STRATEGIES AGAINST SLEEPING
When the time came to leave, Señora Eloísa still considered herself fortunate to be returning to Azul by car. The travelling salesman — who worked for her daughter’s future father-in-law — had arrived punctually to pick her up at the hotel and seemed very proper; he had shown great care in placing her little crocodile skin suitcase on the back seat and even apologised about the car being so full of merchandise. A pointless apology, in the opinion of Señora Eloísa, who always found the exchange of pleasantries with new acquaintances trying. As the car pulled away, she too felt obliged to make trivial remarks about the suffocating heat, prompting an exchange of opinions on low pressure, the probability of rain and the good that rain would do to the country, this last observation naturally leading to the fields of Señora Eloísa’s own husband, the trials of being a landowner, the highs and lows of life as a travelling salesman and the various attributes of many other occupations. By the time they reached Cañuelas, Señora Eloísa had already spoken — amiably at first, but with a growing reluctance — about the characters of her three children, the eldest one’s impending marriage, assembling a cheese board, good and bad cholesterol and the best kind of diet for a cocker spaniel. She also knew a few details about the man’s life, details which, before their arrival in San Miguel del Monte — and after a blessedly prolonged silence — she could no longer even recall. She was tired. She had lent back against the headrest, closed her eyes and begun to feel herself lulled by the low, soporific hum of the engine, evoking cicadas during scorching afternoon siestas Do you mind if I smoke. The words seemed to reach her through an oily vapour and with an effort she opened her eyes.
‘No, please do.’
She looked sleepily at the man who was driving, whose name she had completely forgotten; was it Señor Ibáñez? Señor Velazco? Mister Magic Bubble? Master Belch?
‘A great driving companion.’
This time her eyes sprang open in alarm. Who? Who was a great companion? Looking around her for clues she found nothing: only the man smoking with his eyes open unnecessarily wide. The cigarette, of course. She made an effort to be lively.
‘Everyone tells me they’re wonderful for clearing the head.’
Nobody had told her any such thing, it had been a mistake not to take the coach back, by now she would have been stretched out in the seat and sleeping peacefully. She half-closed her eyes and thought that she could, up to a point, do the same here. Lean against the headrest and go to sleep. Just like that, how delicious: to fall asleep and not wake up until a godsend. Did she hear him speak? Had the man just said ‘a godsend’? So was he never going to stop talking?
‘… because the truth is that tedium makes you tired.’
A joyful spark ignited within Señora Eloísa.
‘Unbearably tired,’ she agreed. She thought the man would realise now that she needed to sleep.
‘And it’s not only the tedium. Shall I tell you something?’ said the man. ‘Last night I didn’t sleep a wink. Because of the mosquitoes. Did you know there’s been an invasion of mosquitoes?’
Please be quiet, she cried out, silently.
‘It’s because of this heat,’ she said. ‘We need a good storm.’
‘The storm is on its way — look,’ the man nodded towards a dark mass approaching from the south. ‘In a couple of minutes we’re going to have ourselves a proper drenching, I can tell you.’
‘Yes a proper drenching.’
The need to sleep was now a painful sensation against which she had no desire to fight. She let her head loll back again, almost obscenely, her eyelids falling heavily. Little by little she disengaged herself from the heat and the man and surrendered to the monotonous rattle of the car.
But I don’t mind the rain if I’m well rested. She let the words slide over her head, almost without registering them. The thing is that today, for some reason, I feel as if I could drop off at any minute. Was some state of alert functioning within her somnolence? The splattering of the first raindrops seemed to trigger it.
‘Shall I tell you something? Today, if I hadn’t had good company and someone to chat to me, I wouldn’t even have come out.’
She didn’t open her eyes. She said crisply:
‘I don’t know that I am particularly good company.’
Fury had brought her almost fully awake, but she wasn’t about to give this man the pleasure of a conversation: she pretended to be dozing off. Immediately the clatter of rain started up, like a demolition. For a few minutes that was all she heard and gradually she really did begin to fall asleep.
‘Please, talk to me.’
The words burst into her dream like shouting. With difficulty Señora Eloísa opened her eyes.
‘Well just look at this rain,’ she said.
‘Terrible,’ said the man.
Already it was her turn again.
‘Do you like the rain?’ she asked.
‘Not much,’ said the man.
He certainly wasn’t helping. All he wanted was for her to talk and keep him awake. Barely anything.
‘I like it, I like it very much,’ she said, fearing that this avenue of conversation was leading nowhere; quickly she added: ‘but not this kind.’
In a garret, I’d be an artist or a dancer, half-starving, and there’d be a handsome man with a beard, loving me as I had never imagined it was possible to be loved, and rain drumming on a tin roof.
‘Not this kind,’ she repeated vigorously (she needed to give herself time to find another direction for the conversation: the tiredness was leading her into dead ends). On an impulse she said: ‘Once I wrote an essay about the rain.’ She laughed. ‘I mean, how silly I sound, I must have written lots of essays about the rain, it’s hardly an unusual theme.’
She waited. After a few seconds the man said:
‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’
But he didn’t elaborate.
Señora Eloísa applied herself to thinking up new avenues of conversation. She said:
‘I used to like writing essays,’ luckily she was beginning to feel talkative. ‘A teacher once told me I had an artistic temperament. Originality. That essay I was telling you about, it’s odd that I should suddenly remember it. I mean, it’s odd that I should have said “once I wrote an essay on the rain,” don’t you think, when in fact I wrote so many’—the secret was to keep talking without pause—‘and that I shouldn’t have had any idea why I told you that when I did and that now I do. I mean, I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but now I am sure that when I said “once I wrote an essay on the rain,” I meant the beggars’ kind rather than any other.’
She paused, proud of herself: she had brought the conversation to an interesting juncture. She would be willing to bet that now the man was going to ask her: Beggars? That would certainly make her job easier.
But no, apparently the word had not caught the man’s attention. She, on the other hand, had struck a rich seam because now she clearly remembered the entire essay. This was just what she needed: a concrete subject, something to talk on and on about, even while half-asleep. She said:
‘Here’s a curious thing: in that essay I said that rain was like a blessing for beggars. Why would I have thought something like that?’
‘That is curious,’ agreed the man.
Señora Eloísa felt encouraged.
‘I had my own explanation for it, quite a logical one. I said that beggars live under a blazing sun, I mean, I suppose that I imagined it was always summer for them, they were burned by the sun and then, when the rain came, it was like a blessing, a “beggars’ holiday,” I think I called it.’