You just had to stay, didn't you, Jaime?' Luisa said before I could say anything. 'You just had to wait up to see me.'
Now, though, after that initial glance, I spotted what was wrong at once, it was impossible not to, at least for me. She had tried to cover it with make-up, to conceal it, hide it, perhaps in the same way that Flavia would have tried unsuccessfully, with the unlikely help of Tupra in the ladies' restroom, to make the wound on her face invisible, the mark of the rope, the weal left by the whip, the welt caused by De la Garza's clumsy lashings during his wild gyrations on the fast dance floor. That wasn't what Luisa had on her face, it wasn't uno sfregio, not a gash or a cut or a scratch, but what has always been known in my language as 'un ojo morado'-literally 'a purple eye'-and in English as 'a black eye,' although since the impact or cause was not recent, the skin was already growing yellow, the colors that appear after such a blow are always mixed, there's never a single color, but several, which combine at every phase and keep changing, perhaps the disagreement between the two languages stems from that (although mine does lean more to English when it refers to such an eye as 'un ojo a la funerala'-more or less 'an eye in mourning'), they always take a long time to fade, it was just our bad luck that not enough time had yet passed. When I saw it, I no longer had to respond to her words, nor to apologize. Unfortunately, I couldn't greet her either or give her a kiss or embrace her, I had waited so long for this meeting and now I couldn't even manage a smile or an 'Hola, niña-'Hello, love'-as I used to when we were still together and on good terms. I immediately went over to her and the first thing I said was: 'What's that? Let me see? What happened? Who did it?'
I took her face in my hands, taking care not to touch the affected area, she had clearly just been in the bathroom applying various creams, to no avail. Her eyelid was no longer puffy or only a little, but it obviously had been. I calculated that the injury must have occurred about a week or perhaps ten days ago, and it was the result of a blow, I was sure of that, dealt by a fist or a blunt instrument like a bat or a blackjack, I had seen such bruised eyes and cheekbones and chins years before, under the Franco regime, when students who had been arrested and beaten up would emerge from the police station, from the headquarters of the security forces in Puerta del Sol or from Carabanchel prison, my fellow university students who'd had much worse luck than I did during the small semi-spontaneous street demonstrations that we called 'saltos' and at illegal rallies that were broken up with the aid of very long, flexible truncheons, which really hurt because the truncheon flexed on impact, they were used by the police or 'grises' who charged on horseback, sometimes it seems incredible to me that it was only in the mid-seventies that we used to flee their hooves every few days or weeks, as we left our classes. Although, of course, everything can come back.
She moved away, avoided me, retreating two steps in order to re-establish the distance between us, smiling as if my questions amused her, but I could see that they didn't.
'What do you mean? No one did anything to me. I collided with the garage door about a week ago. It was my wretched cell phone's fault. Someone called me, I got distracted and misjudged the distance when the door was closing. It hit me full on, it's really heavy, it must be made of solid iron. It's nearly better now, it looked worse than it was. It doesn't hurt.'
'Your cell phone? So you've got a cell phone now? Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you give me the number?' And while, in my surprise, I was asking her all this, I thought or remembered: 'Reresby made me say the same thing to De la Garza, I had to translate it for him while he was lying motionless on the floor, bruised and beaten: "Tell him that if he has to go to the hospital, then he should give them the same line drunks and debtors do-that the garage door fell on him." Luisa has become neither of those things, neither a drunk nor a debtor, as far as I know. But Tupra was obviously aware that blows from garage doors are almost always inventions.' And thanks to him I was even more convinced that she was lying to me. She lacked the kind of imagination that a habitual liar develops, and so she had resorted to cliché, like any inexperienced liar who avoids the implausible, which is precisely the thing most likely to be believed.
'It's because of the kids,' she said. 'I realized that, however much we might hate cell phones, there's no sense in a babysitter or my sister, for example, or the school, not being able to locate me immediately if anything should happen to them.'-So the Polish babysitter could have called Luisa's cell phone from the kitchen and warned her that I was refusing to shift from the apartment, and also found out with some degree of accuracy when she would arrive.-'Especially since you're not here. I bought it for my own peace of mind. Now that I'm alone with them, now that I'm the only person anyone can contact in an emergency. And anyway why would you need the number in London? It's not as if we still spoke every day…'-Unfortunately, I sensed no reproach in these last words, I wished I had. I couldn't stop looking at her purple, yellowish, bluish black eye, the white of which was still slightly red, it would have been crisscrossed with red veins during the first few days after the blow. She was pretending that she wasn't even aware of it, but she could see me staring at it and this made her slightly nervous, as became apparent when she turned to look at the television so that she was in profile, to escape my scrutiny. And she tried to change the subject too. 'What were you watching, a movie about pigs? Is this some new interest of yours?' she added with the amiable irony that was so familiar to me and so attractive. She must have seen my fleeting smile. 'I'm sure the children would enjoy it. How did you think they looked, by the way? Have they grown a lot? Do they seem very different?'
While I did want to talk to her about the children, to tell her what impression they'd made on me after such a long time, I wasn't going to let myself be diverted so easily. I was the way I was, and now I had the examples of Tupra and Wheeler, who never let go of their prey as long as there was something to be got out of him or her, after all the digressions and evasions and detours.
'Don't lie to me, Luisa, you and I haven't changed that much. That business about the garage door is so old hat, they're always rebelling and hitting people,' I said, and again I noticed that I only called her by name when we were arguing or when I was angry, rather as she only called me Deza in similar situations, as well as in other very different ones. 'Tell me who did this to you. I hope it's not the guy you're going out with, because if it is, we've got a problem on our hands.'
'Our hands? Just supposing I was going out with someone, what's that got to do with you?' she said at once, parrying my remark not sharply, but firmly; and she had enough spirit to recover her irony and immediately soften the blow: 'If you're going to continue down that road, you'd better go back to watching your little animal friends while I tidy up, but once it's over, you leave; the children have to get up early, and it's already very late. We'll talk another day when we're both a bit fresher, but not about this. I told you what happened, so don't insist on seeing phantoms. And if that was just a way of asking me if I'm going out with someone, that's none of your business, Deza. Go on, finish watching your pig, and then go back to the hotel and sleep, you must be tired from your trip and from the children. They're exhausting, and you're out of practice being with them.'