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 multi-use 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.