doesn’t know anything yet, but anyone who had gone to the house would have done exactly what I did, they would have looked for and found Deán’s London address and phone number and he would, therefore, already have been informed. Presumably, then, he knows nothing about it, unless, that is, he’s taken it all with remarkable calm. If the child is in good hands, he may have decided to fly back tomorrow. No, he can’t possibly know, or perhaps he’s only just been told and there’s nothing he can do. Perhaps he’s still sitting in tears in his foreign hotel room and will be unable to sleep tonight.”
“Excuse me, have you done?”
I turned round and saw a man with very long teeth (so long that his mouth must have been permanently ajar) and well dressed, by conventional standards, in a camel coat: as is usual in these cases, he had a rather plebeian way of speaking. I removed my card and stood to one side, then I returned to my table, paid for my Coca-Cola and left; and that was when I returned to Conde de la Cimera in a taxi. It wasn’t a long visit, but rather longer than I had envisaged. I asked the taxi driver to wait and I got out thinking that it would only take a matter of seconds, I stood by the side of the car and looked up, but what I saw did nothing to allay my fears: the lights I had left on were still lit,although it was hard to remember if they were exactly the same ones or if there had been some change. I had only glanced briefly up at them from that position when I left, I hadn’t lingered, being then too shocked and fearful and tired; and if they were the same lights, it was very likely that no one had gone into that house all day and that the corpse was still there, undergoing its slow transformation, half-naked beneath the sheets, in the same position in which I had left it, or perhaps uncovered now, having been pulled about by an impatient, uncomprehending, desperate child (“I should have covered her face,” I thought, “but it wouldn’t have done any good”). And the child would still be there too, perhaps he had eaten everything I had left out for him and would be hungry again, no, for a small stomach I had left a fair amount of food, a mish-mash, a “revoltigrama”. I didn’t know what to do. I was standing there once more in my overcoat and my gloves, at my side sat a silent taxi driver who had decided to turn off the engine once he saw that my wait was going to be longer than planned. By then, more lights had gone on in the building, but my eyes were fixed on those of the apartment I knew, as if I were looking through a telescope. I felt more distressed than I had on the previous night, more than I had when I left there at dawn. I knew what had taken place and, at the same time, it seemed to me nonsensical and ridiculous that it should have taken place at all, nothing that happens has ever completely happened until you tell someone, until it is spoken about and known about, until then, it is still possible to convert those events into mere thought or memory – the slow journey towards unreality begun the very instant they occurred – and the consolation of uncertainty, which is itself also retrospective. I hadn’t said anything, perhaps the boy had. Everything was as normal in the street, a group of drunken students passed by, garrulous and hideously dressed, one of them bumped against me with his shoulder, he didn’t apologize. I was still gazing up at the fifth floor of that fourteen-storey building, trying to make sense of the light visible through the blinds on the balcony doors, the balcony on to which the living room opened, the glass doors were apparently closed, but it was impossible to know from below if it really was closed, or just pushed to.
“Why don’t you use the entry phone and call up and tell them to come down?”
The taxi driver had assumed that I was there to pick somebody up and he was getting impatient, I had told him to keep the meter running, I
“Excuse me, have you done?”
I turned round and saw a man with very long teeth (so long that his mouth must have been permanently ajar) and well dressed, by conventional standards, in a camel coat: as is usual in these cases, he had a rather plebeian way of speaking. I removed my card and stood to one side, then I returned to my table, paid for my Coca-Cola and left; and that was when I returned to Conde de la Cimera in a taxi. It wasn’t a long visit, but rather longer than I had envisaged. I asked the taxi driver to wait and I got out thinking that it would only take a matter of seconds, I stood by the side of the car and looked up, but what I saw did nothing to allay my fears: the lights I had left on were still lit,although it was hard to remember if they were exactly the same ones or if there had been some change. I had only glanced briefly up at them from that position when I left, I hadn’t lingered, being then too shocked and fearful and tired; and if they were the same lights, it was very likely that no one had gone into that house all day and that the corpse was still there, undergoing its slow transformation, half-naked beneath the sheets, in the same position in which I had left it, or perhaps uncovered now, having been pulled about by an impatient, uncomprehending, desperate child (“I should have covered her face,” I thought, “but it wouldn’t have done any good”). And the child would still be there too, perhaps he had eaten everything I had left out for him and would be hungry again, no, for a small stomach I had left a fair amount of food, a mish-mash, a “revoltigrama”. I didn’t know what to do. I was standing there once more in my overcoat and my gloves, at my side sat a silent taxi driver who had decided to turn off the engine once he saw that my wait was going to be longer than planned. By then, more lights had gone on in the building, but my eyes were fixed on those of the apartment I knew, as if I were looking through a telescope. I felt more distressed than I had on the previous night, more than I had when I left there at dawn. I knew what had taken place and, at the same time, it seemed to me nonsensical and ridiculous that it should have taken place at all, nothing that happens has ever completely happened until you tell someone, until it is spoken about and known about, until then, it is still possible to convert those events into mere thought or memory – the slow journey towards unreality begun the very instant they occurred – and the consolation of uncertainty, which is itself also retrospective. I hadn’t said anything, perhaps the boy had. Everything was as normal in the street, a group of drunken students passed by, garrulous and hideously dressed, one of them bumped against me with his shoulder, he didn’t apologize. I was still gazing up at the fifth floor of that fourteen-storey building, trying to make sense of the light visible through the blinds on the balcony doors, the balcony on to which the living room opened, the glass doors were apparently closed, but it was impossible to know from below if it really was closed, or just pushed to.
“Why don’t you use the entry phone and call up and tell them to come down?”
The taxi driver had assumed that I was there to pick somebody up and he was getting impatient, I had told him to keep the meter running, I
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