•
A sharp noise awakens him. First he thinks maybe the bottle of champagne has fallen on the floor and shattered, but he slides his foot along until he finds the bottle right where he remembered leaving it: by the side of the bed. Then he figures it must be the shade banging against the windowpanes. Then he opens his eyes and shifts around under the sheets. Maybe it was a cat on the roof, or one of the wicker chairs on the balcony blown over by the wind, or maybe the glass ball has struck the banister. He sits up and touches his head. It hurts. He remembers the window shade again: it must have crashed into the glass, harder than ever before. Or maybe it had been a thief with a mask and a striped jersey who slipped in through the dining room window? Or a hit man with a long, black, shiny getaway car waiting out in front, with the motor running, who has jimmied the door open and is now coming slowly up the stairs, feeling his way along to that very room where he would now kill him? Or maybe it’s Helena herself (Helena would certainly have no need to hire a hit man) who suddenly feels like . . . ?
He yawns. Yawning makes you sleepy. He closes his eyes tighter. He tries to go back to sleep.
He can’t. He lifts his head. He runs a finger along Hildegarda’s shoulder. He kisses her ear. In the half-light he looks at her back, her hips . . . He squeezes his eyelids shut. He tries to pick up the thread of the dream again, but it eludes him; the more he tries to remember it, the faster it flees. He only remembers the beach . . . If it were summer, he’d get up and run out to the ocean for a swim. Some people have a tradition of swimming on a certain day in the winter. In Barcelona they swim across the port. On New Year’s Day? The Feast of the Kings? Christmas? He remembers the beach full of spots, like red caviar. All at once, he can make out the counter, the waiter, the woman.
He saw the painting for the first time when he was thirteen, as a father in well-pressed trousers dragged him from one gallery of the museum to the next (until the moment he discovered the painting, after which the hard part was dragging him away from it). Nighthawks had mesmerized him. Many years later, when a critic averred (in passing in some article) that Hopper was a precursor of the hyperrealists, Heribert read it with surprise. It was a devaluation and, to some extent, an injustice to categorize him (and thus to label, limit, judge him, and store him in formaldehyde) as a mere precursor of the hyperrealists, when in any Hopper there was much more (a web of memory, of desire) than in all that evaporated outpouring of canvases filled with ketchup, French fries, and shiny cars.
He knows full well why he dreamed of it. Because the night before, in the shop window, he looked at it coldly and thought it really wasn’t such a big deal after all, and maybe if he were to come across it now for the first time he wouldn’t find it so exceptional. He yawns again; he decides to shut his eyes, but they are already shut.
There is no getting around it. He squeezes his eyes even tighter and thinks of the girl he saw last night at the party (wearing a magician’s hat covered with cardboard stars and a silvery moon) who was eating the twelve grapes of New Year’s by the handful and choking. He retrieves the image. He stands next to her. He smiles. The girl smiles back. They quickly down their drinks (Hildegarda is off in a corner of the room, dancing alone) and, hand in hand, they go outside. They sit on a stoop behind some bushes; he strokes her thighs, she strokes his chest.
He is tired of fantasizing, but he persists. The girl, naked . . . ; no, not naked: wearing a skirt but no underwear. No, wearing black panties but no bra; no: white panties . . . He feels like sleeping, but he’s not sleepy.
He checks the time: four o’clock. Only a little over an hour ago, he got into bed swearing that next New Year’s Eve he’d go to sleep at 9:00 p.m. He licks Hildegarda’s back and waist and she shivers and shifts in her sleep.
He turns on the light on the night table. He picks up a book lying there. A coleira do cão. He starts to read.
He reads eighty pages. Then he stops. It’s not that he’s bored; he’s just not in the mood any more. He gets up, puts on his pants, lifts the shade a crack, flips the switch to the outside light, looks out at the snow-covered balcony, and the beach, farther on, black as the sky. He opens the door to the balcony: an icy gust of wind and the sound of the waves come in. He closes it at once.
In the kitchen he makes coffee and adds a splash of milk. He opens the shades. If a vampire were to appear now at the window and look at him, fangs at the ready, he would consider it the most predictable thing in the world.
He raises the shades in the living room, the dining room, in all the rooms. With the cup of coffee in his hand, he sits on the throw rug next to the bed where Hildegarda is still sleeping. He lets his eyes wander around the room and stops at the window. A round spot is reflected in the glass: the lamp on the night table. He looks at the window frame, the shutters, and the strips between the panes of glass . . . “What do you call the slats between the windowpanes? There has to be a specific name for them. Every object has a specific name.” He looks at the windowsill and thinks: “Now that’s a windowsill. But what are the lateral ‘sills’ called? And the opposite of the windowsill, the upper ‘sill’? What about the edge of the windowsill, does that have a name? Does the name change according to whether the edge is squared or rounded?” He goes down to the living room, searches among the books, finds a dictionary; he takes it out, goes upstairs, and sits down by the bed again. He opens it at random and reads: board (bōrd, bôrd), n., 1. Daily meals, esp. as provided for pay: Ten dollars a day for room and board. —v.t., 2. To furnish with meals, or with meals and lodging, esp. for pay: They boarded him for $20 a week. —v.i., 3. to take one’s meals, or be supplied with food and lodging at a fixed price: Several of us boarded at the same rooming house. He shuts the book. He opens it again: georgic (jor´jik), adj., 1. agricultural. —n., 2. a poem on an agricultural theme. Syn. 1, 2. bucolic. Georgics, The, a didactic poem (39-29 B.C.) by Virgil.
He goes on reading at random. A few hours later, he closes the book and leaves it on the floor, and he sits watching as, bit by bit, the sun appears beyond the horizon and the first dawn of the year sheds an imperceptible light on all things below: the water, the sand on the beach, the folded umbrellas, the chairs on the balcony, the slats on the windows, the windowsill, the floor where he is sitting, the furniture, his own feet, which he stares at for quite a while as if they were two monsters. Then he hears Hildegarda waking up, and he sits on the bed, feeling her gaze on the nape of his neck. He doesn’t turn around until she traces the length of his spine with her fingernail.
•
Afterwards, he is completely overcome with sleep. When he opens his eyes again, the sun (a pale, faint sun) is high in the sky and Hildegarda is sitting in the armchair with a blue robe on (sky blue, bluer by far than today’s gray sky), painting her toenails, each nail a different color: one pink, one blue, one gold, one black, one purple, one white, one silver, one yellow, and one gray.
Hildegarda is reconstructing the (approximately) two weeks they’ve been involved, weighing the pros and cons of their relationship. Heribert thinks that the terms she’s using (“involved,” “our relationship”) are mere euphemisms. Euphemisms for what, though? What does “involved” mean? The two weeks we’ve spent touching each other? “Touching each other” sounds like another euphemism to him, though. “The two weeks we’ve spent kissing and caressing each other’s genitals?” He finds the last expression cold enough to be accurate. Then he turns his attention entirely to what Hildegarda is saying to him: everything he hears is a euphemism.