Gasoline (6 page)

Just then the phone rings. He listens for a good while, one more sound among all the screeches, squawks, and whistles bubbling up from every corner of the house. Then he thinks maybe he should answer. He stops ringing the doorbell, closes the door, and picks up the telephone. He can’t hear a thing over the racket. At the top of his lungs he asks the person on the other end, whom he isn’t able to identify, to give him a moment, and one by one he shuts off the record player, the radio, the cassette, the toaster, the lights, the blender, the burners, the oven, the transistor radio, until the house is plunged into absolute silence and darkness. He sits on the floor and feels his way (because his eyes, dazzled by the previous brilliance, take a while to adjust to the absence of light) over to the telephone. It’s Herundina, who asks him what all the ruckus was. Heribert tries to explain, and when the girl seems to have understood, he is surprised because not even he understands it very well; he even has to ask her to repeat the question, “What are you doing this evening?” because he hasn’t the foggiest notion what he’s doing that night or what he ought to answer.

•

He has taken off his wristwatch and placed it on the table in front of him. For fifteen minutes (when he’s already been waiting a half hour) he has silently been following the progress of the second hand. He has interrupted this contemplation three times, each time to order more rum. Now the waiter is filling his glass again. He takes a swallow and quickly goes back to studying the second hand. He is surprised to have lived so many years with watch hands before him and never to have been aware of the obsessive life they led. Now he perceives them all, the agile second hand, the slow minute hand, and the lumbering hour hand, as unsung comrades. He kisses the face of the watch.

He’s disconcerted at Herundina’s not yet having arrived. What if it’s all his imagination, and she hasn’t called and, consequently, they haven’t arranged to meet at all? What if he dreamed it and now, in a waking state, he is fruitlessly awaiting a meeting that will never take place? Or what if he’s dreaming now and fretting about a date that can’t take place unless he wakes up? He feels so disinclined to think about the possible reasons why the girl hasn’t shown up that, when he finishes the last glass of rum, he gets up, pays the bill, leaves the restaurant, and heads down the street.

A few steps farther on, he leans against a telephone booth, waiting for a taxi. Three of them go by, all occupied. The fourth, also occupied, stops in front of the restaurant and, to Heribert’s surprise, Herundina gets out, smoothes out her leopard-print miniskirt, unwraps a piece of gum, and puts it in her mouth. For a moment, Heribert considers going back into the restaurant, running into her, scolding her a bit for arriving late, accepting whatever excuses she offered, sitting down at a table with her, and searching for things to talk about over dinner, only to find himself at a loss as to what to do with her afterwards. When the taxi she had gotten out of starts up and the signal light goes on, Heribert hails it, opens the door, and gets in, with time enough to watch through the rear window as Herundina pushes open the restaurant door.

When he walks into the bedroom at home he is surprised to find Helena already there, asleep. It’s been days since she has beaten him home! As he gets undressed and into bed, he wonders if she is pretending to be asleep, as he has so often done.

A
weak sun shines in through the picture window, outlining the contours of things, bringing them into relief in a way that disturbs Heribert, who is sitting on a stool before a canvas, his head resting on the hand of the arm whose elbow is propped on his thigh. On the ground lies a torn canvas. He can hardly believe that just five minutes ago he stomped it to pieces. On the calendar he calculates how many days are left until the opening. Eighteen. He can do twenty paintings in three days, if he wants to. All he needs is a bit of will and a little courage. Has be become so demanding that he no longer approves of work that just months before would have satisfied him? Maybe that’s it. Maybe, two days before the show, the pressure will make him prolific. It wouldn’t be the first time that urgency had made him prolific. Maybe in the end it’s just that he isn’t anxious enough yet, and the calm was boring him. Maybe if he tries now
. . .
He picks up the charcoal pencil. He touches the tip of it to the surface of the canvas. He keeps it there for a while, struggling mightily to make even a stroke. Not a single one. He lowers his arm in exhaustion. He sits down in a chair, gasping for air, so tired he thinks he won’t be able to do another thing for the rest of the day.

He looks out the window. He moved into this house about a year ago. He chose to work by that window because of all the light it gave him. For almost a year now, he has been there each day, painting, and observing the turn-of-the-century brick building across the street when he takes a break. The first figure to become familiar was a young man who lived on the third floor. At first he had been surprised to see him at the window so often. He soon understood that the guy was pacing, along one invariable route: He walks purposefully from one end of the room to the window and, once there, stops, looks out at the street, turns on his heel, and walks back to the other end of the room
. . .
Over and over, for the space of a minute, for minutes on end, for an entire hour, all morning and all afternoon, every day of every week of every month. For how many years?

