JOURNEY THROUGH THE NIGHT

He had missed the last bus. But he accepted this contretemps with indifference, as if he couldn’t quite take it seriously, and the prospect of a distance of many kilometres didn’t discourage him, but struck him as appealing. At the bus stop, so superfluous by now, he gazed at one and the other side of the road. Then he continued on his way.

It was snowing. It hadn’t stopped raining all afternoon, but now it was snow that was falling, the first snow of winter. But he wasn’t cold. He was wearing a coat and had pulled up the collar to prevent, as far as possible, the icy snow reaching his body, slipping down the collar of his shirt.

He walked along the dark road, flanked by a black field which night, having erased what looked, in the light of the sun, like excessive urbanization, had given back a certain force, a certain impenetrability. The tarmac road was straight and narrow in these parts. He knew the town wasn’t far; he’d walked this route before, in the opposite direction. But what town was it? The station was Nr. Coulsdon, there could be no doubt about that. Or was it? He went through some other names – Hooley, Coulsdon on its own, for example – and wasn’t sure what they referred to. Perhaps Nr. Coulsdon was just a couple of streets. Or a station. It amused him to feel so disoriented. The first time, he’d travelled by train and been very sleepy. That day – the second time – he’d come by car, but in an awkward position from which to observe the landscape.

He would soon reach the first houses – soon in comparison with the time it would take him to get to London. The station was on the right, in the direction he was going, and he surmised he should be able to get there without too much difficulty.

He turned down the first street on the right he came to. It was a dark, deserted street which went down a steep slope. The station didn’t appear. He heard the deafening roar of a passing train, long-distance perhaps. That meant the track had to be a little further on. But still he couldn’t see the station. After a while, he began to descend the slope by inertia, convinced he wasn’t going to attain his goal. Then he came up with some elementary reasoning: the further down he went, the more he would have to climb later. Even so, he refused to turn around without going on a few more metres. It wasn’t a good start.

The town again, so clean and quiet. For its inhabitants it was late by now, even though it wasn’t yet half past eleven. There were enough lights in the street, but it was abandoned. All the same, he might encounter somebody he could ask the way to the station. For now, though, he preferred to rely on his own resources. Besides, he wasn’t expecting to receive much help from the station. He’d been told the trains stopped even before the buses did. Of course, it was better to know this for sure and to find out what exactly was meant by “last train” – because if, for example, the next train was at two or three in the morning, then it was almost worth waiting for.

Was it possible the town remained all night, until the next morning, without connections not only to London, but anywhere else, absolutely without connections? This hypothesis struck him as strange, but then some contrary reasoning turned it on its head and made it seem more plausible, probable. In effect, wasn’t his situation entirely exceptional? How many cases like his could there be in a year? Perhaps none. Apart from the fact an Englishman, if he managed to miss the last public transport, could always borrow a car from a friend or hire a taxi. His own was an exceptional situation. He only had a pound and a few coins left.

He found the street in the end. This was it. Right from the outset, it had given him a feeling of distant familiarity, as if it were not altogether unknown to him. He spotted a wire mesh and a house set back from the road, details that had aroused his curiosity the first time. All he had to do was go around that bend. He seemed to remember the station blocked off the street.

There were no trains until six in the morning. That, at least, was what he had understood. The employee, brisk, upright, the only living being in sight, had answered with a gesture of surprise, as if the question had been unusual.

He turned around slowly.

The road seemed long – he’d been there before – and yet short. On the main thoroughfare, which resembled a high street, three women scurried off into the distance; from their voices, he judged them to be compatriots. They must be nurses, he thought, in a neighbouring mental hospital he’d heard about. Their high heels clattered noisily on the ground.

The station was closed, but it had a roof with broad eaves, under which he could always seek shelter, protection from the snow.

He decided to head back down to the station. He wasn’t going to find a better place to shelter in. He would wait and while away the time under the eaves. What else could he do? Flag down a car? That was what he would end up doing: hitchhiking. But he had thousands of reasons to distrust the idea of hitchhiking in such circumstances. Besides, who knows? Perhaps something better would come up or he would find an unexpected solution. Going to the police to ask for refuge, apart from the fact he didn’t know where the police station was – he could always ask – struck him as a trifle humiliating. After all, he wasn’t in that much of a hurry.

So down he went again. If only the waiting room were open… It wasn’t reasonable to close it. A waiting room should remain at the disposal of the travelling public; one has the right to wait for as long as one wants to. Waiting rooms, or their equivalents, in Spanish towns were very useful because there, as under stalls in marketplaces, beggars and tramps could find somewhere to sleep. Of course, these English railway stations, so simple and clean, had nothing in common with beggars and tramps. In England, all railway stations have a clock, a German on Curaçao had once told him. What had made him remember the German now?

He arrived. It was certainly very well illuminated. The bit of ground covered by the eaves, which he started pacing up and down, was still dry. The eaves gave off drops of water, as if it were raining. He couldn’t see anywhere to sit. All the same… If he got really weary, if things took a turn for the worse, he could find shelter there. From time to time, he leaned against the wall. The night seemed made for snow to fall. The whole night, but not him, and he was part of the night as well.

Train activity was reduced to nothing. At least, he hadn’t heard any more trains go by. There was a deep silence, which the snow enlarged. He didn’t want to stay still for too long, he might start getting cold, and he immediately fell to walking again. It was strange his coat hadn’t let in any water and his feet didn’t feel damp.

He wasn’t sure when the man put in another appearance. It was the same employee who had confirmed the non-existence of trains. The fact is he repeated there wouldn’t be any more trains until six in the morning. This was all he understood with any clarity. He was gesticulating by now and seemed to harbour the firm intention that he should move away from there. They went back to the bend in the road and he couldn’t work out what the employee was trying to show him. In the end, he understood. He was advising him to flag down a car. He felt a little offended and wanted to come out with a brusque reply, to tell him he knew all about this, such advice wasn’t very helpful, with regard to hitchhiking he knew as much as the next man. The employee turned around and he continued up the street.

