The Man of Feeling (13 page)

"Bear in mind that there is no stronger bond than that which binds one to something unreal or, worse, something that has never existed." And I saw him raise his index finger for the third time. That was also the third time that I saw him.

I suppose the fourth journalist finally rang not long afterwards. But by then I had finished shaving and had covered my mouth with sticking plaster: I hesitated for a moment, I did not answer.

I
WAS
SO
HUNGRY
THAT
I
HAD
TO
pause for a moment and go downstairs to have supper in a nearby restaurant, lively, expensive and crowded, and which, being much frequented by tourists, opens its doors fairly early. First I looked in my mailbox and picked up the letters that had been waiting for me since the morning. No one had brought them up to me because no one has come to see me today. And I've had the answering machine on too, so I haven't seen or spoken to anyone all day, and the day is nearly over. Among various circulars from banks and the odd pre-contract to sing in a couple of years' time at some particular spot on the globe where I know I will be sure to find myself on that precise and distant date, the only letter in the box (and which I read while I was waiting for supper amid the gabble of tourists) was from that man, Noguera, the husband or widower of my girlfriend Berta. Surprisingly—given my silence—he has written to me again, on today of all days, just when Berta had appeared to me again in this morning's dream, only three weeks after I had learned of her death by the same marital route. Noguera, in this second letter, which I have just read, initially goes on again about my old books and warns me that if I do not write to confirm that I want them back, he will have no option but to throw them on the fire along with everything else (that is what he says, "throw them on the fire," an odd expression given that spring is already here). He is not going to continue living in the house or "tower" he shared with Berta, he tells me (and on this occasion, unlike the first, he does mention his state of mind, which is one of despair), because he finds the constant memories of his wife extremely painful. So sadly do the hours pass that he plans not only to leave the marital home, but also to destroy all her belongings and anything that serves to feed her memory, which he intends to allow to "die of inanition." He is still young, he says, he hopes to rebuild his life, and, given that he has the firm intention of destroying photos, clothes, shoes, records, jewelry, lotions, videos, creams, aprons, books, mirrors, pills, letters—in short, everything that his wife ever used while alive—he asks me if, before he lights the pyre, I would like to have—as well as those books of mine that he has already listed—some of those objects which he, "on the other hand," never wants to see again. Perhaps he thinks that, contrary to what is happening to him, I do want to keep Berta's memory alive with something tangible that once belonged to her, and this legalistic individual—whom I now am sure is called Noguera because I have just read his name—sends me another detailed improbable list of all the things he is kind enough to offer me before the planned incineration. Noguera thinks that I would be particularly interested in photos from the time when she and I "saw most of each other" and in the letters and postcards that I sent her ("there are not that many and most are postcards") and which he found in an old tin box of Lindor chocolates. But— he insists—it would be no trouble at all to send me any other object I might like to keep. If, within two weeks, he receives no answer—just as he received no answer to his first letter—he will assume that I have no desire to keep anything "from the above inventory" and he will proceed with the "cremation," which is why, if there is anything I want, he urges me to reply and gives me his Barcelona telephone number in case my many travels and commitments ("which I know about from the newspapers and the television") do not leave me enough time to write and it would be easier for me to tell him over the phone what I would like to keep. I have not dared to read the new list closely, it is several pages long, but when I glanced over it—repeatedly in fact— I noticed two things: that Noguera is mad enough to include in it all kinds of things that have nothing whatever to do with me, things clearly bought long after I had ceased to have anything to do with Berta; but he is not mad enough to offer me (as I had begun to fear) tights and panties and other such things—which will doubtless be among the objects to be devoured by the fire—nor her set of silver cutlery, her record player, her video machine or her television—which will certainly not be consumed by the flames in a fortnight's time. Noguera, unhinged by the unexpected and possibly avoidable death of his wife (and it is perfectly normal that he should be more troubled now than the first time he wrote to me, when he had just buried her and when the sense of calm and reason that the dead bestow on us would not yet have deserted him), is incapable of understanding that if
he
wants to forget Berta Viella, then
no one else
