Don't Move (3 page)

Angela, there’s an empty chair right behind you, behind your innocent back. And there’s an empty chair inside of me. I look at it, at its back and its legs, I wait, and I seem to hear something. It’s the sound of hope. I know about hope. I’ve heard it busily throbbing in dying bodies, I’ve seen it dawn in the eyes of a thousand patients, I’ve felt it sputter and stall every time I’ve moved my hands and decided the course of someone’s life. I know exactly how I’m deluding myself. I stare at the dark flecks on this floor—they’re moving slowly now, like soot—and I delude myself into thinking that I see a woman in that empty chair, even if only for a moment, filling it not with her body, no, but with her pity. I see two low-cut wine-colored shoes, two bare legs, a forehead that’s too high. And already she’s there in front of me, come to remind me that I’m a plague-spreader, a man who marks others for misfortune, carelessly including those who love him. You don’t know her—she passed through my life before you were born, but her passage left an indelible imprint, like a fossil. I want to reach out to you, Angela; I want to join you in that tangle of tubes where you’re lying, where the craniotome is about to break your head open, and tell you the story of that woman.

2

I met her in a bar, one of those bars you find on the outskirts of big cities. The coffee was as bad as the smell coming from the half-open door of the toilet, which was located behind an old Foosball table whose players had been decapitated by the competitive zeal of the bar’s patrons. The heat was suffocating. As I did every Friday, I had been driving to join your mother at the beach house we rented on the seashore south of the city. On the way, without so much as a tremor, my car had died; it had gone out like a match on the deserted highway that ran between some parched, dirty-looking fields and a few industrial sheds. I was on the outer fringe of the outskirts, and the only buildings I could see were off in the distance. I had to walk to them in the broiling sun. It was early in July, sixteen years ago.

By the time I got to the bar, I was quite sweaty and unhappy. I ordered a coffee and a glass of water and asked where I might find an automobile mechanic. She was off to one side, bent over and rummaging in the cooler. “There’s no whole milk?” were the first words I ever heard her say. They were addressed to the boy behind the bar, a boy with a pimply face and a small discolored apron tied tightly around his waist. “Dunno,” he said, serving me my water with one hand and carefully sliding a dripping pewter saucer under the glass with the other. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and she placed a carton of skim milk an inch or so away from me on the bar. She slipped her hand into a tiny coin purse, a child’s purse made of flowered plastic and closed with a catch. She took out some money and put it down next to the milk. “There’s a mechanic,” she said, picking up her change, “but I don’t know if he’s open.” I turned around at the sound of that voice, as toneless as the mew of a cat. Our eyes met for the first time. She was neither beautiful nor very young, with badly bleached hair and a thin but strong-boned face. She was wearing too much makeup, which made her bright eyes look sad. She left the milk on the bar and walked over to the jukebox. Despite all the sun outside, the place was dark, it smelled like a backed-up sewer, and soon it was filled with the tedious sounds of an English rock group that was very much in vogue in those days. She stood against the jukebox, practically clutching it, closed her eyes, and began to move her head slowly from side to side. She stayed like that, a quivering shape in the shadows in the back of the room. The bartender glided out from behind the bar and stood at the door to give me directions. I went all the way around the block, but I couldn’t find the mechanic’s shop. The streets were empty of people. Up above my head, an old man on a balcony was shaking out a tablecloth. I went into the bar again, sweatier than before.

“I couldn’t find it,” I said. I took some paper napkins out of a metal container and dried my forehead.

The jukebox had fallen silent, but she was still there. She was sitting on a chair, a dazed expression on her face, staring into space and chewing a piece of gum. She got up, took her carton of milk from the bar, and bid the bartender good-bye. When she reached the door, she stopped. “I’m passing right in front of the shop. If you want . . .”

I followed behind her in the scorching sun. She was wearing a purple T-shirt and a short lizard-green skirt, and on her feet she had a pair of high-heeled sandals, narrow strips of multicolored leather, above which her thin legs exerted themselves clumsily. She carried her milk in a patchwork purse with an extremely long shoulder strap, which almost reached her knee. She walked quickly, paying no attention to me, never turning around, dragging her feet along the uneven pavement, hugging the walls.

