Rage (7 page)

He was no longer running a temperature, although
his bones and his joints were aching somewhat. He
observed the door to his room did not make the slightest
sound, even if he yanked it open to test it, just as he had
when he returned to his lair.

He emerged onto a landing flooded with a dangerous
light, but for the first time he could at least get an
all-round view of where he was. He surveyed all of it
slowly, mentally noting the arrangement of rooms and
passageways, and the position of any object he might
have collided with on his previous ventures, or might
conceivably collide with on any future excursion.

He descended a floor. If the attic looked uninhabited,
the third floor gave the impression of being a temporary dwelling; maybe this was where the Blinders accommodated their house guests, if they ever had
any. Every window was closed, but all the rooms had
the necessary creature comforts: deep-pile carpets,
a chimney nook, a little trolley loaded with alcoholic
drinks, a shelf laden with books, a phone, a television
set... The beds were not made up, they were bare of
sheets and covered justwith a bedspread, and the atmosphere in these rooms was dry and fresh, as if someone
came in and gave them a daily airing. Here and there
on the walls there were portraits of serious-looking men
andwomen done in oils, eachwith agiltframe. The main
staircase descended almost to the main chimney breast.
Maria proceeded in the opposite direction, following
a corridor leading to the service wing, along which he
passed a number of empty rooms of much smaller size:
these belonged to the house staff, who years ago must
have been a full complement of servants, from butler to
housekeeper. Why, then, did Rosa sleep on the ground
floor and not upstairs here?

As he descended further, he realized the entire house
had been reorganized as a result of the reduction in the
number of its inhabitants. The room occupied by Rosa
must, for example, have originally been used by the
housekeeper or head butler. The facilities on the second
floor were very similar to those on the third, although
the decoration was much heavier, almost baroque in
style. The living room contained a remarkable number
of tables, side tables, settles, sofas and easy chairs.

He approached a table covered with framed photographs, and leaned over each one in turn to study
it more closely. Each one was a portrait of a blonde
woman, aged around forty, always wearing the same
smile, although the hairstyle kept altering. At times she
appeared alone, and at others she was accompanied by a man of about the same age: presumably either
her husband or her brother. The were other men of
around thirty-five to forty-five years old and lots of
small, blond, smiling or serious children of various
ages and in various places - anywhere from in a church
to on a beach. One of the men appeared in just one
photograph and by himself: even his photo frame
seemed to occupy the least important place on the
table. In the last photograph Maria examined, everyone
appeared together (with the exception of the man of
whom only one portrait was exhibited), one linked to
the other behind a gentleman and lady seated on cane
chairs, both dressed up to the nines... At that moment
he overheard a rasping voice up on the first floor. He
went over to the staircase.

Senora Blinder had just learned of the visit from
the police. Israel had stopped her on the street a few
minutes earlier and, maliciously, had expressed his
concern about "the case of Rosa's boyfriend". Alarmed,
Senora Blinder raised a hand to her mouth.

"My God, Rosa, it looks as if your lover killed someone!"

Rosa's knees collapsed under her. Her head was
spinning.

"They say he killed the foreman on the site where
he worked! How long is it since you last saw him? Why
didn't you tell me the police had been round here?
Rosa, are you listening to me?"

"It can't be..."

Rosa began to cry.

"Now what are we going to do? Everyone in this district
is already gossiping about it. How long is it since you saw
him?"

"Three or four days," answered Rosa.

"Why didn't you inform me the police had been
round?"

"I got scared, Senora..."

"The police come round to my house to see me, and
you don't tell me anything about it?"

"I was afraid, Senora..."

"Unbelievable. What am I going to do with you?"

"Forgive me Senora, please. I didn't know anything."

"You didn't know anything about what?"

"Anything about anything, Senora."

"What a shock, you going out with a murderer! He
would come to see you and you'd open the door to
him..." she went on. "I saw him on two or three occasions, at least in the distance, and didn't like the look
of him. That's how he looked to me at least. So now
what?"

