A Heart So White (22 page)

Berta covered her face with the open book without realizing what she was doing; when she felt the contact of the pages on her face she dropped it and then covered her face with her hands, as she'd meant to do in the first place. She wasn't crying, just hiding for a moment, for an instant. I stopped watching
Family Feud,
got up and went over to her. I picked up the book from the floor and put my hand on her shoulder. She took my hand and stroked it (just for a second), then slowly removed it, a gesture of gentle rejection.

There was no face in the video sent by "Nick" or "Jack", who on this third occasion had chosen to call himself "Bill", "which might be my definitive name and then again it might not", he said, still in English, on the card that accompanied the recording, and the "i" was identical to the "i" in "Nick". It may have arrived on the day that it couldn't have arrived at the house and didn't, but Berta picked it up two days later, when she went to look at her box number at the local post office, where she received her more personal, or rather impersonal, correspondence. She was still wearing her raincoat when I got in that evening, she'd arrived only a few minutes before me, although she would have arrived a good deal earlier than me if she hadn't stopped by the post office or been delayed or got nervous when she was trying to open the silver mailbox. She was holding the package in her hand (a package in the shape of a video tape), she held it up and waved it at me with a smile, to show me, to let me know it had come. She was standing still and so wasn't limping.

"Shall we watch it together tonight after supper?" she asked me, trustingly.

"I'm having supper out tonight. I don't know what time I'll be back."

"OK, if I can, I'll wait until you get back. If I can't, I'll leave it on top of the television so that you can watch it before you go to bed, then we can discuss it tomorrow."

'Why don't we watch it now?"

"No, I'm not ready yet. I want to wait a few hours, just to know that I've got it but without watching it. I'll wait up for you as long as I can."

I was on the point of cancelling my date. Berta would rather watch the video with me, in order to be protected while she was watching it or in order to give it the visual importance that she'd been giving it verbally for days now. It was an event, even a solemn event, and you have to give importance to what is important to your friends. But my date was in part work-related, with a senior Spanish civil servant, a friend of my father's who was visiting the city and who had a reasonable but uncertain grasp of English and had asked me if I could accompany him and his (much younger) wife to supper with another couple, an American senator and his (much younger) American wife, in order to chat to the women while the men discussed dirty tricks and also to lend him a hand with his English if, as was quite probable, he needed it. Not only were the two ladies younger, they were also a pair of frivolous birdbrains who, after supper, insisted on going out dancing and so we did: they danced for hours with me and with various other men (never once with their husbands, who were up to their eyes in dirty tricks) and they danced very close, especially the Spanish woman, whose breasts to me felt like silicon implants, like wood soaked in water, not that I submitted them to any hands-on analysis. The two couples were both rich and sophisticated, they did deals, they injected themselves with silicon, they spoke of Cuba like people in the know, they went to places where you dance very close.

