Or he could enter the shop, go straight up to the woman and propose a bribe. Or else, frankly, without further ado, with no cutesy preambles, he could adopt a straightforward approach and pour out his troubles, tell her all about his father’s secret affair and the enigma of the woman’s voice that has brought him to this place smelling of lavender and steam. Whichever ploy he finally chose, Andrés emerged from the dry cleaner’s with a name, address, and phone number. The woman is called Inés. Inés Pacheco.
One day, when he was a boy, he followed his father. He was fifteen at the time. Well, everyone has been fifteen once. He can’t remember why he did it, there are no clues, no explanations. His memory offers him only a feeling, something resembling rancor, an aggressive, piercing pain. Andrés is crouched down in the shelter of the dusk, spying. He’s hiding behind a truck being loaded up with crates of vegetables. There are carrots, celery, zucchini, and two crates full of red onions. In the crate at the back he can see only the green fingers of some leeks. His eyes take in this landscape, peer through the windshield, and finally reach the other side of the sidewalk. That’s where his father is. He’s talking to a couple of men. Andrés is a little disappointed. He has a fantasy about his father having a secret affair with another woman, who has at last replaced the memory of his mother.
He had waited patiently near the building where his father worked and then followed him, just like in the films, always keeping a few yards behind, occasionally changing sidewalks to avoid being seen. His father went to have a coffee with his usual friends, then made his way to that alleyway and those two men. He took some bills out of his wallet and offered them to the men. They exchanged glances. They didn’t seem at all pleased. One of the men, the taller one, shook his head. The three of them talked briefly. Andrés was getting more and more tense. He was afraid something would happen. Suddenly, with no warning, one of the men punched his father in the stomach. A short, sharp blow. Javier Miranda doubled up, the breath knocked out of him. The other man, almost in the same movement, as if they were working in tandem, swiftly brought up his knee and struck Javier Miranda in the face. Andrés couldn’t move. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to do too many things at once. He wanted to race over and punch those two men, he wanted to run away, he wanted to cry out, to call for help, he wished he’d never followed his father. The two men took his father’s wallet and watch and walked quickly away. Andrés stayed where he was, stock still and frozen behind the truck, while his father struggled to his feet, moaning and wiping the blood from his mouth. Not even then did Andrés dare to go over and help him. His fear of giving himself away, of revealing that he’d been following him and why, was too strong. His father limped away. In his memory, Andrés’s eyes are red. The memory smells of red onions.
That night, his father came home late. Andrés pretended to be asleep. The following morning, he told Andrés some silly story about tripping and colliding with a door in the office. That’s how he explained the cuts to his eyebrow and mouth. They never talked about it again.
Nevertheless, Andrés remembers it now, on the fourth floor of a small building in the old part of Chacao. He’s standing outside the door to apartment 4C. He has just rung the bell. After a few moments, he hears or thinks he hears the sound of footsteps. He could almost swear it’s the sound of sandals approaching. The door opens gently and there she is. Or so Andrés thinks. She must be Inés. She’s a woman of about sixty. She was obviously very beautiful once and still has all the elegance of a once-beautiful woman. She has very dark shiny hair. She looks at him without saying a word, she doesn’t even seem surprised. She merely waits.
“Good afternoon, are you Inés Pacheco?”
“Yes,” says the woman.
What follows is silence, because Andrés doesn’t know how to continue. He’s run out of script, he suddenly finds that he has no idea what to say, and is now hanging from the edge of this scene, afraid he might drop abruptly into the void. The woman is still looking at him, waiting, increasingly bewildered.
Then after a pause, Andrés asks, perplexed: “Don’t you know me? Don’t you know who I am?”
The woman studies him more closely, as if trying to locate Andrés’s face in her memory.
“No,” she says quite naturally.
“I’m Andrés, Javier Miranda’s son.”
Only then does the woman react, and she seems to tense slightly, as if something inside her had cracked. But she still says nothing and makes no move to invite him in. She remains silent, looking at him. Andrés merely watches expectantly.
“I think there’s been some mistake,” she says at last. Her tone of voice is warm, but she pronounces each word rather too exactly, too precisely. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
And without letting Andrés add anything further, or giving him a chance to react, she gently closes the door. Andrés stands in silence for a few seconds, taken aback. Then he hears, or thinks he hears, the sound of sandals approaching and then moving off again.
The situation is getting worse all the time. Karina arrives at the office now at half past six in the morning, when the cleaners are just starting work, when the grime and the shadows are still part of the dawn itself. She leaves at eight o’clock in the evening, two hours after finishing her day’s work. Dr. Miranda has urged her to take a vacation too, but she refuses. She watches the time pass on the computer screen, always waiting for the unexpected to happen, for a new e-mail suddenly to appear.
“You’re going mad,” says Adelaida.
“Typhus is less contagious than hysteria,” wrote Joseph Roth. Adelaida doesn’t know these words; she has never read and never will read Joseph Roth, but this is more or less what she thinks too.
“Look at you!” she cries. “Look at the state you’re in over that guy. He’s passed his sickness on to you!”
“It’s your fault,” says Karina in her own defense, albeit rather unconvincingly. “You were the one who persuaded me to start writing to him!”
“That has nothing to do with it. Don’t try and put the blame on me. You’re the one who let that madman poison you.”
Is that the right word? Has she been poisoned? Karina herself wonders the same thing several times a day. It not only has to do with her response to Ernesto Durán’s absence; there’s something worse, something she hasn’t even dared confess to Adelaida, something she may not even want to put into words.
It happened for the first time two Wednesdays ago. On her way home, Karina stopped at a video shop. She thought that perhaps a film would help her overcome the all too frequent bouts of insomnia that had been troubling her lately. She went into the shop at seven o’clock at night, the place was packed, and she was afraid there wouldn’t be any new films available. She went straight to the shelves marked “Comedy.” Perhaps she just needed something to distract her, perhaps that would help her to sleep. However, as she advanced slowly down the narrow aisle, running her eyes over the titles of the films, she began to feel nervous, strangely nervous. It wasn’t something she could describe clearly, but suddenly, the shop seemed much too small; suddenly, she felt hemmed in, unable to move freely, in need of air. A shudder ran through her. Almost a faint electric shock, like a distant nerve tweaking. The voices of the other customers appeared to come at her from varying distances and at different volumes, almost as if they were circling her or dancing, suspended from the shop’s suffocating ceiling. She felt unsteady. Her left eyelid was twitching. As if it had a life of its own. As if it were independent. Her forehead felt cold and clammy too. Her saliva was like sand, difficult to swallow. She couldn’t help thinking again of Ernesto Durán. She grabbed the video that was closest at hand and walked briskly over to the queue at the register.