She stopped in front of a rolling shutter pulled all the way down. According to a small piece of yellowed paper taped to the metal, the shop was closed and would reopen in a couple of hours. I thought about your mother; I had to call her and tell her of my plight. Perspiration was running from my head, behind my ears, along my shirt collar. We stopped in the middle of the street. She turned toward me, just her head, and looked at me. Her eyes were half-closed because of the sultry air and the bright sun. “You have a bit of paper on your forehead.”

I felt around on my sweaty skin for the remnant of that bar napkin. I asked her, “Is there a telephone booth around here?”

“You have to go back, it’s in the other direction. I don’t know if it works. They break everything here.”

Still chewing her gum, working her jaws vigorously, she kept one hand raised to ward off the sun. Her eyes, which turned out to be pale gray now that we were out in the open, ran over me swiftly, taking me in. She didn’t look like a person who was afraid of strangers, but perhaps my tie and the wedding ring on my finger reassured her.

“If you want, you can use my telephone. I live back there,” she said, stretching her neck out toward an unspecified location on the other side of the street. She crossed over without looking. I followed her along a dirt path leading downhill, then through a labyrinth of increasingly spectral edifices, until we came to an apartment building that was still under construction, though some of its apartments were already occupied. There were naked steel girders where terraces should have been and gaping holes that opened onto the void and were blocked by upended bedsprings.

“We’ll take the shortcut,” she said, heading for the unfinished building.

We walked among the concrete pillars of what seemed to be an enormous abandoned parking garage, where we finally found some respite from the sun. Then we stepped into a dark lobby covered with spray-painted graffiti. It stank like a public urinal, and the stench was mingled with a fried-food smell coming from who knew where. The elevator door was wide open. The panel with the buttons was uncovered, the wires exposed.

“We’ll walk up,” she said. I followed her up several flights of stairs. Sudden screams occasionally pierced the silence, and the light of television sets flickered in the darkness like signal flashes from hellish lives. The filthy stairs were littered with used hypodermic needles. She stepped over them casually, lifting her bare feet in their flimsy sandals. I wanted to go back, Angela. I whirled around at every noise, expecting someone to jump me from behind, someone who would rob me or maybe even kill me, some accomplice of the vulgar woman who was leading me on. Her purse thudded against the stairs, raising a cloud of dust, and from time to time her smell, a warm, stale mixture of makeup and perspiration, reached my nostrils. I heard her murmur, “It’s disgusting, but it’s the fastest way,” as though she had read my fearful thoughts. She spoke with a slight southern accent, lingering gloomily on some syllables and aborting others.

She climbed up one more flight, then walked rapidly through the dirt covering the floor and stopped in front of a metal door. Thrusting a finger into the hole where the lock should have been, she pulled the heavy obstacle toward her. Light struck me in the face so violently that I had to raise an arm to protect myself; the sun seemed very close. “This way,” she said, and I saw her body drop out of sight.
She’s nuts. I’m
following a woman with a diseased mind. She picked me up in
that bar just so I could watch her commit suicide.
I found myself standing at the top of an exterior stairway. It was a fire escape, a plunging iron spiral. She was descending the steps fearlessly; from where I stood, I could see the dark roots of her blond hair. Now she looked unbelievably agile in her high heels, like a small boy, like a cat. I ventured into the coils of that spiral staircase, holding tightly to the rusty tubes and bolts of the handrail. My jacket caught on something; I pulled at it and heard the fabric rip. I was startled by a sudden roar, and there before my eyes, very close, was a gigantic viaduct. On the other side of the guardrail, cars were whizzing by. I couldn’t figure out where we were, so I stopped and looked around. The woman was below me, standing on an embankment some distance away. With her peroxided blond hair, her painted face, and her multicolored bag, she looked like a clown left behind by the circus.

“Here we are!” she shouted.

