While the Women are Sleeping

the resignation letter of senor de santiesteban

Whether it was one of those bizarre occurrences to which Chance never quite manages to accustom us, however often they may arise; or whether Destiny, in a show of caution and prudence, temporarily suspended judgement on the qualities and attributes of the new teacher and so felt itself obliged to delay intervening just in case such an intervention should later have been found to be a mistake; or whether, finally, it was because in these southern lands even the boldest and most confident of people tend to distrust their own gifts of persuasion, the fact of the matter is that young Mr Lilburn did not discover what truth there might be in the strange warnings issued to him — only a few days after he had joined the Institute — by his immediate superior, Mr Bayo, and by other colleagues too, until he was well into the first term when sufficient time had elapsed for him to be able to forget or at least to postpone thinking about the possible significance of the warnings. Mr Lilburn, in any case, belonged to that class of person who, sooner or later, in the course of a hitherto untroubled life, finds his career in ruins and his unshakable beliefs overturned, refuted and even held up to ridicule by just such an event as concerns us here. And so it would, therefore, have made little difference if he had never been asked to stay behind to lock up the building.

Lilburn, who was just thirty-one, had eagerly accepted the post offered him, through Mr Bayo, by the director of the British Institute in Madrid. Indeed, he had experienced a certain sense of relief and something very like the discreet, imperfect, muted joy felt in such situations by men who — while they wouldn’t ever dare to so much as dream of rising to heights they had already accepted would never be theirs — nevertheless expect a small improvement in their position as the most natural thing in the world. And although his work at the Institute did not, in itself, constitute any improvement at all, either economic or social, with respect to his previous position, young Mr Lilburn was very conscious, as he signed the rather unorthodox contract presented to him by Mr Bayo during the latter’s summer sojourn in London, that, while spending nine months abroad was almost an invitation to people in his native city to forget all about him and his abilities, and implied, too, the loss — perhaps not, he imagined, irrevocable — of his comfortable but extremely mediocre post at the North London Polytechnic, it also brought the distinct possibility of coming into contact with people higher up the administrative ladder and, more importantly, with prestigious members of the diplomatic corps. Furthermore, having dealings, for example (why not?), with an ambassador could prove most useful to him — however sporadic and superficial those dealings might be — possibly in the not too distant future. And so, around the middle of September, and with the indifference characteristic of any only moderately ambitious man, he made his preparations, recommending a far less knowledgable replacement for the post he was vacating at the Polytechnic, and arrived in Madrid, determined to work hard if necessary to earn the esteem and trust of his superiors — with an eye to any future advantages this might bring him — and to resist being seduced by the flexibility of the Spanish working day.

Young Lilburn soon managed to establish an orderly life for himself in that foreign land and, after a few initial days of vacillation and relative bewilderment (the days he was obliged to spend in the house of old Mr Bayo and his wife while he waited for the previous tenants to vacate the small furnished attic apartment in Calle de Orellana reserved for him from 1 October by Mr Turol, another of his Spanish colleagues; the rent was too high for Lilburn’s budget, but it wasn’t really expensive if one took into account that it was extremely central and had the incomparable advantage of being very near the Institute), he set himself a meticulous and — if such a thing were possible throughout a whole academic year — invariable daily routine, and which he did, in fact, manage to maintain, although only until the month of March. He got up at seven on the dot and, after breakfasting at home and briefly going over what he planned to say in each of his morning classes, set off to the Institute to teach. During break-time, he would share with Mr Bayo and Miss Ferris his dismay at the Spanish students’ appalling lack of discipline and then, over lunch, would make the same remarks to Mr Turol and Mr White. Over dessert, he would review the afternoons lessons, which he would take at a rather slower pace than he had in the morning, and, once they were over, would spend from six to half past seven in the Institute’s library, consulting a few books and preparing his classes for the next day. He would then walk to the elegant house of the widowed Señora Giménez-Klein, in Calle de Fortuny, in order to give an hour’s private tuition to her eight-year-old granddaughter (his protector, Mr Bayo, had found him this simple, well-remunerated work), and then return to his apartment in Calle de Orellana at about half past nine or shortly thereafter, in time to hear the radio news: although, at first, Lilburn understood almost nothing, he was convinced that this was the best way to learn correct Spanish pronunciation. He then ate a light supper, read a couple of chapters of his Spanish grammar book, hurriedly memorising vast lists of verbs and nouns, and went to bed punctually at half past eleven. Any reader familiar with the aforementioned Madrid streets and the buildings occupied by the British Institute will have no difficulty in grasping that Lilburn’s life could not fail to be anything but methodical and ordered, and that his feet probably took no more than two thousand steps each day. His weekends, however, with the exception of the occasional Saturday when he attended suppers or receptions laid on for visitors to Madrid from British universities (and, on just one occasion, a cocktail party at the embassy), were a mystery to his colleagues and superiors, who supposed — based on the not very revealing circumstance that he never answered the phone on those days — that he must make use of his weekends to go on short trips to nearby towns. It would seem, however, that at least until January or February, young Lilburn spent Saturdays and Sundays closeted in his apartment struggling with the whims and caprices of Spanish conjugations. And one can only assume that he spent his Christmas vacation in the same way.

