Читать книгу Crocodile Tears - Mercedes Rosende - Страница 8

31

IV

Ursula seems to have had a bad night. She has bags under her eyes and an expression that puts the neighbours off talking to her, puts them off even saying hello. She looks at the elevator, which has been broken or temperamental for years, and curses in a way that would be obscene if anyone could hear her. The elevator is out of order again, and at any other time this would just be a minor setback, maybe she’d postpone her outing or even cancel it, but today the setback becomes a tragedy because there’s no question of postponing; it’s already late, she’ll have to deal with the situation, walk down five flights of stairs and hold at bay the feelings of anxiety that arise when she thinks about having to climb back up those stairs this evening.

She’s in a hurry but she doesn’t rush, she doesn’t race down the stairs but takes them one step at a time, planting first one foot and then the other, gripping the banister firmly, tightly even.

No doubt she is thinking, as always, that her extra weight could cause her to trip or to lose her balance, to tumble and fall, rolling clumsily from floor to floor until she reaches the bottom. Perhaps she thinks that if she trips then her body will plummet, bouncing off the worn marble steps, her head smashing against the edges and corners of the bronze-and wrought-iron banister. Perhaps she even imagines the sound of soft flabby flesh hitting the floor, the sound a veal cutlet 32makes when hammered with a tenderizer. Maybe she sees her wrecked and bleeding body, finally still, forever still down there, in the hallway, at the end of its descent. Stair after stair, on her slow march she imagines curious passers-by peering through the glass of the entrance hall, their noses pressed against it for a better view of the spectacle, the red trail of blood on the marble, because people are morbid and nothing attracts an audience quite like disease or pain or death. Or sex.

Her father’s voice warns her to take care when she’s going down the stairs: You’re fat, Ursula, with all that extra weight you shouldn’t exert yourself, your heart could give out. Don’t tell me that now, Daddy, I’m in a hurry, I’ve got lots to do. Look at yourself, Ursula, you need to do another slimming treatment, for the good of your health. I told you to shut up, I’m in a hurry. And remember I’m not that little girl any more, Daddy.

She shakes her head in annoyance and carries on down the stairs, carefully, one foot after the other; he knows, Daddy knows when to talk to her and what to say to make her soul shrink to the size of a lentil.

We observe her pausing on the second floor, stopping as if to rest or to get her breath back, but then Ursula turns sharply and walks quickly over to the apartment closest to the stairway, number 201. The residents are a couple – students or bank clerks, she’s not sure. Silently, she touches the door, presses her face against the wood, first her cheek, then her mouth, then her ear. It seems she wants to listen to something. She stands quite still for a few moments, and we don’t think she’s heard anything: at this time of day, the couple in number 201 must have gone out a while ago. But she doesn’t give up; she tries again with her right ear and then again with her left, and only after a while does she 33let up. A little put out, she continues her descent, step by step. She reaches the final stretch, the entrance hall and, against all her own predictions, makes it to the main door safe and sound.

From inside you can barely hear the nervous echo of the outside world: the roar of the Old Town is muffled, wrapped in insulating material, the racket is scarcely audible and this silence accentuates the almost womblike atmosphere of the building in which she lives.

Every day for just over a month, Ursula López has followed a military routine: she sleeps, gets up at six, has a bath, eats breakfast, leaves the house, makes her way to the place where the woman lives, the other Ursula, and keeps watch until she sees her go out for a run. Sometimes she follows her, sometimes she just watches her disappear, sometimes she waits for her to return. All to a precise timetable that she implements every day, without fail. It is the timetable of her revenge.

Today she walks down Calle Sarandí, hurrying the short distance to Plaza Matriz among artisans and tourists, yuppies wearing clothes that scream lawyer, accountant, manager; among beggars with huge coats and misshapen caps, gay couples holding hands, diligent and carefully made-up bilingual secretaries, delivery boys, shivering prostitutes, uniformed teenagers. And as she walks among these people, she hears the cathedral bells tolling eight o’clock. Eight o’clock on the dot.

