The Heart and Other Viscera Read online

  Pelayo still blushed whenever he recalled the way he had bombarded his hostess with an icy autopsy of his own existence, ruthlessly pruned of everything unimportant, only to discover how little there was left—nothing more than a bare trunk of irrefutable loneliness. A loneliness that could only be overcome, he had admitted in a rush of unabashed sincerity, by the longed-for company of a woman whom he described in his own terms as loving and innocent and as keen as he was to have someone to share a bed with after an exhausting, dismal workday. A woman capable of showing him why he was born, of instilling in him a wild desire to live with just one look; a woman he thought he glimpsed every day on the bus, in the park surrounded by pigeons, in the library, absorbed in an atlas, and whom he sometimes clumsily accosted, only to discover that she wasn’t the one who would thaw the ice from his days, because if she didn’t have time for a coffee, then she was far less likely to have enough to dissipate his fears and scare away the monsters. On his way home, Pelayo had reflected on the extraordinary way that people opened their hearts to perfect strangers, relieved by the certainty that nothing he had said could be used against him. The old woman deserved praise for the way she had weathered the storm. He felt he was almost obliged to give her the gift basket.

  The three long hours before nightfall finally convinced him. Besides, he no longer needed to walk there: he had a car now. He would resolve the matter in half an hour and then return to his tranquil existence without dangers or gift baskets. He picked up the gift and, since it looked like rain, decided to try out the red coat his mother had given him back in July, with her usual foresight.

  It wasn’t difficult to find his car in the street. He had bought it secondhand as soon as he was promoted, weary of having to traipse everywhere, and still could not avoid a stab of emotion whenever he saw it waiting for him like a faithful old dog in the same spot he had left it the day before, the hood covered in frost, the wheels pissed on, the roof decorated by pigeons. Today, some kid from the neighborhood had written on the grungy windshield to tell him in labored handwriting that he was screwing his mother. Shaking his head at the graffiti with a disgust that was more theatrical than sincere, Pelayo climbed into the car, deposited the gift basket on the front passenger seat, and switched on the engine. The vehicle gave an anguished wheeze that boded ill, then fell silent, like a wounded animal that a coup de grace spares the cavalry of suffering. At this point, Pelayo discovered that his quota of hope was way above average, because he spent almost an hour repeating the gesture before admitting that the frozen battery had no intention whatsoever of producing the reviving spark that evening.

  Depressed, he slumped back in his seat and stared forlornly at the gift basket. He contemplated going back up to his apartment and resigning himself then and there to the task of devouring its contents, but an image suddenly came into his mind of the pitiful old lady in her miserable little room, deprived of any kind of Christmas, drawing a creaking tune from the rocking chair with the slight bundle of her mint-intoxicated body. It was a shame that his good intentions would come to nothing, but it wasn’t his fault that the car had chosen that very moment for its first act of betrayal. And yet, however many excuses Pelayo found to assuage his conscience, the Christmas gift basket seemed to be on a sacred mission to burst into that house on the outskirts and exorcise the spirit of Christmases without cheer.

  Pelayo got out of the car, picked up the gift basket, and contemplated the far end of the street with a mixture of resignation and heroism, its horizon bristling with tall buildings enveloped in the play of light and dark brought on by the first storm clouds, the challenging gauntlet of this misty suburb that this evening seemed to have taken on a new mystery.

  He strode off, not wishing to nitpick his memory in case the fact that he had only a vague recollection of where the old woman lived might end up completely undermining the faint hopes he still had for his mission. And yet, a long hour later he came to a halt, his hands frozen and his feet on fire, at a crossroads that completely punctured what remaining faith he had of being able to find her home. He remembered that the name of her street was Rosaleda, and he was almost sure he would recognize the building if he saw it, but this unexpected ramification of paths to follow only complicated matters further. Why was everything so difficult, why was the world organized so as to make even the most altruistic deed so awkward, why did living seem such a strenuous, painful effort? Annoyed, he looked up at the sky, only to see two dark clouds locking horns like bison. Up there, a storm was slowly building. The pub he saw on one of the street corners seemed to him the perfect place to recuperate, lift his spirits, and supply himself with inner warmth thanks to a glass of brandy.

