Guadalajara

Centripetal Force

The man has unsuccessfully been trying to leave his apartment since daybreak; whenever he opens the door, the same thing happens: he can’t see the landing, only the hallway he’s trying to leave at that exact moment. He’s tried dozens of times. He tries again: He opens the door to go out, it’s dark out there, he takes a couple of steps, touches the wall, gropes for the switch for the light that’s next to the elevator. He can’t find it. On the contrary, he finds the coat stand, and underneath that, the umbrella stand. So he’s back in the hall he’s just tried to leave. He stretches a hand out to the hall light switch, finds it, switches it on, and sees that he’s standing with his back to his own front door. He turns half around and once again confronts the door. Opens it wide and looks outside. It is very dark, and there’s a single patch of light on the floor, the light that is coming precisely from his hallway through the open door, too little light to determine whether beyond his doorstep the landing that’s always been there is still there, a generously spacious one, as in all old apartment blocks. He could try to leave again, but there would be no point. He’s tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully since the early morning. He shuts the door and leans back on it.

He goes into his dining room and looks into the street. Several people are walking up and even more are walking down it. He tries not to get stressed. He must get out one way or another. He picks up his phone, dials a girlfriend’s number. It’s a girl he’s not known very long, and he hasn’t yet managed to be intimate with her, which he regrets. Why not? Is it because he’s shy? Because he’s never had the right opportunity? He thinks that it’s perhaps because he’s not reached that degree of intimacy with her that he’s decided to ask her this favor: She should come to his place immediately. The friend asks why. He adopts an extremely somber tone of voice, and without saying exactly what’s wrong (he doesn’t tell her because she won’t believe him or will think he’s mad and won’t come), he tells her he is caught in a most unusual situation (not a serious one, but a most unusual one), so unusual that if he tells her on the phone she won’t believe him or will think he’s gone mad; he needs her help. She says nothing for a few seconds and finally says she will drop by at three, after work.

The man spends the next couple of hours staring at the door and smoking non-stop, until he’s filled a vase with butts. In effect, his friend arrives when it’s three minutes to three. He briefly tells her what the situation is, as clearly as he can, and before she can react in shock, he tells her what they are going to do: “This is what we are going to do: We will leave the apartment together. If I leave by myself, I will never reach the landing. I always find myself back in my hallway and not on the landing.”

She asks, “Why do you think things will be any different if I’m with you?”

He doesn’t reply, grabs her wrist, they walk towards the door, he takes a deep breath, turns the handle, opens the door, and they go out; in effect, they reach the landing as he’d predicted. He gives a sigh of relief. She looks at him, taken aback. He presses the button for the elevator. She says there’s no point because the elevator is out of order: she’d had to walk up. They walk downstairs. On the ground floor there’s a notice on the elevator-door: OUT OF ORDER.

They go for a stroll, look at the shop windows and the colored lights—shaped into stars, little birds, and bells—that decorate the street. She buys two presents for Twelfth Night. A truck and a cement-mixing truck, huge, plastic toys, for her nephews. With those presents for company, they dine out, drink tea in a café until she looks at her watch and says it’s time she was going. He takes her right hand in his left.

“Come home with me,” he suggests, “don’t abandon me. If you do, it will happen again.”

The woman laughs and acknowledges nobody’s ever used this line on her before, but it’s not ingenious enough to persuade her to spend the night in his apartment. They’ve often talked about doing it. She knows he wants to sleep with her, but for the moment she’s happy the way things are. She understands he’s frustrated: she knows men can’t usually accept the possibility of a straightforward friendship with a woman without sex. He finds her little homily rather tiresome, is annoyed and decides that in fact it would be better if she did clear off. They kiss each other on the cheek; she disappears down into the subway. The man walks on along the street. He can’t be bothered (he’s not afraid, just can’t be bothered) to go home because he knows the minute he’s back inside he won’t be able to leave. So he decides there’s no point rushing back. There’s a cocktail bar nearby that he particularly likes, with a wooden floor and ceiling and glass cabinets full of bottles mounted on every wall. He heads there. In the distance he can see the elongated light over the gold nameplate. He pushes the thick, heavy door open, pulls aside the red velvet curtain, and, hey presto!, he’s back in his hallway. He turns half around and opens the door again: every step he takes to leave is a step that takes him inside. He turns half around again, opens the door again, leaves again, and comes back in again. He’s back inside now.