Derek Lilburn was a man of little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past: the only son of a couple of mediocre, second-rate actors who had achieved a certain degree of popularity (if not prestige) during the early part of the Second World War with an Elizabethan and Jacobean repertoire that included Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Heywood the Younger, but which scrupulously avoided authors of greater stature like Marlowe, Webster or, indeed, Shakespeare, Lilburn had nonetheless failed to inherit what used to be called a vocation for the stage’; although one might well question whether his progenitors had ever harbored such a vocation themselves. When the war was over, and the various divas, anxious to resume their positions and hungry for applause, hurried back to the theatre with vigour and assiduity, and the slow work of reconstruction as well as the return en masse of the armed forces made London, if not a more anxious city, certainly a more uncomfortable place than when the bombings were rife, the Lilburns, apparently without regret, left the capital and the profession. They settled in Swansea and opened a grocery store, doubtless with the money they had saved during their years devoted to the ignoble and thankless art of acting. All that remained of those eventful times were a few posters advertising Philaster and The Revenger’s Tragedy, and a few facts that have led me, when speaking of his parents, to give more importance to their dramatic incursions — mere anecdote — than to their true status as shopkeepers. Neither books nor erudition filled young Lilburn’s childhood, and you can be quite sure that he did not even benefit from the one vestige that might unwittingly have remained of his parents’ years spent treading the boards: an emphatic, smug or affected way of speaking even in banal, domestic conversation.

The death of his father, which occurred when young Derek was just eighteen, meant that he could take personal charge of the business, and the death of his mother, a few months later, served as a good excuse to sell the establishment, move to London and pay for his own higher education. Once he had gained his degree, with the deceptive brilliance of the diligent student, he worked as a teacher in state schools for a few years — without, in that brief interval, being assailed by any vocational doubts — until, in 1969, thanks to a superficial and entirely self-interested friendship with one of the teachers at the Polytechnic, he was appointed to the very post he had now rejected in favour of a brief stay abroad — a period which he sensed would somehow be a transitional one.

