The Plimsoll Line (10 page)

That wind, however, carries no sound to the poplar grove where the man breathes peacefully, filling his lungs, only the echoes of other voices.

She suggested, “We could go away for the weekend. The countryside looks beautiful.”

And he replied,“Maybe.”

“You remember that little hotel on the other side of the valley? What wonderful views it had . . .”

“And a good wine list.”

“We could go for a drive and then have dinner in town. Something.”

“Something?”

“We should try.”

“I suppose so.”

“We haven’t been on a trip for a long time. I could go to a travel agency tomorrow, I’m told Bali is fantastic.”

“Bali?”

“Or New Zealand. It must be an extraordinary country. Or Madagascar.”

“The other day, I saw a documentary about some amazing monkeys that live in Madagascar. Although, now that I think about it, I think they may not have been monkeys, but a species of gigantic squirrels.”

“I saw an antique shop where they were selling Chinese sculptures at knock-down prices. A real treasure trove.”

“We can’t fit anything else inside this house. All we need now is to put a terracotta warrior in the garden.”

“What if we go to the cinema? Don’t you want to see the latest Woody Allen movie? It’s just opened.”

“All of Woody Allen’s movies seem the same to me.”

“If you won’t come, then I’ll go on my own.”

“Please, Ana, we’re grown-ups here. If you want to go and see Woody Allen’s latest piece of trash, then go, but don’t make a scene. I’m not in the mood.”

“I’m not making a scene . . . I’m expressing myself, that’s all, something you never do.”

“‘I’m expressing myself, that’s all,’ . . . it sounds like a sentence out of a self-help guide.”

“And you? Tell me, what do you think you sound like?”

Their conversations did not end then, as used to happen, with the domestic melodrama of a Mexican ceramic plate smashing on the terrazzo of the porch, or with a punch aimed at the wardrobe door, the same door he had hit on three separate occasions in the same place, above the handle, with so much force and such a lack of precision that, the first time, he had grazed his knuckles on the wood, but ended now without a way forward, with the full stop of the door closing and Ana’s car heading in the direction of the city. Anything but mentioning Laura, anything to escape from Laura. So they never discovered a charming hotel or a restaurant whose wine list—not very extensive, but well curated—could have served as a prelude to a reconciliation, then a walk home through the neighborhood, feeling tipsy, searching for each other’s skin under their clothes to see if they might find each other that way. They were outbursts, brief flashes of vitality he didn’t encourage, since he was convinced that every move Ana made to emerge from the darkness she had sunk into was a false one. And if he did occasionally yield to the proposition of an innocent marital fling, he did so in the knowledge that a Woody Allen movie, dinner at a French restaurant, a vintage wine, and the predictable, fleeting, protocolic intercourse in the bedroom were nothing more than subtle strategies that would make her even more dejected.