He decides to try the window. He pulls up a stool, stands on it, opens the window, pulls himself up, and climbs out. It’s a narrow sill. The cars look tiny down in the street. In effect, he’s managed to leave his apartment through the window and is now precariously balanced. It’s cold. He stands there for a time weighing up his next step. It’s not that he needs to do anything special. It’s fine outside. If there weren’t such a wind, it would be even better: being outside means that at least he’s gotten out. So he’s not simply standing still, he walks slowly along the ledge, his back to the wall, looking out into the void until he’s level with the window of the next-door apartment. Inside, his neighbor is helping her son do his homework. Watching these scenes of daily life through windows always makes him feel sentimental. When he walks down the street, he’s always on the lookout for an interior in a low-level apartment. A light in a dining room ceiling, two heads around a table, a chunk of shelving, a painting, and someone sitting in an armchair. He doesn’t even consider the possibility of knocking on his neighbor’s window. He knows that if he does, the shocked, surprised woman will scream, even though she’ll recognize him as soon as she opens the window. Naturally, she’d let him in; she couldn’t do otherwise, she knows he is her neighbor and must have a very good reason for being on her windowsill. Besides, she is a gossip and wouldn’t want to fritter away such a splendid opportunity. But what good would it do? If she doesn’t accompany him, once he finally decides to leave his neighbor’s flat, he’ll only have to walk out of the door and he’ll return to his own place without even crossing the landing. He’ll only have to open her door to open his and be back to square one. He decides to walk back. He retraces his steps along the ledge, as slowly as he’d come. He’s soon close to his window. He’s about to twist around and climb back in when he notices a small group of tiny people looking up at him and pointing. He’s alarmed. If they’re looking at him and pointing like that, it can only mean one thing: they think he wants to commit suicide! Or that he’s trying to break into an apartment and steal something. It’s a reasonable assumption. Why else would anyone want to walk along that ledge? To steal or to commit suicide. Or take photos. He could be a detective trying to take photos of his client’s husband, catch him in the act with a lover. He’s been watching them for quite a while. He finds it amusing. More and more people are looking up at him. He’s excited to think they think he wants to commit suicide or steal. The traffic soon snarls up. Cars honk their horns, the municipal police arrive, look up at him for a moment, and then blow their whistles and try to restore order. The crowd gets bigger. Soon after, the firefighters arrive, siren wailing and revolving light flashing. Seven men get out of their truck. The seven spread out a safety blanket, to give him a safe landing. The man gets even more alarmed (they really do think he’s going to commit suicide!), he turns round abruptly, pulls himself up, climbs through the window, and is back inside his apartment. He closes the window and takes a deep breath. He looks around and back down into the street. The crowd is still there. He pours himself a glass of water. Sits on his sofa. Sweats. Switches on the TV.

A few minutes later, someone knocks on his door. He gets up and opens the door. Two firefighters stand there: one is extremely fat, making the other one seem comparatively thin, though he’s not. They are out of breath. The extremely fat one wipes the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, folds it, still breathless, and makes a declaration, as if scolding the tenant: “The elevator’s out of order.”

The other firefighter takes a step towards him.

“Good evening. Number two on the eighth?” The man nods. “We have to write a report justifying why we came out. A moment ago a man was near your window, about to jump. Who was it?”

“No, he wasn’t going to jump. Let me explain.”

