His back ached and his neck was stiff. Only a few years before, he and his friend Horacio Amado-Castro used to go camping upstate, spending the night in sleeping bags on the hard ground, but now he was too old for such a lack of comfort. Curled up alongside him, Lucia, however, had the placid expression of someone sleeping on feather down. Evelyn, stretched out on the cushion and wrapped up in her parka, boots, and gloves, was snoring lightly with Marcelo on top of her. It took Richard several seconds to recognize her and remember why this tiny young woman was in his house, their collision, the snowstorm. After hearing part of Evelyn’s story the previous night, he once more felt the moral outrage that in the past had stirred him to defend migrants and still made his father’s blood boil. Richard had ultimately distanced himself from taking action, ending up enclosed in his academic world, far from the harsh reality of the poor in Latin America. He felt certain that Evelyn’s employers were exploiting and possibly mistreating her, which would explain her terror at such a slight accident.
He pushed Lucia aside somewhat brusquely to get her off his legs and out of his mind, then shook himself like a wet dog and struggled to his feet, his mouth parched. He reflected that the brownie had been a bad idea: it had led to the revelations of the previous night, to Evelyn’s story, Lucia’s as well—and God knew what he had told them. He did not recall having let slip any details about his own past, something he never did, but he must have mentioned Anita, because Lucia had commented that all those years after losing his wife, he still missed her. “I’ve never been loved like that, Richard, love has always been in half measures for me,” she had added.
Richard looked down at Lucia and felt a sudden rush of tenderness. She was still asleep on the floor and her sprawling limbs gave her a vulnerable, adolescent look. This woman who was old enough to be a grandmother reminded him of his Anita when she was resting, his twentysomething Anita. For a second he was tempted to stoop down, take Lucia’s head in his hands, and kiss her. Disconcerted by this dangerous impulse, he controlled himself at once.
Whenever Richard turned on his computer, a screen saver of Anita and Bibi appeared, their expressions accusatory or smiling at him depending on his mood. It was not a reminder; he had no need of that. If his memory were to fail him, Anita and Bibi would be waiting for him in the timeless dimension of dreams. Occasionally a vivid one would stick with him, and he’d spend the entire day with one foot in this world and the other in the shifting sands of a dreadful nightmare. Each night when he switched off the light before going to sleep, he would summon Anita and Bibi in the hope of seeing them. He knew he was the one who created these nocturnal visions, and so if his mind was able to punish him with nightmares, it could also reward him, although he had not discovered a sure way of producing those consoling dreams. Over time, his mourning had changed in tone and texture. In the beginning it was red and piercing; then it became gray, thick and rough like burlap. He became used to this dull pain and incorporated it into his everyday discomforts, along with heartburn. The guilt though remained the same, as cold and implacable as glass. His friend Horacio, always ready to celebrate the good and minimize the bad, had at one point accused him of being in love with misfortune. “Tell your superego to fuck off, man. The way you examine every single action, past and present, is twisted. The sin of pride. You’re not that important. You have to forgive yourself once and for all, just like Anita and Bibi have forgiven you.”
Half-jokingly, Lucia Maraz had once told him he was turning into a fearful old hypochondriac. “I already am one,” he replied, trying to adopt her joking tone, and yet he felt hurt, because it was undeniably true. They were at one of those dreadful social events in their department, this time to bid farewell to a retiring professor. He came over to Lucia with a glass of wine for her and mineral water for himself. She was the only person he’d had any desire to talk to there. And she was right, he lived with a constant feeling of anxiety. He swallowed handfuls of vitamin supplements because he thought that if his health failed everything would go to hell and the whole edifice of his existence would come crashing down. He protected his house with burglar alarms, because he’d heard that in Brooklyn, as everywhere else, robbers were active in broad daylight. He protected his computer and his cell phone with such complicated passwords that every so often he forgot them. Then there were the elaborate car, health, and life insurance policies. In the end the only insurance he lacked was against his worst memories, which would assail him the moment he stepped outside his routines, threatening to overwhelm with disorder. He preached to his students that order is an art rational beings possess, a ceaseless battle against centrifugal force, because the natural dynamic of all living things is to expand, multiply, and end in chaos. As a proof you only had to observe human behavior, the voracity of nature, and the infinite complexity of the universe. To maintain at least a semblance of order, he never let himself go, but kept his existence under control with military precision. That was why he had his lists and a strict timetable, which made Lucia laugh out loud when she discovered them. The bad thing about working with her was that nothing escaped her.
“How do you see yourself in old age?” Lucia had asked him.
“I’m already in it.”
“No, you’ve got a good ten years yet.”
“I hope I don’t live too long, that would be awful. The ideal would be to die still in perfect health, say at around seventy-five, when my body and mind are functioning properly.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” she said cheerfully.
To Richard it was a serious plan. At seventy-five he would have to find an effective way of putting an end to it all. When the moment arrived, he would travel to New Orleans, where he could hear the music of the French Quarter’s quirky characters. He intended to finish out his days playing the piano with some stupendous musicians, who would allow him to join their band out of pity, and lose himself in the blare of the trumpet and the saxophone, the exuberance of the African drums. And if this was too much to ask, well then he wanted to leave this world silently, seated beneath a dilapidated ceiling fan in an old--fashioned bar, comforted by the rhythms of a melancholy jazz tune, quaffing exotic cocktails with no thought of the consequences, because he would have the lethal capsule in his pocket. It would be his last night, so he could permit himself a few drinks.
“Don’t you ever feel the need for female company, Richard?” Lucia asked with a mischievous wink. “Someone in your bed, for example?”
“Not at all.”