The Plimsoll Line (3 page)

In fact, he didn’t understand anything. He had a memory of tobacco-colored stones and plaster guardian angels. He retained the impression of air on the back of his neck, and a few faces, not many—that of his brother, Óscar, swollen behind ample aviator sunglasses, the weight of his hand on his shoulder, though they didn’t say anything to each other, alongside other, equally contorted faces turned toward Ana. He told himself he had to protect her, but he couldn’t, because at the same time, he had to make an effort to stop those same faces arousing his own pain, which, since the start of the day, had remained anaesthetized beneath his coat. He managed it until he felt a cold sweat descending from the nape of his neck to his tailbone, followed by a wave of nausea and the unstoppable reflux of a watery soup of María Fontaneda cookies, very strong coffee, and black kiwi seeds. He moved away from the group of mourners and vomited into a rosebush. He was given a bottle of water and forced to swallow a pill as he sat on the stone edge of something. Somebody fanned him. It occurred to him that this made no sense, was ridiculous—nobody has a fan in December, with that cold frosting the glass of the bottles on the walls and the windows of the cars parked at the entrance to the cemetery, but a woman, the cleaning lady, was fanning him, and he started to feel better. He felt his buttocks frozen on the stone lip. The bitter taste of bile disappeared, and everything returned to a very pleasant evaluative neutrality. He remembers when the burial finished, he even came up with a few words of consolation for a pimple-faced girl that was crying while gripping the railings at the entrance. “Go home,” he said, trying to prize her fingers off the iron bars. And he remembers Óscar’s terribly pale face behind the sunglasses as he rocked back and forth, his feet very close together, in the corridor of the funeral home, concentrating on the toes of his garnet-colored moccasins, his arms weak and drooping. How strange it all is, he thought to himself, because everything was happening with stunned slowness after seeing so many familiar faces, one after the other, and trying out different ways of offering and receiving condolences—a squeeze to the arm, pursed lips—not knowing what to say, because, to be honest, there wasn’t much to say, or perhaps there was, there was so much to say and no way of doing so that it involved a gesture that expressed impotence, disbelief, and pain all at the same time, though the result of such expressive willfulness ended up being more of a dumb gesture—a disconcerting grimace and vague smile.

He wished it could all be over as soon as possible and nodded in response to every polite formula or expression of condolence, hidden behind Ana, swallowing saliva constantly but without managing to get rid of the ball bearing that had been stuck in his throat since the morning and wouldn’t dissolve, even though he sucked on violet-flavored candies, until the two of them were back home alone again in the evening. Ana ran herself a hot bath, and he smoked on the porch by himself, the cat on his lap. It was raining, and the water melted a convex layer of ice that covered the garden. The hydrangeas were frozen, and Polanski purred continuously on his stomach. From above came the sound of the water tank, and the faucet filling the bath. Only then did he cry at length, minutely and without respite.

And yet when Ana declared she was leaving, there was nothing, no scenes or weeping, and although he was tempted to give free rein to the actors studio he’d always sensed inside himself, hidden beneath his jacket, ready to reveal his long-suppressed dramatic vocation, he managed to restrain himself in time, and this effort at self-restraint still fills him with satisfaction. Although he barely managed to suppress a slight gesture of horror, he didn’t give way to the recourse of overacting; he did, however, stare at his wife in some alarm at the allusion to their daughter, a recourse he judged to be as deceitful as it was effective in the situation, which he also managed to exploit by introducing just the right amount of drama. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to conceal his relief, since when all was said and done, his wife had just demolished the partition wall he himself had been eroding day after day, and in her words, which she considered forthright and perhaps even original, he glimpsed a kind of long-awaited liberation. The fissures were finally giving way, sending cracks up and down the building. So the sudden feeling of vertigo in the pit of his stomach was a physiological reaction that responded more to the certainty that something long desired was finally happening than to any innocent declaration of marital breakup. After all, everything was reaching the point he himself had foreseen, evidence that strengthened him in a conviction he’d assumed with everyday cynicism and according to which he was a sentimental man, bad and sentimental, which was based on irrefutable proof—his uncanny ability to get somebody else to do for him what he would never have dared to put into practice on his own, to exhaust the options open to his opponent until finally forcing them to make a decision they, in their ingenuity, believed to be the fruit of their own free will but which was in fact nothing more than the logical conclusion of a long-drawn-out and well-planned siege. Victory through attrition, exhaustion, a process in which time loses all consistency and his opponent’s intellectual capability is reduced, since once the final maneuvers—prolonged silences, moderate but well-aimed reproaches, false compassion, reconciliation, hurried intercourse, and back to the beginning—have been exhausted, the other loses the match in the false belief that they have won it. This is why, when his wife said “we’re finished and you know it,” his innate dramatic vocation contented itself with a slight, episcopal nodding of the head—“You’re right, Ana, you’ve taken the words right out of my mouth.”

