Gasoline (13 page)

“Say yes.”

“Yes.”

“When can we meet?”

“I’ll come to your studio.”

“No, not to the studio. I’ll do studies of you on the street. I see this as something alive, completely spontaneous
. . .
”

Hildegarda tells him that another painter had asked her to pose for him, a long time ago.

“But he must not have done anything with the paintings in the end, because I’ve been waiting for him to do a show, to see if I had been an inspiration to him, but he’s never done another exhibition. You don’t hear anything about him these days. We were good friends. Maybe you know him
. . .
”

Humbert looks at her: she is wearing a black wool pullover with a deep V-neckline front and back, a straight gray skirt, big earrings, a wide, shiny leather belt, black gloves, gray stockings with seams, shoes with five-inch heels, with a great big black bag under her arm.

•

“I have to go. How could you start sketching me now? Call me at home tomorrow.”

Tomorrow was too late, Humbert thought. They are sitting on a bench in a park, and Humbert is surprised that there are still pigeons around at that time in the afternoon. Over by another bench a pigeon and a squirrel are staring each other down, motionless.

Humbert asks her if she’d like to go to Chicago with him, to a show he’s doing there, which he hadn’t planned to go to, and wouldn’t, he had just decided, unless she came along. Hildegarda keeps laughing, saying over and over that he’s crazy. He takes her hand, looking at her lips, which are so dark red it almost hurts. As he moves in to kiss her, she asks him (without backing off so much as an inch) if he doesn’t think he’s moving a bit fast. Humbert doesn’t know whether to continue along the road leading to those lips, or to turn back. He sees her floating in the air, soaring over the buildings.

She agrees to go to Chicago, though. But they won’t be able to leave together, she says, since her husband, who is an opera singer, is in the city now, and he will definitely want to take her to the airport to say goodbye, particularly since the following Wednesday he will be starting his European tour. It would be easy for her to find an excuse for going off suddenly to Chicago: so many years of marriage have created a network of tacit ellipses and accepted ploys that amply justified sudden leave-takings. Humbert confesses that he, too, is married. She kisses him hard, not just closing her eyes, but squeezing them shut, with such ardor that Humbert feels weak and aroused at the same time, seeking closer contact, which she does not want. As they walk toward the place where the car is parked, they set the date. She will go by plane, he will go by car. When they say goodbye, besides kissing, they feverishly caress each other’s backs.

•

The problem is how to explain this sudden change in plans to Helena, how to justify his repeatedly having refused to go over the past few weeks, only to change his mind so unexpectedly. He pushes open the door to the house, vaguely certain, though, that it won’t be all that hard for him to find a way. There is a surprise awaiting him at home: the whole room is full of people he knows, and some he doesn’t, drinking, laughing, and talking at the top of their lungs, inaudible under the waves of music. When he isn’t able to locate Helena at first glance, he tries to cross the room discreetly, to the corner where the drinks are set up. Along the way, though, he greets four painters with mustaches who are chatting with one another, a couple of critics, an Ethiopian sculptor whose show has just opened, three women he has never met before (two of whom are twins), and two expressionless men, who are leaning against the wall and contemplating the goings-on, seriously, with drinks in their hands. Finally, he finds Helena, behind a ficus, arguing with an illustrator; they’ve both pierced the same canapé. He gives her (Helena) a kiss and takes her aside. What are they celebrating?

“Xano. He was supposed to be back today with the latest news, live, about the Japan show, but he hasn’t gotten in yet.”