It is well known to all those familiar with the Institute, whether as teachers, students or merely as regular visitors to the library, that its doors close at nine o’clock sharp (half an hour after the last evening classes end). The person charged with closing up is the porter, to give him his conventional title, even though his duties, and this is more or less the norm in all such coeducational establishments, often depart from those implied by his title and more closely resemble those of a librarian or beadle. This man has to keep an eye on the entrances and exits of anyone not employed by the Institute; attend to any orders, errands or demands issued by teachers; clean the blackboards which, for reasons of carelessness or forgetfulness, have been left, at the end of the day, covered in numbers, illustrious names and notable dates; ensure that no one takes a book from the library without its loan having been duly recorded; and, finally — and leaving aside a few lesser tasks — make quite certain that, at five minutes to nine, the building is empty and, if it is, lock the doors until the following morning. Fabián Jaunedes, the man occupying the busy post of porter when young Derek Lilburn arrived in Madrid, had, for twenty-four years, been carrying out his duties with the perfection of one who has virtually created his own job. And so when, in early March, with some haste and urgency, he was admitted to the hospital for a cataract operation and thus forced to abandon his duties for at least as long as it would take him to recuperate (a recuperation that would necessarily be incomplete or partial and which would, at any rate, take far longer than those running the organisation might desire), the internal life of the Institute suffered far worse disruption than one would have thought. The director and Mr Bayo immediately rejected the idea of taking on a replacement, for, on the one hand, they thought that, at such short notice, it would be hard to find someone with good enough references who would be prepared to commit himself for what little remained of the term, only perhaps to find himself replaced (they doubted the old porter would make such a speedy recovery, but it seemed to them that filling the vacant position for more than five months was tantamount to getting rid of Fabián for good, which would be a gross act of disloyalty to someone who had himself been so loyal and given such good service for so many years). On the other hand, they soon revealed that ability or obscure need to turn a minor sacrifice or compromise into something truly epic — an ability or need so prevalent among the unimaginative and among people of a certain age — when they decided that, in view of this unexpected setback (which they would have described, rather, as an adversity), it would not be unreasonable to call for a minor sacrifice on the part of each and every one of the teachers, who could easily share the absent porter’s various duties and demonstrate en passant their selfless devotion to the Institute. The librarian was left in charge of keeping an eye on any strangers who went in and out of the main door, which she could easily see from her usual position; Miss Ferris was to keep the flyers and announcements on the bulletin boards in the entrance hall up to date, although without allowing too many to accumulate; every few hours, Mr Turol was to inspect the state of the toilets and the boiler; those teachers who finished their classes at half past eight were urged to appoint one of their students to clean the blackboard before leaving; and, lastly, among the members of staff who had not been assigned any specific task, an equitable rota was put in place: someone must remain in the building until nine at night to check that all was in order and to lock the doors. And although this represented a disturbance to Lilburn’s rigid routine, he had no alternative but to miss his appointment with Señora Giménez-Kleins granddaughter one evening a week and to collaborate with his superiors and colleagues in the smooth running of the Institute by staying in the library until the usual time of nine o’clock every Friday from March onwards.

It was on the first Friday when he was called upon to perform this new duty that Mr Bayo revived in his memory — with the same nonchalance that had made an astonished Lilburn wonder if this earnest man with his irreproachable manners was really capable of such an outrageous assertion — that initial warning which, when he’d first arrived, had produced in him a certain feeling of unease.

‘Now tonight,’ Mr Bayo said to him during break-time, ‘as I explained to you once before, don’t worry about the ghost. I believe I mentioned it briefly when you joined us, but I thought I’d better remind you just in case you’d forgotten, since it’s your turn to be on duty and you might be startled by the noises Señor de Santiesteban makes. At a quarter to nine, you’ll hear a door burst open, then seven footsteps in one direction and, after a pause, eight footsteps back. The door that opened will then close, more quietly this time. There’s no need to be frightened or to take any notice of it. This is something that has been happening since who knows when, certainly for as long as the Institute has had its headquarters in this building. It has nothing whatsoever to do with us and, as you can imagine, we’re more than used to it; as, of course, is poor Fabián, who’s usually the only person to hear it. Just one thing, given that you will have the keys over the weekend and will, therefore, be the first to arrive on Monday morning to open up, please don’t forget to remove his letter of resignation from the bulletin board opposite my office. Be sure to do this as soon as you come in. Although everyone knows of Señor de Santiesteban’s existence (we don’t hide it from anyone, I can assure you, and no one is troubled or upset by his presence, which is, besides, most discreet), we do nevertheless try not to let it intrude too much on the lives of the students, who, being children, are more sensitive than we are to such inexplicable events. So please do remember to remove the letter. And, of course, simply throw it in the nearest wastepaper basket. Imagine what it would be like if we kept them! By now we’d have a whole roomful of them. When I think about it, it all seems utterly ridiculous! Night after night, at the same hour, the same identical letter, with not a single word or syllable different. That, you’ll agree, is what you’d call perseverance.’

Young Lilburn responded only with a nod.