Events, however, proved too much for Ana. In the months after Laura’s death, she began to lose her mind. One morning, she went so far as to assure him she could hear somebody at night knocking softly with her knuckles, that’s what she said—“with her knuckles”—while at the same time imitating the gesture of knocking on the kitchen window,
tap
,
tap
,
tap
, and it could only be Laura, that is to say—she explained—Laura’s spirit. He tried to convince her that their house was not the house of the spirits, and that the only cause of such poltergeists was Polanski,“the fucking cat,” he exclaimed in a fit of temper at Ana’s insistence, “going
tap
,
tap
,
tap
with its paw every time you leave the kitchen window closed,” but Ana regarded him with sadness, her eyes bleary from lack of sleep. How was it possible he couldn’t understand that their daughter, transformed into ether after her collision with a frozen-fish truck, wanted to come home? As a way of pacifying the ghost and persuading it to leave the house, he secured the services of a medium from Guipúzcoa. But at the end of that attempt at communication with the great beyond—or the right beside you, one never knows—via a Ouija board on a tall, round table decorated with esoteric liturgy, all he achieved was for Ana to wonder whether she would really end up going crazy. “To start with, I thought it was a mischievous spirit, but now there can be no doubt—it is your daughter,” pronounced the medium, still transfixed by the energy with which Laura had, apparently, expressed herself. A few days later, Ana saw, or thought she saw, her daughter in the hallway, in a red parka with her hair covered in frost. That was her own craziness, not his, he thought at the time with a coldness that frightens him a little now and explains his innate inability to give free rein to his own particular ghosts, whether mischievous or not, his intimate energies, his secrets, which was just another way, possibly more neurotic than silent, of dissolving his anguish, since, unlike that of Ana—whose unease kept moving away from her in a kind of continuous exorcism, like an emanation of bad humors, and whose pain was expressed in pointless, compulsive purchases to decorate the house or in cooking new ethnic dishes—his own was a centripetal neurosis, which instead of manifesting itself in anxiety attacks, squeezed up inside him like a ball bearing, locking him in a stunned, hieratic pose. If the plates moved, let them move, he thought; if Ana saw Laura in the hallway, let her take more sedatives; if the cat urinated on the curtains, scratched the sofas, mewed for no good reason in the hallway, or knocked at the window,
tap
,
tap
,
tap
, then it would be better for the vet to inject it with a mixture of potassium chloride, or arsenic, or whatever the hell vets use to sacrifice neurotic household pets; if Ana wanted to have another session with the medium from Guipúzcoa, let her do so, better that—he thought—than squandering her fortune on bingo, taking to drink, or ending up on the useless, costly couch of an inevitably pedantic, Argentinian psychoanalyst. Ana’s visits to the cemetery turned into a rite she performed alone, one he did not feel part of, though he wasn’t excluded, either. He knew they were both creating separate environments in which to dissolve their anguish, private rituals they couldn’t share with each other or communicate. They were united by silence. But when Ana asked him to go with her, he felt a superstitious fear, despite his wish to disguise it with a pretext of agnostic prejudice, or a rational argument of distance, or a slight anticlericalism before the liturgy of flowers and priests’ high-pitched voices. He thought that perhaps, deep down, what he felt was a great fear of returning to that sacred ground—after all, that’s what it was, it was a cemetery—and that the sight of the niche he hadn’t visited since the day of the funeral would arouse in him a kind of religious fervor, something like enforced piety. This wasn’t entirely improbable, under the effects of mourning, at least. In fact, Ana had discovered in prayer a way of dissolving her anguish, something that in his eyes was respectable, just as the private space he believed he needed, or that he demanded, simultaneously lessening and feeding his pain, should be in hers.

He agreed to go with her that morning, a morning with an overcast sky and a south wind so propitious for migraines and bad tempers. The cemetery wasn’t sad but ugly, drab, and crushed beneath a crudely provincial air. Moss covered the stone of the niche. That’s all it was—an enclosed space no bigger than a
pelota
court, with stinging nettles growing inside it. There was glass from beer bottles. He wondered whether these were the remains of a drinking spree; perhaps on Saturday nights young tomb raiders gathered here and held witches’ Sabbaths with alcohol and hashish. Ana laid down a wreath of Gerbera daisies, crossed herself, and rested her chin on her chest. He merely stared at the tips of his shoes, rocking forward and back. He passed the time by drawing in the gravel with the tip of his umbrella. He glanced around at the names on the other stones, evaluating the neighborhood around his daughter’s grave. She was the youngest in that part of the cemetery, there could be no doubt about it, apart from the rockers who drank beer and then urinated all over the walls. When Ana finished praying, he took her by the arm, and they headed for the exit. A slightly putrid smell of roses floated in the air, so he grabbed her elbow and quickened his pace. A magpie cawed at them from the railings at the entrance; it was a bird like any other, a black and white corvus with green-blue iridescence on its tail. He waved his arm to frighten it away, but the magpie redoubled its caws. His wife looked at him, as if seeking an explanation for the bird’s behavior. He shrugged his shoulders and waved his arms again, forcefully this time, as if wanting to disperse a herd of cows that had stopped on the highway, but far from being scared off, the bird rose to its full height on the railings. He thought that if he’d had a shotgun, he would have killed it right then and there. He considered hurling a stone at it. “What’s the matter with that bird?” asked Ana. A dog prowling around the entrance to the cemetery barked at the magpie. It was an old German shepherd, barely capable of moving its hindquarters, its eyes masked by cataracts. It barked furiously, hoarsely. He didn’t know which to frighten away, the dog or the bird, but his gesticulations only succeeded in exciting them both. His wife pleaded with him for them to leave. Behind the dog, a man appeared, a tiny beret pulled over his head. He swung a broom in the air, at hip height. By this time, three more magpies had joined the chorus from the top of a cypress. There was a sense of gregarious ferocity in their calls. Ana yanked at the sleeve of his raincoat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, but he bent down to pick up a stone, though he wasn’t sure who to throw it at, the dog barking more and more loudly, the groundskeeper, or one of the birds. The guard had managed to grab the dog by the tail and gestured to them to get out of there, but the German shepherd turned around with surprising agility and made as if to bite, without seeing who it was attacking, with the instinctive perceptiveness of the blind, opening its mouth full of chipped teeth, yellowed as if by nicotine. It latched onto the guard’s hand. In an ingenious, effective move, his wife grabbed the umbrella from him and, opening and closing it energetically, advanced,
flop
,
flop
,
flop
, toward the dog, which meekly retreated into its kennel. The guard clenched his lips in pain. The bite had sliced through a nail and the skin of his phalange hung loose, pink and translucent. Alarmed by the cawing of the birds, they sought refuge in the car. Ana dressed the wound with a handkerchief. On the way to the hospital, the groundskeeper couldn’t explain why his dog, Tula, had bitten him; they’d been together for fourteen years, it had never bitten anybody, not even the troublemakers that hung around the cemetery at night. Until then, it had simply barked. It was a very obedient animal. He suggested putting it down, it might have lost its mind, this happened to animals that were very old, he said. The man accepted the money Ana offered as compensation, and they left him at the entrance to the nearest hospital. On the way home, they discussed the details of the incident, Ana’s intrepid gesture with the umbrella, his own inability to frighten those birds out of a Hitchcock movie. They seemed relieved it was all over. He noticed how the racket of birds and dogs had banished any reference to Laura. He smiled on thinking it had just been a joke, but he didn’t share this thought with Ana. It must have been a code of signals one had only to know how to interpret, clues as subtle as the twitching of a net curtain, a whisper behind a partition wall, a tickling on the back of the neck, signs that, as with plagues, start revealing themselves little by little, in the insistent flight of a fly, or the presence of insects in the bathtub, insignificant signs, the revelation of which presages the arrival of something one can only surrender to without putting up any resistance. That’s what it must have been. A joke of his dead daughter’s. But he didn’t explain his theory, he just said he would have to find a good cleaner to get rid of the blood stains on the car’s upholstery.

