B0040702LQ EBOK (29 page)

She smiled at him from one end of the sofa. She was wearing
a very short black skirt and a tight grey sweater. It was dark
in the sitting room and out in the street the evening was
beginning its leisurely decline.

`Are you sure your parents aren't going to turn up any
minute?' he asked.

`If you're going to be like that, we'll go out,' she replied.

`I just feel really uptight,' he said.

`Why?' she asked.

He passed her the joint and did not respond at once. Finally,
his gaze lost in the geometry of a piece of porcelain, he said:

`I get like this sometimes, I get a sort of knot in my chest,
just here. And it doesn't go away until something happens.'

`What sort of something?' she asked, stubbing out the joint
in a copper ashtray.

`Something bad,' he said.

It was a very spacious living room, full of over-large furniture and objects that harked back to a solid but inglorious past.
The boy, who was sitting at the other end of the sofa, smiled at
the girl and tried in vain to evoke some exciting fantasy. The
minutes passed noisily on a pendulum clock. For the second
time, she asked him if she should put some music on and he
again said no.

`If they tried to open the door or if they rang the bell, we
wouldn't hear them,' he argued.

`So you spend the whole day just waiting for something to
happen,' she said.

`Yes,' he said shyly.

At that moment, the phone rang and he almost jumped off
the sofa, causing her to collapse in laughter.

`Aren't you going to pick it up?' he asked.

`I can't, we're not here,' she said.

`Where are we??

`At the cinema or having a few beers somewhere.'

`What if it's your parents and they've decided to come
back?'

`Don't start that again.'

The phone continued to ring throughout this conversation
and then stopped. Night was falling on the other side of the
windows, although the living room had been in darkness for
some time. The boy was sweating; he switched on the table
lamp to his left, and a few objects recovered their shapes.

`Imagine it was true what you said before: that we're not
here.'

She crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. Then she screwed up
her eyes and pursed her lips; the shadow of a smile flickered
across her mouth.

`It's possible,' she said at last, `we might well be somewhere
else, but, for some reason, we might believe that we were
here.'

`That would be great,' he said, as if relieved of an enormous
burden. `That way, even if your parents did come back,
nothing would happen.'

`Have you ever seen a film called The Boston Strangler?'

'No,' he said.

She changed position, put out her cigarette and proceeded to roll another joint while she summarised the plot
for him.

`It's based on real events, I think. It's about this really
normal guy who worked as a plumber or something. The
thing is, the guy was a murderer, only he didn't know it.
There was a murky area in his life that he knew nothing
about, and when he was in that murky area, he used to
strangle women.There's a really moving bit when the police
discover that he's the murderer, but at the same time realise
that he doesn't know it. Like I said, he was a model family
man and all that. Anyway, they arrest him, but they don't tell
him what he's been accused of, instead they call in some
psychiatrists to see if they can make him remember his crimes. The man is completely baffled, of course, because he
has no idea what's going on.Then the psychiatrists start
working with him and there's one really chilling moment.
Just thinking about it makes my hair stand on end. I'm going
to put the centre light on.'

She handed him the joint and got up to turn on the main
light. The shadows, far from diminishing, grew thicker in
the most densely furnished parts of the room. The boy took
a rather anxious drag on the joint. He seemed to have
grown thinner in the last few minutes, but that was due to
the intensity of his gaze and the effect of the light on his
face.

`And where did he think he was when he was killing these
women?' he asked.

`He wasn't anywhere,' she replied, `the crimes were parentheses, black holes.That's what I think anyway. So, I was
telling you about this one moment, when he's with the psychiatrists, when an event surfaces in his memory that he has
no knowledge of having been part of. He sees himself climbing furtively down the drainpipe in some inner courtyard
somewhere. Then you get a close-up of his face on the
screen and it shows the utter horror he feels at remembering
something that, as far as he was concerned, never happened.
Can you imagine what it must feel like to remember
things that haven't happened or that you believe haven't
happened?'

`How did it end?'

`I can't remember.'

`Those things usually end badly.'

`Have you still got the knot in your chest?'

`It's got much worse now. That story about the plumber
has made me feel really strange.'

She changed position and sat looking up at the ceiling,
watching the smoke from the joint rise up and disperse.
The boy could not find a position in which he could sit
comfortably for more than half a minute. After a while, he
said:

`Why have you gone all silent?'