But as night fell and he was sitting in the library marking papers until it was time to lock up the building and go home, he heard a door being flung open so violently that it rattled the glass panes, then a few firm, resolute — not to say mutinous — steps, followed by a brief silence that lasted only seconds, then more steps, calmer this time, returning and, finally, the same door (one presumes) gently closing. Lilburn looked at the clock hanging on one wall and saw that it was eight forty-six. Feeling more irritated than surprised or alarmed, he got up and left the library. In the corridor, he stopped and listened, expecting to hear new noises, but there was nothing. Then he scoured the building in search of some laggardly student or joker to whom he would try to demonstrate, more than anything, the pointlessness of his prank, but he found no one. Nine o’clock struck and he decided to leave and give the matter no further thought; however, just as he was about to leave, he remembered another of Mr Bayo’s instructions, possibly the one that had most stuck in his mind: he went up to the second floor to inspect the bulletin board in the corridor, immediately opposite his superior’s office. All he saw there, affixed with four thumb tacks, was an already much-read leaflet announcing a series of talks on George Darley and other minor romantic poets that was due to be given by a visiting lecturer from Brasenose College, beginning in April. But there was absolutely nothing remotely resembling a letter of resignation. Feeling calmer and also rather pleased, he set off towards Calle de Orellana and thought no more about the episode until on Monday, around mid-morning, Miss Ferris came up to him after one of his classes and informed him that Mr Bayo wished to see him in his office.

‘Mr Lilburn,’ said the old history teacher when he went in, ‘don’t you remember my urging you, before you did anything else this morning, to remove Señor de Santiesteban’s resignation letters from the bulletin board outside?’

‘Yes, sir, I remember perfectly. But on Friday night, after I’d heard the footsteps you warned me about, I went up to do exactly that, but found no such letters on the board. Should I have looked again this morning?’

Mr Bayo struck his forehead like someone who has suddenly understood something and replied:

‘Of course, it’s my fault for not having warned you. Yes, Mr Lilburn, you need only look at the bulletin board in the morning. Not that it matters, this is hardly the first time it’s happened. But next Friday, remember: the letter only appears at dawn, even though one would imagine that Señor de Santiesteban would pin it to the noticeboard at a quarter to nine. Yes, I know it’s inexplicable, but then so is the very presence of the gentleman himself, is it not? Well, that was all I wanted to say, Mr Lilburn, but don’t worry, the children will have calmed down by this afternoon.’

‘The children?’

‘Yes, it was the juniors who alerted me to the fact that the letters were still there. I heard them talking excitedly in the corridor, went out to see what was going on and found the boys, all very worked up, handing round the three sheets of paper.’ Lilburn made an exasperated gesture and said: ‘I don’t understand a word, Mr Bayo. I really would be most grateful if you could give me a detailed and coherent account of the facts. What is all this about three letters, for example? What is the story behind this ghost, if he really exists? You keep talking about letters of resignation, but I still don’t know what the devil it is that this Señor de Santiesteban fellow resigns from each night. I’m totally bewildered and don’t know what to think.’

Mr Bayo gave a faint, melancholy smile and said: ‘Nor do I, Mr Lilburn, and, believe me, after all my years here, I, too, would like to know the details of Señor de Santiesteban’s doubtless sad story. But we know absolutely nothing about him. His name tells us nothing, nor, of course, does it appear in any yearbooks, dictionaries or encyclopaedias of any kind: he wasn’t famous or, rather, he did nothing in his life worthy of mention. Perhaps he was in some way linked to the former owner of the building, the man who had it built around 1930—I can’t remember the exact date now: he was an immensely wealthy man, interested in the arts and in politics; he was a kind of patron of left-wing intellectuals during the time of the Second Republic, and he died bankrupt. But we don’t know for sure, nor, indeed, do we have any concrete information that allows us to assume any connection. Then again, it could be that his close association with the building stems from his acquaintance, friendship or professional involvement with the architect, who was an equally interesting character: his ideas were quite advanced for the time, but he committed suicide, jumping overboard during an Atlantic crossing when he was still relatively young. Again, there’s no way of finding out. All of this is mere supposition, Mr Lilburn, mere hypothesising that I don’t even dare to formulate in its entirety because there are so few facts.’

‘It’s all very strange, very curious,’ remarked Lilburn.

