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Authors: Sergio Bizzio

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BOOK: Rage
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He had installed himself on the top floor, in the
attic, where he felt himself to be more invisible. The
first night, he didn't sleep at all. The second night, for
fear of someone coming in, he slept underneath the
bed. The key stayed in the lock, but it took another day
before he decided he could close the door and remove
the key: if for some reason somebody came to the room
and found the door locked, presumably they'd assume
that someone else inside the house had left it locked
up; they'd look for the key, and when they didn't find
it, they'd either call a locksmith or else they'd simply
abandon the attempt to get inside. What would they
come looking for inside this room anyway? There was nothing there apart from a bed with an old mattress
and an empty wardrobe.

Even so, for the first nights he spent in the house, he
took fewer precautions than Rosa did when she first
started working there. For Rosa, despite having received a
catalogue of obligations and prohibitions which one way
or another took care of her working and leisure hours,
ended up feeling lost, diminished, often frightened. But
once she'd learned where to find the floor polish or the
ironing board, or in which drawer the Senor kept his
socks or the Senora her blouses, she felt more at ease,
increasingly comfortable with the domestic routines
into which she gradually became integrated.

Two years had gone by since she first came to the villa.
During that whole time, she had never done anything
untoward. A few days after the Blinders' unexpected
return, her personality began to change: she became
taciturn, distracted, went everywhere bright-eyed, on
the brink of tears, wringing her hands. She had received
no further news of Maria at all.

Three days had gone by since the Tuesday, during
which she heard nothing of Maria. On the Wednesday
she waited with an escalope sandwich: she thought of
going out onto the pavement to give it to him wrapped
in greaseproof paper, so he could eat it on the bus.
Now that the Blinders were back, her meetings with
Maria would have to revert to being restricted to the
tradesmen's entrance. But Maria didn't appear. Rosa
guessed he must have been a bit nervous as a result
of the Blinders' sudden return, the fact that they'd
been on the point of surprising them there together,
and supposed that must have been the reason for his
few days' delay in coming to see her again. He didn't
appear on Thursday either. Rosa began to get worried. Her assumption that Maria would like to leave a couple
of days' pause before coming to see her again could by
now only apply to this last day.

On Friday, she stopped by the building site on her way
back from the Disco supermarket. Someone told her
he wasn't there, that he hadn't come in for the past few
days. She realized the atmosphere seemed charged, but
she couldn't tell why.

She was on the point of leaving, when an unskilled
worker, on his way in with a bucket of sand, approached
and told her that Maria had been thrown out of his
job.

"What? When?"

"On Tuesday."

"I didn't know anything about it... what do you mean,
he got thrown out?"

"Yes, he got the sack."

"He didn't tell me..."

"Sorry," replied the builder, as he continued on with
his bucket: the new foreman had come out of a portable
toilet and lit a cigarette, then stared at her through the
smoke, with the hungry look of a wild beast.

That afternoon the police came to see her. There were
two of them: a tall one with a black moustache as stiff
and straight as a toothbrush, and a young one with long
hair, both in plain clothes. They spoke to her in the
main entrance. They asked her a thousand questions
about Maria. They wanted to know where he lived, his
phone number, if he had been with her on the Tuesday.
She told them he lived in Capilla del Senor, and didn't
have a phone number. Yes, he had been with her the
previous Tuesday. Had anything happened to him?

"It would seem that the earth has swallowed him up,"
said the moustache, with heavy irony.

Rosa was bereft. She was relieved that neither the
Senor nor the Senora were home at the time, for
although they always spoke respectfully of the police,
they disliked the idea of having them around. A few
years ago the police had killed a burglar just outside the
house, and had blocked off the pavement, where they
remained for over an hour, until they finally decided to
remove the body. In the interim, one of the policemen
rang the bell, asking for a glass of water... Senora
Blinder took his request as indicative of a scandal, since
there were a dozen more appropriate houses to call on
along the block, more suitable to involve in satisfying a
basic need such as that for a drink of water. Years had
gone by, and from time to time Senora Blinder would
still mention the matter of the policeman's thirst. The
Senora would clearly never forgive Rosa if the police
came to the house to discuss her boyfriend with her.

