The Tenant and The Motive Read Free

campus, but it also had a veranda, back yard and garage, and furthermore, he’d managed, with some effort, to furnish it entirely to his taste during the year he’d been living there.
    The apartment consisted of a study, living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. As well as the typewriter and computer, there was a dark oak table in the study, with drawers on both sides, which served as his desk, a filing cabinet, several bookshelves; there was also a wicker armchair, an easy chair and a few other places to sit. The bedroom furnishings were sparse: two closets built into the back wall with full-length mirrors on the doors, a chest of drawers made of a pale wood against the right-hand wall across from the bed, which was covered with a deep red eiderdown. An extension of one wall divided the living room in two. On the left-hand side was a pale wooden table surrounded by metal chairs; two vaguely cubist pictures hung on the walls, along with a poster for an exhibition of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec in a gallery in Turin. On the right-hand side of the living room there was a television, a record-player, a cream-coloured sofa, two armchairs of a similar colour but different design, a transparent, low double-decker table (through the top level periodicals, books and magazines piled on the lower level were visible); hanging from a hook on the wall was a reproduction of a medium-sizedHockney painting. Separating this part of the room from the dining area was a glass cabinet crammed with valuable and not so valuable objects: a marble elephant, an Algerian pipe, an hourglass, three antique pistols, a frigate imprisoned in a Chianti bottle, several clay figures and other trifles that Mario had collected over the years with neither acquisitive nor sentimental zeal. Except for those of the kitchen and bathroom, the walls of the house were covered with grainy wood panelling; the baseboard and door and window frames were painted white.
    He could not have found the apartment more satisfactory, which was why Mario considered it foolishness even to raise the possibility of leaving it, for no other reason than the fact that a colleague had suddenly turned into a neighbour. Furthermore, he thought optimistically, it’s hard to imagine I’ll be worse off for the change. There was no doubt that Nancy had been at the very least an annoying neighbour. She was an untidily stout woman, careless about her appearance, with dry, straw-coloured hair, quite ugly but at the same time endowed with an obvious and aggressive sexuality. The feminist ideas and prejudices against Latin men that Nancy brought up in any conversation, no matter how casual or brief (on the stairway, taking out the garbage, while washing the car), had not facilitated pacific cohabitation in the building. Otherwise, the strange affection Mrs Workman professed for her translated into a blind trust that had always made Mario feel uncomfortable, for it put him in an awkward position not only each time Nancy accused him of gettingdrunk on his own, but also when she denounced him to Mrs Workman for spying on her whenever a man entered her apartment, especially at night. On another occasion, Mrs Workman and the rest of the tenants in the building – a married couple of Belgian origin, and a young woman who worked in the admissions office at the university – had to intercede to keep Nancy from filing an official complaint with the police for his alleged sexual aggression: she insisted she’d caught him masturbating behind the curtain in his living room while she was sunbathing on a lounge chair in the back yard.

IV
    â€˜Ginger? It’s Mario.’
    â€˜How are you?’ asked Ginger. Not waiting for a reply, she asked another question. ‘When did you get back?’
    â€˜A couple of days ago,’ answered Mario. ‘I haven’t called because I’ve been getting things organized. You know.’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    Mario thought: The