The Plimsoll Line (9 page)

He enjoyed a standard of living he could never have dreamed of with his salary as a university professor and art critic—cruises, social reunions, vacations in inoffensively exotic countries, get-togethers at the house, Art Tatum’s piano on the record player, like the parody of a Woody Allen comedy, and he felt very fortunate to be able to talk to a diplomat about Japanese calligraphy, or to a shipowner who explained to him the principles of the Plimsoll line; the good manners, the grateful deportment, the warm brandy, it all formed a pleasant world of soft lights and long banquet tables with mirrors, exclusive places for exclusive people, Ana’s friends, her parents, a little false and frivolous, perhaps, artificially cosmopolitan, he thought at the beginning. But Ana was able to take him by the hand and introduce him into this comfortable world with the authentic optimism and lack of pretense of a creature born to be happy. And this, he thought, had been his major sin: to have frustrated the expectations of a being who deserved to be happy, for happiness was what Ana longed for without demanding it, her natural inclination, and that was love, the fact she existed was enough, to glimpse the aura surrounding her ash-blond hair, her white skin, rosy on the corollas of her breasts. Even this splendor would not cease to shine on those occasions when, in gentle rebuke, a smile on her lips, seated on the porch, having listened to his masculine diatribes and taken a sip of green tea, Ana would say,“Gabriel, you men are so childish, so weak . . .”

Ana kept a cautious distance from mundane affairs, placidly, her hand resting on her newly pregnant belly, while showing him the room that was to be Laura’s, already prepared, the walls painted a pearly color, the booties, the bottles of baby cologne, the tiny clothes folded up in drawers in the wardrobe, and he inhaled deeply—the fragrance of Nenuco, dry bottom, healthy bottom—kissed her on the forehead, placed his hand on her round belly, and everything was in its place, everything was perfect, especially after the two miscarriages which seemed to his father to confirm his village vet’s early diagnosis, irrefutable proof that his daughter-in-law was a sickly, weak creature. He persuaded Ana to buy a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, next to an oak forest, a local road, and an alfalfa field. What better company for a little girl, he adduced, than trees and clean air, walks in the country, less than twenty minutes from the city and downtown, a house for one’s whole life, a house to be born, live, and die in, solid, a little solitary, perhaps, but beautiful. And Ana agreed to the plans for their future home.

They were a sight to be seen, seated on the porch or in the living room—his father frowning, Ana praising the dietary excellences of sushi, Óscar already half drunk—and a multitude of exotic dishes his wife had learned in her latest Japanese cooking course spread out before them. His father’s face was a sight to be seen, the face of someone who usually devoured rough country stews, now staring over the top of his glasses at an unidentified dish full of raw fish while Óscar made quick work of the wine and came out with the odd dirty joke, made inappropriate remarks, or told some anecdote from his life as an adventure photographer. But it was perfect, he thought, in spite of everything it was, and with the appearance of a ruminant, his father chewed those balls of eel-stuffed rice followed by a dish of strawberries dipped in white chocolate, while looking at Laura over the top of his glasses. In the mornings, he would take her for walks in the local area. He knew the tracks, the forest paths, the toponyms, the names of the different fields, and, when they returned at midday, Laura, as if reciting a multiplication table, would sing out the names of birds they’d spotted—jay, hoopoe, golden oriole, blackbird, coal tit, robin—or newly discovered species of trees and plants—oak, beech, birch, chestnut, fern, lavender, boxwood—words that acquired the consistency of glass in her childlike voice. As a boy, he had also been taught about the diversity of bird life in the local region, and this repetition of actions seemed to him to confirm a bond, that emotional material, which could never be broken.

Three shots ring out in the pinewood like a succession of barks. The sound surprises him as he walks along a muddy path. He stands on tiptoe, but finds nothing strange, here or on the other side of the coppice. He stops to catch his breath at the crest of the path. Further down, the gas station attendant is cleaning the windshield of a car. Jeremías sometimes does odd jobs for the houses in the valley, small domestic tasks that help to top off his salary. He used to buy those violet candies, the ones Laura liked so much, from him. His blue work overalls are too small, he is wearing a cap with earflaps that makes him look like a man from the steppes. Taking his time, he charges the driver for the cost of the service, then hands over the change, extracting a bill from an old, leather money belt. He lifts his chin on seeing the man, aided by a cane, heading in the direction of the river.

