A Heart So White (30 page)

"And what did he say?"

"Nothing, he just laughed."

"So you talked about me, then?"

"Well, I told him a bit, after all we had thrown you out on to the street in order that he could come up, it's only logical he should feel some curiosity about the person he was inconveniencing." Berta's reply seemed exculpatory when there was no need to be. Unless my question had sounded somewhat accusing because of the "then" with which I'd closed it, converting it into a statement of fact. Berta didn't want to talk, she kept replying to my questions, but without any enthusiasm, just so as not to be rude or to make it up to me a little for my nocturnal wanderings. Her dressing gown had fallen open slightly, I could see part of her breasts through the opening, and the shape of them through the silk, just then I would like to have seen those breasts I hadn't wanted to film, an extemporary desire. She was dressed provocatively. She was a friend. I didn't insist.

"Right, I'm going to go to bed, it's late," I said.

"Yes, I'll be going to bed in a minute," she replied. "I just want to tidy up a bit."

She lied to me just as, later, on the other side of the ocean, I would lie to Luisa, when I didn't want to go to bed so that I could watch Custardoy from the window. There was nothing to tidy up, apart from a bottle of Eau de Guerlain on the table and the opened box. I picked up my book, my record and the newspaper in order to take them to my room. I still had my raincoat on.

"Goodnight," I said. "See you tomorrow."

"Sec you tomorrow," Berta said.

She stayed where she was, lying on the sofa in front of the canned laughter on television, tired, with her feet up and her dressing gown half open, perhaps with her thoughts on a new concrete future which the night could not yet take away from her. Or perhaps she wasn't thinking at all: I went to the bathroom for a moment and while I was cleaning my teeth and the water from the tap blotted out all other sounds, I thought I could hear her singing abstractedly to herself, with the pauses you'd expect a person to make who is in fact singing without realizing it, while they're having a wash or caressing someone by their side, even though Berta wasn't having a wash (she perhaps wanted to hold on to the smell of "Bill") and there was no one by her side. And what she was singing was in English, it was this: "In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk to you," the beginning of a well-known song from perhaps fifteen years ago. I didn't go into the living room again that night. I went straight from the bathroom to my bedroom. I got undressed and got into the bed that had no particular smell, I knew that I wouldn't be able to get to sleep for ages, so I prepared myself for insomnia. I'd left the door ajar as usual, so that the air could come in (in New York, on the lower floors of buildings, you always keep windows that open on to streets closed). And then, when I was more awake than at any other moment in the whole night and there was no sound at all, I heard again, very low, as if through a wall, the voice of "Bill" or the voice of Guillermo, the vibrato voice of a gondolier, the saw-like voice that repeated its cutting phrases in English from the screen. The result was very sombre.

"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."

