In the Midst of Winter Page 2

  Lucia suspected that Richard’s taciturn appearance hid a store of kindness and a well-disguised wish to help without any fuss, from discreetly serving at a charity soup kitchen to volunteering to monitor the parakeets in the cemetery. Richard must surely have owed that side of his character to his father. Joseph would never allow a son of his to go through life without embracing some worthy cause. In the beginning, Lucia studied Richard to try to find any openings to secure his friendship, but as she was not drawn to the charity soup kitchen or any species of parrot, all they shared was their work, and she could not find a way to insinuate herself into his life. She was not offended by Richard’s lack of interest, because he equally ignored the attentions of his female colleagues and the hordes of young girls at the university. His hermit’s life was a mystery: Who knew what secrets it concealed? How could he have lived six decades without any unsettling challenges, protected by his armadillo’s hide?

  By contrast, she was proud of the dramas in her past and wished for an interesting existence in her future. She mistrusted happiness on principle; she found it rather kitschy. She was content to be more or less satisfied. Richard had spent a long period in Brazil, where, to judge by a photograph Lucia had seen, he had been married to a voluptuous young woman, yet neither the exuberance of that country nor that mysterious woman seemed to have rubbed off on him. Despite his odd behavior, Richard always made a good impression. In her description of him to her daughter, Lucia said that he was liviano de sangre—light ­blooded—a Chilean expression for someone who is good natured and makes himself loved without meaning to and for no obvious reason. “He’s a strange sort, Daniela. He lives alone with four cats.” She added, “He doesn’t know it yet, but when I leave he’ll also have to look after Marcelo.” She had thought this over carefully. It would be heart wrenching, but she couldn’t drag an aged Chihuahua around the world with her.

  Richard

  Brooklyn

  Whenever Richard Bowmaster reached home in the evening, by bicycle if the weather permitted, otherwise by subway, he first attended to the four cats. They were not exactly affectionate and had been adopted from the Humane Society to solve his mouse problem. He had taken this step as a logical measure, devoid of any sentimentality, and yet the felines became his inseparable companions. He had obtained them neutered, vaccinated, with a chip injected under their skin. They also had names, but to simplify matters he called them with numbers in Portuguese: Um, Dois, Três, and Quatro. He fed them and cleaned out their litter tray, then listened to the news while he made his supper on the large multi­use kitchen table. After eating he would play the piano for a while, sometimes feeling inspired, other times simply as a discipline.

  In theory, his house had a place for everything, and everything was in its place, but in practice the papers, magazines, and books proliferated like phantoms in a nightmare. Every morning there were more of them, and occasionally publications or loose sheets appeared that he had never seen before, and he had no idea how they had ended up in his house. Later on he would read, prepare his classes, correct his students’ homework and his essays on politics. His academic career was based on his persistence in researching and publishing rather than on his vocation as a teacher. This meant he found it impossible to explain the devotion his students showed him, even after graduating. He kept his computer in the kitchen and the printer in an unused room on the third floor, where the only piece of furniture was a table for the machine. Luckily he lived alone and so did not have to explain the curious distribution of his office equipment, since few would understand his determination to get exercise by going up and down the steep stairs. In any case, he was forced to think twice before printing anything unnecessary, out of respect for the trees sacrificed to make paper.

  During nights of insomnia, when he could not manage to seduce the piano and the keys seemed to play whatever they wished, he gave in to the secret vice of memorizing and writing poetry. To do this he used very little paper, writing by hand in school exercise books, which he filled with poems he later abandoned, and a couple of luxury, leather-bound notebooks where he copied out his best verses with the idea of polishing them to perfection in the future. But that future never arrived: the thought of rereading them made his stomach twinge. He had studied Japanese to be able to enjoy haiku in the original, and while he could read and understand the language, he would have thought it presumptuous to try to speak it. He was proud of being a polyglot. He had learned Portuguese as a child with his mother’s family and later perfected it with his wife, Anita. He had acquired some French for romantic reasons and some Spanish out of professional necessity. His first great passion, at the age of nineteen, had been for a French woman eight years older than himself whom he met in a New York bar and followed to Paris. The passion quickly cooled, but for convenience they lived together in a garret in the Latin Quarter long enough for him to attain the basics of carnal knowledge and of the language, which he spoke with a barbarous accent. His Spanish came from books and the street; there were Latinos everywhere in New York, but these immigrants rarely understood the Berlitz school pronunciation that he had studied. Nor could he follow them much beyond what he needed to order food in a restaurant. Apparently almost all the waiters in the country were Spanish speakers.

