Gasoline (7 page)

When
he hears her arrive, at 5:35
a.m.
, he pretends to be sleeping, as always. At nine, the alarm goes off. Helena gets up right away. Heribert opens one eye and sees her, sitting on the bed, stretching. How does she manage to sleep so little and not feel the effects? He closes the one eye when he sees that Helena is turning around to wake him up.

“Heribert. It’s nine o’clock.”

He continues to pretend to be asleep. He hears her get up and shower. He watches her get dressed, on the sly: panties, stockings, bra, blouse, skirt, jacket, shoes. She is a very beautiful woman. Until not so long ago, he could spend hours (maybe not quite hours, but certainly minutes) looking at her eyes, her lips, her eyebrows. Helena picks up her handbag and, before leaving, walks over to him again.

“Lazybones, it’s ten o’clock.”

A moment later he hears her close the door. He yawns, takes over the middle of the bed, stretches out comfortably, and buries his head in the pillows.

He lifts his head and looks at the clock: 11:30. He feels tired. He stays awake until 2:00, when he falls asleep. At 3:23 the phone rings. He fumbles around on the night table. He thinks he’s crushed something hard. A cockroach? He finally finds the telephone. He picks it up. Whenever he happens to think about cockroaches, afterwards, for quite a while, he can’t get them out of his head. Now he’s afraid they’ll start coming out of the holes in the receiver and run into his ear.

It was Hildegarda. What was going on, why hadn’t he called her? They make a date. They arrange for Heribert to stop by at 7:00 to pick her up. He hangs up the telephone and decides to stay in bed until it’s time. He sets the alarm for 6:00.

When the clock goes off, he curses at it. He is so definitively not in the mood to get up that he decides to stay in bed a little longer. To watch the minutes tick by, sees 6:15 come and go, then 6:26, 6:30, 6:37, 6:45, 7:00, 7:15, 7:30
. . .

He lies there the whole time with his eyes open, staring at the face of the clock. At 7:45 the phone rings again. It’s Hildegarda. Did he fall asleep? Heribert is about to tell her, “I am just not in the mood to get up
. . .
” but he doesn’t, perhaps not wanting to annoy her. Not saying it, though, makes him feel like a coward. Then he thinks maybe it’s not so much that he doesn’t want to hurt Hildegarda’s feelings as that he’s just not in the mood even to speak. This new line of reasoning gives him momentary satisfaction. He gets up slowly. He finds that getting up slowly is good. Slowly he gets dressed. Then, he slowly thinks that he hasn’t showered. On the verge of wondering why he has to shower he manages not to finish the thought. He undresses slowly. He showers slowly. He dries himself off slowly. He closes the front door slowly. Slowly he raises his arm to hail a cab, which, in Heribert’s opinion, approaches too quickly. With measured words he tells the drives to take him to the address as slowly as he can: there is no hurry. When Hildegarda gives him a kiss, he returns it in the slowest of slow motions.

“What’s up, are you rusty?”

•

Slowly he sits in a pink armchair, and in absolutely no hurry, he tells Hildegarda that he no longer feels any passion for Helena, nor for painting, nor perhaps for anything at all. (As he tells her this he thinks, with satisfaction, that this decisive declaration of his state of mind, completely at odds with the impassivity of that day in bed, is just what Hildegarda expected to hear from his lips. He vows to himself that from this moment on he will do only what is expected of him.) What if Hildegarda takes him seriously? Will she be capable of asking him if he also feels no passion for her? If she does, he’ll slap her in the face, for
. . .
? For what? For being banal and predictable. But she doesn’t ask. At first, this gives him some satisfaction. “Maybe we’re cut from the same cloth.” Gradually, though, he sees that this possibility doesn’t appeal to him either. He’s the one who’s ill at ease with everything. Annoyed at the possibility that she might be as detached as he, he tells her that Hug has told him about her, about their going out together and, as she can see, all of this was neither here nor there to him. He thinks, “If she gets angry now, or pissed off at my lack of sensitivity in telling her, or if she goes off on Hug for spilling the beans, then I win.” She walks over to him and asks him if he’d like to know how they did it. Then she puts her arms around him; they fall to the floor and roll around; she pulls off his pants and pulls up her skirt, stroking him and laughing. Heribert laughs, too, for a moment. He remembers how, before, the smoothness of Hildegarda’s cheek used to arouse him to the point of turning into a beast, an athlete. He touches her cheek, hoping to feel that velvety softness again, and even though he feels
that velvety softness
again, it doesn’t seem the same. He caresses her clitoris as if barely touching it, and she smiles, giving in to the pleasure. A short while later, though, Heribert yawns, closes his eyes, progressively decreases the friction, and falls asleep.

