Rage (21 page)

"Yes."

"Hang on a second, I still can't find any change... Ah,
here it is... What were you saying?"

"You were about to tell me something..."

"Oh yes. I..." There was a pause and then he said:
"Have you grown cold towards me or is that my imagination? What's going on? Don't you love me any more?"

"Why on earth do you ask me that?"

"That's the way it feels."

"No... well, Maria... so much water has gone under
the bridge since..."

"Didn't it make you happy to think of meeting me
today, as we'd arranged?"

"Sure! I kept watching the clock every few minutes
but..."

"Now, what time is it?"

"I can't come out now."

"I know. All the same, what time is it?"

"Ten past eleven."

"What did the doctor make of you?"

"Fine, all well. Oh, Maria!" Rosa suddenly exclaimed.
"If for once and all you'd only tell me something real,
like why you disappeared, why today we could have
met up but tomorrow we can't... why you couldn't ever
before! At the end of the day, all this is your fault!"

"What's all my fault?"

"You upped and left me... you never came back... left
me to take the rap, and I paid it with my heart! There
are times when I swear I hate you! Yes, I hate you, I swear
it! And today when I was finally going to see you, I hated
you more than ever, Maria. Will you forgive me all this
one of these days?"

"You're asking me if I could forgive you?"

"Yes..."

"There's nothing for me to forgive you, Rosa! Today I
wanted to see you precisely because I needed to tell you
that the only thing I want is to be near you and care for
you, and..."

There was a silence.

A bird flew overhead. Maria couldn't avoid following
it with his eyes. The rarest of things: a white bird, at least
five yards up in the skies over the Avenida Santa Fe, at
eleven o'clock at night, flying in the same direction as
the one-way traffic...

"Are you really never going to come back?" asked
Rosa.

"One of these days..."

"I knew that was what you were going to say..."

"You need to understand..."

"I knew it..."

"What is it that I need to forgive you for, Rosa?"

At that instant the line went dead.

In the kitchen, inside the villa, with the telephone still
in her hand, Rosa said:

"I'm pregnant..." knowing that Maria couldn't hear
her.

"I forgive you," he said, his eyes filled with tears, and
hung up.

28

Finally, here he was again, stopped outside the villa. A
few blocks back he'd again asked for the time: three
in the morning. The villa was in darkness. There was
nobody out on the street. Very occasionally a car slipped
by. That was when he saw a policeman heading towards
him.

He felt a shiver run up his spine. He stuck his hands
into his pockets, moved on, and doubled back on his
tracks to take a turn around the block. Getting inside
again was going to be far harder than getting out. How
come he hadn't thought of this? As he walked past
Israel's building, on his way back into the villa, he saw
the lights illuminated on the fourth floor... The cop
was no longer on the corner: he walked on up the street
to kill his hunger and cold.

He felt an impulse to run for the corner and make use
of the cop's absence to reach the door and get inside
without being spotted: he controlled himself with
difficulty. The key was already in his hand. There were
about ten yards between the corner and the barred gate
of the tradesman's entrance: he ran them looking over
his shoulder, towards the street the cop was disappearing
down, hands clasped behind his back.

He was on the point of putting the key into the lock
when all of a sudden a man and a woman emerged from
the shadows, with their arms around each other. They
came along the road chatting, gazing at the ground,
and didn't seem too startled when they bumped into
him. Maria rapidly regained his posture and the pace of
a normal walk he had adopted up until his brief delay
beside the gate, and set off in the opposite direction to
the couple.

He paused another fifteen yards further down the
road. He was sweating. The man and the woman
crossed the street... The policeman was about to reach
the corner; another second and he would turn on his
heel and start walking downhill towards Maria again.
He got to the gate in the blink of an eye, inserted the
key into the lock and turned it. He pushed at the gate,
went inside, and shut it again. He completed the moves
very slowly, muffling its creaking from the start, and
eliminating them as he went through.