  BY DAWN ON SATURDAY, after the worst of the storm had moved on, Richard awoke with the sour aftertaste of having offended Lucia the evening before when he coldly dismissed her fears. He would have liked to be with her while outside the wind and snow lashed the house. Why had he been so abrupt with her? Afraid of falling into the trap of romanticism, which he had avoided for twenty-five years, he never asked himself why he rejected love, because the answer seemed obvious: it was his inescapable penance. Over time he had grown used to his monkish habits and the inner silence of those who live and sleep alone. After hanging up the phone with Lucia he had felt an urge to appear at the basement door with a thermos of tea to keep her company. He was intrigued by this childish fear in a woman who had experienced a fair amount of drama in her life and who seemed invulnerable. He would have liked to probe this breach in Lucia’s fortress but was prevented from doing so by a sense of danger, as if by giving in to this impulse he would find himself on uncertain ground. The feeling of danger was still there. Nothing new in that. Every so often he fell prey to an irrational anxiety, which was why he had his green pills. At such times he felt he was plunging unavoidably into the icy depths of the sea, with no one nearby to stretch out a hand to pull him back to the surface. These fatalistic premonitions had begun in Brazil, brought on by Anita, who lived on the lookout for any sign from the Great Beyond. In the past he had often suffered from these attacks, but had learned to control them.

  The instructions given on radio and TV were to remain indoors until the streets had been cleared. Manhattan was still semiparalyzed, with most stores closed, but the subway and buses were running again. Other states were in a worse situation than New York, with houses destroyed, trees uprooted, neighborhoods cut off, and some areas without gas or electricity. The inhabitants had gone back two centuries in a few hours. By comparison, in Brooklyn they had been lucky. Richard went out to clear off the snow from his car before it turned to ice and would need to be scraped off. After returning, he put out food for the cats and made the breakfast he ate every day: oatmeal with almond milk and fruit. He settled down to work on his article about the economic crisis in Brazil that international observers had detected in the run-up to the Olympic Games. He had a student’s thesis to review but would do so later, since he had the whole day before him.

  At around three in the afternoon, he realized that one of the cats was missing. Whenever Richard was at home, they made sure to stay close by him. His relationship with them was one of mutual indifference, except with Dois, the only female, who took advantage of the slightest opportunity to jump up and settle herself near him so that he would stroke her. The three males were independent; they had understood from the outset th
at they were not pets and that their duty was to hunt mice. Richard could see that Um and Quatro were prowling around the kitchen, but there was no sign of Três. Dois was stretched out on the table next to his computer, one of her favorite spots.

  He looked throughout the house for the missing male, giving the whistle they all recognized. He found him sprawled out on the second-floor landing, with pink froth around his nostrils. “Come on, Três, get up. What’s wrong with you, my boy?” He managed to set him on his feet, and the cat staggered a few drunken steps before collapsing again. There were flecks of vomit everywhere, which often happened, as sometimes the cats did not properly digest the rodents’ tiny bones. He carried Três to the kitchen, where he tried in vain to make him drink water. While in the midst of doing this, Três’s four legs went rigid and he started to convulse. Richard understood these were symptoms of poisoning. He quickly ran through a mental list of the toxic substances in the house, all of them safely stored. It took him several minutes before he found the cause in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, where he had stored the car’s antifreeze. Some of the fluid had leaked, and Três must have licked it, because there were paw prints on the floor. Richard was sure he had closed the container and the cabinet door properly. He could not understand how the accident had happened, but he’d worry about that later. For now what was most urgent was to take care of the cat; antifreeze was lethal.

  Traffic was restricted except for emergencies, which was exactly what this was. He looked up the address of the nearest veterinary hospital, which he remembered passing by at some point. He wrapped the cat in a blanket and put him in his car. He was glad he had brushed the snow off that morning, and relieved the disaster had not occurred the day before while the blizzard was raging. Brooklyn had become a Nordic city, white on white, the angles softened by the snow, empty streets, and a strange peace, as if nature were yawning. “Don’t you dare get the idea of dying, Três, please. You’re a proletarian cat, you’ve got steel guts, a bit of antifreeze is nothing, hang in there,” Richard encouraged him as he drove with painful slowness through the snow, conscious that each extra minute could prove fatal for Três. “Stay calm, pal, hang on. I can’t go any quicker, because if we skid we’re done for. We’re almost there. I’m sorry I can’t go any faster . . .”

  A journey that would normally have taken twenty minutes took twice as long. By the time he finally arrived at the clinic, it was snowing again and Três was being shaken with fresh convulsions, bringing up more pink froth. The cat was seen by an efficient veterinarian of few gestures or words. She showed no optimism about the cat or sympathy for his owner. His negligence had caused the accident, she told her assistant in a low voice, although not so low that Richard did not hear. On another occasion he would have reacted to this caustic comment, but a powerful wave of bad memories caught him off guard, and he remained silent, humiliated. This was not the first time that his negligence had proved fatal. From that terrible moment on, he had become so careful and had taken so many precautions that he often felt he went through life walking on eggshells. The vet explained that there was little she could do. The blood and urine tests would show whether the damage to the kidneys was irreversible, in which case the cat was going to suffer and it would be better to give it a dignified end. It had to stay at the clinic; there would be a definitive diagnosis in a couple of days, but he should prepare himself for bad news. Richard nodded, on the verge of tears. He said goodbye to Três with his heart in a knot, feeling the vet’s hard look from behind: an accusation and a sentence rolled into one.

