At Close Quarters

One morning as he was shaving, he heard children’s voices on the other side of the fence outside his house. It was an unusual sound at that hour – ten past nine in the morning – in a quiet
residential
neighbourhood with wide streets, far from the city centre. He turned off the tap in order to hear better, and in the increasingly loud buzz he made out some adult voices. Razor in hand, his face still lathered with shaving foam, he walked over to the study and, unseen in the semi-darkness of the room, he observed, with surprise and curiosity, the group of children loitering on the broad pavement accompanied by their parents. The kids were all wearing the blue school uniform of the Marian Catholic School he himself had worn as a child. He’d just heard on the radio it was the beginning of term, and seven million Spanish children were returning to school after the summer holidays.

It all made perfect sense when he saw a shiny school bus appear at the end of the street. His house was on a corner, and the stop for a new bus route had been situated there. He realised he was smiling, pleased at the sight which stirred a peaceful but rather boring neighbourhood, in which any novelty – the annual pruning of trees, a change in the traffic system – almost felt like an event. There was too much quietness in the area, too much reserve, as people stayed in their houses and patios, seldom going out into the streets. And so, the sounds of the local children gathering at his doorstep as they set off for school would be like a fresh breeze each morning.

The bus, bearing the name of the school on its windscreen, stopped at the corner. Samuel saw an assistant help the little ones get through the front door and settle in their seats. The parents kissed their children goodbye and then waved at them through the windows, with excessively broad smiles and much movement of the arms.

The last of the children had boarded the bus when he saw a young woman hurrying along the pavement with two children – the elder, who must have been four or five, hanging onto the stroller in which the smaller was sitting. The woman hastily raised an arm to stop the bus from pulling off, and Samuel almost leaned out of the window and shouted at them to wait up, but he checked himself on realising he was still holding his razor and his face was covered in foam. The driver seemed about to shut the doors when he saw the woman crossing the road. She then stopped the stroller, and helped the boy up, giving him a quick kiss.

She breathed out in relief when the bus drove off. Since the other mothers were already walking away, she stayed alone on the pavement – Samuel saw her clearly from his windowed balcony – catching her breath while she tried to make her small child more comfortable in its chair. Then she turned round and checked the number of the house, as if she’d never been there before and wanted to make sure she wouldn’t forget the address. When, with a touch of curiosity, she lifted her eyes to the balcony windows, Samuel instinctively stepped back, into the shadows, fearing that she might see him and think he was spying on her. Her eyes lingered for a couple of seconds on the glass, and even though he knew the reflection of the sun and the darkness of the interior prevented her from seeing him, he withdrew a little further, though not to the point of being unable to observe her. The woman was very beautiful. She didn’t look weak or fragile, but there was a grace to her movements that she had not lost even when she’d been hurried and agitated, running towards the bus along the pavement.

Then she slowly walked away, her steps undulating slightly under a hemline that stopped just below her knees. He kept his
eyes on her until she turned the corner at the second junction, where the detached houses ended and the three-storey blocks began. Samuel was not experienced enough with women not to be moved by visions such as this. When she disappeared from view, he noticed the foam had dried on his face.

That morning, while Samuel was having a coffee in his local bar, the waiter confirmed what he already suspected. The old Marian school had outgrown its small, antiquated premises, a damp dark building in the heart of the run-down city centre, from where the new bourgeoisie had fled over the last decade, preferring the recently developed suburbs. The Marians had acquired vast plots of land on the outskirts, where they had built a modern
educational
compound with sports facilities, an indoor swimming pool, state-of-the-art installations, and easy access for vehicles, hoping to attract the children and grandchildren of those who had already been educated with them and who refused to take their offspring to the old place, where the cold and draughty classrooms with their high ceilings were now obsolete, and never big enough to take in the teeming crowds of immigrant children whose families had, little by little, taken possession of the dilapidated big houses of the city centre.

He felt gladdened by the news when he left the café. There seemed to be more people in the streets, and he noticed a kind of first-day-of-school excitement affecting even adults without children. This small event would allow him to see the woman the following day, and the one after that, and after that, perhaps for a long time.

Five years previously, Irene and he had bought the house off the plans as its proposed size had closely matched what they were looking for: a place comfortable enough to raise the three children they hoped to have. Although it was a bit far from the beach and the promenade around which the city was laid out, they liked the new area which turned its back to the hustle and bustle of summer tourism, with houses of two storeys at most that by law had to be
set back at least three metres from the pavement. Besides, it was near the industrial area where his small company was situated. They had it all planned, and yet, fifteen months after signing the deeds to the house, when it was almost ready, Irene had left him for a frantic web designer whose visual montages were nauseating. They reached an agreement. He bought her out, and settled into a house too large for a single man.

It wasn’t an easy period of his life. He thought that as far as women were concerned there were two kinds of men: hard,
sarcastic
, tough-skinned ones incapable of love and immune to pain; and men capable of pleasure and tenderness and passion, and as a consequence prone to suffering from a lack of the same. He was among the latter. Not that he complained. On the contrary, he was convinced that, in the long run, in the final reckoning of a life, no feelings of love counted as a loss, even if one had given one’s love to someone who did not deserve it.

For a few weeks following the separation, he walked about in a daze. One morning, after a restless night of insomnia, he got up wishing Irene all the worst. This surprised him, as he couldn’t remember ever feeling so resentful. He searched for an
explanation
and said to himself: ‘Because I loved her so much then, I hate her so much now. Because, for her sake, I gave up meeting other women, instead putting in more hours at work and having fun with no strings attached.’ He felt that Irene had planted that small, painful amount of malice within him when she left, and later he had watered it, fertilised it and made it grow by forgetting her.

