“Is that stuff safe?” Leonardo Barroso asked.
“Very safe. It’s biodegradable. Once it’s used, it decomposes into innocuous elements,” his Yankee partners answered.
“It sure better. I put a clause in the contract making you responsible for work-related illnesses. You could die of cancer here just by breathing.”
“Come on, Don Leonardo,” laughed the Yankees. “You’re tougher than we are.”
“Welcome a tough Mexican,” concluded the businessman.
“You’re one tough hombre!” cheered the gringos.
She walked with a feeling of thankfulness from her apartment on East 67th Street to the building on Park Avenue. She had spent Friday night in seclusion, giving orders to the doorman to let no one up, especially not her ex-husband, whose insistent voice she listened to all night on the answering machine as it begged to see her. Listen, sweetheart, let me talk to you, we were very hasty, we should have thought things through more, waited until our wounds healed. You know I don’t want to hurt you, but life sometimes gets complicated, and I always knew, even in the worst moments, that I had you, I could come back to you, you would understand, you would forgive me, because if the situation had been the other way around, I would have forgiven …
“No!” the desperate woman shouted at the telephone, at the voice of her ex-husband, invisible to her. “No! You would have gotten even as cruelly as you could. In your usual selfish way, you’d have enslaved me with your forgiveness.”
She spent a fearful night pacing back and forth in the small apartment, nicely appointed, even lavish in many details — pacing back and forth between the picture window, whose wool drapes she’d opened to give herself over completely to the sumptuous snow scene, while the distorting eye of the Cyclops at the door protects people from eternal observation, the city’s perpetual threat. The crystal hole in the door that allows the hall to be seen, allows one to see without being seen but to see a distorted, submarine world, as if through the blind eye of a tired shark that can’t allow itself the luxury of rest lest it drown, sink to the bottom of the sea. Sharks have to keep moving eternally to survive.
She felt no fear the following morning. The storm was over and the city had been dusted with white powder, as if for a party. It was three weeks before Christmas and the whole town was decked out, covered with lights, shining like a huge mirror. Her husband never rose before nine. It was seven when she left to walk to the office. She was thankful that the weekend would give her a chance to lock herself away and get something done, catch up with her paperwork, dictate instructions without telephone calls, faxes, the jokes of her office mates, the whole New York office ritual, the obligation to be simultaneously indifferent and witty, to have a wisecrack or joke at the ready, to know how to end conversations and phone calls brusquely, to never touch anyone — especially that, to never touch one another physically, never a hug, not even a social kiss on the cheek, bodies at a distance, eyes avoiding eyes … Good. Her husband would not find her here. He had no idea … He’d go insane calling her, trying to worm his way into her apartment.
That morning, she was a woman who felt free. She’d resisted the outside world. Her husband, too, was now outside her life, expelled from her physical and emotional interior space. She resisted the crowds that absorbed her every morning as she walked to work, making her feel she was part of a herd, individually insignificant, stripped of importance: weren’t the hundreds of people walking down Park from 67th to 66th Street at any moment of the morning doing something as important — or unimportant — as what she was doing, or perhaps even more important or less important.
There were no happy faces.
There were no faces proud of what they were doing.
There were no faces satisfied with their jobs.
Because the faces were also working, squinting, gesticulating, rolling their eyes, feigning horror, expressing real shock, skepticism, false attentiveness, mockery, irony, authority. Rarely, she told herself, as she walked rapidly, enjoying the solitude of the snow-covered city, rarely did she show them or they her a true spontaneous face, without the panoply of acquired gestures to please, convince, intimidate, impose respect, share intrigues.
Alone, inviolable, self-possessed, in control of her whole body and soul, inside and out. The cold morning, the solitude, a sure step, elegant, her own person — she was given all that on the walk from her apartment to her office.
The building was full of workers. She’d forgotten. She laughed at herself. The day she’d chosen to be alone in the office was the day they were going to clean the interior glass. They had given advanced warning. She’d forgotten. Smiling, she went to the top floor without looking at anyone, like a bird who confuses its cage for freedom. She walked through the corridor on the fortieth floor — glass walls, glass doors, they lived suspended in midair; even the floors were made of an opaque glass, the tyrant of an architect having forbidden carpeting in his crystal masterpiece.
She entered her office, located between the glass corridor and the interior atrium. It did not have a view of the street. The polluted air of the street did not circulate here; there was only air-conditioning. The building was sealed, isolated, the way she wanted to feel today. The door opened onto the corridor. But the entire glass wall faced the atrium, and at times she liked to feel that her gaze fell forty stories, transforming on the way into a snowflake, a feather, a butterfly.
Crystal above the corridor. Glass on both sides, so the two offices next to hers were also transparent, obliging her colleagues to be somewhat circumspect in their physical habits while nevertheless maintaining a certain degree of naturalness in their behavior. Taking off their shoes, putting their feet up on the desk — everyone was allowed to do that, but the men could scratch their armpits or between their legs, while the women couldn’t. But the women could look at themselves in the mirror and fix their makeup. The men— with some exceptions — couldn’t do that.
She looked straight ahead at the atrium and saw him.
Lisandro Chávez was alone on the plank they raised to the top floor. They’d asked everyone if they suffered from vertigo, and he’d recalled that he sometimes did — once on a Ferris wheel he’d had the urge to jump into the void — but he’d kept his mouth shut.
At first, busy arranging his mops and cleaning devices, but most of all concerned about making himself comfortable, he did not see her and did not look in. His objective was the glass. Everyone supposed there would be no one working in the building on Saturday.
She saw him first and took no notice of him. She saw him without seeing him. She saw him the way one sees or no longer sees the people fate assigns one when one rides an elevator, gets on a bus, or takes a seat at the movies. She smiled. Her job as an advertising executive obliged her to take planes to meet clients in a nation the size of the universe. She feared nothing so much as a talkative person seated next to her, the kind who tells you his miseries, his profession, how much money he makes — the kind who ends up, after three Bloody Marys, with his hand on your knee. She smiled again. She’d fallen asleep many times with a stranger next to her, both of them wrapped in their airplane blankets like virginal lovers.