Humbert struggles, successfully, to avoid being included in a discussion of art deco, rationalism, and the Nazi aesthetic. At one point, trying to catch a rest from the din in one of the bedrooms, he encounters a luxuriant couple. In the kitchen he finds traces of jam in the mustard pot. Someone must have stuck a knife in without cleaning it. He finds a woman’s shoe in the freezer. In the hall, having taken out his notebook to jot down a few impressions, he runs into the double giggle of the twins, who carry him off into one the bedrooms, undress him, and subject him to all manner of abuses. On his return to the living room, dressed only in a Japanese kimono (too short and too tight for him), he finds a cardboard rocking horse in the hall, a whiskey bottle among the potted plants, a turbot in the fruit bowl. They were playing the lying game. The person who seems to have proposed the game is a short guy who is so drunk he can only keep his balance by holding on to the curtains. For a while everyone tells lies that give them away, lies that seem like the truth, boring lies, brilliant lies, pointless lies. Then a critic, who was sitting on top of the television set and nudging a peach someone must have stepped on after it had fallen on the floor with his foot, tells him that his work is extraordinary, that the utilization of diverse methods, styles, and media is neither impoverishing, tacky, nor the greatest farce in the history of art, but rather an enrichment; what’s more, it wasn’t full of contradictions, as some said; on the contrary: it was one of the most solid
oeuvres
of the century, probably the body of work that was destined to link this century with the next, to make that leap for contemporary art which the great creators of other times had made for their own. The people laughed; Humbert, annoyed, gets up from his chair, and slams his fist into the critic’s face without missing a beat. Short, and quite astonished, the guy loses his balance and, trying to clutch on to something, encounters the curtains, which he brings down with him in his fall. Then there is a mass of arms trying to keep Humbert and the critic apart, one or two shrieks, the giggling of the twins, Helena telling him that what he has done is deranged, and Humbert alleging that the critic was out for blood, and even a child would have been offended if someone telling a lie had gone on about how good he was. Helena tells him that maybe he should develop a little humility and self-control and get used to tough criticism. Humbert tells her that, by the way, he has decided to go to Chicago the next day.

Humbert
is driving down the highway. He has been at the
wheel for more than twelve hours, and he has only stopped once. To compensate, he decides that from that point on he will stop at every bar he comes across.

At the first, he orders a scotch. At the second, a bourbon. At the third, a vodka. At the fourth, a gin. At the fifth, a rye. At the sixth, a glass of wine. At the seventh, a tequila. At the eighth, a rum. At the ninth, an anisette. At the tenth, a cognac. At the eleventh, a martini.

At the thirteenth he sees, right next to the jukebox, a woman who starts out by singing the song that’s playing on the machine, then dances to it by herself, and, as it ends, dances to it with another one of the women sitting there. At the fourteenth, he sees an American flag placed symmetrically across from an Irish flag on either side of the mirror between the shelves of drinks, centered on the shiny cash register. At the fifteenth, a drunk is so happy to hear that Humbert has ordered his brand of beer that he turns his own bottle around to show him the label and demonstrate that he, too, is drinking that brand. At the sixteenth, he finds a backed-up toilet that has left puddles of piss all over the floor, which is composed of tiny tiles. He has to slosh through it to get to the bowl. At the seventeenth, he finds a bar with no bar, only tables. Indignant, he turns and leaves. At the eighteenth, he finds the waiter asleep at one end of the bar, and when he raises his voice to wake him, the other customers give him a dirty look. At the nineteenth, they don’t let him in because they’re closing. At the twentieth, he goes over to the pool table and watches as the player rips a hole in the green felt, and everyone, both the player who made the hole, the other players, and the other customers in the bar, stares at him in silence until he leaves. In the twenty-first he finds a little boy at the bar, drinking sarsaparilla, looking into the eyes of a man who must be his father, who is drinking Curaçao. At the twenty-second, he orders giant clams with horseradish sauce to go with his drink. At the twenty-third, he orders cheese with onions and mustard on wheat bread. At the twenty-fourth, he orders oysters with lemon, but they don’t have any: they’ve run out.

The twenty-fifth is the bar of a roadside hotel. After having a drink at the bar, he orders an abundant supper, followed by coffee and a glass of whiskey. He looks at his watch: 1:15. He decides to spend the night there. He asks if there are any rooms.

A receptionist (dark, tall, with thick lips, a little under twenty years old, who walks in front of him gently swaying her hips) takes him up to his room, showing little surprise at his having no luggage. She takes her tip with a smile and closes the door softly. Humbert urinates, washes his face, and lies on the bed to rest for five minutes. Since it seems clear to him that he isn’t drowsy, and is not likely to fall asleep, he goes back down to the bar.

The bartender asks what he’ll have. Humbert would like to see the whole length of the bar full of glasses and more glasses of different sizes and shapes. For starters he orders gin and then, in succession, a whole series of different kinds of drinks. A half hour later that stretch of bar looks like a glassware showcase, until a woman comes out of the kitchen and picks up all the empty glasses, leaving him just the one that is half-full of maraschino. Humbert takes out the little notebook and writes: “Still life of different types of glasses and mugs.”

Humbert turns his head. A woman with long curly brown hair, dressed in black and staring at the surface of the liquid in her glass, is sitting two stools down. When she also turns her head to look at him, they both smile. Humbert thinks of initiating an approach, but when he feels his eyelids heavy with sleep, he picks up what money is left, puts it in his pocket, and leaves the bar without looking back.

