Housebroken (13 page)

During the day they each hid in their corner. The man drank his morning coffee at his desk as he leafed through his diary, arranged appointments, and made phone calls at the top of his voice so the woman would hear that he was busy. The woman drank her coffee at the kitchen table, and sometimes, when she couldn't stand the solitude of the mornings, she would get dressed and go out, inventing imaginary meetings with friends, and going to sit alone in the café with the redheaded waitress.

She found it difficult to concentrate, but the man threw himself completely into his work. He would leave the house at noon, come home hours after dinner, and sprawl on the sofa in front of the television. When he couldn't stand the woman looking at him he would go out for long nocturnal walks with the dog, taking brisk, rapid strides, the dog dragging his feet behind him.

Sometimes the man passed his old house and wondered who the lucky guy was who had moved into his apartment. Once he walked past a little after midnight and saw two people, a young man and woman, carrying out the landlady's old closet and standing it on the sidewalk. For a moment he wanted to run up and shout at them, ask who had given them permission to throw the closet out, but he restrained himself. He stood on the other side of the street, leaning against a stone wall, and looked at them. Even after the young couple had gone back inside, he went on standing there looking at the closet and the passersby, some of whom stopped next to it, opened and shut its creaking door, walked around it, knocked on it with their knuckles, and wondered whether to take it home. But none of them wanted the closet.

On these long walks, when he wasn't busy spying on his old house, he would sometimes walk down his woman friend's street. He hadn't seen her for a while and he wondered how she was. They talked on the phone; she called him regularly once a week, mostly on Friday afternoons, when the loneliness of the week reached intolerable peaks. When the woman answered, she managed to mobilize all the cheerfulness in the world in order to make a few meaningless remarks before she asked: “Is he there?”

One night, when he saw the light on her porch, he almost went upstairs, but he was afraid of the moment when he would sit down on the old armchair, which was once his armchair, and he would have to collect his thoughts and tell her what was happening, because she would be able to see at once that he was miserable.

When he arrived home after his wanderings, the apartment would be dark. It was the beginning of spring, the windows and the shutters were open, and a pleasant breeze was blowing through the rooms, trying to banish the evil spirits imprisoned there in the winter. He would find the woman asleep, or pretending to be asleep, curled up under her comforter, from which she refused to be parted in spite of the warm weather. He would stand next to the bed and get undressed, and apart from the rustling of the leaves outside, and the lapping of the dog in the kitchen, and the soft thudding of his clothes falling to the floor, everything was quiet. A quiet broken only by the sound of the bedroom door slamming, and afterward the whispers and the demands and the grunts.

One night they did it in the bathroom. The woman was standing by the sink brushing her teeth, and the man came and stood behind her and slid his finger down her spine, and then he pulled her panties down to her ankles. He saw her face looking at him in the mirror. She put her toothbrush down, quickly washed her face, wiped her hands on her T-shirt, braced herself, and gripped the rim of the sink.

The dog passed the bathroom door on his way to his rug, and when he saw them standing there he stopped. They didn't see him. The woman's head was bowed; her hair sheltered her face. The man's cheek was pressed against her head, and his face was turned to the wall. The dog was flooded with sadness. The man and the woman looked like the dogs in the park. Sometimes he would run to join them, sniffing and filling with excitement, retreating when the big males growled at him, or squeezing in between the medium-sized and little dogs clustering around the hindquarters of the female, and sometimes, if he was lucky, if he was brave, he even succeeded in mounting her for a minute himself.

Now he stood and looked at the man and the woman, and in the silence he heard only the whimpers choking his throat, and the woman's necklace hitting the side of the sink.

26

In the middle of spring everything seemed to return to normal. Guests were invited to dinner, complaining good-naturedly about the weeks of neglect, and the house filled again with noise and people and food. The days were calm, gentle, and full of sunlight and fine weather. They were also full of the presents the man and the woman gave each other—silly little things, bought on the impulse of the moment in the wish to appease and placate, for the crisis had passed, they knew that, but bits of it still floated around the house like wisps of cloud.

