The Plimsoll Line Read Online Free Page A

cold frosting the glass of the bottles on the walls and the windows of the cars parked at the entrance to the cemetery, but a woman, the cleaning lady, was fanning him, and he started to feel better. He felt his buttocks frozen on the stone lip. The bitter taste of bile disappeared, and everything returned to a very pleasant evaluative neutrality. He remembers when the burial finished, he even came up with a few words of consolation for a pimple-faced girl that was crying while gripping the railings at the entrance. “Go home,” he said, trying to prize her fingers off the iron bars. And he remembers Óscar’s terribly pale face behind the sunglasses as he rocked back and forth, his feet very close together, in the corridor of the funeral home, concentrating on the toes of his garnet-colored moccasins, his arms weak and drooping. How strange it all is, he thought to himself, because everything was happening with stunned slowness after seeing so many familiar faces, one after the other, and trying out different ways of offering and receiving condolences—a squeeze to the arm, pursed lips—not knowing what to say, because, to be honest, there wasn’t much to say, or perhaps there was, there was so much to say and no way of doing so that it involved a gesture that expressed impotence, disbelief, and pain all at the same time, though the result of such expressive willfulness ended up being more of a dumb gesture—a disconcerting grimace and vague smile.
    He wished it could all be over as soon as possible and nodded in response to every polite formula or expression of condolence, hidden behind Ana, swallowing saliva constantly but without managing to get rid of the ball bearing that had been stuck in his throat since the morning and wouldn’t dissolve, even though he sucked on violet-flavored candies, until the two of them were back home alone again in the evening. Ana ran herself a hot bath, and he smoked on the porch by himself, the cat on his lap. It was raining, and the water melted a convex layer of ice that covered the garden. The hydrangeas were frozen, and Polanski purred continuously on his stomach. From above came the sound of the water tank, and the faucet filling the bath. Only then did he cry at length, minutely and without respite.
    And yet when Ana declared she was leaving, there was nothing, no scenes or weeping, and although he was tempted to give free rein to the actors studio he’d always sensed inside himself, hidden beneath his jacket, ready to reveal his long-suppressed dramatic vocation, he managed to restrain himself in time, and this effort at self-restraint still fills him with satisfaction. Although he barely managed to suppress a slight gesture of horror, he didn’t give way to the recourse of overacting; he did, however, stare at his wife in some alarm at the allusion to their daughter, a recourse he judged to be as deceitful as it was effective in the situation, which he also managed to exploit by introducing just the right amount of drama. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to conceal his relief, since when all was said and done, his wife had just demolished the partition wall he himself had been eroding day after day, and in her words, which she considered forthright and perhaps even original, he glimpsed a kind of long-awaited liberation. The fissures were finally giving way, sending cracks up and down the building. So the sudden feeling of vertigo in the pit of his stomach was a physiological reaction that responded more to the certainty that something long desired was finally happening than to any innocent declaration of marital breakup. After all, everything was reaching the point he himself had foreseen, evidence that strengthened him in a conviction he’d assumed with everyday cynicism and according to which he was a sentimental man, bad and sentimental, which was based on irrefutable proof—his uncanny ability to get somebody else to do for him what he would never have dared to