Ghosts Read Free

(But with this
expression, which Tello formulated silently, clasping his hands and lifting his
eyes skyward, as if to say “Even I couldn’t have come up with that,” he
unwittingly confessed that he was fifty thousand times more bourgeois than those
who were scandalized by the behavior of the pretty laundress with the limp.)
    Except for the oldest couple and the youngest, all the others had
embarked on their second, that is to say, definitive, marriages. Which is why
they had invested in comfortable, pleasant dwellings, where they could settle
down and live for years. That was Tello’s style: sensible,
child-friendly, family-oriented design. And good business
sense, of course.
    The little group hanging on his words, those remarried couples with
their shared project of happiness, had been infiltrated by two individuals, two
naked men covered in fine cement dust. They were listening too, but only as a
pretext for bursting continually into fierce, raucous laughter. Or not so much
laughter as vehement, theatrically sarcastic howling. Since the others didn’t
hear or see them, the conversation continued at its polite and leisurely pace.
The naked men shouted louder and louder as if competing with each other. They
were dirty like builders, and had the same kind of bodies: rather stocky, solid,
with small feet, and rough hands. Their toes were spread widely, like wild men’s
toes. They were behaving like badly brought-up children. But they were
adults. A builder who happened to be passing by with a bucketful of rubble on
the way to the skip stretched out his free hand and, without stopping, grasped
the penis of one of the naked men and kept walking. The member stretched out to
a length of two yards, then three, five, ten, all the way to the sidewalk. When
he let it go, it slapped back into place with a noise whose weird harmonics went
on echoing off the unplastered concrete walls and the stairs without marble
paving, up and down the empty elevator shafts, like the lowest string of a
Japanese harp. The two ghosts laughed more loudly and frenetically than ever.
The architect was saying that electricians lie, painters lie, plumbers lie.
    Most of the visitors were already leaving when a truck loaded with
perforated bricks arrived and backed into what would be the lobby on the ground
floor. The architect was impressed to see the delivery being made, given the
half holiday. He explained to his audience that it was the final load of
perforated bricks for partition walls, then indulged in a subtly cruel quip: if
anyone wanted to make a last-minute change to the floor plan, they
should speak now or forever hold their peace. Things were becoming irrevocable,
but that didn’t worry the owners; in fact, it enriched their sense of
well-being. For the builders, however, the delivery came as an
unpleasant surprise, since they had no choice but to unload the truck, and their
half-day would have to be extended. They lined up quickly, forming a
human chain, as they do for unloading bricks. The two ghosts had taken up a new
position in the air above a round-faced electric clock hanging from a
concrete beam above the place where the elevator doors would go. Both of them
were head-down, with their temples touching; one vertical and the
other at an angle of fifty degrees, like the hands of a clock at ten to twelve;
but that wasn’t the time (it was after one). Tello suggested going upstairs, so
as not to get in the way, and to show the late arrivals the games room and the
swimming pool, which were the building’s prime attractions. Those who were not
going up said good bye. When they got to the top, where it was scorchingly hot,
they said what a good idea a swimming pool was. The metal skeleton rearing above
them required some explanation: the solarium would be roofed with sliding glass
panels, moved by a little electric motor, and a special, separate boiler would
send hot water through that tangle of pipes, because of course the pool would