The Plimsoll Line (15 page)

The ringing of the phone sounds too shrill in the semidarkness of the house. The day has not begun yet, and the phone call adds a note of unnecessary urgency. The anonymous observer is not oblivious to this acoustic interruption that forces the room to disturb its internal order with a succession of imperceptible acts, beginning with the portrait of the woman, who blinks one, two, three times, accustoming her eyes to the light. Beneath her perhaps somewhat perplexed gaze, the beetle takes off from the telephone and flies over the living room with the soft hum of a fan. It leaves behind the silver cutlery, the sculpture in the form of an ostrich egg, the pages of the diary still spread out over the kitchen floor, and goes up to the second floor. It flies over the dirty pajamas, the alarm clock that has stopped at half past six, then, maneuvering like a fighter jet, dodges the cat that is dozing on the radiator and suddenly awakes and takes a swipe at it. The beetle zooms through the hallway, but nobody answers the call, so it goes up to the attic. It glides around the study, past the book-filled shelves, the discarded papers, and the open laptop, on whose plasma screensaver hangs the weightless image of an astronaut. With mechanical tenacity, the insect swings around and repeats the journey in the opposite direction. Foreseeing the cat’s ambush, it stays up at the height of the lamp and, as the phone continues ringing insistently down below, passes through the bedroom, crosses the hallway, and dives down to the living room. Before folding its forewings, it mounts to the ceiling in a display of aeronautical skill that does not go unnoticed by the woman in the portrait. She squints as the beetle flutters on a level with her eyebrows. Like a helicopter, it descends toward the phone just as the red light of the answering machine starts blinking—“
I can’t come to the phone right now. If you’d like to leave a message, please do so after the tone
. . .” The beetle folds its wings, and there is a beep to indicate the beginning of the message.

“
I imagine you’re on the way to the clinic, but if not, forgive me for calling so early. I suppose you remember . . . today is Laura’s anniversary . . . There’s something else. I spoke to my lawyer yesterday. The real estate agent called him to say there’s someone very interested in buying the house. They assured him that if we can reach an agreement, we should be able to resolve the matter very quickly. My lawyer will take care of all the paperwork. We need to see each other and talk. OK, I’ll try and catch you later.”

The woman in the painting returns to her initial hieratic state, fixes her gaze on the shadow of the anonymous observer, who now withdraws from the space where the pages of Laura’s diary are. It could be said the text seems to have been written recently, despite the traces of humidity, faded ink, and other signs of decay, and this gives the diary a fertile elegance, as if the author of these sentences were breathing through the paper. A breath is gently expelled into the air of the living room in a combustion of oxygen only witnessed by the objects there, now silent and still, and the cat, which, sensing the movement of the observer, moves off the radiator and stealthily descends the stairs. It walks lazily, indolently, toward the kitchen, hops up onto the table, and closes its eyes. The flame of the memory of the girl writing at the living-room table one afternoon three years earlier, a blond-tobacco cigarette between her fingers, still glows green in its pupils.

She wrote with a concentrated, nervous air. She lifted her eyes from the notebook, as if seeking inspiration in the view of the garden, then in the dining room ceiling. She bit a piece of skin stuck to the nail of her thumb, then carried on writing. As she exhaled the smoke of her cigarette, the doorbell rang. She jumped in her chair. Waved her arms around in front of her face to dispel the smoke. Stood up with athletic agility and opened the window to the garden. “I’m coming!” she shouted, throwing the cigarette butt outside. Through the peephole, she recognized the silhouette of her uncle Óscar, somewhat deformed by the fisheye lens, on the doormat. She arranged her hair before opening the door.

“How’s it going, Lo? Is your father in?” asked Óscar, having kissed his niece on the cheek.

“He’s not back yet, and my mother’s in town, shopping. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

“Do re mi, do re fa,” crooned the man jokingly.

His tanned skin heightened an impression of adventure or risk in his appearance. He wore a photographer’s vest with lots of pockets. Under his arm, he carried a motorcyclist’s gleaming, black helmet. The helmet reminded Laura of the head of a large, outer-space beetle.

“Were you studying?” he pointed at the notebook open on the table.

