The Manual of Darkness (41 page)

‘Sure. Got a free bar going all day. What can I get our little miss?’

‘Elm and oak.’

‘What are you planning to do?’ Viviana says, searching among the little bottles in the drawer. ‘Put down roots?’

They hug goodbye. The last bars of ‘Oblivion’ are still playing. As she fixes her hair in front of the mirror in the lift, Alicia hears the little bottles clink against each other. They seem inadequate weapons for an attack on a fortress. Upstairs, Viviana looks up oak and elm on the list: ‘overwhelmed by responsibility’, and ‘exhausted but does not give up hope’.

H
e should hardly be surprised that her body is rigid and she seems reluctant to co-operate; after all, it is a strange position. They are both standing naked, strapped into Kellar’s levitation harness. He had to swear to Irina that this was not some sadomasochistic experiment. Now he grabs her below the knees and, with a jerk, pulls her legs up around his hips as though he wants her to ride him. Then he tells her to hold on tight. Trust me, he says. She goes along with him, but shows little enthusiasm. Víctor reaches behind him, fumbling for the lever that starts the levitating mechanism. In the twelve seconds it takes for the board to reach the horizontal position, he hugs Irina even tighter. She holds her breath. There is a click, telling him the mechanism has reached its resting point. Kellar used to grease it with dubbin before every performance; there are eighty-five cables attached to the ceiling, and the slightest noise could ruin the illusion.

The most interesting thing about this position are its limitations. Irina does not dare move her arms because she needs them to cling to the board. He cannot do much either; the harness is strapped around his waist and the board extends only as far as his calves, giving him no support for his feet. If he is going to do more, it will have to be confined to his abdominal and lumbar muscles.

They hover for a long time without doing anything. Since they are about the same height, their bodies are pressed against each other, their faces together. They are not so much making love as breathing each other in. She can tell that he is ready. All too ready, between their bodies, is something warm and hard, something with its own pulse. What is more surprising is
that he finds she too is ready, to judge by the dampness between her legs.

Irina is in no hurry to start, however. If it were up to her, they would stay like this for a long time. But she did not come here for a rest, still less for comfort or pleasure – she came to earn herself €230 euros. Plus tip. She knows Víctor is generous. Though she has not been in the profession for long, she has enough experience to recognise that, in this position, she has to take the lead. She lifts herself just enough to slide her hand between their bodies and reposition Víctor’s penis. She wants to thrust her hips but can find no way of supporting her weight and is afraid she will fall. All she can do is press herself against Víctor’s body. He places his hands on Irina’s buttocks and squeezes.

These hands have spent one year tracing boundaries. This is me and here is where me ends. Everything else is there and there is not a place, but a whole world. Irina’s buttocks are as round as the planet itself and he is inside her. Inside a floating world. They are eight feet off the ground, but they could just as well be light years away, in a galaxy barely discernible by its distant glow. His fingers exert only the slightest pressure, like someone testing a watermelon to see whether it is ripe. They both begin to breathe more deeply and their chests, as they expand and contract, generate just enough movement to make this much more than simply an embrace.

Irina breaks down and starts to cry. It would be pointless to try to explain the reasons why she is crying, since even she does not understand them. Perhaps it has something to do with anger, because she has just come. This is a slight problem since he came at the same moment and only then did Irina realise they had forgotten the condom, though this should not worry her too much: she never forgets to take the pill and, as for diseases, well, it doesn’t seem likely she could catch anything from Víctor, except perhaps his loneliness. Could it be that she is crying out of sheer sorrow, because the end of this fuck means the end of an embrace? Come to think of it, are they going to stay like this much longer? Because he is crying too, and he hasn’t taken his hands from her buttocks and doesn’t seem in any hurry to activate the weird mechanism that will bring them back to the ground, back to the real world,
the world of there, where men pay her, where she charges then leaves.