In time, Heribert has come to recognize all his sweaters. He has one very loud one, yellow and blue, and he seems happier on the days he wears it. In the summer, Heribert has seen all his t-shirts. Once, at the peak of August, he saw him in a bathing suit. He often smokes a pipe as he paces. Sometimes he pretends to read a book. Once he stayed at the window for a long time, hugging a record cover to his chest. Often, when the window is open, he shouts things down to people on the street. Heribert has only seen him outdoors once, on his way home with two older women. He was on the corner, arguing with a lamppost. Now he is at home, going through his daily paces. How many miles must he clock in a year? “Crazy as he is,” thinks Heribert, “any minute now he could take a shot at me. Maybe even the next time around!” He can see him now, approaching the window as he always does, but this time he’s not holding a book, or a pipe, or a record cover, but a revolver, which he aims at Heribert. As he pictures this, Heribert closes his eyes, the better to imagine that perhaps at this precise moment the guy is aiming a gun at him. “What will I do if he shoots and misses?” Would he throw himself to the ground? Could he go on living there, knowing that the madman might attack again? Would this finally force him to look for a new apartment or, more to Helena’s liking, a house in the suburbs? How exhausting, though.

Heribert opens his eyes again and sees the guy pacing the room, coming up to the window, and looking out, as always. He hears the phone ring, hears Helena pick up the receiver, hears her say it’s for him. He picks up the phone. Helena hangs up the other extension. Heribert leans up against the window, certain that, as always, nothing will happen. It’s starting to snow. Herundina is apologizing for having been late for their date the day before. A meeting. Do twenty-year-olds have meetings? Herundina says it had to do with school. She asks if he waited long.

“Two minutes. When you didn’t show up after two minutes, I left.”

“You could have waited a little longer.”

“What for, if you didn’t get there for another hour and fifteen minutes?”

“How do you know, if you weren’t there? I don’t get it.”

If he were a writer, he would write about fear of the blank page
. . .
Maybe he could paint something like that. A painter in front of an easel with an empty canvas? An empty canvas painted white?

“I don’t think you’re listening to me,” Herundina breaks in.

“Sure I’m listening.”

“You’re very strange.”

Heribert hears Helena say she’s going out. He thinks, “Who did she think this was on the phone?” He starts making excuses into the receiver. Says he has to leave right away, promises to phone, accepts her apology for being late the night before, agrees to her being the one to call, on Wednesday, hangs up the phone, picks up his coat.

•

This time, the wait is more tedious. It doesn’t amuse him to count the parked cars, the time elapsed between the passing of two cars, the potholes, the windows of a house, the windows of all the houses on the street, the trees in the yards, the trees that grow on the sidewalks, the number of the house Helena went into
. . .
And the children aren’t there, either, perhaps because snow is falling softly the whole time. With his lapels up high and wearing a wide-brimmed hat (when he saw that the snow was sticking, he picked up a hat; could that bit of precaution be a sign of recovery?), Heribert sits on the curb, thinking that if he’s there much longer they’ll find him under a good layer of snow, turned into a snowman, a sculpture for the show that will be opening on the twenty-second. From the time Helena goes into the house until the time she comes out, accompanied by greenglasses, exactly two hours, forty-eight minutes, and nine seconds elapse. As he follows them, he turns the hours into minutes in his head. He has been waiting 168 minutes and nine seconds. He turns the minutes into seconds: 10,080, which (with the nine remaining seconds) comes to a total of 10,089 seconds. The snowstorm is thinning.

The couple stops at a corner. Heribert also stops, acting nonchalant. He pulls his hat down over his ears. If they hail a taxi now, he’ll really be screwed, because in that neighborhood it will be hard to find another one right away. If the man has a car parked nearby, he’ll be in the same fix. And, even if he’s lucky and finds a cab, he feels nauseated at the mere thought of telling another cab driver, “Follow that car.”

It has stopped snowing. Helena and glasses were strolling along, laughing, their arms around each other. Heribert thinks that when he gets home he’ll have to get the operator to tell him the name of the person who lives at that house number. But, what if the phone is in someone else’s name? Or he doesn’t have a phone? The couple stops from time to time for a kiss. Heribert pretends to be checking out a shop window or waiting for a bus, sinking lower and lower into his lapels and hat. If only he had a disguise
. . .
He realizes he’s in front of a drugstore with wigs in the window. He rapidly calculates his chances of losing them if he stops for, say, fifteen seconds, to make a purchase. Impossible: they are right at the beginning of the block and there isn’t another corner for at least a minute. He goes into the shop and orders the big blonde wig with the curls; he pays; he tells them not to wrap it, takes off his hat, puts on the wig, puts the hat on over it, and goes out, indicating with a gesture to the salespeople and the two customers that they shouldn’t follow him out, which of course they do immediately, ignoring his pleas in their amazement.

The couple has progressed as far as Heribert had predicted. He speeds up until he is once more maintaining the distance he considers ideal. “The trouble with amateur detectives,” he thinks, “is that they think they’ll blend in by acting mysterious. But no one would ever think of shadowing someone wearing such an outrageous blonde wig.” He thinks it’s precisely because he looks so outlandish that they will never realize he’s trailing them.