Now that the firefighters are here, there is a landing. Is it always like that? If there is someone with him, the landing is there; if he’s alone, the landing disappears and he finds his hallway in its stead. His neighbor’s door is on the other side of the landing (she’s straightening some paintings that are hanging in her hall), it’s open a few inches so she can see and hear better. The man invites the firefighters inside, and as he closes his door, he sees his neighbor close hers too. What would happen now, if he tried to leave with the firemen inside? Would he simply come back in or would he find the landing there? To check that out, he apologizes, leaves the firemen in his living room, goes into his hall, opens the door, and as he leaves, comes back into his hallway and shuts the door with a click. But the firefighters aren’t in his new hallway. He pokes his head into his dining room: they’re not there either. He opens his cocktail bar and pours himself a glass; sits down and watches TV once again.

Twenty minutes later, more knocks at the door. Three more firefighters.

“Good evening. Sorry to bother you. Two colleagues of ours came up to this apartment a while ago to fill out a report and haven’t come back down.”

“They left some time ago.”

“We were waiting downstairs, and we’ve not seen them.” The firefighter with the oversize mustache, who’s talking, opens a folder, so he too can fill in a report.

The man invites them in and sees that his neighbor’s door is half open. As they walk in, the firefighters take their helmets off. Did the last two do that? He hadn’t noticed. The man with the really oversize mustache asks if two firefighters had come to see him. The man nods. He asks him to describe them. The man can’t. He hardly looked at them.

“It’s a routine question. We need to find out whether the physical description of the individuals who visited you matches our colleagues.”

Through his half-open door, the man can see his neighbor is still looking at him from hers, while she pretends to clean the gold-colored spyglass. He waves, indicating she shouldn’t shut her door. He speaks to the firefighters, “Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be back right away.”

He leaves his apartment, gently closes the door, and crosses the landing, with the protection (he intuits) of his neighbor preventing it from transforming into his hallway. The neighbor opens her door. He asks her to let him check something. She invites him in. He goes in. Would she let him climb out of her window for a moment? His neighbor is thrilled to bits and says he can do whatever he likes.

“I can see you’ve got an apartment full of firefighters,” she says while bringing him a three-rung ladder. His neighbor’s son immediately stops doing his homework, chews his pencil, and watches them. The man smiles, nods, and climbs out of the window. Keeping close to the wall, he walks slowly along the ledge, as far as the window to his apartment. Down in the street, the crowd is pointing at him again. Near his window, he strains his neck, looks inside, and sees the firefighters holding their helmets. Looking at each other and now and then at the door to see if he’s coming back. The crowd in the street had shrunk since his last sally, but it was on the increase again. His neighbor puts her head out of the window. The man walks back slowly.

“Everything’s in order.”

He pulls himself up. He jumps in, thanks the woman, and they walk towards the hallway. On the landing (here’s confirmation: whenever he is with someone, the landing never turns into a hall), he thanks her again, and before closing her door, rather than entering his apartment, he runs downstairs. He reaches the ground floor and goes into the street. A cold wind is blowing and sweeping up sheets of newspapers that fly over the ground until they catch on benches, dumpsters, and the legs of passers-by. He joins the crowd looking up at his apartment.

Half an hour later, the firefighters who went up still haven’t come down. One of the two firefighters who stayed in the truck goes up to look for them. The minutes tick by. The flashing light revolves silently on top of their truck. The firefighter, who is now by himself, looks tired. He’d like to be home. Today, there are greens and fish in breadcrumbs for supper. He’d wear his slippers and maroon jersey, and after dinner he and his wife would argue about what to do to relax. Ten minutes later, the three firefighters who went up to get the first two appear in the front entrance to the block, together with the last firefighter to go up. No sign, however, of the first two. Before they reach the truck, the man discreetly moves away in case they recognize him, feeling a guilt he finds altogether unjustified.

•

The extremely fat firefighter closes the book, pants, and puts the book on the coffee table in front of the sofa and plants his feet there too. The comparatively thin firefighter re-arranges the flowers in a vase on the cocktail bar. He moves two steps away, scrutinizes them, and walks back to re-arrange them yet again.

“This guy’s not coming. I think we should go.”

“There’s no rush. We can at least take a break. I’d rather be here than go back to the station and have to go out on another job. Get me another whisky.”

“It will be obvious if we drink anymore.”