  He went into the bar, as long and thin as a freight train, and chose the table closest to the front window, from where he could observe both the comings and goings of passersby and the gathering clouds. Was it going to rain or not? Was all this suspense necessary? He ordered a brandy from a waiter who dragged himself over like a dying man, and after setting his soul on fire with a greedy gulp of the liquid, collapsed back in his seat and glanced angrily at the gift basket. Maybe it would be best to leave it there as if he had forgotten it, go home, decorate the tree, and put himself through the umpteenth rerun of It’s a Wonderful Life, secure in the knowledge that life is sad, exhausting, disappointing—anything but beautiful.

  Unable to make up his mind, Pelayo examined the pub around him. The clientele invariably depressed him because they were always such kindred spirits and rarely offered anything beyond a display of all the different varieties of loneliness that man can endure on his trip to oblivion. Scattered among the tables, drinks in hand, he could see people of every walk of life united by the trademark look of gazing into the middle distance; people who would possibly kill to escape from what, two tables away, another person would kill to have. Not that he possessed that much either, apart from the Christmas gift basket that was ruining his day. He sometimes thought that life, merely due to the fact that one accepted it, ought to guarantee a friend to play squash with, another to be able to share secrets with over a warming drink or two, and a woman who would love him with the passion of a bacchante. Even though he admitted he might be able to struggle on without the first two, he knew he would need the resolve of a hermit to survive without the third. Taking another sip of the brandy, he closed his eyes and as a joke, since it was the day before Christmas, he made a wish to the ancient forces of Christmas for the companion he thought he had a right to. And, as if reality had no sense of humor or if his own existence were no more than an old musical comedy, at that moment, a woman’s hand settled on his like a warm, sweet butterfly.

  Pelayo’s eyes widened when he felt the jolt of contact, the burning sensation from another person’s skin. His face was a picture of bewilderment at finding the woman of his dreams sitting next to him. She was occupying the seat where the gift basket had been, which was now on the floor between her high heels. One glance at her was enough for him to curse himself for being so imprecise in his wish, because the woman that the Christmas elves had brought him far exceeded his expectations. She was undoubtedly a woman, but one of those man-devouring females; an authentic, urban she-wolf starving for company. She was already running her finger around the rim of his glass and asking him huskily if he had plans for the rest of such a frigid evening, followed by an even colder night. Of course Pelayo had plans, plans he could not get out of: he had to take the gift basket to the little old grandmother’s house. He rushed to explain all this in a squeaky, lamenting voice as if he were trying to convince himself that it was really the gift basket preventing him from accepting the woman’s offer, and not her layers of makeup, revealing clothes, the contrived sensuality of her thick head of hair, or her menacing gestures, the millenarian hunger in her eyes. That it was the commitment he made to the damned gift basket and not the fear that gripped his innards simply at imagining himself—a defenseless weather vane blown about in the hurricane of her lust—shut in a be
droom with this she-wolf that really forced him to refuse her attractive offer. Under other circumstances, he would not have hesitated for a moment to accept it, given that she seemed to him a truly enchanting and extraordinarily beautiful woman. But right now, unfortunately, he had to be getting along, because he still had to find Calle Rosaleda: Maybe she knew it? The woman observed the nervous Pelayo for a moment before informing him, with a scornful twist of the mouth, which street he had to take. Stammering a thank-you, Pelayo recovered the gift basket and left the pub, trying to ensure his steps reflected a calm he was far from feeling.

