Rage (20 page)

It must have been about three in the morning, and
it was very cold. The streets were deserted. From time
to time a car passed by in the distance. Maria had the
sensation he had been walking those streets the previous
day... but at another hour. He didn't register that he
was out of doors until he went into the locksmith's. In
some sense, being outside was hardly all that important,
after all. What mattered was being inside. It even (in a
barrio hitherto unknown to him) seemed curious that he
had gone straight to the nearest locksmith, a locksmith
which remained open round the clock, as if he'd ended
up knowing the barrio from within the villa.

A man advanced in years, with the aspect of a retired
crook, looked suspiciously at him all the time he made a
copy of the key. Maria held his gaze. (Between them there
flashed the sparks made by the key-cutter.) Eventually Maria made his way back to the villa. Once inside the
tradesmen's entrance, he took off his shoes and repeated
the same careful actions he had performed in leaving,
with a brief pause in the kitchen to select his dinner.

That was on 12th August. The rest followed naturally.
Next morning, on 13th August, he would call her by
phone and tell her he wanted to see her. He could only
leave the house at dawn, which was what he would do
that very 13th August, and spend the night out on the
street until he went to his assignation with Rosa - some
time either in the morning or the afternoon - in some
place yet to be determined, after which he would bid
her farewell and return to the house at dawn on the
14th August. He knew very well what he was going to
say to her. It would mark the end of their going round
in circles.

"Don't spin me any more twisters, Rosa. Would you
like us to meet, yes or no?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"Well... where would you like to meet up?"

"The little hotel on the Bajo?"

"I don't think so, Maria. Now that things are..." she
interrupted herself.

"Different?" finished Maria sadly.

Rosa paused a while and, as was her habit each time a
difficult question came up, changed the subject:

"Would you like us to meet in La Cigale?"

"So what's wrong with the little hotel, that you don't
want to meet there any more? I'm not about to bite
you..."

"Of course I know you're not going to bite me," Rosa
laughed (mirthlessly). "The problem is that..."

"Forget it. I'll be waiting for you at the entrance."

"Of La Cigale?"

"Of the little hotel."

"Don't you prefer La Cigale?"

"No. I don't want to meet in La Cigale. I don't want
anyone to see us. I'll wait for you at the entrance to the
little hotel at... well, you tell me."

"At five o'clock."

"As late as that?" Maria said, then straight away realized
that it was all the same to him, whatever time they met:
in any case he was going to have to spend the rest of
the day out on the street, until night fell. "It's fine. At
five o'clock sharp," he added, "I'll wait for you at the
entrance. See you tomorrow."

"Maria?"

"Yes?"

"No, nothing..."

A pause followed.

"See you tomorrow," repeated Maria.

Rosa asked him a question:

"Are you all right?"

"I'm OK. What about you?" said Maria.

"Me too."

"
"Good. I'm glad for you...

Another pause.

"Good, until tomorrow..."

"Until tomorrow, my..." and Maria sharply interrupted himself.

27

Rosa didn't show.

Maria spent twenty minutes waiting for her in the
doorway to the little hotel, another ten minutes on the opposite pavement, and still a further twenty minutes in
pacing to and fro.

He was beside himself with rage.

He was on the point of leaving when he suddenly
caught sight of Israel.

It was such a monstrous coincidence that it could only
have occurred in order to justify and compensate for
the fact that Rosa had stood him up.

Israel was standing by a newspaper kiosk, studying
the cover of a magazine. He had one hand stuffed
in his pocket, where he was jingling his keys or some
loose change, while the other hand was busy for real:
it scratched the nape of his neck, his nose, adjusted his
rugby shirt, held down the magazine cover each time
the wind lifted it... Maria didn't need to pause to think.
He crossed the street and went straight over to him.

