Rage (8 page)

So he wasn't at all surprised when he found Rosa
masturbating so often. What did seem strange to him was that sometimes they'd reach orgasm in unison,
each of them on their own side of the door. At which
point Maria would hurriedly depart, holding one hand
cupped... A moment later, Rosa would emerge from
the bathroom, go into her room and start watching
television. Maria would wipe his hand underneath his
pillow, and lie on his back for hours, thinking of her.
It was this or prison. There wasn't really that much to
think about after all.

6

He established a routine of gym exercises. Stretches,
flexes, stomach crunches, squats, the works. His abdomen, already naturally muscular, now resembled a
washboard. He had doubled the strength in his arms.
Working out was now the only form of physical exertion
he had undertaken since incarcerating himself in
the house; it became essential to him to maintain his
routine, partly because his body was now the only tool
he had to work with. He cultivated every muscle in his
body as carefully as if it were a magnolia.

You could say that reading, masturbating and working
out "in his spare time" could sound like a load of nonsense, but the premises were perfectly reasonable: he
genuinely had to work hard in order simply to eat and
fulfil his basic biological needs. These were the activities
that consumed most of his day. It was an adventure to go
up and down from the attic to the kitchen in order to
steal something to eat: on every trip he played Russian
roulette with life and liberty. To be able to do it, he had
to learn to have complete control of himself and of his
environment.

Before ever going downstairs, he would do breathing
exercises in order to obtain the necessary degree of
relaxation; this would last for only a few minutes, before
his state of heightened alertness would reappear, and
then return renewed at every step. His excursions to
the bathroom or the third-floor library were equally
risky, as were the "leisure walks" he undertook. On
the latter occasions, he would lean over the banister
of the first-floor stairwell, to see if he could hear the
sound of voices on the ground floor, while he picked
his teeth with a straw taken from a broom, or basked in
a moment of sunlight from the adjacent window. But
basically he felt little anxiety over having nothing to
do: he now lived outside any system of production and
he enjoyed the lack of demands on his time. He was
answerable to no one, he had no orders to follow, and
his one and only worry was to remain out of sight and
remain undiscovered.

In fact, the adrenalin rush arising from the risky
situations in which he could find himself gave him a
degree of pleasure, giving him the sensation that even a
vital necessitywas transformed into an adventure... Take
washing, by way of example. He had now spent nearly
three weeks in the house without washing. Formerly,
whether at work or at home, he took a daily shower;
here it was unthinkable. Yet he still had to find a way of
keeping clean; his entire body was itching, to the point
where some nights he could scarcely sleep.

The central heating system only had radiators on the
ground and first floors. Still, the second floor remained
more or less warm thanks to the fact that warm air rises;
by the third floor the air was cooler, and in the attic it
was freezing. He decided to wash himself in one of the
downstairs toilets. That night, as every night, he obtained his supper from the kitchen, took it up to his room,
then descended the flight of stairs to the bathroom in
the north wing (done out in black marble, coated in
lime scale). He stripped off, got into the bathtub, wet
the sponge, and rubbed himself from top to toe. The
water was icy, and he'd been unable to find a bar of soap
anywhere, but once he'd finished, he felt much better:
shivering but renewed.

He wiped out the bath using the sponge, then put
it back where he had found it, dressed and went back
up to his room. A minute later, as he was eating, he
realized that he hadn't the faintest idea what day it was.
He simply hadn't kept daily tally. This realization left
him feeling somewhat lost. As of that night, he vowed to
keep track of the days. He had murdered the foreman
on Tuesday 26th - or was it the 27th? - September. He
estimated he had spent at least twenty days in the house,
which made it now around the 13th or 14th October.
The next day, he stole a pencil and a sheet of paper, to
keep a record.

He ate a chicken leg, a roll and a tomato, before
flinging himself onto his back on the bed, arms akimbo
under the coverlet. Without emotion, he considered
the fact that three days after killing the foreman, he
should have been in receipt of his fortnight's wage
packet (also of the fact that on the same day he had left
his Rolex hanging from a nail in the work hut) when he
was suddenly aware of a noise in the room. He froze to
the spot.