Eventually he moves. There comes a moment when the sweat cools, the scent changes, and the weight begins to bother him, at which point Víctor reaches for the lever. Once on the ground, he releases the harness and she feels the sticky, viscous fluid slide down the insides of her thighs, and asks him whether she can shower. When she emerges from the bathroom, her breathing finally back to normal, her eyes dry, she finds him lying on the bed. She goes over to him and cannot help but ask:

‘Víctor, what is the matter with him?’

And without knowing nor asking why she is using the third person, whether she is trying to be polite or whether she simply hasn’t learned how to conjugate verbs, Víctor answers:

‘The matter with him is he’s blind.’

‘Much?’

It’s absurd; the conversation is impossible. And yet Víctor is moved by her childlike way with words, the way she happens upon a single, inaccurate, ordinary word that nonetheless sums up everything.

‘Completely, Irina,’ he says. ‘Completely.’

And he pats the mattress so she will come and sit next to him.

He is going to tell her his life story. He is going to go on talking for hours. Irina will interrupt him only once or twice to ask a question, and sometimes it will seem as though he is talking to himself. The torrent of words will sweep them both along. He will move from the darkness of today to the light of one year ago, from his loneliness now to the loneliness of his childhood, from the stubborn silence of the ants to the cockroach he could not wake up, from the hands that cupped her buttocks to those that once upon a time picked up a pack of cards for the first time.

When tiredness finally overcomes them, Irina will murmur, ‘Darius’; she will try to fight off sleep only to give in, thinking it’s just five minutes, only five minutes, before she gets up and goes home. And perhaps he tosses and turns as he falls asleep,
goaded by some dark nostalgia, but at some point relief will cradle him. This is what words are for, Víctor. For laying down a burden.

A
t precisely 9 a.m., they are woken by the intercom, a buzz that is so loud and insistent that it cannot be the first. They both wake with a start and with a name on their lips: Alicia, thinks Víctor. ‘Darius!’ Irina shouts. Víctor hurries to the intercom and pushes the button that opens the door to the street.

‘No, no,’ he hears just as he is about to hang up. ‘I’ll wait for you down here.’

A breath of air moves along the hallway. It is Irina, rushing to the studio to pick up her clothes, which lie in a pile by the foot of the levitating table. Víctor asks her to fetch his too and put them in the laundry basket. Asks her to find him a pair of shoes and socks. A few short minutes later, she places the shoes in one hand and the socks in the other, then says goodbye with a caress. She smoothes his hair, runs her fingers across his chin. Something changed last night: they almost kiss each other on the cheek.

Víctor remembers that he hasn’t paid her yet, and gestures to the dresser, suggesting that she get the money herself. Irina has never seen so much money together in one place, and seeing it, she suddenly feels Víctor’s defencelessness, his life exposed in all its fragility, more than she did a few hours ago when he was pouring out his heart to her. She cannot even bring herself to put her hand in the drawer.

‘You work out how much you want to charge,’ Víctor says. ‘That was a lot of hours.’

Irina says nothing for a few seconds.

‘No. Two hundred and thirty,’ she says eventually.

Nobody forced her to sleep there.

‘There are no small notes,’ he says. ‘Take five fifties.’

Irina picks up the notes with the tips of her fingers and lays them out on top of the dresser one by one, her gestures exaggerated, as though he can see her count them out, so he will know she’s not robbing him.

Downstairs, Alicia is wondering whether she should buzz again. It has been five minutes, but she’s in no hurry. She is certainly not going to go upstairs. She is moving towards the staircase when she hears footsteps. Before she even sees Irina, Alicia knows it is not Víctor coming down. At that speed, he would kill himself. Besides, it sounds as if the person is wearing high heels. A neighbour, she thinks, when Irina finally appears. She could say something, ask this woman whether she knows Víctor, find out whether she can rely on her in case of an emergency, but she decides to leave it for another time. To judge from her rumpled hair and the dark circles under her eyes, the woman is late for work.