"Now, I don't know, Senora. I think it's impossible,
there must have been some mistake..."

"And you're telling me you never saw him again?"

Rosa swore on the cross of her closed fingers. Then
she began crying again.

"So why didn't you see him again? Did he tell you
something of what he'd done?"

"No, Senora."

"Didn't you know anything at all about it?"

"Nothing at all, Senora."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, Senora, but it can't possibly be true. He's incapable of swatting a fly, he's such a good man, he
is..."

Senora Blinder paused a moment in silence, her head
swirling with conflicting notions. Finally she seemed to
banish them all; she uttered a deep sigh, and she left
the room at a smart pace. Rosa sat down on the edge of an armchair and buried her face in her hands. Maria
withdrew and began pensively to climb the staircase.

5

By the end of the second week he knew every sound in
the house, much as if he'd always lived there. Something
similar would also apply to the space and the position
of objects within it, essential to his survival there. Concerning the noises he himself made, there remained
something of his initial fear, however unjustified it had
become, but which it was difficult to shed. For example,
certain doors took more time to open than strictly
necessary: he would open each one inch at a time, even
when he understood that were it to creak, it still wouldn't
be heard by anyone else. Even when asleep, he would
only change his position in bed with extreme caution.

His precautions, combined with his natural agility,
meant that he moved about in the gloom with the ease of
a ghost. More than a ghost, in fact, he resembled a figure
out of a silent film projected outwards from the screen,
an image already familiar with distances, provided with
an extraordinary radar, which at moments of distraction
- like when he was about to knock a flower vase flying,
or trip over the edge of a carpet - sharpened his extrasensory perception, allowing him to dematerialize or
dissolve.

He knew he couldn't relax his guard to the point
where he affected the slightest detail in the way in which
things were positioned around the house. He was aware
that nobody would notice whether a pair of scissors or
the bathroom towel were in the same place as last week,
but he paid scrupulous attention to leaving everything precisely as he found it. From time to time he would
awaken suddenly in the middle of the night, and run
out of his room in order to shut the bathroom door,
which he had absent-mindedly left open, but on the
whole he made no mistakes: he carried a detailed and
exhaustive inventory of the place and position of every
single object around in his head, and was scrupulous in
respecting them, by now almost unconsciously.

In addition, his inventory had to be revised from top
to bottom, on a regular basis: from time to time upstairs in the attic, weekly on the second and third floors,
and daily down on the first floor and in the kitchen,
following Rosa's cleaning rota around the house. The
ground floor remained an utterly unknown territory to
him. He avoided it: every night, he descended to the
kitchen down the service staircase. He was absolutely
certain that this way he wouldn't meet a soul, least of
all Senor or Senora Blinder. In return, he could bet his
life that neither Blinder had ever set foot in his part
of the house. And every night, on his way down, he
would pause an instant outside the door to Rosa's room.
On the whole he would hear nothing, since he only
went downstairs so very late at night, but occasionally
he'd hear her cough, or walk up and down in a fit of
insomnia, tidying up her room, or watching television.
Once he overheard her masturbating.

He missed her. On more than one occasion, he considered the possibility of revealing himself to her, but he
didn't dare believe that Rosa's love of him would reach
such heights. She'd be scared, then no doubt decide
he was mad. It would have put her in an impossible
position, too difficult either to accept or assimilate,
most of all in coming to terms with the fact that he was
the principal suspect of a serious crime.

He started having imaginary conversations with Rosa.
To begin with, they were brief dialogues, of the "question and answer" variety, generally involving people or
situations of the most boring ordinariness. Later, when
he had finally accepted that Rosa was not to blame for
his inability to admit to her that he was in hiding there,
and permanently eliminated the thought of making her
his accomplice, the dialogues became longer and more
amiable. He spoke often with her while he ate or while
he read, or occasionally even when curled up near the
window, as close as possible to fresh air and light, just to
get a bit of warmth on his face.