They had been living together for nine months. Each of them thought this number symbolized something. The man imagined a child. The woman imagined separation. Each of their thoughts contained some plausible element, distant enough, something to play with but not actually touch—at night, before they fell asleep, in each other's arms.

One Saturday they decided to paint the apartment. They worked all day, dipping their brushes in the paint, climbing up and down the ladder, exchanging only necessary words, not wasting time. They painted in a frenzy, laboring to cover every stain, filling the little holes with plaster, plying the walls with layer after layer of paint until they could absorb no more. When it grew dark, they turned on the lights and the walls glared at them like flashing knives. They looked around, dazzled, and then they picked up the newspapers from the floor, put the furniture back, washed the paint off themselves, and released the dog from the kitchen porch. They had locked him up there early in the morning with a bowl of food and his pan of water and the sock and the yellow tennis ball.

They sat in the kitchen and ate dinner under the neon light, whose coldness and whiteness was intensified by the freshly painted walls, and whose little flickers irritated their eyes. They each followed their own thoughts, the man that he still loved her and the woman that it had been so long since she had any thoughts of her own. The man sat across from her and ate his omelette, his hair glistening from the shower. He smiled at her and stretched his hand over the table to touch her chin. She thought: He hasn't done that for a long time. She wanted to reciprocate with a little gesture of her own, but she couldn't think of one that would symbolize what they had had between them.

But what had they had? she thought, and began to crumble the slice of bread on her plate. Fear, she thought, that's what there was, I became somebody's girlfriend, and a coward. It began with the fear of being alone, and when she met the man the fear didn't disappear, but was doubled and magnified until it blinded her. And now, she thought, even if she wanted to go back to her original, independent fear, she couldn't because the fear of being alone had become something else: the fear of being alone again. Like a sick person who only becomes really afraid of his illness when he begins to recover, she thought, and raised her eyes from her plate to look at the man. He was reading the newspaper. One of his hands was lying across the table, touching hers, and the other was slowly turning the pages, while his mouth chewed a piece of bread in time to his reading, with the chewing motion stopping whenever his eyes came to rest on one or another sentence.

She sat on her chair and waited for the wave of anxiety to flood her, but it didn't. She raised her eyes to look at the man, to look at him so that she would be afraid of losing him, but she no longer saw him. On the other side of the table she saw a man reading a newspaper, his legs stretched out, his toes wriggling inside his socks, biting his nails. She saw a stranger with a familiar appearance and smell and movements, especially of rapidly nibbling his nails, which reminded her of the way birds cracked seeds with their beaks.

She had never given much thought to this gesture before. It was just another one of the man's habits, a part of him, but now that her eyes were dismantling him, the nail biting became something separate, a weakness, even a sickness. She looked at the parrotlike pecking and heard the nibbling sounds, and then went on taking him apart: first the head, the top of which peeped over the newspaper, a masculine head with hair cropped almost to the scalp. Black hair, with occasional strands of white, which the man angrily uprooted in front of the mirror as soon as he noticed them. And then there was the forehead, furrowed now with the effort of reading, and the eyebrows and the eyes, which ran over the page without noticing her, and the full cheeks, still a little red from shaving, and the nose. And under the nose the lips—the upper one thinner than the lower, both now stretched to make room for the busy teeth nibbling the nail of the little finger on his left hand.

There were the shoulders, roomy and inviting and beloved, the arms and the hairs that covered them, the hands, the thick fingers, neither long nor short. And the chest, and the little paunch, and the stripe of hair that began on the chest and parted into two separate lines on the stomach to meet again at the groin—there too the man would sometimes discover a white hair which saddened him—and then there was his penis, but when she tried to think of it separately, like the forehead, or the cheeks, or the nibbling, all she could see before her eyes were the past few weeks, the man who was a stranger.

She wanted to run to him and embrace him, to put him back together, but her gaze went on dissembling him, as if it contained active digestive juices. She saw the man's thighs, thick and solid, his knees with the big ugly scar on the left that always felt a little strange when her fingers or tongue touched it, and the feet and ankles; and last the heels—dry and rough—with toes that were beautiful and perfect. The man was proud of them and liked looking at them and rubbed them against each other inside his socks.