The succubus laughs from the bedhead, and its laugh sounds feeble, asthmatic. The man sits up in bed as if that simple gesture were enough to stop the chatter. He says, “Enough,” and the word elbows its way through his mind. He says “enough” again and drinks down the glass of water that sits covered in bubbles. He holds the tepid, soft water in his mouth and gets out of bed, ready to spit it out in the bathroom. The succubus stifles its laughter and adopts the pose of a sentimental harlequin. It sheds a fake tear while watching the man head off in the direction of the bathroom, his cheeks full of water.

Two slippers trailing along the hallway, a raucous piss in the toilet bowl, the water cascading down the drainpipe behind the kitchen wall, the forked hiss of the water tank . . . The house awakes with a sudden, vulgar succession of noises, and the anonymous observer slowly turns away from the photographs, leaves the entryway, and moves noiselessly across the living room to the back of the blue sofa at the foot of the stairs. Meanwhile, in the garden, the movement of the cat’s ears indicates it is uncertain whether to remain at its observation post, waiting for the mole to make up its mind to leave its tunnel, or to return to the porch and mew at the window, since the man, like every afternoon at this time, will exit the bathroom, come down to the kitchen, and open the door to the refrigerator, that olfactory paradise that promises first-rate slices of boiled ham to which, if the cat is lucky, its owner will add a gelatinous ration of braised chicken and vegetables. The man descends the stairs with a rhythmical clacking and reaches the first landing. He looks much older than in the photograph, an impression that is heightened by a set of clothes the observer would judge more suitable for a tramp were it not for the fact that the house discredits this hypothesis—a frayed bathrobe knotted loosely beneath his belly, coffee stains on the sleeves, prison underwear, the ampleness of which reveals the wearer has lived through less meager moments, pea-green socks that stylize the anorexic thinness of his calves even more, and warped slippers. The man crosses the living room and opens the window to the garden. Driven by the certainty of a snack offered in the form of a wafer-thin slice of ham that banishes the mole and the remote possibilities it represents as a hunting trophy to the depths of an inhospitable gallery, the cat abandons the deckchair and, with feline cynicism, deploys all the signs that indicate familiarity and welcome. It rubs itself against his calves, swishes its tail. “Hello, fucking Polanski,” says the man, patting it on the head, while the cat ignores this offensive greeting and effectuates a frail mew, slightly shriller than normal. Man and cat zigzag, getting in each other’s way, toward the kitchen. The animal gives the anonymous observer a mineral, transparent look. It is far too busy weighing up the possibilities of slices wrapped in silver foil to devote its attention to the intruder, who is, anyhow, as insipid and odorless as the figures its owner gazes at for hours while lying in front of the television. He may vacillate between going up to the second and third floors of the house, to where the attic is, and collapsing on the sofa, or between remaining at the bottom of the stairs and molding himself to the white cavity of the sculpture in the form of an ostrich egg, but in the end, the anonymous observer slips into the shadow of the entryway closet, into the smell of the elements exuded by the black coat on a hanger, a remnant of dampness clinging to the cloth that retains the suggestion of an overcast afternoon and the footsteps of the man out on the street one Friday a year before, sweating despite the cold, his temples soaked, on his way back home after a week of intense work that had borne its fruit—two reviews for the paper’s art supplement; a foreword he’d agreed to write for the catalog of a sculptor; and the promise of a series of conferences as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s next season. What’s more, that Friday evening, having imparted his final class at the university, he’d dropped in at a cocktail party given by an artist presenting his latest video installation. In the natural habitat of critics—a diverse group of well-dressed, elegant people—he felt uncomfortable, but the maintenance of this distance, real or imaginary, safeguarded his reputation as a severe, somewhat anachronistic man. He arched his eyebrows into the distance by way of greeting and made his way over to a tray of champagne flutes in order to focus on the cones of bubbles in their interiors, which freed him from the obligation of having to undertake a conversation of uncertain trajectory, zigzagging between courtesy, preventive flattery, and dissimulation, in particular after the second or third glass, when the bubbles rising to the surface converged in the very center of the glass and the voices and laughter also seemed to mount toward the ceiling. Engrossed in the prodigy of the bubbles, he avoided all commitments, though he could hear the tinkling of the artists as they bumped into each other like the ice cubes in their whiskey glasses. Far from lessening his tiredness, the fourth champagne cocktail convinced him that social marathons left him feeling exhausted, so he grabbed another glass of champagne as it made its way past—it may have been the fifth, or the sixth at this point—and downed it at lightning speed while blindly nodding and shaking his head at a video artist’s