People in the Room Read online

  I took Calle Echeverría home, so they wouldn’t see me running. It would take them a while to arrive, if they really were the occupants of the drawing room and of my persistence. I approached my house slowly, and looked over at theirs. The drawing room was empty. I felt like crying, like I would have given anything for it to be them. The voice didn’t matter. Later I would think of the voice, about what to do when faced by my voice in that room I would one day enter—I was sure of it—to sit down in their company.

  I settled in by the window and waited a few minutes. After a while I saw three shadows, slender as poplars, strikingly lengthened by the streetlamp on the corner, and soon afterwards, they took the place of their shadows. They paused for a moment at the door, as if it were necessary to cross the threshold by other means, and then she disappeared inside, followed by the others. A few seconds passed—long enough for them to take off their coats—and the drawing-room light came on as usual. I could see the three faces resume their usual positions with ease, without any needless delay. It seemed to me that each, as if answering a mysterious calling, was returning to her place in her own portrait, and that perhaps they might be able to relive a portrait from their past, bearing garlands of flowers, a long, pale arm reaching out tirelessly, gazing at the same marble flight of stairs as they had twenty years before.

  It was them, the three faces of my vigil, my voice, the clover of their faces upon an arduous reply-paid telegram. I thought that I would never again be as happy as in that moment, that many things would have to happen before I would forget it. I kept watching them as if someone had returned them to me slightly improved, as I remembered the reply-paid telegram. I supposed the reply might come before they retired from the drawing room. It was already six o’clock. I could keep watch over the street until half past eight. I decided to wait; to not let them out of my sight.

  I spent almost two hours in the drawing room. Then, not knowing what I was about to do, I took some money and stepped out into the street. After a few minutes, I saw a telegram boy coming along our block. I crossed the street and stopped in front of the door to the house across the way. When the telegram boy arrived, he checked the number of the house and removed a telegram from his satchel.

  “This is it,” I said in a low voice, holding out the money before he had a chance to ring the bell, then signing the receipt. The telegram boy went off whistling.

  I stood for a moment with the telegram in my hand, almost at the edge of their faces, in their own doorway. It was impossible not to read it. Perhaps someone one day would forgive me, or perhaps the memory would fade and I would change. I stepped towards the light. The street was deserted. Then I opened it, but not even then did I pay any attention to the recipient’s name. No signature followed the dull words, “Will come Thursday evening.”

  That day was Tuesday. It would be two days until he burst in, nameless, arrogant, without even saying hello; but I could already imagine him, armed with belated marriage certificates, leaving his house unseen; as a respectable man with a son, shunning memories (the three bothersome faces); devoted to his Sundays with silver cufflinks, to his handkerchiefs, to his rain shoes, to his son, so precocious at drawing and idiocy, his house-proud wife … Until I was amazed by how much I hated him.

  I remembered the open telegram and managed to regain my composure. I urgently needed to seal it. I ran back to my room, stuck down the edges, and sat on my bed, not knowing what to do. I tried to convince myself I wasn’t the one who should deliver it, until gradually the task became impossible to put off.

  I looked at myself in the mirror and, while combing my hair, tried to get used to the idea that soon, that very evening, in just a few minutes, the three faces would come close to my own. Perhaps it would be terrible to see them up close, and I’d be left with nothing but my twenty days of keeping watch across from their shadowy faces, their wan lips, while a shrill voice said over and over, “Thank you so much, thank you so much, we were waiting for it,” when I already knew they’d sent a reply-paid telegram, and now my only solace was to cry at them, with all my wasted hours, with their ruined faces, “Don’t be so foolish! Don’t make such a fuss just because someone is coming on Thursday without daring to sign his name. Is that all? Is that why you spend all day in the drawing room?” I wouldn’t be as angry with her, the eldest, but would advise her to live alone, and not to misuse my voice. But no. It was impossible that their lips should be wan and shapeless—their smiles a mere slit from one cheek to the other—and, distractedly, I ran some lipstick across my lips, so they wouldn’t imagine that I was anything like them.

  From my doorway, I spied them in the drawing room, unchanging and beloved. I let a moment pass so I could keep loving them, as if saying farewell to loving them before anything could change; only loving them, without needing to watch them or delve into their pasts; saying farewell to their precise faces, whose details I’d learned by heart, that so willingly accepted the destinies I assigned them from my window, except for that Thursday, its promise ruined by urgency and hatred.

  The street was still deserted when I crossed over towards the house across the way. The doorbell looked full of meaning, as if it were spying on me. The whole house seemed to have placed its hope in the message. Finally, I rang the bell, and stood there motionless, holding the telegram to my chest. I soon heard the shuffle of steps, many steps, as if all three were coming through the vestibule. The door opened slowly, and she appeared between the others. She looked at me for a moment; I was sure she saw only the telegram. I had prepared the first thing I would say so it wouldn’t all be ruined, and if it were, it wouldn’t be my fault. I looked at her for a while and said, “This telegram isn’t for us. Is it for you, by any chance?”

