The Plimsoll Line (5 page)

He wets the pad of his thumb on the tip of his tongue. Turns the pages anxiously. One might say he is not motivated by the informational content of the news but by the desire to fulfill a certain set, daily ritual. The repetition of actions affords him a primitive sense of security he is aware of but clings to superstitiously. Small goals that open or close circles, petty tasks whose purpose is to shore up his routine, like jotting down notes on small pieces of paper he then sticks to the door of the fridge—things he must buy, things he must do, phone calls he must make:
Visit the university department
;
Go to the bank
;
Buy surgical tape
;
Return Ana’s call
;
Buy boiled ham
. . . To do lists he imposes upon himself and doesn’t follow through on, and then scribbles out only to write them again on another sticky note, this time accompanied by asterisks and exclamation marks that make them more pressing and urgent. It is with this same obsessiveness that he now turns the pages of the newspaper. His glance slides over the photograph of an Arab boy posing with his fists on his hips and a Kalashnikov across his chest. He is wearing a soccer jersey. He smiles against the backdrop of an open field covered in rubble and glistening dust. Another article reports that an explosion has seriously wounded a woman walking along a beach. In the same section is a photo of two politicians. From their posture, they appear to be sharing a secret, the younger one, with a long face, bowing his head and the other, with bushy eyebrows and white hair, moving his lips next to his colleague’s ear. The man pays no attention to the caption under the photo, drawn by an article on the human genome and the possibility of reproducing organs in the laboratory. For a moment, he imagines a new kidney, the size of a fist, glistening like a stone recently pulled from a river, a dark red pebble, covered in a network of tiny veins, a fruit throbbing inside his abdomen, but the text explains that experiments carried out on laboratory mice will take decades to produce results. He contorts his face at the news that interest rates are due to go down. He can hear the ringing of the phone in the living room and his ex-wife’s voice informing him that she has found a buyer for the house,“
a wonderful couple, he’s a Catalan architect, she’s a yoga teacher, a young couple that’s decided to get out of the big city, just what we were looking for; a serious, cultured couple who, according to my lawyer, are very creditworthy, will respect the house and its surroundings, and are expecting their first child, don’t you think it’s wonderful there will be children in the house again? It’ll be like a kind of liberation
.” Or else it may be a retired German couple,“
they loved the place when they came two years ago, on their way to the beaches in the south, but they’ve decided they’d like to live in the north of Spain, in a house like this, it’s not so cold as in Westphalia, and the summers are warm, that’s what he told me, a ruddy-complexioned retiree with the strength of an ox, you wouldn’t believe how much he reminds me of your father, he even has the same glasses . . . isn’t that amazing
?” Or, in the worst-case scenario, the future buyer is a man of independent means, a representative of one of the capital’s old families, a hick who will pay in cash and is all set to redo the house and turn it into a papier-mâché replica of a Tennessee mansion, complete with Doric columns, stuccowork, a spiral staircase, and wisterias on the porch. “
My lawyer’s ready to draw up the necessary paperwork, all we have to do is make up our minds. We could start by putting up a for-sale sign. What do you think
?”

He wets the pad of his finger with the tip of his tongue. A pilot whale stranded on a beach. A man in a raincoat covers his face with a handkerchief while two seagulls walk along the rotting cetacean’s vertebrae. There are footprints in the sand, and a leaden sky. The sports section opens with a lengthy report on the recent European Cup champions. The players shout while perched on the head of a statue. They’re wearing the same shirt worn by the Arab boy posing with an assault rifle in the international section, but he forgets this coincidence as soon as he notices he has reached the TV listings: Cartoons at 9:00; Nature documentaries: “Tree-Kangaroos” (Part Two) at 15:00;
Matters of the Heart
at 18:00; Game show at 18:30; Soap opera at 19:30; News at 22:00;
It Happened Here
(Crime Report) at 22:30; Report:
Mothers for Hire
at 23:00; Late-night cinema:
Nosferatu
at 1:30;
Teleshop
at 5:00.