Impelled now partly by this external force – the employee – he was determined to give hitchhiking a go. His horizons had become more limited. He couldn’t count on the eaves anymore, and that hesitant, dilatory attitude of slowly deciphering the multiple circumstances that surrounded him no longer held any appeal – he could see it now for what it was: pointless.

When he reached the high street, he glanced in both directions. There was absolutely nobody there.

He realized the word the employee had kept on saying was “car”, whereas in a state of logical confusion and perplexity he had understood “cow”. This misunderstanding almost made him laugh. That said, this didn’t make him think any better of the employee. Perhaps the main, or only, task he was given was to guard the station and surrounding area at night. Perhaps, before deciding to show his face, he’d been watching him for a while, in hiding. According to this hypothesis, his behaviour no longer struck him as so harsh because in truth, from his point of view, a subject like him must have seemed utterly strange, standing there, wandering about from time to time, apparently planning to spend the night there – a subject who’d already been told there wasn’t another train until six in the morning.

He started walking along the street in the direction of London. Although the thought this might be the way to London was a bit of a joke. All he knew for sure was that, going in the opposite direction, he would arrive back where he started. Where was London, anyway? Which direction was north, south, east or west?

When he reached the first crossroads, he ground to a halt because he really didn’t know which way to go. Shame it wasn’t summer, he thought, a warm summer’s night, because then he could have slept in a field, on the grass, without any worries.

Finally, a car came. He raised his arm. It ignored him completely. There wasn’t much traffic, and any cars there were whistled straight past. No doubt his figure, at that time and in that weather, must have seemed a bit surprising. It wasn’t like when someone hitchhikes properly, in comfortable clothes, with a rucksack on their back, even waving the flag of their country of origin.

The snow didn’t let up, but fortunately it didn’t get any worse. He noticed the innumerable snowflakes sometimes glistened, standing out against the black backdrop of night. Watching them fall one after the other made him feel dizzy. He kept glancing at his shoulders, in case the snow began to settle, but all he ever came across was a small amount that had almost melted. He couldn’t detect any indications on the ground that the snow was going to settle there either. It was probably snowing much less than he imagined, exposed to the elements as he was. At least he wasn’t cold.

He recalled a story a friend had told him. It was during the Spanish Civil War, on a snowy night with temperatures well below zero. His friend was due to go on sentry duty but had managed, in return for a few pesetas, to get somebody else to do it. Time passed, and his replacement kept laughing all the time; his friend, watching him in the distance, kept laughing too, by way of reply. When it was his turn to be relieved, they discovered the sentry was almost frozen. When they finally got him to react, he almost cried out in pain. It wasn’t that he’d been laughing earlier on, his friend said, it’s just that when somebody starts to freeze, they adopt this expression that makes it look as if they’re laughing their head off, like a madman. Could that be true?

When he’d been waiting for at least half an hour, a vaguely suitable car turned up.

He must have surmised, or completely invented, what the driver of the car said, and yet he was convinced he’d comprehended the situation.

In short, the situation was this: the car wasn’t going to London, so he would have to get out somewhere that would do for continuing to London, wherever that might be. The driver was young and spoke as if apologizing for not being able to fulfil his wish. Perhaps as a way of making up for this disappointment, he’d come up with a kind of intermediary solution – if that was really what he’d suggested – thinking the other would be unlikely to accept. But he hadn’t hesitated. Even if getting into that car had meant going away from his destination, he would still have got in, in order to be comfortable for a while and to interrupt the monotony of all that waiting.

All he had to do was get out when the driver told him. The car was old, third or fourth hand. But never had he felt so well inside a car before.

The driver braked when he was least expecting – or else he’d already braked by the time he realized. It was like waking up from a pleasant dream. He said “thank you very much” twice and got out of the car without heeding the words the kind young man whispered to him and without turning his head. He closed the door, which banged a little emphatically. The car drove away and immediately disappeared down a side street. He carried on walking calmly.

He was out in the countryside. It would have been difficult to work out how many kilometres he’d travelled in that car. Very few, perhaps.

It seemed to him that on either side of the road vast, level forests spread out and merged with the shadows. He walked along one side of the road. He felt like the only living creature, as if he’d recently landed on a new planet. Now he really didn’t have a clue where he was. A little further on, at another crossroads, he came across a sign that said “Croydon”. He’d heard that name before, because of the airport.

He carried on walking.

He had to have the button of his white jacket sewed on again.

Elvira, the Portuguese maid, had told him he needed a white jacket. It was better to prepare all these details as early as possible, even if he wasn’t admitted and it turned out to be a waste of time. He had an appointment at the Embassy for half past five the following afternoon.

Elvira had been optimistic, she thought they would take him in and said the work wasn’t too hard, anybody could do it. The last butler, a half-crazy Pole, had been dismissed, but that was a different case entirely.

He wasn’t afraid of hard work or of the difficulties that might arise, were he to be accepted in the Embassy. He had never been a cook before, and yet with that cookery book he’d been given in Buenos Aires, just by following the recipes word for word, he had produced some fairly discreet dishes, for which he had been congratulated by distinguished guests. Besides, that Embassy belonged to a semi-barbaric country, what refinements could they demand in a place like that? He would add the fact that he spoke some French. French was considered highly important in such surroundings.

At least another half hour had passed before a second car stopped. It was occupied by two young men. They weren’t going to London either. All they could suggest…

He got in at once. It was partly a repeat of the first car. He had clung to the offer of being taken a few kilometres – a few miles, they would have said – but there was probably a slight difference in that this wasn’t an offer dictated by mere courtesy, rather it was a real wish on their part to get him out of that grim wasteland. One of them, the one who wasn’t driving, held out a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t refuse: a Navy Cut, that would do nicely… Having lit the cigarette, and crossed his legs, and leaned back in his seat, he felt as if he were imitating the sybaritic life.

