A Heart So White (12 page)

"No, not at all, I'm in no hurry, nor should you be, I don't want to meddle but that's how I feel. I just want to know how you intend confronting this new situation, right now, at this very moment. That's all, it's just curiosity really."

And he spread his hands out before me, like someone showing that he's carrying no weapons.

"I don't know, I'm not confronting it in any particular way. I'll tell you later on. I think the very least I could expect from you is not to be asked that question, today of all days."

I was leaning against the table, on it still lay the useless signatures of our last-minute witnesses. I stood up a little straighter, the first sign that I felt the conversation was over and I wanted to go back to the party; but he didn't join me in my gesture by putting out his cigarette or uncrossing his legs. For him, the conversation needed to go on a little longer. I thought that he must want to say something concrete to me, but didn't know how or wasn't sure that he wanted to. That was entirely like him, for he often forced others to answer questions he hadn't even asked or to discuss some subject that he hadn't mentioned, even if that subject was the one thing on his mind, beneath that striking head of hair white as talcum powder. I knew him too well to help him out.

"The least you could expect," he said. "I don't think anything can be expected. I, for example, no longer expected you to get married. Only a year ago I would have laid bets to the contrary. In fact, I did do so with Custardoy, and with Rylands by letter, and I've lost a fair bit of money too, because here we are. The world is full of surprises and of secrets. We think we know the people close to us, but time brings with it more things that we don't know than things we do, comparatively speaking we know less all the time, there's always a greater area of shadow. Even if the illuminated area grows larger too, the shadows still win. I imagine you and Luisa have your secrets." He remained silent for a few seconds and, seeing that I didn't respond, added:

"But, of course, you can only know about yours, because if you knew about hers they wouldn't be secrets."