EIGHT WEEKS ISN'T a very long time, but it's longer than it seems if you add to that another period of eight weeks which is separated from that initial eight weeks by another eleven or twelve. My next eight-week stint was a trip to Geneva in February, it was also my last. I'd like it to stay that way for a while, there's no sense in Luisa and I being married if we're going to spend so much time apart, so that I'm not there to witness the changes wrought by marriage or grow accustomed to them, and to harbour suspicions that I must later dismiss. I wonder if I'm changing too, I can't say I've noticed, I suppose I must be, since Luisa changes in superficial ways (shoulder pads, hairstyle, gloves, lipstick), the apartment changes, the apartment whose unnatural inauguration now seems ages ago, work changes, my workload has increased whilst hers has diminished, indeed almost dried up completely (she's looking for a permanent post in Madrid) : since my stay in New York until my return from Geneva, that is, from mid-September to almost the end of March, she's made only one work-related trip, and it didn't last weeks but days, a trip to London, to stand in for our celebrated high- ranking politician's official translator, who'd been careless enough to catch chicken pox off his children (the leading politician now has his own exclusive interpreter, a post snapped up by an intriguer — though an interpreter of real genius, let it be said — of uncertain nomenclature, for, having obtained the post, he is now known by his two surnames, De la Cuesta y de la Casa), who (the leading politician not the interpreter with chicken pox, who'd been denied entry because of the risk of infection) was making a lightning visit to convey his regrets to his recently deposed colleague and to talk to her successors about what our representatives say they always talk to the British about: Gibraltar, the IRA and ETA. Luisa doesn't go in for telling incredible stories, nor do I require her to do so, and she said little about the interview, to me that is, since one assumes that interpreters, official or not (but it's more common amongst consecutive than amongst simultaneous translators, I do both types of work, but I'm very much the exception, not that I often work as a consecutive translator, for consecutive translators hate simultaneous translators and simultaneous translators hate consecutive translators), never breathe a word about what was said inside a room, they're all principled people who would never betray a secret. But she could have told me. "It was extremely dull," she said, referring to the conversation that had taken place in the official residence which the British leader was about to abandon in a few days' time: she was surrounded by half-full packing cases. "It was as if he saw her now as an old friend stripped of all responsibilities and power and she was feeling much too sad to attend to his pressing problems, it must have filled her with a kind of advance nostalgia." There was only one moment reminiscent of the personal conversation into which I'd guided them the day I met Luisa. It seems that the British politician had quoted from Shakespeare again, again from
Macbeth,
which must have been her constant reading matter, either that or she saw it performed repeatedly. She said: "Do you remember what Macbeth says that he heard when he murdered Duncan? It's very famous."

"I can't say that I do, perhaps you could refresh my memory. . ." our representative had said by way of an excuse. "Macbeth thinks he heard a voice crying out: 'Macbeth does murder Sleep, the innocent Sleep'. Well," she added, "that's how I felt about my sudden removal from power, murdered while I slept,
I
was innocent sleep, content to rest surrounded by my friends, by people watching over me, but it was those same friends who, like Macbeth, Glamis and Cawdor, stabbed me while I slept. One's friends are one's worst enemies, my friend," she warned our leader, rather unnecessarily, since he's left behind him a path strewn with ex- friends. "Never trust the people closest to you, those whom you always thought never needed to be obliged to love you. And never go to sleep, years of security seduce one into it, one gets used to feeling safe. I fell asleep for an instant feeling perfectly safe and you see what happened." And with an expressive gesture, the ex-leading politician indicated the open boxes round about her, as if they were a manifestation of opprobrium or were the drops of blood spilled in her murder. Shortly afterwards, her ex-colleague from Spain left her to go and speak to her successor, that is, with her Macbeth, Glamis and Cawdor.

That was the only job Luisa had during all that time, not that she was idle: the apartment looked more and more like a home and she was becoming more and more like a real daughter-in-law, not that I required her to be that either.

I had no friend living in Geneva and so I spent my weeks as an interpreter at the ECOSOC Commission of Human Rights living in a tiny rented furnished apartment, my only distractions being long walks through the empty city in the evenings, going to films subtitled in three languages or out to the occasional supper with colleagues or old friends of my father's (who had obviously struck up new friendships on all his trips abroad) and watching television, there's always television, it's the one thing you can rely on. The eight weeks I'd spent in New York had been bearable, even pleasant and intense, because Berta was there with her stories to tell (as I said, she's someone I always vaguely miss and someone for whom I store up news for months at a time), the weeks I spent in Geneva, however, were depressing in the extreme. It's not just that I've never found the work interesting, but in that particular city, in winter, I found it unbearable, since it isn't the work itself that's such a torment, but what you know awaits or doesn't await you when you leave it, even if all that awaits you is being able to plunge your hand into a mailbox. There, nothing and no one awaited me, a brief chat on the phone with Luisa (whose vaguely amorous words meant that I only lay awake at night for a couple of hours, rather than for hours on end), followed by an improvised supper more often than not cooked in my own apartment, which ended up stinking of whatever I'd eaten, never anything complicated, nothing too pungent, but it would still smell, the kitchen occupying the same living space as my bed. After twenty days of being there and again after thirty-five days, Luisa came to spend two long weekends with me (four nights each time); in fact there was no reason for her to wait until then or for her to stay so short a time, since she wasn't tied to any task that couldn't be postponed, nor to any timetable. But it was as if she foresaw that I too would soon give up the kind of casual work that forces us to travel and spend far too much time away from home, and it seemed more important to her - more important than keeping me company doing something that was certain to end, something that was, by definition, ephemeral — to prepare and nurture what was permanent and to which I would eventually return for good. It was as if she'd stepped fully into her new role, burying all that had gone before, whilst I was still bound to my single life by a prolongation of that life which was anomalous, inopportune and unwanted; as if she'd got married and I hadn't, as if she were waiting for the return of her errant husband whilst I still awaited the date of my wedding, Luisa was installed in marriage and her life had changed, whilst mine - when I was away - was the same as it had been in previous years.

