Skylight (15 page)

“I'll see what I can arrange. What kind of work does she do?”

“She's a typist, I think.”

Every drop of Lídia's irritation was distilled in those words “I think.” When she stood up and removed her hand from her lover's knee, it was as if she had covered herself with the heaviest, thickest clothes she owned. He noticed this transformation and was puzzled, but had no inkling of what was going on in her head. He finished his coffee and stubbed out his cigarillo in the ashtray. Lídia rubbed her arms as if she were cold. She glanced at her dressing gown abandoned on the bed. She knew that if she put it on, Paulino would get annoyed. She felt tempted to put it on anyway, but fear got the better of her. She valued her financial security too much to risk it all with a fit of the sulks. Paulino folded his hands over his belly and said:

“Tell the young woman to come here on Wednesday and I'll talk to her.”

Lídia shrugged and said in a brusque, cold voice:

“All right.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Paulino frown. She scolded herself for creating a scene. She was behaving like a child and decided the moment had come to pour oil on troubled waters. She smiled at him, but her smile froze: Paulino was still frowning. She began to feel afraid. She had to find a way to cheer him up. She tried to speak, but could think of nothing to say. If she ran over to him and kissed him on the mouth, everything would be fine, but she felt incapable of doing that. She didn't want simply to hand herself over. She wanted to surrender, but not to take the first step.

Without thinking, and acting entirely on instinct, she turned out the bedroom light. Then, in the darkness, she went over to the dressing table and turned on the standard lamp next to it. She stood quite still for a moment, bathed in that light. She knew that her lover could clearly see the outline of her naked body beneath her negligee. Then, very slowly, she turned. Paulino Morais was unbuttoning his braces.

Abel paused on the landing to light a cigarette. At that moment, the stairwell lit up. He heard a door open on the floor above and the muffled sound of voices, followed immediately by heavy footsteps that made the stairs creak. He took his key out of his pocket and pretended to be fumbling with the lock. He only “found” it when he felt the person coming down the stairs walk right past him. He turned and saw Paulino Morais, who murmured a polite “Good evening,” to which Abel—who had now opened the front door—responded in the same manner.

As he walked along the corridor inside the apartment, he heard light footsteps above heading in the same direction. When he went into his room, the footsteps sounded farther off. He turned on the light and looked at his wristwatch: five past two.

The room was stuffy. He opened the window. The night was overcast. Slow, heavy clouds drifted across the sky, lit by the lights of the city. It had grown hotter, and the atmosphere was warm and humid. The sleeping buildings surrounding the back yards were like the wall around a deep, dark well. The only light was the glow emanating from his room. It flooded out of his open window and spilled into the yard below, revealing the stalks of the shrunken, useless cabbages that, plunged in darkness up until then, now had the startled look of people torn abruptly from sleep.

Another light went on, illuminating the backs of the buildings opposite. Abel could see clothes hung out to dry, flowerpots, and windows glinting. He decided to finish his cigarette sitting on the garden wall, and so as not to have to go through the kitchen, he jumped down from the window. He could hear the chicks piping in the chicken run. He walked through the cabbages bathed in light. Then he turned and looked up. Through the panes of the glazed balcony, he could see Lídia making her way to the bathroom. He smiled a sad, disenchanted smile. At that hour, hundreds of women would be doing the same as Lídia. He was tired, he had walked many streets, seen many faces, followed many nameless shapes. And now there he was in Silvestre's back yard, smoking a cigarette and shrugging his shoulders at life. “I'm like Romeo in the Capulets' garden,” he thought. “All that's missing is the moon. Instead of innocent Juliet, we have the highly experienced Lídia. Instead of a delicate balcony, a bathroom window. A fire escape instead of a ‘tackled stair.'” He lit another cigarette. “Any moment now, she'll say: ‘What man art thou that, thus bescreen'd in night, so stumblest on my counsel?'”