It is ten minutes before Víctor comes down. Alicia hears the door upstairs, closes her eyes and counts the steps. She draws in her shoulders, barely breathing, as though she is waiting for him to stumble. She would almost swear she can hear Víctor’s hand brushing the banister. She opens her eyes a second before he comes around the last corner. The first thing she sees is his shoes, black ankle boots that hardly seem suited to his casual outfit or the weather. But they’re better than nothing. Much better. She checks the urge to congratulate him and simply says hello, then offers him her elbow. She already knows neither of them will mention what happened yesterday. It is a sort of protocol they seem to have established without discussing it. Clearly the lessons learned have not been forgotten, the insults and the incentives have not been erased, but they never talk about the days that have gone before. Perhaps he believes that, in this way, by starting afresh every day, he will remain, stock still, at the point of departure. She on the other hand believes that the race has almost been won and, consequently, keeps shortening the distance.

Forcing him to go outside feels like she is punishing him, but Alicia has not made the decision out of a desire for vengeance. Quite the reverse, she is determined to demonstrate the antithesis of his malice. You lock me in a wardrobe; I show you the world. You abandon me; I guide you. They are not going to talk much;
she has no intention of irritating him with a long-winded lecture or getting him to perform some test. In fact, although she realises that Víctor is prepared to walk unaided, at least to the first corner, she will not let him. Nor will she use any of the opportunities for a lesson the short distance provides. When, as they step outside, Víctor immediately brings his hand to his eyes as though to shield them, she doesn’t tell him that there’s no need, that the light cannot dazzle him, that he would be better off using that hand to protect himself from knocks and bumps. When there is a shift in the slope of the pavement, at the entrance to a car park, she does not recommend that he remember this so he can use it for future reference. Only when they pass a van parked against the kerb does she say:

‘Aren’t you the one who said shadows are so interesting? Well, here’s one.’

‘What shadow?’ Víctor asks, confused, his hand still shielding his eyes.

When she turns to speak to him, Alicia notices that, although he appears to be following her meekly, silently, Víctor is tense, his head drawn in.

‘We’re going to take three steps back,’ she warns him. ‘Listen carefully to the noise of the traffic. OK, now forward again.’ Alicia stops next to the van. ‘Listen again. You can’t hear it as clearly, can you? The noise is slightly muted. Stretch out your right arm a little. You’re touching the side of a van. It’s higher than most of the parked cars, that’s why it blocks more of the sound. It does exactly the same with sound as it does with light; it casts a shadow.’

‘And that’s useful how?’

‘Well, in this case, I’d suggest you move slightly farther away, or at least protect your head.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s likely that a van will have a wing mirror at just the right height to hit you in the forehead. It won’t kill you, but it will hurt. And make you angry …’

They come to the first corner. Techniques for crossing the road take up several pages in Alicia’s notes. However, this time she simply checks to see that there are no cars coming and tells Víctor he can cross. When they come to the next corner, they turn right.

‘Calle Asturias,’ Víctor announces.

His tone is so neutral that she cannot tell whether he is proud or indifferent to the fact that he knows where he is. They walk one block and come to Plaza del Diamante. It is 9.30 a.m. A waiter is setting out metal tables and chairs outside the only café on the square. Alicia notices the grating shriek of metal and, glancing at Víctor, can see that it is setting his teeth on edge. They sit at one end of a long stone bench that runs along the north side of the square. Although autumn is still a month away, there are already a few dead leaves on the ground. Two drunks are sleeping off their hangovers at the far end of the bench. A mother opens the gate to the children’s playground so she can push her buggy through. It is like a small sheep pen, about sixty metres square, containing a slide, some swings, three rockers and three trees. The rockers are in the shape of a dragon, an elephant and a horse. Alicia notes all these details, but it does not even occur to her to describe them to Víctor. She is sure he has seen them a thousand times. They both sit in silence. Anyone looking at them would think they were old friends, a brother and sister, colleagues or lovers with nothing new to say to each other; people close enough to share the morning sunlight in silence. He has his eyes closed and seems to be enjoying the sun’s warmth on his face. Pedestrians wander by. Víctor notices this only when he hears the leaves crackle. The only constant sound comes from the playground, where every now and then mothers shout at their children if they look as if they’re about to fight, or attempt something too acrobatic on the swings.