the street door is not suddenly flung wide open so that the neighbors can see for themselves and spread the word that the widow Estudioso and the old potter love each other with a true and finally declared love. In a voice that had almost recovered its normal tone, Cipriano Algor said again, I'll come back, I'll come back, there must be some solution for us, The only solution is for you to stay, said Isaura, You know I can't, We'll be here waiting for you, Found and me. The dog could not understand why the woman was holding his leash, since all three of them were moving toward the door, a sure sign that he and his master were finally leaving, he could not understand why the leash had still not been passed back to the hand of the person who had the right to put it on him. Panic began to rise from his guts to his throat, but at the same time, his legs were trembling with excitement at the plan that instinct had just outlined to him, to lunge forward when the door was opened and then triumphantly wait outside for his master to come for him. The door only opened after more embraces and more kisses, more murmured words, however, the woman was still holding him firmly, saying, Stay, stay, as is the way with speech, the same verb that had proved incapable of preventing Cipriano Algor from leaving was the very verb that would not now allow Found to escape. The door closed, separating the dog from his master, but, as is the way with feelings, the pain of abandonment experienced by one could not, at least at that moment, expect to find sympathy or understanding in the tormented happiness of the other. It will not be long before we find out more about Found's life in his new home, whether it was easy or difficult to adapt to his new mistress, if the kindness and limitless affection she showered on him were enough to make him forget the sadness of being unjustly abandoned. Right now we have to follow Cipriano Algor, just follow him, trot along behind him, accompany his somnambular footsteps. As for imagining how one person can possibly contain such opposing feelings as, in the case we have been looking at, the most profound of joys and the most painful of griefs, and then going on to discover or to create the single word by which the particular feeling born of that conjunction would come to be designated, this is a task that many have undertaken in the past, but all abandoned the attempt knowing that, as is the case with a constantly shifting horizon, they would never even reach the threshold of the door to those ineffabilities longing for expression. Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fiftysixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.
Meanwhile, Cipriano Algor had reached the end of the street, turned off into the road that divided the village in two and, neither walking nor dawdling, neither running nor flying, as if he were dreaming that he was trying to break free from himself, but kept stumbling over his own body, he reached the top of the slope where the van was waiting with his son-in-law and his daughter. Before, the sky had seemed set fair, but now a hesitant, indolent rain had begun to fall, it might not perhaps last very long, but it greatly exacerbated the melancholy of these people who were only the turn of a wheel away from leaving much-loved places, even Marcal felt his stomach tighten uneasily. Cipriano Algor got into the van, sat down next to the driver, in the place that had been left for him, and said, Let's go. He would not say another word until they reached the Center, until they got into the service elevator that carried them and their suitcases and packages up to the thirty-fourth floor, until they opened the door of the apartment, until Marcal exclaimed, Here we are, only then did he open his mouth to utter a few organized sounds, albeit nothing very original, he merely repeated his son-in-law's words, with a small rhetorical addition, Yes, here we are. Marta and Marcal had also said very little during the journey. The only words worthy of recording in this story, and only superficially, purely incidentally, because they have to do with people about whom we have only heard, were those they exchanged when the van was going past the house of Marcal's parents, Did you tell them we were leaving, asked Marta, Yes, the day before yesterday, when I came back from the Center, I just popped in, the taxi was waiting, Don't you want to stop, she asked again, No, I'm tired of arguments, fed up to the back teeth, Even so, Remember the way they behaved when we both went to see them, you surely don't want a repeat performance, said Marcal, It's a shame, though, they are your parents after all, It's a funny expression that, What, After all, That's what people say, Yes, I know, but words which, at first sight, seem to be mere adornment and could, in every sense of the word, easily be discarded, become frightening once you start to think about them and realize what they imply, After all, Marta had said, which is another disguised way of saying what else can we do, what do you expect, that's the way things are, or, put more bluntly, resign yourself, We have to live with the parents we've got, said Marcal, Not forgetting that someone will have to live with the parents we will