Love in Lowercase (6 page)

On my way to the intersection bar for the second time, the wild horses that Marilyn was trying to save in the film I had seen the previous day were still galloping through my head.

From a distance I could make out the figure of someone I didn't wish to see seated at one of the tables. The black hat and white scarf left me in no doubt: it was him.

I was tempted to turn around, walk away, and never go back there again, but the bearded man seemed so engrossed in his manuscript that I doubted he'd notice my presence. Indeed, when I sat down at the middle table, he didn't even look up. I could relax.

I asked for a vermouth and paid for it in advance as a precaution. That Thursday lunchtime, the hubbub of cars and pedestrians was even greater than usual, so I had to be on the lookout. I was so absorbed in studying the people moving about that it took me a while to realize that the bearded man had gone, leaving his manuscript on the table.

I thought I'd do my duty and give it to the waiter to keep for him. He must be a regular, so he'd get it back soon.

But now that I had the manuscript in my hands, I couldn't resist having a peek. I checked the title again—
The Dark Side of the Moon—
and started reading it.

Every light has its shadow. However simple they may appear to be, people conceal a world in which unthinkable things happen. If by chance we enter it, we are invaded by feelings of bewilderment and fear, as if we were trespassing in someone else's garden.

Suddenly we realize that we have been blind to something that has always been there. The next step is to extend the territory of doubt to adjoining spheres, whereupon the region of shadows can lead us into never-imagined realms. After all, the other side of a coin occupies the same area as the one you can see.

You might discover that you know nothing of the person living beside you, or that you have closed your eyes so as not to see. And you would then wish that this first revelation—which has ripped apart the sweet calm of your everyday existence—had never happened.

This is why sometimes it is better not to want to know everything.

After reading this, I sat there perplexed for a few moments. I didn't know what to make of it. Those first few lines didn't tell me what the book was about.

Intrigued, I decided to keep reading, but luckily I looked up. The bearded man was crossing at the traffic light, walking at a frantic pace. He wasn't angry with me. That was clear because he didn't even look at me: he was annoyed with himself because he'd committed the unforgiveable error of leaving his manuscript on the terrace.

Still, I left his book on the table and rushed away without looking back.

I had a strange feeling when I got home. My encounter with the bearded man and his manuscript had set off alarm bells in my mind, as if reading what I shouldn't have read was going to have consequences—the butterfly effect unleashing a chain of small events with devastating results.

As I tried to find a radio station with decent music, I stopped at the sound of electric guitar from the 1970s, even though I usually prefer to listen to classical or jazz. The program was devoted to a Pink Floyd record on the occasion of one of its anniversaries.

“This is one of the most emblematic albums ever,” said the radio announcer in a deep, relaxed voice. “It has sold more than twenty-five million copies since its first appearance in 1973. After rehearsing the songs live, the group cloistered itself away in the legendary Abbey Road Studios. The sound engineer was Alan Parsons, who recorded sixteen tracks using the new Dolby equipment to produce a true work of art. This is a recording full of stunning surprises—for example, the use of the voice of the studio's doorman, who didn't expect to be heard on the record. For
all our listeners, we are delighted to present the remastered version of the classic
The Dark Side of the Moon
.”

—

I shut myself away in Titus's office, trying to forget about the coincidence and recalling the old man's description of chance: “the shadow of God.”

“No more shadows, please,” I said out loud, while waiting for the laptop to boot up.

Mishima had followed me upstairs and was now asleep under the train-set table. A butane heater filled the room with soporific gas.

On the desktop I found a document called
A Short Course in Everyday Magic
. I clicked, and it opened fast: it contained very little text apart from the title.

Titus was using the name of Francis Amalfi for the anthology. This was just one of his many pseudonyms. Since I was supposed to be the one who had to write the book, this would now become my pen name and alter ego. Samuel de Juan, with a doctorate in Germanic Philology, could not be the author of a mass-market book.

I scrolled down the document and reached the list of contents. It was the only thing Titus had written; the rest of the book was blank. I read the chapter headings to see if I could come up with something that would fit with them.

Contents (draft)

0. Prologue: Welcome to Magic

1. The Treasures of Solitude

2. Everyday Caresses for the Soul

3. The Flowers of Chance

4. Heart in Hand

5.

