Don't Move (4 page)

I attached my lips to the cup and took a sip. The coffee was good, but my mouth was deadened by fatigue and ill humor, and so the liquid left a coating of bitterness on my tongue. The woman came and sat at some little distance from me on the sofa. The light was behind her, but her frayed bangs failed to hide her high forehead. It was too high, too prominent for the rest of her face, which gathered around the furrow between her nose and her heavily painted mouth in a single fixed grimace. I looked at the hand she was holding the espresso cup with. The flesh around her short fingernails, which she no doubt chewed, was red and swollen. I thought about the smell of stale saliva on those fingertips and shuddered. As I did so, she bent forward. I saw a dog’s muzzle appear from under the sofa. A sleepy middle-sized dog with a dark, wavy coat and long amber ears. He licked her hand, including those nibbled nails, as happy as though he’d received a reward.

“Heartbreaker,” she whispered, rubbing her big forehead against the dog’s. He noticed me, but he seemed to look at me without interest, and I saw that his eyes were strangely clouded. She gathered up the tray and the dirty cups. “He’s blind,” she said in a lowered voice, as though she didn’t want the beast to hear her.

“Would you give me a glass of water?”

“Do you feel all right?”

“No, I’m hot.”

She turned around. As she walked to the kitchen, I observed her buttocks. They were as thin as a man’s. My gaze slid over her entire retreating body: her narrow, curved back, the empty space between her legs where her thighs should have met. This was not a desirable body. Indeed, it looked downright inhospitable. Swaying on her high heels, she came back to where I was sitting and handed me a glass of water, then stood there and waited for me to give her back the glass. “Do you feel better?”

Yes, I did; the water had cleaned my mouth.

She didn’t accompany me to the door. “Well then, thank you,” I said.

“Don’t mention it.”

The heat was still there, hanging heavy in the air, imperceptibly shifting things. The asphalt felt soft under my feet. I took up a position next to the closed shutter and started waiting for the shop to reopen. I was sweating again, and I was thirsty again. I went back to the bar. I asked for a glass of water, but when the young bartender with the pimply face stepped aside, I got a good view of the row of bottles behind his head, changed my mind, and ordered a vodka. I had him pour it into a tall glass and requested some ice, which he doled out from the bottom of an aluminum container. Maybe as it melts, I thought, it’ll give off the same smell as the rest of the place, rancid mayonnaise and sour floor cloths. I walked over to the far side of the barroom and sat down next to the jukebox. I took a long, noisy swallow; the alcohol penetrated me like a sharp pain, like a hot flash that turns at once into an intense, protracted chill. I looked at my watch—I still had more than an hour to wait.

I wasn’t used to intervals, Angela. I was barely forty, and already I’d been a chief surgeon for five years, the youngest in the hospital. My private practice was growing, and with some reluctance, but more and more often, I performed operations in private clinics. I caught myself appreciating those places, where the patients had to pay and where everything was clean, well organized, and silent. I was barely forty, and maybe I had already fallen out of love with my profession. When I was a young man, I was impetuous, always in motion. After my internship, my first years in practice were febrile, vigorous, like the time I punched a nurse because he hadn’t waited for the steam autoclave, which sterilizes the instruments, to complete its cycle correctly. Then, almost without my noticing, a veil of peacefulness, accompanied by a mild feeling of disenchantment, came over me. When I talked about it with your mother, she said that I was simply slipping into the habit of adult life, making a necessary and by and large agreeable transition. I was barely forty, and I’d given up taking offense some time ago. It wasn’t that I would have sold my soul to the devil; it was just that I hadn’t offered it to the gods. I’d kept it in my pocket, and there it was now, in the pocket of my lightweight summer suit, inside that ugly bar.

The vodka gave me a spark of life. A tall young man, filthy with dust and mortar, glared at the fan and its motionless blades. As he headed for the Foosball table, followed by his stocky friend, he blurted out, “It’s hot! Turn on the fan!” With a brusque yank, he pulled the cylindrical handle on the table, and the balls started to roll in the wooden belly. The stocky boy threw in the first ball, dramatically letting it fall to the playing field from high above his head, apparently some kind of ritual, and then the game began. The two of them said little to each other. Their hands gripped the handles tightly as they flipped their wrists, striking hard, precise blows that made the metal rods vibrate. The bartender slouched out from behind the bar, drying his hands on his towel, and turned on the fan. As he was walking back, I handed him my glass and said, “Bring me another one, please.” The fan blades began moving, sluggishly stirring up the hot air in the bar. A napkin fluttered to the floor, and I bent over to retrieve it. I noticed a few revolting piles of sawdust and, a bit farther away, the legs of the two Foosball players. By the time I straightened up, my head was heavy with blood, and the sudden movement made my brain reel. The bartender brought the glass of vodka to my table. I drank the whole thing in one gulp. My eyes floated toward the jukebox. It was an old model, speckled blue in color, with a little window. When a song was playing, you could look into the jukebox and see the metal tonearm gliding across the record. I thought, I’d like to hear a song. Any song at all. That woman’s face came back into my mind. Wearing too much makeup, looking dazed and coarse, she was swaying in the light that came from the lower part of the music machine. A ball leaped off the Foosball table and rolled across the floor. On my way out, I left the young bartender a handsome tip. He laid aside the sponge he was using to wipe off the bar and gathered the money into his dripping hands.

I walked back to the mechanic’s shop. In front of me, a group of half-naked children were laboriously hauling a cart containing a large plastic garbage bag filled with water and leaking from many holes. The mechanic had finally hoisted his rolling shutter, but only partway, and I had to duck to enter the shop. Inside, under the oiled breasts of a calendar girl, I found a powerfully built man of about my own age, wearing overalls too tight for him and black with grease. He and I climbed into an old Citroën Dyane with blazing hot seats and drove to where I’d left my car. It needed a new oil pump and a cylinder sleeve. We went back to the shop to pick up the required parts. The mechanic discharged me in front of the shop, tossed what he needed into his trunk, and drove away.

I loafed about aimlessly for a while. My shirt was drenched with sweat and my eyeglasses were fogged, but I didn’t care about the heat anymore. This calm indifference was due to the alcohol, but it also happened to correspond to one of my most secret desires. I’d been driving myself hard during all those years of success; I was always where I should be, always traceable. Now, purely by chance, I was flying under the radar, and I assented to my temporary freedom, which I saw as an unexpected reward. Now I would offer no further resistance; I’d let myself explore my new situation, like a tourist. I went back to the unfinished apartment building. The children, having poured the water from their trash bag onto a mound of pozzolana, were molding the stuff into a sort of hut that looked like a big black egg. I stood there stupefied and watched them under the hammering sun.

My mother never wanted me to go out into the courtyard and play with the other children. After her marriage, she’d had to adjust to living in a poor neighborhood. It wasn’t a sad part of the city at all; it was crowded and lively, and it wasn’t even very far from the center. But your grandmother refused to look out the windows. In her view, our neighborhood wasn’t sad—sadness was something she knew how to bear. No, it was much worse than that; it was one step above absolute penury. She lived a sequestered life in that apartment, as though it were a cloud where she had reconstructed her life, where she had settled in with her piano and her son. During certain languid afternoon hours, I would have liked to join all that teeming life I saw going on downstairs, but I couldn’t bring myself to humiliate her. I pretended that the downstairs world didn’t exist for me, either. She would hustle me onto the bus that took us to her family home, to her mother, and in that setting, amid all those trees and those elegant houses, I could finally open my eyes. When my mother was there, she was radiant; she was another person altogether. We’d lie down together on the bed in her old room and laugh and laugh. She was filled with new energy; she shone with new beauty. Then she’d put her overcoat back on and assume her normal look. We’d catch the bus back home long after dark, when everything was pitch-black outside. She’d run from the bus stop to our front door, terrified by the abyss that surrounded her.

My mother’s face passed before my eyes—or rather, her faces, one after another, all the way to the end of the sequence, when her face was closed in death and I asked the sexton to leave me alone with her for a moment so that I could look at it one last time. I chased away that image by angrily shaking my head.

Now I’ll go back to get my car. I’ll pay the mechanic, turn
on the engine, and drive home to Elsa. Her hair will still be wet,
along with her gauzy primrose-colored shirt. We’ll go to that restaurantand sit at that table in the back and look at the lights of
the gulf shining through the darkness. I’ll let her drive so I can lay
my head on her shoulder. . . .

