A Heart So White (37 page)

I still haven't talked to Ranz about what I heard that night, which was in fact only a short time ago, although it's fast receding into the distance in these precipitate times, which, nevertheless, like all times, contain the same thing, a single, incomplete or half-lived life, that of each of us, my own life, or Luisa's. We probably never will talk about it. Ranz won't even know that I know, he won't even ask Luisa if she told me in the end, there's always someone who doesn't know something or doesn't want to, and thus we linger on forever. As far as I can see, their relationship remains the same, or very similar to what it was before, as if that night had never existed or didn't count. It's better that way, they have a great deal of respect for each other and she enjoys listening to him. The only thing that's new is that now he seems older, not so ironic, almost an old man, which he never was before. He's a little unsteady on his feet now, his eyes have lost some of their life and sparkle, they seem less fervent when they look at me or at others, they gaze less flatteringly upon the person before them; his feminine mouth, so like mine, is becoming blurred by lines; his eyebrows no longer have the same vigorous arch; sometimes he puts his arms into the sleeves of his raincoat, I'm sure that next winter he'll do so all the time. We see each other often, now that I know I'm going to be in Madrid for a while and now that I'm taking some holiday. We often go out to lunch, with or without Luisa, to La Trainera, La Ancha, La Dorada, to Alkalde as well as Nicolas, Rugantino, Fortuny and El Café and La Fonda, he likes to vary the restaurants. He still tells me stories, familiar and unfamiliar, about his working life, about his years of travelling and his time at the Prado, about his contacts with millionaires and directors of banks, who have long since forgotten him, he's too old now to be of any use to them, to amuse them or be able to fly over to visit them, the very rich like to receive people and won't move an inch in order to see a friend. I thought about what Ranz told Luisa and which I overheard, sitting smoking a cigarette at the foot of my bed. Although I will in time forget it, I haven't done so yet, and now when I look at the small portrait of my Aunt Teresa (who could never have been my aunt), which Ranz keeps in his house, I look at it with more attention than I did before, during my childhood and adolescence. Perhaps I look at it the way one looks at the photographs of people who can no longer see us and whom we no longer see, out of anger or absence or attrition, the photographs that end up usurping their vanishing features, the photographs fixed for ever on a particular day that no one can remember, the day that they were taken; the way my grandmother and my mother sometimes looked, transfixed or wearing a foolish smile, after their laughter had died, staring into space, their eyes dry and unblinking, like someone who's just woken up and still doesn't quite know where they are, that was how Gloria must have looked at the last (there's no portrait of her) had she managed to turn her head; unreflecting, not even remembering, feeling grief or retrospective fear, grief and fear are not fleeting emotions, looking at faces that one watched grow up but not grow old, three-dimensional faces that have now grown flat, mobile faces that we become used to seeing in repose, not them but their image which has replaced them, as I prepare myself to do with my father, as one day Luisa will become accustomed to doing with my photograph when she no longer has before her even half her life and mine is over. Not that anyone knows the order of the dead or the living, whose turn it will be to experience grief or fear first. It doesn't matter, everything is past and nothing ever happened and, besides, you just don't know. What I heard that night from Ranz's lips seemed to me neither venial nor ingenuous nor did it make me smile, but it did seem to me to belong to the past. Everything does, even what is happening now.

I doubt that I'll ever hear anything of Miriam again, unless she manages to get out of Cuba or the new Cuba, for which there are so many plans (may that island soon prosper and may fortune aid her). I think I'd recognize Miriam anywhere, even if she wasn't wearing her yellow blouse with the scoop neck or her tight skirt or her high heels stabbing the pavement, nor carrying her huge bag on her arm not on her shoulder, as women do today, her indispensable bag that almost overbalanced her. I'd recognize her even if she walked more elegantly now and her heels didn't keep slipping out of her shoes and she didn't make gestures that meant "Come here" or "You're mine" or "I kill you". There is, alas, a good chance that I might meet Guillermo one day in Madrid, where sooner or later everyone meets everyone else, even those who come from elsewhere and stay. But I wouldn't recognize him. I never saw his face and you can't recognize someone by their voice and their arms. Some nights, before I go to sleep, I think about the three of them, about Miriam, him and his sick wife, Miriam far away and the other two possibly in the same city as me, or in the same street, or in the same apartment block. It's almost impossible to resist putting a face to someone whose voice one has heard, and that's why sometimes I give him "Bill's" moustachioed face, the most likely face, too, since it might well be his, I could meet him in this restless city; on other occasions, I imagine him looking like that fine actor, Sean Connery, a childhood hero of mine, who in his films often sported a moustache; but mixed in with it is the obscene, gaunt face of Custardoy, who's constantly growing and then shaving off his moustache, or that of Ranz himself, who had a moustache in his youth, when he lived in Havana and later too, when he married Teresa Aguilera and left with her on their honeymoon; or mine, my face which has no moustache and never has, but one day I might grow a moustache, when I'm older, as a way of avoiding looking like my father as he looks now, as he looks now and as I will remember him.