6.

7.

Not much to go on.
I felt exhausted at the mere idea of the amount of work in store for me. Titus had not even finished the contents page and expected me to turn this into a book!

Since I am a methodical person, I decided I had to complete the list of contents before starting to work on the book. I stared at the empty space to the right of number 5, hoping for a flash of brilliance. A sudden meow from Mishima shook me out of my stupor.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mishima
. I started typing.

5. Feline Philosophy

Not a brilliant title, perhaps, but I found it amusing to devote a chapter to a cat—though I had no idea what the cat was going to say.

Encouraged by this, I moved on to number 6. Perhaps I could include a dictionary of sorts in the book. I could take some of the entries from
They Have a Word for It
, if I had nothing better to contribute. At least I had a title for the time being.

6. The Secret Language

Sounds good
. Now I was really into it. Since one thing leads to another, I typed in the title of the last chapter almost without realizing it. The list of contents was complete.

7. Love in Lowercase

I regarded the last heading with pride. This was the only chapter I could imagine with a certain clarity. It would open with an introduction about the power of small actions. Then I would list things that can generate “love in lowercase.”

I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and jotted down the first item.

No. 1: Give a cat some milk (even if the milk doesn't agree with it).

This reminded me that I had to go to the vet to get Mishima vaccinated. An attractive woman with a prickly character but a good heart was waiting for me there.

With the cat following behind, I stopped for a moment to look at the wanderer in the picture, which had turned into a sort of mirror.

“Let me know when the fog clears,” I told him.

I was beginning to know a thing or two about feline behavior, so I kept my bedroom door closed all night to prevent Mishima from hiding somewhere in the house. He must have guessed what was awaiting him, because he was doing everything he could to get out.

When he worked out that scratching at the door was pointless, he started meowing and jumping onto the bed to wake me up, but I held my ground. He gave up in the end and was now curled up at my feet, fast asleep.

Before getting myself some breakfast, I locked him in the cat carrier. As I tried to calm him by stroking his head through the grille, his meow turned into a moan.

“That's life,” I told him. “Don't take it personally.”

—

Before us at the vet's clinic was a slobbering pit bull terrier that kept glowering at us in a threatening way. Its young skinhead owner didn't look friendly either. I could almost feel Mishima bristling inside the carrier. At least he'd be happy to be locked up inside it now.

The consulting-room door opened, and a lilac-haired old lady came out with a poodle in her arms. The pit bull started to bark and slobbered even more, but a firm hand grabbed his collar and lifted him up slightly to cut off his wind and silence him.

“I'll be with you in a moment,” the vet said, smiling, before shutting the door again.

Mishima meowed faintly in relief.

When the pitbull and the skinhead came out, I picked up the cat carrier and went in. The vet seemed much more relaxed than she'd been at my place, perhaps because she was in her own territory.

“My name's Meritxell, by the way,” she said, although I hadn't asked, as she took Mishima out of the carrier.

While she was injecting him, I studied her face. I once read somewhere that the beauty of a face isn't part of a particular cultural canon but a concept shared by all ethnic groups. Apparently, the same face would look attractive to the vast majority of human beings. Experiments have been run in nurseries, showing that babies have different reactions depending on the facial features of the staff member. They tend to cry when they see an unattractive face, while they are soothed by and will smile at one with regular features.

When she finished her work, Meritxell gave me another smile. That of course didn't mean she was going to accept an invitation to hot chocolate and ladyfingers. I opted for discretion and left without saying a word.

I saw a fleeting expression of disappointment on her face. No doubt she would have said no, but probably she would have loved me to ask her. I've never dared to probe too deep into the mysteries of female coquetry.

Since I had the rest of the morning free, I thought I'd pay Titus a visit in the hospital.

During my Metro journey, I took the opportunity to read a few of Buddha's aphorisms, which could be used for the book. I felt a bit embarrassed pulling out the anthology I'd found in Titus's apartment. That car full of gray faces didn't seem to be the best place for contemplative reading. Soon, however, I realized that no one was paying attention to what I or anyone else was doing. All the passengers looked on without seeing, with their eyes open—which is worse than them having their eyes closed. In that case, they could dream.