“So what? He must have disappeared three quarters of an hour ago. The least he can do is offer us a whisky. I’ll get more ice from the kitchen.”

The extremely fat firefighter gets up and goes into the kitchen.

“We really should be going down, I don’t give a fuck where he’s gone,” says the thin man. “Let’s do the report and get downstairs.”

“The longer we wait, the more likely they’ll have repaired the elevator. This is an eighth floor plus the mezzanine.” The fat man comes in from the kitchen with two glasses full of ice. The thin man is about to suggest they should definitely go down, when he looks through the window and sees their truck start up and begin to move off.

“They’re leaving!”

The fat man runs to the window. They both watch the truck drive downhill, its flashing light revolving non-stop. The two firemen grab their helmets in a rush and leave the flat. They press the button to the elevator, just in case they’ve repaired it in the meantime. They see that’s not the case and head down the stairs.

When they’ve been going down five minutes, the comparatively thin man stares at the sign on the wall: they’ve only reached the sixth floor. They stop. It can’t be true. They’ve been going down for such a long time: they should have reached the ground floor ages ago. They’ve walked down fourteen or fifteen floors, how can they still be on the sixth? They go down one more. The sign says FIFTH. They go down another. But, after the fifth, the floors have no signs. They keep walking down: one, two, three, four more floors. No signs. That’s to say: there’s a mark where a sign used to be, a rectangle that’s lighter than the rest of the wall and the holes where screws must have secured the sign. On the next floor, there is another sign: FOURTH. The floor beneath doesn’t have one. The next one doesn’t either. Nor the next one. The next one has a sign. The fourth again. They rest for a moment. The extremely fat man suggests knocking on a door and asking permission to call the station. The comparatively thin man points theatrically at the signs, as if to suggest that all their effort is in vain. But the other man doesn’t understand his gesture.

There are two doors on each landing. They put their ears to the nearest door. The one with a two at the top. Number two on the fourth. But they can’t hear anything. They run to number one on the fourth. They can hear a television. They look at each other. They don’t need to say a word; they both think it’s ridiculous for two firemen to be knocking on a door to ask permission to call up the station to get someone to fetch them. They go down another floor. It’s the fourth again. They put their ears to the nearest door. In number two on the fourth they can hear several people laughing. A family reunion? A party? At number one on the fourth they can hear the clacking of a typewriter. Who on earth can be typing in this day and age? They go down another floor. It’s a landing without a sign. They hear a couple arguing behind the door to number two. The later it gets, the more disheartened the firefighters feel. The truck shouldn’t have gone without them. When they get to the station, what excuse will they have for abandoning them? Did they decide to leave because they were taking their time? The sound of someone playing a piano reaches them from a distant apartment. They both imagine it’s a woman. She’s playing a cheerful tune—badly. La, la, la, do, mi, mi, re, do, B flat, re, do, do, do, do . . . They try in vain to remember the tune’s name.

The extremely fat firefighter goes down the stairs, followed by the comparatively thin one. They’ve decided to knock at a door—the pianist’s. They prick their ears up, trying to discover which flat the piano music is coming from. They can hear it increasingly clearly. They finally reach the door through which the music is coming. Not only can they hear it very clearly: some notes are escaping under the door. The extremely fat firefighter looks at the thin one, who nods and knocks. The piano continues to tinkle away. The firefighter knocks again, more insistently. The piano goes quiet. Can they hear footsteps? They glue their ears to the door. If the piano has gone silent it’s because they’ve been heard. But nobody comes to open up. They knock again. Suddenly, the door opens. A woman’s head appears in the gap created by the security chain and gives them the once over, from helmets to boots. Perhaps she is the pianist? Both had imagined her being much younger. The firefighters greet her and say they need to call the station, to tell them to come and pick them up. The woman gives them the once over again, this time from boots to helmets. They feel absurd. The woman closes the door for a second, removes the security chain, opens it wide, and invites them in. They go in. The woman shuts the door and points to her telephone. The thinner firefighter picks up the receiver, puts it to his ear, and dials.

