“Are you the engineer?”
“The engineer? What engineer? No, no, of course I’m not.”
“Oh, sorry. So he’s not on this train either. We’re waiting for the mines engineer, you see.”
They were from Hoyo de Manzanares. They must have been guards or miners. They were waiting for the train so as to receive their weekly wages perhaps or in the hope of finding work. They were waiting for an engineer. Apart from that brief exchange of remarks, they had approached Lorenzo as soon as they saw him. How odd. Out of all the other passengers who had arrived, those men had identified Lorenzo as the engineer. His cousin Isabel found the mistake most amusing. She smiled as if there were nothing else to do in the world but smile, because she was pleased that her cousin had come to see her and because she was ill.
Mistaken identities! What mysterious veil covers the eyes of the person who makes the mistake? What are they trying to tell us with that mistake? What path are they opening up for us? What mysterious essence in us encourages those erroneous questions?
People had been mistaking Lorenzo for someone else long before he even noticed.
“Do you own a hotel in Los Negrales?”
“You’ll have had your lunch, I suppose.”
“Hi, are you the jeweller from the shop on the corner?”
“Are you related to Señor Requena?”
“Heavens, is that you, Andresito!”
“You probably know Julia already.”
“Is your father called Antonio?”
“Did you do your degree in History or in Politics?”
“You look to me like you’re from Extremadura.”
Good grief! What a world of possibilities people offered him! He was capable of being called Lorenzo, of having his own life and relationships and, at the same time, filling other worlds, too, indeed overflowing them, and having a father called Antonio, being related to Requena, having a university degree, meeting and even marrying Julia and being a native of Extremadura like Hernán Cortés…
But he was just plain Lorenzo. The son of Pedro and Aurora. Born in León. Inhabitant of Madrid. A bookkeeper in Calle de Carretas. Resident in an obscure boarding house in Corredera Baja. He was Lorenzo. The kind of man who comes over all romantic when he sees a clean shirt folded neatly on a wardrobe shelf.
He was Lorenzo, who, on that particular morning, could not decide whether or not to buy a ticket for the football match and was strolling indecisively to and fro in the midday sun in Plaza de Canalejas. Some other men were hanging about, too. And walking slowly along next to him was a pale, very pretty young woman, her hands in her overcoat pockets and her spine slightly arched; she was wrapped up warmly, with a kind of feline grace, looking cold and delicate despite the sun. Lorenzo, strolling idly back and forth between two streets, glanced at her for a moment, then continued his pacing. Suddenly, at his back, he heard an indecipherable hubbub, a slight commotion, and noticed people hurrying to a spot immediately behind him. He turned. The young woman, looking even paler, almost waxen, was lying on the ground in a pose of deathly abandon, as if — or so it seemed — she had been laid low by the thunderbolt of being stood up. He stepped into the circle of six or seven people.
“Are you the boyfriend?” asked an older fellow with moustaches, who revealed himself to be a man of action and took charge of the situation.
“No…no…”
“You’re probably still in shock. Come on, help me! If she’s just fainted, that’s no problem, but if it’s her heart, which it might be… Take that arm. That’s it. You over there. Come on. Easy does it. Right, now what we want is a taxi. There’s one! She needs to be taken to the nearest first-aid post. Come on, man, in you get and don’t worry. Come on, lad!”
He felt someone giving him encouraging, affectionate pats on the back. Then someone else grabbed his arms and propelled him into the taxi. When the taxi moved off, the crowd of onlookers on the pavement discussing the incident suddenly increased in number.
He was alone in a taxi with a woman he didn’t even know. The taxi driver turned and asked drily:
“So what happened, then? Did she faint? Are you the boyfriend?”
He spoke slowly, with great aplomb, sarcastically savouring every word, as if he were accompanying his questions with a slow handclap. Lorenzo was troubled. People just wouldn’t listen. “Are you the boyfriend? Are you the boyfriend?” they kept asking. The boyfriend of this young woman! He stared at her. She had fine features, long, white, manicured hands. She might be in love or she might just be hungry. Her handbag was simple and in good taste, her overcoat thick, warm, elegant…
He had often thought about how other people’s mistakes offered him a new life. He had more chances than most of acquiring an alternative identity, of being mistaken for someone else. He could be any one of those mistakes. He demonstrated this by confirming both the question asked by that older man with the moustache and by that impertinent taxi driver: “Are you the boyfriend?”
Yes, he was Laura’s boyfriend, Laura being the young woman who had suffered that fainting fit, as transient and spectacular as rain in May. No one was in the least surprised when they got engaged, but he thought privately that some mistakes are like prophecies, mysterious and very troubling…
THE BOOKSTALL
THE STREETS OF THE CITY are like airways, wide-open doors that seek out our vitamin deficiencies and render us prone to catching colds. The streets of the city are good for nothing but wearing away the soles of our shoes, freezing our noses off, finding us a seamstress girlfriend to whom we can boast that our village has a telegraph office and provoking endless, tear-filled yawns and a kind of aggressive sadness that turns our teeth the colour of the winter sun. The boarding house filled Guillermo with a kind of neurotic wisdom. Guillermo was slowly going crazy and, if he hadn’t been a strong, serious-minded young man, many would have said that he was already stark staring mad. He played the harmonica and had a good ear for music. He made ox carts out of toothpicks and corks and gave them to Marianín, the landlady’s little boy. Every day, after lunch, Marianín would say:
“Go on, make me an ox cart, go on!”
And if Guillermo refused, Marianín would punch him with his hard, strong little fist. Guillermo didn’t always make him a cart. Sometimes it just wasn’t the right moment to do so, to recall those distant roads. Sometimes it was the moment to chew on a bit of wood, to bat at the light bulb with your hand or to fall asleep. Time was cyclical and various in the streets and rectilinear and monotonous in his room. Guillermo was under the illusion that he wasn’t using up time at all. He felt that he was being prepared for death in some other establishment, that he was heading for death in a different ox cart. Time didn’t touch or trouble him. He was hoping to beat time and gain eternity through sheer indifference or perhaps through sympathy. When June came around, he would read a few books and pass a few exams. Then, teeth gritted, he would wait to get the results before setting off by train for his village, where he would tramp the fields, drink the local wine and be happy. He had pale eyes, into which the world slipped very easily. He suffered from melancholia, the same kind of enduring melancholia as that suffered by the cricket or the old duck on the pond. He lacked only one thing in order to be happy, which is all anyone lacks. But Guillermo had the advantage that his one thing was very simple.
He found it one rainy afternoon at Juacho’s bookstall, as he was walking down the same street he walked down every day. The stall was propped against a convent wall and sold dog-eared old novels and sad magazines. It was made of four planks of wood and two battered crates covered by a small, dark piece of filthy canvas. The stall stank, was home to hundreds of small, wingless insects and resembled a boat wrecked on a cliff — the remains of Juacho’s shipwreck, because Juacho, that seller of detective novels, was a shipwreck victim, the shipwreck having occurred when he was thrown out of his house, but that’s another story. Juacho had the black bushy moustache of a stage villain or one of life’s tyrants. Leaning on his stall, he resembled a swarthy, hairy whore, a whore from the south. He had the body of a navvy, and his laughter was loud, wry and brazen. He laughed like a young picador. He had a harsh voice that gave off visible waves and filled the whole street, a voice that emerged from among the accumulated dust of all the imaginary police stations that appeared in those novels and from the occasional real police station too. However, he never talked about Scotland Yard, Sherlock Holmes, Maigret, Dog Savage, the Coyote, the FBI or about the suicidal Max Linder, the old star of stage and screen. When he spoke, what he said was pure Madrid.