Laura hesitated for a moment, went around the table, and closed the notebook.

“No, actually I was just writing,” she gestured vaguely, “things of mine.”

The man smiled with interest. Sat down on the blue sofa.

“Are you not going to invite your uncle to a beer?”

Laura left the room for a few moments, her walk attracting the man’s gaze. She returned with a Keler beer, an iced glass, and a bowl of peanuts. She let her uncle serve himself. She drank from a carton of pineapple juice.

Óscar sipped the beer while contemplating his niece. He thought she was getting much older, but this distance, far from separating them, brought them closer together, since age does not divide people but in the end draws them together—Laura was a woman. He wondered whether to adopt a paternal or confidential tone with her. He opted for the latter. It went better with his theory of age, and it was time to treat Laura like she deserved, as an equal.

“Were you really writing? When you feel bad, it’s good to write. I used to do it, you know. Before I got into photojournalism, I mean. I also wrote things of mine, as you say, dreams, desires, stuff like that, in these tiny, spiral-bound notebooks, with cramped writing . . . I wrote most of all when I felt bad. They’ve probably gotten lost during some move or other. But it’s good to do it, really it is. I even wrote poems, can you believe it? Your uncle Óscar, a poet . . .”

Laura smiled in disbelief.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really, I swear,” said Óscar, kissing his thumb. “I was a very shy boy, you know, and fell in love with all the girls my age, all of them. I wrote them the most heartfelt, sincere poems.” He gazed at the ceiling in a gesture of concentration. “I wonder if I can remember . . . ah, yes! I wrote these verses with a blond girl in mind. See what you think.” He raised his beer glass and recited in a stifled voice,“And you will return forever to your fields of oblivion / and I will be left with the ashen smell of your hair / how slow and piercing your footsteps echo in my heart / I wonder what moon I will lick my wounds under now . . .”

He forced a declamatory silence.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Laura observed him, a little lost in thought.

“It’s nice . . . ,” she looked at the window to the garden and allowed the words to sound again in her head. “I like that bit about the ashen smell of your hair, and the moon and wounds . . . I don’t know why I write. It makes me feel good, I suppose that’s all . . . it gives me some relief,” she said, perching on the armrest of the sofa. “I could never write something as pretty as that.”

The man smiled, unable to avoid a paternal gesture, just as he couldn’t help noticing her lips painted with Chinese red lipstick. In front of him was not his niece but an athletic woman, worthy of being contemplated at a distance that precluded any kind of filial bond, the way one looks at a beautiful, desirable, innocent woman. He nodded while at the same time framing the girl with his fingers.

“You certainly look beautiful,” he said, closing one eye, watching her through his fingers, framed in the imaginary viewfinder of a camera. “How young you are, Lo, how young, there’s still so much you don’t know.”

“Nobody ever wrote me such nice verses.”

The man pressed the shutter of his camera. Thought it would have made a magnificent photo, a portrait of plenitude.

“No, Laura, those verses are terrible. You deserve something a lot better. You’re a real woman now, just look at you, I’ll bet there are tons of boys jumping up around you, like puppies. Though I don’t suppose they write poems as bad as mine, boys nowadays don’t write poetry, right? Besides, you only write when you’re unhappy. And you’re not unhappy, are you?”

“I’m just a silly girl,” she said with a frown. Her lower lip began to tremble. “A silly girl,” she repeated, on the verge of tears.

“What makes you say that?”

“A very silly girl,” she said again, her face in her hands.