He stopped beside him. At that very instant Israel had
finished reading and had straightened himself up ready
to move on, but the cover of another magazine, hung
directly below the first, caught his attention. The first
one was all about weapons, the second about hunting.
Maria smelled his odour - a powerful blast of pine
combined with armpit sweat - and examined the stubble
of his hairline, recently trimmed around his nape and
over his ears. His neck was considerably wider than his
head and his ears even smaller than his eyes. The kiosk's
owner surfaced, counting a roll of banknotes. Israel
pulled himself together and went slowly on his way.

Maria followed him. It was a Friday and the Bajo was
full of cars hell-bent on escaping the city. People came
and went, some hurrying too rapidly and others making
no haste at all, as if they were all equally lost. Israel
proceeded in a straight line. He held his elbows out,
obliging anyone coming towards him to move out of his way, but it was clear he had no particular destination
in mind. He was taking a stroll, perhaps killing time
until it was his customary dinner time. Twilight was
already setting in, but fortunately Israel continued
following a path that took him away from his house,
towards which Maria could not have followed him, for
fear of being spotted by one of the builders at his old
building site, or by the doorman, or even by Rosa... He
was forgetting that by now it would be very difficult for
anyone to recognize him: he was thin, pale, with long
hair down to his shoulders, and several months' growth
of beard. So it was that Israel, awoken by Maria's glare
fixed on the back of his neck, turned round and stared
back at him.

They had reached a street corner. Maria, who had
followed behind at a distance of six or seven yards, held
his gaze as he caught up with him, without allowing his
pace to show the least hesitation or acceleration. His
mind was a blank, but he approached the man as if he
knew exactly what he was going to do. For his part, Israel
didn't recognize him, but was uncomfortably aware that
something wasn't going quite right.

"Israel."

"Do I know you?"

These were the only words they exchanged. All of a
sudden, Maria grabbed him by the neck, dragged him
over towards a building, and shoved his head against the
wall with all his strength. Israel was left dumbfounded.
Maria grasped his neck with his two hands, staring
him in the eyes. He had thrown his body weight well
forwards, and was pushing out from where he had a
foot planted firmly on the ground, to reinforce the
pressure through his hands. He was so enraged that
blood started to trickle from his nostrils. The blood wet his lips. He exhaled and Israel's face became spattered
with tiny red splashes, some of them assuming the
shape of a tear.

Maria looked left and right and experienced the
strangeness of killing someone in the middle of the
street, without anyone else being the wiser. Israel was
offering no resistance at all, other than that naturally
offered by a neck as broad and tough as his own: the
most he could do was struggle to keep his eyes open;
his pupils were rolling, floating in their orbs without
focusing on anything...

Maria dragged him back a little way, and hammered
his head into the wall once more. This time, the blow
was far more violent than the previous one.

Israel closed his eyes. The weight of his body doubled
at least. That was when Maria loosened the pressure in
his hands.

After which he fled. He stopped only when he ran out
of breath. He had the impression that everything had
happened very rapidly and that he'd fled the scene of
the crime so fast that Israel, now a mile or two behind
him, was still breathing his last.

He sat down on a doorstep, in a block in the middle of
a darkened street. A man came past, carrying a pizza in
its cardboard box on the palm of one hand.

"D'you have the time?" asked Maria.

"No."

The man went on by.

Maria got to his feet, put one hand in his pocket and
felt for the key to the villa. Then he sat himself down
again.

A tramp approached, pushing a supermarket trolley
loaded with cardboard he had collected and, without
pausing on his journey, called out:

"D'you have the time?"

"No," replied Maria, and paused to wonder why a
tramp would need to know the time. Probably the pizza
delivery man was asking himself the same question
about him. It had to be around eight - or possibly nine
- o'clock at night.

The door before which he was seated opened unexpectedly, and a young woman almost tripped over him.
She backed off in panic and shielded herself behind
a skinny and pallid youth dressed all in black, with a
woollen hat embellished with the slogan PORN in red
pulled down over his eyebrows.

"Excuse me," the young guy said to him.

