The next afternoon, the phone beside my bed did ring. It will be the secretary of the department, I convinced myself, but when I picked up the receiver, no one spoke.
When I asked the proprietor if he had the number of the silent caller, he told me he hadn’t put any calls through to my room. ‘How can that be?’ I asked. He told me they must have called the room directly.
As I turned away from the reception desk, I realised our exchange had been overheard by another guest in the lobby. As I looked over, she smiled at me, and beckoned me towards her. She wore lipstick in a deep scarlet and, despite the lack of natural light, oversized sunglasses. She looked at me as if she recognised me. ‘Have we met?’ I asked. She ignored the question.
I pulled out a chair at her table. ‘The story that I’ve just overheard,’ she told me, ‘brings to mind my old friends B and X. B would call X to tell her of his dreams—a snowman, a desert, a border, I seem to remember—but he would hear nothing from the other end of the line—there would only be silence.’
There was something compelling and familiar in this woman: if she had nowhere urgent to be, I would order us each a drink, I insisted. I went up to the bar: again, the young bartender barely acknowledged me, refusing to engage in conversation (my new companion also fell silent: a jealousy, no doubt, of the younger woman making our drinks, the beauty of her youth).
I struck up conversation again: when I mentioned the job I should have been starting at the department, the woman in the sunglasses asked me whether I had come to the city for the job or to run from something else. ‘For the job,’ I began, but I (and she) suddenly felt my argument peter out. She took my eventual silence, she told me, as clear indication I was running from something—from someone, perhaps, from where there had once been love.
I did not respond to her assertion.
‘There are countless men like you, placing all meaning in where they are going, failing to recognise what they are fleeing. Up to this point,’ she told me, ‘your story is banal; unfortunate, but banal.’
Published in Llamadas telefónicas, Editorial Anagrama, 1997, and in English in Last Evenings on Earth, Vintage, 2008
A Personal Anthology 