Once in bed he hears a couple arguing in the next room. Humbert positions his ear closer to the wall. The woman is saying (so loud the whole building could probably hear her) that, although he is indeed a good politician, capable perhaps of being the best—by his standards as well as by hers—he would never really be the
best
, because what he was after was to be the
only
one, to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue, every member of the human race, forever after, in every remaining moment of history, and that, the woman said, was impossible. There has never been anyone, no matter how important his or her contribution to the course of history, who isn’t a stranger to many. Neither popes, nor emperors, nor film stars, nor pop music idols (when pop music was still producing idols) have ever managed to do it, and neither would he. Humbert takes out the little notebook and takes it all down. The woman is running down a list of great celebrities and asking him how many times a year he thinks of each of them. Without waiting for an answer, she herself responds, hardly ever. He tells her to shut up, and his rebuttal is so garbled that Humbert has trouble understanding any of it. She then says not to take it like that, that she loves him, but that loving him hasn’t left her so blind as not to see clearly what was happening to him. He seems to be sobbing. Humbert hears how she starts consoling him, in a lower voice, and how they kiss. He hears whispering, brief laughter. He can even imagine how they are touching each other. Humbert is immediately aroused. He hears the woman moan. He hears some obscenities being whispered by the man that intensify the woman’s cries. Humbert begins to stroke himself. The bedsprings in the room next door creak obsessively until the woman breaks out in a long cry, almost at the same moment in which Humbert abundantly stains the sheets and, as he dries himself, hears the cavernous groan of the man.

For a while, everything is quiet. Then the whispering starts up again, more placid this time. Humbert has another erection. He should have taken advantage of the chance to strike up an acquaintance with the girl at the bar. Maybe it isn’t too late: he could get dressed and go back down. But most likely she will already have left. Not knowing what to do, he frantically dials the desk and orders a double scotch, and when the same receptionist who had taken him up to the room delivers it, he pulls her into his arms and, between giggles and no-no-nos, drags her to the bed, pushes the wet sheet aside, and kisses her passionately.

•

The following morning he spends his breakfast in the hotel bar trying to imagine which of the couples who occupy the other tables had spent the previous night in the room next to his. He closes his eyes, trying to place the voices, without success. He pays for his breakfast and the room and, as he opens the door, sees two of the chambermaids whispering to each other, looking at him, and shrieking with laughter. He stops, takes out the little notebook, and sketches the hotel, with the two maids at the door, one whispering in the other’s ear.

He drives without stopping. When he reaches the town where he had arranged to meet up with Hildegarda, he sees two cars totaled by a recent crash.

He doesn’t have to look very far: the hotel is a gigantic skyscraper, boring and extravagant, on the only street in town. The receptionist greets him with a smile. He tells him his wife has already arrived, not fifteen minutes before. He tells him the room number. Humbert bounds up the stairs, two by two. He knocks twice on the door. He hears Hildegarda’s voice asking him to wait a moment. But the door had opened when he knocked; it must not have been quite shut. Humbert walks around the room, looking at the items of clothing Hildegarda has left scattered on the bed. He runs his hand over all of them, picks one up, and smells it. Hildegarda opens the bathroom door, wrapped in a towel, and takes little steps in his direction, leaving the floor full of wet footsteps. She hugs him gleefully as he scolds her for having left the door open, and he takes off her towel.

•

When they park by the bar, Humbert realizes that the gas tank is almost empty. They have coffee at a small table by the window. It is beginning to snow. The room smells of boiled cabbage. An extraordinarily fat black cat, like a balloon about to burst, saunters between the tables, rubbing up against the legs of the people sitting there. Humbert finds the animal so disgusting that, when it comes near, he gets up from the chair and goes to sit at another table. Hildegarda shoots the cat a ferocious glare. The cat turns tail and goes over to Humbert’s new table. Humbert gets up and goes to the other end of the room. The cat is so bloated that he think just touching it will leave his fingers slathered with lard. If he squashes it, he thinks, he will splatter the walls of the place with grease. When the cat comes over to him yet again, Humbert goes back to Hildegarda’s table, asks for the check, and pays, fleeing from the animal’s slow and constant gait, that trails him wherever he goes. When Hildegarda opens the door to leave, he closes it instantly, fearful it will follow them out.