‘It certainly is,’ said Mr Bayo. And I have to say that a long time ago, when I was only a little older than you are now and had just started work at the Institute, Señor de Santiesteban’s mysterious footsteps aroused my curiosity and even robbed me of my sleep for some months; I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that they came close to becoming an obsession. I neglected my work and devoted myself to making enquiries. I visited the relatives of the former owner and of the architect and asked them about a possible friendship between either of those two men and one Leandro P. de Santiesteban, but they had never heard of him; I consulted old telephone books in search of someone called Pérez de Santiesteban, for example (because I still don’t know what the P stands for: perhaps the first part of a double-barrelled last name, perhaps simply Pedro, Patricio, Placido, I don’t know), but I found none; in my overwhelming desire to know the ghost’s story, I went to the registry office in the hope that I might find a birth certificate that would at least give me a trail to follow, even if it was a false one: a similar last name so that I could at least focus my investigations on something; but I got no positive results, only problems with various bureaucrats, who took me for a madman, and with the police, because my behaviour, in those alarmist times, seemed very suspicious indeed; finally, I went to visit all the Santiestebans in the city, and there are quite a few. But those I spoke with told me there had never been anyone called Leandro in their family, while others refused to even talk to me. In short, it was all in vain and finally I had to abandon my search, with the disagreeable feeling of having wasted my time and made a complete fool of myself. Now, like everyone else who works at the Institute, I simply accept the ghost’s undeniable existence and pay him not the slightest heed, because I know there’s no point and that taking any interest at all brings only trouble and discontent. And so I’m very sorry, Mr Lilburn, but I can’t answer your questions. I would only advise you to ignore Señor de Santiesteban, like everyone else. Don’t worry, he’s not dangerous; he simply leaves a resignation letter each night and we remove it the following day.’

‘That’s precisely what I was going to ask you. Doesn’t the resignation letter explain something? What is he resigning from? And why, as you said earlier, were there three letters today?’

Mr Bayo bent towards the wastepaper basket beside him, removed a few crumpled sheets of paper and held them out to Lilburn, saying:

‘There were three of them today for the simple reason that today is Monday and, as usual, there was no one in the building over the weekend to take down the letters from Friday, Saturday and Sunday. You should have removed them from the bulletin board first thing this morning, but, as I said, that was my fault, not yours. Here.’

Lilburn took the sheets of very ordinary paper and read them carefully. They had been written with a fountain pen, and the words were the same on all three, without the slightest variation:

Dear Friend,

In view of the regrettable events of recent days, the nature of which run counter not only to my habits, but to my principles, I have no alternative, even though I am well aware of the grave difficulties my decision will cause you, of resigning forthwith from my post. And may I say too, that I strenuotisly disapprove of and condemn your attitude to the aforementioned events.

Leandro P. de Santiesteban

‘As you see,’ said Mr Bayo, ‘the letter reveals nothing, in fact, it only serves to make the whole business even more baffling, given that this building was a private residence and not an office or whatever, that is, not a place occupied by people with posts from which they could resign. We have to be satisfied with merely contemplating the enigma without trying to decipher it.’

The months of March and April came and went, and each Friday, young Lilburn, sitting in the library, would listen to Señor de Santiestebans unvarying footsteps on the floor above. He tried to follow the advice Mr Bayo had given him and to ignore those mysterious steps, but sometimes, unexpectedly, he would find himself pondering the ghost’s personality and history or mechanically counting the number of steps in each direction. In this respect, he had discovered that, as his superior had told him on one occasion, Señor de Santiesteban always took seven steps in one direction and then, after a pause, eight steps back, after which he closed the door. And it was during the Easter vacation, which he spent in Toledo, that a possible explanation for this occurred to him. He was extremely excited by this tiny discovery — which was, in fact, no more than mere conjecture whose truth he would be unable to verify — and he longed for the moment when he could return to Madrid and tell Mr Bayo.

And on the first day back after the holidays, instead of staying in the playground during break, exchanging complaints with Miss Ferris and Mr Bayo about the unsatisfactory behaviour of their students, young Lilburn asked Mr Bayo if they could go somewhere private to talk and, once they were ensconced in the old history teacher’s office, he laid his discovery before him.