Maria stood up to make way for them.

The young couple made their exit one behind the
other, and disappeared rapidly into the distance, arm
in arm and whispering. Maria took note of where the
girl had been looking: she had been staring at his nose.
He touched it with a finger. Over his upper lip was a
cascade, or a Hitler moustache, of dried blood. He tried
to clean it off with saliva, but ended up having to wash
it with water from the pavement gutter. He rubbed the
cuff of his shirtsleeve across his mouth, drying it off,
and walked over to the corner.

The next time he asked for the time, already in the
neighbourhood of the villa, he was told it was three
o'clock. Until that point, he had been walking without
any sense of direction, while deliberately singling out
the streets with the most traffic on them, on which
he felt he could pass by without arousing the least
suspicion - or less than on emptier side streets, with
or without lighting. Ahead or behind, along the avenues, there were great pools of light drawing people in
like moths around a flame: a cinema, a shopping mall, a discotheque, where people gathered like insects.
Sometimes the point of convergence was wide, sometimes less so, but it was always surrounded by dusk or
darkness.

On one occasion, if he wasn't mistaken, he had passed
by that way arm in arm with Rosa, window-shopping and
finding something to say about whatever they saw. Rosa
enjoyed comparing the price of clothes with the cost
of public services, or with food; she grew indignant as
she drew up the list of those items she knew she could
purchase in the supermarket and compared them with
the price of a pair of jeans, or when she attempted
to make the equation between that of a pair of tights
and a dozen - or maybe even fifteen - trips on the
bus (depending, obviously, on the value of the tights)
or the cost of a month's supply of gas (whenever she
found cheap tights, the cost of gas seemed to her to
go up).

For a while he'd been walking along, fumbling with a
piece of paper in his pocket. He took it out. It was a tenpeso note. The note must have been there since before
any of all this began...

The first thing that occurred to him was to ring
Rosa. For that he needed coins. A few yards further on
there was a McDonald's. He entered, went up to one
of the tills and took his place in the queue. When his
turn came up, he asked for one of the set meals and
to have his change in coins. Then he sat down at the
one empty table, and devoured his hamburger with its
microwaved chips without lifting his head, intimidated
by the hustle and bustle, uncomfortable beneath the
bright lights, paranoid at the difference between him
and the dozens of young people coming and going
from the adjacent cinema, and squeezed out by a large family surging by with their trays, in search of a place
to sit down.

He got up and left. In the doorway there was a public
telephone. He dialled the number for the villa and in
less than three rings he heard Rosa's voice:

"Hello?"

"Rosa, it's me. Whatever happened? You didn't turn
up.

"Maria, I'm so sorry. I couldn't make it. I wanted
to come - I was going to come - but the Senora had
booked me a doctor's appointment and I couldn't
refuse to go."

"Why was she taking you to the doctor?"

"Oh it was nothing... just a check-up..."

"Did you feel ill?"

"No, no, I had some kind of a bug and... what do I
know about it? Lately, the Senora seems to be looking
after me as if I were made of gold. So you went, did
you?"

"Why wouldn't I go? I needed to speak to you. I was
waiting for you."

"What about tomorrow?"

"I don't know if I can make it tomorrow... It was
supposed to be today..."

"Where are you? I can hear a racket..."

"Out on the street."

"Ah, now I can make it out. Come to think of it, it
has to be the first time there's been a background noise
when you've rung me. Where were you calling from
before, from a private house?"

"Yes...

"I swear I'd reached the point where I was certain
that..." Rosa began, before interrupting herself again.

"What had you come to believe?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all, don't listen to me..." said
Rosa. She sounded disappointed, as if Maria's love for
her would have been greater within the walls of a prison
than out on the street.

"Listen, Rosa, I'm in a phone booth, and they're
going to cut me off at any moment. Wait until I can put
in another coin... Oh - but what did I do with all my
change? Ah, here it is. Hello?"