Javier Cercas - The Tenant and The Motive

‘Be so kind as to fill in the form,’ the nurse parried curtly. Then she added in a quieter voice, ‘That’d be great if I had to remember everyone who came through here.’

Mario filled in the form, handed it back to the nurse. She pointed him towards the row of chairs opposite the counter and asked him to wait. Mario sat down in a chair and set down in the one beside it a bag in which he’d taken the precaution of putting the shoe and sock that matched the ones he was wearing on his right foot. He leafed through old issues of Newsweek, Discovery and Travel and Leisure. On a couple of occasions he noticed distractedly that the nurse was leaning over the counter to look at him. He smiled, but the nurse vanished back into her cave. He heard her speaking on the phone, in a low voice, and once thought he heard the name Berkowickz. Almost in disgust, he thought: There’s no getting away from him. He again felt a ball of anguish in his throat; his hands sweated again. Then he thought that since he’d entered the hospital he hadn’t seen anyone except the crimson-faced nurse: no doctors, no patients, no other nurses. He shuddered. Absurdly, he thought of going home and taking the bandage off himself. An instant later he heard a nurse, at the other end of the foyer, calling him by his name and motioning him to follow her.

They went into a room that smelled of cleanliness, iodine and bandages. The nurse told him to lie down on the examining table that occupied the centre of the room; she removed the bandage from his ankle and examined it. Under the oblique light that illuminated them, Mario noticed the thick shadow that soiled the nurse’s upper lip; he realized she was the same one who had attended him the week before. He sat up a little, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her anxiously, as if searching for a sign of recognition in her eyes. The nurse smiled coldly. She said, ‘The doctor will see you straight away.’

After a moment the doctor came in: pale, Oriental, small, nervous. Mario was no longer surprised that it was the same doctor as the previous week. He lay back down on the table while he felt the pressure of investigating fingers on various parts of his foot. He tried to relax, not to think of anything. Bent over Mario’s ankle, the doctor squinted; his eyes thinned into slots.

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the doctor, gently squeezing his instep.

Mario sat up again: he noticed that the swelling around his ankle had completely disappeared. The yellow pallor and stains of dirt that darkened his skin revealed the recent presence of the bandage. The nurse watched them smilingly from a discreet distance.

‘Does it hurt?’ the doctor repeated.

‘No,’ Mario assured him. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

‘Hmm,’ murmured the doctor.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘The ankle is fine,’ the doctor said, straightening up and looking at Mario: the two slots turned back into two green ovals. He smiled, walked over to the sink that was on the other side of the room and washed his hands.

‘Completely?’ asked Mario.

‘Completely,’ the doctor answered, turning around as he dried his hands on a towel.

Perhaps stupidly, Mario asked, ‘Could I go out for a run tomorrow?’

The doctor looked him in the eye again, this time maliciously. Then he looked down to his dirty, naked ankle against the white of the sheets.

‘You could,’ he ventured. ‘But it might be better to leave it till Monday.’

In a rush, wanting to get out of the hospital as soon as possible, Mario washed his foot before the nurse’s immutable smile, and put on his sock and shoe. He crossed the foyer accompanied by the nurse, walked down the corridor and reached the door. When he was about to leave, the woman stopped him by grabbing his arm. She looked up and down the corridor, stared at Mario in a strange way, and smiled.

‘I recognized you,’ she whispered. ‘I knew you’d be back.’

Before the nurse approached to kiss him, Mario thought: Now I’ll wake up.

Mario went out for a run at eight o’clock on Monday morning. He immediately noticed the street was suffused in a halo of mist: the houses opposite, the cars parked by the sidewalk and the globes of light from the street lamps seemed to shimmer with an unstable and hazy existence. Trying not to strain his ankle, he did a few arm and leg stretches on the tiny rectangle of lawn in front of the house and thought: Fall’s here already. Then he remembered something; he almost smiled. He went back inside and came out again a moment later, this time with his glasses on. The mist having dissolved, Mario began to run along the path of greyish flagstones between the road and the meticulous gardens, enclosed by flowerbeds and wooden fences aligned in front of the houses. At first he ran with care, almost fear, barely putting any weight on his left foot; then, as he noticed his ankle wasn’t suffering, he quickened his pace.

The streets were deserted. The only person he saw during the first five minutes of his run was a young woman crouched down beside an anemone bush in the back garden of the First Church of Christ Scientist, as he was turning right on McCollough. The girl turned: she bared her teeth in a devout smile. Mario felt obliged to return the greeting: he smiled. Later, by then on Pennsylvania, he crossed paths with a grey-haired man in shorts and a black T-shirt, who was jogging in the opposite direction. The man’s expression seemed concentrated on a buzzing emitted from two earphones fed from a cassette player strapped to his waist. After that came a postal truck, an old, bandy-legged black man, who supported his decrepit steps with a wooden walking stick, a young woman with diligent Oriental features, a family having a boisterous breakfast on the front porch, complete with laughter and parental warnings. When, on the way home, he turned back on to West Oregon, the city seemed to have resumed its daily pulse.

That’s when he saw the bed of dahlias where he’d twisted his ankle last Monday. He didn’t think anything.

Panting, sweating and almost happy, he arrived home. He took a shower, made some breakfast (peach juice, scrambled eggs with bacon, toast, coffee with hot milk) and ate hungrily as he listened to the news on the radio. As he left the house he told himself that the physical exercise had done him good, banished his anxiety and perhaps the fear as well: he felt spirited.

At a quarter past nine he parked the Buick in front of the foreign languages building. He picked up his leather briefcase from the passenger seat on his right and went into the building. The hall was half empty: just a few young people, sprawling on the carpeted floor, leaning against the walls, studying or dozing while waiting for the next class.

He went up in the elevator alone. When he got to the main office of the department Branstyne and Swinczyc were speaking in low voices. They stopped talking as soon as they noticed Mario’s presence: they turned to him, said hello. After a few innocuous comments on the weather or the tedium of weekends (or maybe about the Conference of the Association of Linguists), to which he barely paid any attention, Mario got to his cubbyhole. He picked up an envelope, he opened it: Scanlan asked to speak to him right away. Resigned, he thought: This is it.

Since he didn’t see Joan, he knocked directly on Scanlan’s door.

‘Come in,’ he said.

Scanlan was sitting behind his desk; he didn’t stand up. With a gesture he indicated that Mario should sit down across from him. Mario sat down. The morning sunshine lit up the office: the white walls, the leather chairs, the desk covered in papers, the poster advertising a retrospective of the work of Botero, Scanlan’s eyes, dark and intelligent behind the thick lenses of his glasses.