He takes a path that slips away from the highway. The sound of engines gradually fades behind him, to be replaced by the wind humming in his ears and zigzagging between the forest and the fields. He likes to walk along the path that leads down to the river; as on other occasions, he gets the impression after a few steps that he is leaving everything behind. There is nothing now to indicate the proximity of the highway, only a wide vista that suddenly appears before his eyes. He is grateful for this emptiness, which startles him and banishes the old taste of violet candies. He advances, unaware of the picture he might offer an anonymous observer adopting the viewpoint of a black kite rising on a thermal—barely a dot, advancing unhurriedly, now stopping for a moment to catch his breath, and moving again, descending, tinier and tinier, almost invisible now, in the direction of the irrigation channel. A happy murmur rushes through the arches of the bridge. He promises himself a cigarette as soon as he reaches the water’s edge. He makes his way through the gorse and slowly descends, checking the firmness of the ground with his cane. His boots make a squelching sound as he walks toward the poplars. He chooses a trunk covered in lichen to sit on. He lights a cigarette.

Óscar was a sight to be seen, leading Laura by the hand through the garden, saying “Lo, Lo, Lo,” as the child took her first steps; Óscar, the adventurer, who was already crossing the threshold where bachelorhood turns into a habit, evokes in his memory a figure on the grass that smelled of sun-toasted pasture, while the girl, holding his hand, said “Lo, Lo, Lo,” and Óscar raised his arms in sign of victory because Laura had just taken her first steps and crossed the entire width of the garden; he looked up from his papers, alerted by his wife’s shouts ordering him to come to the window and see how his crazy brother had just taught Laura to walk. When his daughter was no longer a baby but a teenager with a beauty spot on her cheek and eyes the color of dried moss, she continued to get along well with Óscar, as if the fact of having taught her to walk had created an initiation, a complicity. Perhaps she viewed Óscar as an older brother, a mature person who was still immature, or a falsely young adult, someone, in any case, who was not weighed down by social convention, a little harebrained, exempt from the inevitable family rebuke, the deaf and annoying voice of a paternal figure—someone, he thought, as close and complicit and yet as opposed to her father as the negative of a photograph. This special affection for Laura bothered him a little, arousing a father’s jealousy he would never have allowed himself to admit, and this bond, which became stronger over the years, disturbed Ana, as well, though they rarely spoke about it, since it was understood she didn’t approve of the compliments and endearments they exchanged at family gatherings with an impudence Ana judged inappropriate for a relationship between an uncle and a niece.

He gazes at the embers of the cigarette between his fingers. It could be said that even the murmur of the river prefigures the tone of the voices in his memory. Back then, he was a different person, even the taste of tobacco was different, or seemed to be, and he didn’t notice how intense such a trivial act as inhaling tobacco smoke through a filter stuck to the skin of his lips could be, something as amazing as watching the capricious spirals of smoke rising before dissolving in the air, because perhaps in every act our consciousness can dilate and a man can sum up his life in that gesture, a present that dilates, unrelated to words. But he paid no attention to the slightest changes—the air suddenly growing stronger on the other side of the poplar grove, the murmur of the water in the irrigation ditch, the whistle of a goldfinch carried on the breeze, the report of a shotgun—that might encode a devastating, beneficial correspondence. Perhaps that’s love. But back then, he was a different Gabriel—a profile absorbed in a mirror, an observer who observes nothing, half asleep, smoking or making love or reading or walking, without smoking or making love or reading or walking, oblivious to the unavoidable fact that the taste of tobacco is bitter and acidic on both sides of the palate and leaves a slight pungency on the tip of the tongue, a remnant of toxicity that inundates his delicate network of veins and arteries, blocking the flow of blood, sinking him into the briefest of limbos early in the morning, after breakfast, over the first coffee of the day and the kiwi cut down the middle and the María Fontaneda cookies, his only concern to feel for a moment the lassitude in his muscles and the irrepressible desire to go to the bathroom on account of the effective laxative effect of nicotine. He would come out of the bathroom with just enough time to brush his teeth and take his leave of Ana, who, together with the cleaning lady, was already preparing some experimental dish. He glanced at Laura’s unmade bed, she would be at school by now, and then grabbed his leather wallet, ballpoint pens, keys, and money. He bought the newspaper from Jeremías, parked the car to avoid the foreseeable traffic jam, and approached the university on foot. He cannot recognize himself in that man climbing the steps of the history department and walking down the building’s gray, decrepit corridors, which are teeming with students, then greeting the old desk attendant seated like a stuffed saurian in his glass cubicle, just like twenty-five years earlier, reaching the elevator, and opening the door to the department of art history. He could breathe in the air, but he no longer perceived the smell of pencil wood, of old school, that filled the hallway and offices and yet would not escape the notice of an occasional visitor, bringing to mind, perhaps, the combustion of desks and brown paper. This ancient impression is prolonged in the faces that greet him from inside the offices—the faces of interns, some with a PhD student’s late blackheads on their forehead, with premature, erudite bald patches, and meritorious bags under their eyes; the forgetful professor emeritus who wears a university badge on the lapel of his herringbone jacket and carries a sheaf of yellow papers, typed on an Olivetti, under his arm; the pointed face of the department secretary, who, seeing him, raises his hand, solicitous and smiling, on the other side of the glass, an unlit pipe between his teeth, a cloth tie and rimless glasses, somewhat overweight for his age; and the distracted gazes of Clara, and Matilde, the latter correcting exams, hidden behind a black mop of hair she flicks back with coquetry, silent and competitive, on seeing him arrive. It is him, this dapper university professor, dressed like an intellectual from one of Woody Allen’s movies, walking down the hallway and saying hello in such a low voice that only his shirt collar hears him, and he makes his way to his office, on the polished glass door of which is a piece of paper, stuck with Scotch tape, that says, “Chair of Aesthetics and Art Theory. Professor Dr. Gabriel Ariz. Office Hours:Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a. m.–1 p. m.”