By the time I got home it was after two o'clock in the morning, but luckily it was Saturday the next day (indeed, I'd only agreed to the evening out because it was a Friday). The light was on, the one Berta read by and had been reading by, the one she left on when she went to bed before I got home, or that I left on if she hadn't got home. I wasn't tired, my ears were still filled with the music I'd danced to with the two birdbrains and the sound of the manly voices drawing up plans for the new Cuba (I had to help the civil servant out several times by translating for him). I looked at my watch even though I knew what time it was and I remembered what Berta had said: "I'll wait up for you as long as I can." She hadn't been able to wait for me until the end of the dance. On top of the television, as she'd promised, was a video tape with a card, the card from Bill ("which might be my definitive name") that I've already mentioned. The tape was very brief as these personal videos usually are, it was at the end and hadn't been rewound. I put the cassette in to wind it back, I still had my raincoat on. I sat down, creasing it, something you should never do, because then you walk around for weeks looking like an illegal immigrant. I started playing the video and watched, sitting in my raincoat. During the three or four minutes of recorded tape the scene didn't change, it was always the same, the camera remained resolutely still, and what you saw was a headless torso, the frame cut off the man's head (you could just see his throat, his pronounced Adam's apple) and below, you saw only as far as his waist, he was sitting upright. The man was wearing a bathrobe, a pale blue bathrobe, newly bought or just washed, perhaps the sort that expensive hotels lend their guests. Or perhaps not, since on his left: breast you could see two discreet initials, "PH", his name was perhaps Pedro Hernandez. You could also see his forearms, his arms were folded, hiding his hands, but the sleeves to the bathrobe were not that long, it was a kind of kimono style that left his strong, hairy, possibly even long arms uncovered, folded and immobile, dry, not wet, not just out from the shower or the bath, the bathrobe was perhaps only a way of avoiding wearing any clothing that might be recognizable or identifiable, a kind of sartorial anonymity: the only object that was clearly his was a large, black watch on his right wrist (his hands were concealed by his folded arms), perhaps he was lefthanded or merely perverse. He spoke in English, but his accent betrayed his Spanish origins even more clearly than his letters had. Talking like that, he couldn't possibly believe that he could pass himself off as an American to a Spanish woman who lived in New York, who worked as an interpreter (only he didn't know that); and yet he continued to speak in English, using language as a disguise, as a false trail, voices change slightly when they speak a language not their own, as I'm all too well aware, even when the person speaks it imperfectly and without making much of an effort (his English wasn't bad, it was just that he had an accent). The open neck of his bathrobe revealed a triangle of chest, which was again very hairy and with a few grey hairs, though the hair was otherwise dark. In that bathrobe and with all that hair he reminded me of that great actor, Sean Connery, a childhood hero of mine: as I remember it, when he played the part of the spy licensed to kill, he was often dressed in a towel or a bathrobe or a kimono. I immediately gave the faceless man Connery's face, it's difficult to listen to someone on television without imagining their features. At one point in the recording his chin appeared in the picture when he lowered it, just for a few seconds, it seemed to be cleft although not quite, the shadow of a dimple, a groove, a hollow in the bone but not in the skin, but which nevertheless showed through (I can't remember if Sean Connery has a cleft chin or not). For more than a minute I watched the almost motionless image of this torso with its arms folded (motionless apart from his breathing) and heard nothing, as if the man had set the camera running before he was ready to say his words, or as if he were thinking about them or memorizing them. In fact, far off in the background you could hear music playing, as if there was a radio or a television on in the distance. I was just about to fast-forward the tape to see if it changed at all and whether there was in fact any message when "Bill" finally started speaking. His voice shook. It was almost a whisper only rather sharp, shrill even, it didn't seem the right voice for such a hairy man and certainly not for Sean Connery. His Adam's apple moved up and down. He made strange pauses when he spoke, as if before sitting down in front of the video he'd broken his text down into short, simple phrases and was reciting them. Sometimes he repeated himself. It was difficult to know if this was for stylistic effect or involuntary, in order to correct his pronunciation. The result was very sombre. The phrases were not just short, they were cutting. His voice was like a saw. His voice was like the voice I'd heard in Havana on the balcony and through the wall, the voice of Guillermo, which in English translates as William, the diminutive of which is Bill and not Nick or Jack. "I received your video, thank you," said the voice in its intelligible but Hispanicized English which he'd translated and which I now re-translate, long after the event. "The fact is that it all looks very promising. You're very attractive. But that's the unfortunate thing, that it's only promising. It's not enough. It's not enough. That's why I'm only sending you something partial too. Incomplete. You seeing my face would be equivalent to me seeing your body. Your body. You women care about faces. Eyes. That's what you say. Men care about the face and the body. Or the body and the face. That's how it is. As I said before, I work in a very visible arena. ("A very visible arena," he said again and the last word he pronounced as if it were Spanish, he couldn't help himself, given the Spanish origin of the word. I leaned back. My raincoat grew even more creased.) "Very visible. I can't meet a complete stranger just like that. Unless I'm convinced that it's worth it. To know that, I have to see all of you. Everything. I have to see you naked. In as much detail as possible. You say you had an accident. You say you limp a little. A little. But you don't let me see how little that little is. I'd like to see your injured leg. How it looks. To see your tits. Your cunt. If possible, wide open. To see your tits. Your cunt. I'm sure they're lovely. Only once I've seen them can we arrange to meet. That's how it is. If your breasts and your cunt and your leg persuade me that it's worth running the risk. If you're still interested in me. Perhaps you don't want to go on with this. You probably think I'm being too direct. Brutal. Cruel. I'm not cruel. I just can't afford to waste any time. I can't waste any time. I can't run unnecessary risks. I like you. You're very pretty. I mean it. You're very pretty. I like you a lot. But from what you've sent me I know as little of you as you now know of me. I've seen very little of you. I'm not cruel. I just want to see more. Send it to me. Send it. Then I'll show myself. If it's worth it. I think it will be. I still want to fuck you. Even more now. Even more now. That's how it is." The recording continued for a few seconds longer, with no voice now, the same scene as before, the hairy triangle and the folded arms, the black watch on the right wrist, the Adam's apple not moving as it had when he was speaking, his hands hidden, I couldn't see if he was wearing a wedding ring, as Guillermo had, and as I'd seen from my balcony. Then the torso got up and walked off to the left (still wearing the long dressing gown), and for a few seconds I could see what until then had remained hidden, a pillow, a large, unmade double bed, at the foot of which he'd sat to film himself. Immediately afterwards the screen went blank and the clock stopped, it was a new tape, one of those lasting fifteen or twenty minutes, which are beginning to replace letters or perhaps photographs, since letters have already been replaced, long ago. When I switched off the television and its light, much brighter than that of the reading lamp, had gone, I saw Berta behind me, reflected in the now dark screen, and I turned round. She was standing there in her dressing gown, looking sleepy or rather sleepless, she must have watched and listened to the video dozens of times before I arrived and now she'd left her bedroom in order to see it again, with me or rather while I watched it for the first time. She had her hands in her dressing-gown pockets, she had no shoes on, her hair was all dishevelled from her tossing and turning, she looked pretty, with no makeup on. Nor shoes, if she'd been walking she would have limped. She didn't move. The music from the dancing had left my head, but not the Cuba of the conversation. She took her hands out of her pockets and folded her arms as "Bill" had done to speak to her but not to reveal himself; she leaned back against the wall and said:

"So now you see."

My raincoat was seriously creased by now. I got up.

"Yes," I said, "I see."

OVER THE NEXT few days I waited for Berta to mention him again, "Nick" or "Jack" or "Bill" or "Visible Arena" or maybe Pedro Hernandez, or perhaps Miriam's Guillermo, although I almost immediately dismissed this possibility, because we always distrust our first impression of something or someone when a second, third or even fourth impression becomes superimposed on it, someone whose words or image remain for too long in our memory, like a dance tune that dances on in our thoughts. But during that time, during the weekend immediately following (the whole of Saturday and Sunday), Berta said nothing or perhaps preferred not to talk about it, she wandered round the apartment and came in and out as if distracted, not in a bad mood but not in a good mood either, without the cheery nervousness of the days of waiting, perhaps asking me more questions than she usually did about my plans, about my still recent marriage and apartment, about my father and about Luisa, whom she knew only from her photo and from talking to her on the phone. If I often thought about "Bill", I thought, she couldn't but do otherwise, after all she was the person he'd been speaking to in his bathrobe, she was the one he wanted to see more of before agreeing to meet her, this man who needed so many certainties. Neither of us used the video that weekend, as if it were jinxed or contaminated, and "Bill's" video remained inside, at the end of the tape just as I'd first found it and then left it, without either of us rewinding it or taking it out.

On Monday, however, when we both went back to work, I got home in the evening to find Berta, who'd also only just got back (her handbag was still open and in it her key, she'd taken off her raincoat, but it was lying on the sofa), playing the video. She was looking at it again and stopping now and then, stopping it here and there, all in vain, since, as I've explained, the image remained the same throughout its three or four minutes' duration. The days were already quite short, it was getting dark, it was Monday, my work at the Assembly had been exhausting, as I imagined it had been for her as well, after that you need some distraction, you need not to listen. But Berta was still listening. I said nothing, just waved to her, went to my room, then to the bathroom to freshen up, and when I returned to the living room she was still studying the tape, stopping it and winding it on a little only to stop again.