Javier Cercas - The Tenant and The Motive

Troubled by the fear of failure, he began to go over openings he knew by heart. That’s when someone knocked at the door. Since he suspected it was the concierge, he didn’t even get up from his armchair. Ten minutes later the bell was still ringing. He opened the door in a rage without first looking through the peephole.

‘Hi!’ said the journalist with the granulated face. ‘Look, sorry to bother you, but I was just making some lunch when suddenly I realised I’d run out of potatoes and, since it’s so late, I’m sure the supermarket’s closed. So I said to myself, “Surely Álvaro can lend me a few. He’s so organized!”’

Álvaro remained sunk in impatient silence. He noticed his stomach hurt. Angst always seized him in the stomach.

‘Álvaro!’ demanded the journalist again. ‘Have you got a couple of potatoes?’

‘No.’

‘Any oil?’

‘Nope.’

‘OK, then give me a bit of salt.’

The journalist pushed into the dining room. Álvaro came back from the kitchen with a little bag filled with salt, offered it to her without handing it over and walked to the door. With a hand on the knob of the half-open door, he looked at the girl, who remained in the centre of the dining room with the air of someone visiting Roman ruins. For a moment she seemed much younger than he’d previously thought: in spite of her decisive manners and her false adult air, she was barely an adolescent. Where had he got the idea she was a journalist? In that case, she must still be studying for her degree, because she could hardly be twenty. ‘On veut bien être méchant, mais on ne veut point être ridicule.’ Ridiculing her would be an efficient antidote against the impertinence of her visits.

‘Hey,’ he said in an ironic tone, ‘you’ve really grown lately, haven’t you?’

The girl let out a sigh and smiled with resignation.

‘Whereas for you time stands still.’

Álvaro couldn’t help but blush. She helped him open the door the rest of the way and said goodbye. Álvaro stood with the door half closed, his left hand on the doorknob and in his right the bag of salt. He slammed the door closed and felt absolutely grotesque with the bag of salt in his hand. He hit himself on the head with it, then he threw it into the toilet and flushed. As he sat back down at his desk, he abruptly reflected on the coincidence that he and the concierge, at the most ludicrous point of their two most recent phenomenal performances, had both stood gripping the doorknob in their left hands while holding the door half closed. A cold shiver ran up his spine as he remembered the dream of the green hill with the white door and its golden doorknob; he smiled to himself and decided he should put all those symmetries to use in some future novel.

The bell rang again. This time he sneaked up to the door and, holding his breath, spied outside through the peephole. Irene Casares was standing outside with her shopping trolley. Álvaro glanced in the hall mirror, smoothed his chaotic hair and adjusted the knot of his tie.

He opened the door and they greeted each other warmly. Despite her protests, her insistence that she didn’t want to disturb him and that she still had to get lunch ready, he invited her into the living room. They sat down opposite each other. After an expectant pause, the woman declared that she’d come to thank him for all he’d done for her husband. He’d told her about his conduct and was full of gratitude. She said she didn’t know how they’d ever repay him (Álvaro made a vague magnanimous gesture with his hand, as if indicating that such a concern had never even entered his head) and that he should count on their friendship for absolutely anything. He then noticed the woman’s gentle serenity: her eyes were bright and blue, her voice clear, and her whole body emanated a freshness barely in keeping with her pauper-princess clothes.

Álvaro thanked her for the visit and for her kind words, played down the importance of his role, insisted that anyone in his place would have done the same. He offered her a cigarette, which she politely declined; he lit one. They talked about the dangers of smoking, about anti-tobacco campaigns. He assured her he’d tried several times, with the results she saw before her, to give up the vice. She declared she’d overcome it five years earlier and, with the excessive passion of the convert, listed one after another the unquestionable benefits such a success brought with it. Then she claimed her duties at home prevented her from enjoying his company any longer. When they were standing in the dining room, Álvaro said his job allowed him to keep abreast of developments in the labour market and he would not hesitate to use his influence, slight as it was, to help her husband find a job. She looked him in the eye with disconsolate candour and mumbled that he could not imagine how much that would mean to her family and, as her tremulous hands clutched the handle of the shopping trolley, she admitted their situation was desperate. She opened the door, gripping the doorknob in her left hand, and held it half open while she turned towards Álvaro as if trying to add something. He hurried to reiterate his promises, practically pushed the woman out the door and suggested that one of these days (this elastic expression would allow him to fix the date at the time best suited to his objectives) they must come over for dinner. Señora Casares accepted.

That night, when he got back from the office, Álvaro felt tired. As he was making something for dinner, he said to himself that perhaps he’d been working too hard lately, maybe he needed a holiday. He ate a meagre supper and sat down in front of the television. Around midnight, when he was getting ready for bed, he heard, amid the silence populated by nocturnal breathing, a key scrabbling at a neighbouring lock. Then a bang revealed an interior chain that prevented the door opening from the outside. Álvaro crouched behind his and spied through the peephole. The Casareses were quarrelling, one on either side of the slightly opened door. Despite the conversation being carried on in very low voices, Álvaro hoped the complicit silence of the building would allow him to record at least a few snippets of it. He ran to get the tape recorder, plugged it in near the door, put in a blank tape, pressed record and added all five of his senses to the mechanical memory of the recording.

The woman whispered that she was sick of him coming home so late and that, if he wasn’t able to behave like a decent person, it would be better if he found somewhere else to sleep. In a wine-soaked, imploring voice, her husband begged her to let him in (his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and his words were just a muffled murmur). He admitted he’d been out with his friends, that he’d been drinking; with a surge of vaguely virile indignation, he asked her what she expected him to do all day at home, idle and impotent, whether she wanted to watch him turn into an idiot from sitting through so much television, whether she wanted to see him get even fatter than he already was, eating like a pig all day. After a silence tinged by the husband’s heavy breathing, his wife opened the door.

Álvaro unplugged the tape recorder, ran down the hall with it, plugged it in again in the bathroom, sat down on the lid of the toilet, pressed record. His tiredness had disappeared; all his limbs were tense.

The man had raised his voice, grown bolder. The woman told him not to speak so loudly, the children were sleeping, and besides, the neighbours could hear them. The man shouted that he didn’t give a damn about the fucking neighbours. He asked his wife who she thought she was, she wasn’t going to tell him what to do, it had always been the same, she was always giving him stupid lessons and advice and he was fed up, that’s why he was in a situation like this, if he hadn’t married her, if she hadn’t reeled him in like an idiot, things would be very different now, he could have done what he really wanted, he wouldn’t have had to come to live in this city that sickened him, he wouldn’t have had to take whatever job he could find to earn a shitty wage in order to support a damned family. .