“The line’s busy,” the thinner firefighter tells the fatter firefighter and the pianist as well. It’s obvious she is in fact the pianist: an enormous piano occupies almost the whole room. “How can the fire-station line be busy?”

The pianist gives them a look of irritation, hugging herself and rubbing her arms together against the cold. The thin firefighter says: “If I told you what’s happened, you wouldn’t believe me.”

The fat firefighter suspects the thin firefighter has dialed the wrong number. He takes the receiver and dials. In effect, the line is busy. He hangs up. He looks at the other firefighter. The pianist looks at them, alternately, from one to the other. Suddenly they hear a scream on the stairs.

The scream is repeated. They hear a door open, another scream, louder and clearer now, and several doors open. The pianist goes to her door and opens it. On the landing above, a neighbor, in a padded quilt dressing gown, is saying haltingly, between sobs, that she’s just found her husband dead in the hall. Someone forced their door open and killed him.

The pianist turns around and looks questioningly at the firefighters. Before she has time to ask, they both shake their heads and say: “Nothing to do with us.”

The pianist opens her mouth wide (a huge mouth, no lipstick, full of teeth and very visible tonsils) and screams. The neighbors peer over into the stairwell. Hundreds of them walk down at once and surround the suspicious firefighters, who defend themselves, repeating time after time that it had nothing to do with them.

“How shameful for the firefighting force!” says the neighbor who has just called the police. In a matter of seconds they hear the wail of sirens and, soon afterwards, cursing the elevator that’s still out of order, two policemen appear, handcuff the firemen, and take them downstairs to the ground floor, out in the street, to the police van. Apart from their understandable annoyance at being mistaken for murderers (wrongly of the opinion that their innocence will be proven), they feel relieved to reach the ground floor.

•

The neighbor who was wearing the padded quilt dressing gown is now wearing a black dress and sitting in front of the coffin that is home to what’s left of her husband. From time to time she puts a handkerchief to her eyes and wipes a tear away. Her relatives keep her company: the brother-in-law (her husband’s brother), two sisters, her son and his fiancée. Not very far away are the neighbors, among whom the pianist enjoys pride of place; she thinks she has a certain right to the privilege, to a kind of superiority over the other neighbors and even over some relatives, especially the ones who are very distantly related—the firefighters were arrested in her house. Nonetheless, reasonably enough, the widow is the center of attention and is hugged methodically by everyone present.

When the funeral parlor staff arrives, everyone standing in the circle moves back towards the walls and creates a space around the coffin. When the staff closes the coffin, the widow bursts into a more intense bout of crying: she will never see her husband again, dead or alive. Her son gives her a hug, the funeral parlor staff carry the coffin on their shoulders as her sobbing reaches a crescendo. As the coffin exits the apartment via the door, the widow’s sobs reach an even higher pitch. They are all on the stairs now. One of the widow’s sisters locks the door and puts the key in her purse. The parlor staff climbs the stairs and slowly starts to bring the coffin down. There are lots of steps, and ensuring they don’t drop the coffin is a long, annoying process. Finally, however, they reach the ground floor, open the front door, and walk out. There is a strong, cool breeze. The funeral car is waiting in front of the door, loaded down with wreaths. There are so many that they’ve had to leave some on the ground—it’s impossible to fit them all in without them sticking out of the car, which is against the law. The staff makes one last effort and lifts the coffin inside. The funeral parlor staff dusts their jackets and gets into the car. The relatives divide themselves between the other two, incredibly immaculate cars. The pianist gets into the third car. She is the only person allowed in who isn’t a relative; she is truly very proud and watches the rest of the neighbors who remain by the front door, smiling half contemptuously. Some of the women are carrying handkerchiefs and wipe tears and snot away.

