He walks past the bar that’s halfway down the road; he stops when he’s about to leave it well behind. He wonders for a moment whether to go in or not and finally decides he wilclass="underline" he pushes the door open and lets out a general, Good day, to the owner and some customers who are playing dominos. He leans on the bar and orders a beer. The waiter serves him and, inevitably, asks how life’s treating him. The liar says, Well, and gulps his beer. His mustache is coated white. A poorly tuned radio is blaring out a melody punctuated by sounds that usually express pain. He watches the dominos game for a while. One of the players asks him if he wants to join in the next round, and he waves a hand to indicate that he doesn’t. He turns round, takes another gulp of beer, and gazes at the Russian salad under the glass cover. The golden-brownish hue of the mayonnaise makes him feel like ordering some. The owner sees him looking its way and asks him if he wants some. The liar says he doesn’t, because if he eats something now he won’t want dinner and his wife will nag. The owner smiles because it’s a standard joke: the liar isn’t married, he lives alone and always uses his imaginary wife as his excuse. When, for instance, he wants to leave and the others insist he has one for the road, or when they say he should play football with them on Sunday, and he doesn’t feel like it. He sometimes adds in children for good measure: a girl who, depending on the day, is between three and seven years old, and a boy who initially didn’t exist and is now even older than his sister. The owner washes a glass under the tap and is about to follow their ritual, extending the liar’s joke about the would-be wife by asking him whose wife, given he doesn’t have one. But before he can open his mouth, the liar asks him loudly—so everyone can hear—if he’s seen the circus they’re setting up on the esplanade. The owner is now drying the glass. Nobody answers. The liar turns to face the dominos players and continues in the same vein: There are three trailers, one of them huge and cage-like. One of the players raises an eyebrow, looks at him, and says, Of course there are. The liar pretends to be indignant: What does he mean “of course”? Is he implying it’s not true? He swears they’re setting up a circus on the esplanade. He’s seen the letters on the ground; they’re made of bulbs that will soon light up on the signboard on the tent: RUSSIAN CIRCUS. The tent, he now adds, is almost erected. There are four trailers. No, five, not four. And six cages: with lions and tigers. And three elephants: big as houses. The dominos players have finished their game and stare at him in astonishment: How can he be trying to make them believe yet another of his lies? However much goodwill they might feel toward him, how could they believe a man who always lies, who lies even when there’s no need to lie, when he won’t reap any benefit from lying? Their disbelief doesn’t waver for a moment or give way to doubt, but, as always happens, the liar speaks so convincingly and so heatedly that, as usual, they don’t believe him, but they are fascinated by the passion with which he tells and elaborates his lie. The elephants, for instance, soon become twelve rather than three; the tent is a triple, not single, affair; and the trailers, parked beside it in serried ranks, soon occupy an area the size of a football pitch. As he listens to what he is saying, one of the dominos players (they’ve finished the game and haven’t yet started another) feels his eyes begin to blur. No circus has come to town in thirty years, and he’s sure, at the rate things are going, that no circus will ever erect its tent on the esplanade again. None of them misses having the circus (not even the liar, although he’d argue the opposite if need be), and if a circus ever did come, they wouldn’t be at all interested: circuses belong to bygone times, and even then people weren’t interested. However, their lack of interest doesn’t stop them from listening, fascinated by the way he unrolls the canvas sails and erects one tent after another, how he makes the drums roll and multiplies the number of acrobats with such conviction—even though he never thought any of them believed him, let alone that, by virtue of his persistence, he himself would believe his own story. Only one (on the deaf side) asks in an unduly loud voice if anyone wants another game. But nobody answers: someone else has already suggested immediately going to the esplanade. He doesn’t need to twist their arms. They now harangue each other, put on their coats and scarves, and are in the street, walking next to the liar, who’s describing a pyramid of thirty-six tightrope artistes riding eight unicycles and a horse that can juggle. The last to leave is the owner, who puts on his jacket, pushes out the guy who’s on the deaf side, locks the door, and breaks into a run in order to catch the group of men who are hurrying along the road.
Life Is So Short
The man runs towards the third elevator that has just started to close; he manages to stick his right foot into the small space that’s still open, which is enough to make the two sides of the door immediately shoot open. He steps inside and greets the woman who is there already with a “Hello!”; she is very beautiful, with cascading tresses of hair and chestnut colored lips. The man (inhibited by the thought that he’d glimpsed a censorious glint in her eyes, because he’d re-opened the doors and stopped the elevator) stands to one side, looks at the buttons, sees 9 is lit up, takes a step forward, presses 12, that lights up, and goes back to where he was standing. The door closes slowly. He tries not to look at the woman too brazenly. But he can’t stop himself from looking at her out of the corner of one eye. Her eyes, chin, legs . . . The door closes, the elevator begins to go up. The numbers light up on the indicator: 1, 2 . . . Piped music plays a sanitized tune. The man looks at his wristwatch. It stopped a while ago. He shakes it, as if shaking will bring it back to life; that used to work with wind up watches, not with the battery kind. It’s a slow elevator, and the slowness helps underline the impression of safety suggested by the thick, protective walls. The clean state of the interior also reinforces this impression. A dirty elevator seems abandoned and, hence, unsafe. This one isn’t: it is spick and span and new. 5 has already lit up on the indicator and now it will be 6’s turn. When 6 lights up, the elevator stops, the doors open, and a bespectacled old man wearing a small hat pokes his head inside.
“Going down?”
The man says they aren’t. The old man wrinkles his nose and disappears to the right, index finger at the ready, clearly intending to summon the second elevator, unaware it’s out of order and being repaired on the ground floor. The door closes again. For a second, the woman glances at the man, and their eyes meet. He smiles. She averts her gaze. They can see 7 light up on the indicator and then 8. They are midway between the eighth and the ninth floors (8 is still lit up on the indicator and 9 has yet to show) when the elevator stops. The man looks from the woman, to the button panel, to the door (“Here we go again!”). The woman looks at him, the button panel, and the door. The woman is the first to express dismay (“Now what?”) and the man the first to try to act as if everything is under control (“Above all, we must not panic.”). The woman presses 9, 12, and the ground floor buttons, and when none responds, she asks the man if they should push the button sporting the image of an alarm bell. The man agrees. So they press the alarm button, and the bell immediately rings loud and clear, as if it was on the other side of the elevator walls. Where on earth is it? On the ground floor? In the concierge’s office? Is there more than one? From time to time they stop pressing the bell and listen hard, to see if they can hear any noise, someone who’s heard them and started the rescue operation or, at least, is nearby and shouting to them reassuringly. But they hear nothing, except for the piped music that churns out song after song, quite oblivious.