  He handed his credit card for the initial deposit to the receptionist, a young woman with carrot-colored hair and a ring in her nose. When she saw how he was shaking, she took pity on him, reassuring him that his pet would be very well looked after, and pointed out the coffee machine. Faced with this gesture of minimal kindness, Richard was overwhelmed by a disproportionate sense of gratitude and let out a deep sob. If anyone had asked him his feelings toward his four pets, he would have answered that he fulfilled his duty by feeding them and cleaning their litter tray. His relationship with the cats was no more than polite, except with Dois, who demanded affection. That was all. Never had he imagined he would come to appreciate those aloof felines as part of the family he did not have. He sat on a chair in the waiting room and drank a cup of watery, bitter coffee while the receptionist looked on sympathetically. After taking two of the green pills for his nerves, and a pink one for his stomach acidity, he gradually regained control. He had to get home.

  THE CAR HEADLIGHTS REVEALED a desolate cityscape as Richard drove cautiously in the twilight, peering out through the semicircle free of frost on the windshield. The streets seemed like those of an unknown city; for a minute he thought he was lost, even though he had taken this route before. Time seemed at a standstill. The hum of the heating blower and the relentless back-and-forth motion of the windshield wipers gave the impression that the car was suspended in a fog. With the unsettling sensation of being the only soul alive in an abandoned world, Richard was talking to himself as he drove, his head filled with sounds and gloomy thoughts about the inevitable horrors of the world and of his own life in particular. How much longer was he going to live, and in what state? If a man lives long enough, he gets prostate cancer. If he lives longer, his brain starts to disintegrate. Richard had reached the age of fear: no longer attracted by travel, he was tied to the comfort of home. He did not want any shocks and was scared of getting lost, or of dying and no one finding his body until a couple of weeks later, by which time the cats would have devoured most of what remained. The possibility of being found in a puddle of putrefying viscera terrified him so much that he had agreed with his neighbor, a widow with a steely temperament and a sentimental heart, that he would send her a text every night. He had given her a key so that if he did not text her for two days in a row, she could come and take a look around his house. The text message was just two words: Still alive. She was under no obligation to reply but, feeling a similar fear, always did so with three words: Shit, me too. The most dreadful thing about death was the idea of eternity. Dead forever, how terrible.

  Richard was afraid the cloud of anxiety that often enveloped him was closing in again. Whenever it appeared, he took his pulse and either could not find one or discovered it was racing. In the past he had suffered from panic attacks, which were so similar to heart attacks that he ended up in the hospital, but in recent years they had not returned, thanks to the green pills and because he had learned to control them. He focused on visualizing the black cloud above his head being pierced by powerful spears of light, like the divine rays in religious pictures. Thanks to that image and some breathing exercises, he would manage to disperse the cloud, but this time there was no need to have recourse to that technique, because he soon accepted the novelty of his situation. He saw himself from afar, as if in a film in which he was not the protagonist but a spectator.

  For years now he had lived in a perfectly controlled environment where there were no surprises or upheavals, and yet he had not completely forgotten the fascination of the few adventures he had known in his youth, particularly his mad passion for Anita. He smiled at his apprehension, because driving a few blocks through Brooklyn in bad weather was not exactly an adventure. At that moment he clearly saw how small and limited his existence had become. Then he really did feel afraid, afraid of having wasted so many years shut in on himself, afraid of the speed with which time was passing and old age and death were approaching. His glasses misted over with perspiration or tears; he tore them off and tried to wipe them on his sleeve. It was growing dark and visibility was poor. Clutching the wheel with his left hand, he tried to put his glasses back on with the right, but the gloves made him fumble, and the glasses fell down between the pedals. A curse issued from deep in his guts.

  At that moment, when he was briefly distracted as he groped on the floor for his glasses, a white car that was almost invisible in the snow stopped
at an intersection in front of him. Richard crashed into the back of it. The impact was so unexpected and overwhelming that for a fraction of a second he lost consciousness. He recovered at once, but felt as he did earlier that he was outside his body, with his heart racing, bathed in sweat, his skin burning hot, his shirt stuck to his back.

  Despite this physical discomfort, his mind was on another plane, separated from this reality. The character in the film kept on muttering curses inside the car while he, a spectator in another dimension, was evaluating the situation coolly and calmly. He was sure it was only a minor accident. Both vehicles had been going very slowly. He had to find his glasses, get out of the car, and talk to the other driver in a civilized manner. After all, this was what auto insurance was for.

  As he clambered out of the car he slipped on the icy sidewalk, and if he had not clung to the door he would have ended up flat on his back. He realized that even if he had braked he probably would have crashed, as he would have glided on along the ice for three or four yards before coming to a halt. Since the other vehicle, a Lexus SC, had been hit from behind, the force of the collision had knocked it forward. With the wind against him, Richard struggled the few yards separating him from the other driver, who had also emerged from the car. At first he thought it was a child too young to have a driver’s license, but as he drew closer he saw it was a tiny young woman. She was wearing pants, black rubber boots, and a parka that was far too big for her. Her face was obscured by the hood.

  “It was my fault. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you. My insurance will pay for the repairs,” said Richard.