Gasoline (5 page)

He doesn’t know how to behave. Should he start kissing her right off and, if she resists, force her right then and there? He seems to remember it doesn’t quite go like that. They’ve been in the taxi for quite a while. They haven’t decided where to go, and the driver is showing signs of impatience. Heribert says the first thing that comes into his head:

“Drive straight ahead.”

The taxi drives up the avenue. Heribert wonders what to do. Stick his hand under her skirt, right now? Kiss her first? Talk to her about things that will seduce her? How contrived! It all seems hypocritical. In truth, he is so certain (from the way she’s looking at him; from the way she agreed not to go dancing with Hilari and Hilda; from the way she’s putting up with him, boring as he is; because he can feel it on the surface of his skin) that she likes him as much as he likes her (and realizing this is even more disconcerting) that it all makes him feel even more inhibited.

“You’re awfully quiet. Am I boring you?”

He’s caught in a bind. To say yes is a lie, and to say no seems ridiculous. The dilemma forces him to choose the middle road: he looks deeply into her eyes, as if he were so much in love that her question was absurd and not deserving of a response. When he can no longer maintain her gaze without betraying its emptiness, he kisses her on the cheek imagining that the girl must consider this style of courting to be senile. How old is this girl? Eighteen, at the most? As long as he doesn’t become very aroused, it will be fine. If he manages to look at her coldly, dispassionately, as if contemplating a particularly beautiful porcelain dish, he’ll get by. Maybe he should ask what she does. Is she a student? Does she live alone? Does she live with her parents? These are the things one is supposed to ask.

“Are you a student?”

“Yes. Interior design. Did you know that your paintings are perfect for filling up a sparsely furnished space?”

“Oh.”

Now what should he do next? He thinks they’ve gone quite far up the avenue. He tells the driver:

“Turn right at the next corner, and keep driving straight ahead.”

He looks at the girl again. She studies interior design.

“Do you work? I mean, do you have a job somewhere as a decorator?”

“Yes, with my father. My father is an interior decorator. Don’t you remember? My father: Hannah’s father.”

“Oh. Of course.”

He has absolutely no recollection of what Hannah’s father did for a living.

“Do you live with your parents?”

“No, I live with my mother. My parents are divorced and now I live with Mom. I see Dad in the studio whenever I go to work there.”

How do eighteen- and twenty-year-olds behave nowadays? Do they have the same attacks of shyness that he had, fifteen years ago? The taxi is still driving straight ahead; if he keeps going much farther they’ll end up right in the water.

“Listen,” the driver says, “if I keep going straight we’ll end up right in the water.”

Heribert tells him to turn right, and go down the avenue. He suddenly feels very tired. He decides to wrap things up: he asks Herundina for her phone number. She gives it to him, in exchange for his. He promises to phone her.

“Please do. I’d like very much to see what you’re painting now.”

He leaves her at the door to her mother’s house. What must she look like now? He remembers her from a few years back when he picked Hannah up at home. Every so often while he was in bed with the daughter he would fantasize about the mother.

Then the taxi starts up and takes him home. Heribert pays the driver, who has a sympathetic look on his face, for which Heribert gives him an excessive tip, so that he will realize that if either of them should feel sympathy for the other, it is he for the driver. At home, in the bedroom, he hears the door as he’s undressing. Helena. He hurriedly shuts off the light, gets into bed, and pretends to be asleep.

Heribert
looks at the new, totally blank, canvas he’s placed on the easel. He’s put the paint, brushes, and solvents on a small table. He runs his hand over his cheek. What if, really and truly, he cannot paint another stroke, never again? In his current state of mind, even to entertain a doubt about it seems a sign of valor. This gives him confidence. But when he touches the canvas with the charcoal pencil, he doesn’t know what to draw. Downstairs the phone rings twice. Helena picks it up. He hears her speak: it is such a distant whisper that he wouldn’t be at all
surprised if he had to take a train, a subway, and a bus to get downstairs.

To break the spell, all he has to do is yawn. When he was a child he would endow some gesture with an shamanic power, so that he would get what he was wishing for if he carried out the ritual, like tracing three circles over his belly before going into the classroom where he had to take an exam. He yawns halfheartedly.

Helena calls out to him.

“I’m going shopping. I’ll be back later.”

I’ll be back “later”? One is always back “later” when one goes out. Later than what, then? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have said, “I’ll be right back?” Of course she will buy something so as not to come back empty-handed, but what he’s sure about is that she’s not “going shopping.”

He hears the front door close. He quickly puts on his jacket and coat, leaves the brushes dirty and the paints uncovered, and goes down the stairs.

Once in the street, he’s taken aback: he doesn’t see her anywhere. Then he spots her off in the distance: one very blond head among all the others. He picks up the pace. He runs until she’s a reasonable distance ahead. Then he thinks that that distance isn’t, in fact, very reasonable. He slows down. He thinks: “Now I’ll find out who her lover is. Now this is something I find interesting.” But in his heart of hearts he realizes that it doesn’t really interest him all that much, and he’s sorry. In truth, he doesn’t really care if he never learns what the guy who’s
going out
with Helena looks like, how he dresses, whether or not he’s a nice guy. Helena turns a corner. Heribert follows her.

•

Carrying three shopping bags, Helena takes the same path in reverse. Heribert follows her at a distance. She’s gone to a pastry shop, a boutique, and a bookstore, and she spends so little time in each place that it would be impossible for her to have been with a lover, no matter how efficient the two of them might have been.

Helena searches in her coat pocket for the keys. Heribert watches her from a distance, and when he sees her go in, he goes for a walk so as not to get home right away. He wonders whether to go into a bar. He does. It’s half empty, with wooden paneling and mirrors. Not exactly dark, but lacking in light. He sits down on a barstool, leans on the bar, and when it’s time to order he remembers that not so long ago (today? yesterday? he doesn’t feel like wracking his brain to remember exactly when) he had had trouble in another, different, bar choosing what to drink when the time came. He doesn’t want the situation to repeat itself now, so when the bartender asks him what he’ll have, he looks for something to latch on to. When he sees the beer taps, he feels he’s been saved.

“Draft beer. A pint.”

Later on, when he spies the whisky bottles aligned before the mirror facing him (there is a mirror directly in front of him: he’s been seeing his face reflected in it for a while and hasn’t recognized himself until now), he thinks that if he had seen them first he would have ordered whisky. The waiter serves him the pint. He pays up. He licks off the foam.

•

Heribert opens the door to the house and goes in. Helena is in the kitchen, and she looks up from the carrots she’s chopping.

“I didn’t know where you were.”

“I went out for a walk. I didn’t think you’d be back for lunch.”

“What about you, are you eating at home today?”

“Yes.”

As she prepares the carrots and spinach, Heribert cleans the mushrooms and celery. The morning call must have been Hipòlita, he figures, to warn Helena that he had called last night and she hadn’t known how to answer the questions she wasn’t expecting. Could Helena have thought it didn’t matter? If she has spoken with Hipòlita, she must imagine he has suspicions. Why doesn’t she come up with a lie so good he’ll even have to doubt his own suspicions? Or doesn’t she care? Or does she think that she doesn’t have to cover things up? And why hasn’t she asked him what he’s been working on today? With every hour that goes by he sees more clearly that either he has to begin painting, without stopping, and with an energy that clearly he neither possesses nor desires to create, or when the day comes to hang the canvases, he won’t have a single one, and he will not be opening a single bottle of champagne at a single opening.

•

“You know what?” says Helena as they peel oranges. “I went to the theater with Hester yesterday, and we saw a show that was so good that even you, who claim not to like theater, and never want to go, even you
. . .
”

He’s put off by the way she’s pulled Hester out the hat to let him know that she didn’t go with Hipòlita. It’s as if she were taking him for a fool. Heribert supposes that now Helena is waiting for him to say, “Hester? Weren’t you going out with Hipòlita?” And then she would say, “Hipòlita? No.” And then if he continues to question her, she will act surprised and say, “Did I say I was going with Hipòlita? I meant Hester.” Considering how clever Helena is, he can even foresee a more detailed ending, to make it more believable. “I always slip and mix up one name for another, and I say Hester when I mean Hipòlita or Hipòlita when I mean Hester. I do it all the time.” But Heribert has another idea: not to act surprised at all, and calmly to ask her, “Oh, what did you see?” If she doesn’t realize he’s caught her in a lie when he says this, at least she’ll be intrigued. Or does she think he’s forgotten the whole episode? Or believed the story? It’s no use calling Hester on some pretext and subjecting her to subtle questioning because she’ll have been tipped off that she is last night’s alibi. What outcome is he really interested in? Not knowing what to say, and not yet having said anything, he sets the knife and the peeled orange on the table, gets up from the chair, and says he’s going to the bathroom.

•

He lines up all the blank canvases he has in the studio and examines them. What if he showed just that: white canvases, without the slightest trace of a human hand? It’s been done. Minimalism. And anyway, if he signs them he will have placed a few strokes of his own. He could not sign them. Someone must have done that, too. Is there anything original left to do? Even halfheartedly filling up all the walls of an exhibition isn’t new. Do you really have to do something new? Why? What is more important, to be honest or to be original? Out of honesty, people often refused to be original. And out of honesty people often fall silent rather than open their mouths only to hear their own voices. Will he be able to tell when he opens his mouth and nothing interesting comes out?

Helena’s voice floats up to him:

“I’m leaving. See you later.”

It seems to him that, in the past, she would always tell him where she was going when she left, to the gallery or to do this or that, or to see this or that person. Or maybe she had never done anything of the sort, and now he just imagined she had. He hears the front door close. He puts on his jacket, and as he goes down the stairs he tries to calculate how many times he’s done that this year. On the table next to the door there are two brochures: one from Chevrolet and another from Ford.

This time he has no trouble spotting her. She’s standing in front of the windows of a shoe store. Heribert hangs back by a telephone booth and watches her out of the corner of his eye. There’s a drunk hanging onto a mailbox, and a girl (dressed like an old-fashioned secretary) is trying to mail a big stack of letters (and looking afraid that the drunk may attack her). The phone in the phone booth rings. Heribert looks at Helena, who’s still looking at shoes, but has gone on to another window. He’s afraid the constant ringing of the phone no one is answering will make her turn around. He goes into the booth, picks up the receiver, and says hello. On the other end, he doesn’t hear a thing: no breathing, no click to indicate the call has been cut off. The line was totally dead. He hangs up and turns around. Helena is walking down the street. “All this,” he thinks, “just to see her go shopping or to the gallery
. . .
” Helena signals, and a taxi jumps three lanes and stops right in front of her. Heribert has to stop another one, quickly, but feels ridiculous lifting his arm to flag it down. He will feel even more ridiculous, once inside, when he has to say, like in the movies, “Follow that car.” He remembers one where a taxi driver is thrilled when they ask him to follow another car, saying that he had been waiting all his long working life for that moment, like in the movies.

When he is in the cab and says it, the driver looks at him in the rearview mirror, gives a short laugh, and starts to talk. He talks nonstop the whole time, recklessly passing the other cars. Once, when Helena’s driver jumps a red light, Heribert’s steps on the gas and (between two lanes of traffic, almost scraping the cars on either side) shoots forward and crosses the street on the red just as a Cadillac Seville coming from the left makes the turn. They make such headway that, by the next red light, Heribert’s taxi is directly behind Helena’s. Heribert hides behind the driver’s head. If they keep up this pace, he thinks, soon they’ll take the lead, leaving the other car in their wake, turning this into the most original chase in history, in which they precede the pursued car instead of following it. They go across the bridge.