He surprises himself with a second cigarette between his fingers. He flaps his hand, as if driving flies away from his face. He gets up from the tree trunk with sudden urgency. He crushes the cigarette butt against the crust of lichen covering the bark. He hears a crack behind him. He grasps his cane. Bends down to put himself at the height of the shadow moving behind the bushes. It could be the stray dog that sometimes prowls around the house in search of scraps of food. He picks up a stone. The shape emerges from the undergrowth. He has never seen a fox so close before. They look at each other, united by a bond of atavistic mistrust. The fox pants with its jaws wide open, watches him, prepared to accept whatever might happen now that this man is also staring at it, standing there, ready to pounce, armed with a cane and a stone. It sees this figure, but does not sense the predatory instinct of the men shouting on the other side of the highway or the ferocity of their hunting dogs, whose barks can no longer be made out. It hesitates for a moment between retracing its steps or slipping slowly past, toward the promise of freedom coming from the mountain, on the other side of the tree line. The man drops the stone. The fox walks unhurriedly past, watching him the whole time, and the air carries a scent it has never smelled before, except on some of the animals left in the ravine by shepherds, animals whose remains it sometimes feeds on, an impression that is mixed with other, stronger smells, but it finds nothing threatening in them, so it keeps moving away from the figure of the man, leaving it behind, and forgetting it as soon as it reaches the bend in the river.

The sound of the siren pierces the forest. He lifts his binoculars. On the shoulder of the highway is a fire engine, and several men running toward the scene of the accident; he identifies the figure of Jeremías approaching the car with a beach ball under his arm. He sees him stop next to one of the doors and crouch down without letting go of the ball. He lies down on the ground and gesticulates as if talking to somebody inside the car. He gets up and takes a few indecisive steps, not knowing what direction to go in. Suddenly, he puts his hands on his head and the ball bounces at his feet. A man dressed in a reflective vest pushes him away from the scene of the accident. The two men walk now toward the gas station. Jeremías continues gesticulating, and his companion puts an arm around his shoulder. The red and blue lights of an ambulance flash next to the alfalfa field. Another man spreads out a thermal blanket next to the wreck of the car. On the other side of the highway, an iodine-colored dog runs up and down the shoulder. A hunter kicks at the bushes. He holds an unlit cigarette butt between his teeth. The others stare up at the sky with their shotguns on their shoulders, scanning, as if expecting the arrival of a low-flying flock of woodpigeons. But in that angle of clear sky, the only thing that can be seen is the peaceful flight of a black kite.