  Outside the bar, he scurried along the street she had mentioned, getting away as quickly as possible from the bonfire of his manliness: after his woeful display, it was no longer any use laying the blame on life. He was the chief architect of his own misfortune, the only one responsible for the fact that his emotional dossier was still a blank sheet. For once Pelayo tried to distance himself from what had happened, to avoid beating himself up by recalling a scene he could not change, and so quickened his pace beneath the tumorlike sky. A saffron glow lit the horizon, heralding the noisy clatter of thunder, and the clouds were rehearsing a fine rain. Pelayo pulled his coat hood as far up as possible as raindrops began to bounce off it like gallstones and tried to protect the gift basket as best he could.

  It took him a good hour to realize that spurned women are capable of the most refined cruelty. Mysteriously, every step he took seemed to be leading him away from the suburbs. This called for some thought. Although he was unwilling to admit it, everything appeared to indicate that the she-wolf had deliberately sent him up the wrong street. He stopped and cursed out loud. He could not bear any more. He thought of handing over the blessed gift basket to the first person he met, setting off for home, taking a shower to get rid of the cold in his bones, and, if the television had nothing better to offer, slicing his wrists with the bread knife to see if things went any better for him in the afterlife. But the recurring image of the grandmother slipped into his mind once more to dissuade him, and so Pelayo grit his teeth and walked back the way he had come until he was at the crossroads near the pub. Once there, he peeped cautiously in the window, but there was no longer any sign of the she-wolf. She was probably devouring some other man with fewer scruples. He examined the crossroads carefully and finally chose the opposite direction to the one the woman had indicated, so convinced was he of her evil intentions.

  And he was not wrong. He had only gone a few paces when details began to prick his memory. Pelayo had been here before, toting his briefcase and struggling door to door to gain a commission. It was one of those streets on the outskirts that appear endless, alongside a highway clogged with refrigerated trucks, a place where ugly buildings with decaying facades alternated with empty lots matted with undergrowth and small parks embossed with junkies’ needles. Most of the streetlamps had been knocked out by stones, so that the only light came from the moon that peeped through the fog from time to time, as well as from the glow of the many bonfires the local inhabitants were clustered around. From a distance, those individuals with faces cast in orange from the flames did not appear dangerous; they seemed instead to have a certain pastoral charm that Pelayo decided not to disturb, despite the fact that his whole being was crying out for a minute of bonfire warmth.

  A smile of triumph spread across his face when he found himself outside the building where the old woman lived. It was a down-at-heel apartment block, its facade blackened by the exhaust from a thousand trucks, its windows linked by a web of ropes, as if its inhabitants boarded one another’s homes at night. From the ropes hung, swaying in the wind, the vast and varied catalogue of everything that humanity has at its disposal to cover its indignities.

  In a rusty barrel next to the entrance to the block, another bonfire was going full blast. A crowd of people, among whom Pelayo could not distinguish the old woman, were holding their hands to the comfort offered by the fire, which a pair of young shepherds was feeding with lengths of wood. The person supplying the blaze in this way was an athletic young man gleefully wielding an axe as he chopped firewood from broken chairs, ruined tables, and any other useless bits of furniture he was given. Pelayo stood for a few minutes observing them, until he felt ridiculous standing there with his hood and his basket.

  The woodcutter’s blows followed him into the house like an echo of his own heartbeats. Pelayo climbed the stairs without much thought, in the hope of stumbling across something he might recognize that would tell him on which floor his climb should end. The familiar conjunction of a broken hallway light, a fire extinguisher that had been torn from the wall, and a graffiti of a phallus, accompanied by writing that guaranteed him indescribable pleasure if he agreed to pull his pants down then and there, made him halt on the fifth floor.

  Using his recollections as a guide, he went down a very long, stinking corridor intermittently lit by flashes of lightning, until he came to a door with an image of the Virgin Mary above the peephole. This had to be the old woman’s door—the door that prevented the smell of mint from spreading down the staircase and impregnating the whole neighborhood with a remarkable freshness, turning it into a kind of sterilized purgatory.