Curves, uphill and downhill slopes, fell behind them. He soon took up the interrupted thread of his thoughts.

The work Paco, the kitchen assistant from Cádiz in the Baltimore Hotel, had suggested sounded absurd. He was, like all good Andalusians, a little fantastical. That said, he admired and respected him. Without having bothered anybody, without having wanted or deserved it, he had endured the whole Spanish Civil War on the front line, on the Republican side, suffered all the hardships of the French concentration camps, fought in the World War against Hitler and then, always as a result of circumstances, almost lost his life in Indochina during the colonial war. And he was just a happy-go-lucky peasant farmer from the province of Cádiz: thickset, bald, with a good-natured expression. It was funny how well he could speak both English and French. Trouble was he couldn’t read or write. He must have been earning twenty pounds a week and was content, but not completely, because he longed for his native land. “I’m missing something,” he would say, thumping his chest.

He may have been missing something, and yet at least he had indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom…

He was set down in a town the name of which he obviously didn’t know. Having travelled in two cars, the fact was he hadn’t made much progress. He could carry on like this until the following day without ever getting to London.

The same snow was falling. He again started walking blindly. What time would the buses go back to working? If it was six, he still had triple the time that had passed until then.

Everything was deserted. All these towns looked alike: the same sensation of cleanliness, the same streets, the same shops – closed at that hour – with their tins of meat, eggs and bottles of condensed milk.

At a crossroads, he came across a policeman on the edge of the pavement, holding a bicycle by the handlebars in one hand and a lit torch in the other. He went up to the policeman and greeted him. The policeman, enormous and correct, wearing a raincoat in the form of a large cape, beneath the typical, lofty helmet they always had on, gazed at him in curiosity and surprise. Imagining what the effects of the question would be, after the usual “excuse me, please”, he asked him which way it was to London. The policeman raised the hand that held the torch and pointed to one of the streets at the crossroads, but immediately added that London was very far away. Yes, he answered, but since there weren’t any buses or trains… The policeman accepted the veracity of this remark. “Italian?” he asked. “No, Spanish,” he said. “Spanish,” repeated the policeman. Then he must have been feeling the cold… Not too much, he said, it also snowed in Spain. “Ah, yes!” exclaimed the policeman, as if grateful to him for this clarification. And after a very brief pause he asked him where he had been.

That would have been difficult to explain, even if it hadn’t been in English.

“You see now. It turns out I wanted to be a merchant seaman. I worked on various ships as an apprentice engineer and visited ports in different parts of the world. On a trip to Buenos Aires, I became friends with an English girl who went from Buenos Aires to Mexico and only just returned home two weeks ago. We wrote to each other from time to time; she knew my address in England. So we decided to meet up. She invited me over for lunch twice, including today’s invitation. She lives in Nr. Coulsdon or somewhere nearby; to tell the truth, I’m not even sure what Nr. Coulsdon is. In short, I had lunch and dinner with her and her parents and missed the last bus, which left at eleven o’clock, by a matter of seconds. When I reached the stop, the bus, a hundred metres away – I’m afraid I can’t say what that would be in the equivalent English unit of measure – was slipping away in front of my eyes.”

He came out with a much shorter reply. All he said was that he’d been to dinner in the house of some English friends and missed the bus. Even so, the policeman remained silent for a while, as if he’d only half understood. But it didn’t take him long to say the best thing would be to see if they could stop a car that was heading to London, he didn’t like to do such things, being an authority figure, but he would do it this one time. He would do it, he said, not feeling displeased, but happy and encouraged. He replied that he was grateful, but there was really no need. The policeman, however, insisted.

He stopped the first car that was passing. It was large, white, American in style. The policeman peered in through one of the front windows, holding on to his bike and torch. He heard him say, “Excuse me, please…” Some difficulties must have arisen because the conversation between the policeman and the occupants of the car dragged on. In the end, the policeman signalled to him to get in the car, and they opened the back door for him from inside. Before saying goodbye, the policeman explained where they would take him. He pronounced a couple of names which meant nothing to him.

For the third time, the back seat was completely empty. In front, two men in their forties (one driving, of course) chatted quietly and laconically from time to time, about business, he thought. It was far and away the best of the three cars he had been in. It swept along the road quickly, noiselessly, softly. He was tempted to succumb to sleep, right there and then, on that plush seat.

He wished the moment of their arrival could be delayed for hours…

He didn’t have to be sorry, he thought, about leaving the judge’s house. That man was a wretch and a maniac; he was always complaining that things weren’t in their proper place or clean… When, in fact, cleaning the house was not, properly speaking or only to a small degree, part of his responsibilities, his work was in the kitchen, but such things the judge would not have understood… Besides, living so far from London was a big disadvantage.

Yes, all these considerations were very well, but wasn’t he just trying to make himself feel better? Had he left the judge’s house out of his own free will or had he, with greater or lesser diplomacy, been sacked?

What did it matter?

Seeking consolation, deforming the truth, wasn’t a manly thing to do. Even so, he had to admit it, recently everything had gone against him. What hurt the most was the failure of the project he had envisaged with the help of Mr Strata (who had been so good to him). Living in Mr Strata’s house in legal terms as his butler, but really as his guest, paying for his lodging and working in some café – the Fiesta, for example, with ten or twelve pounds a week as wage – that would have been a grand solution. But they’d smelt a rat in the Home Office. “It is regretted that your employment cannot be accepted.”