Then he hid himself behind the wall. Crouched
there, he waited until the cop got to the corner and
set off up the street once more, in order to feel safe
in crossing the side garden and entering the villa at
last by the kitchen door. That was the most dangerous
part of it. The lights were out, but he couldn't be sure
whether Senor or Senora Blinder - or Rosa - were
just on the other side of the door, for whatever reason
they might have (even in the dark) to be there: he
had to avoid making the least sound, because the
house trebled the intensity of any noise and someone
could have overheard. At the same time he had to do
everything as swiftly as possible: someone could pass
by on the street at any moment and catch sight of
him between the bars on the gate. Dozens of worrying
risks occurred to him, but he managed to overcome
them all, and reached the kitchen safe and sound. He
leaned his back against the wall and stayed there a
moment in silence, waiting for the beating of his heart
to quieten, and for his sight to become accustomed
to the darkness. Then he opened the fridge, drank a
large swig of white wine, removed his shoes, and set off
for his bedroom. It was a success story. All except for
one tiny detail.

That afternoon the gardener had mowed the lawn and
watered the garden plants. And Maria had covered one
shoe in mud while he was crouching beside the wall, to
avoid being seen by the police.

He only noticed all this the following morning.
Alarmed, he ran downstairs and approached as near as
he could to the kitchen.

Rosa was sitting there on a chair, looking pensive. In
one hand she held the floor cloth and was staring at the
muddy footprints over by the door. A moment earlier,
on seeing the footprints, she had automatically picked
up the floor cloth and was on the point of wiping clean
the mud when something attracted her attention. It was
this she was now thinking over.

She couldn't fathom who might have left those footprints behind, still less why they went from the door to
the fridge, where, all of a sudden, they stopped.

29

Only a few hours earlier, Rosa was on her way down
from the attic washroom with a heap of clothes over
one arm. Her belly, which had grown substantially in
the last couple of months, along with all the clothes she
was carrying in her arms, prevented her from properly
seeing the steps, so she was descending slowly and taking
care. Suddenly the hand with which she had steadied
herself on the banister moistened, and she unleashed
a squeal as she stopped in her tracks. The clothes fell
to the floor, Rosa grabbed her belly and screamed for
Senora Blinder.

For an instant, Maria was on the point of going to
her rescue himself. He restrained himself with great difficulty. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Rosa and
Senora Blinder flew out of the house at high speed.

Now Maria began pacing nervously, not the traditional
"to and fro" pacing, but more like a constant "up and
down"... In recent months, he had been closer than ever
to Rosa; it was incredible he hadn't actually trodden on
her heels. He phoned her every week. He had come
across a book called My First Child in the library, which
he had read from cover to cover, and he'd taken to
giving her advice on what forms of exercise were still
suitable, and what kind of diet she'd do best to adhere
to. But it hadn't exactly been easy getting Rosa to admit
that she was actually pregnant.

In the course of a number of phone calls, starting with
the one in which he had invited her to meet up with him
in the little hotel down on the Bajo, Rosa kept insisting
that they meet up, until the matter simply dropped out
of the conversation, as if she'd forgotten all about it. It
didn't escape Maria's attention that Rosa had wanted to
meet up while her belly was still flat and had dropped
the subject - he even thought he saw in her a kind of
fearfulness, now it was he proposing a new rendezvous,
which she found difficult to know how to refuse - when
her belly became obvious, something which seemed
to occur from one month to the next. Eventually one
afternoon a ruse occurred to Maria, as obvious as it was
effective: he would tell her he had just seen her in the
street by chance.

"When?"

"The day before yesterday."

"Tuesday? But on Tuesday I had to spend the whole
day in the house."

"Well, then it was Monday. You were just coming out
of..." Maria paused, hoping that Rosa would complete the sentence for him. But wherever it was he saw her
was something that Rosa couldn't have cared less about
at that point in time.

"And you didn't call me?"

"I thought about it, but no I didn't. You were with the
Senora."