•

When he awakens he sees Hildegarda, dressed in black, sitting in the pink armchair he had previously occupied. She is looking at him. With severity? With indifference? As if she didn’t see him? With disparagement? With curiosity? All those questions strung together, muses Heribert, could be the lyrics to a torch song. How exactly is she looking at him?

“Shall we go out?” she says.

Heribert slowly gets dressed. Does he feel better than before? Worse? “If only I had felt a little guilty
. . .
” he thinks, but then wonders, guilty of what? If only he could say that Hildegarda was punishing him with indifference, punishing him with contempt
. . .

They say goodbye outside. Hildegarda gives him an icy kiss on the lips. Heribert walks away, crossing to the alternate side of the street at every corner.

When he gets home, Helena is arriving at the same time. At the street entrance, they look at each other, each with key in hand, grinning at each other, like tacit accomplices.

“Good evening
. . .
”

“Good evening
. . .
”

Pleasantly, they say “after you” on the way in and “after you” at the stairs. This is the first time they have run into each other at night, each coming home separately. At the door to the apartment, the double keys are repeated and the double smiles. “We seem symmetrical.” If only symmetry could be applied to everything
. . .
They take their coats off at the same time, one next to the other, and one next to the other they hang them on two hooks of the coat rack. They brush their teeth in neighboring sinks, symmetrically: one holds the toothbrush with the right hand, and the other with the left. They get undressed at the same time, on either side of the bed. They pick up the top sheet at the same time and get in at the some moment. Heribert wishes they would dream the same dream.

•

Helena wakes him up, hands him the telephone, and disappears into the living room. It’s Herundina. Half asleep, he answers, agrees to see her that evening, arranges the time and place, hangs up, thinks that it’s the second time Helena has heard Herundina’s voice, and goes back to sleep.

A short time later, Helena wakes him up again. She covers the mouthpiece of the telephone with her hand. It’s that young man, she says, whom Heribert is supposed to have called and hasn’t. Since Helena has called him about seeing some etchings, why doesn’t he take a moment and talk to him? He talks to him. Humbert is a painter, he wants to meet him, show him his work, ask for his advice. They arrange to meet that evening. He would stop by Heribert’s for a chat and a drink. Heribert estimates that this will leave enough time for him to meet up later with Herundina. He hangs up.

He admits to himself that he’s incapable of going back to sleep. He gets up. Helena is having breakfast in the kitchen. She stops her toast and marmalade in mid-air and asks him what he thought of Humbert and what arrangements they had made, and before Heribert can answer, she comes out with a string of praise for this up-and-coming young artist. Heribert, washing his hands in the sink, lowers his head and places it under the flowing water of the faucet in such a way that he manages not to hear a word she is saying.

•

When Helena leaves, he doesn’t feel like following her again. He goes back and forth about whether to go up to the studio, but he’s afraid of finding himself in front of the blank canvases. And who did Helena think Herundina was?

He was pleased to have had three such different thoughts in such a short time, and he makes an effort to have another one right away, but he can’t. When he’s about to give up, he sees the telephone: he has to call information and, tactfully, under reasonable pretenses, get the names of the tenants in the building where Helena’s young friend lives, to see who he might be. But it sounds like too much trouble for nothing. He sits down to watch TV. He sees one ad for cosmetics, another for cereal, another for toys, another for a health club, another for ladies’ underpants, another for a condominium, another for soup, another for yogurt, another for romance novels, another for a razor for legs and underarms, another for bras, another for pants, another for insurance, another for convertible sofas, another for shoes, another for an electric shaver for legs and underarms, another for soft drinks, another for chicken, another for a numismatist. This one, in particular, catches his attention because it claims that while coin collecting is fun, it is also an investment. That’s it: maybe what he needs is to find an obsession like coin collecting. Collecting
. . .
And not just coins, stamps must also fulfill the two objectives. He searches in the yellow pages for the listings of numismatists and philatelists; he tears the pages out, folds them carefully, puts them in his pants pocket, puts on his coat, opens the door, and goes down the stairs.

At the front door he runs into Hug with his finger on the buzzer. His only greeting is what’s up with the paintings and doesn’t he realize that they’ve already sold them all, the day before yesterday already, even before they were done. He calls him to task, if nothing more than because half the planet is already involved. The buyers have already been selected, as well as the museums that will aquire some of the works. He complains, in passing, about how Helena does things and reminds him of the good old days when Hug was calling the shots. He announces that the titles of the paintings (for which they have commissioned an advertising copywriter) have already been chosen. They are vague enough to adapt to whatever he paints, no matter what it is. He supposed that Heribert won’t mind, since putting names to his paintings is a job he’s not fond of, and reminds him that when they met all his paintings bore the same title:
Untitled.
He informs him that they have managed to place a painting with Peter Ludwig, who has called from Germany to learn when the exhibition will be closing and, hence, the exact date on which they will be sending the painting. Morton Neumann is in from Chicago to talk with Helena. He reminds him that the opening is the twenty-second, so he should do it however he can. He reminds him how hard it has been to get this far. He asks him if what he wants is for Hug to paint them himself, or if he’s trying to be cool or play the
enfant terrible
. Lowering his voice, he observes that at this stage of the century, playing the
enfant terrible
is not the recipe for success it once was. Or is it?