Two motives might have influenced this decision: the first, the fact that Mr Strata was in the business of renting out rooms; the second, that, given he was from Gibraltar, the Home Office would have considered him a kind of semi-compatriot or at least suspected him of some kind of complicity. And yet other, much worse, much more obvious, trickery had gone on. Like that of Miguel, better known in certain surroundings by the nickname Spirit of Evil… Of course, in Miguel’s case, he may have received some help from the Rotarians, since his father, they said, was a Rotarian. All the same, there was the chance Miguel might find himself one day…

The worst part was not being able to remain in England unless it was working as a butler, not being able to extricate himself from this condition, from the necessity of fulfilling the role effectively. All because of a misjudgement, not having ignored bad advice, having applied for that work permit…

He wasn’t suited to domestic service. He would never get used to domestic service. If, on the other hand, he had been registered, like almost all his friends, in the Home Office as a student, he could have had almost complete freedom. That said, Vicente, the doctor he shared a room with, was registered as a student, but had been out of work for a week and was on the cusp of using up all his savings. Then again he could always find a job. In fact, there would soon be an opening in the kitchen at the Fiesta. Anyway, Vicente had a back-up plan: he could always go back to Santander, where he had family, and return to the job he’d been doing, and that way get by.

All of them, it didn’t matter who they were, lived with a larger or smaller amount of insecurity. And if the threat of being expelled from the United Kingdom didn’t weigh over Paco, the kitchen assistant in the Baltimore Hotel, it was only after all those hardships, all those wars…

He had been told to get out there. The car would continue its journey outside London.

This was certainly London, but he realized now that reaching London wasn’t in itself an advantage; the idea of walking home from where he was was about as reasonable as doing it from Nr. Coulsdon. London was far too extensive.

The district was dark and seemed to be outlying. Having walked a little, he spotted an entrance to the Underground on the opposite pavement, closed with a metal barrier. He went over to see what station it was, in the hope that this detail might help to give him a sense of his bearings. Clapham North. He remembered this name from the Underground map. And so what?

He carried on walking.

Having gone past two streets, on reaching a crossroads, he came across a surprise. A few metres in front of him was a stationary bus with its engine running. The lights on both floors shone with feverish intensity; it was like an island of light. He ran towards it. He still had the strength to run, even in his overcoat. He reached the conductor just as he was taking his leave of an old man, who had the amusing appearance of a travelling salesman. He asked him if the bus was going to the centre of London, anywhere near Oxford Circus. The conductor answered confusedly, in a Cockney accent, perhaps, but favourably – he got this last bit, not the words themselves, just “Charing Cross”, he made those out very clearly.

He boarded the bus and occupied one of the seats at the back, with room for three people, which were attached to the bodywork of the vehicle. Then the conductor got on and the bus pulled away. Apart from him, there was only one other passenger halfway down the bus. He could see him from behind, also with his collar up, his head down, as if he was sleeping.

Strange bus, he thought. It must have been the only one driving around London at that time. What motives justified its existence? What was its function? It probably obeyed a regular, fixed timetable… The conductor stopped in front of him, turned the handle of the ticket machine that hung around the neck of all conductors – and always reminded him of a toy – and out popped a long, cardboard ticket, with that grating sound, through the corresponding slot. He paid with the coins he had left.

The bus raced along the empty streets. He felt overwhelmed by a desire to sleep…

After all, it was easy to understand why they placed so many obstacles and limitations, otherwise Great Britain, a relatively small island in terms of territory, would be entered, because of its economic power, by men of every race, in violent waves, perhaps, and the native population would be smothered…

He had got off, not without the conductor having pointed it out to him, in a street the atmosphere of which he recognized. In effect, he soon saw the bridge which led over the Thames to the Festival Hall. But he couldn’t quite get his bearings. From the Festival Hall, on the other hand, he had had the experience of walking home. There was nothing to stop him doing the same thing now. The important thing was to get to the right departure point, not to start with uncertainty. He resolved to cross the bridge.

The main part of the bridge had been built for the railway, but next to it, at a slightly lower level, was a wooden walkway for foot passengers. His footsteps echoed drily on the wood. Below flowed the turbulent waters of the Thames, seemingly driven by a hidden force. The Thames wasn’t a river for swans. He had seen swans on it, and they always went about – swam about – with an air of unease.

He reached the vicinity of the Festival Hall. In that uninhabited area, the silence became more obvious. He climbed back on to the bridge. Now he could see the other side of the river, which he always associated with the Savoy Hotel – where he’d almost got a job – lit up as if for a party. The lights were splendid and tumbled into the void.

London was an enormous, superior personality, indifferent to the millions of people that lived there in every age. It was also the vast, grey, almost black clouds that stuck in the sky, giving that evening when he’d emerged from a café in Chelsea a special quality. And also a very large factory over in the distance, right next to the river, with a plethora of windows that reflected the sunset and an infernal concentration of noise, which he could faintly make out, of cranes and another thousand powerful machines. And…

If he did have to leave the United Kingdom, where would he go?

In the Finnish Embassy, during the first few minutes, everything had been straightforward. There had been some kind of important ceremony going on at Buckingham Palace – he’d seen men leaving the embassy in top hats and tails.

Things had turned nasty when they’d found out what it was he wanted: to work in Helsinki. Everything had gone pear-shaped, there had been only doubts and problems. In the end, it turned out those in the embassy – or was it a legation? – would have to consult those in the Finnish Foreign Office. All the same, they’d given him a printed piece of paper, which he’d lost.

That business about Finland had been out of curiosity, really. There were other nations about which he’d received more or less favourable reports. He had friends in all of them, though the fact some of them had very advantageous jobs couldn’t be taken as a general rule; it was normally just a question of chance, good fortune…

Germany, France, Switzerland…

Or back to sea.

Better not to think too much about the future, even if it was rather imminent…

On reaching the Strand, confident that he was now on familiar territory, he continued upwards, not very sure of his itinerary, but certain this would serve as a shortcut. He continued going up, unable to find a road he was sure he should turn down. When he finally understood he was close to the BBC building – Bush House, he’d gone looking there for a job as well – he turned around and decided to head back down to Trafalgar Square. This meant he’d taken a roundabout route, but he was fed up of blind alleys and didn’t want to risk going down another.

He couldn’t tell now whether it was still snowing or just raining. Snow or rain, the fact was the water didn’t bother him all that much, unlike normal. He felt as if he could keep on walking for hours.

From time to time, he passed in front of a policeman sheltering under the lintel of a closed door, rigid, all tense, as if focusing on adopting the posture of a statue or on withstanding the cold like a stone… As soon as he got to Piccadilly Circus, he reckoned his goal would be within reach. He would walk up Regent Street to Marble Arch, then go along Edgware Road; later, on the left, he would turn down Sussex Gardens and then, on the right, Westbourne Terrace and after that, on the left again, Craven Road… Everything was relative. Other times, the route from Sussex Gardens had struck him as long.

As he set foot in Piccadilly Circus, in a kind of illumination of his conscience, he remembered the key. He calmly examined the pocket where he usually put it. He then examined, walking all the while, all his pockets – those in his trousers, his jacket and coat. He must have left it in his workday suit. There could be no doubt. The worst thing was the front doorbell was out of order. He couldn’t help asking himself, in a fit of despair, full of rage, “Why this last, small but all-important setback?” He only had himself to blame. When he thought about it from a different perspective, though, the setback almost made him burst out laughing.

If only he had a couple of loose coins, he could ring them up, see if he could wake a member of Mr Strata’s family. But how was he to get change for a pound? For the first time in his life, much to his surprise, he wished there were night watchmen.

Perhaps, if he shouted out loud, he could wake Vicente. Luckily, the window of their bedroom faced the street.

It wasn’t long before he’d have to set out again for Queen’s Gate Gardens.

CAT ON A URALITE ROOF

Dedicated to my daughter, Clara, who always got on well with cats and dogs

Two initial words – later there will be more – about myself. I have never had a thing against cats or even had problems with them; with spiders I have, in a hallucinatory fashion. But after my attack of delirium tremens, I took the decision never to try a drop of alcohol again. How then to explain that I should spend every morning in an inhospitable bar-cafeteria called the Montparnasse (its owner had been an emigrant in Paris)?

First of all, I only ever drank innocuous infusions, tea and other such nonsense. Second, even uglier than the Montparnasse is the bedsit I rented thanks to the wretched pension I was given for total and permanent incapacity, having been sent to a hundred places. Last, uglier than the Montparnasse, and uglier than my bedsit, is this city, or ex-city, this indigestible pile of apartment blocks inhabited by people who express themselves in a loud and grating caricature of language. Suffice it to say I cannot bear being out in the street – not just, as will become obvious, because of its wild, deafening traffic. Will that do to explain my loyalty to the Montparnasse café? Perhaps not, but it wasn’t about myself that I wanted to talk. I just wanted to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the long, final story of Brandariz.

Fair, solid in appearance, he could chat at ease, with an expert’s opinion, about disk brakes, gearboxes, distributors, horsepower and refrigerated cargo ships. Nothing surprising in that – Brandariz had worked in a shipyard, in several garages and other mechanical positions, and had almost emigrated to Rotterdam as a qualified labourer. And yet, on account of health problems, he’d ended his professional life as a porter in a pretentious residential building, tall, eleven floors – not counting the basement, of course – with numerous apartments and flats, perhaps eighty in total or something like that. One of its sides gives on to an alleyway; the opposite faces a street that is lower than the one at the front; the back of the building, I’m not quite sure where it leads. The building is called the Caracas; its promoter must have been an emigrant in Venezuela. Strangely enough, it is thought these urbanistic-architectonic aberrations are worthy of a christening, as if they were beautiful ocean liners.

Few porters are left nowadays. No doubt, Brandariz wouldn’t find such a job today. It’s more common to skimp on the cost of a porter, replacing them with one of those electronic gadgets and, above all, making sure the entrance hall is permanently closed.

Now then, in my opinion the Caracas has gone downhill since Brandariz left. He was a jack-of-all-trades and, to tell the truth, his least important role was that of porter sensu stricto – keeping an eye on who is coming in, preventing the access of beggars, gypsies and others. Brandariz was a mechanic, plumber, electrician and bricklayer all rolled into one. If any inhabitant of the Caracas had a problem with his car, he would go to Brandariz; any faults in the boiler would be resolved by Brandariz; Brandariz guaranteed the normal supply of hot water, fixed the lifts and handled electric cables with the brash confidence of professional electricians, who grab them without harm, however many sparks are flying. In fact, Brandariz was far from leading the kind of life that would have been in keeping with his fragile state of health. But he didn’t complain. On the contrary, he seemed satisfied, happy and complaisant.

There were two parts of the Caracas where he reigned with absolute dominion. One was the basement, the whole of which was given over to a garage, a shelter for a sprawling mass of cars, where the boilers and other vessels were kept. The other was the attic, also immense, with a multitude of small, dark rooms, one for each apartment – around eighty in all, if my calculations are correct – always closed, used as lumber rooms, arranged on either side of long corridors with concrete floors and only ever lit by bulbs that automatically went out after a couple of minutes. The attic also held the two Elevator Rooms, as Brandariz used to call them somewhat pompously, each equipped with a skylight that gives on to the roof and forms the only – insufficient, perhaps – means of direct communication with the outside world on that floor. The roof slopes a little and is made of uralite.

Of all the regulars in the Montparnasse, it was Brandariz I got on best with. He would turn up at the most diverse times, often more than once in a morning, taking advantage of his moments of leisure, which is to say whenever he was tired of playing the role of porter sensu stricto. The doctors had put him on a severe diet, but he interpreted this in his own way. So, for example, the prohibition to imbibe alcohol he took to mean doing without “white” drinks, by which he understood any kind of alcoholic drink except wine. This meant a bowl of white wine was not a white drink, in his opinion, whereas a black coffee liqueur was.