For an instant, he considered the possibility he might
have moved one of his legs without being conscious of
doing so, and it was therefore him making a noise. But
then he swiftly noticed that the sounds were coming
from over by the door. He became alarmed, still frozen in position. Perhaps there was someone on the other
side of the door. He heard the sound again. It sounded
most like the noise made by someone turning the pages
of a book, one after another. Most probably Senor or
Senora Blinder had come upstairs to look for a book, or
an old notebook, in the loft and, whichever of the two
it was, had paused there to leaf through the book just
outside his door. He decided to get up and listen more
closely: it was something inside his room.

It must have been two or three in the morning. He
opened the blinds a crack and by the street lights
he could see a rat, running to hide underneath the
cupboard. Maria stopped stock-still, his hand on the
blind, thinking. How had it got in? Maybe he hadn't
properly shut the door when he went to get washed,
and the rat had found a way into the room. He closed
the blind, opened the door ajar, knelt down beside the
cupboard, and gently patted the floor with the palm of
his hand. But the rat didn't make a move until Maria
rolled up his pair of trousers and, as if he were wielding
a whip, directed a couple of blows to the bottom of the
cupboard.

Then the rat emerged from its hiding place, running
everywhere as hard as it could, but it didn't head for
the door; it made a couple of laps round the bed, went
behind Maria, and hid itself again under the cupboard.
It was a gigantic rat, the size of a man's shoe. And it was
petrified.

Maria repeated the operation. He saw it come out.
This time it didn't look quite as big, but was even faster.
Maria stayed another minute on his knees beside the
cupboard, looking and listening. Nothing. Finally he
gave up, shut the door, and went back to bed. Let the
rat do what it will.

Later that night, properly clean and no longer hungry,
he recognized that at least he now had time to think. And
the first thought he had was that he had never thought
before. The next minute he was soundly asleep.

7

The next morning, when he returned from the bathroom carrying a glass of water to prepare his mate herb
tea, he noticed the door of his room was wide open. His
blood froze in his veins. He retreated across the loft, ten
or a dozen yards in front of the door to his room. From
this position he could see Rosa opening the window.
She wasn't wearing her maid's uniform: instead she
was in jeans and a T-shirt, with a cloth thrown over one
shoulder. A vacuum cleaner stood in the doorway.

He felt as if all was lost. He had made the mistake of
leaving the room without taking his bag with him - as he
always did, except when he went out at night. The bag
was underneath the bed, and as soon as Rosa started
vacuuming there, she would be bound to discover it.
That wasn't even the worst of it: he'd left a book lying
on the floor too. Not to mention the bone from his
chicken leg!

He had to prevent Rosa from running the vacuum
cleaner under the bed. For now, she was still busy with
cleaning the windows. Maria didn't think twice about it:
he left the loft and ran on tiptoes over to the vacuum
cleaner, removed the adaptor from its socket, and
returned to his place in the loft again. He had barely
got back to base before Rosa left the bedroom.

If Rosa had had the least suspicion that Maria was
hiding somewhere in the villa, she would have to have spotted him then. Clearly she did not. Instead she
picked up the vacuum cleaner and took it into the room
without registering what had passed before her eyes for
a fraction of a second: a hand holding the doorjamb at
the edge of the loft, and the profile of a face with one
eye glued to her and what she was doing.

Maria was as breathless as a long-distance sprinter
and his heart was pounding heavily. As he attempted
to steady his breathing, he saw Rosa emerge from
the room once more, looking about her to see if she
could find something there on the landing floor... His
scheme had worked. Rosa felt around in her trouser
pockets, shrugged her shoulders, and set off downstairs
in search of another adaptor. Maria slipped back into
his room. The book he'd abandoned on one side of the
bed now lay on top of it, so he decided it was better not
to move it; obviously Rosa must have picked it up from
the floor and placed it there, without paying it any heed.
He took his bag out from under the bed, but couldn't
see the chicken bone anywhere at all. He crouched,
searching more and more desperately, here there and
everywhere, thinking that Rosa must have trodden on
it without noticing. He simply couldn't find it. Then he
heard Rosa's voice saying:

"Here I am, Senora, up here, cleaning!"

Silence.

"Yes, Senora, straight away!" Rosa replied, and this
time her voice sounded much closer than before.

Maria had no more time to continue looking for his
bone. He left the room and hurried into the loft. He went
inside, closing the door after him, leaned his back up
against a wall, then let himself slide down it until he was
sitting on the floor, clutching his rucksack to his chest.
A moment later he changed position, or perhaps, more accurately, his attitude altered: he set the rucksack to
one side and let himself slide still further, this time from
drama into slumber. He imagined that Rosa had found
the bone, that she had reported it to Senora Blinder, and
that two or three policemen had come up to the attic and
conducted an inch-by-inch search until they discovered
him. No sooner had they done so than they clamped
him in handcuffs and dragged him downstairs.

On the landing on the first floor Senor Blinder, there
waiting for him, immediately blocked his way and
started punching him, without any of the policemen
attempting to prevent him. He passed Senora Blinder
on the ground floor, who backed off while staring him
in the eyes. Rosa huddled in the doorway giving onto
the street, silently shaking her head, her face wet with
tears. Senor Blinder stopped them suddenly:

"Not that way," he said. "Take him out through this
door," and he pointed at the tradesmen's entrance.

Rosa was obliged to go with them. She went ahead
and throughout her ordeal kept turning back at every
step, as if she couldn't believe what she saw.

"Why?" she asked him.

"How do I know?" he answered. "I could give you so
many reasons... Are you well?"

"Why?" repeated Rosa.

He shrugged his shoulders. She opened the tradesmen's gate and let them through. In the second before
they put him in the police patrol car, Rosa succeeded in
asking him, tender as a mother:

"What have you been eating?"

He emerged from his daydream when the water in his
jug ran out.

The mate tea was his best acquisition in recent weeks.
The truth was it was the same as a morning cup of coffee; he had found a number of mate gourds in a kitchen
drawer, and he was sure that nobody would notice if one
were missing. Rosa drank mate daily, so there was always
an open packet of the tea lying around. For now, Maria
had to drink his mate cold, although soon he would
begin to heat up the water... He emerged from his
dream at this point, and realized that this whole time
he'd not heard a single sound emerge from the vacuum
cleaner. He awoke properly and looked out at his room.
The door was shut tight.

Was Rosa still in there? It seemed highly unlikely
that Rosa would shut herself in there in order to clean.
Surely she must have finished the job and left. Just
in case, he decided to hang on a little longer before
returning to his room. He occupied himself by going
through some of the boxes stacked up in the loft, which
seemed to be filled with anything from straw hats to old
crockery. Quite a lot of the stuff up there could prove
useful to him, should occasion arise. He had already
sniffed around inside a few of the cases, coming across
various old shawls and blankets, and a mother-of-pearl
card box with a deck of playing cards inside it (with
which he'd played solitaire), but it was only now that
he noticed the walkman. Manufactured by Sony, it had
probably once belonged to one of the Blinder children,
or possibly grandchildren. It didn't have any batteries,
and although he searched high and low, he couldn't
find the headphones. He decided to take it with him
in any case. He put it in his bag and, for a brief instant,
felt as if he were in the midst of a shipwreck, a Robinson
Crusoe rescuing from what was left of his sea voyage
whatever might prove useful to him. It was time to leave
the loft behind him. He zipped up his bag and set off to
return to his island.

The air inside his room now seemed fresh and new.
The book still lay on the bed. While Maria had been
in the loft, he had waited every moment for Rosa to
discover the chicken bone and, beside herself, go and
show it to Senora Blinder. Presumably the truth was that
she had not found it at all. Otherwise - as it was a "bone
of recent provenance" that no one could believe was
some old thing brought there and forgotten who knows
when and by whom - his dream would have become
reality. So the first thing he did on getting back into his
room was to search for the bone, going back and forth
on his knees, criss-crossing the room. But he was just as
unable to find it as she was.