Rage (23 page)

"Who is it?" asked the uncle.

"Me, Jose Maria. Listen carefully, as I don't have too
much time... Is everything OK with you?"

"Do you know the bedside table in my room? Do me a
favour: go and take a look, and see whether underneath
it...

"Hang on a second," said the uncle. "Which Jose Maria
are you referring to?"

"Me, it's me, I'm Jose Maria! Maria! What other Jose
Maria would I be referring to?"

"Where on earth have you been?"

"It's a long story..."

"Well, tell me something about it! Are you in the
country?"

"No."

"That's what I thought. What happened? The cops
turned up here three or four times, to see if they could
find you. So how come you're managing to give me a
call right now?"

"Is your phone tapped?"

"What do you mean?"

"The telephone. Has it been tapped?"

"How the hell do I know? Why on earth would my
phone be tapped - because of you? No... what I'm
talking about happened years ago, at least two or three
years... Anyway, what do I know about it? They never
returned since then. You know what a state this country's
in now."

"Listen to me..."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. Listen here, Uncle. Do you know the bedside
table in my bedroom, the one on the right? If you're
standing at the foot of the bed, on the right-hand side?
Are you with me?"

"What were they looking for, drugs? They wouldn't tell
me a sausage. Were you mixed up in that whole drugs
thing?"

"No, Uncle, drugs had nothing at all to do with it."

"Well in any case, to me taking drugs is hardly a crime,
eh! You can talk openly to me. Especially as now there's
so much of it about everywhere." He lowered his voice,
making it sound reedy, without meaning to. "Does what
you were going to tell me about the bedside table have
anything to do with dope?"

"Listen to me, you idiot," Jose Maria interrupted in
exasperation. He spoke in a monotone, a low note that
was pure resonance from his vocal cords. His uncle
pulled himself up mid-flow. "Under the bedside table
on the right-hand side you'll see there's a drawer. It's as thin as an eyelash. In it you'll find there's $250. In the
drawer of the opposite bedside table, there's a little bell,
half chewed-up and in the shape of a star. It's an oldfashioned baby's rattle. You are going to bring both those
things and deliver them to a girl who works over here.
Her name is Rosa. You'll find her here, you'll hand over
those gifts on my behalf, and you'll tell her I sent them.
Is that clear now?"

"Why are you talking to me in that strange tone of
voice?" asked his uncle, after a pause.

"Because I know you," answered Maria. "And I want
you to remember something: I'm watching you, both you
and the girl. The police are out looking for me because
I killed a guy, and believe me, that guy mattered more to
me than you do. So if you don't hand over the rattle and
the dollars to the girl tomorrow morning, I'll come after
you, and when I find you, you'll finish up seeing only
darkness for the rest of your days."

Then he gave him the address.

The next day, Maria's uncle rang on the doorbell at
the villa. He had dressed in his best clothes (a checked
shirt, an old-fashioned anorak, without a designer label
and so dark it seemed almost worn out - in fact it was
a mass of every sort of loose synthetic thread, and that
was it - and a pair of cream Oxford trousers, which gave
him away as gay). Maria could see him from one of the
windows at the front of the house: the shameless old
devil rang the bell at the front door.

Senora Blinder went to answer it. On seeing him, her
first reaction was one of surprise. She would never under
normal circumstances have exchanged so much as a
monosyllable with someone like him, but under present
circumstances, she found herself talking to him for a
while.

Then she went back inside again. Rosa, seated on the
living room sofa, was just finishing giving Jose Maria his
feed.

Senora Blinder stood facing her, looked down at
where she sat and, with a serious expression on her face,
said to her:

"It's so strange. This has to be the first time in my life
I've answered the door to someone who calls, and I
learn the last thing I ever wanted to know."

And she held out a brown paper envelope to Rosa.
Someone had written her name and address on its
mauve surface in careful black calligraphy.

Rosa opened it. She took out the dollars and the rattle
and sat there staring at them, open-mouthed. Senora
Blinder told her that someone had delivered them on
behalf of Jose Maria.

