Chapter VII - Blue Flowers

The next morning he was still thinking about the previous day, about how there was no point to keeping watch like that. Not even if he were to spend the whole day there, watching the post office and every woman who went in, every woman who came out, always thinking that each one might be her, and always missing her. How many times had he missed her these past few days, waiting in the snack bar, during some conversation or other, a momentary lapse, a distracted glance. How many times had she been in and out without his even knowing? So close and yet, at the same time, a stranger.

He imagined her tall, very thin, her clothes elegant but discreet, maybe a little vintage, as though she were right out of an antiques shop, a thrift store, a pearl necklace, he pictured her hair tied back, maybe a few strands come loose, light makeup, the quick walk of someone who knows she is being watched, the walk of someone who has no time to waste. Except that nobody was her, even if he spent the whole day there, sitting opposite the post office, in the snack bar. Nobody was her, he thought, rather disillusioned.

At last, he decided to talk to the doorman. When he came into the building he asked, as though he didn’t really care, it couldn’t matter less, he asked whether the doorman knew the previous resident of his apartment; the doorman looked at him suspiciously, first saying yes, then immediately correcting himself to say no, he didn’t know who he was, he’d only seen him a few times. He thought it would be best to explain himself, so he explained that some correspondence had arrived addressed to the previous resident and that he didn’t know whom to pass it on to; the doorman looked at him strangely—maybe he knew something, he thought—the doorman said he didn’t know the new address either, he didn’t really know who the former tenant was. And again he felt that the doorman was keeping something from him. Then he thought he was surely being paranoid about this whole business with the letters, what secrets could the doorman and the previous resident really be sharing, after all? He thought it best not to insist. There had to be other ways to get to him, he thought, and he immediately remembered the owner of the apartment, the lady he had only briefly met for the handover of the keys. He would phone her that same day.

He decided to call his ex-wife while it was still early. First, he went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. He had been eager to try out the machine he’d just bought. He sat on the living room sofa, cup in one hand, telephone in the other. On the end of the line, his ex-wife’s irritated voice:

“Hi, Marcos, so you decided to reappear at last.”

He drank a gulp of coffee, put the cup down on the coffee table.

“Yeah, I was busy.”

“Yeah, I can imagine, you must really be very busy indeed, I’ve been trying to talk to you for two days, I left you I don’t know how many messages.”

He looked at the blue envelope on the table, the envelope and the cup, side by side, as though one was not possible without the other, as though in a composition, he thought.

“Yeah, I was busy.”

“Sure, but however busy you are, I don’t think you should forget you have a daughter, that next week is her birthday and I’m organizing a party.”

“Right, I know.”

“Look, Marcos, I’m not even asking you to help me organize the party, I’m not asking you to do anything, just that you show up for your daughter’s birthday, that’s all, it’s not as hard as all that, what do you think?”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“Excellent, so don’t forget, next Wednesday, and as for the present, since you never know what to buy, just leave it to me to buy something, the only thing you’ve got to do is show up at her preschool. Next Wednesday, four o’clock in the afternoon. You’d better write it down.”

He took the envelope carefully, looked closely at it, one more time. The postmark stamped on it.

“Four won’t be possible, I’m still at work then.”

“Yesterday I called your work at three and you weren’t there.”

“I was busy.”

“Fine, well, next Wednesday you’ll also be busy, at your daughter’s birthday party.”

Resting the phone on his shoulder, with his hands free now he opened the envelope, the letter, five pages, ending, as usual, with just an A.

“Fine, you can leave that with me, I’ll be there.”

“Great.”

“. . .”

“You know, Marcos, sometimes you’re really hard to handle—is there something going on?”

Also as usual, at the beginning of the letter, My darling, except that her darling wasn’t him, he thought, unable to prevent the feeling of disappointment, perhaps even rage. It wasn’t him, but in a way it could be. He put the letter back down on the table.

“No, everything’s fine.”

“I know you, Marcos, I can sense there’s something going on, don’t you want to tell me what it is? You never know, I might be able to help.”

His ex-wife seemed to have calmed down, at least the tone of her voice was now conciliatory, almost friendly. He tried to reciprocate, to make peace.

“No, thank you, there’s nothing going on, really, nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He picked up the cup, took another gulp.

“I mean, yeah, maybe you could help me, actually. Would you mind having Manuela this weekend?”

“What do you mean, have Manu?”

“Just this once.”

“Oh, I knew there was something going on, it’s that Fabiane, isn’t it?”

He looked at the letter on the table, the envelope beside it, he needed a free weekend, he thought.

“No, it’s nothing to do with Fabiane, it’s just I’ve got some problems at work, I’m going to have to travel.”

“If it isn’t Fabiane, who is it, then?”

“I’ve got some problems at work. That’s all it is, nothing to do with Fabiane or any other woman.”

“I know you too well for that, Marcos, I know it’s some woman, if it isn’t Fabiane it’s someone else.”

It was always the same, he thought, after a few minutes of truce the argument would always begin again.

“I’m telling you there’s no woman, would you stop that? I hate how you always insist on thinking you know everything about me.”

“Of course I don’t, I haven’t known anything about you for ages. You became a stranger to me a long time ago.”

He got up off the sofa, walked over to the window, it was a sunny day, already pretty hot for that time of the morning. He thought it was the first time since he’d moved to the apartment that he’d had a proper look out of the window.