  She held out her hand and I passed it to her, placing it carefully in her palm. Then she folded it in two without looking at it, and said, with my voice, “Yes. It’s for us.”

  Behind her face, I saw the other two watching me. I didn’t know what to do. I had to leave. Then, if only so as to look at them, look them up and down in the almost darkness, I began to murmur “Good night,” while the others, as if obeying an order, withdrew until they disappeared into the shadows, and she murmured, “Do you remember the message?”

  “Yes,” I answered, as if I’d been simply awaiting her patience: “‘Will come Thursday evening.’”

  “Thank you. We are always at home,” she added gravely, in no hurry, closing the door as I crossed the street, trying to deserve her, willing her not to forgive me.

  When I arrived in the drawing room at home, the younger two had already taken their places. She slid towards her own, towards her eternal self-portrait, as if my voice, her face, my hand holding the telegram, had never happened. My face might be worthless, and perhaps I was wrong about the voice, but not about the visit, or her immediate hatred.

  Though I couldn’t make out the telegram, I could already see Thursday evening in their faces.

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  ‌6

  There were some nights when I was so absorbed in dreaming up complicated itineraries for their obedient faces that when I returned them to the walls of the drawing room, I remained as if suspended between one dream and another, trying all the while to hold on to the first. Because the only thing I could remember, and that caused me to suffer, was that I might become obsessed, that as I spied on them—tortured them, fixed them with a haunting gaze, which would emerge suddenly from familiar corners like a finger of fog that had passed unnoticed—a persecution mania (in reverse, since I would be the one continually stalking them) would fill my days and nights, until everyone noticed how much I had changed.

  “She must have some secret ailment,” some would say, when they saw me close a book without marking the page. “It must be her age,” others would whisper, while the three faces settled into my own, becoming accustomed to strange conversations, forever leaving their mark on my seventeenth winter. When I imagined the remarks that might be occasioned by my sudden fondne
ss for the drawing room, and my habit of getting up from the table because I had to watch the faces, I thought the others might easily guess at the truth if they suggested, in the kind of voice usually reserved for a dimly lit bedroom when a fever takes hold, “Perhaps she’s trying to look like something.”

  But it wasn’t possible yet to look like three faces, an avenue of poplars, a house against a golden sky. That likeness was theirs alone, and I didn’t want to resemble them, or anything like them. I preferred for my voice not to sound like that of someone hiding something. Nor could I tell whether she was hiding something, or whether my voice could really be heard in hers. Perhaps it was unfair of me to imagine her whispering sad yeses in deferred confessionals, and no matter how much I amused myself by detaining her in other scenes that had nothing to do with her presence in the drawing room, something advised me gently from a far-off place that I shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry with their faces.

  I always returned to the task, though, but not while I spied on them, since in those moments it was enough, happily enough, to make sure their faces were still there, against the same wall; slightly paler as they passed through the sheer curtains, as if emerging, swirling, floating into the street, carried along by the smoke of their cigarettes. It was in my bedroom—and after getting ready for bed, so nothing could disturb me once I was tucked in—that I would begin to imagine them.

  I often awoke to find them just as they’d been when I fell asleep. It was as if I was slowly composing a silent film that might go on forever: a film without action or scenery, only a house and its necessary piece of street, and people passing without stopping, their faces flickering briefly by its high white walls topped with glinting-green shards of glass, behind which they concealed a crime or a love affair. But no one was looking for them; the crime they’d committed was perfect.

  At other times, I began very slowly, carefully choosing the hour, the day, even the necessary breeze, since it was essential for a dark shawl to float about her face, the face that led the way, beseeching them to follow. Then the faces would advance with an urgency I couldn’t explain, until they arrived at a post office and collected, politely, a letter from poste restante; when she took it in her hand, she would glance at it, then hide it beneath her black overcoat. At first, she might seem to be happy, but that was the way she did everything—so that the other two would be mistaken.

  Sometimes, although not often, since they were very particular, and their tidy presences scarcely allowed me to add an extra piece of muslin, their faces would disappear into a church doorway to spy on a wedding, and on the two figures gliding along the red carpet towards their hatred; or, when the organ had begun to play its strident tune, they would sit in the back pew attending a mass for a stranger’s soul’s rest, or for someone she couldn’t name, since the others didn’t know of her guilt. So she withheld the name and they all prayed for the hands someone clasped around an antique rosary, not meeting the eyes half-closed by strangers in mourning.

  But most of all I saw them countless times, with a persistence that amazed even me, and which forced me to believe I could no longer picture them any other way: calmly crossing a plaza, where a crowd was beginning to gather for a protest. They didn’t seem to notice the throngs of people around them, the hostile cries echoing off their faces, the shadows that trampled their three slender, pensive silhouettes.

