Alone in the Crowd Read online

“Was anyone sitting next to her?”

  “Yes, on both sides. All the chairs were occupied.”

  “And was she talking to those people?”

  “It’s possible, but I wasn’t paying attention. I deal with money. I have to be very careful with what I’m doing. But I can tell you that there are two types of senior citizens: the distracted ones, who talk to everyone around and don’t even pay attention to see what number’s being called, and the other kind, who pay such close attention, who are so focused on their number, that they don’t see anything else around them. They don’t talk to anyone, and if people are chatting around them they complain. The lady who died was of the second variety. She wasn’t one to chat.”

  “And when you were helping her, she didn’t make any comments?”

  “The only thing she said is what I already told you.”

  “Do you mind repeating it?”

  “Well, she said that it was hard to get to the counter, with all the people sitting down and standing, blocking her way.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “That she ought to start moving forward as soon as the number before hers was called. Even so, she forgot to take her ID card out of her purse. When I said that she should come up to the counter with her card in her hand, because otherwise she slowed things down, she replied gruffly that whoever came there knew it would take a long time, sometimes the whole morning.… Something along those lines.”

  “And did you say anything?”

  “I just asked if she was going to withdraw the whole amount, and she said yes.”

  “Neither of you said anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Among the people who are waiting now, do you see anyone who was here on Monday morning?”

  “It’s hard to say.… No … I don’t remember seeing any of them on Monday.”

  “Thanks. We hope we haven’t slowed too many people up.”

  After that, Welber and Ramiro found the general manager and the security director to ask for the tapes from the security cameras that were focused on the waiting room, as well as those from the front door. With the help of a photograph taken from the pensioner’s apartment, they spent the rest of the day analyzing the images the cameras had recorded. Laureta was easily found. After that, every movement of her head, every apparent movement of her mouth, as well as those of the people around her, were noted, as was her visit to the counter. However, the images of her dialogue with the cashier were not very clear, because there a grille and a window stood between them. Moreover, even though the angle of the camera allowed both parties to be identified, it was impossible to make out the movement of their lips with any clarity. But neither her expression nor his movements suggested that either was upset. The images from the sidewalk revealed nothing more than Laureta heading toward the corner.

  After his shift, Hugo Breno chose to go home down the Avenida Copacabana. He felt best on the busiest streets, where he could let himself get lost in the crowd. At those times he felt especially at peace with himself and with the world. Sometimes, when there weren’t enough people on the street, he went into a large department store and wandered through it without buying anything, just to feel himself surrounded by people. But he did that only when there was nothing else going on: what really attracted him were the giant outdoor masses. When he was among the people in a crowd, he never spoke to anyone and he never looked deliberately at anyone in particular. His participation was silent and solitary. He didn’t try to establish relationships or make friends, and he didn’t hope for a movement of mass solidarity or for a unifying collective feeling to emerge, some kind of metaphysical “us.” He wanted the opposite. He sought out the crowds as a place of multiplicity, not of unity. He wanted singularities, since he himself was one. He didn’t want to feel “equal”; he was absolutely attached to being different, to his own uniqueness.

  After he left the bank, once the workday was over, he went to the Avenida Copacabana and walked about fifteen blocks. Then he went back to the corner of the Rua Siqueira Campos, at which point he broke off from the pedestrian mass and went back up the street toward his house. He did that almost every day. Not necessarily down the Avenida Copacabana (though he really liked it); sometimes he took the subway all the way downtown (his favorite was the Avenida Rio Branco), walked about ten blocks, and then took the subway back. The experience of the subway at rush hour was the next best thing to the experience of the streets, and sometimes even better.

  3

  It was Friday and Espinosa had arranged a dinner with Irene. She’d just gotten in from São Paulo, where she’d been working for two weeks. It was one of the longest periods they’d spent apart, not counting the month she’d spent in New York in an intensive course. He was calling her cell phone to confirm.

  “Do you mind if someone else comes along?” Irene asked.

  “Of course not,” he answered, hoping his voice wouldn’t let him down.

  “Great! Then there will be a surprise guest.”

  Espinosa would have preferred it to be just the two of them: he hadn’t planned on guests. Surely the person would only be eating with them. At least, that’s what he hoped.

  He walked down Tonelero on his way home, thinking about Irene and how long their relationship had lasted. It was a thought that had been occurring to him more and more. The more time went by, the more obvious the ten years that separated their ages became. Irene had never said it was too much, nor had she ever suggested that it was time to change the nature of their relationship. They had a tacit agreement not to ask the other to get married or to remain sexually faithful. As for their emotional connection itself, they agreed that it didn’t need any agreement: either it was real or it wasn’t an emotional connection. They also agreed that a relationship doesn’t have a backstory: it exists in the present tense, which eliminates any discussions related to earlier times. He was thinking about all this as he crossed the square that was at the center of the Peixoto District, a bit abandoned at that hour, when the kids had been called home for dinner.