Her shoulders trembled rhythmically. The man embraced her. Between hiccups, she told her uncle all about her amorous disenchantment with Antonio. Sitting next to him on the sofa, Laura confessed her solitude, the bitter experience of feeling used and betrayed for the first time. Laying her forehead on his chest, she said she felt very alone at home, with those parents of hers, enclosed like fish in their respective fishbowls, each gaping away alone, without paying attention to anything or anybody; she talked of her fear of failing her exams, of disappointing her father, the university professor, and her mother, who was so good, so quiet, so focused on her exotic dishes. Everything, in short, was a black block that weighed down on her chest and stopped her from breathing properly, a maze she couldn’t get out of, which is why she wrote, but she still kept feeling this black block on top of her chest and couldn’t get rid of it. Her uncle wiped her face with a handkerchief he produced from one of the multiple pockets on his photographer’s vest, dried her tears, and kissed her on the cheek, near her lip. He felt the girl’s chest shaking against his own, pumping the cleanest blood imaginable, the blood of all horses stampeding, of all thoroughbreds there have ever been, the boiling blood of a volcano, the sap of a primitive fruit tree, the tree of good and evil, a ripe substance now pushing to overflow all banks, like the systole and diastole of a desire it was no longer possible to repress, and he detected, very close to him, the scent of freshly squeezed lemons given off by his niece’s body, impregnating the fabric of her T-shirt; her gentle breath, which smelled of a mixture of pineapple juice and tobacco, issued a tender, voluptuous invitation, so he took her by the shoulders and brushed aside her hair in order to search out the bottom of her eyes and say in the voice of a radio presenter,“You mustn’t worry, I’m here to help you. Don’t be afraid.” And it seemed to him that his voice sounded a little shrill, as if he were afraid or lying, so he coughed to clear his throat and repeated, in a polished voice now, without a hint of doubt,“Don’t be afraid, please.”

Laura nodded while rubbing her eyes. She let her uncle stroke the back of her neck and pressed her cheek against his neck, just as she had dreamed so often. And as happens in certain dreams, everything was very simple, without blunders or hesitations; she just let herself go, let herself be cradled by that wise, silky voice, the touch of fingers on her neck, behind her ears, then around her shoulders, moving around the nape of her neck and her dragon tattoo, long fingers that traced her skin and now climbed up the back of her skull, pressing electric buttons concealed beneath her scalp, like acupuncture points.

“Laura . . .”

“What?” she replied.

She heard the voice repeating her name very close to her ears and felt her legs tremble a little when Óscar’s lips sought out her own, but she did not reject the advance, rather she succumbed to a desire she had only ever expressed in solitary yearnings, while stroking her sex in the bath and discovering without surprise the same shuddering between her thighs, except that now there was another body, a pair of hands, a mouth, and skin, all very different from Antonio’s bony, angled body; this was the body of a man, an energetic, comfortable shape emitting a warmth that took her in and carried her off, which is why she allowed herself to fall back slowly onto the sofa, her uncle kissing her on the neck, and she detected the scent of a sport cologne, acidic sweat, a man’s smell replacing Antonio’s, which struck her now as rancid, the smell of old ashes, a wet dog, and Óscar’s body was replacing Antonio’s, which moved away, getting smaller and smaller, coming off like the slough of a snake, from his head to his toes, slowly to begin with—she watched him stagger along with his leather bracelets, his black T-shirt, and samurai ponytail toward the end of an alley that could be the darkest bottom of his own shoes—and then more quickly, seemingly pushed by an invisible force as she advanced in the exploration of Óscar’s body, so solid, that of a grown man, and felt his strong hands grabbing her gently, molding themselves to the shape of her tiny swimmer’s breasts, then she gazed into the bottom of those eyes, so close to her they were transformed into the single eye of a Cyclops, and deep inside watched Antonio leave without moving, inert, like a straw man that has just been thrown into the current of a river.

Polanski half-opens its eyes, and outside, on the other side of the window, the figure of the man, looking slightly larger on account of his warm clothes, moves around. His actions are meant to be energetic, but all he does is move in the cold of the morning, which forces him to walk back and forth in front of the door with short steps, like a bird. He rubs his hands together on the roadside, but stops when he discovers an orange sign with a telephone number under the words “FOR SALE.” The placard bears the name of a real estate agent from the capital. The logo shows the needle-like silhouette of the Chrysler Building in New York. Somebody has gone to the trouble of using a ladder to stick the sign on one of the upstairs windows of the house. The advertisement is absurd, pointless. Who on earth could see that for-sale sign? Nobody, except for the black kites. Somebody must have put it there the day before, when he was out walking. He must call Ana and demand an explanation. She should have asked his permission before agreeing to a sign like that. He must write
Call Ana re sign
on a sticky note and put it on the door of the fridge.