As time passed, he did start to forget her. He rarely went out, and when he did he avoided places where he might meet her. A couple of times he had seen her from the car, and on one occasion they’d run into each other at the cinema, but they exchanged little more than a greeting and a couple of polite questions that left a bitter aftertaste.

Later on he learned that she wasn’t happy. She had separated from her techie boyfriend and now lived alone. It surprised him how little he was affected by the news. What business was it of
his whether she was happy or not? Either way his life would not change, because he didn’t want a second chance or a fresh start. He no longer missed her, although at times he remembered her, calmly and non-dramatically, in a spirit of gentle disillusionment. The memory of her had stopped hurting, and he was left only with a mild feeling of disappointment.

He had already shaved and was buttoning his shirt in the
semi-darkness
of the study when he saw the woman walking down the pavement, pushing the stroller and holding the elder boy by the hand, this time in no hurry because she was in good time. She was wearing a light-coloured shirt and quite faded jeans, and perhaps the clothes made her look younger, less of a mum, to the point that he started having doubts about his previous assumption. He even wondered whether the two children were hers. She might well be an au pair hired by working parents. But when he saw her kiss the elder boy goodbye his doubts disappeared. The gesture, halfway between vigilance and tenderness, oblivious to the eyes of others, was an unquestionable indicator of motherhood.

Now he had another reason – a small, but a constant and
pleasant
reason – to get up in the morning. In good and bad weather, whether it was cold, hot, sunny or foggy, she would come to the corner, and he, from his high window, would be able to observe her way of walking, her dark hair sometimes tied up in a ponytail, her attractive form, her impatient movements when the bus was late, her way of rubbing her hands as if they were always cold, her smile and her farewell wave at the boy on the other side of the bus window. It was like a ritual – a small daily gift that had fallen in his lap by chance, due to a simple change in a bus route, a secret he couldn’t share with anyone, because even if it felt like nothing of the sort to him, the outside world might see something obscene in the fact that he was spying on an unknown woman from the anonymity of a dark room; they would call furtiveness what he called reserve, and would find guilt where there was only harmless voyeurism. Not even the fact that he was home and she
was outside, in a public place, would be considered a mitigating factor, because that was a legal technicality that did not apply to the general notion of chivalry.

Sometimes, while waiting for the bus, she would cast curious glances at the house, at the pointed cypress growing by the entrance, the saplings with yellowing leaves on the branches overhanging the fence, the windowed balcony with its three-metre wide window box, where he had planted geraniums that spilled down the lower wall.

Samuel loved plants and their inability to hide their needs and grievances, the shameless innocence with which they displayed their genitals on top of their stems, as he’d read somewhere. At weekends, he spent several hours looking after the rose bushes, the vigorous wisteria, the hydrangea, the lantanas, the bougainvillea, the jasmine, and the begonia, which, with its explosion of flowers, seemed to want to escape its destiny as creeper but was hindered by the muscular branches which coiled between the metal bars of the fence making it warp. He was not put off by the constant attention they demanded: watering, pruning, fertilising, cleaning them of plant lice, slugs and snails, replanting and grafting in order to keep a balance that they often broke by growing or wilting unexpectedly. When the gardener’s away, it was said, nature finds a way.

He came to suspect that she too liked flowers, because one morning he saw her approach the bougainvillea that hung over the fence and caress its dark petals; another day she stopped off to smell the jasmine, and yet another smiled in front of the explosion of fuchsia bellflowers arching over the door.

One evening, Samuel placed a flowerpot containing a
spectacular
rhododendron in full bloom on the cornice of the balcony windows. She quickly discovered it the next morning and stood a few seconds admiring it. Then her eyes slid slowly along the rest of the façade, as if wondering who might live in that house where she’d never seen any sign of life, where no one came in or went out, where no noises gave anything away as to the movements of its inhabitants, but where obviously there lived someone who treated
plants with great skill and knowledge. Another day, Samuel added the bursting flowers of a hibiscus, making the window box look like a frieze which contrasted with – and made more mysterious – the darkness reigning on the other side. He left flowers there, beneath the place from where he spied on her, until they lost their splendour, and in a way he felt he was sending secret declarations of love and affection to the woman, who seemed to have grown used to appraising the changes offered each morning by the
mysterious
, anonymous occupant of the house.

He knew her well, and yet didn’t know a thing about her. People, it was said, discuss others a lot; they tell each other details and gossip, murmur about men and women they’ve never seen, cast and recast anecdotes about prestige and infamy, accept
apocryphal
biographies without questioning their veracity. Yet he did know the way she walked, flicked her hair, stirred to keep warm in the cold, caressed her children, hung her head when she seemed worried or pensive, or smiled luminously when remembering something. One day he discovered that what seemed peculiar about her movements was the fact that she was left-handed. It was the left hand that she used to help her son up the high steps of the bus; the left hand that did up a loose button of her shirt; and the left hand that first waved at a known face. Samuel would have recognised her shadow without having seen her body, and yet he didn’t know anything else about her. What was her name? Did she live alone? Was she in a relationship? Did she have a job or did she stay at home until it was time to pick up the elder son at half past five, as he’d noticed one afternoon he hadn’t gone to work? Why did the children’s father never bring them to the bus stop?

At other times his thoughts were not so chaste, and he would catch himself aroused at the thought of the texture of her thighs, or the slight weight of her breasts, or of how hard her nipples would feel if one day he got to kiss or bite them. He imagined his tongue knifing through her lips in search of hers; he pictured the peculiar way in which she would fondle his stomach with her left hand; and a few minutes later, with eyes closed, he would smile at
remembering all the things he imagined doing with her. He would invent pick-up lines he knew he’d never use, as he’d never been very decisive with women.