There was still a smile on Ranz's oddly defined lips, those lips identical to mine, although his had lost their colour and were invaded by vertical lines that rose up from his chin and from beneath the place where his moustache would be, the moustache he'd worn as a young man according to photos taken at the time, although I'd never seen him with one. His words seemed somehow malevolent (at first I thought he must know something about Luisa and had waited until after the wedding to tell me), but his tone was different now, it wasn't even ambiguous. I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I described his tone of voice as helpless. It was as if he'd got lost shortly after he began to speak and now no longer knew how to get back to the path he originally set out on. I might help him, then again I might not. He was smiling in a friendly manner, a slim cigarette in one hand, burned down, with more ash than filter, he hadn't got rid of the ash for some time now, he probably refrained from putting it out in order not to increase his sense of helplessness. I picked up the ashtray and held it out to him and then he stubbed out the cigarette and rubbed his fingertips together, the burning filter smelled bad. He interlaced his fingers, which were large like the rest of his body and like his flour-white head of hair, they showed their age a little more, but only a little, not much, they were lined but were unmarked by age spots. As was his custom, he was smiling affably, almost pityingly now, though without a trace of mockery, his eyes were very clear — those eyes like plump drops of whisky or vinegar — we were more in the shade than in the light. As I said before, he wasn't an old man, he never was, but at that moment I saw that he'd aged, that is, I saw that he was afraid. There's a writer called Clerk or Lewis who wrote about himself after the death of his wife, and he began by saying: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." Perhaps it was grief that I could glimpse in Ranz's smile, in my father's smile. Everyone knows that mothers cry and feel something like grief when their offspring marry, perhaps my father was feeling his own particular happiness and also the grief that my mother would have felt, my dead mother. A vicarious grief, a vicarious fear, a grief and a fear that came from another person whose face we'd both slightly forgotten, it's odd how the features of those who no longer see us and whom we can no longer see become blurred, out of anger or absence or attrition, or how they become usurped by their photographs fixed forever on a particular day, my mother, for example, isn't wearing her glasses, the reading glasses she tended to wear rather too often in her latter years, she's remained fixed in the picture I've chosen of her when she was twenty-eight years old, a woman younger than I am now, her face calm and a slightly resigned look in her eyes, which she did not, I think, normally have, her eyes were usually smiling like those of my Havana-born grandmother, her mother. The two of them used to laugh together, often, but it's also true that sometimes in the eyes of both of them I would glimpse a prolonged look of grief or fear, my grandmother would sometimes stop rocking in her rocking chair and sit gazing into space, her eyes dry and unblinking, like someone who's just woken up and can't quite remember where they are, sometimes she'd sit looking at the photographs or the painting of the daughter who'd disappeared from the world before I was born, she'd look for a minute or perhaps more, certainly without thinking, without even remembering, but feeling grief or retrospective fear. My mother also looked at her like that sometimes, at her distant sister, she'd interrupt her reading and take off her glasses, keeping one finger between the pages of the book so as not to lose her place and, holding her glasses in the other hand, she'd sit looking sometimes at nothing in particular and sometimes at the dead, at the faces she'd watched grow up but not grow old, three- dimensional faces that had grown flat, mobile faces that we suddenly become used to seeing only in repose, not them but their image, the living face of my mother would stop to look at them, her eyes made melancholy perhaps by the barrel-organ music that used to drift up from the street in Madrid during my childhood and which, when it started, always made everyone in the house stop for a moment, mothers and lazy or sick children and maids, who would look up and even lean out over the balcony or from the window in order to see again the same scene, a man with a tanned face wearing a hat and playing a barrel organ, a mechanical man who would interrupt the women's singing or would provide a channel for that singing and for a moment — or in my mother's case for more than a moment, for grief and fear are not fleeting emotions - would fill with melancholy the eyes of the people living in the house. Mothers and children and maids always reacted to that sound by looking up, raising their heads like animals, and they reacted the same way to the swooping whistle of the knife-grinders, the women wondering for a moment if the knives in the house were as sharp as they should be or if they should run down to the street with them, making a pause in their labours or their indolence to remember and to think about knife-blades, or perhaps becoming suddenly absorbed in their secrets, the secrets they kept and the secrets they suspected, that is those they knew about and those they didn't. And it was at that moment sometimes, when they raised their heads to listen to the mechanical music or to a repeated whistle that came advancing down the street, when their gaze would fall upon the pictures of those who were absent, half a lifetime spent glancing at eternally enigmatic photographs or paintings with fixed eyes or foolish smiles, and another lifetime, or half a lifetime, that of the other person, the son or the sister or the widower, receiving those same fixed, foolish glances in the photograph, which even the person looking at the photo cannot always remember when it was taken: my grandmother glancing at her dead daughter and my mother at her dead, supplanted sister; my father and I looking at her and myself now preparing myself to look at him, at Ranz, my father; and my beloved Luisa, the newlywed in the room next door, unaware that the photographs they've taken of us today will one day be the object of her glances, when she no longer has half her lifetime ahead of her and mine is over. But no one knows the order of the dead or of the living, no one knows who will be the first to feel grief or fear. Perhaps Ranz now embodied the grief and fear which had reappeared in his expression, smiling, compassionate and calm, and his now cigaretteless hands, the fingers interlaced and idle, and his socks pulled up so that not an inch of bare flesh was showing, flesh as old as that of Verum-Verum the Cow, fodder for photographs, in his patterned tie a little too wide for today's taste but the colours of which were perfectly matched, the immaculate knot also a little too large. He seemed comfortable sitting there, as if he were the owner of the Casino de Madrid rather than someone who'd hired it, but in a way he seemed uncomfortable too and I wasn't helping him to tell me what it was that was bothering him, what he'd decided to tell me - or had still not told me - on the day of my wedding when he'd taken me aside into that room next door to the party and placed one hand on my shoulder. Now I understood: it wasn't that he couldn't, it was superstition that was paralysing him, not knowing what might bring good luck and what bad, speaking or remaining silent, not remaining silent or not speaking, letting things follow their natural course without invoking them or deflecting them or intervening verbally to affect that course, verbalizing them or saying nothing, alerting the person to danger or not putting ideas in their head, sometimes the very people who warn us against certain ideas end up putting those ideas in our heads, they give them to us precisely because they warn us about them and make us think about things that would never have occurred to us otherwise.

"Secrets? What are you talking about?" I said.

