Quim Monzó - Gasoline

“All the other hotels (as you must already have noticed) are closed. There’s no business in it. We only open because if we didn’t, what would we do? Our children are all grown, they live in the city, and if we stay open, someone always happens along, like you folks. .”

He gives them the key. They go up to the room with the bottle and the glasses. From the window you can see an endless stretch of woods, blacker even than the sky above it, and to the left, points of light. They must be houses. The place is silent, but the floorboards creak. Heribert fills both glasses with champagne and locks the door from inside. Herundina embraces him. Heribert would have been irritated if Herundina hadn’t wanted to come upstairs, but now that they’re there he feels rather annoyed by the embrace. Too weary to come up with a convincing excuse, he indolently lets her proceed.

•

The heat is up so high that Heribert is sweating and the sheets are sticking to his skin. The sound of a television reaches him from the ground floor. The couple must be watching TV. Heribert glances at the clock. It’s 1:00 a.m. What should he do now? Go right home? Wait for her to wake up? He could grab the cars keys, take off, and leave her there, fast asleep.

At 1:30 he looks at the young woman’s broad back. At 1:57, her slender waist. At 2:07, the shadowy crack between the cheeks of her ass. At 2:30, the whiter triangle that (he thinks at 2:45) must be the negative of the panties she wears when she tans herself under infrared lights or in the snow (he thinks at three o’clock). At 3:45 he thinks that, in fact, all he had felt for Herundina was desire.

It had taken him hours to formulate this thought. When Herundina wakes up, it’s 4:00 a.m. She sees Heribert looking at her. She smiles at him. He isn’t sure whether or not to smile back. She puts her arms around him, and brings her mouth close to his.

One hour later, the old couple waves goodbye from the verandah. Heribert and Herundina take the road back to the city. Herundina wants to go with him to see the two paintings he’s had at the Whitney for a few months now.

They leave the car in a nearby parking lot. They walk arm in arm through the first few galleries. Herundina asks him if he’s been a citizen for long. He says for twelve years. She asks how long he’s lived here. He says since he was four years old. They go up to the second floor. Before two adjoining rooms, Herundina pulls in one direction and Heribert in the other. As he pulls Herundina, without really knowing why, toward the room she doesn’t want to go into, Heribert feels that the building reminds him of the cemeteries he had seen from the car the night before.

“You’re not very nice. Why don’t you want to come see your paintings with me now?”

Eyes closed, as if blind, he accompanies her till she comes to a halt. Then he opens his eyes and finds himself before two walls at an angle. There are two canvases; he finds it hard to identify them as his. When Heribert hears the girl say she’s in love with him, no matter how obtuse, stubborn, and distant he wants to appear, a chill runs up his spine. Feeling lost, he goes over to the corner formed by the two walls and rests against it. What should he say to her? He can tell her that there was a time when he liked her, that, at times, when he was in bed caressing her sister, he would pretend he was caressing her. When he looks up, a figure too dark and mustachioed to be Herundina is standing before him. “Good thing I didn’t think of hugging her with my eyes closed,” he thinks.

Herundina watches as the gallery guard reprimands Heribert. As he apologizes, Heribert considers the thought of lying and telling Herundina he loves her. Where would that lead, though? If he had never lied, he could resolve to commence a new life, always lying without fail, firmly vowing never again to utter so much as a single truth. Even if it were completely false, he would make the woman very happy if he declared his love for her, and in point of fact, it wouldn’t be all that hard. That must be the solution. There can’t possibly be another. They leave the gallery. They walk through the museum without looking at a single painting. Heribert opens his mouth and says, very slowly:

“I love you.”

Herundina’s expression wavers between happiness and stupefaction. Is she not sure whether or not to believe him? All he needed now was for her not to believe him, after the effort he’s put into saying it. Her draws her close to him, takes her in his arms, and kisses her. Kissing is so easy, even if you don’t feel like it. As he kisses her, he sees a girl, who looks vaguely familiar, walk by The Paris Bit by Stuart Davis. “She looks like an Anna, or an Anne. .” He remembers: she was the girl from a few days ago at the bookstore, the one he had involuntarily kept from stealing a book! It would be so easy for him to feel desire for her. . It would be so easy, later on, to stop feeling desire for her. . At that very moment he is feeling it, desire, a faint desire that (if he keeps looking at her much longer) will grow increasingly strong (or weak, or even disappear if he turns his head and looks at one of those paintings, or at the floor, or at the ceiling, and forgets her). What if everything were different with her, though? Maybe he will only be able to grab onto something when he no longer expects anything. He watches the girl vanish into another gallery. He makes a move to follow her.

“Answer me. Do you want to or not? Hey. . you weren’t listening!”

He looks at the woman in his arms and steps back. He recalls her name, but can no longer form a single thought about her. She extricates herself from his embrace; furious, she strikes him and flees down the stairs. Heribert bursts out laughing, runs his hand over his stinging cheek, and thinks maybe he should follow her, tell her he was sorry, that he had been listening to her, or that he hadn’t, that all he heard was the mellifluous flow of her marvelously harmonious voice, as if it were music: that was how much in love he was. She would never buy it, though. Or would she? (And what about mellifluous? What exactly did it mean?) For a moment, the urge to know whether or not she would go for that story has him on the verge of dashing down the stairs after her. Instead, he heads toward the adjoining room. The girl from the bookstore isn’t there. He looks in all the other galleries until he sees her in front of The Brass Family, by Alexander Calder. Heribert positions himself by her side, slowly turns his head, and looks at her. The girl also turns her head and looks at him. Heribert feels an intense attraction to her, and he is certain she feels the same for him, so certain he feels they need not so much as say a word to understand what they feel for each other. Finally, there is someone with whom words will be superfluous, and perhaps nothing he has experienced till now would make any sense were it not for this encounter, which in contrast now gives meaning to everything. He moves close to her and smiles.

•

He caresses her thigh; he kisses her on the neck. She opens her mouth; she kisses his tongue. They were in a museum hallway, near the telephone booths. She suggests they go for coffee.

They sit at a table. They order coffee. The waiter brings it. The girl pays for it. She says she’s delighted to buy coffee for such a prestigious artist. He picks up the cup and pours the coffee over his head. She laughs and asks him again if he hasn’t been drinking. Heribert says no, and to prove it, he gets up from the chair and balances himself on his left foot while raising his right thigh until it is parallel to the ground. Then he places the thumb of his right hand at the tip of his nose while simultaneously stretching his palm and inclining his trunk until he almost touches his knee with the pinky of the same hand. Having stood like that for ten seconds without losing his balance, he salutes the girl and the customers in the cafeteria, who were staring at him, and sits back down. The girl laughs.