When they’re born, humans choose one of three paths in life, there’s nothing else: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you eat the wolves; if you go straight ahead, you eat yourself”), but Platonov and Vengerovich prevail over all the others, sucking his attention:

  VENGEROVICH: I need you…To a certain degree…Let’s walk a bit farther…Keep a distance, as if we weren’t talking…Lower your voice…Do you know Platonov?

  OSSIP: The schoolmaster? Of course.

  Diego Lazkano knows very well what comes next. How could he not, when he’s translated it himself? How could he not know it, when he’s been Platonov’s very reincarnation during the past few weeks? The villain Ossip and the schoolmaster Platonov have been his bedfellows, they’ve dirtied his sheets by transpiring their gargantuan alcoholic intake into them, they’ve pushed him to the edge of the precipice. He knows very well what comes next, because he wrote it. And because he wrote it, he’s suffered it in his own flesh.

  VENGEROVICH: Yes, the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster who teaches how to insult the world and nothing else. How much would it cost me to injure the schoolmaster?

  OSSIP: What do you mean by injure?

  “What do you mean by injure, Fabian? What do you mean by injure, Vengerovich? Tell me, please, tell me what you mean.”

  VENGEROVICH: I don’t mean to kill him, just injure him…Thou shalt not kill…Why kill? Murder is so…Injure him, hit him and beat him up enough so he’ll remember for the rest of his life.

  “Nothing more than that, Fabian? Only that? What happened with Soto and Zeberio then? Did you do the same to them? Or were you not among them?”

  OSSIP: All right, that’s within my scope…

  VENGEROVICH: Break something, disfigure him…How much will that cost me? Shh…Someone’s coming…Let’s walk a bit farther…

  Nailed to his seat, Diego holds tight to its arms, although what he would really like to do is hold on to the hand of the woman sitting next to him – to have to hold on to an object rather than a person, what a sad turn. How to forget that hand that rests on the arm of the adjacent seat, that hand with the very well kept nails, which ran across his body, caressing it, which took his erect penis when it unexpectedly slipped out and slipped it back in to keep riding it, which turned sticky with his sperm, and sticky too the spaces between her fingers, her eyelashes once, a drop of sperm on her forehead, by her hairline, the arch of her back naked on the mirror, how to forget that, how to forget so many promises they’d made each other, that chimera of a future they built with words, how many castles in the air, names for their children that were never born, precarious constructions that came down like a house of cards, the scent of orange and coffee, naïve dreams from the age when naïveté is like a bunker and doesn’t inspire compassion but tenderness, but yes, he had to forget all that, he had no option but to do that: the woman sitting next to him has been erased from his mind in hearing “Fabian” Vengerovich’s voice on the stage.

  He feels a cold sweat on the back of his neck, the folded coat resting on his lap is suffocating him, he would like to leave, but how, he can’t, he could leave the stalls discreetly through a corner, but what would he tell Gloria afterward? “You hired one of the men who tortured me as an actor in your play, well done!” Here is an opportunity if there ever was one to stand up silently in the darkness of the theater, to rise up and make a scandal proclaiming, on the very day of the play’s premiere: “This man tortured me, this man is a beast, how can he be walking the streets, how come he’s not hiding in a sewer forever, why isn’t he ashamed to show his face to the world?” Doesn’t he contemplate the possibility that someone in the audience might be one of his victims? How can this be happening to me, just as I find the woman of my life sitting next to me, a woman I lost more than twenty years ago, a woman I spent ten years thinking was the woman of my life, and another ten thinking that I spent ten years thinking she was the woman of my life; maybe I could hold her hand without her husband noticing and ask her: “Have you forgotten about me, really? I can’t believe you forgot me so easily.”

  Diego knows very well what he must do, of course he knows it, and that’s what he’ll do: he will climb onto the stage and grab Vengerovich by the throat until he stops breathing; after screaming that he’s a torturer, he’ll squeeze his neck until he dies of asphyxia, that’s what he’ll do, and he won’t miss a heartbeat doing it.

  But, what are you thinking, Diego? You are not capable of doing that, not in a million years, any time actors requested a volunteer from the audience you were the guy sinking into his seat; when they turned the lights off on stage and turned them on in the stalls, you were always afraid they would pick you, the idea of standing up and climbing onto the stage was terrifying to you, how far are the days when you’d walk into a scene to say your four lines, you’d be incapable of doing that today, and, even if you were, do you really think they’d let you strangle one of the actors with your own hands? If at least you had a weapon at hand, then yes, everything would be easier, how many assas
sinations have taken place in theaters, Lincoln’s own for example, wasn’t he killed in a theater?

  But Diego is paralyzed, he doesn’t move, he’s not capable of moving.

  He can’t help it: his five senses are on that stage, what’s taking place there subjugates him, body and soul. He unfolds the program on his lap trying to hit on the actor’s name, so many years without being able to even mention the Devil, Fabian, but I’ll be able to do it now, he tells himself, but he can’t see anything in such darkness; even though his eyes have grown accustomed to the dark, he can’t distinguish any names, not with the tenuous blue light that emanates from the stage; such is life, the stage is right there, the truth of the facts, everything happens right in front of your nose, but what little light spreads over events, we’re not the actors who propel them, making the story move forward, it is not us who move on the stage, we’re not lit by stage lights, and, despite that, and besides, only a glimpse of that light reaches us, an insignificant ray, a speck, almost nothing.

  Platonov is dead on the ground.

  “Who will I drink with at the funeral? Tell me: who with?”

  “Kepa, Xabier, tell me: who with? Who will I drink with at your funeral?”

  And a sentence he didn’t remember reading in the original: “You’ve all seen it, it was a suicide.”

  When the play comes to an end, the theater bursts into enthusiastic applause. It’s been a long time since Diego came to see a play, and he doesn’t know if the applause is sincere or bought, spontaneous or fake, or if it’s simply the audience’s attempt at persuading themselves that the past two and a half hours of their lives have not been completely wasted, and that the price they paid for their tickets was money well spent. The play seems to be a success, at any rate. A bunch of flowers for Gloria, another round of effusive applause, most of the audience on their feet, Lazkano included. And although Lazkano wants to look to his side, although what he really wants is to confirm that the woman next to him is who he thought she was, he doesn’t turn toward her; instead, he looks for Vengerovich on the stage, and there he is, grateful for the audience’s response, holding on to Gloria’s hand no less. And Lazkano is terrified now, because people have started to leave the theater, because the couple sitting next to him have been swallowed by the crowd, and because, now that everyone is done with their performance, he is about to start his own, as soon as he meets Gloria in the dressing rooms and she asks him the hateful question: