Joanes tried to do his best at work, but things didn’t go as well as he or his superiors hoped they would. He felt out of place there, and pined for the post that never was at Robot Systems. He realized that he’d wanted it much more than he’d previously realized. He ended up convincing himself he’d been destined for that job and that now that it was out of his grasp, no other job would ever be right for him. Time and again, his initiatives at the company came to nothing.
After a couple of years, he was transferred to a secondary department whose main role was replacing the polyethylene covers on cables. His performance there also stood out for all the wrong reasons.
One evening, on his way home, he heard someone calling his name as he sat in a line of cars all waiting to reach the tollbooth. In the adjacent line, a driver was waving his arm, trying to catch Joanes’s attention, half his body hanging out of the car window. It turned out to be an old friend from the School of Engineering. They hadn’t seen each other since graduation. Yelling from car to car, they agreed to meet up in town for a few beers.
Things weren’t going so bad for his friend. He headed up a small air conditioning firm, where he acted as an intermediary between manufacturers and clients, and at the moment he found himself with more work than he could manage alone. He dropped into the conversation that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to have a partner with some technical know-how. Joanes didn’t take the hint, but that night he told his wife about it. It was true that he’d never seen himself at the helm of an air conditioning company, but the opportunity had come up at just the right moment, and it was pretty tempting — just two partners, no one above him, the chance to make decisions. .
As part of joining the company, he was required to invest some capital, capital he didn’t have. He spoke to his father, who gave him the money he’d been saving for his yacht. Joanes promised to repay him the moment he could.
For a while things went swimmingly, exactly as Joanes had hoped, and better. The business grew. He repaid his father the money he’d borrowed — although his father still didn’t buy himself the boat. And Joanes, his wife, and his daughter left the apartment they’d moved into after the wedding and rented a bigger one. Even then they didn’t imagine staying there forever. They began saving up to buy a house — one with a sea view.
But as the years went by, his friend became more and more distrustful and distant. He avoided Joanes outside work hours. He assigned himself all the business trips, as if he wanted to spend as little time as possible in the office. Things went on like this until, one day, he revealed his plan to up sticks and move to a bigger city. He offered his part of the business to Joanes, who could either take it over entirely or risk someone else buying it, someone he might not get along with as well. He talked it through with his wife, and the two of them together opted for the former. They dipped into their house savings, and Joanes, once again, asked his dad for help.
Suddenly he owned one hundred percent of the business.
And then things took a turn for the worse. The jobs began to dry up, as if his ex-partner had been the only one the clients trusted. The formerly profitable business was being run into the ground, and in a matter of months it was on the cusp of insolvency. Joanes began to think that perhaps he’d had nothing to do with its previous success, that it had all been thanks to his ex-partner. Now that he, and he alone, was at the helm, the whole thing was falling apart. None of his efforts came to anything, just as had happened at the telephone cable company.
Over all those years, he’d never forgotten his visit to see the professor, but when the company began to go from bad to worse, the memory came back on a daily basis to haunt him. He no longer wondered what the professor had seen in him to discourage his hiring at Robot Systems; the problem was perfectly clear from the way everything had gone for him since. Now he asked himself how the professor had managed to see it, how he’d come by his power of prescience. And he asked himself, too, if during the little time that they’d spent there on that balcony, from the few words that they’d exchanged, the professor had perceived anything more than a bleak professional future.
The nights he couldn’t sleep, when all those thoughts came into his head, spinning in an endless spiral, his self-respect kicked in as a kind of defense mechanism.
Accurate as the professor’s intuition might have been, it didn’t allow him to see into the future. If he hadn’t recommended Joanes for Robot Systems, perhaps it was because he wanted the post for some family member or friend, or perhaps for an even more banal reason, like, for instance, him not liking some physical feature of Joanes’s or because of the geographical implications of his last name.
But not even this idea offered him any relief, because beyond any of the possible reasons the professor might have had at the time, Joanes, and Joanes alone, was responsible for his pitiful career.
And a second later he’d tell himself no, that he couldn’t be the only one responsible. That there must be someone else to blame, someone to share some of the responsibility. And his old don fitted the bill just perfectly.
And in this way the professor became the virtual stooge for Joanes’s problems. During their brief encounter on the balcony, he hadn’t merely foreseen the unfortunate future that lay in store for the boy who’d once been his student; he — the professor — had provoked it. For whatever reason, he had condemned him in some way, cursed him.
Joanes let himself think this way. And in time he came to believe it. The professor became a vessel for all his frustrations and rage. And the vessel gradually filled up, and its contents grew more and more viscous, until eventually they became as hard as stone; the professor was no longer a mere emotional device, a fantasy for self-exoneration, he’d become the one true culprit of everything bad that had ever happened to Joanes.
The room measured four by five feet. While it had seemed big enough at first, now it gave Joanes the impression that there was barely space to move. He stood waiting, unsure what to do. The professor was sitting in the only available seat, which he’d put next to the bed where his wife was resting. She’d changed into a pale pink dress, as much like a hospital gown as the previous one. She looked a little better. Her husband had helped her freshen up. On the floor there was a washbowl with soapy water and a sponge inside. The professor had also gotten ahold of a pillow, and his wife was resting, her head upright, against it.
“That strange girl, the owner’s daughter, came by,” said the professor. “She put the hammock up.”
Joanes would have more than happily thrown himself into the hammock, but he rejected the idea; the stance would have seemed too indolent, insulting even, given the circumstances. Instead of lying down, he went over to the window and remained there, on his feet. Apart from the chair where the professor was sitting, there was just one other seat — the wheelchair. He didn’t even entertain the idea.
“How are you doing?” he asked the woman.
She cocked her head in a gesture that could have meant anything.
The professor was holding a damp handkerchief, which every now and then he used to cool her forehead. His face betrayed no emotion whatsoever. He wore the same vacant expression he used to in class when he would fall suddenly into one of his absorbed silences. If someone had asked Joanes what the professor might be feeling, he’d have said “exhaustion” or “anger” long before “concern.”
A few minutes later, his wife began to make fitful snoring sounds, and the professor got to his feet, taking care not to wake her. He moved over to the window. Joanes and he both looked out.