Brandariz would talk to most of his friends in the Montparnasse as an urban exile. That is to say, about football, lottery draws, cars and other technical innovations, as I have explained, and against politicians. This was his social appearance, his outer light, an anodyne and uninterrupted surface.

But Brandariz also had his Shadow. In other words, he hadn’t lost his depths, his contact with the earth – his house, now in the suburbs, had formed part of the rural world when he was born – his link to the past, all the intrahistorical undercurrent of his class. His Shadow was one of the last, so to speak, by which I mean that Brandariz’s children had grown up as pure urban light, public neon light, one of them even playing in a rock band.

Cela va sans dire (I also worked in France), what interested me most about Brandariz was his Shadow. For example, his thoughts on Destiny, or firewater – a white drink, but Brandariz continued to prescribe it for himself for purely therapeutic reasons – or the purge of the sea, or the influence of the moon on the sex of children – those conceived during a waxing moon would be males; during a waning moon, females – or the wickedness of the fox, clearly illustrated by the story of the fox that pretended to be dead in a courtyard, where it had been caught, having been in with the chickens, and took advantage of the owner of the house leaving the door open to run away at top speed. I was also very interested in Brandariz’s knowledge of the monetary reserves in Spain before the outbreak of civil war in 1936.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one Brandariz could communicate with from his Shadow. He also talked to the owner of the Montparnasse, and to Mr Oia, a regular of the café and an inhabitant, like Brandariz, of the semi-rural suburbs, as sparing with his words as he was generous with open smiles of comprehension, acquiescence and compassion. Mr Oia was a bricklayer, but was lame because of a work accident and also drew an incapacity benefit, albeit with a difference: he continued doing odd jobs on the side, on the margins of legality, comme il faut; to be precise, Brandariz would call him whenever he needed help with a repair in the Caracas, since Mr Oia was also a dab hand.

Of Destiny, Brandariz had as pessimistic an idea as the Greek tragedians. If a friend of his was killed in a car accident, Brandariz would blame Destiny. And yet he never explained happy events, such as winning the lottery, as an act of Destiny. He never actually used the word “Destiny” – Brandariz’s Shadow hated abstractions and grand words. He would say something like “it was written” or “we’ve all been born with our paths marked out”.

On the other hand, there was Nature – another word Brandariz never used. As far as I know, he had never bothered clarifying the relationship between Destiny and Nature. But he took it as a given, I think, that Nature was wise, just and even patient, unlike Destiny, blind and capricious. And yet, or so I believed, Destiny had no choice but to manifest itself through Nature. As for the latter, it would sometimes protest, quite rightly, because of all the tricks and insults of man, and change the climate, winters were not winters anymore, or summers summers, because of all those artificial satellites that were being launched, all that scrap metal flying overhead. For Brandariz, outer space, as it’s known, was sacred – sacred and, after a certain height, inviolable: Brandariz did not believe that men had set foot on the moon; this, for him, was a propagandistic lie on the part of the politicians. Rivers, to go no further, were sacred as well, and Brandariz told me how a river had regained its rights by flooding and thereby demolishing a house that had been built on its bank without maintaining a certain distance.

In short, Brandariz was a sailing vessel – not monotonous, but free of important mishaps, because of his age and experience. Until a surge of the sea turned everything upside down. And ended up sinking him.

I said “surge of the sea” when I should have said “cat”. My apologies for the comparison.

No one knew how or why the cat entered the Caracas. It would wander up and down the stairs, and at night its miaows and laments produced ongoing insomnia. To make matters worse, it scratched the upholstery on the chairs in the excessive entrance hall of the building and even the plastic rubbish bags that were put out at night to be taken away by the dustcarts.

Brandariz’s struggle with the cat started out being rudimentary. It consisted primarily of running after it. All the same, on one occasion, having been cornered, with an impressive display of horror, the cat started snorting and fixed Brandariz with such a ferocious stare the porter had to back down at once.

“Fire was blazing from its eyes. It was frightening how red they were.”

Brandariz was not ashamed of his retreat. Buddha, the Doberman from 8-B – nobody paid any attention to the ban on dogs in the apartments – had endured a similar fate. It also had tried to stand up to the cat, but withdrawn on account of those criminal eyes.

The second phase of the struggle was more discreet. Brandariz put out some food that had been poisoned with a product capable of laying low an elephant (Brandariz was fond of exaggeration). He didn’t say what kind of poison it was, or where it had come from.

“Nothing. The cat was immunized.”

Yes, but was it immunized ab initio (I spent some years in the seminary) or had it immunized itself by taking the poison in small doses? Brandariz didn’t clarify this point.

Nor did he specify what colour it was. Not black, lighter than that, but not white either. That practically left only grey. “Yes, something like grey,” agreed Brandariz with scant conviction, as if not wanting to be more precise. Grey is a colour, or lack of colour, that doesn’t make you commit yourself. It seemed to me that, for Brandariz, this cat could have been likened to any other cat. It was as if the cat’s substantive reality (remember my time at the seminary) prevented Brandariz worrying about unimportant details – after all, the colour of the cat was not the cat itself. And yet this lack of precision about the colour in the porter’s mind might have ended up harming him. It could also be said that his encounters with the cat, as short as they were tense, were hardly suitable for a lengthy observation.

Suddenly, for a period of time, the cat stopped being a nuisance. It disappeared. Brandariz breathed a sigh of relief. That said, he wasn’t confident the animal was dead – he’d seen it several times after he’d given up trying to poison its food and it was always in rude good health. And yet, deep down, Brandariz was sure there would be an inevitable reappearance.

Sure enough, it reappeared in the garage. This was immense, overwhelming, damp, murky, full of pillars and holes in the walls. It had fluorescent tubes that emitted little light and, like the bulbs in the attic, automatically went out a few minutes after they were turned on. For this reason, in his renewed battles with the cat, Brandariz made use of a torch – another insufficient light source.