  He’d arranged to pick up Irene at nine. That was enough time to take a shower, get dressed, call a cab, and get to Ipanema. He’d gotten rid of his old car. It had sat unused for so long in front of his building that the battery died, the tires deflated, and, when he finally got it up and running, it turned out to have a whole range of little mechanical and electrical defects that were the result of its abandonment. They were in the seventh year of the twenty-first century and his car was still from the twentieth. Before it became an antique, he decided to sell it. The term he used to describe the transaction was “get rid of it” instead of “sell.” He was very grateful when a guy who lived on the other side of the square agreed to take it off his hands. The price was ridiculously low, so the neighbor was very grateful, too. Everyone was happy. Espinosa was sure that the happiest one of all was his old car, which from then on would lead a dignified life. Not to mention that because it was so close by he could visit it often, though he didn’t think the two of them would miss each other. After that transaction, he had started using taxis for social engagements. For his professional needs, he had the cars from the station.

  When the taxi stopped in front of Irene’s building, Espinosa got out of the car to greet the two women waiting for him in the lobby. They looked like women of the future. Both very pretty, they looked like each other, despite Irene’s friend’s blond, short, and upright hair. Irene came up first, hugging and kissing Espinosa.

  “Darling, this is Vânia, my friend from São Paulo.”

  “Hi, Vânia. Welcome.”

  “Thanks. Irene’s told me so much about you.”

  “Vânia came to spend a week in Rio. She’s staying here at my house.”

  “You couldn’t have chosen a better place,” Espinosa said.

  Vânia was from São Paulo, but she might just as well have been from Berlin, Copenhagen, or New York. Just like Irene, she was a woman from the new millennium, Espinosa tho
ught. He immediately reflected that it was still hard for him to get rid of small but resilient residues of the nineteenth century. They got in the cab and Espinosa gave the driver the address of a little restaurant on the Avenida Atlântica, in Leme, where they could talk quietly.

  The three of them were sitting in the back seat. Even though it was a spacious car, their physical proximity promoted an intimacy that was facilitated by the resemblance between the two women. Since they were both in a chatty mood, Espinosa alternatively had one of their arms touching his and one of their legs rubbing up against one of his. It wasn’t in the least an unpleasant situation, but when the conversation got more animated, he occasionally got embarrassed, unsure of what to do with his hands. Nineteenth century, he thought.

  The trip took them down part of Ipanema Beach and all the way down Copacabana, but it was a straight shot, uncomplicated by traffic. It was enough time for Vânia and Espinosa to start getting along with each other, which didn’t seem to bother Irene in the least. During dinner, Vânia expressed interest in Espinosa’s work, an interest that he satisfied only minimally but that was enriched by Irene’s passionate contributions. The meal was pleasant and could have been perfect except for one question he couldn’t shake: What was going to happen afterward? Would Irene and Vânia go back home together and leave him to sleep alone in his apartment, after two weeks spent far apart? Would he and Irene sleep in the Peixoto District, leaving the guest to sleep alone in an apartment she’d hardly had time to see? It didn’t seem right or hospitable. There was the “only logical and not real” possibility, he thought, that the three of them would sleep in his own apartment, but that never managed to become a full-fledged thought, just a fleeting and perverse image that crossed his mind and was immediately written off. The dilemma was solved by Irene as they were leaving the restaurant.

  “Honey, since it’s Vânia’s first night here, and since I invited her to stay with me, I’m going to keep her company tonight. Tomorrow and Sunday she’s going out with friends who live here in Rio and I’ll spend two days with you in your apartment. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s perfect.”

  He didn’t think it was perfect. Alone in his apartment after dropping the two off in Ipanema, Espinosa thought the solution was perfect according to the rules of hospitality and friendship, but extremely frustrating and unsatisfactory from the point of view of desire.

  Reading was out of the question. No text could compensate for the absence of Irene. Television much less, even if he just let the images wash over him. He took off his clothes, lay down in bed, and stared at the ceiling. He understood that Irene didn’t have a choice, since she’d invited her friend to stay at her place. What he didn’t understand clearly was why the two had planned it beforehand—since there was no doubt that they’d planned it. And it didn’t mean any suffering for Irene, or at least not that she showed. Of course she wasn’t suffering for being with her friend, and she didn’t seem to be suffering for not being with him or for leaving him by himself. Or maybe that was it: she preferred to spend her first night in Rio, after two weeks away, in the company of Vânia.

  When they met, Irene had just ended a long relationship with a woman, also from São Paulo. Beginning a relationship with him meant, as she herself said, choosing him as a person and as a sexual option. That choice, however, didn’t come with promises of heterosexual fidelity. Neither had she promised not to have other homosexual affairs. From what he could tell, Irene’s homosexual choices had never excluded heterosexual choices. That was why their involvement had been viable and lasted so long. They’d never brought up the subject again. There was no reason to. What Espinosa was wondering was whether the blond Vânia didn’t mean Irene was reverting to her old ways. Or: if that kind of option had ever really stopped existing since they had met or if it still went on, silently, during her trips to São Paulo.