They have to drive across the city to reach the highway that will take them to the cemetery. They proceed in a caravan: the first is the funeral car. The other two drive behind in a strict single file. They scrupulously respect the traffic lights and drive very slowly. They take the main road leading to the avenue leading to the highway. There is a lot of traffic, and inevitably, some passengers in the cars overtaking them turn round and gawk. If they are children, their mouths are wide open with fear. It’s the first time many of them have seen a car carrying dead people, and they look at the coffin with terror: there’s a dead man in there. They finally reach the avenue. The traffic is flowing well now, and the further they drive, the fewer cars they meet. They drive like that for a few minutes until construction suddenly forces them to take a detour. The driver of the funeral car follows the signs, indicating the route of the detour, until gradually there are fewer and fewer signs and the driver has to use his intuition. He decisively takes a turn but finds it’s a dead end. He should back out, but the two cars behind him are jammed too close together and he can’t. He gets out of the car and asks them to back out, so they can take one of the side roads they’ve just left and try to get back to the avenue that should take them to the highway, or at least, to the signs. They back up: first the last car, then the second, and finally the funeral car, which accelerates ostentatiously as soon as it’s out the bottleneck; this has a negative impact both on the relatives and the pianist. The other two cars, nonetheless, follow on, screeching their tires. They are in an area of the city that’s full of shops. There are large industrial parks and (huge) parked trucks. The roads have names unknown to most citizens, them included.

The absence of traffic isn’t helpful. On the contrary: if there were traffic, if people were driving along these roads, they could ask someone how to get out of their impasse. They are suddenly forced to turn right and come to a beach that runs parallel to a road. It would make reasonable sense to head left, but when the driver of the funeral car indicates which way he intends to turn, the driver behind honks his horn. He lowers his window and says it’s a dead end. They should go right or back the way they came. Although it’s in the wrong direction, it is the only way to return to the signs. The driver of the funeral car acknowledges that he doesn’t know where they are, but deduces that as the metropolitan cemetery is more or less to the north, beyond the first ring of suburbs, they should head northwards along the road: that is, to the left. The few occupants who by this stage haven’t gotten out to voice their opinions finally do get out, slamming their doors. The son, the son’s fiancée, the brother-in-law, the father, the father-in-law, the mother-in-law, and the pianist have very clear ideas about what to do, even though they’re at odds with each other. The widow starts crying again. Finally they decide to take heed of the suggestion made by the driver of the funeral car, simply because they think he’s an expert: of the three drivers he is the only one who drives professionally. They return to their cars. They drive off. They head left along the road that runs parallel to the beach. They carry on for a mile or so, until the road runs out in front of a swimming club. The only asphalted exit is to the left, a road even narrower than the one they’ve just negotiated. They take it. That narrow road soon joins four other equally narrow roads, where there are a few homes. They are simply styled, century-old houses with a ground floor and an upstairs with a balcony and green wooden shutters. All the houses are painted white. The doors on the ground floor are made of glass and wood. They can see people inside: a man watching TV, a girl studying, a man repairing a radio, and a girl at a sewing machine. Some children are playing ball in the street. The driver of the funeral car stops, gets out, and speaks to the women sitting and sewing on chairs outside the door to their house. He asks them how to get off of these side roads and on to the highway. They raise their arms and point their index fingers to the road they’ve just driven up. The driver says that is precisely where they’ve come from and that they hadn’t been able to find a way off those roads. The deceased’s relatives get out of their cars once again. The deceased’s son suggests they drive back across the city, go south, along the other highway, the ring road around the whole city, to get to the north, to the small town where the cemetery is. The deceased’s brother doesn’t agree. They are north of the city. It is ridiculous to drive back across, simply to drive all the way around to where they are now. What they should do is not get into a panic and look for the street that leads to the highway. It must be very close to where they are now: One road or another is bound to lead there. The driver gets back into the funeral car, the others follow suit, drive to the next road, turn left along it, and the next one also to the left, trying to find the wider road that ran out by the swimming club and the beach. But there seems to be no way to get there, and they suddenly find themselves in a rectangular square. It is a square that bears the name of a general from a couple of centuries ago; planted in its center is a tall tree with a gnarled trunk, where two kids are trying to make the other fall off and where there’s no other road apart from the one they have just driven along.