In the next town, he also parks on what appears to be the main street. They go into a movie house. In the vestibule, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a chocolate-covered cake. In the theater, once their eyes have adjusted to the dark, they realize there is no one else there. They talk about movies. Though Hildegarda hasn’t seen many of the ones he mentions, the few she has seen she really likes. Happy to be alone, they allow themselves to speak in a completely normal tone of voice, in a movie house.

When they leave, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a sandwich and drinking orange juice. It is still snowing. He gets back into the car. Humbert announces that they have been running on empty for quite some time and that they should fill up as soon as they see a gas station.

A little ways beyond the town, to the right, Hildegarda sees the lake. They veer off onto a little road and park lakeside. They kiss and embrace, isolated from the outdoors by the coat of snow that is blanketing them.

•

When they try to start the car, it won’t start. Hildegarda says they should have filled the tank. Humbert says, “Ah.” They have two alternatives: wait for the snowstorm to peter out or try to walk back. They opt for the latter. Humbert considers offering to go to the gas station himself, but he thinks she could also have offered. They pull up the collars of their coats, pull their hats down over their ears, give each other a hug, and start walking.

When they arrive, over an hour later, they are completely soaked. They buy a can of gasoline and ask the person in charge if he knows anyone who can drive them back. He knows someone who lives in the next town over and runs a taxi service. He arrives twenty minutes later. He takes them on a search that seems unending because in that snowstorm all the roads look alike, and at each fork in the road they end up choosing one side practically at random, only, in the end, to have to turn back and try the other. It is hours before they find the car.

Exhausted and aggravated, they go back to the hotel. They go up to their room and get into bed. Humbert turns over to embrace Hildegarda. She says not right now.

Feeling restless, Humbert tries to figure out if he can get any notes out of all that. Finding nothing, he tries to sleep. Hildegarda asks him if he’s sleeping. He says no. Then she starts talking non-stop: somehow out of context, he feels; she tells him that years before she had been involved with a stage actor, precisely at the same time she was a member of a mime troupe. And now she has the same feeling she had when she started losing interest in the opera: she feels she isn’t going anywhere with her painting. She asks him if he really thinks she isn’t any good. Humbert alleges that he hasn’t seen her work and thus has no way of judging. Hildegarda says that the same thrill of satisfaction she had once got with mime, and then with the opera, she was now getting (more and more strongly) with jazz. She asks him his opinion as to what instrument she should try. Humbert, acting as if he were thinking it over, wonders how to evade this monologue that doesn’t interest him in the slightest. In his little notebook (which he had left on the night table, just in case) he manages to write: “Woman tells boring story that doesn’t interest me at all.” He continues to listen until he falls asleep and dreams that he is going out with a girl who had been Heribert’s girlfriend but isn’t Hildegarda. Since Helena is at his house, they go to hers, but when they open the door, they find it full of cockroaches. Humbert then proposes that they go to his house, where there have never been any roaches, and they would find some pretense for Helena. They go there and the house is a hotel, which greatly reduces the danger of their being found out by Helena. They are so certain that no cockroach has ever entered that house that they are taken by surprise when, upon turning on the lights in their room, a roach appears right in the middle of the bed. When he immediately proceeds to crush it, the juice that oozes out is like thick semen, which obliges them to take off the sheet. They lie down without touching. They fall asleep. Humbert, in the dream he is dreaming in the dream, dreams that he is in a car at Hildegarda’s side. She is driving, and she announces that something is wrong with the car. In what appears to be the ideal solution for such cases, she has connected the car with wires to a (disgusting, fat, enormous) dead cat. But Hildegarda tells him that they have to massage the cat; otherwise, the contraption doesn’t work. Humbert goes to massage the cat; when he touches it though, its flesh, soft and putrid, disintegrates and falls off. Humbert realizes that this is only natural, because they hadn’t boiled it first. In cases like this, you had to boil the cat so the car could keep going. So they boil it, then, as all these people look on. Thousands upon thousands of roaches start to stream out of it. A spider appears and approaches. The spider is laughing. It goes up to the pot, looks in, and rests a leg on the rim. The people bat it away. It goes off, but remains within eyeshot. From there it observes the scene with disdain. Then it comes close again: dozens of hairy legs in motion, that stupid laugh
. . .
It sticks its head in the pot again, to see the dead cat (which, dead and all, is surreptitiously laughing) boiling and the roaches streaming out. The people bat it away again, and it exits laughing. Then, in the dream, he awakens from the other dream because the weight of the woman’s body (who has rolled over on top of him in her sleep) is smothering him. He gets up to have a drink of water, and a red roach comes up out of the drain of the sink.