Fifteen minutes later, Helena’s taxi stops on a wide, solitary avenue, lined with houses.

“Park across the street, a little farther down.”

Having to come up with such stratagems exhausts him. The driver says something under his breath and smiles. Looking out the back window, Heribert watches as Helena gets out of the cab and goes into one of the houses.

•

A couple of children are playing with an enormous ball in one of the yards. Heribert tries unsuccessfully to figure out what they’re playing: sometimes it looks like soccer, then like baseball, then a minute later like handball. Then they laugh and take a rest, leaning on the fence. Once, he thinks they look at him, whisper about him, and laugh again.

He sits on the curb, and since he’s getting bored, he starts doing things. First he counts the seconds that elapse between one particularly loud shout from one of the kids and the first car to go down the street (another taxi): 634. Then he counts the minutes until the next car (a Mercury Cougar) goes by: 18. He adds the 634 seconds and the 18 minutes: 652. He finds it interesting to add up dissimilar things. In school they said you couldn’t add apples and oranges. If he adds the 652 to the 2 kids playing in the yard, he gets 654 seconds, minutes, and kids. He counts the cars parked on that stretch of street: 17. Added to the previous 654 that makes 671 seconds, minutes, kids, and cars on that stretch of street. He thinks of adding in the 4 stoplights, the two garbage cans he can see, the fire hydrants, the potholes. If he could add up all objects, all feelings, all ideas, all creatures, add them all up together, everything would be so simple. How easy it would be to face any situation, get out of any labyrinth, form a fairly accurate image of the world; the world (for example) would be exactly 78,345,321,834,042,751,539 things. If he could just diagram this feeling of perplexity! But how? Turning the canvas into a blackboard and writing down all those figures seems idiotic to him. And the mere thought of coming up with a more elaborate way to depict that morass wears him out.

He lets himself fall back. It feels wet. He looks at the white sky. It’s cold out. He thinks it’s strange that the two children are playing outside on such a cold day. He thinks, “If I start to imagine that the sky is empty, I’ll fall upwards, I’ll fall into the clouds.”

After a wait that seems interminable, Helena appears arm in arm with a tall man, with brown hair and a broad mouth, wearing a very long, gray raincoat and glasses with apple green, almost fluorescent, frames.

Thinking that he has to get up to follow them, he lies down again and keeps trying to convince himself that gravity will suck him up into the sky, but he doesn’t quite manage to believe it. When Helena and her escort catch a cab at the corner, he gets up, brushes off his pants, and starts walking home.

•

He opens the door, turns on the light in the foyer, and then, one by one, he turns on all the lights in all the rooms of the house. Upstairs, he turns on the light in the studio, and the radio, as he gazes with infinite estrangement upon all the cans, paintbrushes, portfolios, pencils, canvases, and easels. He goes back downstairs. He turns on the other radio, the television, the record player, and leaves them all at full blast. He can’t turn on the radio and the cassette player at the same time because turning one on automatically turns the other off. This annoys him. He will never again fall for one of these outlandish models that claim to be a radio and a cassette player at the same time; at the moment of truth they cannot be both radio and cassette player at the same time, and hence it is a lie. He remembers that he has a small transistor radio, which must be in some corner of the house. He looks through all the rooms, until he finds it next to the picnic baskets. He also turns it on. In the kitchen, he turns on all the burners, the oven, the toaster, the blender, the coffee grinder, the mixer. For a moment he’s afraid the circuit breaker will blow. He puts the teakettle on the stove, with a little water. The whistle soon joins all the other cries, songs, melodies, conversations, noises, and lights that fill the house. He feels at home, in a house full of life. He goes out to the door, opens it, and keeps pressing the buzzer over and over again. The din produced by all those appliances working at once is delightful. “If in this precise moment the telephone rang, I’d be a truly happy man.” He could phone a friend and ask him to call, but that would ruin the fun.