On many nights I'm aware of Luisa's breast brushing against my back in bed, either when we're awake or asleep, she likes to lie close up. She'll always be there, at least that's what I intend, that's the idea, although there are still many years to run before that "always" comes to pass, but sometimes I think perhaps everything will change over time and in the abstract future, which is what matters because the present can neither taint nor assimilate it, and that strikes me now as a great misfortune. At such moments I'd like nothing to change, ever, and I can't discount the possibility that at some point, someone, a woman I haven't even met yet, will arrive, absolutely furious with me or perhaps relieved to find me at last, but she'll say nothing to me and we'll just look at each other or stand locked in a silent embrace or go over to the bed and get undressed or perhaps she'll simply take off her shoes, showing me the feet she'd so carefully washed before leaving home simply because I might see them or caress them and by then they'll be tired and aching having waited for me for so long (the sole of one of them dirty from contact with the pavement). It might be that this woman will go to the bathroom and shut herself in for a few moments, without saying a word, in order to regain her composure and do her best to erase from her face the accumulated expressions of anger and tiredness and disappointment and relief, wondering which would be the most appropriate, most advantageous face to wear to confront the man who's kept her waiting all this time and who's now waiting for her to emerge from the bathroom, to face me. Perhaps that's why she'd make me wait much longer than necessary, with the bathroom door closed, or perhaps that wouldn't be the reason, perhaps she'd just want to sit on the lid of the toilet or on the edge of the bath weeping secret tears, having first taken out her lenses if she wore them, drying her eyes and burying her face in a towel until she managed to calm down, wash her face, put on her make-up and be in a fit state to come out again and pretend that everything is all right. Neither can I discount the idea that Luisa might one day be that woman and that it won't be me there that day but another man demanding a death of her and saying to her, "It's him or me" and that the "him" will be me. But were that the case, I'd be happy simply for her to come out of the bathroom and not lie there on the cold floor with her breast and her heart so white and her skirt all creased and her cheeks wet from a mixture of tears and sweat and water, because the jet of water from the tap had been splashing against the basin perhaps and drops would have fallen on her fallen body, drops like the drop of rain that falls from the eaves after the storm, always on to the same spot where the earth or skin or flesh grows softer and softer until the drop penetrates and makes a hole, perhaps a channel, not like the drip from a tap that disappears down the plughole leaving no trace in the sink, or like a drop of blood that can be soaked up with whatever is to hand, a cloth or a bandage or a towel or sometimes water, or when only the hand itself is to hand, the hand of the person losing the blood, assuming they're still conscious and the wound wasn't self- inflicted, the hand that goes to the stomach or the breast or the back to stop up the hole. Someone who's wounded himself, however, has no hand, and needs someone else's hand to support them. I would support her.

Sometimes Luisa sings when she's in the bathroom, while I watch her getting dressed, leaning against the door which is not our bedroom door, like a lazy or sick child seeing the world from his pillow or without crossing the threshold and from there I listen to that murmured feminine song, which isn't sung in order to be heard, still less interpreted or translated, that insignificant song, with neither aim nor audience, which one hears and learns and never forgets. A song that is sung despite everything, but that is neither silenced nor diluted once it's sung, when it's followed by the silence of adult, or perhaps I should say masculine life.

The translator would like to thank Javier Marias, Annella McDermott and Loreto Todd for all their help and advice.