So he got up, he got up from the chair in front of the glass partition that divided the room in half; he was totally exhausted, which was surprising for someone who had done nothing but sit there silently, and after confirming once more, in a final attempt to look at him, that at no point, at no blasted point, not at the beginning, when he first saw him, not for the entire time he had been there — and he couldn’t have said if the time had been long or short, fleeting as the blink of an eye or completely endless — and not even now, when he saw the end was fast approaching, at not a single, blasted, infernal moment had his son even come close to removing that same old expression of smug self-importance and disgusted rancor in his eyes, after confirming once more what there had most likely been no need to confirm, he turned his back to him, looked straight ahead, at the door, and headed slowly for the exit.
“A whole lot of fuss over some fucking pig!” he jumped up and shouted. “Over some fucking chalk pusher, over some two-bit hack just as full of shit as you are, you fucking pussy, you fucking nobody, you’re a nobody and a fascist and you always will be!” And at the same time he was spouting off these words, as if he had never in his life said any other words and nothing had ever meant anything other than what he was saying, he suddenly began, with an intensity of violence accentuated by the suddenness of his outburst, to pound on the glass partition that divided the room in half and through which the image of his father’s back was gradually disappearing.
It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds for his father, impassive, to cover the half dozen yards that separated him from the exit and turn the handle to pull open the metal slab of a door, the same amount of seconds it took the pair of guards posted under the clock to get to his son and subdue him, one on each side, holding to neutralize him. But it was likewise an infinite world of time, with its thick glass in which everything was reflected twofold into a vortex of images, that definitively separated time itself into two and the world into two and perhaps even, if such a thing were possible, the infinite or the definitive into two. Will the same thing happen at the end, will we not know if life has slipped away from us in the blink of an eye or if it dragged on eternally, he would later wonder.
They dragged him away toward the metal door in the middle of the room while he continued shouting at the top of his lungs you piece-of-shit traitor and you fucking piece-of-shit father, crawl back to that shithole of yours you should’ve never come out of in the first place and I hope you rot there more than you’ve ever rotted anywhere in your entire fucking piece-of-shit life.
They immediately yanked him out, his father had slowly disappeared through the other door, as well, and nothing remained but time, ticking itself out and persisting unopposed — the shouts he continued to hurl from the other side weren’t coming through now, not even muffled — as the sole presence in that empty space.
20
His younger son saw him push against the door’s glass pane and, once outside the imposing edifice, after taking the three or four steps that seemed to use up the last remaining inertia of his exit, suddenly pull up and stop short, spiritless and tiny in the distance, not knowing what direction to point his feet and not even realizing he didn’t know. He looked up, at the blue of the sky, at the rows of identical windows on the apartment buildings, and then all around him, at the views of streets crisscrossed by cars, cars, and more cars, all going in opposite directions, and people hurrying in and out of the same door he had just left through but not exactly left behind. Lost, his son Felipe said to himself, watching him from the window of the bar where they had arranged to meet, the poor man is completely lost, he has no idea which way to turn or which way to look, and broken, he said to himself, his heart has been broken.
In the middle of all of that coming and going of people who were going about their business and knew where they were going, he now seemed to have nothing at all to go about but the literal ground on which he was walking, and his next step forward. That was his road now — his single next step forward, he thought. And he went on watching him take short, tentative steps as if he might, after each one, regret having taken it or even topple over a cliff, then stop again like some halfwit and try to look up, only to immediately look down at the ground again, as if wanting to ask it something, or rather evaluate something, or perhaps just needing to have something to assure himself of his own presence. It’s as if before he takes a step, he needs to say goodbye to the previous one, he thought.
When he finally made up his mind to start walking in the direction he couldn’t help but walk in, it seemed to his son that it took him a yeoman’s effort — as his father was in the habit of saying — to descend the one dozen steps that separated that official building from the sidewalk and head toward him. It seemed like he had to request permission from one foot to put the other one forward, and that once on the sidewalk, it took him not just an interminable but an incomprehensible amount of time to walk across the crosswalk, agonizing the vehicles that now had a green light.
Several times, he was on the verge of running out of the bar where he had been waiting and going to take him by the arm, to say Dad, I’m here, or it’s just here, this is where we’re going, but a paralysis akin to that which had taken over his father seemed to have seized him, as well. So just as he had been watching, up until only a moment ago, the foam dissolving in his glass of beer, he watched him from behind the bar window come slowly toward him; he watched him cross the street, as a person crosses a rope bridge suspended from one side of a chasm to the other, and then stop again at the door to check for something that couldn’t possibly be missed, and afterward, but only after a before that did not now seem to retain any connection to its after, come in with an air of clumsiness and disorientation that were truly unprecedented in his father. It seemed that he had returned from those just barely two hours, which is how long it took, what with one thing and another, with an additional twenty years on him.