The slowness with which Rosa raised her eyes to look
at Senora Blinder laid bare her deception and her guilt.
But Senor Blinder was too absorbed in her own cause
for astonishment to take note of Rosa's.

"I stopped and chatted a minute with this... `senor'
on the doorstep, and he told me his nephew is Jose
Maria, that local builder you knew, the one who was
said to have murdered the foreman... No doubt you'll
remember the story better than I. He told me that he
had sent this to you via him..."

"Yes, you're right, I do remember him now..."

Today was Jose Maria's first birthday, but he was still
taking breast milk and hadn't yet started to walk. While
his mother and Senora Blinder were talking, Jose Maria
turned himself around and crawled across the livingroom floor at top speed.

"Isn't it as if the earth had opened and swallowed him
up?" Senora Blinder was asking.

"It's exactly like that..." replied Rosa.

"So how, then, did that fellow just turn up on the doorstep to hand over these things, supposedly on his sayso?"

"I don't know, Senora..."

They were both so immersed in their own questions
and anxieties that neither took any notice when Jose
Maria set out to clamber up the staircase.

"Are you hiding something from me, Rosa?"

"No!„

"Are you in touch with this man?"

"No, Senora. I swear, I'd had no idea about any of
this... It came out of the blue as far as I was concerned,
too... It must be years since I've seen that guy!"

Senora Blinder stared at her for a second in silence.

"So, then, how come you gave the baby Jose Maria's
name?"

"Because I like it... by chance. My father was also called
Jose Maria. Jose Maria Verga. Don't make me repeat it
- you know I don't like the surname..." went on Rosa,
feigning embarrassment.

"And what was that workman's surname?"

"Negro."

"Negro?"

"Yes..."

"Do you realize," Senora Blinder added, having
thought it over for a moment, "that if you'd gone on
going out with him, you could have ended up being
called Rosa Verga de Negro, Rosa Negro's dick."

There was another moment's silence. Rosa and Senora
Blinder looked one another in the eye seriously, and
then both simultaneously burst into loud guffaws. They
laughed until their eyes ran with tears. The pair of them
knew that it was about nothing, but on some level they accepted this way of releasing tension. As soon as it was
over, they felt much better.

Senora Blinder came back round and seated herself
down next to Rosa again.

"Why do you think that builder fellow would have sent
you those things after such a long time?"

"I don't know, Senora... Who brought them here?"

"An uncle of his, apparently."

"And the uncle didn't say why?"

"He didn't know. Or else he didn't want to tell me. He
said he'd heard nothing at all of or from his nephew for
years now..."

"So then it's true!" said Rosa.

"What's true?" Senora Blinder looked at her enquiringly.

"That the earth opened and swallowed him up," said
Rosa. "Nobody knows anything about him... I certainly
don't..."

Senora Blinder believed her. There was no reason
whatever not to.

"But it worries me that he should have sent you this..."

"Perhaps it means he's thinking of leaving the
country..."

"I will have to keep the police informed..."

"They won't remember a thing about him."

"But that man could be dangerous..."

"Don't fall for that, Senora. He was purer than the
Communion Host..."

Senora Blinder stared at her in silence. Rosa seemed
to her either sad or exhausted, maybe both at the same
time. She put an arm around her shoulders and said:

"You must promise me something... The very least
clue you find regarding that workman, you have to tell
me immediately."

Rosa nodded her agreement and, holding the dollars
in one hand and the rattle in the other, kissed her
fingers in the form of the crucifix.

32

That afternoon Jose Maria junior climbed twelve steps.
Maria, poised at the top of the flight, counted them
one by one in a mixture of panic and pride (pride in
his proficiency and panic lest he fall). He gesticulated
wildly at him, trying to scare him off, but the child only
seemed to feel spurred on by this. At least until Rosa
finally registered his absence. She shot up off the sofa
at the speed of a rocket, spotted him, grabbed a toy
car to tempt him and grabbed him from the top of the
staircase, carting him back down under her arm.