Maria knew that Rosa had been out with Senora
Blinder.

"So..." Rosa said meaningfully, lowering her voice.

"Yes, I know."

They both allowed for an interval.

Maria was under the impression that Rosa had stopped
breathing.

Then he asked her:

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because... Maria, I..." answered Rosa, and started to
cry.

"Don't worry, everything will be fine," said Maria, to
calm her down. "How many months are you?"

"Five months."

"And the father?"

"Oh my God..." said Rosa.

"Who is he?" persisted Maria.

It had been a while since Maria had known all about
it, and he managed to sound serene, even in a way
relieved.

"The Senores' son..." replied Rosa. "He raped me...
one time..."

That came as a surprise to Maria. It had never occurred
to him that the child could belong to Alvaro... Then,
while Rosa told him the history (the harassment, the
rape), he processed a million figures, at the end of which
he realized that Rosa couldn't be saved: she was completely incapable of stopping herself from lying to him.

He further realized that to her it was easier to say (or
to say to him) that the pregnancy was the consequence
of a rape than of her relationship with Israel. But this
was no longer a matter in which he had the slightest
interest. In any case, to contradict her would be to
reveal himself. All the same, he did his utmost to sound
indignant:

"The bastard, I'll kill him!"

"He's dead," intercepted Rosa.

"I know, I know, you already told me... What a
bastard!"

"There's no point in getting all worked up about it
now... are you all worked up?"

"I swear to you, I'd kill the bastard."

"I'm asking you if you're angry with me?"

"How do I know? You've told me so many things all at
once that..." he began. And he observed he wasn't at all
angry, only anxious to elicit a response.

Maria noted a grain of gratitude in Rosa's reaction.
He was as good as certain that Rosa was reproaching
herself inside for having hidden her pregnancy from
him all this long time. She might as well have confided
in him (he heard, in her voice). The mystery of his
disappearance would soon be transcended by the
discovery of a new man, absent but generous, a man
without a body, whose voice would caress her more
than anything else could.

From that day onwards, Maria kept her company
wherever she went. Not perhaps every moment of the
day, but in a general way. Cooking, washing and ironing,
watching television, whatever Rosa was doing, he would
be close beside her. Every night, when he came and
went in search of food, he went out of his way to be
there outside her room, and watched her for a long while through the keyhole, monitoring her position as
she slept, the rhythm of her breathing.

He acquired the habit of checking the expiry dates
on tinned products for fear lest Rosa might consume
something past its sell-by date, and helped himself to
the least fresh fruits and vegetables in order to leave
only the best for her. Each time a new issue of Selections
arrived, he would use his ingenuity to smuggle it up to
the attic for awhile. He conspicuously left self-help books
out for her edification, like My First Child, and any time
he got the opportunity he would add to the shopping
list drawn up by Senora Blinder items like yogurt or
chocolates, meticulously copying her handwriting,
in order to satisfy Rosa's possible cravings. Naturally
enough, Rosa attributed all of these stupendous delicacies to Senora Blinder's kindness. Maria observed
this through the change in the relationship between
the women, as it became more like that of friends, or
even of family members. In his role as an invisible spy,
he never discovered the true cause of the change in
Senora Blinder's attitude towards Rosa. But the result
was spontaneous and, at times, very moving. All thanks
in some part to him.

They left behind them the chats in which nothing
mattered as much to Rosa as knowing why he had
disappeared in the way that he did, or where he was
and when he would return. It was good luck (for
him, who hated evading her questions). Nonetheless,
nothing stopped him going over things in his mind.
And every time he did so, he came up against fragments
(moments) in a love which he savoured in his triple role
as husband, father and phantasm. In fact he had taken
his relationship with Rosa to a stage where his physical
presence had ceased to be what mattered: what obstacle was there now to his being her husband? And if he were
the husband who loved her and Rosa loved him and was
expecting a child, why should he refuse to be its father?