observations. He then winked an eye at a journalist—or she may have winked a breast at him, he couldn’t be sure—and took French leave, slipping off toward the exit. From a distance, his progress through the city resembles an escape more than a walk, a kind of aimless evasion, since his current preoccupations were already a vague premonition announced by slight failings—fatigue in the middle of the afternoon, confusion and doubt, resentment—or with transparent, physical clarity—palpitations, cramping in his calves, dryness in his mouth—unequivocal signs that something wasn’t working as it was supposed to, which was something he refused to accept, out of fear, pride, or both, despite the fact that in some region of his more primitive brain, a warning light had been flashing for quite some time. He was overcome by the impression that his body was an added volume, restrained by a weight that had refused to keep up with the ever more pressing rhythm of his mind. He dragged his own reflection along past shop windows, but never achieved unity between his body and his reflection. The most trivial activity—a phone call, a task at the university, the routine preparation of a class—constituted an effort that made this bilocation even more obvious; he looked and saw himself without being able to observe himself completely. This is how he remembered himself in his final class, standing up on the platform, the place from which he measured himself against the slide of a painting by J. M. W. Turner—a man seated behind a wooden table, sometimes standing up or taking a few short steps, glancing from time to time at the script for the day’s lesson and the heads of students raised toward him, looking at him without seeing him and listening without hearing him, a man who lengthens his sentences, moving around concepts that vanish in the air like spirals of smoke, while the whitewashed wall at the far end of the classroom bounces his words back at him, like in a game of
pelota
, and the words return to that professor who is explaining the basics of Turner’s painting and pointing on the screen to the sky’s hesitant line, because “in that fog pierced by light, in that cleverly anarchic disposition of the misty, weightless atmosphere—please pay attention,” he says emphatically, heavily,“can be appreciated the ability of a painter to reflect worlds never seen before,” he insists, though he knows he is not in a position to offer the excess of dramatic energy required to communicate amazement, even though this also means accepting his own defeat from the outset, entering the classroom with smugness and without hope, because amazement in art is an incommunicable event and there are no synonyms for such a revelation. Clinging to this decalogue that disguises as sublime affectation what is nothing more than pure physical and intellectual decadence, he attempts to prevent his voice from trailing away in a gasp, although he cannot help a drop of sweat sliding down his side from his armpit to his hip, because he needs a breath of fresh air and would run away were it not for the fact that, sheltered in the darkness, he has asked his students to observe the painting, so that half a minute later he is able to control his breathing and improvise a few words in praise of the spirit of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements, followed by a eulogy on knowledge as the only way to attain personal autonomy, but his enthusiasm wanes little by little, and his explanation is confused and disappointing, even for the unconditional female student blinking in the first row, blinking just as the little, voluptuous, clear-eyed girl who gazes at him with her small hands under her chin because she possibly understands, or possibly doesn’t, it’s impossible to tell, blinks; and in the first row, the ugly, shrill-voiced girl whose predictable questions provoke contemptuous remarks from her classmates and who seems to look at the blackboard as if he were made of clear glass, blinks; and the pupil occupying the far end of the classroom, ensconced in one corner, tall, with hair dyed platinum blond, disdainful, who never takes notes and only listens, or perhaps doesn’t, but always smiles, because the girl sitting next to him may be taking notes on his behalf, blinks; and the slim girl who wears stretch garments and violet eye shadow and sits next to the obese boy with glistening skin, slow and efficacious, who bites his nails down to the quick and at the end of class will come to ask him for bibliographical references on the topic, blinks; and the mature woman who is permanently circumscribed within her own atmosphere of silence, blinks. Most, he thinks, are faces without much history, without knots, faces of terse and possibly untamed ingenuity, but he is still perturbed by the fact there are also sad faces that foretoken a shadow of distrust, or a kind of very ancient melancholy, and he wonders where such a premature imbalance comes from; perhaps it should be sought in prenatal experience, in the amniotic sac, or even further back, in the DNA chain, and it pleases and disturbs him to notice these signs of some very young but already ephemeral energy. Then the impression that it was really somebody else who had spoken and gesticulated for ninety minutes would persist, something he realized every time he finished class and gathered his notes, his keys, and his wallet, and there at the back of the classroom was the whitewashed wall, which kept him up in the air, as if his words and movements remained there, floating in the uncertainty of the shadows.

