Ricardo Romero
The President’s Room
Translated by Charlotte Coombe
For Victoria, on her birthday,
this and all stories.
Or, to put it another way,
is it possible that the secret
lies open before us,
that we already know what it is?
Steven Millhauser, ‘The Sisterhood of Night’
The house isn’t big, but it’s not small either, compared to the rest of the houses on the block. It has two floors, three if you count the attic, a storage room up on the roof terrace where nobody goes apart from me. The rest of the family call it the loft, but I prefer to call it the attic. I didn’t decide this on a whim. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, up there in the attic, among the old furniture, the trunks, and always the same warmish air capturing the rays of sun as they filter through the skylight and the frosted glass of the door. Rays of sun, skylight, frosted glass. When I’m there, I’m able to think ‘I’m in the attic’, but I find it impossible to think ‘I’m in the loft’. Not everything can be thought. Why should everything have to be thinkable?
On the first floor of the house are the bedrooms. My parents’ room, my older brother’s room and the one I share with my younger brother. There are two large bathrooms that seem much older than the rest of the house, as if they’ve always been there, hovering at the height of the first floor, waiting for my family to come and build the house around them. The bathtubs, the taps and the medicine cabinet are majestic; the porcelain, mirror and brass are yellowing in the corners with stains that aren’t stains, because you can get rid of a stain but you can’t get rid of these. I can’t imagine the tap in our bathroom sink without that pale, discoloured cloud underneath it, or the mirror of the medicine cabinet in my parents’ bathroom without the black spots on the left-hand side. However, what really makes these bathrooms feel old, as if they’re of an earlier time, are the tiles covering the walls right up to the ceiling. What is it that makes those tiles so old? I don’t know. I only know that they’re impossible to count. No, that’s not all I know. I also know that although the bathrooms seem the same, like twins, they’re not.
And then there’s the ground floor, which is the same size as the first but seems bigger. It only seems it, though: I know they’re really the same size. And yet, even though I know this, every now and again I feel the need to compare corners and angles, to see how the walls of one floor and another are the same. Or rather: are aligned. The walls of the ground floor and those of the first floor are aligned. However, the ground floor seems bigger.
On the ground floor are the kitchen, the dining room, the living room and the study my father shares with my older brother. There’s another, smaller bathroom, squeezed in between the kitchen and the staircase. There’s a small cleaning cupboard. There’s an entrance hall leading to the front door.
And of course, at the front of the house on the left, looking out over the garden, is the president’s room.
The staircase. The grand staircase where my younger brother plays. Which floor is it on? The ground floor, or the first floor? Although that’s not the right question to ask, because I could easily answer that it’s on the ground floor. So, the right question to ask is: which floor does it belong to? This is harder to answer. Does it belong to the ground floor or the first floor? Could the exact location of the staircase be what makes one floor seem larger than the other? Could it hold the key to this distortion that I imagine but can’t see?
If the bathrooms are the oldest part of the house, the president’s room is the newest. But it’s new in the way the bathrooms are old. My grandparents built this house before the neighbourhood was a neighbourhood. Now there are barely any empty spaces left and the houses are crowded together side by side. But I don’t want to think about that. About the houses stuck to one another. When my grandparents were building the house, the president’s room came before the bathrooms, which is obvious, because how could they have built the bathrooms first if there was nothing below them?
Our bathroom, the bathroom I share with my brothers, is directly over the president’s room. When we pull the flush, can he hear it below us? Can he hear the noise of the shower or the silence when we’re masturbating? So as not to think about it, not to think about the president when I’m in the bathroom, I try to count the tiles. But there are just too many.
There’s no basement. None of the houses in the neighbourhood have one. They’ve been banned since my grandparents were around. People say that terrible things used to happen before, in the basements. That’s why no more basements were allowed to be built. In the houses dating back to the times before the ban, the basements were bricked up. Although they’re large houses, they’re cheap nowadays, easy to buy. People don’t like living in those houses. It’s understandable. Who’d want to live above a sealed room, devoid of all light?
From the window of the room I share with my younger brother, we can see the street. The small front garden, the little metal gate with its peeling white paint, the pavement and the street. On the pavement right opposite our house, there’s a tall laurel tree, with a lot of dark leaves. My brother, who’s still little, sometimes climbs it. I’ll be sitting at my desk, doing my homework, and when I look up I see him tucked away among the branches. At first, without fail, I always think he’s spying on me. But then I realise that it’s not me he’s spying on. He’s spying on the president’s room. So then I wave at him, but he doesn’t wave back. I know my parents talk about him more than they do about my older brother and me. And when they do, they do it in hushed tones. They’re worried. For some reason, they seem to prefer to do it in the kitchen. As if that were the place in the house for talking about those things that need to be talked about in hushed tones. They talk about my little brother more, and they talk to my older brother more. I’m the middle child and I’m always in the middle. Conversations aren’t normally directed at me. I don’t mind. It means I can do things like go to the attic and nobody will disturb me for hours.
Nobody knows, or at least I don’t think anybody knows, but I’ve also climbed the laurel tree to peer into the president’s room. Right now, I’m not doing that. Right now, as I’m sitting at my desk and looking at the laurel tree from my bedroom window, I’m wondering what the tree looks like from the president’s room.
Since long before basements were banned, people were building rooms for the president. Every house has one. Or at least houses owned by people like us. The blocks of flats in the city centre don’t. And because they don’t, they lose their privileges. I don’t really know what those privileges are, or even whether our parents know what they are, but nobody doubts that they exist. In our neighbourhood, all the houses have a president’s room. And yet the president has never been to visit us. It’s not that we’re expecting him, because to be honest, most of the time we forget the room’s even there. Most of the time, we forget.
When I said the president had never come to our neighbourhood, that wasn’t entirely true. Our school is in our neighbourhood, and the president visited a boy from our school once. Or at least, that’s what people say. Everyone says it, because there’s not much else to say about the president, although nobody dares to ask the boy, who is slightly older than me, if it’s true. The boy lives in a different neighbourhood but he goes to our school, like lots of children from other neighbourhoods. That’s normal. It’s a big school, and there aren’t enough children in our neighbourhood to fill it. And a school should be full.
We’re not jealous of him. The boy’s no different to any of us. There’s nothing about him to make us think he’s special, or that his family’s different. He walks around the playground with his tie loose and his sleeves rolled up, he laughs and gets angry as quickly as any of us. He’s tall and skinny and always well-groomed. He is pale. But then, lots of us are pale. Sometimes I bump into him in the toilets and he’s always slicking his hair back with a comb he keeps in his back pocket. I’ve never dared talk to him because he’s older than me. But I’ve heard him talking to boys his age, and he doesn’t seem to stand out for any particular