Andrés Neuman - The Things We Don't Do

Doctor Freidemberg held the telephone in her hand for several seconds. She could hear a monotonous buzz coming from the receiver. Finally she put it back on the cradle, searched for a key in her pocket and opened one of the drawers. She picked up one of the filing cards, wrote some notes on it, put it back in the drawer. An amber grid of light scraped the desk and her coat sleeves. Outside no birds were singing. Almost empty, the water jug cast glinting distortions and reflections.

IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME. I load the weapon. I raise it. I stare down the barrel for a moment, as if it had something to tell me. I point it at my left temple (yes, I’m a lefty, so what?). I take a deep breath. Screw up my eyes. Wrinkle my brow. Caress the trigger. Notice that my first finger is moist. I slowly release my strength, very cautiously, as if there was a gas leak inside me. Clench my teeth. Almost. My finger bends back. Now. And then, as always, the same thing happens: a burst of laughter. An instantaneous laugh so raw and meaningless that my muscles quiver, forces me to drop the gun, knocks me off the chair, prevents me from shooting.

I don’t know what the devil my mouth is laughing at. It’s inexplicable. However downhearted I feel, however ghastly the day seems, however convinced I am that the world would be a better place without my annoying presence, there is something about the situation, about the metallic feel of the butt, the solemnity of the silence, my sweat dripping like pills, what can I say, there is something impossible to define that I find dreadfully comic in spite of myself. A millimetre before the trigger gives way, before the bullet travels to the source of rest, my guffaws invade the room, bounce off the window panes, scamper through the furniture, turn the whole house upside down. I’m afraid my neighbours also hear them, and to add insult to injury, conclude I am a happy man.

Devote your life to humour, a friend suggested when I told him of my tragedy. But except when I’m committing suicide, I don’t find any jokes funny.

This problem of mine, this laughter, is going to test my patience to the limit. I am ashamed of the ridiculous euphoria that ripples through my stomach as the weapon falls to the floor. Each time this mishap occurs, and although I’ve always been a man of my word, I offer myself a brief postponement. A week. Two. A month, at most. And in the meantime, of course, I try to have fun.

AFTER ELENA’S DEATH, I decided to forgive all my enemies. Our belief that important decisions are taken gradually, that they evolve over time, reassures us. But time doesn’t make anything evolve. It only erodes, retracts, ruptures.

I switched the furniture around. I cleared out her things. I gave her study a thorough clean. A week later, I donated all her clothes to a hospice. I didn’t even feel the consolation of charity: I had done it for myself.

I had always imagined that losing the person you loved would feel like opening up a bottomless hole, starting off a permanent absence. When I lost Elena, the exact opposite happened. I felt closed off inside. Without purpose, or desires, or fears. As though each day were the postponement of something that had in fact ended.

I carried on going to the university, not so much to safeguard my routine or my salary. The ridiculous savings we had set aside for who knows when, together with the money from the insurance, would have allowed me some unpaid leave. I went on teaching simply in order to find out whether the obvious youthfulness of the new students could persuade me that time was still ticking by, that the future still existed.

One afternoon, browsing through my contacts list in search of a friendly name, I made two simultaneous decisions: to start smoking again and to tell my enemies that I forgave them. The first was an attempt to show myself that, although Elena was no more, I was still breathing. To draw my attention to the fact that I survived each cigarette. The second was unplanned. It wasn’t an act of kindness. I regarded it as something inevitable, a fait accompli. I simply saw the names Melchor, Ariel, Rubén, Nora. At first I tried to resist the idea. But as I lit each match (I have always preferred the leisureliness of matches to the instancy of lighters), I thought: Melchor, Ariel, Rubén, Nora.

Melchor hated me because we were alike. Two people whose ambitions are similar constantly remind each other of their own pettiness. I hated him from the start. Although I admired him too, something I doubt he reciprocated. Not because I was better than Melchor, but out of vanity: I admired in him everything that, in some way, I myself took pride in. And it upset me that Melchor didn’t acknowledge the same thing in me. I fooled myself for a while into believing this was because I was nobler than he. As the university years and departmental meetings went by, I came to realize that my unrequited admiration was based on a brutal coherence on Melchor’s part. To him, we were enemies, and that was that.

The most despicable about him was his fake disinterest. I couldn’t stand the way he coveted everything with a look of humility. Such a deception, as unmistakable to me as an umbrella on a sunny day, won him numerous supporters. More than half the department was on Melchor’s side, and his acolytes would religiously repeat the same old tired refrain about what a principled man he was, incorruptible and far-removed from the traffic of influences the rest of us were caught up in. That, and not his academic recognition, was what most exasperated me. In the early days I made a few attempts at rapprochement, whether out of weakness or tactically, I am not sure. But Melchor was unbending, he rebuffed me harshly, and left me in no doubt on two counts. He would never stoop to diplomacy where I was concerned. And, deep down inside, he feared me as much as I did him.

Over the past few years we had scarcely exchanged two words. The odd, sardonically courteous greeting at this or that meeting. On those occasions, the moment I went anywhere near him, Melchor would hurriedly surround himself with his crowd and do his best to look nonchalant. My strategy was different: I would stop to speak to his lackeys, be extremely friendly to them and, as I moved away, relish the thought that I had sown a few seeds of doubt among his camp.

The enmity between Ariel and me was quite different. Perhaps it was more violent. Although for that precise reason it was more innocuous. Ariel was, so to speak, a classically envious person. And, like all people of his kind, his fury turned against his own interests and slowly ate away what little happiness he had. Because he was capable of arousing a certain aggression in me that was out of character, many assumed I considered him my worst enemy. And yet I sensed something purifying about my fits of rage at Ariel, and I thought I perceived beneath my hostility a tiny, surprising hint of compassion. Tormented beings enjoy that advantage: they obtain from us, perhaps unfairly, greater goodwill than those whose capacity for pleasure is intact. Needless suffering in others never upsets us as much as well-earned happiness.

While Ariel languished in the lower echelons of academia, he made life impossible for three or four of us who were his colleagues. When at last he obtained his tenure, he appeared to calm down and we formed one of those relationships of false camaraderie that came so naturally to me. Of course, I never lowered my guard. I continued to observe his movements, and tried to make use of his supposed complicity whenever a conflict arose in the department. I am sure Ariel did the same. I know that, years earlier, he was the one responsible for the rumour about me sleeping with a student reaching Elena’s ears. Since communication between Elena and me (our treasure) enabled us to set things straight, I never let Ariel know that I had discovered his ruse. I let the matter pass and went about watching with satisfaction and pity the way, forever single, forever deprived of love, he continued to be consumed with envy. When he called to offer his condolences, Ariel’s parting words stuck in my craw: “I can’t even imagine how it must feel to lose a woman like Elena.” I still don’t know whether it was a movingly honest gesture, or the cruellest jibe.