She didn’t look surprised. In fact, I got the feeling she’d been expecting me. She blushed when she stepped back to let me in. I entered awkwardly, inadvertently stumbling into the bookshelf on the wall. The porcelain doll fell to the floor. I bent down to pick it up. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, swaying toward me. She was wearing a different T-shirt. This one was white, ornamented with a gaudy paste flower. She murmured, “How’s your car?”

Her voice was uncertain, and so was her mouth, with all the lipstick gone. I looked past her shoulder at her tidy, wretched house, and it seemed even drearier than it had a little while ago. But this didn’t bother me. In fact, I took a mysterious pleasure in the sensation that everything around me was incontestably dismal. “They’re fixing it,” I said.

Her hands were behind her back, and I could hear her rubbing them together. She lowered her eyes, then raised them again. It seemed to me that her whole body was quivering imperceptibly, but maybe I was only drunk.

“You want to use the telephone?”

“Yes.”

Once again, I went into the bedroom; once again, I stroked the tobacco-colored chenille bedspread. I looked at the telephone. I looked at it as though it were made of plastic, a toy that wouldn’t put me in touch with anybody or anything. I didn’t even touch it. I closed the dresser drawer. I straightened out Jesus on the wall. Then I stood up and walked toward the door. I just wanted to get out of there. The vodka had left me with a dull headache and no manners.
Maybe I won’t go to the beach house; maybe I’ll go back to the city
and get in bed, I don’t want to do anything or see anyone.

“No answer?”

“No.”

There’s that cold fireplace behind her, empty and black as a toothless mouth. I catch her by the arm and hold on. She breathes through her mouth; her breath is like a rat’s breath. Suddenly, her face is quite close to me, and it changes shape. Her eyes with their dark shadows look huge; they dart about under her eyebrows like two imprisoned insects. I’m twisting her arm. She’s so alien to me, and so close. I think about hawks, about how frightened of them I was as a little boy. I raise my hand to knock her far away from me, her and her knickknacks and her poverty. But instead, I grab the paste flower on her shirt and pull her against me. She tries to bite my hand, working her jaws in the air. I don’t yet know what she has to be afraid of, I don’t know what I intend to do. I only know that my other hand is pulling that coarse hair of hers very hard, I’ve got a handful of it, and I’m holding it like an ear of corn. Then I go at her with my teeth. I gouge her chin and her hard, frightened lips. I let her groan, because now she has a good reason, now that I’ve torn that paste flower off her chest and seized her skinny breasts and started to knead them. And now my hands are between her legs, between her bones. She averts her eyes from my fury, lowers her chin to her neck, raises one vague arm above her head. And that arm trembles, because I find her sex, as lean as the rest of her, and I’ve already got mine in my hand. I thrust her quickly against the wall— no, more than quickly—and her yellow head jerks downward. She’s a loose-limbed puppet, slumped backward against the wall. I pull her up by the jawbone, drooling into her ear. My saliva runs down her back while I thrash inside her bony cavity like a raptor in a captured nest. And thus I make an utter ruin of her, of myself, and of that muddled afternoon.

I don’t know if she was panting afterward; maybe she was crying. She lay on the floor, clasping her body. Quite beside myself, I retreated hastily to the other side of the room. The blind dog’s muzzle, resting on one paw, protruded from under the sofa. I could see his hanging ears, his clouded eyes. The unmoving monkey on the wall kept sucking his bottle. My glasses were on the floor near the door; one lens was broken. I took a few steps and bent to pick them up. Then I stuffed my wet shirttails back into my pants and left the house without a word.

The car was parked in front of the mechanic’s shop with the key in the switch. I started the engine and drove away. Soon I was going down the long, straight highway, past stands of wild pine and thickets of withered reeds. I hit the brakes but failed to come to a full stop, then opened my door and vomited while the car was moving. I fumbled around under the seat and brought out my bottle of water. The plastic container was hot, and so were its contents. I rinsed out my mouth, stuck my head out the window, and poured what was left in the bottle over my head. The road ran on, as did the smell of great heat, mingled now with the odor of the sea, which was very close. I let go of the steering wheel and raised my hands to my face so I could sniff them. I was looking for a trace of my brutality, Angela. But all I could detect was the odor of rust, perhaps from the fire escape. I spat on my hands. I spat on those creases: my life line, my head line, my heart line. Then I rubbed my palms together until they burned like fire.