Today he won’t watch television, he thinks, today he won’t have dinner, and the cat notices from up on the counter that the man won’t watch television and won’t have dinner, as always when he is due to get up early the next day and go to the clinic. On days like this, he eats little more than an afternoon snack—a piece of fruit, perhaps, a kiwi with excessive vitamin C, or a fat-free yogurt—because a block of anxiety has installed itself in his stomach and seems to be writhing, following the twists and turns of his intestines, as if an exhausted intestinal parasite were making its way through his insides. He doesn’t find it easy to explain his symptoms, which is why he simply says “my stomach is sad,” and the nephrologist nods without surprise, as if he understood the cause of this sadness destroying his abdomen. He believed this melancholic fatigue was the result of Laura’s death, the divorce process, or both things at once, perhaps he had overestimated his strength and was now going into a tailspin, falling into a pit of depression. He decided to go in for a medical checkup following a night when Óscar, visibly drunk after a trip that had taken him to New Zealand to do a photo-essay on urban Maori communities, dragged him to a bar downtown. He wanted to talk to him, to go over his doubts, his romantic conquests, his professional successes, at least that’s what he thought in the beginning, though after a couple of drinks it wasn’t difficult to detect a trace of nostalgia in their meeting, for a shadow seemed to have come between them, to have occupied the empty stool where they’d left their sheepskin jackets. He didn’t want to talk about her, he couldn’t talk about her, but Óscar appeared possessed by one of his unstoppable fits of alcoholic verbosity and talked to him without seeing him, over the rim of his glass, searching with his eyes for something that seemed to be scurrying along the bar top, a grimace, a glint in the bottles. “You’re like a character from some Gothic novel, shut away up there in your house, I bet you don’t even talk to your cat anymore, it was named after a movie director, wasn’t it? Or was it a writer? Tarkovsky? Nabokov? What was its name?” he said, ordering another drink from the girl behind the bar. “Look at it like this. You’re fifty-two, you have an enviable job, an impressive art collection, and a neutered cat. That’s certainly a lot more than I can hope for in another ten years . . . Ten years. What a strange thing time is. When I think about time, I imagine threadbare innerlinings, I don’t know, something like a dream. That’s the only revolution it would be worth fighting for. The revolution of time. A photographer supposedly freezes moments. To tell the truth, all I freeze are landscapes, outfits, customs, little animals in danger of extinction, traditional costumes, ancestral habits, a collection of full-color photographs, covers for
National Geographic
. That’s what I’m paid for, local color and anthropological flavor, I’m no Juan Rulfo or Robert Capa, but I am number one at photographing Bedouins, orchids, seals, and Maoris. That’s not nothing. My work forced me to give up accident and crime reporting, coverage of swollen women, Colombian burials, waiting lines outside of police stations, just awful, and become a photographer oxygenated by Nature and adventure trips. But I’m also aware, don’t think I’m not, that to take a photograph is to stir up something of death, like the dust that comes off butterfly wings and gets stuck between your fingers. Pure necrophilia.”

Óscar framed him with his fingers and winked his eye through the imaginary viewfinder of a camera.

“You should only look through one eye and apply yourself to the vision at the moment the photograph is taken; everything comes down to applying the basic principle of limits. I can photograph a beautiful girl in a field of red flowers, I can photograph the bare feet of that same girl crushing the flowers . . . You have to decide, up or down. Everything else is literature, criticism, deferment. But I’ll tell you something, Gabriel, I have never developed my best photographs. All of them have yet to be made. Some images remain stuck to your retina. And when I blink again, one week, two months, three years later, they come loose from my optic nerve, like scales, and with every image that comes loose, I lose a memory. That’s fortunate, because it’s not easy to forget. In hotel rooms, I leave behind images and scales, like the contact lenses near-sighted people lose in plazas or swimming pools, but there are other images that never come loose, they stay there behind your eyelids, like glow worms. However hard I try to develop them, they remain stuck to the frontal bone, right here, above my eyebrow, but I can feel they are alive, warm, and I wonder what they’re expecting me to do with them. I imagine they’re the only photographs worth developing. Because, you know what?” he asked, lowering his voice. “A photograph, deep down, is an act of love.”