His marriage deteriorated with the same lentitude with which they used to collect paintings by local artists and invitations to cultural centers in the capital, to book launches, events he threw himself into with a vehemence that could only suggest a certain sense of desolation that should never be named, never mentioned, except in passing, perhaps to exemplify, in his classes, the meaning of expressionist angst, his shadow reflected against a reproduction of
The Scream
by Edvard Munch. He maintained inwardly that such comments were part of the scene, of the embodied drama that a good professor should be—words, gestures, empathy, a certain dramatic quality. And yet his comments on avant-garde art were just a way of distancing himself from the real meaning of that desolate head, those hands covering the ears in order not to hear the inner voices.

He was different back then, he thinks, but he could follow his trail like somebody following a shadow, even if that shadow belongs now to another, just as there are others steering vehicles down a lane on the highway at this very moment, driving peacefully, absorbed in a daily act that, like so many others—having an aperitif, blinking on seeing the first drops of rain, buying a cinema ticket—forms a fragile network of threads, a
maya
of cause and effect on which they walk with the folly of one who is unaware of the void gaping below, sleepwalkers, tightrope walkers, not even suspecting that the thread along which they are sliding at that very moment could break right now—right now—on account of a mechanical failure, a triviality, a broken axle, a flat tire, an oil slick on the road surface, an invisible layer of ice on the brow of the hill, or just a furtive, frightened animal running out of the forest, pursued by the yelps of a pack of hounds that have picked up its scent, a fox emerging from the bushes and racing across the highway in order to reach the poplar grove on the other side, next to the irrigation ditch, and the sudden swerve of the driver who sees only a lengthy shadow, barely bigger than a cat, jumping over the median in front of the car, and the sudden braking of the car, which skids and spins out with a screech of burned rubber, and then the landscape spinning dizzily in front of the driver’s eyes, earth and sky inverting their natural order, because the car flips one, two, three times and collides with the median and then breaks the guardrail, and now the driver cannot see anything, or anybody, because the car, transformed into a heap of metal, flies over the hard shoulder and smashes into the hillock next to the alfalfa field, and none of the passengers feels fear, or vertigo, or pain, because they are just silent bodies, three fragile shapes, knocking against the engine casing, the bodywork, and the windows that have burst in an explosion of tiny prisms that sprinkle over the road, next to the useless skid marks and a splash of oil and gasoline. A few objects are left scattered here and there, in slightly absurd quietude, over the road. A flip-flop, a travel bag, a blue and white beach ball that rolls off toward the gas station, and the tires of the car, still turning in the same direction as the wind blowing over the alfalfa field.