“What’s wrong?” said my wife feebly.
I turned round, she was sitting up in bed, with frightened eyes, the eyes of a sick person who wakes and cannot see anything and doesn’t yet know where she is or why she feels so confused. The light was off. At that moment, she was a sick woman.
“It’s nothing, go back to sleep,” I said.
But I didn’t walk over to her to stroke her hair or calm her down, as I would have done in any other circumstances, because I couldn’t leave the balcony, or even take my eyes off that woman who was convinced she had arranged to meet me. Now she could see me clearly, and I was obviously the person with whom she had made an important date, the person who had caused her to suffer by making her wait and who had offended her with my prolonged absence. “Didn’t you notice I’d been waiting for you here for an hour? Why didn’t you say something?” she was yelling furiously now, standing outside my hotel, beneath my balcony. “Do you hear me, I’m going to kill you!” she shouted. And again she made the gesture with her arm and her fingers, the grasping gesture.
“What on earth’s going on?” asked my wife again, lying dazed on the bed.
At that moment, I stepped back and pulled the balcony shutters to, but not before seeing that the woman in the street, with her enormous, old-fashioned handbag and her stiletto heels and her strong legs and her stumbling walk, was disappearing from my field of vision because she was entering the hotel, ready to come up and find me and meet me. I felt empty inside when I thought about what I could possibly say to my sick wife to explain the interruption that was about to take place. We were on our honeymoon and on honeymoon you really don’t want the interference of a stranger, although I was not, I think, a stranger to the person now coming up the stairs. I felt empty inside and I closed the balcony shutters. I prepared myself to open the door.
BROKEN BINOCULARS
For Mercedes López-Ballesteros, in San Sebastian
ON PALM SUNDAY, almost all my friends had left Madrid, and so I went to spend the afternoon at the races. In the second race, which was not particularly interesting, a man to my left inadvertently jolted my elbow as he abruptly raised his binoculars to his eyes in order to get a better view of the final straight. I was already looking, I already had my binoculars before my eyes, and the sudden blow made me drop them (I always forget to hang them round my neck, and that’s how I pay for it or how I paid on that day, because one of the lenses cracked, the binoculars hit the steps, they didn’t bounce, they just lay there on the ground, still and broken). The man crouched down before I could pick them up, he was the one who first noticed the damage, apologizing as he did so.
“Sorry,” he said. And then: “Oh no, what bad luck, they’re broken.”
I saw him crouched at my feet and the first thing I noticed was that he was wearing cufflinks, a rare sight nowadays, only the very vulgar or the very ancient dare wear them. The second thing I noticed was that he had a gun in a holster strapped to his right side (he must have been left-handed), as he bent down his jacket gaped open at the back and I saw the butt of the gun. Now that’s an even rarer sight, he must be a policeman, I thought. Then, as he got up, I realized that he was a very tall man, a whole head taller than me; he must have been about thirty and he had sideburns, straight but much too long, another old-fashioned touch, I wouldn’t have noticed them fifteen or even a hundred years ago. Perhaps he wore them to frame and add volume to his head, which was long and rather small, he looked like a matchstick.
“I’ll pay for any repairs,” he said, embarrassed. “Here, I’ll lend you mine for the moment. It’s only the second race.”
The second race had, in fact, finished. We didn’t know who had won, so I didn’t dare tear up my betting slips, which I held in my hand as we all do, only to tear them up and immediately throw them to the ground if we’ve lost, and thus instantly forget our mistaken forecast. At that moment, I was also holding my broken binoculars (I’d bought them on a plane not long before, in mid-flight) as well as the other man’s undamaged ones, he had handed them to me at the same time as he had announced that they were mine to borrow, I had taken them mechanically so that they too did not crash onto the steps. When he saw that I had my hands full, he relieved me of the betting slips and put them in the breast pocket of my jacket and gave it a little pat, as if to say that they were now in safekeeping.