The Tenant and The Motive by Javier Cercas

Author:Javier Cercas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2005-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

XVIII

During the night he woke up several times bathed in sweat, the sheets twisted. One time he imagined he’d just dreamed the visit he’d made the previous evening to Berkowickz’s apartment; another time, as he smoked a cigarette of insomnia looking out the window of his study (outside the bulbs of the street lamps projected a weak light over the street), he wished vehemently for that whole week to have been a nightmare. At some point he managed to get to sleep, comforted by the hope that the next day everything would be different.

The next day he woke up with the certainty that nothing was going to be different. It was seven in the morning; filtering through the curtains, the skeletal light of dawn lit up the room. Although overwhelmed by the prospect (a Saturday without a single activity to occupy his time), he got up immediately, shaved and showered, and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. He tried to banish from his mind the ominous proximity of Berkowickz’s apartment, on the other side of the landing. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. Morbidly he leafed through the sheaf of photocopies that Berkowickz had given him the day before: it was an article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz. He left the sheaf of photocopies on the sofa and went to his study where he spent a while putting papers in order. By nine-thirty he didn’t know what to do with himself any more. If only I could at least go out for a run, he thought, lighting a cigarette. That was when he remembered that it had been almost a week since they bandaged his ankle. He remembered the doctor’s words: ‘Come back in a week.’ He called a taxi and, while he waited for it on the porch, he was happy to have found something to occupy the morning. He was also happy at the mere possibility of getting rid of the bandage, crutch and limp that had been humiliating him all week.

The taxi stopped on the expanse of pavement surrounded by grass where Mario had parked his car the previous week: the old second-hand Buick was still there; Mario felt a sort of tenderness towards it.

He went into the hospital. At the end of the corridor with very white walls he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy hands was entrenched. Mario recognized her. Leaning his crutch and his elbows on the counter, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone she turned to Mario and handed him a form.

‘I don’t know if you recognize me,’ said Mario, smiling, because he was sure the nurse recognized him and could perhaps save him the paperwork. ‘I was here last week and –’

‘Be so kind as to fill in the form,’ the nurse parried curtly.

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