‘In my opinion,’ he said, slightly nervously, ‘the reason Señor de Santiesteban takes, first, seven steps and then eight is this: outraged by the events to which he refers in his letter and which prevent him, a man of principle, from remaining in his post, he storms out of the room in which he is sitting and takes seven steps, or should I say strides, over to the bulletin board. He leaves his letter there, and, feeling calmer now that he has done his duty, now that he’s broken with the friend who has so disappointed him, and now that his conscience is clear, he returns to his room taking eight steps instead of seven because he is now less angry or agitated, and may even be feeling rather pleased with himself. The proof of this, Mr Bayo, is the fact that he then closes the door slowly, without the anger evident in the violence with which he flung it open.’

‘You put the case very well, Mr Lilburn,’ replied Mr Bayo with barely perceptible irony. ‘And I think you’re right. I myself reached the same conclusion many years ago, when I, too, took an interest in the matter. But it got me nowhere imagining that the different number of steps taken in each direction was due to a slight change in Señor de Santiesteban’s mood. Here I am, as ignorant as I was on my first day. Listen. The enigma of the Institute’s ghost is just that, an enigma. There is no way it can be deciphered.’

Mr Lilburn thought for a moment, somewhat disappointed by Mr Bayo’s cool response. After a few seconds, however, he looked up and asked:

‘Wouldn’t it be possible to speak to him?’

‘Speak to whom? To Señor de Santiesteban? No. Let me explain: on Friday night at a quarter to nine, you hear the door of this office being flung open, as you would on any other evening of the week if you happened to be in the Institute; then you hear footsteps and the door closing again. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

‘And where are you usually sitting when this happens?’

‘In the library.’

‘Well, if, instead of sitting in the library, you were in this office or, indeed, outside in the corridor, you would hear exactly the same thing, but you would also see that the door does not open. You hear it opening and closing, but you can see that it neither opens nor closes; it remains in its place, motionless, the glass panes don’t even rattle when you hear the door being flung open initially.’

‘I see. And are you absolutely sure that it’s this door and not another door that the ghost opens?’

‘Yes. It’s definitely that glass-paned door behind you. Believe me, I’ve checked. When I was sure that this was the case, I spent a few nights here, watching it. As you said before, Señor de Santiesteban storms out of this office, goes over to the bulletin board, pins up his letter of resignation and comes back. The letter, however, doesn’t appear at once, but at some point during the night or in the early hours — precisely when I don’t know. The only two occasions on which I managed to remain awake, without once nodding off and thus giving Señor de Santiesteban a chance to pin up his letter, I heard the usual footsteps, but the letter never appeared. That must mean that he saw me (saw that I was awake, which is why the letter didn’t appear). But he refuses to speak or perhaps cannot speak. After those two nights, when I realised that I, in turn, was being watched by him (or, rather, although I couldn’t see him, he was watching my every move), I addressed him on several occasions and in the most diverse tones of voice: one day, I greeted him respectfully, the next mellifluously, the day after that angrily. I even went so far as to insult him, just to see if he would react. But he never responded; nothing worked, and so I did the best thing I could have done: I abandoned my stupid, naive vigils and came to think of Don Leandro P. de Santiesteban just as everyone else here does, as “the Institute’s remarkable ghost”.’

Young Lilburn again thought for a few moments and then said with real concern:

‘But, Mr Bayo, if everything you have told me is true, then Señor de Santiesteban must inhabit this office and might well be listening to us now, isn’t that so?’

‘Possibly, Mr Lilburn,’ responded Mr Bayo, ‘possibly.’

From that day forth, young Lilburn did not speak to Mr Bayo or to anyone else about the Institute’s ghost. The old teacher assumed, with some relief, that Lilburn had concluded that giving any further thought to the matter was a waste of time and had decided to follow his advice, born of long experience. This was not, however, the case. Young Lilburn, behind his superior’s back and in a rather improvised fashion, had decided to find out for himself what it was that drove Señor de Santiesteban to resign from his post every night and, since he was left in charge of the keys of the building over the weekend and could, therefore, come and go as he pleased during those days without having to explain himself to anyone, he had started spending Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights on the sofa in the second-floor corridor, where, even when lying down, he had a clear view of the entire, albeit rather limited stage occupied by the invisible ghost’s nocturnal walks, that is, the door of Mr Bayo’s office, the bulletin board opposite and, of course, the space between.