On one of her visits we went out to supper with a friend of my father's - younger than him and older than me by some fifteen years - who was in Geneva for one night, on his way to Lausanne or Lucerne or Lugano, and who, I imagined, had murky or dirty dealings in all four cities; he was an influential man, a shadowy figure as my father had been when he worked at the Prado, since Professor Villalobos (for that's his name) is best known (though only to a literate public) for his studies of eighteenth-century Spanish painting and architecture and for his childish behaviour. He's known to an even smaller but less literate public as one of the chief academic and political intriguers in the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Rome, Milan, Strasbourg and even Brussels (and Geneva; much to his annoyance he still has no power in Germany or England). As one would expect in such an exalted and busy personage, he has, over the years, touched on a wide variety of fields of study and Ranz has always claimed to feel great respect for his brief but illuminating study of the Casa del Principe at El Escorial, which, I'm afraid, I've never read and never will. This professor lives in Catalonia, which is enough of an excuse for him not to visit my father whenever he comes to Madrid, having so many other things to do in the kingdom's capital city. But the two of them often exchange brief letters, those from Professor Villalobos (which Ranz, amused, has sometimes allowed me to read) being written in a deliberately antiquated, ornate prose style which, on occasions, also infects his diction or rather his loquacity: he's the sort of man who, confronted by some obstacle or snag, would never say, for example, "We're in a mess", rather 'This is a fine pickle we're in." I'd seen him only rarely, but one Monday afternoon (intriguers never travel at weekends) he phoned me, at the suggestion of my father (as the high-ranking Spanish official with the dancing, silicon-enhanced wife had done in New York), hoping not to have to languish alone in his hotel room that night (when evening falls, local intriguers return to their homes to rest after the intrigues of the day, leaving the foreign intriguer to his own devices). Although I wasn't too pleased at the idea of sacrificing one of my nights with Luisa, we didn't in fact have anything planned for that night beyond a tacit agreement to spend it together, and within marriage such agreements can be broken without serious consequences.

Villalobos didn't just want to invite us to supper, he wanted to impress us too, Luisa more than me perhaps, or perhaps just in a different way. He was impertinent, as was apparently his habit, criticizing the profession I'd chosen or, rather, drifted into. "Where are you going with this job?" he said, a superior sneer on his moist, fleshy lips (they were naturally moist, but he'd also drunk a lot of wine), as if he were my father (one's father's friends seem to think that they inherit from the former their way of treating their children). He did not, on the other hand, reproach Luisa with having chosen the wrong path, perhaps because she was no longer working as a translator or perhaps because, deep down, he saw no reason why she should choose any path at all. He was pleasant, smug, nominally wise, coquettish, pedantic and affable, he took pride in being shocked at nothing, in knowing untransmittable secrets and knowing all there was to know about everything that goes on in the world, be it yesterday or four centuries ago. Over dessert he fell silent for several minutes, as if overcome by weariness after all the frenzy and excitement or as if he'd plunged into dark thoughts, perhaps he was unhappy and was suddenly reminded of this. It was clear that he was a man of talent, being able to move so swiftly from smugness to depression without appearing false or insincere. It was as if he'd said: "What does it all matter anyway?" The conversation faltered (he'd taken it upon himself to do most of the talking) while his gaze grew absent and the hand holding the spoon with which he was eating his raspberry tart remained poised in mid-air.