Read Don't Move for Free Online

needed into his trunk, and drove away.
    I loafed about aimlessly for a while. My shirt was drenched with sweat and my eyeglasses were fogged, but I didn’t care about the heat anymore. This calm indifference was due to the alcohol, but it also happened to correspond to one of my most secret desires. I’d been driving myself hard during all those years of success; I was always where I should be, always traceable. Now, purely by chance, I was flying under the radar, and I assented to my temporary freedom, which I saw as an unexpected reward. Now I would offer no further resistance; I’d let myself explore my new situation, like a tourist. I went back to the unfinished apartment building. The children, having poured the water from their trash bag onto a mound of pozzolana, were molding the stuff into a sort of hut that looked like a big black egg. I stood there stupefied and watched them under the hammering sun.
    My mother never wanted me to go out into the courtyard and play with the other children. After her marriage, she’d had to adjust to living in a poor neighborhood. It wasn’t a sad part of the city at all; it was crowded and lively, and it wasn’t even very far from the center. But your grandmother refused to look out the windows. In her view, our neighborhood wasn’t sad—sadness was something she knew how to bear. No, it was much worse than that; it was one step above absolute penury. She lived a sequestered life in that apartment, as though it were a cloud where she had reconstructed her life, where she had settled in with her piano and her son. During certain languid afternoon hours, I would have liked to join all that teeming life I saw going on downstairs, but I couldn’t bring myself to humiliate her. I pretended that the downstairs world didn’t exist for me, either. She would hustle me onto the bus that took us to her family home, to her mother, and in that setting, amid all those trees and those elegant houses, I could finally open my eyes. When my mother was there, she was radiant; she was another person altogether. We’d lie down together on the bed in her old room and laugh and laugh. She was filled with new energy; she shone with new beauty. Then she’d put her overcoat back on and assume her normal look. We’d catch the bus back home long after dark, when everything was pitch-black outside. She’d run from the bus stop to our front door, terrified by the abyss that surrounded her.
    My mother’s face passed before my eyes—or rather, her faces, one after another, all the way to the end of the sequence, when her face was closed in death and I asked the sexton to leave me alone with her for a moment so that I could look at it one last time. I chased away that image by angrily shaking my head.
    Now I’ll go back to get my car. I’ll pay the mechanic, turn
on the engine, and drive home to Elsa. Her hair will still be wet,
along with her gauzy primrose-colored shirt. We’ll go to that restaurantand sit at that table in the back and look at the lights of
the gulf shining through the darkness. I’ll let her drive so I can lay
my head on her shoulder. . . .
    She didn’t look surprised. In fact, I got the feeling she’d been expecting me. She blushed when she stepped back to let me in. I entered awkwardly, inadvertently stumbling into the bookshelf on the wall. The porcelain doll fell to the floor. I bent down to pick it up. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, swaying toward me. She was wearing a different T-shirt. This one was white, ornamented with a gaudy paste flower. She murmured, “How’s your car?”
    Her voice was uncertain, and so was her mouth, with all the lipstick gone. I looked past her shoulder at her tidy, wretched house, and it seemed even drearier than it had a little while ago. But this didn’t bother me. In fact, I took a mysterious pleasure in the sensation that everything around me was incontestably dismal. “They’re fixing it,” I said.
    Her hands were behind