The Truce Read Free Page A

walked over to her, and began to caress her head, all without saying a word. Little by little she calmed down and her weeping convulsions subsided. When she finally lowered her hands, I dried her eyes and wiped her nose with the unused half of my handkerchief. At that moment she didn’t look like a twenty-three-year-old woman but like a little girl, momentarily unhappy because her doll had broken or no one would take her to the zoo. I asked her if she was unhappy and she said yes. I asked her why and she said she didn’t know. I wasn’t that surprised. I sometimes feel unhappy myself for no concrete reason. In contrast to my own experience, I said: ‘Oh, there must be some reason. A person doesn’t cry for no reason.’ And then she started to talk fast, urged on by a sudden desire to be honest: ‘I have the terrible feeling that time goes by and I do nothing, nothing happens, and nothing moves me to the core. I look at Esteban and then I look at Jaime and I’m sure they’re also unhappy. Sometimes (don’t get angry, Dad) I also look at you and think that I wouldn’t want to reach fifty years of age and have your temperament, or your poise, simply because I find them commonplace and worn out. I find myself with a great abundance of energy, but I don’t know where to apply it, nor what to do with it. I think you resigned yourself to being gloomy, and I think that’s horrible because I know you’re not gloomy. Well, at least you weren’t before.’ I replied (what else could I tell her) that she was right, that she should do everything possible to get away from us, from our orbit, and that I was happy to hear her shout her disagreement, which was like hearing one of my own shouts from long ago. Then she smiled, said I was very kind, and threw her arms around my neck, like before. She’s still a little girl.
Friday 1 March
    The manager held a meeting with the five section directors. For forty-five minutes he talked to us about low staff output. He said that the Board of Directors made him aware of the situation, and that, in future, he wasn’t going to allow his position to be gratuitously undermined due to staff laziness (how he likes to emphasize ‘laziness’). So that from now on, etc., etc.
    What do they mean by ‘low staff output’? At least I can say that my people work. And not only the new workers, but the veterans too. It’s true that Méndez reads detective novels which he blatantly places in the middle drawer of his desk, all the while holding a pen in his right hand in preparation for the possible appearance of some manager. It’s true that Muñoz takes advantage of his trips to the Excess Profits Department by stealing twenty minutes of leisure from the company and nursing a beer. It’s true that when Robledo goes to the toilet (at ten-fifteen, exactly) he carries either the colour newspaper supplement or the sports section hidden under his smock. But it’s also true that the work is always up to date, and during the hours when a transaction needs urgent attention and the drawer crammed with invoices circulates continuously, they all exert themselves and really work as a team. Each of them is an expert in their limited specialty and I can have complete confidence that things are being done correctly.
    Actually, I know quite well where the manager’s complaint was directed. ‘Shipping’ work lazily and, moreover, do their job badly. Today we all knew that his complaint was about Suárez, so why ask all of us to attend the meeting? What right does Suárez have to share his exclusive blame with all of us? Could
it be because the manager knows, like all of us, that Suárez sleeps with the president’s daughter? That Lidia Valverde isn’t bad-looking.
Saturday 2 March
    Last night, for the first time in thirty years, I dreamed about my hooded men again. When I was four years old, or perhaps