Jaume Cabré: Winter Journey

"God damn it," he said when he got close enough to see the traffic warden putting a ticket on his windshield. He came up, breathing hard. "Hey, it's only been two minutes," he complained.

"Nobody's ever been parked for more than two minutes," she said coldly. "You're blocking an exit."

"Damn it, 1 was…"

"Look, that's your problem. I'm just following the rules."

That was what really got him: saying it was his problem to run around all morning, make thirteen visits in two hours, spend a fortune on parking, leave the car in a spot for a minute, meet with a chatty client and, boom, a ticket. Shit.

"You know what I'm going to do about my problem?" said the potential heart attack as he grabbed the ticket. The cop stood waiting for the man to get it out of his system. Which he did by crumpling up the ticket and throwing it to the ground. Which is just what Caries would have done. Exactly. The man couldn't believe his ears when she said, with a smile:

"Fine. But I'll write you another ticket for littering."

That was too much, damn it all. He got in the car and, unconsciously, avoided slamming the door so the harpy wouldn't write him a ticket for making noise on the street less than three hundred yards from a hospital. He turned the key without worrying whether the cop was picking up the ticket and smoothing it out with her hand, or taking out her gun and pointing it at his goddam neck. He almost ran into a limo that was double parked in front of him. He put on his blinker and swung out and Shit, shit, shit. He had to slow down even more because there was a huge truck just… That's really a pisser, why don't they give him a ticket? Swearing under his breath, he stopped at the light, which was red. Mad about everything, he banged his hand on the steering wheel and the horn sounded, clear, ironic, and perfectly illegal.

Though she had good vision, most of her teeth, and legs that still worked just fine, what she couldn't do was break into a run in the middle of the crosswalk. So she thought, 1 don't care, make all the noise you want. And she looked defiantly at the nervous man who was putting one hand out the window of a blue car and drumming his fingers on the side as he lit a cigarette with the other hand. He was the one who'd honked, as if she couldn't see that the walk sign was still lit. Slow and steady wins the race.

She immediately forgot about the rude guy and started window shopping, which was what she liked to do when she walked home on that side of the street. Look at that dress. Not at my age. 1'd like to find out what it costs, but I'm embarrassed. 1 can say it's for my niece. And what do they care, anyway? She saw a traffic cop writing something by a car and thought maybe she was giving somebody a ticket. If it weren't for my age, 1 would've gotten my driver's license long ago, she thought. And she kept walking so she could get home, because one thing she'd never done was smoke out on the street, it wasn't appropriate at her age. But another really nice dress caught her eye. No, she wouldn't dare wear that, at any age. They wear them really short these days. But it sure was pretty. She looked up and was startled; a shadow was reflected in the glass of the window. The shadow of a man with a dark beard who was singing the slave chorus from Nabucco very softly in a deep voice. The shadow thought, That old girl's scared. Right away he forgot about the old lady, who had continued on her way, mumbling about her fantasies, and concentrated on the window. Suggestive feminine apparel. The green dress wouldn't look good on his wife; she's too big in the waist. He corrected himself a little bitterly: her waist is getting bigger every day. Silvia could wear it, though. Everything looks good on her. He looked at the price. Good Lord. Good Lord. He didn't know if he could indulge without his wife getting suspicious.

Regretfully, he turned away from the window. Then, to his annoyance, some uniformed guards motioned him off the sidewalk because workmen were unloading wooden containers from a truck. Paintings, he thought. They were taking them into the Fundacio. It irritated him to have to step into the road because of the delivery. He should keep the exposition in mind. He should keep all kinds of things in mind, now that even his times with Silvia were starting to acquire a patina of boredom. And he began to sing very softly in his baritone voice a fragment from one of the songs from Winterreise, the one that said, Eine Strasse muss ich gehen, / Die noch keiner ging zuruck,' which made him feel sad. In front of him, an impressive limousine came up fast and quiet out of nowhere and had to stop at a light thirty yards farther on. The man with the dark beard and the baritone voice took his key ring out of his pocket and with practiced fingers sorted out the right key before he got to the door. He began whistling his stair-climbing melody (the adagio from Dvorak's American Quartet), as he did every day of every year. He took in the Thursday smell of oven-baked rice and thought it was lucky his wife was such a good cook, if nothing else.

"Hi," he heard from the back of the apartment, "what are you doing home so early?"

"Hey," on his way down the hall, "did the guy come to fix the washer?"

he'd wondered many times how many thousands of books there were in that house. But because she was on her best behavior as soon as she walked through the door, respectfully afraid to make a mistake and end up without a job, she'd never dared to ask Sr. Adria that question. She just did what she'd been told: Monday, Wednesday and Friday, fill out cards in her careful handwriting. And Tuesday and Thursday, dust, because a layer of dust on a book is a sign of disrespect and carelessness. She started out doing it with a damp cloth, but the spines were black from years of neglect and the water made a dark paste that was even worse. So Tere told her it would be better to use the vacuum cleaner or, if that didn't work, an old-fashioned feather duster. She ended up with the old-fashioned method because it didn't even occur to her to ask Sr. Adria if he had a vacuum cleaner. The books she was cleaning now had a good layer of dust on them, which she was trying to get rid of before he noticed it.

Sr. Adria was a mystery. Maybe a millionaire, certainly a loner. He never went out, and he was always reading, going through books, writing cards or going over them, or unpacking, with obvious relish, boxes of new acquisitions, most of them old, worn books, some of them very old. He was obsessed with books. Toni was obsessed with sex, but Sr. Adria was obsessed with books. Today, a dusting day, she'd end up exhausted, with her nose and her throat dried out and the taste of dust in her mouth, because in that house the bookshelves went on and on and the dust stuck to everything.

She felt him behind her as he turned a page of the book on the lectern, and she thought it was impossible for anybody to spend his life like that: people have to move, breathe fresh air, talk to other people, go out to eat, whatever. He didn't.

Victoria got down off the ladder she'd had to climb to do ORIENTAL POETRY. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she could see Sr. Adria watching her. When she checked to be sure, he was already deep in a book.

On the first day, when he opened the door with the lack of interest he showed for everything that wasn't a book, he asked how old she was. Victoria told him twenty and thought he would send her away because she was too young. And she needed the work because they were supposed to get married next fall. Age wasn't a problem, or lack of experience. Almost having gone to library school surely hadn't helped. She knew that what had made Sr. Adria decide had been the delicate way she had taken the book that he handed her by surprise: she took it delicately, almost lovingly, just as Elisa picked up the embroidery box when she found out about the death of her lover in Elisa Grant by Ballys (Pittsburg, 1883). And on top of that, it turned out that she had beautiful handwriting. It was a good idea to get help because 1 can't keep up with things alone.