But why were they looking for him? What on earth
had happened to Maria? Where on earth was he?

Worst of all, she had no one to talk to, no one in
whom she could confide her worries. OK, fine, so
they had sacked him from his job, and it appeared
he hadn't wished to inform her of the fact, but that
wasn't a sufficient reason simply to disappear. Could
he be ill? Maybe so, and perhaps that was the likeliest
explanation. If he weren't ill, why would he just
disappear? Wasn't it obvious to him that, if the cause
of his disappearance were the shame of losing his job,
at any moment she would be bound to show up at
his workplace to enquire after what had happened to
him, and would then be informed of what had actually
occurred? He had to be ill.

She wasn't mistaken: Maria was running a temperature. Stretched out on the mattress in the room he had made his own, he was shivering with cold. Hours had
gone by since he'd last made a move. The index and
middle fingers on his left hand were still wrapped in
a cobweb which he'd unintentionally leaned on that
morning, when he got up to go to the toilet. He was
weak. Even turning onto his side on the bed required a
major effort; also, although the mattress was of superior
quality, an old coil-spring number, the bed's wooden
slats creaked and he was afraid someone would hear,
which meant he had to remain there utterly immobile
for hours on end. In addition to which, two days had
gone by without him eating a thing. The venetian blinds
in the room were down and, if it weren't for the sounds
from downstairs, he would have had no idea whether it
were night or day.

As soon as he began to feel a little better, he returned
to the bathroom. He had found the toilet the previous
night, in a courageous and very daring excursion, reconnoitering the terrain across a large part of the attic
floor. Even the bathroom looked abandoned, just like
the room in which he'd installed himself. It was clean
enough (Rosa must have been wiping it down from
time to time), but it was obviously out of use. He took
advantage of his expedition to try the doors of the
rooms along the passage: most he found locked, others
gave onto more empty spaces, and one was employed
as a sort of loft or store in which all kinds of junk was
heaped, from old clothes to plastic bags to children's
toys.

Getting himself up and going to take a leak was a whole
new adventure. He left the bedroom door open, just as
he'd found it, so that anyone who suddenly decided to
come upstairs wouldn't notice any difference, assuming
such a thingwere possible, and also in order to be able to listen out and have enough time to go and hide, should
it prove necessary. The principal problem arose when it
came to pulling the chain, an operation which required
a considerable amount of time; the cistern was ancient,
and the water tank located at a distance from the bowl
and inserted in the angle between the wall and the roof,
from which dangled a chain ending in a wooden handle
which he would lower an inch at a time, until the first
trickles of water began to flow downwards. These little
trickles, amounting to no more than a small leak, Maria
caught and used to wash his face, and did so with such
care than not even he could hear a sound.

Incredibly, sometimes a drop of water would break
away from the main flow and plink on the edge of the
bowl, or else he himself might, while urinating, wet the
edge of the seat, which he would then need to cautiously
wipe clean (with a piece of paper, or with his shirt tail)
before leaving the bathroom.

Up until Thursday night, when he decided to venture
into the kitchen, he had stayed entirely in his room,
except when making his occasional forays to the bathroom, or his one and only investigation of the attic
floor. He hadn't moved anything, nor left the slightest
trace of his presence there: every item was properly in
its place.

His fever was so high that he spent the first few days
lying on the bed; he had put his work clothes on over
his street wear, covering himself with a pair of trousers
and even with his rucksack, but he was still shivering.
The cold weather of early spring combined with the
cold atmosphere in the house and the cold shivers of
his fever. Yet he never for an instant considered leaving
his hideout. On the contrary: he needed to stay there to
recover, and to do that he needed to find food.