There were three reasons, or, rather, feelings, that drove him to carry out his investigations in secret: suspicion, the lure of the clandestine, and the sheer challenge of the thing. He made good use of Mr Bayo’s generous account of events and of the lessons to be learned from his failure, but, at the same time, he felt that if he was to fulfil his desire to solve the mystery, he had to experience for himself at least some of the setbacks that this same ambition had inflicted on his superior in the past. He also found in those long periods of waiting the pleasure one always gets from experiencing anything that is forbidden or unknown to the rest of humanity. And finally, he savoured in advance the moment when his endeavours would be crowned with victory, which consisted not only in securing and forever possessing the longed-for truth, but also in enjoying the inner satisfaction — from which vanity definitely derives the most pleasure — implicit in any triumph over a more important and more knowledgeable opponent.

And in the months that followed, the last of the school year, young Lilburn suffered the same setbacks as the old history teacher had in his youth. He tried without success to speak to Señor de Santiesteban; he waited patiently, again and again, for the letter to appear on the bulletin board, but sooner or later, being obliged as he was to remain for hours with his eyes fixed on one point, sleep almost always overcame him; and on the two or three occasions when he did manage to keep his eyes open until the next morning, the letter did not appear.

Time passed rapidly and he was left with ever fewer opportunities to attain his objective. Dissatisfied with the abominable behaviour of his Spanish students and with his work, which had brought him few chances to improve his short-term prospects, he had resolved not to renew his contract for another year and to return to London and to his job at the Polytechnic as soon as the term was over. However, as the end of school activities drew nearer, Lilburn came to regret more and more having made that choice. Now that he had his ticket home, he could not go back on his decision, and he repeatedly berated himself for his precipitate behaviour when, in a sudden, irrational rush of confidence, he had thought that success was only a matter of weeks away. He could see the day approaching when he would have to leave, doubtless never to return, and he ceaselessly cursed his excessive optimism and the cold indifference of Señor de Santiesteban, who treated him as haughtily as he had Mr Bayo, and — even more woundingly — other mere mortals as well. In his madness and while he was listening for the nth time to the sound of the footsteps on the wooden floor, he would try to grab the ghost or shout at him, calling him a vain, cowardly, heartless fraud — in short, heaping him with insults.

However, on just such an occasion, he came up with a possible remedy for his despair, a solution to his ignorance. A moment before, he had been through one of those stormy episodes provoked by the ghost’s disdain for him and, feeling desolate and in the grip of the hysterical rage induced by situations of prolonged impotence, he had lain face down on the sofa in the corridor. It was eight forty-seven. And suddenly, in the midst of his anguish, he seemed to hear the door to Mr Bayo’s office flung open and Señor de Santiesteban again take his invariable fifteen steps before once more closing the door, as he always did. Surprised, he sat up and smoothed his dishevelled hair. He looked at the door and then at the bulletin board. And that was when he realised that he hadn’t actually heard anything the second time, but that, like a piece of music on a record one has played and replayed throughout the day, the footsteps (their rhythm and intensity) had lodged in his brain and were being repeated inside him, unwittingly, involuntarily, like an obsessive, particularly complicated passage that one remembers perfectly and yet cannot reproduce. He knew them by heart, and although it was, of course, impossible to imitate them with his voice, he could with his own feet. Buoyed up by new hope and enthusiasm, he left the building. And on that Saturday in June, for the first time in many weekends, he slept in his apartment in Calle de Orellana.