will want to remember her. For the last person is the one who counts, thus, for example, it will be our last widow who will have to be consoled, and any inheritance we leave will almost always go to those who did not know us when we were young, but only when we were already deep in vile decrepitude or in rigid old age. That is why neither I nor anyone else in the world considers the great Gustav Hörbiger to be the most heroic Heldentenor of our century, but, rather, an obsessed madman, doubtless confined in some German hospital and whose imminent death will not now be his defining moment. That is why Otello is an avenger and Liu a martyr until the end of time, that is why I cannot easily forget Manur (that is why, on the other hand, I do not yet know what I am nor if anyone or no one will remember me). Noguera, with his impossible offer, is trying to contravene an immutable law, according to which the last person is the one who determines, sanctions, amends or cancels everything that came before. He is and always will be Berta's husband, her final choice, and if he now regrets and is wearied by his inability to forget, what he cannot do is to try and carry out an illicit transfer and pass that responsibility over to me. I cannot perform an act of palingenesis, I do not want to remember her; more than that, as I said before, I do not remember her now. I don't want those books that were once mine, I don't want her photos of monuments and faces and beaches, nor the postcards I sent to her from half the known world, I don't want a sponge or a bathrobe, or a scratched record of Lauritz Melchior or even a new one by Pavarotri, let alone one of me singing sublime extracts from seven operas. I don't want her medicines or her sunglasses, her stiletto heels or her azaleas; her random selection of novels, her rings, her colorful earrings, her unopened bottles of Rhine wine and Veuve Clicquot; her cologne, her eye drops, her lamps, her lipsticks, her bits of pottery from La Bisbal, the trilobite I gave her; her silk-blend blouses, her glass Murano ashtrays, her iridescent skirts, her shells from the Lido, her English teapots, her collection of cockerels from around the world and made of all kinds of materials, her—very lovely—Fortuny engravings. I do not want anything that she once owned. Or perhaps just one thing: because although I had no intention of doing so, between courses—the restaurant was so crowded, the waiters so rushed, the hubbub of voices so loud that even the normally affable head waiter did not speak to me, and, unable to eavesdrop on anyone else's conversation, I grew bored—I spent rather too much time leafing through the mad, meticulous sheets that Noguera had sent me, and on the third page, I noticed this object, "elegant Italian calendar" (that is the description given by poor Noguera, about whom I still know nothing, what he does or who he really is). I wonder if it is the same one (
marzo, ottobre, dicembre)
that adorned the bedroom wall in our apartment in Barcelona, I mean, I wonder if it is the same make or the same series, if the very precise Berta would have continued buying them all these years and if they were therefore still being made. I could ask Noguera to send me that elegant calendar. Besides, in a few months' time it will be out of date and will have to be thrown out anyway, it will not last nor will it remind me for very long of what I am now incapable of remembering. Perhaps it would do me good to look at it during that time, for I fear that, from now on, no one will watch over my sleep nor will I watch over that of Natalia Manur. This morning, when I woke, she was not in our vast bed with its four lion's feet and she has still not come home. There may be nothing strange about this. I have slept so badly and so little for so many years that I now take a powerful soporific (twenty-five drops) that plunges me into such a deep torpor that until I have had my eight hours of sleep nothing can wake me apart, that is, from my own will, alerted before I drop off, or else another person's will to interrupt my slumbers and return me to the world: on occasions when Natalia needed me during the night, she had to call out my name and shake me and unbutton my pajama jacket and splash cold water on my forehead and neck. But last night, my thoughts were not vigilant, and she clearly did not need me, so she must have gone out early without my noticing and, quite possibly, she was in a hurry, so much so that she did not even leave me a note explaining where she was going or at least warning me that she would not be back for lunch or supper. Yes, she was probably in a hurry, because she seems to have gone off somewhere on a trip—it's impossible to know if she went by plane or train—and when one is traveling, there is never time to spare. Two expandable suitcases and a large bag are missing from the wardrobe where we keep our luggage, as are most of her more personal belongings, of which I would not now be able to make a list like Noguera's because, unlike him, I do not have them here before me. However she has taken with her the things one never leaves behind: almost nothing of hers remains in the bathroom and my toothbrush is alone again, as it was once before; I know that her drawers are now empty of her underwear and her wardrobes of her autumn clothes, which leads me to think—given that, in our hemisphere, spring is just beginning—that perhaps she has flown off to Argentina, the country where her brother Roberto (whom, it is true, she has not seen for a long time and whom she often misses) enjoys a prosperous lifestyle and where he has chosen to remain. Yes, perhaps, on an impulse, she decided to go and see him. But an impulse like that requires planning, and there is also the possibility