Having reached the limit of a certain critical mass, he felt his insides were experiencing minute deflagrations, cellular displacements, molecular storms that became more obvious at night. He felt he was a syncopated man, because the impression came and went, and when it left, without warning, he would forget his body and regain his natural lightness. But that evening, after the cocktail party, he again felt his body was not indifferent to the law of gravity but rather could be said to be the very object of gravitational attraction itself. That may have been why he walked more quickly than usual, his eyes fixed on the pavement, though still unable to avoid the dog shit and dirty puddles. He heard it from his brother, Óscar, who was trying out a new zoom on his resplendent Nikon camera that day and after a Sunday outing had forced him to pose next to his wife and daughter on the outdoor dining patio of a restaurant and say
cheese
in unison. They returned to the city, and the two of them spontaneously decided to leave his family at home and go off on their own, unexpectedly united by a kind of brotherly complicity they rarely succumbed to, perhaps as a result of a lack of habit due to the strange and radical suspicion every family relationship seems to require. Having knocked back several drinks in a bar chosen at random and lost his composure and the ability to see straight, Óscar, glassy-eyed, said,“You have to realize, Gabriel, maturity doesn’t exist; it’s tiredness. That’s all.” To which he didn’t know what to reply. He smiled drunkenly, clinging to his stool, allowing himself to be carried along by his natural inclination toward consensus and therefore accepting, with his customary false meekness, Óscar’s abusive, existential, and clearly alcoholic statement. He felt, however, that his brother’s words were an absolution. He’d awkwardly explained his apprehensions, the insurmountable distance with Ana, the intimate dislocation of one who feels out of place at the age of fifty because he seems unable to find a comfortable fit at work, at home, or anywhere else. That impression of foreignness and intimate duplicity. But all of this, according to Óscar, was just tiredness, sheer tiredness, and nothing else.

He continued walking, the champagne and cigarette smoke banging against the insides of his eyelids, and the symptoms of his intimate dysfunction took on the appearance of an irresistible need to escape, which is why he walked quickly, stepping in dog doo and puddles. Driven by a traveler’s urgency, he obeyed the childish lure of the green, neon sign of a diner—the Chipre 97—and entered for no good reason and ordered an incoherent cup of linden blossom tea served to him by a waiter in a naval officer’s uniform. He burned his tongue, lit a cigarette, and stared at two women with violet hair who were silently wolfing down pancakes with syrup. On a television with no sound, the weatherman was pointing to some isobars looped like geological folds over the city. He stayed like this for a good while—the waiter facing him, standing at attention against a background of a photograph of a sunset in Cyprus, the violet-haired women enclosed in an atmosphere of noisy deglutition—until the tea had cooled down a bit. He was grateful to have finished work—the classes, the newspaper reviews, the text for a catalog. He imagined the reactions his reviews would have the following week, the suspicions and wounded pride of the artists, most of whom, he thought, were functional illiterates incapable of threading together a coherent discourse. Artists babbled, that was all they could do, and with that false modesty they displayed their works, masquerades, conceptual rags, sophisticated technological monstrosities, puerile games no more interesting than the newspaper crossword. He knew he stood outside current thinking, and this pleased him. Someone had to occupy the place of incorruptible academic, although at times, it was only fair to admit, he had to make exceptions. To tell the truth, he had written the review quite quickly, after a phone call from the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The director had asked him as a personal favor, as a way of promoting his nephew, an artist whose sculptures had the curious tendency of adopting forms that were very similar to the remains of planes after a crash. He drew up a text whose vacuity remained hidden beneath a series of rhetorical flourishes that served to increase the emotional heat of the analysis, as if these pieces of metal that appeared to have been pulled from the guts of a tractor really did speak of fear and weren’t just simulacra, fragments, pedantic claptrap. That said, the text would guarantee his participation in the major roundtables the Museum of Contemporary Art was organizing for the following season.