  Pelayo cleared his throat and pressed the bell lightly. His gesture brought about an eclipse in the peephole: the old woman was becoming more wary with the years. He brought the gift basket up to his face and opened his lips in a toothpaste commercial–worthy smile. After a moment’s pause, which seemed to him eternal, he heard someone drawing back an endless number of bolts. Pelayo was astonished to find himself facing not the grandmother’s feeble eyes but confronted by the malevolent gaze of the she-wolf, wearing a housecoat that must once have been blue, and smelling of mints, which left him reeling from impossible conjectures. The woman studied his astonishment and then shook her head, as if she could not believe that reality could accommodate such an absurd scene.

  “Come on in, Little Red Riding Hood,” she invited him, leading the way down the corridor. Pelayo realized he still had his hood up and snatched it down before following the she-wolf disguised as a grandmother down the twisting passage.

  The tiny room they came out into seemed even narrower and sadder than he remembered: the furniture piled on top of itself, the lamp giving off a glow-worm’s light, the smell of mint making it seem like an enchanted wood. And however much he peered into the gloom, Pelayo could not see the old woman. When she saw him looking for someone, the she-wolf explained: her mother died three months ago. Pelayo took advantage of another lightning flash to scowl at the portraits on the chest of drawers, where the childhood and youth of the she-wolf were on display. The pieces fit together in his mind with astonishing ease. He shrugged, not knowing what to say. He had arrived too late, but anyway it was obvious that a Christmas basket was greatly needed here, and so he deposited it as solemnly as he could on the table. It produced a symphony of grotesque sounds as it crushed all the sweet wrappings strewn over the surface.

  The woman thanked him with a smile. A withered kind of smile that was miles distant from the one that lit up her face in the final photograph on the chest of drawers. A smile that seemed to Pelayo extremely melancholy, little more than a grimace that gave a glimpse of a sorrowful, resigned soul, as neglected as his own in the distribution of happiness. He looked more closely at the she-wolf and was surprised to see in the anemic light that she was incredibly vulnerable, not at all dangerous without makeup, her wild mane of hair sacrificed in a schoolgirl’s bun and her shapeliness disguised by the threadbare housecoat. Life seemed to have done a good job of crushing her. Pelayo had no difficulty imagining her returning to the nest, head down, devoting herself to looking after her mother like someone who has found the perfect excuse not to have to go on facing an icy, malevolent world set on defrauding her time and again. He noticed she was looking at him equally intently, as if vainly searching for any duplicity. She seemed surprised that she had stumbled across someone without a mask, that Pelayo was not
hing more than what she could plainly see: a shell of a man, whose chest you only had to put your ear to in order to hear the sea of his loneliness.

  For a long while they stood there in silence, examining each other closely as they were photographed by the lightning flashes, until finally she said, “I’m sorry about the pub. I was just trying to . . .” and did not know what else to say. Not that this mattered. Pelayo knew from experience that there was no word to define what she was looking for, and that the words that were used always got it wrong or perverted it. No term was suitable enough for their clenched stomachs, their longing for tenderness, their deep need to find someone who could untangle their fears and scare off the monsters.

  They leaped on each other then, because there had to be a reason for the Gordian knot of their failures to meet, for the studied way in which they had missed each other in the world outside, only to finally come together in the old lady’s little room. Pelayo was not surprised that her kisses tasted of mint, that her caresses were like a soothing balm, or that the collision of two desperately needy souls should produce such an overwhelming love that flung them against the small table and sent the Christmas basket crashing to the floor. Its contents were a riot of colors, the bars of turrón smashing, the syrup sweetening the drabness of the floor tiles, the cava recreating miniature oceans. He did not resist, allowing himself to be devoured by the she-wolf’s ancestral passion with his coat half off, hearing through the window the woodcutter’s rhythmic chopping, which no longer had any place in the story, because if there was one thing Pelayo could be sure of after this crazy evening, after the novelesque adventure the gift basket had led him on, it was that what he had been taught at school—that life is a fairy tale—was a fairy tale.