“This isn’t the first time you’ve asked me to wait for a story, I don’t know if you realize that.”
“But it’ll probably be the last,” I said. If I told him straight out that I thought I might be seeing a dead woman, it was quite likely that he wouldn’t help me at all, things like that make him nervous, as they do me normally, we who hardly believe in anything.
I got out of the car and Ruibérriz drove off to make his enquiries. There were no shops or cinemas or bars in that area, a boring, tree-lined residential street, with barely any lighting, with nothing you could use as a pretext or to distract yourself while you were waiting. If a neighbour saw me, he would doubtless take me for a marauder, there was no reason why I should be there, alone, silent, smoking. I crossed to the other side of the street just in case I could see anything of the upper storey from there, the only one where the windows were unobstructed. I did see something, but only briefly, a large woman, who was not Estela, passing and disappearing and passing again in the opposite direction after a few seconds and then disappearing again, obscuring my view still more after she had gone, since, when she left the room, she switched off the light: as if she had just gone in there for a moment to pick something up. I crossed the road again and approached the gate as stealthily as an old-fashioned thief; I pushed and it gave way, it was open, people leave it like that when there’s a party on or if a lot of people come and go. I continued to advance so carefully that had I been treading on sand there would have been no footprints, I moved slowly towards one of the windows on the ground floor, the one to the left of the front door from where I was standing. As with nearly all the windows, the blind was down but the slats were open to let in the warm breeze that had slackened now, that is, they weren’t tight shut. Behind the blinds there were motionless lace curtains, the room must be air-conditioned or perhaps it was a sauna. You often unwittingly take steps that you consider possible merely because they are possible and it has occurred to you to take them, and that is how so many acts and so many murders are committed, sometimes the idea leads to the act as if it could not live and sustain itself as long as it was a mere idea, as if there were a certain kind of possibility that grows frustrated and begins to fade if it is not instantly put into action, without our realizing that, in that way too, it has vanished and died, it will no longer be a possibility, but a past event. I found myself in the situation I had foreseen in the car, with my eyes glued to a crack at about eye level, looking, peering, trying to make out something through the tiny gap and through the transparent white cloth that made it even harder to see. That room too was only dimly lit, a large part of it lay in shadow, it was like trying to get to the bottom of a story from which the main elements have been deliberately omitted and about which we know only odd details, my vision blurred and with only a restricted view.
But I thought I saw them and I did, both of them, Estela and the coarse man one on top of the other, outside the beam of the light, the niceties were over, on a bed or perhaps it was a mattress or the floor, at first I couldn’t even make out who was who, two dark, intertwined masses of flesh, someone was naked in there, I said to myself, the woman would have uncovered those breasts that I so needed to see, or perhaps not, perhaps not, she might still have her bra on. There was movement or was it struggle, but hardly any sound emerged, no grunts or cries or groans of pleasure or laughter, like a scene from a silent movie that would never have been shown in decent cinemas, a grim, muffled effort of bodies doubtless entering upon what was just another stage in the proceedings — the fuck — rather than a surrender to genuine desire, his body felt no more desire than hers did, but it was difficult to say where the one began and the other ended or which was which, given the darkness and the veil of the curtain, they were just a grotesque shape, how could I possibly not be able to distinguish the body of a young woman from that of a coarse man? Suddenly a torso and a head with a hat on loomed into view, they entered the beam of light for a moment before plunging down again, the man had donned a cowboy hat in order to have a fuck, good grief, I thought, what a jerk. So he was the one who was on top or above, when he rose up, I thought I also saw his hairy, swarthy, unpleasant torso, broad and undelineated, not exactly athletic. I looked through the slat below to see if I could catch a glimpse of the woman and her breasts, but I couldn’t see anything and so returned to the slat above, hoping that the man might grow tired and want to rest underneath, it was odd not knowing if it was a bed or a mattress or the floor, and even odder how muffled the sound was, a silence like a gag. Then I noticed a new singlemindness about the sweating, two-headed beast into which they had been momentarily transformed, they’re going to change position, I thought, they’re going to change places in order to prolong this stage of the proceedings, which is just that, another stage, since the participants remain the same.
I heard the bolt on the door and scuttled off to the left, just managing to disappear round the corner of the house before I heard a woman’s voice saying goodbye to some people who were leaving (“Bye then, come back and see us again sometime,” as if she were an American): a literary critic I know by sight, with a pure primate face and wearing red trousers and hiking boots, another jerk, if that was a whorehouse it didn’t surprise me in the least that he should visit it, he always has to pay, like his friend, a fat guy with a greying crewcut, a head like an inverted egg and a reptilian mouth, wearing glasses and a tie. They swaggered out and ostentatiously slammed the gate shut, no one would see them, the street was empty and dark, the second guy sounded as if he came from the Canaries, another jerk to judge by his appearance and his behaviour, a bit of a flash harry. When I could no longer hear their footsteps, I returned to my post, a couple of minutes or three or four had passed and now the man and Estela were no longer intertwined, they had not changed position, but they had stopped, the end or a pause. The man was standing up, or kneeling on the mattress, the beam of light illuminated him more than it did her, reclining or sitting, I could see the back of her head, the coarse man grabbed her head with his two hands and made her turn it a little, now I could see both their faces and his erect body with its proliferating hair and his ridiculous hat, it seemed to me he was starting to squeeze Estela’s face with his two thumbs, how strong two thumbs can be, it was as if he were caressing her, but hurting her too, as if he were digging into her high cheekbones or giving her a cruel massage that went ever deeper, becoming more and more intense, he was pushing into her cheekbones as if he wanted to crush them. I felt alarmed, I thought for a moment that he was going to kill her and he couldn’t kill her because she was already dead and because I had to see her breasts and talk to her about something, ask her about the spear or the wound — the weapon wasn’t left impaled in her, someone had pulled it out — and about my friend Dorta who had received her blood on that spear. The man eased the pressure, let her go, he squeezed his knuckles and cracked them, muttered a few words, then moved away, perhaps it was nothing, perhaps it was just the reminder some men like to give women that they could hurt them if they wanted to. He took off his hat, threw it on the floor as if he no longer needed it, and picked up his clothes from a chair, he would be the one to leave. She lay back, absolutely still, she didn’t appear to be hurt, or perhaps she was used to being treated violently.
“Victor!” I heard Ruibérriz’s voice calling to me quietly from the other side of the gate. I hadn’t heard him arrive, or his car.
With my head turned towards the house — sometimes it’s hard to make yourself look away — I went to meet him as daintily as I had come, I took him by the sleeve and dragged him over to the other pavement.