“Come over here, this is worth seeing.”
He gestured for me to open the door. I looked inside and immediately felt a gust of icy, deathly air on my face that made it difficult to breathe.
“The best refrigeration chambers in the country.”
His breath was a frozen mist, but for the first time, I observed a warm spark of enthusiasm in his eyes. We were in the secret storeroom of a tribe of giants — the shelves were packed with monumental milk cartons, mammoth bottles of oil, colossal jars of mayonnaise. There were crates holding tons of carrots and cabbages, and blocks of butter and chocolate enough to build an edible Tower of Babel. From great hooks attached to the ceiling rails dangled the red-and-white-streaked carcasses of entire pieces of livestock, like prehistoric hunting trophies.
I was getting goose bumps, and not just because of the cold. The memory of old Pedro on my trail began to seem confused, or secondary. Any second now, like in the fairy tale, the legitimate masters of all this would arrive to claim what was rightfully theirs and punish us for snooping.
The critic was engrossed in fingering some enormous pomegranates that had split open. I retreated to the door and spoke to him from there.
“I’m going back upstairs, if you don’t mind.”
He was lifting a scarlet pomegranate seed as big as a grape to his lips, and he didn’t raise his eyes. I don’t know if he only affected not to hear me or if he really was too far away to catch my mumbling.
I turned and walked briskly through the kitchens, toward the exit. I could hear the squeak of his wheelchair behind me, and I wanted to leave before he could say anything.
But I was cut off before reaching the door. With perfect punctuality, obeying my fears to the letter, old Pedro and his imperturbable smile stepped between me and the door. We breathed heavily for a moment without speaking, face to face.
He was the first to recover from the surprise. Actually, I think he still wasn’t in the least surprised.
I looked behind me and couldn’t see the critic anywhere. The refrigeration chamber was open and empty; the hanging lamps shone more implacably than ever on the metal surfaces. A last spasm of misplaced dignity or demented politeness stopped me from saying anything. I found myself stepping backwards, keeping the other man in sight.
He stood motionless. I backed away as far as the entrance to the enormous freezer, once more feeling the icy draft on the back of my neck. I don’t recall whether he was serious or smiling when he strode toward me. I was rooted to the spot. Instinctively, I raised an arm.
And through the fingers of my outstretched hand, barely a yard away, so that I could practically feel his breath on my face, I witnessed a strange, almost slapstick scene. I saw him stumble and lose his balance and take an almighty leap toward me, a flailing but not entirely graceless leap. The open corners of his jacket flapped as though helping to propel his flight, raining keys, coins, papers, and cigarettes in the air. Part of me cheered the precision, the unerring accuracy of that pirouette. I felt the delight of the child who discovers that sometimes, very occasionally, reality will try its hand at cartoon loops and ricochets.
I stepped sideways to dodge him. He didn’t so much as brush against me. I only grasped how powerful a force was concealed in the inertia of that stumble that looked so comically fake when, after an eternal second of unsightly windmilling, old Pedro landed with a loud, painful-sounding crash on the floor of the refrigeration chamber.
He lay prone and pensive, then moved a tentative hand like a blind man making sure the way is clear before taking the next step. I imagined him to be as dumbfounded as I was. Then came the euphoria inevitably brought on by other people falling. I wanted to giggle; at least I felt I ought to want to.
I turned around and scanned the kitchen for the vanished critic. Behind the last metal plinth in the middle of the room, I spotted the wheelchair footrest sticking out, and two small, malformed feet, now slumped off their saddle and twisted to the right. The brake release clicked and the chair rolled forward until we could see each other’s faces again. His had no doubt been illuminated by the most consummate of all his Mephistophelean smiles, but I only caught the final shadow of it. He used his hands to reposition his ankles, and when he finally looked at me, his expression was sober.
“Close the door.”
He gave the order calmly, he seemed almost put out, as if it were hardly worth pointing out to me what the most practical course of action was.
There was no sound from inside the freezer. Old Pedro was slowly levering himself up, without grumbling. He still had his back to the kitchens. The door made no grumble, either, as it moved around its hinges. It was nearly four inches thick, but I found it surprisingly light. One soft push was all it took for it to settle into its frame with a tiny, almost ridiculous click. There was no handle on the inside. As closing scenes go, this one struck me as something of a letdown, a sign that reality was reverting to its usual, sensible ways and hastening to draw a veil over an unexpected pirouette it was already beginning to feel ashamed of.
Were it not for the contents of his pockets littered over the floor, nobody would have credited that it was only a moment since the looming figure of old Pedro had filled the whole kitchen. Beneath the unforgiving glare of the ceiling lights, among the small change and bits of folded paper, glinted the piolet-shaped key ring with a key attached to the handle.
The critic was looking at it, too. Our gazes met, but I couldn’t detect the slightest shred of complicity in his eyes. Or even of curiosity, truth be told. When he spoke — and he spoke immediately — it wasn’t to ask questions.
“That service elevator goes up to the rooms.”
I scooped up the key from the floor and walked over to the elevator door embedded in the wall that was at a right angle to the line of refrigeration chambers. When I pressed the button, it opened meekly and without a sound. I stood still and waited for him to go in first.
I felt an urge to peek through the porthole into the chamber where old Pedro was. But it seemed a mean-spirited thing to do, and I didn’t want my page neighbor to think badly of me. If I’d been alone, I might have gone ahead. I can’t deny that I would have enjoyed trying out on old Pedro the expression that the boy from the cheap hotel had directed at me just before he got into the car: a look utterly without shame, but also without mockery; a friendly look, somehow, suggesting he take things as they come and bow to the inevitable, like a good sport. Perhaps the very look, in fact, that old Pedro himself would have turned on me if he’d looked out just then from the other side of the door.
Entering the elevator, the critic laughed uproariously the way he does at newspaper dinners. It was not, I discovered again, an infectious laugh.
“Up we go, then? I believe everything is in order down here.”
Luckily, he stopped cackling when the doors closed. We both became serious, and I checked old Pedro’s key ring — the number inscribed on it was 906, and 9 was the last floor marked on the panel.
I hesitated before pressing any buttons, and he noticed. In the wake of our adventure, a kind of awkward intimacy was rapidly forming between us. Now that we had ceased to be anything of the sort, we were suddenly like a couple of real neighbors. The kind who hardly know each other and are thrown together in an elevator for a ride that goes on too long.
“I’m going to the second floor.”
He broke the silence at last, in a perfect imitation of the neutral tone with which people say that sort of thing in elevators. I say “imitation” because I sneaked a glance at him sideways — again the way people tend to in elevators — and noted that although he looked serious, a last spark of merriment was still dancing in his eyes. It occurred to me that perhaps, once again, I was the only one experiencing this neighborly awkwardness.