Ranz blushed a little, or so it seemed to me, the culmination and conclusion of his momentary helplessness; but he immediately banished the colour from his cheeks — older people rarely allow themselves to blush - and with it his smiling, somewhat foolish expression of grief or fear or both. He got up, we're now both about the same height, and again placed his large hand on my shoulder, but he did so from in front this time and looked at me from very close to, intensely but with no particular intent, his hand on my shoulder felt almost like the flat of a sword knighting someone who was no knight: he'd opted for the middle path, for insinuation, he'd reached no resolution, or perhaps it was just a postponement. He spoke calmly and seriously, no longer smiling, his few words were uttered without the smile that played almost constantly on his plump lips so similar to mine, a smile which, once the words were spoken, instantly returned. Then he took out another slim cigarette from his old- fashioned cigarette case and opened the door. The noise from the party rushed in and in the distance I saw Luisa talking to two girlfriends and to an old boyfriend of hers whom I disliked, but she was looking at the door which until then had been closed. Ranz made a gesture with his hand, a gesture of farewell or warning or encouragement (as if he were saying "See you later" or "Cheer up" or "Take care") and he left the room ahead of me. I saw how he immediately took up his frivolous persona again and started making jokes and laughing uproariously with a woman I didn't know, doubtless someone from Luisa's half of the guest list, the half of the guests at my own wedding whom I'd never seen before and would doubtless never see again. Or perhaps, now that I think about it, it was someone my father himself had invited: he's always cultivated strange friendships, or friendships I know almost nothing about.

This was the whispered advice that Ranz gave me: "I'll just say one thing," he said. "If you ever do have any secrets or if you already have, don't tell her." And smiling again, he added: "Good luck."

The witnesses' signatures remained in the room and I've no idea if anyone picked them up or not or where they are now. Perhaps they were thrown out with the rubbish along with the empty trays and the leftovers from the party. And I, of course, didn't pick them up from the table on which I'd been leaning for a while, all dressed up in my bridegroom's clothes, just as I was supposed to be that day.

YESTERDAY, I was surprised to hear coming up from the street the sound of a barrel organ, there are hardly any left now, they're a relic of the past. I looked up immediately as I used to do when I was a child, it was too loud and was keeping me from my work, the noise was too evocative for me to be able to concentrate on anything else. I got up and looked out of the window to see who was playing, but I could see neither musician nor instrument, they were farther round the corner, hidden by the building opposite which, however, since it's a low building, doesn't block my light. It doubtless only just concealed them, since, on the corner itself, I could see a middle-aged woman, her hair caught back in a gypsy plait but otherwise dressed in an unfolkloric manner (she was wearing ordinary clothes), who was standing side on to me and holding in her hand a tiny plastic saucer, almost the size of a coaster, that wouldn't hold many coins before it had to be emptied again, its contents slipped into her pocket or a bag, though there were a few coins, for money calls to money. I listened for quite a while, first to a
chotis,
then to some unrecognizable Andalusian air, then a
paso doble,
before going out on to the balcony to see if I could spot the organ- grinder from where the plantpots were, I went out knowing that I wouldn't be able to, for although the balcony — which, like all balconies, projects slightly - brought me a little closer to the street, it was in fact situated to the right of my window, that is, it offered even less of a view of what was hidden round the corner, since I was looking towards my left. There weren't many passers-by, so the woman with the plait kept shaking her plastic saucer in vain, rattling the few coins in it, coins she'd perhaps placed there herself, because money calls to money. I went back to my desk and tried to ignore the music coming up from the street but I couldn't, so I put on a jacket and went downstairs with the intention of putting a stop to the music. I crossed the pavement and, at last, saw the swarthy-complexioned man: he was wearing an old hat and had a neat, white moustache, leathery skin and a friendly face with large, smiling eyes that seemed slightly dreamy or absorbed as he turned the handle of the barrel organ with his right hand and kept time on the pavement with the opposite foot, his left foot, both feet shod in weavework shoes, brown with a white instep, almost swamped by his rather long, baggy trousers. He was standing on the corner near my building playing a
paso doble
. I took a banknote out of my pocket and, holding it out to him, said: