‘Will you stop shouting?’ the woman said.
She went into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.
Nicolas interrupted his song as if someone had switched off his current. There’s a limit to surprise, he thought. Over that limit there’s inhibition. He stood in the middle of the hallway, not knowing exactly what to do.
The woman opened the bathroom door and poked her head out.
‘Hey, Alfredo,’ she started to say, but she stopped herself and stared at him with interest. ‘Store’s open,’ she said, pointing at Nicolas’ open fly.
Nicolas rearranged his underwear. He couldn’t help admiring the cool head he was keeping under such extraordinary circumstances. He tried imagining the scene when he would tell all this to Segismundo. ‘And then an old cow came out of the toilet and called me Alfredo.’ ‘Sure, and then you both started to sing the drinking song from Traviata, right?’ ‘Look, I swear, there she was, I could have touched her.’
‘So?’ the woman asked. But something in the way Nicolas was acting must have worried her, because she changed her tone of voice. ‘You feeling sick, baby?’
‘No.’ Nicolas replied. ‘No.’
He realised that the woman was approaching him, her hand stretched out in front of her with the unmistakable maternal purpose of feeling his forehead to see if he was running a fever.
‘No, no,’ Nicolas said again. He arched his body backwards like a soccer player about to hit a ball with his head, turned around, walked away and threw himself into the bathroom with such violence that the woman screamed.
First he looked at himself in the mirror. He needed to think things over, quietly. No, what I need to do is wash my face. He washed his face, his neck. Then he put his whole head under the tap. He reasoned that a rational explanation — based on such limited verifiable data — of something as irrational as what had just taken place would imply that he was somehow accepting the irrational. He was certainly capable of not letting himself be deluded by appearances. He dried himself energetically, ran his fingers through his hair and began to stretch out his hand to reach his toothbrush.
What he saw made him stop his hand before it reached its goal. Five toothbrushes. Though he could never have described the toothbrushes used by his parents and his brother, he could nevertheless confirm three things: a) they were not these; b) there had always been only four toothbrushes in the bathroom; and c) his own, with the rubber tip — highly recommended for the prevention of paradentosis — wasn’t there.
He didn’t try to understand. Instead, he thought of doing something more practicaclass="underline" getting dressed. Being in his underwear added a difficulty that it would be wise to overcome. He combed his hair. Hanging from a nail on the door (he had never before seen a nail there) he found a pair of jeans and a shirt. He accepted the fact that they weren’t his. The end justifies the means, he thought a little incoherently as he was dressing. He noticed that the shirt and the jeans fit him fine.
He came out of the bathroom feeling nervous. He didn’t have a clear idea of how to behave, what to do. Should he call that woman? Above all, what should he call her? She had said to him that his ‘store’ was open. Also, he did have a fever. He sighed and tried not to think about what he was going to do.
‘Mom,’ he said.
After a few seconds the bedroom door opened a crack, and the head of the blonde woman peered through the opening.
Nicolas took a few steps towards her.
‘Lady,’ he said decisively, ‘first let me tell you that you are not my mother. I also want to know the meaning of all this, and where,’ he coughed briefly, ‘where I can find my mother.’
He felt one of his eyelids twitching, which bothered him no end.
The woman took a deep breath (she was certainly very fat), pursed her lips and turned around. She spoke to someone inside the bedroom.
‘So?’ she asked. ‘Now what do you say?’
‘What, what do I say?’ a hoarse voice answered, a man’s voice. ‘I say that I’ve been asking for a cup of tea for over an hour, that’s what I say.’
The woman took another deep breath, let out a sound like hmm and turned again towards Nicolas.
‘Look here,’ she said. ‘Your father’s got his gout again. And you bloody well know he’s got his gout again. And on top of everything you give me this monkey business.’
Nicolas stared at her in astonishment.
‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ he said, with such nerve or subtle humour that he was truly sorry that, here in the hallway, he was the only person capable of appreciating it.
The words seemed to have some effect on the woman. She came out of the bedroom, closed the door and approached Nicolas with the vague attitude of a stage conspirator.
‘It’s terrible, baby,’ she whispered in confidential tones. ‘Really terrible. This and that, the armchairs, I don’t know — everything. This isn’t a life, baby.’ She pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her dressing gown (now she was wearing a plum-coloured dressing gown) and blew her nose. ‘And then last night. You didn’t hear the fuss?’ She paused but not long enough for Nicolas to answer. ‘Chelita came home at six; she’s a slut your sister, knowing how he flares up. I swear, I thought he’d drop dead then and there. You really didn’t hear a thing?’
Nicolas made an ambiguous movement with his head.
‘Well,’ the woman said. ‘You can imagine. I swear, I really swear, there are times I just want to leave you all and run away. Are you going out?’ she asked, startled.
Nicolas observed that, with no warning whatsoever, the woman had changed her tone of voice, as if her last question belonged to an entirely different scene.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Oh, good,’ the woman said. ‘Thank God. When you come back, bring me a bag of corn flour from the corner store, Brillo pads, two bags of milk and small noodles to put in the soup. Ask the man if the vaseline arrived. He’ll know.’
Just for a second, Nicolas lost his foothold. Then he stepped back on firm ground, like a conqueror. He had determined that, henceforth, he would not lose hold of the situation.
‘Can’t Chelita go?’ he said.
The woman sighed.
‘She went to bed at six or later,’ she said. ‘You think there’s a chance in hell she’ll get up before one?’
Through the closed door they heard the man with the hoarse voice ask for his tea.
‘What did I tell you?’ the woman said. ‘Sometimes I just want to leave the whole lot of you and run away somewhere.’ She pointed at Nicolas’ feet. ‘Put your shoes on,’ she said and went out through the opening that led into the dining room.
As Nicolas entered his room, he noticed that, where the bookcase had always stood, there was now a chest of drawers with shelves in the lower half. He found shoes under the bed. The socks were inside each of the shoes, carefully rolled into balls. Nicolas reasoned that someone who takes such care in stashing away his socks probably always wears clean clothes; he sat on the bed and put on the shoes. He found that they fitted him perfectly.
On the back of a Louis XV — style chair he found a sweater and a coat. Without knowing why, when he saw that they also fitted him, he remembered the story of Goldilocks. In the coat pocket he tucked away two hundred pesos which he had seen on a sort of bedside table, then he left.
It was a grey morning, rather cold. Diaz Velez Street was on his left; Cangallo on his right; the upholstery store right next to the house; the mattress store, La Estrella, just across the road. At the corner Nicolas said hello to the newspaper man, and the newspaper man said hello back. It occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to go home, check that everything was fine and stop all this nonsense. But he immediately abandoned that idea. If everything was indeed fine, the compulsion to return would only have meant that his mental state was abnormal. And if, on the contrary, the woman was there, Nicolas would find himself once again in the middle of a situation with no visible solution, a situation from which he needed to escape. So he carried out his purpose to go to the Computer Centre and caught a 26 bus on Corrientes.