And, in fact, there was a structure behind her, an old pink wall that didn’t seem to belong to any visible house. She turned toward that wall, and now I saw that it was part of a freestanding dwelling, a sort of minuscule villa crumbling away right under the piers of the viaduct. We walked through a small thicket of dusty shrubs, then climbed two steps to a porch. The door was made of green staves, the same color as her skirt. She stretched an arm toward the rows of bricks above the door and detached a key stuck up there with a piece of chewing gum. She opened the door, took the gum out of her mouth, stuck it to the key, and pressed the whole wad back into place over the door. While she was stretched out like that, I looked at her exposed armpit—not shaved, but not bushy, either. Just a tuft of long, fine hairs, plastered together by sweat.

A diagonal beam of sunlight cut through the air inside the room. That was the first thing that struck me, together with a mixture of odors that reminded me of a house in the country: the smell of soot, overlaid by the sour tang of bleach and rat poison. The room was square, with a coffee-colored stone floor. On the far wall was a fireplace like a big sorry black mouth. The interior of the room was dignified and orderly, though somewhat indistinct because the light came from a single window. The shutters were set ajar, and one of the columns of the viaduct showed through the opening. Three Swedish-style chairs were pushed under a table covered by a patterned oilcloth. Next to this was an open door, through which I could glimpse a kitchen cupboard with an imitation-cork veneer. She said, “I’ll put the milk in the refrigerator,” and stepped into the kitchen.

She had claimed to have a telephone. I looked for it in vain on a low table with an ashtray in the shape of a seashell, on a lacquered chest of drawers littered with knickknacks, on an old couch rejuvenated by a cloth covering with a floral design. I noticed a poster hanging on the wall. It was a studio photograph, artificially lit and decorated with little plastic umbrellas, and it captured for posterity a monkey wearing a baby’s cap and holding a baby’s bottle.

She came back quickly. “The telephone’s over there, in the bedroom,” she said, gesturing at a curtain made of plastic strips right behind my back.

“Thanks,” I murmured, looking at this bit of barroom decor and once again fearing an ambush. She smiled, revealing a row of small defective teeth.

On the other side of the curtain was a narrow room almost entirely occupied by a double bed with no headboard and a tobacco-colored bedspread. A crucifix, slightly askew, hung against the wallpaper. The telephone was on the floor, sitting next to its baseboard jack. I picked up the receiver, sat on the bed, and dialed Elsa’s number. In my mind, I followed the ringing of the phone as it penetrated the beach house. It ran over the coconut-fiber rug in the living room, climbed up the bright stairs to the second floor, entered the large bathroom with the mirror fragments set into the indigo blue plaster, brushed over the linen sheets of the still-unmade bed, over the desk piled high with books, drifted through the gauze curtains into the garden and over to the pergola, which was overgrown with white jasmine blossoms, then to the hammock, and then to my old pith helmet with the rusty eyelets; but there was no response. Maybe Elsa was swimming, or maybe she’d already come out of the water. I thought about her body, stretched out on the beach, and about the water licking at her legs. The telephone was ringing away, unheard. I ran my hand over the chenille bedspread, and at the same time I spotted a pair of worn fuchsia slippers tucked under a cheap-looking dresser. Leaning on the mirror was the photograph of a young man, obviously taken long ago. I felt uncomfortable in that room, sitting on a stranger’s bed, in the sleeping quarters of the deranged clown who was waiting for me a few feet away. One of the dresser drawers was partly open, revealing a swatch of red satin. Almost without noticing it, I slipped a hand into the crack and touched the slippery fabric. The clown’s face poked through the plastic strips.

“Would you like some coffee?”

I sat down on the sofa in front of the monkey poster. Something in my throat was bothering me; it felt dry and grainy. I gazed around me, and that modest setting seemed to augment my physical discomfort. On a bookshelf, a porcelain doll holding a sheer parasol pressed her frightened face against the first in a row of identical volumes, one of those general encyclopedias you can buy in installments. The dreariness was all of a piece, well cared for, honorable. I looked at the woman, who was coming toward me with a tray in her hands. Considered against the background of her house, she seemed less lively; she took on a shabby decency that was perfectly in keeping with her surroundings. They depressed me. For one thing, there was that collection of knickknacks next to my arm. I hate furniture cluttered with trinkets, Angela, as you well know. I like an unencumbered surface, with maybe a lamp in one corner and a book or two, nothing more. My shoulder twitched with a sudden impulse to fling out my arm and knock all that trash to the floor. She served me the coffee. “How much sugar?”