He smiled smugly, rather pleased with his ability to quote Shakespeare. Carefully avoiding the abandoned cabbages, he went and sat on the wall. He felt strangely sad. Doubtless the influence of the weather. It was very close and there was a hint of thunder in the air. He looked up again: Lídia was coming out of the bathroom. Perhaps because she, too, felt hot, she opened the window and leaned on the sill.

“Juliet saw Romeo,” thought Abel. “What will happen next?” He jumped down from the wall and walked into the middle of the yard. Lídia was still at the window. “Now it's my turn to say: ‘But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.'”

“Good evening,” said Abel, smiling.

There was a pause, then he heard Lídia's voice say “Good evening” and she promptly vanished. Abel threw down his cigarette and, much amused, mumbled to himself as he returned to his room:

“There's an ending Shakespeare didn't think of.”

Henrique's condition took an unexpected turn for the worse. The doctor, summoned urgently, ordered tests to be made for diphtheria bacilli. The boy was running a very high fever and was delirious. Carmen, desperate with anxiety, blamed her husband for allowing the illness to get this far. She made a terrible scene. Emílio merely listened and, as usual, said nothing. He knew his wife was right, because she had been the first to think of calling a doctor. He was filled with remorse. He spent the whole of Sunday at his son's bedside and, on Monday, at the appointed time, rushed off to get the results of the analysis. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that it was negative, but the comment on the report that one such test was often not enough plunged him back into despair.

The doctor, however, declared himself satisfied and predicted a rapid recovery—once they had got through the next twenty-four hours. Emílio did not leave his son's side all that day. Carmen, who had been cold and silent since supper, found her husband's presence hard to bear. She found it exasperating enough on normal days, but now that her husband refused to leave the room, she felt she was being robbed of the one thing that was most precious to her: her son's love.

In order to get rid of Emílio, she reminded him that he wasn't going to earn any money stuck at home, and that they needed the money more than ever, what with the additional expense of Henrique's illness. Once again Emílio responded only with silence. She was right about that too; he would do more good leaving her to take care of Henrique, but still he did not go. He was convinced now that he was responsible for that relapse, because his son's condition had only worsened after the night he had spoken to him. His presence there was like a penance, as futile as all penances are, and which only made sense because it was entirely self-imposed.

Despite his wife's insistence, he did not go to bed at the usual hour. Carmen also stayed up, anxious to demonstrate that she did not love her child any less than he did.

There was little they could do. Once the crisis was over, the illness followed its natural course. The medicines had been administered, and now it was a matter of waiting for them to take effect. But neither of them wanted to give in. It was a kind of standoff, a mute battle. Carmen was struggling to hang on to Henrique's affection, which she felt she risked losing because of her husband's caring presence there. Emílio was struggling to quell his feelings of remorse and to make up for his earlier indifference with his present concern. He was aware that his wife's battle was the worthier one and that in his own battle there was a substratum of egotism. Of course he loved his son: he had engendered him, how could he not love him? Not to do so would be unnatural. However, he knew full well that he was a stranger in that house, that nothing there really belonged to him, even though it had been bought with his money. Having is not the same as owning. You can have even those things you don't want. Owning means having and enjoying the things you have. He had a home, a wife and a son, but none of them was truly his. He only had himself, but even then not entirely.

Sometimes Emílio wondered if perhaps he was mad, if this life of conflicts, storms and constant misunderstandings was a consequence of some nervous imbalance in him. Away from home, he was, or thought he was, a normal creature capable of laughing and smiling like everyone else, but he only had to cross the threshold of their apartment for an unbearable weight to fall on him. He felt like a drowning man who fills his lungs not with the air that would allow him to live, but with the water that is killing him. He felt he had a duty to declare himself satisfied with what life had given him, to acknowledge that other, far less fortunate men managed to live contentedly. This comparison, however, brought him no peace. He didn't know what would give him peace or where he would find it, or if it even existed. What he did know, after all these years, was that he did not have it. And he knew that he wanted to find it, the way a shipwrecked man desperately wants to find a plank of wood to cling to, the way a seed needs the sun.