As a rule, Rosa was far from careless with him. Although Senora Blinder (mysteriously, as far as Maria was
concerned) helped her with the boy, Rosa continued in
her role as maid: she was obliged to do all the housework
with her son at her side, and it could happen that
sometimes she was distracted or he escaped her. Joselito
- as she was beginning to call him - was both restless
and at the same time often lazy. He still wasn't walking
even at fourteen months old.

He had the exact same face as Rosa...

Maria called her almost every day throughout the
year. They talked about Joselito. Rosa recounted the
amusing episodes surrounding him, and Maria told
her to be careful around the sharp corners on the
furniture, or with the plugs, and more than anything
with the staircase, to which Joselito seemed to have
become addicted. From time to time (and now only very occasionally from one time to the next) Rosa went
back to questioning him as to where he was and when
he'd be back.

Joselito said nothing (he didn't talk yet), but was
obviously charmed by Maria. As Maria was with him
every minute that Rosa was distracted (each time that
Joselito was alone in his room, or in the living room, or
in the kitchen - and more than ever when Rosa left him
in the playroom on the second floor and set off down
the corridor with her vacuum cleaner), Maria went over
to him, picked him up in his arms, made faces at him,
or gave him a toy he'd made out of balsa wood specially
for him to play with and which Joselito immediately
smashed to pieces, grinning from ear to ear.

He liked his smell, which lapped him like a flame,
without either form or edges, the sound of his gurgles,
his skin as soft as pollen... But nothing pleased him
as much as the hiccuping laughs with which Joselito
greeted his briefest of appearances.

He taught him to say `Joselito" ("Lita", he said), or
"auto" instead of "tutu", and, as he could no longer give
himself a name for fear thatJoselito might go and repeat
it afterwards, he also got the boy to call him "mama"
too.

"Ma... ma," he said the first time, kneeling closely
before him.

"Am..." responded joselito.

"Ma...ma..."

"Am...am..."

"Very good! Now, let's do it again... Mama..."

... ma...

"You've got it! My goodness, what an intelligent little
boy you are..." He congratulated him, all the while
stroking his head, before starting over again:

"Ma... ma..."

"Ama... "

Rosa thought that Joselito was endowed with a vast
imagination, because he was always going around
looking for something behind doors or at the foot of
the staircase.

"I don't know what's wrong with him," she told Maria
on one occasion. "I'm right there beside him and he's
going around the back of me, calling my name. He
makes me really worried when he does that..."

"Worried? What about? He's just playing a game."

"No, he's not playing a game. I'm right there next
to him, and he's looking for me all over... Kids of his
age don't play games like that. It makes me scared he
might have some mental problem..."

"No, Rosa, what kind of a mental problem would he
be likely to have? Kids are just like that..."

"I'd so love you to know him... you'd be sure to get
on so well with him!..."

It broke Maria's heart: the hour (or the age) had
come for him to be seen no longer, not even by his
son.

33

One afternoon Rosa was mopping one of the atticroom floors with a floor cloth when Maria suddenly
heard her swearing. She erupted with a yell, a yell
followed by a patter of feet across the floor. There was
no doubt about it: she must have just seen the rat.

Rosa emerged from the attic room at high speed,
running backwards. In a frenzy, she picked up the
broom and went back in again. Maria could hear the noise of the broom handle being banged on the floor,
here - there - all over the place, in an excess of violent
disgust. The banging ceased a few moments later: Rosa
re-emerged and ran downstairs. Had she killed it?

In all probability not, for she then came back upstairs
with her packet of rat poison. She went into the room
and, a few moments later, emerged again. She regarded
the broom handle with grave apprehension: at the very
least she had hit it.

"Revolting beast..." she muttered, and went off cursing
between gritted teeth.

Maria waited until he was certain that Rosa wasn't
going to reappear, and went into the attic room. The
poison was distributed in little heaps, carefully placed
in every corner. He collected it all up, piled it up on
the bedside table, went down on all fours and looked
under the bed and under the cupboard. The rat was
underneath the cupboard as usual. It looked like a dark
mass, immobile although trembling. It must have been
terrified, perhaps even wounded.