`I'm enjoying myself just imagining things,' she replied.

`What are you imagining now?'

`That what you said about the knot is true, that it warns
you when something bad is going to happen.'

`It's true, I told you it was.

`The same thing happens to my father when he dreams that
he's smoking a cigarette. He gave it up fifteen years ago, but
sometimes, in dreams, he sees himself smoking again and the
following day something always happens.'

The girl stopped speaking and the tick-tock from the
pendulum clock took on vast proportions.

`Keep talking, please,' he said, `when you stop talking, I feel
even more anxious.'

`Did I tell you what happened to my grandmother when
my Uncle Fernando died, my father's twin brother?'

`Don't tell me any more stories like that.'

`All right. Do you want to go to my room then?'

`Not yet. I just need to calm down a bit first.'

She excused herself and left the living room. When she got
to the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror and her
eyes were shining. She sent herself a knowing smile and
unhurriedly retouched her lipstick. Then she brushed her
hair, tried out a few horrified expressions and returned to the
living room.

`It was awful,' she said, `it was in the house opposite, I saw
it from the bathroom window: a woman just leapt into
space.

`What do you mean?'

`She killed herself. The people next door have picked up
the body and put it in a car.'

The boy sat very still, his eyes fixed on the ashtray, as if
listening to some internal event.

`That's probably the thing you sensed was about to
happen,' she added.

`That's exactly what I was going to say,' he said, `the knot
in my chest is gradually dissolving.'

After a while, he got up, put his arm around the girl's waist
and they made their way to the bedroom kissing. From the street came a scream that penetrated the windows, but they
were too busy exploring each other's bodies to notice. The
pendulum clock struck ten.

Ah, well.

© Juan Jose Millis

Translated by Margaret full Costa

Juan Jose Millis (Valencia, 1946) is both a writer of short
stories and novels and a journalist. His first novel, Cerbero son
las sombras won the Sesamo Prize in 1974 and since then he
has published Vision del ahogado (1977), Papel mojado (1983),
Letra muerta (1983), El desorden de to nombre (1988), La soledad
era esto (1990; winner of the Nadal Prize), Volver a casa (1990)
and El orden alfabetico (1998). This story is taken from Primavera
de luto y otros cuentos (1989) in which all the stories end with
the same resigned, anticlimactic 'Ali, well.'

Armand ran into the workshop making a noise like a car and
trampling the shavings on the floor, crunching over them as
noisily as he could. He circled the carpenter's bench twice,
and looked at the saws, gouges, clamps and planes hanging up,
all in perfect order, each tool in its proper place (marked by
the appropriate outline sketched on the wall), then went off
down the passage at the end of which the actual house began.
Uncle Reguard had his workshop at the back of the house
and although the grown-ups always used the front entrance,
Armand preferred to go in through the workshop. He was
fascinated by the fact that his uncle's workshop was just
behind the house. He lived in a flat and his father's workshop
was on the ground floor of another building, four blocks away.
His cousins all felt the same. Uncle Reguard was the only
member of the family to have his house and his workshop
together; there was a little room that served to separate the
two, and also served as a lumber room. Immediately after it, if
you were approaching from the workshop, came the dining
room, with the big table, the chandelier, and the armchairs,
then the corridors with doors to the other rooms.

When Armand got to the dining room the others were
already there, exchanging kisses, laughing, and shouting
louder and louder all the time in order to be heard; his father,
his mother, his cousins, his uncle, his aunts, the other aunt and
uncle, and the other group of more distant cousins, who in
fact weren't cousins at all, he just called them cousins because
they belonged to such distant branches of the family that he
didn't know exactly how to classify them.

They ate a meal that went on for hours, then sat around
afterwards, with cigar smoke filling the room. The empty
champagne bottles began to pile up in the lumber room, between the house and the workshop, the aunts cut cake nonstop and the older cousins played records. The air was thick
and smelled of chocolate. The younger cousins (Armand,
Guinovarda, Gisela, Guitard, Llopard) asked to be allowed to
get down from the table, then ran to Eguinard's room to play
with the wooden houses, which had roofs and doors and
windows all painted in different colours. With the door ajar,
Armand could see a corner of the passageway and in that
corner the harp.