A Heart So White Read Free Page B

directed inwards, behind me, to the bed that Luisa was lying diagonally across, and so nothing in the outside world really held my attention. I was looking out rather like someone arriving at a party from which he knows the only person who really interests him will be absent, having stayed at home with her husband. That one person was in bed, ill, behind me, watched over by her husband.
    Nevertheless, after a few moments of this looking without seeing, I did pick out one particular person. I picked her out because, during all that time, unlike the others, she hadn't moved or shifted or disappeared from my field of vision, but had stayed on the same spot. She was a woman who, from a distance, looked about thirty and was wearing a yellow blouse with a scoop neck, a white skirt and white high-heeled shoes, and she carried a large black handbag over one arm, like the handbags women in Madrid used to carry when I was a child, big handbags carried over the arm, not over the shoulder the way they carry them now. She was waiting for someone, her attitude was unmistakably that of someone waiting, because every now and then she would walk up and down, just one or two steps, and on the last step she would — quickly, lightly — drag her heel along the ground, in a gesture of suppressed impatience. She didn't lean against the wall, as people who are waiting usually do, to avoid getting in the way of the other people who are passing by and not waiting; she stood in the middle of the pavement, never going beyond those three measured steps that always returned her to the same spot, and so she frequently collided with passers-by; one passer-by said something to her and she responded angrily and threatened him with her voluminous bag. Every now and then she would look behind her, bending one leg and smoothing her tight skirt with one hand, as if fearing that some crease might be spoiling the line of her skirt at the rear, or perhaps she was simply adjusting the elastic of a recalcitrant pair of knickers through the fabric covering them. She didn't look at her watch, she wasn't wearing one, perhaps she was being guided by the hotel clock, somewhere above my head, invisible to me, with rapid glances I hadn't noticed. Perhaps the hotel didn't have a clock facing on to the street and she had no idea of the time. She looked like a mulatto, but from where I was standing, I couldn't be sure.
    Suddenly night fell, almost without warning, as happens in the tropics, and although the number of pedestrians didn't instantly diminish, the loss of light made her seem more solitary to me, more alone and more condemned to wait in vain. The person she was supposed to meet would never arrive. She was standing with her arms crossed, her elbows cupped in her hands, as if, with every second that passed, her arms weighed more heavily, or perhaps it was her handbag that was growing heavier. She had strong legs, strong enough to withstand the wait, legs that seemed to dig into the pavement with their thin, high, stiletto heels, but her legs were so strong, so striking, that they became one with her heels and it was her legs that dug solidly in — like a knife in wet wood — every time she returned to her chosen spot after that minimal movement to right or left. Her heels stuck out over the backs of her shoes. I heard a slight murmur, or perhaps a moan, coming from the bed behind me, from Luisa, who was ill, from my new wife, about whom I was so concerned, who was my chosen task. But I didn't turn my head, because it was a moan made as she slept, one quickly learns to distinguish the sounds made in their sleep by the person one sleeps with. At that moment the woman in the street looked up at the third floor where I was standing and, I think, noticed me for the first time. She peered up as if she were myopic or as if she were looking through grubby contact lenses and she seemed disconcerted, staring up at me, then looking away slightly, then screwing up her eyes to