Javier Cercas - The Tenant and The Motive

The old man responded with a grunt. There was silence.

The lift arrived. They stepped in. Álvaro commented, as if thinking aloud, ‘What a beautiful morning! You can really tell spring’s arrived, can’t you?’ and gave the old man a wink of perfectly superfluous complicity, which was received with the barest hint of a smile, a tiny wrinkling of his forehead and a slight clearing of the darkness from his brow. But he immediately enclosed himself back into surly silence.

When he got home, Álvaro was convinced that the old man from the top-floor apartment was the ideal model for the old man in his novel. His edgy silence, his slightly humiliating decrepitude, his physical appearance: it all tallied with the attributes his character required. He thought: This will simplify things. Obviously reflecting a real model in his work would make it much easier to endow the fictional character with a believable, effective incarnation. He could simply use the features and attitudes of the chosen individual as props, thus avoiding the risks of an imaginary somersault into the void, which could promise only dubious results. He would have to become thoroughly informed, about Señor Montero’s past and present life, all his activities, sources of income, relatives and friends. No detail was unimportant. Everything could contribute to enriching and constructing his character — sufficiently altered or distorted — in the fiction. And if it was true that the reader should do without many of these details — which, therefore, there was no reason to include in the novel — it was no less true that Álvaro was interested in all of them, given that in his judgement they constituted the basis for the precarious and subtle balance between coherence and incoherence on which a character’s believability is founded and that supports the incorruptible impression of reality produced by real individuals. From these considerations naturally followed the expediency of finding a couple who, for the same reasons, might serve as a model for the innocently criminal couple in his novel. Here it would be necessary to obtain the greatest possible quality of information on their life. Proximity to this couple would enormously simplify his work, because then he could not only observe them in more detail and more continuously, but also, with a bit of luck, he might be able to manage to listen in on conversations and even hypothetical marital disputes. He might then be able to reflect these in the novel with a high degree of verisimilitude, in greater detail and with more ease and vigour. The conversations of his immediate neighbours (those in the apartment above his own and those who lived next door on the same floor) filtered through the thin walls of his apartment, but only reached his ears dimly or during moments when silence reigned in the building or when the shouts of his neighbours rose above the general murmuring. All this put in doubt the very possibility of carrying out any espionage.

There was yet another inconvenience: Álvaro hardly knew any of his neighbours in the building. And of the three apartments that he might have had a chance to spy on — being adjacent to his — at least two could be discarded out of hand. In one of them lived a young journalist with a face covered in boils who, with nocturnal assiduity and undeclared intentions, interrupted him regularly to ask for untimely cups of sugar or flour. Another apartment had remained empty since a widowed mother and her unmarried grown-up daughter, in love with her dog, had moved out about five months earlier, without paying their rent. Therefore, only one apartment could possibly house a married couple that might meet the demands of his novel.

Then he remembered the little ventilation window, in the bathroom of his apartment, which opened on to the building’s narrow courtyard. Many times, when answering the call of nature, he had overheard his neighbours’ conversations, which came in clearly through the open window. So, in taking advantage of this new resource, not only would the task of spying be simplified and the listening difficulties reduced, but the pool of available candidates would increase, given that he’d have the chance to hear the conversations of all the tenants on his floor. Apart from the apartment left vacant by the two women, the other four were all occupied. And it was not impossible that in one of them might live a couple who, to a greater or lesser degree, might bend to the demands of his fictional couple. He just needed to seek information and, once he had chosen the hypothetical model, devote all his attention to them.

Where could he gather information on old man Montero and the other tenants on his floor? There could only be one answer: the concierge was perhaps the only person in the whole building who knew all the comings and goings in the lives of all the tenants. But it wouldn’t be easy to get information out of her without arousing suspicion. He needed to win her confidence no matter what it cost him, even if it meant overcoming his instinctive repugnance towards that tall, thin, bony, gossipy woman with her servile, saccharine manners and a disconcerting hint of horsiness in her face.

There were all sorts of rumours about her around the neighbourhood. Some mysteriously affirmed that her dubious past was something she would never be able to live down, others, that this past was neither past nor dubious, for everyone knew how assiduously she visited the caretaker of the building next door, as well as the local butcher. All agreed that the real victim of her picturesque tendencies was her husband. He was not as tall as her, a weak, greasy, sweaty man, whom the concierge treated with condescension and unlimited disdain, in spite of the fact that, according to many, he’d been her authentic redeemer. The best informed (or perhaps the most malicious) attested that, although the concierge’s husband’s usual attire — a worn-out pair of trousers and a bricklayer’s shirt — and his permanent air of exhaustion or boredom might indicate the contrary, he was incapable of fulfilling his conjugal duties, which increased his wife’s malaise to extremes of violence. Even though he ignored these rumours as he ignored everything to do with his neighbours, Álvaro could not keep from thinking of one fact that might provide a short cut to intimacy with the concierge: it was obvious she found him attractive. This was the only interpretation of the way she’d looked at him and brushed up against him on more than one occasion, to Álvaro’s embarrassment, surprise and shame, when they happened to meet in the lift or on the stairs. On more than a few mornings she’d invited him in for coffee, while her husband — whose bovine faith in his wife’s fidelity was a guarantee of stability for the tenants — was at work. Far from feeling flattered, these obvious insinuations had increased the repulsion she inspired in him. Now, however, he must take advantage of them.

So, the following day, once he’d made sure her husband had left for work, he rang the bell of the concierge’s flat. At that very moment he realized he hadn’t even prepared an excuse to justify his visit. He was about to run away up the stairs, but then the mare opened the door. She smiled showing a mouthful of orderly teeth and offered him a hand, which, despite its thinness, felt strangely viscous. It was cold and somewhat damp. Álvaro thought he had a toad in his hand.

She invited him in. They sat on the sofa in the dining room. The concierge seemed nervous and excited. She removed a vase and a figurine from the table beside the sofa and offered her visitor a cup of coffee. While the woman was in the kitchen, Álvaro told himself that what he was doing was sheer madness: he would drink the coffee and go home.

The concierge returned with two cups of coffee. She sat down a little closer to Álvaro. She spoke non-stop, answering her own questions. At one point, she nonchalantly rested her hand on Álvaro’s left thigh; he pretended not to notice and gulped down the rest of his coffee. He stood up abruptly and jabbered some excuse; then he thanked the concierge for the coffee.