And then her hungry look went around the man and rested on the nape of his neck, with the little wisps of hair, and the back, and the two little cushions of fat on either side of his hips, and the buttocks, as small and tight as a child's, and the back of his thighs, and the hollows at the back of his knees, and the taut tendons of the ankles, and again the heels.

But no fear came; on the contrary. A strange calm possessed her. Not the serenity she had imagined and wished for, but a peace that was tired and even shy, that didn't know whether it should suddenly make its appearance now, just when everything seemed to be working out. Precisely now, when the house had been transformed and looked so clean and promising. She didn't want to break up with the man, but the possibility no longer frightened her. I've been so alone these past weeks, she thought, that I have nothing to fear.

The dog, who was lying quietly next to the fridge, suddenly woke up as if he sensed his master was in danger, and pressed himself against the man's legs.

What's up? asked the man. He put the paper down, stared into space, and shivered, shaking off someone else's dream in which he appeared. It's getting chilly, he said, and went to close the porch door. I think I'll put on a shirt. He was about to go to the bedroom, but then his eye fell on the newspaper, and he sat down and went on reading, rubbing his arms with his hands.

The quiet dinner, the painted apartment, the shower, filled him with satisfaction. The newspaper hid the woman from his eyes, but her presence on the other side of the table, the sound of her knife and fork, their dog rubbing himself against his legs, all these were part of a picture he had composed in his head, a family picture that merged with the information he absorbed from the newspaper, a picture hidden among the headlines in the lines of print, a picture that smiled and winked at him and told him it would be there later too, when he put the paper down and raised his eyes to look for it.

He was cold, but he was too lazy to get up. He sat on his chair rubbing his shoulders and hoped the woman would get up and bring him a shirt.

He went on sitting there, rubbing his shoulders, ostentatiously now, but the woman didn't get up. The man peeped over his newspaper at her, sitting and staring at her plate, her fingers forming crumbs of bread into little balls.

“Hey,” he said, “what's up? Is everything all right?”

The woman said: “Yes. Everything's fine.”

“It's getting a little chilly,” he said.

“You should put something on,” she said, and her hand reached out to take the newspaper.

27

In the summer the man and the woman took a vacation. That's what we need, they said, a little vacation, far from everyone, far from our friends. They missed the first six months, when they had been all alone. They decided to fly to Paris. Far from the big mirror, which never stopped reflecting them, testing them, breaking their reflection, mocking them, and confusing them. The man asked his friend if she would stay in their house for a week and take care of the dog, and she agreed willingly.

She arrived on the eve of their departure and went down to the cab to help them load their luggage in the trunk. The man gave her the keys to the apartment, and the woman reminded her when the dog had to be fed, how much to give him, and when to take him for a walk. The friend asked whether she should water the plants and the woman said no, she had just taken care of them. This was a lie, but the woman didn't want any favors from the man's friend. If the plants died, it was too bad. The dog was another story.

The friend kissed the man on the cheek, wished them both a pleasant trip, and waved to them as the cab drove off. She went upstairs and inserted the key in the lock. She heard the dog whining and his disks rattling, but when he saw her standing in the doorway with her big knapsack he retreated and jumped onto the sofa, where he curled up in the woman's place.

The friend took her clothes out of the knapsack, went into the bedroom, threw them onto the bed, and opened the closet. The man had promised her they would clear a shelf for her, but all the shelves were full. She stood in front of the open closet and she didn't know what to do with her things. She opened all three doors. The right side was packed tight with dresses, skirts, and coats, the two upper shelves on the left held the woman's shirts and pants, and the two bottom shelves were full of the man's things. Folded up at the bottom of the pile were the black jeans she had bought him, and which he had never worn. She tried the middle door, where she found a jumble of socks and underwear and various soft and undefined items of clothing belonging to both the man and the woman. She put her own little pile on top of them.