He stopped looking at him through his fingers and arched an eyebrow.

“By the way, Gabriel, have you been to see the doctor? You’re very thin, and you look paler than usual. How long has it been since you slept with a woman? That’s what you need, a good woman, a good lay. I know a journalist who’s a bombshell, I’ll introduce you to her. By the way”—he pointed at his empty glass—“one more Bombay Sapphire?”

But it was later, when they were both yielding to the impulses of their drinking spree, and instead of one Óscar there were two, and instead of one Gabriel there were another two, and suddenly there were four guys drinking gin and tonic—not counting the empty stool that was also suddenly duplicated—and laughing, or groaning, or putting their arms around each other’s shoulders, precariously balanced on their stools, that one of the two Óscars, it may have been the original, or perhaps just his double, left a fistful of crumpled bills on the counter, buried his red face in his neck, hugged him, and staggering out of the bar, both of them clinging to the door to help them out onto the street, said,“You don’t know how much I loved Laura. You have no idea.”

Several days later, his anxiety still persisting, he allowed a needle to be stuck into him in a blood draw lab and very diligently filled a jar with a urine sample he handed to the nurse on the other side of the laboratory counter, as if he were serving her a shot of whisky. Later he picked up the results and took them to his general practitioner’s office—a complete, exhaustive analysis the doctor either did not want or did not know how to interpret, simply listening to his chest, taking his blood pressure, and asking him, after a moment’s hesitation, what color his urine was, whether it was blond like beer, like a sailor, or oily in appearance, olive-green, with shades of sienna or ocher, perhaps accompanied by splashes of blood, or else off-white, perhaps transparent, like water, whether the act of urinating made any white foam or large bubbles, whether he had recently been going to the bathroom less frequently, whether he had noticed a smaller volume of liquid, or his urine was weak, perhaps in the last few months he had felt an itching sensation at the tip of his penis, and in the face of his hesitant answers, the doctor ordered that the analysis be repeated. Two days later, he called the doctor’s office and was referred to the nephrology specialist. By this time, doubt and fear were forming a yellow, scented cloud inside his head. Over the days that followed, he scrutinized his urine, counted the times he went to the restroom, filled plastic containers and noted down the amount of liquid, filled small, transparent glasses so he could observe the color of his piss against the light, like an oil taster, and finally resigned himself to the conclusion that there was little difference between the color of his urine and Bezoya mineral water.

The nephrologist’s face was illuminated in the semidarkness with an aquatic iridescence. It took him a while to link this effect to the light being emitted by the computer screen. While the doctor compared the results of the lab tests, he glanced around at the shelves in the office, full of books and scientific magazines, the framed medical diploma on the wall, the certificates of attendance at international congresses, and the sporty detail of a bronze sculpture in the shape of a racket, whose pedestal read, “First Padel Tennis Championship, Golf Millennium Club.” He cleared his throat, stared at the tips of his shoes, and compared the doctor’s hands with his own. He had the impression all doctors had very thin hands, without any hair on their phalanges, and wore repulsive business socks. As if he had read his thoughts, the nephrologist waved his four-colored Bic pen, shuffled the papers, lifted his eyes toward him, and spoke briefly in English.

“Something is moving on.”

He lowered his eyes, blinked, and at his gesture of surprise, repeated “something is moving on” in a neutral voice, without any inflection, from the other side of the methacrylate table on whose unblemished surface his slim fingers without any hair on their phalanges were reflected. He felt he was just waking up, as if the expression “something is moving on,” pronounced in language-academy English that was a bit stiff and no doubt learned—he thought afterward with a chronic sufferer’s resentment—in order to give lectures at international nephrology congresses had acted like a spell, opening an invisible frontier between them, a liquid surface, like the inside of a fishbowl. That’s why he immediately felt certain that, having said “something is moving on,” the nephrologist and his industrious young man’s beard already belonged to a place as near as it was unreachable across the methacrylate table and the screensaver’s aquatic light.

He summoned enough energy to uncross his legs, lean over that liquid surface, and ask,“What do you mean, doctor?” His voice sounded a little high-pitched to him.