He suddenly felt like an actor who has spent several months performing in the same play with considerable success and who, knowing that the audience will reward his performance with a warm round of applause, is in no hurry to appear on stage to play his part, but rather allows himself the luxury of lingering in the wings and making his entrance a few seconds late so as to create a sense of expectation among the audience and slight alarm among his fellow actors. Lilburn, then, felt so confident of his success that, instead of putting his plan into action right away, he devoted himself — although not without having to struggle against his own pressing feelings of uncertainty — to revelling in the good fortune that destiny, he sensed, was about to bestow on him. He spent only one more typical night at the Institute, on the eve of his encounter with Sefior de Santiesteban and of his departure. Indeed, he decided to wait until all the classes and exams were over before carrying out his experiment, and he felt that his last full day would be the most appropriate date to choose, for the following reason: if anything happened to him, anything out of the ordinary, no one would miss him or, in consequence, make any awkward or compromising investigations, given that everyone, including Mr Bayo, would imagine that he was in London and so would find nothing odd about his absence. And although that night, between eight and half past nine, the students would be putting on their traditional end-of-term theatrical production, which would mean that on that particular Saturday he would be far from alone in the building, he felt that this would, in fact, only work in his favour (on the one hand, no one would trouble him, because at a quarter to nine, parents, teachers, students and cleaning ladies would all be in the auditorium, and, on the other hand, if anyone did surprise him in the act, his presence at that hour in the Institute would be more than justified): all these factors only increased his determination. Just in case, though, he left nothing to chance: he found it easy enough to persuade Mr Bayo to lend him his office key and to have a copy made; he synchronised his watch with the Institute clock and checked that neither was running slow or fast; and, as I mentioned before, he spent the whole of the previous night rehearsing, until he had an absolutely perfect imitation down.

The day came. Lilburn made his appearance shortly before eight o’clock and was greatly praised for having turned up at the Institute to see the performance even though he was due to fly to London that very night at half past eleven. He took advantage of this circumstance to warn that, precisely because he had a plane to catch, he would, most regrettably, have to leave halfway through the production, adding that he was nevertheless very glad to be able to see at least a good part of it before leaving. Just as the performance was about to begin, he said goodbye to his colleagues and to Mr Bayo, to whom he said: ‘You’ll be hearing from me.’

That year, the students were putting on a shortened version of Julius Caesar. Both the acting and the diction were appalling, but Lilburn barely noticed, immersed as he was in his own thoughts. And at twenty-two minutes to nine, at the beginning of the third act, he stood up and, trying not to make too much noise, left the auditorium and walked up to the second floor. He unlocked Mr Bayo’s office door and went in.

There he waited for a few more minutes and then, when it was exactly eight forty-five by his watch and he could hear in the distance the voice of a boy saying ‘I know not, gentlemen, what you intend, who else must be let blood, who else is rank’, young Derek Lilburn flung open the door, making the glass panes rattle, took seven determined steps over to the noticeboard, pinned up a sheet of ordinary paper with one thumb tack, took another eight steps in the opposite direction, went back into the office and closed the door gently behind him.

Over the summer, old Fabián Jaunedes lost his sight completely, and Mr Bayo and the director of the Institute had no option but to hire a new porter. When the new incumbent arrived on 1 September to take up his post, Mr Bayo told him about Señor de Santiesteban and about the letter of resignation. As he usually did — feeling fearful, moreover, on this occasion that the new arrival might take fright and decide not to accept the post — he tried to play it down and provide as few details as possible. The new porter, who, as well as having impeccable references, had excellent manners and knew his place, merely nodded respectfully and assured Mr Bayo that he would remember to remove the letter from the bulletin board each morning. The old history teacher breathed a sigh of relief and told himself that acquiring the services of such a man had been a real coup. However, imagine his surprise the next morning, when the new porter came into his office and said:

I’ve taken the letter down from the bulletin board, sir, but I just wanted to say that the information you gave me yesterday wasn’t quite accurate. Last night, exactly as you warned me I would, I heard the door opening and a few footsteps, but I also clearly heard the voices of two people talking animatedly. This morning, I took down the letter as requested, and I hope you’ll forgive me, sir, but purely out of curiosity, I read the letter and I have to say that not only is it not written by just one ghost, as you gave me to understand yesterday, it is signed by two people. See for yourself.’

Mr Bayo took the letter and read it. And while he read, his face assumed an expression similar to that of the teacher who discovers one day that his pupil has outdone him, and — filled by a strange mixture of envy, pride and fear — can only wonder in confusion whether, in the future, he will find himself humbled or praised by the person who will, from now on, be the one wielding the power.

(1975)