The beer was finished. The youngster picked up the empties and put them into his big bag; he’d take them back to the supermarket. He was walking slowly, as if the uphill journey exhausted him.
I too found it difficult to breathe. A blanket was spreading over the city, and smoke and fog were billowing right down into the streets.
I thought we wouldn’t see each other in a hurry, that she’d also made a decision for me. She hadn’t just left the chalet in the foothills, but she’d left me as well, she’d been wise to withdraw from me. Even though the dawning day would now and again greet me with dead eyes, I still felt a sense of relief.
For nearly a month we both remained silent, then I phoned her to ask how she was.
She’d been in bed for the best part of a week, she informed me, she couldn’t even move, she felt so sick. Her voice was full of pain, reproach, but also tenderness. I suddenly realised that I’d been waiting for that voice all that time. I was still close to her, so close she could move me with a few words.
Why did you wait so long before you rang? she asked. You were offended? I was able to offend you after all you’ve done to me?
This is a way of telling me she still loves me, she’s waiting for me. An hour later I give her a purple gerbera and kiss her. Her lips are dry.
She’d gone to the country when she didn’t hear from me, she’d planted some trees, she’d obviously injured her back, for three days she’d lain motionless in her cottage, alone.
She limps over to the bed and I fill a vase with water.
A neighbour had found her and called for an ambulance, at the hospital they’d given her a jab so she could at least manage the bus ride. And I hadn’t even phoned her. You could really forget me so soon? she asks.
I know I won’t forget her as long as I live, but for her the inevitable question is: What good does it do to lie somewhere all alone?
You’ve never considered staying with me altogether?
She’s testing my resolution, my devotion, she forgets that I couldn’t very well stay with her even if I wanted to. After all, she’s got her husband. Maybe she’s prepared to drop him, but I’ve never asked her to do that, I’ve never wanted that kind of arrangement.
How could I possibly not consider it?
But what good is that to her? she asks.
What good is it to her that I have spent nights reflecting on how I would, how we would, live – what use is it to her when nothing has actually changed, when I’m not really with her, when I see her only in secret?
I go out to the supermarket and then cook lunch for us.
You’re so good to me, she says. When you have time! When you can fit me in.
I want to wash up, but she asks me to leave everything and come to her. She’s lying down. I hold her hand. She looks at me, her eyes, as always, draw me into depths where there isn’t room for anything else, for anything except her.
She asks what I’ve been doing all this time.
I tell her about Dad, about my son, I try to explain what I’ve been writing about, but she wants to know if I’ve thought of her, if I thought of her every day.
She’d left me in the middle of the night and she’d left me on my own in a strange hotel, and then for a few more weeks, so I should feel the hopelessness of living without her. I’m beginning to understand that she left me in order to push me, at long last, into making a decision.
She asks: How can you live like this? How can you believe that you’ll write anything when all the time you’re living a lie?
She regards me with anxious love. She’s hoping I will at last find the strength to live truthfully. That is, to stay with her according to the command of my heart. She believes that she understands me. She’s been appealing to me for so long to abandon my unworthy life of lies, and it hasn’t occurred to her that by doing so she is appealing to me to leave her. She is right, I must make up my mind to do it.
On the little table by the bed lie a few books. I pick up the one on top – short stories by Borges. I read her one of them. It is about a young man who is crucified for an illicit love affair.
The plot sounds outrageous to our ears, we’ve got used to the notion that there is no such thing as illicit love, or, more accurately, that all’s fair in love.
She listens to me attentively. I ask her if she wants me to read another story.
Better still, come to me!
She isn’t thinking about her painful back, she presses herself to me and moans with pleasure: My darling, I love you so much, and you torture me! Why do you keep hurting me when you know that you’ll never feel so good with anyone else, that no one will ever love you as I do?
I embrace her once more and then I have to hurry, her husband will be home shortly.
Will you come again tomorrow?
Her gentle fingers, her lips, her eyes: No one will ever love you as I do! No one will make love to you as I do! Why won’t you admit to yourself that you belong to me? Let’s go away somewhere together. We’ll make love till we die! Why do you resist when you know it’s bound to happen? Surely it couldn’t be so perfect if there was anything bad about it.
She looks at me, I look at her face. She’s changed over the years, there is less tenderness and enchantment in her now, and there is more tiredness, or even bitterness. She has aged. Over the last few years she has aged at my side, in my arms, in her vain waiting, in bad dreams and in fits of crying. In sleepless nights more little lines have appeared in her face, and I have only been able to kiss them away temporarily.
I was aware of a surge of regret or even pity, and promised to come the next day without fail.
We were approaching the metro station. We watched the crowds of people who, out of a need to be transported as quickly as possible from one place to another, were voluntarily descending into an inhospitable underworld. Around the stations there is always an increase in litter, the grass is almost invisible under a multitude of bits of paper and rubbish, of course we don’t sweep the grass, even if it is totally covered with rubbish. I noticed the youngster falling behind, then stopping completely, leaning against a street lamp and turning motionless.
I walked back to him. His pallid face had turned even whiter, and there were droplets of sweat on his forehead.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
He looked at me without answering. In his right hand he was still holding the scraper, his left hand was pressing below his stomach.
‘Does it hurt there?’
‘It’s nothing. It catches me there now and then.’
‘Shouldn’t you see your doctor?’
He said that mostly it passes by itself.
But it didn’t look to me as if his pain was passing. I offered to accompany him to the doctor. The foreman let us go without objections. ‘If you finish in time, you know where to find us!’
It didn’t take us more than twenty minutes to get to the hospital, but even so it seemed a long time to me. On the bus I made the youngster sit in the seat for disabled passengers. He was silent. From his postman’s bag he produced a dirty, army-khaki handerchief and wiped his forehead with it. Who does his laundry? I knew nothing about him, I could not picture the place where he slept.
We got off in front of the hospital. I suggested he leant on me but he shook his head. He gritted his teeth but didn’t complain.
The young nurse with whom we checked in was angry that we had no kind of personal papers with us, but in the end accepted the information the youngster gave her and sent us to the waiting room with its depressing atmosphere of silence and greyness. We sat down on a peeling bench. The sweat was trickling down his cheeks.
‘Probably got over-excited last night. At that concert.’
‘Not at all, that was quite fantastic.’ After a while he added: ‘I’ve always wanted to play in a decent band, but at the children’s home we had a director… well, he didn’t think music was a proper career, we each had to learn something proper, like working a pneumatic grinder or cutting out soles – he was a qualified shoemaker.’
He took off his orange vest and put it on the seat beside him. ‘I never told the boys what I’m doing now. I mean this business.’