  When the scene ended vaguely—I could never envision their flight—the transformation would occur. Then I would picture them as three governesses, with little joy in their lives, who met to reminisce about a house, and in that house, beside a grand fireplace, a portrait usually hung of a gentleman repeating a name. Any name. It needn’t be one of theirs. But though I could make out the house, though I could picture the precise, polished curve of the staircase that led to the bedrooms, and any one of them in her respective place, hunched over a notebook, calmly correcting a repeated bend in a river, naive spellings, impatient arpeggios in a cool room furnished in white, I could never attach a face to any of the children they taught. I could only make out the portrait of a man and see them fleeing; sometimes, the three fled empty-handed to forget his name. It was strangest to see them that way, roaming through countless streets as if they were at home. Then they would find themselves in the plaza, and it was to that precise destination I took most pleasure in sending them, since it seemed impossible to offer them anything so terrible as arriving at a house that was secluded (but not in the countryside), climbing the stairs to a room with a small suitcase holding a freshly pressed nightgown, a powder box wrapped in tissue paper, and a little perfume, to begin a new life in a strange house, whose owners appear only at mealtimes, where perhaps subdued children smile when the man mutters that they are orphans as he keeps an eye on a calendar that separates him from a death, waiting, perhaps, the prudent length of time to hold onto a hand, or cautioning a mysterious butler reluctant to arrange some flowers. But it was then that I was mistaken, since no one had died, or the gentleman remained alone in his portrait, free of worries, or his deputy visited him every weekend and new figures corrected easier rivers. They marked sparsely populated lands with a bright dot on a map, while the women gathered in the plaza, walking quickly past knots of people, and arriving at the house across the way when darkness was already falling, and I hardly had time because they were already in the drawing room and hadn’t uttered a name. Then they would light a cigarette, their faces would line up in the gloom, and that was the exact moment when, from my hiding place, I collected their faces, feeling touched, letting them rest there in their precise and everyday faces, trying to forget the letter, the portrait, the exact bend in the river; most of all, trying to forget that they were wayward women.

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  ‌7

  “We are always at home. We are always at home … ” For almost a month I’d been able to confirm it daily. “We are always at home,” I muttered to myself, as I wandered from the courtyard to the dining room, from the dining room to my bedroom, waiting impatiently for the time to come to sit down at the table. I wanted to try that phrase out on the others, to see if they knew what it meant; if they spied my black dress in the wardrobe, set apart from the others, waiting; if they could see me opening telegrams destined for people whose names I didn’t know, absorbing three faces shielded by a window. But it couldn’t be so easy to tell. Perhaps to me it seemed easy, but it was different for their faces to cross the street than to see them just once in a muted row by the door. To me it was easier, because the faces had helped. Night seemed to be taking a long time to fall, and when it finally arrived it would be too much night, too much night after hearing her say, “We are always at home,” as if they were absentmindedly comforting me, as if inviting me to keep spying on them, stealing their habits, pieces of their words. Perhaps she said it without thinking, instead of forgiving me. “Will come Thursday evening” … “We are always at home,” and I was in between both phrases—the first brimming with scorn, the second forgiving—unable to win her.

  Finally, we were all in the dining room. I had an urge to argue, to put on airs, to bestow upon the others some of the mystery floating all around me, and even to briefly lend them the three faces that their own impatience had prevented them from seeing. I unfolded my napkin and spread it slowly across my lap, with a sad expression, even though I was happy. It might have been the last night I was happy at home in the dining room. Very carefully, I spread some butter on a slice of bread, but placed it on the table before lifting it to my mouth. I looked at the wall and tried to summon their faces, but it didn’t matter if I couldn’t see them. I felt briefly as if I was dreaming up something dangerous, but for now I wanted to be coy, even if only this once. But no one looked at me as if I was behaving strangely. It saddened me a little to think that so many things could happen to me for which I might not be ready, or that I might be causing events the results of which I could not predict; that my life could change, suffer real disturbances, swing from love to hate, t
hat I might become obsessed with the faces, and fall into the hands of three wayward women, who would cry out the lines of my palm, forcing me to hold it out to them daily, threatening that if I didn’t obey them, my life line might be cut short, and no one would ever guess, or suspect I was in danger. Their faces might pursue me until I was stricken by an obscure illness caused by keeping watch over three faces, and no one would notice my transformation until the doctor advised, too late, “she needs a change,” and no one could tear me away from the three faces beneath the carriage hood, over a horse’s shiny neck, edged by a bolt of lightning. But the thought of the doctor helped me calm down, and I was convinced, at least for now, that they couldn’t see the faces in me. Later, perhaps other things would happen. But first I needed to get past Thursday evening.