When he’d finished (two of the sides of the rectangle were formed by the right-angled walls of the dining room, and the others by just the chalk lines), he got up, regarded it for a few seconds that could have been an eternity — you might say that he put the space into his eyes — and he told her to get inside. He said it the first time with a strange calmness, get inside, would you, please, he said to her, come on, get inside, but since Asun only stared and stared at him as if he had suddenly lost his mind, he said it again, in almost exactly the same tone of voice — get inside, Asunción, would you, please, get inside — after which, since she still remained impassive, unable to believe what she was seeing or hearing, he shouted it suddenly in such a sharp tone of voice, so aggressively and unexpectedly violently, that there was nothing for her to do but to do what he said and step at once into the chalk rectangle.
“OK,” he went on, having regained his calm, “OK. Now, imagine that where there is a chalk line, instead of the chalk line there is a wall, a solid wall, windowless and damp up to the ceiling, and it closes everything off and you can’t see or hear a thing beyond it. Imagine you’re not here, but there, inside, shut up between those walls, and you don’t know where you are or what you’re under or how deep you are, and now imagine time passing there. Start breathing, that’s right, now start breathing with more difficulty and imagine that you’re in there one day, then another day, and then another day, until a week that you can’t even tell is a week goes by with you in there, shitting and pissing into a pot that someone will collect from you when they bring you your rations, and you in turn stretch to reach up and give them your pot of feces with the same hand you then use to grab your rations, and it’s like that one day, and the next day, and a week, and then another week, and you try at first to take those four steps; go ahead, do it! I told you to do it! Do you hear me? Take those four goddamn steps! That’s it, again, and again, ten, a hundred, a thousand, two thousand, a million times so you don’t go crazy, so you don’t spend the infinity of every moment stretched out on your cot looking up at a bulb that’s always lit right over your face or hearing nothing but the hammering of desperation in your brain, the dripping of time in your brain, and the banging in your brain or maybe of your own head against the wall and the weakened tangle of your body falling onto the cot again and again, one day, and another, and another, for more than three hundred days. Did you hear what I just said?” he shouted. “Did you hear what I just said? Or maybe you don’t have ears or eyes or a heart anymore, just an idiotic anger rotting you from within?”
He realized that he was glaring at her with a degree of vehemence and fury he didn’t believe he’d ever looked at anyone with before, and then he left abruptly — he opened the door, went slowly down the stairs, and set off to walk. That night, as if it were the most natural thing for him to do, as if more than an inclination or a necessity, it were his true character, the activity and the place in which everything that could be conceived of in terms of people and things, and everything impenetrable that in the end existed within everything became plain, he once again walked along what was most likely the only place he knew how to walk along anymore, on the shoulder of the road by the metalworks and the tire retread shop and the long hangar with the high, windowless wall against which he felt particularly helpless as he passed, and afterward by the gas station with its lot full of trucks, which gave him the impression they would run him over as he crossed it, even though they were parked, and then finally the warehouse and the automobile dealership and the interchange, and that brought him to the factory.
When he got to the gate — the halberd tips on the top of the fence would become oddly stamped in his memory — he stopped for a moment and then went on again, mile after mile, to the next town. Once there, in the only bar open at that time, now well into the wee hours, he ordered something to eat and consumed it slowly at the counter, unhurriedly, with his gaze fixed not really on any one thing or another but, you might say, on the gaze itself. You might come to the conclusion that he wanted to intentionally engender suspicion, or maybe just the opposite, that he was endeavoring, poorly as it were, to go unnoticed, but after a while he called the waiter over, paid him with the same unhurriedness, and the same expression, and the same indecipherable attempts to either create mistrust or to hide it that he had exhibited while seated there on that barstool eating, and he started walking again in the opposite direction, toward the factory.
Cars zoomed by, whipping up the air beside him, and some of them honked at him or sped close past him, but not even to the trucks that seemed as if they were going to tip him over, swallowing him up in the great pockets of emptiness they created in their wake, did he seem to pay attention. The vehicles’ headlights coming toward him illuminated him intermittently, dazzling him, and even though he usually stayed as far onto the shoulder as he could — a man on the side of the road, he recalled, a man on the shoulder of the road, that’s what you are, or what you’ve become — in those wee hours everything seemed to indicate that he had forgotten the meaning of distances and margins.
When he arrived back at the factory fence topped with heavy iron bars in the shape of halberds, he sat down next to one of the pillars at the closed gate and slowly fell asleep, scrunched in an increasingly tighter ball.
Dawn had not quite completely broken when the kidnapped industrialist, who had that very day come back to work, early, woke him up. What a coincidence, he said, surprised to have found him there in such a state, as he helped him up, but one of the first things I wanted to do was to thank you and everyone else for what you’ve done.
“There’s no need to thank us,” he responded, getting up with some difficulty. His body had gone completely stiff and his eyes were bleary; it seemed it was going to take a while for him to warm up.
“It’s not going to be an easy thing for you all to go on living here now,” the industrialist continued, not finding the conversation as easy to sustain as he would have liked.
“It’s never an easy thing to go on living, if you come right down to it.”
11
A little more than a year after that morning, the factory was acquired by a multinational group that wasted no time enacting a large-scale workforce reduction plan. The company had begun to fare badly; the kidnapped industrialist, who must have been the one who really held the reins and to whom fell the heavy task of making the most important strategic decisions, had not succeeded in overcoming the depression he’d fallen into after his kidnapping, and his dedication to his work had suffered greatly, so the company, not being able to rely on him as before, had, apparently at the very first sign of trouble, begun slowly but surely to drift, and according to what people were saying, that was the reason it had ended up being not only sold off, but sold at a loss. Among other provisions, the personnel adjustment immediately established by the new ownership would include a series of early retirement offers, and Felipe Díaz Carrión, not thinking twice, accepted one without batting an eye. Truth is, it was like an act of God, his son Felipe said. An act of God, he repeated. An act of God.
He would go back to the village, to his house with the great door and the bronze knocker and the patio with the old cherry tree that his father, may he rest in peace, had planted, and back, too, to his field and his road by the river. At least there he wouldn’t have to put up with anyone threatening him or giving him the evil eye just for going about his business, threatening you and who knows what all else, certain friends would say to him. With the money from the retirement payout, he could fix up the house, as far as possible, and still underwrite part of the costs his younger son’s university education required, at least at first. He wanted to study biology and go live in Madrid; he had already agreed with a couple acquaintances of his who were also leaving the area, as a lot of people were, and were going to open a restaurant in Madrid that they would hire him on as a waiter for as long as things were going well. We’d have to be doing really badly not to be able to hire him at least for the weekends, they assured him.