These battles were bloodless, but highly mobile. Of course, Brandariz didn’t win a single one – that is to say, he never got the cat out of the garage. There were too many hiding places, too much space, and only one exit, which was somewhat complicated. Having said that, I’m quite sure Brandariz avoided any clear opportunity to corner the cat again. He was afraid of the fire in its eyes. But the worst thing was this: let us suppose he did force the cat outside, what would he have gained by doing so? Nothing. It would have been like winning the battle, but not the war. In a while, the cat would have been back inside. It could enter and leave as it pleased. In other words, the only solution was to eliminate it.

Why didn’t he leave it in peace? What harm was it doing down there? Might it not even have been a help in countering the rats, which proliferated in the garage?

According to Brandariz, this cat was a constant menace. Even for cars. Besides, from the garage it would have had no difficulty getting back inside the building. And as for the rats: not only did it not fight them, it actually got on well with them. This was Brandariz’s belief. But first and foremost, the cat was his enemy.

That said, in the end, they reached some kind of tacit agreement and did their best not to coincide. Not to see each other.

Until one day Brandariz discovered that the cat had had five kittens. Down in the garage, surrounded by cars – he mentioned this circumstance with the same mixture of distrust and disgust with which he talked about artificial satellites or that rubbish about a man having landed on the moon. The entente cordiale was over. Brandariz understood this novelty to be an attack of the cat – a new attack in the form of mockery.

OK then. If the cat was going to attack by means of its kittens, he would counter-attack using the same method.

One night, not long after he’d finished his working day, let’s say around ten o’clock, he left the Caracas with the five newborns in a cardboard box. He didn’t explain to me how he’d caught them. Cats defend their kittens with terrible ferocity, and this one in particular would have defended them against Brandariz – also in particular – with every last ounce of cruelty. But nor is it impossible to steal kittens from aggressive mothers, as has been proved to be the case. Aggressive and prolific mothers. They give birth to far too many kittens, and many of us remember left-over cats being thrown into the river shortly after they were born.

The streets were deserted. This meant the miaows from inside the box were heard by almost no one.

Just after the Caracas, the street turns into a little bridge, under which runs another street. Brandariz went down to this other street by means of some steps in the pavement. This took him to a desolate area with few inhabited buildings and several others under construction. In one cul-de-sac, a small, dark, blind alley, he tipped the mewing quintet out of the box, having checked there weren’t any stray dogs in the surroundings.

Brandariz turned around without giving up hope that some of the inhabitants of this new district might collect and adopt these helpless children of his enemy.

But, the very next day, three of the five kittens were back in the garage. This struck Brandariz as a repeated and amplified insult, despite the loss of two units. To a certain degree, his response was also repeated and amplified. He used the same late hour to take the three kittens in the same box and go back down the steps to the lower street, which was deserted as always, especially at this time. But now he didn’t go down the blind alley, he carried on. He kept looking around to check the cat wasn’t following him. The night was clear and a trifle chilly.

He reached an area without any buildings, with plots of land covered in brambles on either side of the street. Brandariz entered one of these clumps of brambles and deposited the three siblings at the foot of a small bush. The chances of their being adopted were practically zero and yet, in spite of everything, such a setting was more suitable for the animals than a garage. This thought comforted Brandariz a little.

He stayed at home all the next day on account of a splitting headache. Actually, his head was full of cats. This meant he could avoid, even if only for a day, a situation he couldn’t help foreseeing with a certain amount of physical unease: a re-encounter with the kittens in the garage.

It could hardly be said to constitute a day of leisure for Brandariz. He kept turning over the only question that occupied his mind. And yet, as those almost delirious hours passed, he glimpsed what could be the final solution for the trio that had survived – he was sure they would have survived. The thing is the mere thought of it made him feel worse than the problem itself, so he did his best to put this final solution out of his mind, albeit without much success.

The following morning, he went down to the garage with the nervousness of a criminal who is about to be sentenced. In effect, over in the selfsame corner, he came across the dreaded scene: the cat with all three kittens. It was a déjà vu that conformed to the strictest reality.

The final solution appeared to him then not as the unhealthy fruit of his delirium, but rather as the only possible exit.

He put it into practice that very night. The three tiny kittens were shipped off in the municipal refuse lorry, Brandariz told me later in a shaking voice, despite the bravest of efforts to display manliness and even a little pride. The repulsion he felt when thinking about the monstrous fate of those tender creatures, who ended up enduring the same treatment as all the tons of urban refuse, prevailed over his sense of satisfaction at having attained the final solution at last.

Final, but not total. Final in the sense that he lost sight of the three siblings. But nothing else. The cat remained.

It disappeared for a while. Several days of apparent normality followed. In the garage, Brandariz encountered no more problems than normal, albeit there were plenty of those. Brandariz, however, was oppressed by the memory of the tiny, living shipment that had been thrown in with all the inert and sickening mass of garbage produced by hundreds of thousands of citizens, and also by fears of a future threatened by the cat.

He was sure it wouldn’t come back as long as it insisted on searching for its kittens in vain. But what would happen when it abandoned this enterprise? What would its next move be? What shape would its revenge take?

It was a sunny morning, like every morning in that monotonous season – monotonous from the point of view of the climate – around midday. Brandariz had gone up to the attic. First, to change a lock. Then he decided to have a look around before going back down. He wandered through the long, dark corridors and then entered one of the Elevator Rooms.

The vision of the cat inside the Room was instantaneous and rooted him to the spot. Quick as lightning, the cat fled to the roof through the skylight, which was open, jumping off the top of a ladder that had been placed underneath.

Overcoming his rootedness – but not his fear – and wasting no time, Brandariz went over to the ladder. His legs were shaking, but he summoned enough strength to climb the ladder and slam the skylight with its glass lid shut. Just like the cat, he acted with all the speed he could muster, feeling more like the hunted than the hunter. Calmer now, he climbed back down and propped the ladder in a corner.

