But when his son got there, it seemed to him that he looked troubled — something’s going on, he conjectured again, something’s going on. After hugging him hello, he barely saw more than the backside of him as he went into his room to drop his bags and then headed back out the front door again to, he said, go buy cigarettes at the bar before it closed. I’ll start dinner, he replied. It’ll be ready in about an hour, so don’t be too long.
He realized that more than hugging him, he had in fact thrown himself awkwardly onto him, sort of heavily and yet absently, as if he were avoiding any contact with him, in spite of his having been the one to reach out to him, and avoiding his gaze and his face the whole time. After a short while — he couldn’t have been gone for even five minutes — he heard him open the door again, trace his steps back to his room, and then head toward the kitchen, where he had already begun to busy himself.
Looking up without raising his head, almost out of the corner of his eye, he saw him hurry in like someone returning in exasperation to retrieve something he had forgotten, or rather to tell him something he couldn’t quite resolve whether or not to tell him, and then suddenly, looking as though he couldn’t possibly be more disgusted with himself than he was at that moment, he turned on his heel once again and left the same way he had come, with the same haste and the same hesitation and the same exasperation, but not without first setting, or more like tossing, a folded newspaper, like a reflection of his own impotence, down on the table.
He hadn’t gotten the chance to say anything to him, he hadn’t even gotten the chance to look at him, and certainly not in the eye, and that silence, that absence of words that was so telling in the end, had unquestionably amplified the muffled sound made by the sheets of newsprint falling onto the surface of the table. Ffflt, went the newspaper, and ffflt he later recalled it continuing to resonate in his head for some time, as if it were trying to tell him something.
Nevertheless, just as he had done so many other times, he took refuge in the mechanical gestures with which one generally carries out the most everyday tasks, executing them with all the care and formality he could muster. It was almost like a prescription against unease, according to his experience, to do diligently, not so much slowly as meticulously, tasks that might seem of quite little importance, to pour your whole soul into each step, as if our entire lives were bound up in each and every detail, as they very well may be. And so he pulled out two of the middle pages from the paper his son had left there, and he laid them out on the table. He usually laid down some sort of paper when he prepared vegetables, almost always a page from the newspaper or an opened out napkin, so that he could then fold the leavings up into a cone and throw them in the garbage without having to wipe down the table again, and the paper his son had left there couldn’t have come in more handy.
To one side of it, then, he put the freshly picked green beans, the carrots, potatoes, and an onion, as well as a block of lamb shoulder, and on the other, a couple of empty plates he would slowly fill up. With mechanical slowness, he scraped the skins of the carrots and then cut them lengthwise; then it was time for the potatoes, which he peeled and afterward cut into pieces as well. He cut them with a snap — first he stuck in the knife, and then, instead of slicing cleanly all the way to the bottom, at the last instant he broke the potato off, which produced that characteristic snapping sound of the finest-quality tubers. Snap, snap he went, with a rhythm that resounded strangely, like an echo, in the quiet emptiness of the kitchen.
And then, as the water heated in the pot, and once the onion was peeled, he removed the tips of the beans one by one, splitting them in half. Sometimes, as he cut them in two, the string from the pod would stick and come off on the knife, and he continued slowly tossing all of it, the peels and the scrapings from before and now the tips and the little strings from the tender beans, onto the unfolded pages of the newspaper that would eventually go, along with all the leavings, into the trash can. The bean tips fell steadily onto the paper a few seconds apart from one another with a flat sound, as if they were the first drops of a storm, and just as those drops slowly coat the ground, these, too, steadily came to cover the lines of text on the newspaper’s surface.
To him, all those sounds resonated as if something were working to amplify them or had set its mind to prolonging them. The snap of the potato, the tiny crinkling of the bean tips as they fell onto the paper — the drops of rain on the muffled dust of the road — or the flattened sound of the newspaper on the table. At one point, an especially long string from one of the beans he was cleaning stuck to the knife — we really are coming up to the end of the season, he thought — and after dropping it contemptuously onto the spread-out paper, he noticed that it had fallen in such a way as to underscore a line of text on the upper part of the open page.
Drawn by that unusual underlining — the little string had ended up positioned almost perfectly horizontally under the printing — he looked more carefully at the paper he had been planning on later throwing away with all the leavings inside, and suddenly, as soon as he read the first two words that were underlined the best, and, immediately afterward, the following ones, it seemed to him that the kitchen, that the whole world in which he was breathing, in an instant was empty of air. But it wasn’t only air that was suddenly missing, it was the floor, no longer solid, his blood, no longer flowing, the very thingness of things, their proximity, it was the dimension of space itself and the severe luminosity of light. As if everything around him had suddenly disappeared, been wiped out by a hurricane that had whisked it all at a single stroke into a state of the most indifferent insignificance, he was overwhelmed by a stupor the likes of which he believed he had never felt in his entire life, and which wasn’t really a stupor, nor was it mere disconcertedness or disorientation. It was a desire for that hurricane to whisk him away, as well, to yank him up and whisk him away to where all those other things had disappeared, so that he could disappear along with them.
Two last names, he saw the two last names and then four more words before the end of the paragraph, and above them, above what was doubtless the continuation of an article that began on a previous page, was a phrase in parentheses and italics that read, “Continued from page 1.” He read those six words, the four words plus the two last names, again and then again and then once more, and he didn’t know if it was in the hope that one of those times they might say something other than what they said, or perhaps out of an unconscious desire to wear them out, for them to become used up or faded, and for there not to be written there what neither his incredulity nor his helplessness could prevent from being written there.