“So, can you have Manuela this weekend? I’ll take her some other time, to make up for it.”

After a brief hesitation:

“Okay, I’ll do this for you as a favor, but don’t get used to it.”

They talked a little more, on his part almost out of a sense of obligation, since for some reason his ex-wife bothered him. His ex-wife who barely knew him, that was what she thought. Ever since Manuela was born, they had become strangers, and he was unable to explain what was going on.

He hung up the phone feeling guilty. He didn’t call Fabiane back. He didn’t return the movies. He didn’t go to the office; he’d called in first thing in the morning, a terrible flu, he said, without much conviction. He hadn’t gone into the office. Instead there had been the call to his ex-wife.

He felt the anxiety of the previous days when he was leaving the apartment. He called the elevator, but instead of going down to the garage he got out on the first floor, headed for the lobby. This time he wouldn’t take the car, this time he’d go out on foot. He greeted the doorman, who responded with a suspicious look. The letter was in his pants pocket, again; he felt strange and naked without the car to protect him from the street, from the people. And it was only at that moment he realized that with the exception of a quick trip to the grocery store or the drugstore, he rarely left home on foot like this.

He looked around him. There was something familiar about the neighborhood, the familiarity of ordinary people, everything there was so ordinary, so normal, it felt like almost a different place, not the one beyond the car window, which was distant, unattainable, the neighborhood he had barely seen since arriving. Since the move. The suitcases and boxes heaped up, many of which he still had not opened, the shelves empty, the whole apartment still unfinished, as though there were something missing, something that would allow him to inhabit the apartment, that would make it finally his. You need some time to arrive anywhere, he thought.

Sometimes, when he was filling in a form, he automatically gave his previous address, the address of the home he’d lived in for so many years with his ex-wife. Separations were always crazy things, his ex-wife felt so distant on the phone, as did his daughter, who would be turning four next Wednesday and for whom he didn’t need to buy a present because he had never known how to buy a present for a one-, two- or three-year-old girl, for any birthday. The girl looked at him with the expression of someone complaining, just like his ex-wife, he thought, like Fabiane, he thought, imagining that all women were like this, demanding attention, security, and the expectation of some mysterious thing; he had this feeling of having failed and failing each new woman again.

How about feeling something new, without demands, a woman ready to give a bit of herself, too, ready to understand that it isn’t always possible to be somebody you are not. A woman ready to surrender something of herself, even if that something undoes her, transforms her.

He walked on, no longer thinking about any destination in particular, just wandering around the neighborhood. So different from the neighborhood where he used to live with his ex-wife and daughter in a large, airy apartment, with the countless requirements of a good life.

In this neighborhood, there were old people sitting at the table of a bar, a restaurant, and the roasted chicken from the bakery, those simple things, familiar ones, that had existed in his life and then were lost, he thought as he wandered aimlessly. He walked on until, on an impulse, he went into one of the many shopping galleries whose entrances it was barely possible to make out, a dark gallery of stores selling knickknacks and children’s clothes, a hair salon, down at the end an antiques shop, a thrift store, he thought, not quite sure what a thrift store was. A secondhand clothes store, a green dress, maybe a hat. Isn’t that what he was looking for? He continued down the street, going into each gallery, the same stores each time, the same barbers waiting in the doorway, manicurists, people dressed in black or white. He considered asking someone, Where is there a secondhand clothes store, a green dress, but he said nothing, he kept walking. Until something caught his eye.

He walked in very cautiously, as though entering a church, a museum, or some other place he didn’t know, and in which he didn’t know how to behave. He asked himself the same question he’d been asking himself all those days: Why this obsession? And anyway, what was he looking for?

He was asked this by the salesgirl of the shop he had just walked into, a very fair girl with short hair and a slender, delicate face. He smiled coolly, as if she had always known him and was judging him. She stood there, looking at him as though she knew, he thought. But what could she possibly know? He felt uneasy, unable to bear that look, that demand. She reminded him of other girls, not his ex-wife, not Fabiane, but rather girls from an even more distant past. He left without saying a thing, almost ashamed at having gone in. What was he looking for, anyway?—that was the question he was asking himself, too. Something special? An old hat, some dress, a person running into the middle of the street, there was something special he was looking for, yes, something so close, there, maybe in his own life. He went on walking; it had been ages since he’d taken such a long walk, maybe three, four years; it was ages since the city hadn’t been merely a landscape seen through the window of the car.

He was trying to summon up the courage, he thought, he was gradually summoning up the courage. But the courage to do what? To face what was to come? To await the next letter? Yes, because he felt there was something in those letters that was approaching. And he was scared, scared to discover it was him, something that he was hiding. You need courage, he thought, to go out like this again, unprotected, unprepared, in the middle of the street. Something was approaching.

It was hot, sweat trickled down his temples, the heat had always bothered him, without the protection of air-conditioning, the heat was becoming a part of himself, part of his own body. He was walking fast, nervously, with anxiety. With a trembling that had been forming over the past days and which was increasing in intensity. Or something that had been there for a long time, many years, it had been there already for a long time. You need a lot of courage, he thought, a lot of courage, because what would it be like, what would it be like if there was nobody to hold out a hand to him?

His thoughts seemed strange to him, it had already been a few days that his thoughts had seemed strange to him, as though they weren’t his, and, at the same time, they had been his forever, he thought. He was walking fast. And he could feel, at last, that something was approaching.