María Angélica Bosco
DEATH GOING DOWN
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1
Death Going Down
The car pulled up in front of an apartment building on one of the first blocks of Calle Santa Fe, where the street opens out to a view across the wide Plaza San Martín. At two in the morning on that cold, misty August night, only the occasional vehicle was gliding over the damp shiny asphalt.
The few people walking the streets were silhouetted against a desolate background. They hurried along, harassed by the temperature and the late hour, but moved with the uncertain gait of sleepwalkers. They were spurred on by the desire to get home, wherever that was, because when night and winter reign in the streets and there is a sense of others sleeping behind closed windows, whether peacefully or fitfully, even a room that is lonely or filled with painful memories counts as home.
Pancho Soler let his body fall against the car door to open it. Framed by the windscreen, the double row of buildings seemed to go on without end. A wave of nausea forced him to close his eyes and steady himself. When he opened them again a yellow streetlamp swam into focus, looking like a badly painted moon.
A pair of legs, floppy as if made of cloth, emerged from the car door and Soler thrust his face into the frozen night air like a carp bursting out of water. The pavement stretched from the car to the building door like an abyss of dull slabs, filling him with fear. He resolved to cross the space, trying in vain to give some direction to his disconnected footsteps, furious that the simplest of tasks demanded such concentration.
Still, he’d had a good time. He always had a good time with Luisita. She was a great girl who knew how to appreciate a drink, a useful tool to curb her eventual complaints. Women always complain that they are left alone.
The light in the lobby was on. If he hurried he would reach the lift before the regulation three minutes were up. The illuminated panel showed number six, the caretaker’s apartment. What a nuisance! He would end up in the dark before the lift reached the ground floor.
Leaning on the frosted glass door, Soler waited while the red buttons lit up and went out successively. A fuzzy tiredness crept along his limbs and up into his head. All of a sudden he noticed that the lift shaft had filled with light and at the same moment, as if choreographed, the lobby plunged into darkness.
Someone had come down in the lift. He could make out a blurry shape on the other side of the door. Still leaning on the wall, Pancho moved to one side to make way for the person in the lift but the door remained stubbornly closed. All he could see was the shadow puppet outline of a shape curled up in the corner.
“It must be a woman,” grumbled Soler. “Women always expect a chap to do everything.”
Nonetheless, he pulled the door open with a smile in reserve in case it was indeed a woman. She might be young and pretty. The mirror doubled the unseemly position of the stranger, who was bundled up in a dark fur coat. He had already been softened by alcohol, and the female shape, half collapsed against the back panel, somehow moved him. She showed not the slightest intention of moving from that spot. Poor thing, she must have been feeling even worse than he did.
There was an air of unreality as Soler, in his impulse for solidarity, approached the woman and saw she was young and blonde. She looked awfully pale. His annoyance faded as he noticed successive details. His selfishness was not, after all, the product of an adult’s resentful attitude, but rather of a child’s innocent self-interest.
All that bothered him now was the constant shifting of the walls and the ghostly light reflected by the mirror illuminating the fallen woman, with her face half hidden in the collar of her fur coat. A strand of blond hair hung limply across her cheek in a suggestion of intimacy. Soler stretched out his hand to sweep her hair back and in doing so, his fingers brushed against her skin. A spasm of horror froze him. Unaware of what he was doing, Soler reached out to touch the stranger’s hands. He was surprised by his involuntary invocation:
“My God!”
He became aware of the ground becoming firmer under his feet. His face in the mirror looked strange and distorted, and the unlit lobby was like a shadowy pit where one wakes at the edge of nightmare. He felt a desperate need to shout in protest. Why did this have to happen to him, him of all people? If only Luisita had insisted he stay with her! That would have been less trouble, all things considered.
He then felt his legs bump against a smooth edge. He had stepped back as if the surprise had pushed him in the chest, and was now crashing against the chestnut-coloured velvet divan along the length of the lobby wall. Soler let himself fall onto it, his eyes fixed on the scene in the lift, which with distance was now brought into clearer focus.
Adolfo Luchter crossed Calle Santa Fe almost at a run, the cold biting his cheeks, bearing the unwelcome memory of desolate nights, and the next day looming as an arduous string of bitter hours to fight through in that unfamiliar city.
As he was about to open the front door he noticed Soler draped pitifully over the divan in the lobby. It was always the same! Whenever he arrived home late at night he ran into one of that man’s displays of extravagant boredom. Soler would either be at home making merry with others just as convinced as he that to sleep at certain times of night denotes an utter lack of personality, or else one had to collect him at the door, help him up to his apartment and even put him into bed when the aforementioned displays had been excessive. Luchter was generally a helpful soul but his goodwill faltered when it came to people like Soler who took life for nothing more than a bothersome, illicit game.
Soler launched himself at the doctor when he saw him come in. Luchter was forced to grab him to prevent his fall, and noticed his glassy eyes. A slight shift of his blond eyebrows was the only sign of annoyance.
Luchter went to turn on the light. Soler clung to his arm, almost letting himself be dragged along. He muttered a few garbled words as though his tongue had to contort itself in his mouth in order to articulate them. His outstretched hand motioned towards the lift. From the gesture, more than from his speech, Luchter guessed what he was trying to say:
“Look,” he mumbled, “there… there’s a dead woman…”
The light came on and its brightness swept away the absurdity of those words, making them seem ridiculous.
“Stop all this silli—” Luchter started.
But a brief glance at the lift made him pause. He held back an exclamation of surprise and started towards the motionless woman. Soler stumbled behind him, following his steps and trying in vain to imitate his confident movements. Luchter would have liked to shoo him away but another more serious problem demanded his attention. Dr Luchter promptly bent forward to examine the stranger in the lift. He acted with an impersonal and professional efficiency. When he stood up, his clear green gaze was clouded with unease. He turned to see Soler’s face, full of idiotic expectation.