  Espinosa got up on Saturday with the strange feeling that he’d been tricked. This, because the first idea that came into his mind was “Today is Saturday,” immediately followed by another: “Irene’s not here with me,” as he stretched his arm out to the side and found nothing but a sheet. The two ideas and the gesture all happened in an instant. He slowly started remembering the conversation the night before, when he’d said good night to Irene, and their agreement to switch Friday night for the entire weekend. From a quantitative perspective, it was doubtless a good trade, but not necessarily gratifying from an emotional point of view. Because they’d been apart for so long, they ought to have stayed together from Friday to Sunday. That was why he felt like he’d been wronged.

  He took an almost cold shower, collected the newspapers that his neighbor had been nice enough to leave at his door, and went to make coffee. Saturday mornings had always had a special flavor for him, because on Saturdays there was no limit to the number of pieces of toast he could have or the amount of cheese and jam he could eat, along with two big cups of strong coffee. A problem that persisted to the point of having become almost like a pet, constantly underfoot, was that his toaster browned only one side of the bread at a time, forcing him to carry out the operation in two steps in order to obtain a nice piece of toast. It was an American toaster that dated to the Second World War, inherited from his parents, and that to this day worked magnificently well, except for that little detail. One day, Irene had given him a new toaster as a present, from a top-of-the-line brand. For two weeks the toasters fought it out, side by side, for their owner’s favor. On week three, the new toaster was placed in a closet, to await the definitive death of the defective but charming toaster that he made a point of saying dated back to World War II, as if the old machine had fought in the skies above Europe or participated in the naval battles of the Pacific. Irene said that it wasn’t the toaster that fed him every morning, but he who fed the toaster, as well as acting as a guardian of its glorious past.

  The table was close to the French windows that opened out onto a little balcony of cast iron, and all the windows were open on that luminous Saturday morning. On the weekends, Espinosa also subscribed to the São Paulo papers; he’d started to do that ever since Irene had begun to work regularly in both cities, as if they were simply two different neighborhoods she hung out in. During the week, the news in both papers talked about politics, crime, and economics, but during the weekend there was the compensation of the cultural pages, promising an hour or two of reading, complete with free refills of coffee.

  That was the first part of the morning. The second was dedicated to little household duties planned on previous Saturdays or to planning new activities to be carried out on future Saturdays, in case those weren’t taken up by planning for other activities. Some of them could be postponed infinitely, whereas others entered the category of “bottomless tasks,” which placed them in limbo (even though that celestial waiting room had been declared nonexistent by the church). That was the case, for example, with the project of constructing wooden shelving to house the books that were piled up all along one wall of the living room, in a heap that for him had acquired the status of a work of art and that would give way to conventional shelving only once it had collapsed all over the room, which he could guarantee would never happen. Ever since he began living on his own, especially since the death of his grandmother, from whom he’d inherited many of the books there, Espinosa used what he called provisional shelving: he’d chosen the longest wall in the room and started piling his books up there, from the floor up, one row of books standing up, upon which he’d deposited a sequence of books lying flat, like a first shelf, upon which he’d lined up another row of standing books, covered by another series of books lying flat, and so on and so forth, in a rising construction whose limit would obviously be the ceiling. That’s what he started calling his “shelfless shelving” or “shelving in the purest state” or “a shelf made only out of books,” and now, a few decades on, it took up the entire wall of the living room and was more than six feet tall … and hadn’t fallen over onc
e.

  But the main promise of that morning was Irene’s arrival for a weekend with just the two of them. They’d arranged to meet for lunch, which would give him time to tidy up the apartment and to order the best sushi and sashimi combination from his favorite Japanese restaurant. For him, that was the ideal food for a lunch that would lead to predictable, and desirable, activities afterward.

  Tidying up the apartment had nothing to do with the obsessive competence of the maid who came once a week; it just meant cleaning off the countertops, taking out the trash, and making the bed. Sometimes it also included gathering up the books he’d left on chairs, tables, and even the floor, near the rocking chair where he liked to read.

  When Irene arrived, the only reason she wasn’t greeted with candles lit on the table was that it was lunchtime and not dinner; it was only about one and it was so bright outside that they almost needed sunglasses inside the house. She arrived looking pretty and happy.

  “I brought two bottles of white wine to go with our lunch, even though I didn’t know what we were having. I have to put them in the fridge.”

  Their embrace was intense, longing, charged with their pasts. There was a time when after not seeing each other for a while they’d hugged passionately, breathlessly, overflowing with desire. That was back when Irene climbed the stairs of the building announcing from the first steps what she’d brought with her and expressing out loud what a delight she herself was. That was when her absences were rarely longer than two or three days. Now, after two weeks apart, their embrace was still full of desire, happiness, intensity, but it also had a memory. Also in their sexual encounters, there was, more than the intimacy of the bodies they explored so minutely, the mutual intimacy those bodies had experienced through the time they’d been together. It was no longer a question of quantity versus quality, nor a substitution of one for the other, but a heightening of intensity: something made of quantity and quality that couldn’t be reduced to one or the other.