These thoughts, repeated over and over, always brought him back to the same point. He compared himself to a mule harnessed to a waterwheel and walking miles and miles, round and round in the same circle, eyes blinkered, not realizing that he is treading the same ground he has trodden a thousand times before. He wasn't a mule, he wasn't wearing blinkers, but he had to agree that his thoughts were leading him round and round a well-trodden path. Knowing this only made matters worse, because there he was, a human being behaving like an irrational animal. You can't blame the mule for submitting to the yoke, but should he be blamed? What was it that kept him tied to the yoke? Habit, cowardice, fear of hurting other people? Habits can be changed, cowardice can be overcome, and other people's suffering is almost always less than we think. Had he not already proved—or at least tried to prove—that his absence would quickly be forgotten? So why did he stay? What force was it that bound him to that house, that woman, that child? Who had tied those knots?

The only answer he came up with was “I'm tired.” So tired that, even though he knew full well that all the doors of his prison could be opened and that he had the key, he still did not take a single step toward freedom. He had grown so accustomed to feeling tired that he took a certain pleasure in it, the pleasure of someone who has given up, the pleasure of someone who, when the moment of truth arrives, turns back the clock and says: “It's too early.” The pleasure of self-sacrifice. But sacrifice is only complete when it is kept hidden from view; making it visible is tantamount to saying, “Look at me, look how self-sacrificing I am,” and making sure that other people don't forget it. Therefore he had not yet given up entirely, and behind his resignation hope still lingered, just as the blue sky is always there behind the clouds.

Carmen was looking at her husband sitting there absorbed in thought. The ashtray was full, and Emílio continued to smoke. One day she had worked out how much money he spent on cigarettes and had criticized him harshly for it. She had told her parents, and they, of course, had sympathized with her. It was like burning money, like throwing it away, money they badly needed. Vices are for the rich, so if you want to have vices, you have to get rich first. Emílio, though, was a commercial traveler for want of any better employment, out of necessity, not out of vocation, and had never shown any desire to get rich. He contented himself with the bare minimum and went no further than that. What a useless man! What a useless life! Carmen belonged to a different race, a race for whom life is not a matter of standing and staring, but of struggling. She was active, he was apathetic. She was all nerves, bones and muscles, all the necessary ingredients for generating power and energy; he was all those things too, but he wrapped his bones, muscles and nerves in a mist of apathy, trammeling them with dissatisfaction and doubt.

Emílio got up and went to his son's room. The boy had fallen into a restless sleep, which he kept waking from and then sliding back into. Incoherent words emerged from his dry lips. In the corners of his mouth, small translucent bubbles of saliva marked the passing of the fever. Very gently, Emílio slipped the thermometer under his son's arm. He left it there for the required amount of time, then went back to the dining room. Carmen looked up from her sewing, but asked no questions. He checked the thermometer: 102.5. Henrique's temperature appeared to be going down. He placed the thermometer on the table where his wife could reach it, but despite her longing to know the result, she made no attempt to get up and read it. She waited for her husband to speak.

Emílio took a few hesitant steps. The clock in the apartment upstairs struck three. Carmen was waiting, her head pounding, her teeth gritted to keep from heaping insults on her husband. Emílio went to bed without saying a word. He was worn out by that prolonged vigil and weary both of his wife and of himself. His throat was tight with anxiety: it was her fault he could not speak; she was the one obliging him to withdraw like someone creeping away in order to die or to weep.

For Carmen this was the final proof that her husband lacked all human feeling. Only a monster would behave like that: leaving her in ignorance and going to bed as if there were nothing wrong, as if their son's illness were of no importance.

She got up and went over to the table. She looked at the thermometer, then went back to her chair. She did not go to bed that night. Like the victors in medieval battles, she remained on the field after the fight was over. She had won. Besides, she would have found the slightest contact with her husband that night unbearable.