On the verge of passing by an optician’s shop, he stops for a second, just long enough to size up the situation and buy a pair of sunglasses with pink frames and heart-shaped lenses. In another window he sees a big red-and-white-striped beach ball, next to an ad for suntan lotion that must have been there since summer. They would give the ball as a gift, it said, to anyone who bought a bottle of the lotion. He finds it so perfectly logical (that they give you a beach ball for buying a bottle of lotion) that he feels they needn’t even have advertised it. The world should always be like that: if you buy a dress, they should give you a typewriter; if you buy a cookbook, they should give you a hockey stick
. . .
He goes into the store, buys the tanning lotion, and asks for the ball.

“It’s not very useful for skiing,” the owner jokes, as he eyes the wig in a way he thinks is inconspicuous. He wraps up the lotion and gives Heribert the ball, in a plastic bag.

Heribert doesn’t answer. He runs out with the bottle of lotion in his coat pocket. He throws the plastic bag on the ground and tries to bounce the ball. Since it doesn’t bounce at all in the snow, he walks along throwing it up in the air and bouncing it off his head. The ball bounces weakly off the hat. A few people stop to stare at him. Not everyone, though, which he finds disconcerting at first, until he reasons that, in fact, it was more logical not to. Why should anyone turn around? He walks past a door in which he can see his reflection. He takes a good look at himself: with those heart-shaped pink glasses, that enormous curly wig, and that beach ball in his hand, he made the perfect shadow. Maybe he could start a new life as a detective. If he could just work up the courage to start over from scratch, doing
. . .
whatever
. . .
He looks closer. Something is missing, something loud: maybe some yellow shoes, plastic ones. Where to get them, though, without losing the couple? If he wants to be a success in this trade, he’ll have to improve his technique. He’ll have to put on a different disguise at every corner. On this block, a fat lady with a dachshund. On the next one, a pirate, with a striped shirt, a bandana, a five-day beard, an eye patch, and a hook for a hand. On the next, an astronaut, eating a lemon ice. And on the next, a tiger with a top hat
. . .
The world was so far from perfection! A little girl passing by points at him. She laughs and pulls on the arm her father was holding her hand with. Heribert lifts his leg as if to give her a good kick. The little girl’s laughter makes many of the passersby turn around, including Helena and her companion. Helena and Heribert look straight at each other, and he is afraid she will recognize him. If she does, he’s lost. Heribert’s and Helena’s eyes meet for an instant, with an intensity that makes him think that not even the dark glasses can keep her from recognizing him. “My eyes,” he thinks. “I should have masked my eyes!” After an unbelievably long second, Helena and glasses smile and go on walking. They hadn’t recognized him! They’d taken him for an eccentric, a madman! He is so pleased he almost runs up to Helena and her companion and takes each of them by the arm to share the joke with him. If they were real people—and not just flesh puppets—they would laugh with him and all three of them would go home, and while four-eyes went to bed with Helena, he would paint thirty paintings in an hour. And then they’d all go out for drinks.

In another window he sees some really baggy pants with a floral print: just the touch he was missing. He goes in, asks for the biggest size they have, pays, says no to a box or a bag, and puts them on right then and there, on top of the ones he’s already wearing. He looks at himself in a mirror: the effect can no longer be improved upon. Playing with the ball, he goes out into the street, not bothering to warn the salespeople (on whose faces he can read the need to break the monotony of the workday by following his progress from the doorway) to stay inside.

Once outside, though, Helena and her escort are nowhere to be seen. He starts to run. Maybe they’ve turned the first corner. He doubts they could have gotten so far in the short time he’s been inside. Just as he thought. They aren’t on the side street, neither left nor right. He goes back. Maybe they’ve gone into a store. But there are no more stores on that side of the street. On the other side, though, are a fish market and a bar. He crosses the street, with the ball in his arms. He has been too cocky. They’re not in the fish market: he can see that from the street, through the clear plate glass. He opens the door to the bar. Indifferent to the gaping of the two winos propped up on the bar, and to the shouts of the owner (who is showing him the door with the index finger of his left hand), he looks the place over and sees that they aren’t there. He goes outside. They are nowhere in sight. They can’t have disappeared just like that, unless (now he sees it, as soon as he turns the other corner, and he looks with hatred at the pole announcing the bus stop) they’re on that bus which he can still see in the distance.

In front of his house, as he pays the fare, the driver asks him if this is where they’re having the costume party.

“Yes. We’re having Mardi Gras a month early and Halloween about two months late. It’s like a sort of equator between the two events. One must always try to find the happy medium.”

As if he could reinforce his words by doing so, Heribert gives him a splendid tip. Leaving the man gaping makes him feel good. Except for the error of losing his prey, the afternoon has been an unexpected success: Helena’s not recognizing him has made him so happy that he claps as he goes into the house. He gets undressed in the foyer and puts the disguise away in a paper bag in the junk closet. In the bathroom he fills the tub with moderately hot water and gets in. He goes under, counting how long he can stay there without coming up for air: one minute, ten seconds.