Fortunately, the skylight in the other Elevator Room was closed – Brandariz went to check this.

As a result, between the cat and the inside of the Caracas, there were now some transparent, fragile – but also for the cat impassable – panes of glass. The cat had ascended from the abyss of the garage to the heights of the roof, but there it had met its perdition.

Brandariz’s mind, however, wasn’t protected by any pane of glass. The cat kept on getting inside, in the most insistent, overwhelming manner. Even when Brandariz was asleep, albeit without its explicit presence. Over and over again, he dreamt he was an open-air prisoner in a prison located in the heights: he could walk from side to side, contemplate the moon and stars at night, but not get out.

When he was awake, things were no better. From time to time, he had to go up to the Elevator Rooms, but he managed to move about at a distance from the skylights. He didn’t want to look through them, however closed they may have been.

He was sure, one way or another, the cat’s vengeance would come tumbling down fatally on top of him. Vengeance for a double reason: because of both the cat and its kittens. Neither its enforced confinement nor its certain death could prevent this.

He never felt safe. Some days, all the cats in the world struck him as accomplices of the cat in the Caracas.

Other days, it was this same cat that transmuted into any cat he came across. And there were even days when he had the impression there was only a single cat, in an invisible place, which manifested itself in all the cats in the world, all of which could be reduced to this one and were identical to, or copies of, it.

With such suppositions as these, there was no rejecting the possibility of action from a distance, vengeance without any physical contact. Brandariz feared something like this when his mother fell seriously ill.

And yet Brandariz refused to seek help for his state of mind from a healer his brother recommended, about whom he himself had a good opinion, having had an exceptionally positive experience. Another relative, I can’t remember who, ventured that Brandariz might have been bewitched by the cat’s “shadow”; were that the case, it would have been a very different shadow from the Shadow of Brandariz and other people. However that may be, in the sphere of more or less demonstrable facts, it was clear that the cat remained incarcerated – incarcerated in an open prison, no doubt, but one without escape.

It couldn’t eat, either. Or drink. In short, it was condemned to a slow death. That said, there was no way it could survive more than a month and a half. I don’t know how Brandariz arrived at such a precise calculation.

I heard the rest from Mr Oia.

It was just before two in the afternoon.

Mr Oia and Brandariz had agreed to go up to the roof that day to check something to do with a chimney. They should have gone up before, but – and this is a deduction of mine – Brandariz had been putting off the task until a little more than a month and a half had passed since the cat’s suicidal run.

In the entrance hall of the Caracas, Mr Oia found Brandariz to be quiet, continually glancing at the floor, worried, thoughtful. It even occurred to him that Brandariz took an age to make up his mind to get into the lift, after they’d had a brief chat.

Normally it was Brandariz who placed the ladder under the skylights, but this time he did so with obvious unwillingness, as if the ladder weighed twice as much as usual. Even after he’d finished, he asked Mr Oia:

“Do you want to go up?”

This was strange because it was always he who went up first.

“You go,” replied Mr Oia because Brandariz was already in position and so as not to vary their custom.

Brandariz started to climb, but as if his body weighed not just twice as much, but triple. When he reached the second rung, he stopped. From this height, he could already open the lid of the skylight, but he froze for a couple of seconds.

In the end, he opened it absent-mindedly, with a bewildered expression, glancing around. He had to climb one more rung and then he would be in a position to exit on to the roof. He climbed this step as if overcoming a weight that was greater than all the previous weights put together but, before going out, he stuck his head out of the skylight, as if wanting to check something. He can’t have been like that for more than two seconds when he uttered, or seemed to utter, or Mr Oia thought he heard, some words, something like “that’s it” – and Brandariz never spoke again. He never even came to.

Some time went by. I came across Mr Oia again. We talked, as is natural, about our mutual friend. Mr Oia told me, in answer to a question of mine, he had never gone up to the roof of the Caracas again. He preferred not to work in that building.

OK then, let us imagine the opposite. Let us suppose he had gone up. What would we have learned? Nothing, I expect. Here, the possibilities are very clear, not like with that famous cat of Schrödinger’s a nephew of mine, a physicist by profession, told me about, even though I couldn’t understand the problem. Here, the possibilities are only three: one, he would have found the cat alive; two, he would have found the cat’s remains; three, he wouldn’t have found anything. What inferences can we draw from any of these that would help us to decipher what Brandariz himself discovered, or thought he discovered, when he poked his head out of the skylight? I don’t see any, to be honest.

I asked Mr Oia whether Brandariz – may he rest in peace – ever discussed cats with him.

“He did indeed.”

He proceeded to explain this to me.

On that unfortunate day, during the brief conversation they’d had before getting in the lift, Mr Oia had told Brandariz how a cousin of his had given him a cat as a present. Brandariz had become very nervous as a result of this information and had even asked Mr Oia what colour it was.

“Something like grey,” Mr Oia had replied.

Mr Oia was a little regretful. Why had he encouraged Brandariz to go up on to the roof when he clearly preferred not to? I didn’t tell him anything I knew, in part because, when it came down to it, I didn’t really know anything.

All the same, I got the impression that Mr Oia’s remorse wasn’t very deep. What I mean is he realized, I think, that Brandariz had been the victim of a complex, dark story and there was no way he could be blamed for his friend’s heart attack. In other words, Mr Oia, from his Shadow, glimpsed the importance of the role played by Brandariz’s own Shadow.

And that’s all there is to it.

I shall only add, as far as I am concerned, that I grew tired of infusions and fell into my old habit, and now I only ever go to real bars, the few there are left, the further away, the dirtier and emptier, the better.

No doubt, I shall have problems again with spiders. In the meantime, my memory has been on the decline: I can’t be sure right now whether the bar-cafeteria of my abstemious period is called Montparnasse or Montmartre.

Text © Heirs of Camilo Gonsar

Translation © Jonathan Dunne