Thursday night he went downstairs to the kitchen. The
villa was arranged on four floors, and he wasn't certain
even as to how high up he was, but he reached the
kitchen far more quickly than he'd anticipated. He went
barefoot, having left his shoes in the rucksack under
the bed. Some parts of the house were in total darkness
and he could see nothing at all; other rooms admitted
moonlight from the garden through odd openings, or
else the light of the garden lamp, permanently left on,
penetrated some part of the building and allowed him
to see where he was going. Not that this left him feeling
any more secure. After all, what could he see? Nothing
but pictures, mirrors, carpets.

The wall clock over the kitchen door showed three
o'clock in the morning. He opened the fridge: the light
hurt his eyes and made him blink. He quickly shut it
again. What would he possibly remove without Rosa
noticing something missing when she came down the
next morning? On the floor, beside the chair, he saw
a plastic bag which had split a moment beforehand,
and was still coming apart and unfolding like a flower.
He grabbed it and started opening it: it was a Disco
supermarket bag and made a frightening amount of
noise. Maria exploited the sound of a passing car to
rip it open. Then he filled the bag with some bread he
found on the sideboard, before opening the fridge door
again and helping himself to a little of everything inside
it, without paying overmuch attention to what he took.

On turning to leave, he glanced at the clock again:
it wasn't three in the morning but half-past midnight.
He had spent fifteen minutes in the kitchen: the clock
must have been showing a quarter-past twelve rather
than three o'clock when he arrived. He was shocked: it
was too early to have come downstairs, someone in the house might still be awake. He left the kitchen, every
muscle tensed, more alert than ever, and mounted the
service stairs two or three steps at a time.

He paused for breath on the first floor. He could feel
his heart pound beneath his hand. He needed to get to
the end of the corridor, to get to the other staircase and
climb the last two floors to reach the attic. He resumed
his steps, but halfway along he heard a faint and halfchoked sobbing in the dark. He paused, more than
anything afraid of suddenly bumping into the person
who was crying, then backed off a few paces, before
suddenly noticing that the sobbing came from the room
opposite where he had shrunk back, and he carefully
applied his ear to the door. It was Rosa. She cried with
her face buried in her pillow: a muffled weeping, heartrending but stifled, suddenly interrupted when Maria
leaned his ear on the keyhole.

Two seconds later, Rosa put her head outside the
bedroom door and looked down the corridor. The
lamp on her bedside table outlined her like a silhouette.
There was nobody there. Rosa blew her nose and went
back into her room.

At that precise moment Maria, his forehead on fire
and his feet freezing, was sidling up the staircase towards
the attic. Once back in his room and eating his food, he
thought - with a degree of logic - that Rosa was burying
her head in her pillow for fear of being heard. On top
of which, she had actually gone into a spare room to
have a cry. Or had she been there on some errand or
other, and suddenly found herself in floods of tears?
There was another question even more important than
this one: was Rosa's own room really so near to that of
the Blinders that she would need to muffle her tears
in a cushion? No. Rosa slept in the east wing and the Blinders in the north wing of the first floor. But Maria
wouldn't figure this out for another couple of days. For
the time being - and including the following day - he
would, unwittingly, be waiting to learn, and from the
lips of Senora Blinder herself, that the police had been
there looking for him.

Next morning, he awoke feeling much better. His
meal had consisted of no more than a bread roll, five
olives, a slice of raw ham, half an onion (likewise raw)
and an apple. He was awoken by the street sounds outside, spreading like a mirage through the silence within
the house, or perhaps merging with it. However long
had he been there? Three days and two nights, he
estimated. Or maybe four days and three nights. Lying
still in a foetal position on the bed, he thought it must
be about time he left. Then, when he rose from the bed,
he entertained the possibility of staying a little longer,
perhaps one more day. Where could he go? There was
absolutely nowhere he could go and hide...

BOOK: Rage
4.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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