In the second-floor library there were hundreds of
books of every kind, from adventure novels to medical
texts. Maria would lock the door to his room, cover
the crack at the bottom of his door with his shirt, then
switch on the night light and read until he fell asleep.
Sometimes he needed to flick back through the pages
and reread a passage again, since he had really spent
the time in an imaginary argument with Rosa, while his
eyes followed the lines on the page inattentively. It came
to his attention that he had never seen Rosa reading,
despite the quantity of books in the house. In her spare
time, she never did anything except watch television.

"It's because reading is harder work than watching
television," she told him.

"Why? All you need to read is to sit or lie down, just
like when you're watching television."

"But you need to use your brain."

"That's a lie! You can read perfectly well without
thinking at all."

Rosa masturbated often. Not during the early weeks
of his disappearance, while she was distraught, but from
the time when she seemed to accept that Maria wasn't going to come back. In one of his mental discussions
with her, Maria "understood" that Rosa still loved him,
even though she now no longer held out any hope of
seeing him again. Rosa told him she did not consider him
capable of killing a fly, and he kissed her silently, then,
without letting her go from his embrace, explained that
on that day, when the Blinders came home, he did exactly
what he told her he would: he waited for the Blinders to
come indoors, he came out of his kitchen hiding place,
then opened the gate onto the street, before realizing
he had no idea where to go, so he closed the gate again,
leaving the key in the lock, as if someone had opened it
from outside, and went back into the house.

"What do you mean, you had nowhere to go?" Rosa
asked. "Why didn't you go home?"

"Home, Rosa... I got on really badly with my foreman.
Nobody would believe me if I said I wasn't the one who
killed him... The police would've come to my house
looking for me; I'd be in prison now, who knows how
long for. I'd prefer to spend the rest of my life here."

Silence.

"I love you," Rosa said, and dissolved into thin air.

She masturbated thinking of him. And he took to
spying on her. Rosa masturbated in her room or in the
bathroom, any time between ten o'clock at night and
one o'clock in the morning, almost daily. (On one occasion Maria caught her masturbating at dinner time,
having just served the Blinders their soup, and just
before they would call her to serve the main course.)

Masturbation occupied a good part of Rosa's free
time, almost as much as watching television. She could
spend an hour or more just on foreplay; she would even
sometimes start playing with herself in the bathroom, in
the shower, then finish off in the bedroom. Maria, his eye glued to the keyhole, would masturbate in rhythm
with her. He was intrigued by the variety of techniques
and utensils Rosa employed. On occasions she'd soap
and caress herself until the foam took on the consistency
of cream; then she'd seize a bottle of deodorant with a
rounded head, crouch down in the bath, turn on the
shower (Maria couldn't quite keep her in sight, however
hard he tried) and insert the end of the bottle between
her legs as the water beat down on her back, rinsing
her off. Sometimes she'd do no more than sit over the
spout on the bidet, without even pausing to remove her
clothes, her pants tugged down around her ankles and
her uniform apron hurriedly hoiked up, as if she had
almost no time for all this.

Maria thought often of Rosa's effrontery. The first
time they had ever made love, in that hotel down on the
Bajo, Rosa had already behaved in a way utterly strange
to him, with a total and unexpected abandon. Maria
had been to bed with many whores in his life (and he'd
also had previous experiences with so-called virgins),
but no one had ever offered him the combination of
ardour and innocence that Rosa presented. Everything
was permitted, from the most gentle tenderness to the
most degraded lasciviousness.

Rosa took such delight in sex that she could cause
him sudden consternation. She'd crack jokes, as if sex
were above all else a joke; she'd unexpectedly poke his
balls with her finger, or grab his cock and work it back
and forth as if it were a car gearstick, going so far as to
make engine noises with her mouth. And she'd laugh
like an (adorable) idiot when Maria held her down by
her wrists and glowered fiercely at her.