The dreams had shaken Senyor Ardèvol so much that he had to flee. He rushed to Arenys de Mar to visit Aran. He told his friend that he needed to take a long trip; his mental health was at stake, but the idea of embarking on a trip alone made him anxious. Aran had smiled, poured him a large glass of cognac, and confessed that he had had a longstanding interest in Gothic cathedrals and had wanted to visit Chartres for some time. His friend’s need for a trip was the enticement he sought for his own journey.
The two men arrived in the village where they had resolved to spend the night. Everything Senyor Ardèvol saw, the streets along which he walked, the houses on either side of the streets, the portals, the balconies, everything, everything, seemed strangely familiar. He did not mention any of this to his friend, but Aran must have sensed that something was troubling him because he asked him several times if he was unwell. Senyor Ardèvol responded that the journey by car had fatigued him, but that a good night’s sleep should restore him. He had a light dinner and fell asleep shortly after retiring. The sheets had a pleasant smell of old-fashioned wash — lavender, he thought — and the pillow and the thick duvet were stuffed with feathers. He awoke with a start, the night still pitch black. And however much he tried he could not fall asleep again. He was inclined to rise, but what would he do then? And even as he was telling himself that he would not get up, he jumped out of bed and dressed. The streets were deserted. There was not a soul in sight. From a market came the stench of rotting vegetables and stale meat. From atop a belfry, the bell tolled; it was four o’clock. He thought of Henry IV, whose name he had seen engraved on the tower of some palace. An urge that came from deep within prompted him to enter the village square: It was the one in his dream. On three of its sides stood two-story houses with tiled roofs and flowers in the windows. Atop a low wall with a railing, a grey cat stared at him. He planted himself in front of it, but the cat did not move or avert its gaze. Its eyes were fixed on his, and it was he who had to turn his head to escape them. A tempest of thoughts left him paralyzed in the center of the square. He felt as though a steel blade were being driven into his back. He wiped the sweat from his brow. . Toward the east, a tender light heralded the day. His head was spinning as he left the square. The cat was still perched on the low wall. The sky was already pink when he entered the hotel.
XXIV THE MIRROR IN THE FOYER
SENYOR ARDÈVOL COULD NOT RECALL WHEN HE HAD STARTED going out at night. At first he had not ventured beyond the beach, though later he went as far as the village, at an hour when everyone was asleep. Three streets flowed into the church square, the middle one continuing on to the outskirts of the village. Past midnight on one of those many nights, he stopped in front of a window with a light on inside. Standing on a pile of stones, he spotted a girl undressing. He could not see her clearly because the window had curtains which, although sheer, clouded the view of the girl’s face. He liked that vaporous image. She probably had the broad face of a peasant girl, perhaps snub-nosed, healthy, with dreamy eyes, but he imagined a creamy blend of white and pink, eyes that offered a glimpse of the soul, trembling lips. . a girl who came to life against a backlight, so that he might contemplate her without really seeing her, and thus be free to reflect on her remembered image to the point of obsession.
Senyor Ardèvol returned from the trip with his friend Aran more anguished than ever and stayed indoors for several weeks. Until, little by little, he resumed his former routine.
It had all begun one night when the sea was in a swell of fury. He was in such a hurry to return home before the rain came that he started running and arrived at his kitchen door with his heart pounding. As he was stepping inside, a bolt of lightning fretted a thread across the sky. His heart still fatigued, he was making his way to the foyer to hang up his trench coat when he felt as though something were trying to stop him. He could not make sense of it, but it seemed that his legs would not respond and that his heart, so agitated only a moment before, had stopped for the space of a few seconds. It wasn’t exactly that; it was more as though a mysterious force were emptying him of his “I.” That was all. When he finally found himself in the parlor, he downed half a bottle of cognac and, although it was late, he read for a while. He chose a book at random and opened it to the beginning of a page that argued, roughly, that man is the master of his actions, free to desire or not to desire, by the power of his thinking and the virtue of his reason; imagination, it said, turns perilous when we ponder the act of becoming and the conditions that govern it. As I read Senyor Ardèvol’s account of the book, I could not quite grasp the meaning of this. The book stated, and I read it many times over so I would remember it. . or, rather, it didn’t so much state as pose the question: Under what conditions can one become another?
On the night following the events just described it was bitterly cold outside and he had to bundle up. He left the house through the kitchen door, leaving it unlocked. The fields were covered in frost. He sat on a rock facing the sea. Senyor Ardèvol explained that he had never had a meditative disposition, but that he was a contemplative man. Enamored of the mystery of life, he had never felt the need, as his friend Aran had, of attempting to decipher it. He considered it an unassailable mystery. And a mystery must struggle — that is its principal reason for being — so that its great beauty will not be stripped from it. The sea resembled a lake that night. Small waves died on the sand, flat, with a litany of sighs. Suddenly the girl in the window came to mind, a faraway thought lost in time. Why had his interest waned, when so many times before she had been the enticement to go into the village? And he began to think of death. Senyor Ardèvol wrote that when people die they should remain frozen in that moment, like those human shapes that have been perfectly preserved in a vacuum and turn to dust with the slightest puff of air. They should die with their senses fully alive, in the middle of the street while strolling through a sleepy village.
The moon deposited slivers of light on his balcony window. Smudges of brightness that elongated and widened in a dance, phantoms of stripes, shiny blocks, darkened spaces. When he returned, he stopped in the foyer and, while hanging up his coat, was overcome by a powerful urgency to turn around. In front of him hung the mirror. Senyor Ardèvol described it. Beveled. Mottled. A mahogany frame with a garland of flowers and leaves. He had never felt the need to look at himself in the mirror, other than when he shaved or was at the tailor’s trying something on. But that night he looked at himself for a while, as if bewitched, not by his own image but by something within the mirror. His features, he wrote, were not harmonious: his brow too high, his cheeks too sunken, his eyes too small. In the mirror, slightly to the right, appeared a pair of eyes with a disquieting fixity, like those of the cat in the square. Only larger, closer together, the whites of the eye more generous. Questioning eyes. He felt — and the thought anguished him more than anything else — that those were his own eyes, though they were not. Those eyes wanted to convey things he could not understand. With great effort, for the fascination was intense, he looked away and, when his eyes returned to the mirror, there was nothing there. Only, as always, part of the coat rack, the lightbulb that cast a yellow gleam, and his own image. He went to the living room and lit a fire; he needed the company of the flames. He was prepared to read until he fell asleep, so as not to think. But he found he could not read a line. An understandable curiosity compelled him to return to the foyer. The mirror was in its usual place, with its mottled specks and flowers. He tapped the lightbulb to see if the pendular movement would summon a reflection into the mirror. He wanted to see those eyes again.