III
In the Bureau of Records I have been told that the property is in the name of a Señor R. Valdivia, who rents the house. To whom? That they don’t know. Who is Valdivia? He is down as a businessman. Where does he live? Who are you? the young woman asked me with haughty curiosity. I haven’t been able to show myself calm and assured. Sleep has not relieved my nervous fatigue. Valdivia. As I leave the Bureau, the sun offends me. I associate the aversion provoked by the hazy sun sifting through the clouds — thus all the more intense — with a desire to return to the humid, shaded park. No. It is only a desire to know if Amilamia lives in that house and why they won’t let me enter. But what I must reject is the absurd idea that kept me awake all night. Having seen the apron drying on the flat roof, the apron in which she kept the flowers, I had begun to believe that in that house lived a seven-year-old girl I had known fourteen or fifteen years before … She must have a little girl! Yes. Amilamia, at twenty-two, is the mother of a girl who perhaps dresses the same, looks the same, repeats the same games, and — who knows — maybe even goes to the same park. And deep in thought, I arrive once more at the door of the house. I ring the bell and wait for the labored breathing on the other side of the door. I am mistaken. The door is opened by a woman who can’t be more than fifty. But wrapped in a shawl, dressed in black and in flat black shoes, with no makeup and her salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a knot, she seems to have abandoned all illusion or pretense of youth. She observes me with eyes so indifferent they seem almost cruel.
“You want something?”
“Señor Valdivia sent me.” I cough and run my hand over my hair. I should have picked up my briefcase at the office. I realize that without it I cannot play my role very well.
“Valdivia?” the woman asks without alarm, without interest.
“Yes. The owner of this house.”
One thing is clear. The woman will reveal nothing by her face. She looks at me, impassive.
“Oh, yes. The owner of the house.”
“May I come in?”
In bad comedies, I think, the traveling salesman sticks a foot in the door so they can’t close the door in his face. I do the same, but the woman steps back and with a gesture of her hand invites me to come into what must have been a garage. On one side there is a glass-paneled door, its paint faded. I walk toward the door over the yellow tiles of the entryway and ask again, turning toward the woman, who follows me with tiny steps: “This way?”
I notice for the first time that in her pale hands she carries a chaplet, which she toys with ceaselessly. I haven’t seen one of those old-fashioned rosaries since my childhood and I want to say something about it, but the brusque, decisive manner with which the woman opens the door precludes any gratuitous conversation. We enter a long, narrow room. The woman quickly opens the shutters. But because of four large perennials growing in glass-encrusted porcelain pots the room remains in shadow. The only other objects in the room are an old high-backed cane sofa and a rocking chair. But it is neither the plants nor the sparseness of the furniture that holds my attention.
The woman asks me to sit on the sofa before she sits down in the rocking chair. Beside me, on the cane arm of the sofa, there is an open magazine.
“Señor Valdivia sends his apologies for not having come himself.”
The woman rocks, unblinking. I peer at the comic book out of the corner of my eye.
“He sends greetings and…”
I stop, waiting for a reaction from the woman. She continues to rock. The magazine is covered with red scribbles.
“… and asks me to inform you that he must disturb you for a few days…”
My eyes search the room rapidly.
“… A reassessment of the house must be made for tax purposes. It seems it hasn’t been done for … You have been living here since…?”
Yes. That is a stubby lipstick lying under the chair. If the woman smiles, it is while the slow-moving hands caress the chaplet. I sense, for an instant, a swift flash of ridicule that does not quite disturb her features. She still does not answer.
“… for at least fifteen years, isn’t that so?”
She does not agree. She does not disagree. And on the pale thin lips there is not the least trace of lipstick …
“… you, your husband, and…?”
She stares at me, never changing expression, almost daring me to continue. We sit a moment in silence, she playing with the rosary, I leaning forward, my hands on my knees. I rise.
“Well then, I’ll be back this afternoon with the papers…”
The woman nods and in silence picks up the lipstick and the comic book and hides them in the folds of her shawl.
IV
The scene has not changed. This afternoon, as I write sham figures in my notebook and feign interest in determining the value of the dull floorboards and the length of the living room, the woman rocks, the three decades of the chaplet whispering through her fingers. I sigh as I finish the supposed inventory of the living room and ask for permission to see the rest of the house. The woman rises, bracing her long black-clad arms on the seat of the rocking chair and adjusting the shawl on her narrow, bony shoulders.
She opens the frosted-glass door and we enter a dining room with very little additional furniture. But the aluminum-legged table and the four aluminum-and-plastic chairs lack even the hint of distinction of the living-room furniture. The other window, with wrought-iron grill and closed shutters, must sometime illuminate this bare-walled dining room, devoid of either shelves or sideboards. The only object on the table is a plastic fruit dish with a cluster of black grapes, two peaches, and a buzzing corona of flies. The woman, her arms crossed, her face expressionless, stops behind me. I take the risk of breaking the order of things: clearly, these rooms will not tell me anything I really want to know.
“Couldn’t we go up to the roof?” I ask. “That might be the best way to measure the total area.”
The woman’s eyes light up as she looks at me, or perhaps it is only the contrast with the shadows of the dining room.
“What for?” she says at last. “Señor … Valdivia … knows the dimensions very well.”
And those pauses, before and after the owner’s name, are the first indication that something has at last begun to trouble the woman, forcing her, in self-defense, to resort to a kind of irony.
“I don’t know.” I make an effort to smile. “Perhaps I prefer to go from top to bottom and not”—my false smile drains away—“from bottom to top.”
“You will go the way I show you,” the woman says, her arms crossed over her chest, a silver crucifix dangling over her dark belly.
Before smiling weakly, I force myself to realize that in these shadows my gestures are of no use, aren’t even symbolic. I open the notebook with a creak of the cardboard cover and continue making notes with the greatest possible speed, never glancing up, taking down numbers and estimates for a job whose fiction — the light flush in my cheeks and the perceptible dryness of my tongue tell me — is deceiving no one. And as I cover the graph paper with absurd signs, with square roots and algebraic formulas, I ask myself what is keeping me from getting to the point, from asking about Amilamia and getting out of here with a satisfactory answer. Nothing. And yet I am certain, even if I obtained a response, I would not have the truth. My slim, silent companion is a person I wouldn’t look at twice in the street, but in this almost uninhabited house with the coarse furniture, she ceases to be an anonymous face in the crowd and is converted into a stock character of mystery. Such is the paradox, and if memories of Amilamia have once again aroused my appetite for the imaginary, I shall follow the rules of the game, I shall exhaust appearances, and not rest until I have the answer — perhaps simple and clear-cut, immediate and obvious — that lies beyond the veils the señora of the rosary unexpectedly places in my path. Do I bestow a gratuitous strangeness on my reluctant hostess? If so, I’ll only take greater pleasure in the labyrinths of my own invention. And the flies are still buzzing around the fruit dish, occasionally pausing on the damaged end of the peach, a nibbled bite — I lean closer, using the pretext of my notes — where little teeth have left their mark in the velvety skin and ocher flesh of the fruit. I do not look toward the señora. I pretend I am taking notes. The fruit seems to be bitten but not touched. I crouch down to see better, rest my hands on the table, move my lips closer as if wishing to repeat the act of biting without touching. I look down and see another sign near my feet: the track of two tires that seem to be bicycle tires, the print of two rubber tires that come as far as the edge of the table and then lead away, growing fainter, the length of the room, toward the señora …