Gonçalo Tavares: The Neighborhood

5

But such expectations had had consequences. Mister Walser sometimes became disoriented. He would go from one room to another and on to yet another and he sometimes found it difficult to find an object that he had left behind somewhere. But this merely amused him instead of irritating him! He felt like a child in such moments. It was at such moments that he realized that his entire adult existence had not conferred upon him any notion of judicious restraint; yes, he had exaggerated, but what else could he do: he was setting out on life, not ending it.

6

In the kitchen, out of curiosity, Walser ran his hand over the brick wall. One brick or another was jutting out more than the rest while others (of course) were set too far back, but on the whole they were more or less even. Near the floor, the small squares of the bricks finished serenely, without having needed to be amputated in the corners — all this was not just the work of a skilled hand, it was the result of mental skills, planning, knowing exactly how the job would finish at the moment it was started. Nothing had been improvised; undoubtedly, a fine job.

He then switched on the tap and without using a glass, bending his neck as he had done in his childhood, he drank the most delicious water that he could recall. He wiped away the drops that ran down his chin with his hand and almost let out a cry of sheer contentment for that moment, finally, of unambiguous solitude. There wasn’t a single human sound to be heard.

And the baseboard that ran through the house, perfect! More than that: what aesthetic sense! What an uncanny understanding of the way in which color and shape should be combined, as though it (the baseboard) had existed that way in nature from the very outset.

Walser then sighed deeply, feeling that he had found something that he could never give up.

It is impossible to deem that movement that was almost a dance with which Walser caressed the furniture, turned door-knobs, and sat down on and got up from various chairs, as being excessive. He then sank into the gray sofa, a two-seater, already imagining his better half, the way he would brush away her hair from her face, how he would draw close to her. The stage was set. His new home!

Walser then sat down at the living-room table and wrote a letter that had seemed indispensable to him for many years, addressed to Thereza M. In the course of those handwritten lines he described the space, in a restrained manner, and invited her, with carefully chosen words, to visit him.

Each word in its place, each character written as though the very structure of the house, its foundations, depended on their shape. What concentration, that of Mister Walser!

Finally, even though his address was clearly written on the envelope, Walser did not hesitate to repeat it, and also drew a rudimentary map in the letter, with an enormous X marking the spot. He wanted to be absolutely sure that she — his Thereza — would be able to find her way to the door of his new home without getting lost.

7

But, suddenly, somebody rang the doorbell. Who could it be? It couldn’t be her — if Walser was still holding her letter in his hand. Only if …

Walser had been in his new home for not even two hours and his first visitor had already rung his doorbell, even before the first time he slept in his house — that first and somewhat uncomfortable sleep, thought Walser, given the circumstances, the casting aside of the pleasure that his body felt in this new space — he had a visitor. Before going to open the door he placed the letter in its envelope and closed it. Walser opened the door of his new home to let in a man who had arrived with all the air of someone who had not yet completed a certain task.

“What’s the matter?” murmured Walser.

“It’s the tap in the bathroom,” said the man.

And he stepped into the house.

8

Perhaps he had been intoxicated with the novelty of the space, but he had certainly not noticed anything incomplete, either in the more or less concrete things that concerned his own being — that feeling of stability that involves muscles, respiratory rhythms, and an undeniable spirit of comfort that nobody could ever capture on paper — or things about the house. A tap had not yet been finished? Oh well, what did he know about such matters?

“Come in, my dear sir, take your time and conclude your work …. Nothing should be left half-finished,” joked Walser to break the silence, but he got only an unintelligible murmur of agreement in response.

9

Having been removed from its fixture and placed on the floor, it almost seemed as though the tap was enjoying a moment of rest, and Walser felt a sudden urge to thank the man there and then, even before he finished his work. It felt like something that needed doing was being done, this was how calmly and definitively the tap and the ground had, in a manner of speaking, mixed.

Wielding a wrench, the man had first removed the nut that attached the tap to the pipe; then, after removing the tap, he had used a bit of liquid paraffin, perhaps, thought Walser, in order to improve the internal mechanisms; and everything then seemed to indicate that a new tap would emerge from his rectangular tool case, but it didn’t.

“It’s probably a leak,” said the man.

Walser bent over the basin. He tried his best to feign as much interest as possible in the matter at hand, but in fact he was thinking of something else.

In truth, he was anxiously awaiting the moment in which he could once again sit in his new living room, savoring that unforgettable smell of paint and varnish that seems to have a well-defined dimension to it, not a material dimension, but a historical one — a smell that in a certain way seemed to be an analogy, in the physical world, of the expression that is a classic beginning to a narrative tale — the childish “Once upon a time.” He wanted to start something and it was almost as though that man was getting in the way of it. He undoubtedly meant well, but a concrete obstacle had now appeared between Walser and his new life — the plumber.

Moreover, Walser hadn’t a clue as to what was going on — the shape of those pipes did not stir him in the least. He saw them not as elements of a greater entity, which served a certain purpose, but simply as almost abstract forms. Since he did not understand the function of each element, Walser looked at the pipes as an aesthete would observe a hitherto unseen painting — trying to discern a meaning to it, not a utilitarian meaning but (so to speak) a spiritual one.

There was such a large gap between his thoughts and events around him that he saw the plumber’s movements almost as though they were happening in a movie, as though there was a film between the two of them, and only one side, Walser’s side, was real.

10