become, concluded Marta. It was then that Marcal glanced to his right and said, smiling, Needless to say, this conversation about warring parents and children does not apply to you, but Cipriano Algor did not respond, he merely nodded vaguely. Sitting behind her husband, Marta could just see her father's profile. I wonder what happened with Isaura, she thought, he obviously didn't just go there, leave Found and come back, judging by the delay, they must have said something to each other, what I wouldn't give to know what he's thinking, his face looks quite serene, but at the same time it's the face of someone who isn't quite in control, someone who has escaped a great danger and is surprised to find himself still alive. She would know much more if she could see her father from the front, then she might perhaps say, I recognize those tears that never fall but are absorbed back into the eyes, I recognize that joyful pain, that painful happiness, that being and not being, that having and not having, that wanting and not being able to act. But it was early days yet for Cipriano Algor to answer her. They had left the village, left behind them the three ruined houses, now they were crossing the bridge over the stream with its dark, evil-smelling waters. Over there, in the middle of the countryside, in the clump of trees hidden by brambles, is where the archaeological treasure from Cipriano Algor's pottery is hidden. Anyone would think that ten thousand years had passed since the last remains of an ancient civilization were dumped there.
When, on the morning after his day off, Marcal left the thirty-fourth floor in order to go to work as a fully fledged resident guard, the apartment was clean, tidy, and orderly, with the things brought from the other house in their proper places, and all that was necessary now was for the inhabitants willingly to take up their rightful places among them. It won't be easy, a person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of the long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don't go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent. The first problem to be resolved by the new inhabitants, with the exception of Marcal Gacho, who will continue with his familiar, routine work of watching over the security of the people and property institutionally or incidentally associated with the Center, the first problem, we were saying, will be to find a satisfactory answer to the question, And now what am I going to do. Marta is in charge of running the household, when her time comes, she will have a child to bring up, and that will be more than enough to keep her occupied for many hours of the day and for some hours of the night. However, because people are, as pointed out above, subject to both action and thought, we should not be surprised if she should ask herself, in the middle of a task that has already taken up an hour and could well take up another two, And now what am I going to do. In any case, it is Cipriano Algor who is confronted by the worst possible situation, that of looking at his hands and knowing that they are useless, of looking at the clock and knowing that the next hour will be the same as this, of thinking about tomorrow and knowing that it will be as empty as today. Cipriano Algor is no adolescent, he cannot spend the whole day lying on the bed that barely fits into his tiny bedroom, thinking about Isaura Madruga, repeating the words that they said to each other, reliving, if one can give such an ambitious name to the memory's insubstantial operations, their shared kisses and embraces. Some will think that the best medicine for Cipriano Algor's ills would be for him to go down to the garage right now, get into the van and drive off to see Isaura Madruga, who, back in the village, will more than likely be going through the same anxieties of body and soul, and for a man in his position, for whom life holds no more industrial and artistic triumphs of primary or secondary importance, having a woman whom he loves and who has already told him that she reciprocates his love, is the most sublime of blessings and the greatest good fortune. They obviously don't know Cipriano Algor. He has already told us that a man should not ask a woman to marry him if he lacks the means to guarantee his own living, and he would say to us now that he is not someone to take advantage of favorable circumstances and to behave as if he had a right to the resulting satisfactions, however justified by the qualities and virtues that adorn him, by the mere fact of being a man and of having made a particular woman the focus of his male attentions and desires. In other words, put more frankly and directly, what Cipriano Algor is not prepared to do, even though he will pay for it with the bitter pain of solitude, is to see himself playing the part of the fellow who periodically visits his mistress and returns from there with, as his only sentimental souvenirs, an evening or night spent agitating his body and shaking up his senses, then planting an absentminded kiss on a face now bereft of makeup, and in the case in point, patting the head of a canine, See you again soon, Found. Cipriano Algor, therefore, has two ways of escaping the prison which the apartment has, in his