This reminded me of a passage I'd particularly liked from Pessoa's
The Book of Disquiet
. In it, Pessoa says, more or less, that when we're asleep we all become children again because, as we slumber, we can do no wrong and are unaware of life. By some kind of natural magic, the greatest criminal and the most callous egotist become holy during their sleep. Therefore, according to the poet, there is hardly any difference between killing a sleeping man and a child.

From
saudade
—another untranslatable term—in Portuguese, I jumped to the words attributed to Siddhartha Gautama:

Pain is inevitable

but suffering is optional.

He who doesn't know what to attend to

and what not to heed

attends to the unimportant

and ignores the essential.

That's me
. I got off at the Hospital Clínic stop, almost angry that someone who lived twenty-five hundred years ago should be giving me advice.

—

“How are your two missions going?” Titus asked.

“I've finished the contents page for the book. What's the other mission?”

“Finding Gabriela, of course.”

“So far I've drawn a blank in my search.”

“I didn't tell you to search for her, but to find her,” Titus pointed out.

“I don't see the difference.”

“While you're looking, your eyes can go no further than the limits of your expectations. It would be like me looking for God under the bed because, in my position, that's the most comfortable thing. Do you understand?”

I nodded, thinking again about the drunk man looking for his keys next to the lamppost.

“So,” Titus added, “when you're looking, you never find anything really important.”

“What am I supposed to do, then? Hang around with my arms crossed?”

“On the contrary,” Titus said, sitting up in his bed.

“In order to find something,” he went on, clutching my hand, “you've got to let yourself go. If you follow preconceived ideas, you won't even see what's happening in front of your nose.”

I nodded again and noticed that the other bed was empty.

“What happened to your roommate?” I asked. “Where's he gone?”

“If I knew,” Titus said with a sad smile, “they'd give me the Nobel Prize for Everything.”

The assignment on Kafka's
The Castle
was revealing, if only because it demonstrated that the students had not understood a thing about it.

This has always been my favorite novel by Kafka, maybe because it's the most enigmatic. Since he died when it was only half finished, one can only guess what would have happened in the end to the land surveyor K., who is constantly thwarted in his attempts to reach the castle.

Was Gabriela my personal castle? Worried by this association, I brushed up on the basic plot on my way to the bar with the terrace.

The land surveyor K. is wandering around, confused by a series of contradictory signs:

K. arrives in a snowbound town, where he's been summoned by the castle owners.

Once he has found shelter at the inn, a telephone call informs him that he will never be able to go to the castle.

Shortly afterward, he receives a letter confirming that
he has been employed in the service of the lords of the castle.

The mayor informs K. that the castle has no need for land surveyors and an administrative error is the cause of the confusion.

The very same day a letter tells him that the inhabitants of the castle are very satisfied with his surveying work.

Although he receives this message, K. is still unable to do his work, and all his attempts to reach the castle fail.

The castle is an emblem of all the most absurd human aspirations—such as the desire for immortality or my efforts to rekindle an old love from thirty years ago. This thought took me back to Titus once more. He'd told me that if I went looking for Gabriela I wouldn't find her, but I wanted to try again, one last time.

I decided that if the madman was sitting on the terrace I'd walk past and never go back. All the tables were free, as it was a cold, windy day, so I sat down at the one in the middle and, once again, asked for a vermouth. I rubbed my hands, trying to get some warmth into them, realizing as I did so that I seemed to be irresistibly attracted to the terrace, like the moon to the earth. I was a ridiculous satellite spinning around an impossible dream.

I studied the to-ing and fro-ing of all the passersby going in both directions. If Gabriela was there among all those people, it would have been like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack, but still I wanted to give it one final chance.

I was humming to the music drifting out of the bar—Billie Holiday crooning “The difficult I'll do right now / The impossible will take a little while”—when a sinister figure loomed before me so fast I had no time to react. The bearded man sank into the metal chair and placed his manuscript on the table.

I could have finished my vermouth and left. Yet I felt
inexplicably rooted to my seat. Feeling strangely calm, I kept watching the passersby.

Something's going to happen today
.

There was no reason for thinking this, but an arrow had pierced the layers of my unconscious to tell me. Perhaps that's why I wasn't too startled when the man in the hat asked, “Do you feel nostalgia for the future?”