that Natalia Manur has simply left me without saying a word, as she left Manur four years ago, about which I also dreamed this morning. (Natalia has so often told me how she used to say to him: "When I do finally leave, you won't even know.") During the last few weeks or possibly months (time is so slippery when one is constantly on the move and, during the years that we have lived together, my profession has meant that we have traveled the world together), she seemed tired of so much to-ing and fro-ing and tired too—just a little—of me. She had again developed those dark shadows under her eyes that only accentuate her femininity, and she laughed less than she used to, revealing the beautiful teeth that light up her face, and—an old habit acquired in early youth, or perhaps only in Brussels—she had resumed that furious gnawing of the skin around her nails, so that her two index fingers—especially those, but the others as well—had again taken on the ugly, childish, raw appearance they had had during our time in Madrid. But what worried me most was the abnormal weariness that overwhelmed her whenever we arrived in a new place where I was to sing. Something which, only four, three or two years ago, or even six months ago, was for her a source of the greatest pleasure seemed to have become a torment borne without any violent complaint, indeed with hardly any complaint at all, but borne—of this I am sure—with great suffering. On our last few trips, she did not even have the strength to unpack the suitcases: she still withstood the departure well and appeared completely composed and even cheerful during the extreme provisionality of the journeys themselves; however, once the bellboy had shown us to our room, she experienced a kind of invincible exhaustion and collapsed, as if felled by lightning, onto one of the beds in the hotel room. After a couple of hours lying there, dazed or in a light sleep, she gathered together sufficient strength to get undressed and take a shower; then she would lie down again and thus, alternating showers and siestas and a bit of reading or television, she would remain for the whole of our stay in whatever city we happened to be in. She no longer wanted to sally forth on her own to visit places (even though we had recently been to Prague, Paris and Berlin) nor attend my rehearsals (even though I had lately performed such highly prestigious roles as Aeneas and Pinkerton and Des Grieux) nor to pick me up afterwards to go and have supper in the company of illustrious colleagues and interesting people (even though we had recently coincided with Anna Telesca and with the picturesque Guillerme and the handsome Jerusalem). She asked for her meals to be taken up to her room, she insisted on speaking and hearing only Spanish and, in short, she passed through those cities—which not long ago she had been thrilled to visit and in which she had eagerly tracked down all kinds of ornaments and implements for our home—as if she only existed as a name on a plane ticket. She behaved like a character in an excellent comedy I saw recently on video, about a delightful ex-boxer, fat, loyal and punch-drunk, who had no idea whether he was in Chicago, New Orleans or Detroit, so accustomed had he become in his previous pugilistic life to enforced confinement to his hotel room. I don't know what Natalia did while I was rehearsing the opera or recording the record that had taken us to wherever we were, but during the brief moments on recent trips when we were together in the room, she just used to lie on the bed—often swathed in a bath towel because she didn't have the energy to get dressed again after a shower—reading all kinds of magazines or dozing or, at the least, yawning, and—the television always on, albeit on mute so as not to disrupt my studies or my practice or because she wasn't interested anyway or didn't want to hear another language—responding only in monosyllables to my comments or attempts at conversation and proffering only her cheek or her forehead in response to my displays of affection. In a couple of cities, a propos of nothing, she suddenly wondered out loud, in an almost nostalgic tone of voice, what had become of Dato, and the truth is that she no longer seemed to take the same pleasure in my voice or my singing: indeed I had seen her look distinctly bored—even pull a face—when I was doing my vocal exercises in her presence and had just performed a few vertiginous vibratos or stentorean tremolos, which once would have provoked her astonishment. In Paris and Berlin, she claimed to have a migraine and did not even attend my performances. She had never missed one before. And she did not seem a great deal happier in the brief periods we spent at home. But it was not until this morning, when I woke from my dream with the renewed image of the one moment (as I have already described to you) when her face appeared to me with utter clarity, when I realized that the look on her face in recent times, the non-expression that predominated when she was lying down, leafing through magazines or half-watching TV programs or, at most, standing at the window and gazing impassively down at a beautiful avenue or a historic square or an ancient church or at a country's enigmatic inhabitants transformed into articulated miniatures, was the same one I had seen that first time and which had made me realize that Natalia Manur (when I still did not know her name) was afflicted by—how did I put it?—a form of melancholy dissolution.