The sound causes her to halt, rooted to the spot, unsettled; the eight chimes of the cathedral remind her, as they do whenever she hears them, of the time at which her father used to open her cell door. Ursula knows she can’t afford the luxury of trembling; there are some things better 34kept in a wooden box, and that box should be kept inside another one, and everything inside an even bigger one made of iron, bound with steel cable and dropped to the bottom of the sea.

One day she’ll have money and she’ll be able to move out of the Old Town, buy a house in Carrasco with a swimming pool and a maid and a fancy car and forget all about her past. Forget about Daddy, for example, leave that house with all its memories. Actually, if it wasn’t for that woman she should already have her house in Carrasco and much more. She feels the pull of hatred, of revenge. No, now is not the time: she’s afraid of getting lost in the labyrinth of her thoughts, and she forces herself to keep going.

She enters the square. Today is one of those pale sepia days when everything makes you feel like crying. Despite the cold air, the nape of her neck is sweating, her armpits are already soaked and there’s a nagging pain between her ribs.

Sebastián, the bookseller, the kid who rents out the garage where she parks her car, approaches from the opposite direction; he’s also in a hurry, they exchange a greeting, a friendly word, a complicit glance. He’s a good boy, Sebastián, he owes her some favours that he might end up repaying one of these days.

Ursula hurries along Calle Sarandí, the city accompanying her like a ghost, she crosses the square without looking, turns right and continues like an automaton; she could follow this route blindfolded. She reaches Calle Bacacay, from where you can see the Solís Theatre and part of Plaza Independencia, but she doesn’t look. She turns, arrives at the same time as the bus that will take her to her destination, hails it and gets on. She doesn’t take her car, she doesn’t want to park nearby, doesn’t want to run the risk that somebody 35might recognize it; she’s thought about everything, even the smallest details, Ursula thinks, and nobody will be able to catch her out.

She climbs on board and sits at the back, like always. At this time of day and travelling in this direction, there are hardly any passengers, and the few that there are sit staring at their smartphones like idiots. She covers her face with a scarf, her eyes with sunglasses, her forehead with a woollen hat.

It will be a short journey; there’s not much traffic and she doesn’t have far to go, just fifteen or twenty minutes, then she’ll get off at the junction of Calle 21 de Setiembre and Ellauri, walk a few yards to Vázquez Ledesma, the street that runs alongside the park, and then a couple of blocks south towards the waterfront, but on the side with the buildings. Then she’ll cross over to Villa Biarritz Park, sit on a bench neither too far from nor too close to her target, inhale the fragrance of the vegetation – eucalyptus, carpet grass, oak, maritime pine, monkey puzzle trees, earth, dog shit – and she’ll wait until it’s time, until the main door opens and the woman comes out.

The woman she’s waiting for will come out of her house, an apartment block almost in the “luxury” category, stepping through the door with its polished bronze frame and out onto the waxed marble beyond, before which she will have greeted the uniformed doorman in a tone somewhere between indifference and sarcasm, that slightly overbearing tone that comes from when she still lived in Carrasco, in a house with a swimming pool and a cook and a maid, and a big garden with exotic trees and two gardeners.

The woman she’s waiting for will come out of her house after greeting the doorman, nimbly descend the stairs 36separating the shiny door from the street, dressed in expensive sportswear, her hair pinned up with a designer hair clip; she’ll check the time on her Swiss watch, adjust her headphones and cross the street, jog through the park at a gentle pace that Ursula will follow from a distance and with some difficulty, until she reaches the waterfront, where the jog will become a run that will separate the two women until the next day. Or Ursula will simply sit and wait as she thinks about how the woman promised to pay her the ransom for her kidnapped husband, Santiago, about how this traitor lied to her, about how she deceived her. She trusted the woman’s promises, she imagined a house, a car, a swimming pool, and now all she has is her anger.

And who knows what Ursula feels today as she waits on this park bench from which she has been keeping watch for a month? Who knows what she feels in this repeated simulation of police surveillance, of espionage or detective work? What does she feel? What does she think? Because sometimes her brain doesn’t entirely belong to her and suddenly she realizes something is drilling away at it: her own rage, the unstoppable internal monster that roars at her, constantly reminding her of her betrayal by that other Ursula López, that other woman, her namesake.