Heribert feels revulsion for a person so full of doubts. He leaps to one side, stops a cab, swings the door open, and, to keep Hug out, gives him a good kick in the shins.

He gets out in front of a stamp shop. He looks one by one at the hundreds of orderly stamps in the window. They seem boring, and if it weren’t for their considerable price, he would have categorized them along with trading cards in terms of the interest they awakened in him. Some of them show drawings of old airplanes, some extremely strange birds, some very serious faces, generals with wigs, horrible flowers. Some, just a few, have been cancelled. What
real
purpose do they serve, then, if they are no longer good for mailing letters? Maybe what he needs to do is to begin collecting them even though he’s not into it—with time and habit, he’ll get into it eventually. He opens the door to the store. They greet him with excessive cordiality. The counter is made of glass, and underneath there are row and rows of stamps. He looks at a very strange series (it seems very strange to him) with drawings of very strange fish, from a country with a very strange name, which he doesn’t even recognize from having studied it at school. He asks the price.

“Seven hundred dollars.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Seven hundred dollars each, sir, not the series.”

“How many are there in the series?”

“Twenty.”

“Do you accept checks, or credit cards?”

“Visa and MasterCard, sir. Checks only if
. . .
”

“I’ll take them, then. Show me a few more series; interesting, hard-to-find ones
. . .
”

He leaves with thirty-eight complete series and hundreds of loose stamps. There is a Cuban stamp, with a military officer sporting a bushy mustache and long white sideburns, which he finds particularly appealing, despite the fact that, according to the information they have provided at the store, it is of slight value. He has taken all the stamps from Gabon, Lesotho, Cameroon, Mongolia, Hungary, Rwanda, Zaire, Bhutan, France, Andorra, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Romania, Malta, New Caledonia, Libya, Czechoslovakia, Mozambique, Tonga, Benin, Mali, the Dominican Republic, and Wallis and Futuna. And Turks and Caicos, with images of football players facing off over a ball. He takes stamps with images of birds: from Christmas Island and the Seychelles, from Bhutan, from Aitutaki, from the Solomon Islands, from Vanuatu Vatu, from Botswana, from Tanzania, from Swaziland, from Portugal, from Norway, from East Germany, from Monaco, from the Netherlands, from Yugoslavia, from the Bahamas, from Barbados, and from the British Virgin Islands. He takes some with images of flowers: from Vanuatu Vatu, from Hungary, from Sri Lanka, from Wallis and Futuna, from India, from Afghanistan, from Laos, from Italy, from Bulgaria, from the Solomon Islands, from China, from Montserrat, from Argentina, from Rwanda, from Ghana, from Mali, from Niue, from Oman, from Ireland. He takes some from Pakistan (with images of the blind dolphin of the Indus River), from Jamaica (with sea cows). He takes some with whale figures: from Australia and Norfolk Island. From the Unites States he takes images of Jackie Robinson, of Harriet Tubman, of Martin Luther King, of Benjamin Banneker, of Whitney Moore Young: the complete Black Heritage series. He also takes some commemorative stamps from the twenty-first birthday celebration of the Princess of Wales: from the Ascension Islands, from the Bahamas, from Barbados, from the British Antarctic Territory, from the Cayman Islands, from the Falkland Islands, from the Fiji Islands, from Gambia, from Mauritius, from Pitcairn Island, from Santa Helena Island, from the Solomon Islands, from Swaziland, from Tristan da Cunha, from Antigua and Barbuda, from Cameroon, from Ghana, from Togo, from Bhutan, from Dominica, from Grenada, from the Maldive Islands, from Sierra Leone, from the Turks and Caicos Islands, from Uganda, from Anguilla. He also bought stamps of Princess Catherine of Aragon, of Anne Neville, of Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, of Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, of Caroline of Brunswick, Alexandra of Denmark, and of Queen Mary (the wife of George V of England), emitted by Tuvalu, Montserrat, Saint Vincent, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Kiribati. On a shelf there is an engraving of a philatelist contemplating his collection, with a magnifying glass in the left hand and tongs in the right. So he also requests a magnifying glass and tongs. He pays, they put it all in a couple of bags, and he goes out into the street. He stops a cab. He gets in. He unfolds the yellow pages he tore out of the telephone book. He reads out another address. The taxi takes off. He folds the sheets and puts them back in his pocket. The taxi drops him at a numismatist’s.