Javier Cercas - The Tenant and The Motive

Just after eight he knocked on the door of the apartment across the hall. Berkowickz took a while to open. When he did (wearing dun-coloured drill trousers, a T-shirt scribbled with signatures of famous artists and an anagram of the Art Institute of Chicago, canvas espadrilles, in his left hand a folded newspaper), Mario realized from the look in his eyes that he’d forgotten the arrangement. Perhaps to hide this fact, or just as a greeting, Berkowickz smiled excessively.

‘Come in, Mario, come in,’ he said, making room for him to pass through. He admitted straight away, ‘The truth is I’d forgotten we were getting together. With so many things to do my head gets muddled. But it doesn’t matter. .’

Berkowickz kept talking. Mario wasn’t listening to him: as soon as he entered the apartment he was overtaken by a visceral discomfort that translated into a kind of vertigo, something like a hollow in his stomach. He sat down on a sofa leaving the crutch on one side. Berkowickz handed him a glass of whisky he didn’t remember asking for; he held it weakly and squirmed on the sofa. He saw his host gesticulating, smiling and arching his brows, but he was unable to concentrate on what he was saying: Berkowickz’s words slid through his ears without leaving any trace whatsoever. He rubbed his eyes, the bridge of his nose, his forehead. Only then did he begin to recognize the pale wood, the metal chairs, the vaguely cubist paintings, the advertisement for a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in a gallery in Turin; he recognized the television beside him, the record player, the double-decker transparent table, the Hockney reproduction hanging from a hook on the wall, the cream-coloured sofa he was sitting on, the two armchairs of the same colour. He recognized the minute cluster of things that packed the glass cabinet: the Algerian pipe, the antique pistols and the hourglass, the frigate imprisoned in the Chianti bottle, the clay figures, the marble elephant.

A chill shot up his back.

Bewildered, abruptly gullible, he realised that Berkowickz’s apartment was an exact, though inverted, replica of his own: the perverse reflection of it in an atrocious mirror. He was frightened: he felt his hands drenched in sweat; his heart pounded wildly in his throat. He tried to control his nerves, to pull himself together. To tackle the situation, he constructed a phrase: ‘Bravery does not consist in not being afraid: that’s called temerity. Bravery consists in being afraid, struggling against it and winning.’ Comforted and strengthened by this reflection, he forced himself to listen to the monologue that Berkowickz, sitting in the armchair in front of him, continued delivering amid gesticulations. At some moment, hazily, he thought he understood that Berkowickz was setting out a problem related to the configuration of the syllable in Italian. Mario nodded in agreement. After a while he realized he couldn’t take any more: with the excuse of a sudden headache, he stood up from the sofa without looking at Berkowickz (on the table, the glass of whisky remained untouched) and headed for the door.

‘Here: read this when you have a moment,’ he heard Berkowickz say with an impeccable smile, thrusting a sheaf of photocopied pages into his hand. ‘If you like, we can talk it over some other time.’ Then, resting a fraternal hand on Mario’s shoulder, he added, ‘And take care of that headache: sometimes life gets complicated by the silliest little things.’

When he lifted the telephone receiver he noticed his hands were trembling; it took him several attempts to dial the number.

‘Mrs Workman? This is Mario Rota.’

‘What do you want?’ Mrs Workman’s voice sounded deep, drenched in sleep.

‘I’m calling about the new tenant.’

‘What about the new tenant?’

Mario answered with a thread of a voice: ‘He has the same furniture as me.’

There was a silence.

‘Mrs Workman?’ Mario enquired. ‘Are you there?’

‘Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to call me at this hour to tell me such a thing?’ mumbled Mrs Workman as if talking to herself.

‘Pardon?’

‘Don’t you think it’s a little late to be phoning me?’ said Mrs Workman in a friendly tone. She continued in a tone of gentle scolding: ‘I believe I’ve told you many times that I go to bed very early, to try to call me at reasonable times. Or have you been drinking?’

‘No, Mrs Workman, I assure you I haven’t,’ Mario hurriedly swore, his voice shrunken with anguish. ‘But it’s horrible, can’t you see? Berkowickz has the same pictures as I do, the same sofa, the same armchairs, everything the same.’

‘And what do you want me to tell you?’ the old woman croaked in annoyance. ‘He must have the same taste as you, which would be a shame. Or you bought them at the same place. What do I know, man, how should I know?’

‘But it’s that they’re exactly the same,’ Mario almost shouted. Immediately he begged, ‘Mrs Workman, something must be done.’

‘That’s for sure,’ answered Mrs Workman. ‘Get into bed and sleep it off.’

During the night he woke up several times bathed in sweat, the sheets twisted. One time he imagined he’d just dreamed the visit he’d made the previous evening to Berkowickz’s apartment; another time, as he smoked a cigarette of insomnia looking out the window of his study (outside the bulbs of the street lamps projected a weak light over the street), he wished vehemently for that whole week to have been a nightmare. At some point he managed to get to sleep, comforted by the hope that the next day everything would be different.

The next day he woke up with the certainty that nothing was going to be different. It was seven in the morning; filtering through the curtains, the skeletal light of dawn lit up the room. Although overwhelmed by the prospect (a Saturday without a single activity to occupy his time), he got up immediately, shaved and showered, and had just a cup of coffee for breakfast. He tried to banish from his mind the ominous proximity of Berkowickz’s apartment, on the other side of the landing. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. Morbidly he leafed through the sheaf of photocopies that Berkowickz had given him the day before: it was an article entitled ‘The Syllable in Phonological Theory, with Special Reference to the Italian’, by Daniel Berkowickz. He left the sheaf of photocopies on the sofa and went to his study where he spent a while putting papers in order. By nine-thirty he didn’t know what to do with himself any more. If only I could at least go out for a run, he thought, lighting a cigarette. That was when he remembered that it had been almost a week since they bandaged his ankle. He remembered the doctor’s words: ‘Come back in a week.’ He called a taxi and, while he waited for it on the porch, he was happy to have found something to occupy the morning. He was also happy at the mere possibility of getting rid of the bandage, crutch and limp that had been humiliating him all week.

The taxi stopped on the expanse of pavement surrounded by grass where Mario had parked his car the previous week: the old second-hand Buick was still there; Mario felt a sort of tenderness towards it.

He went into the hospital. At the end of the corridor with very white walls he found a foyer with several rows of chairs, a few rugs and a counter behind which a crimson-faced nurse with fleshy hands was entrenched. Mario recognized her. Leaning his crutch and his elbows on the counter, he waited for the nurse to finish dealing with a telephone call. When she hung up the phone she turned to Mario and handed him a form.

‘I don’t know if you recognize me,’ said Mario, smiling, because he was sure the nurse recognized him and could perhaps save him the paperwork. ‘I was here last week and —’