El Corazon del Tartaro
de Rosa Montero (2001)
Espasa Calpe
The worst is that misfortunes do not announce their arrival. There are never any dogs howling with the rising sun pointing out the date of our imminent death, and no one ever knows, if, when the day begins, routine or catasphrophe is lurking in the wings. Misfortune is a fourth dimension that sticks to our lives like shadows; almost all of us cling to life forgetting that we are fragile and mortal, but there are some individuals who have no idea how to shield themselves from the terrors of the abyss. Zara belonged to this later group of folks. She always knew that disaster was approaching with muffled and insidious cloth-bound feet.
That day, Zarza woke up before the alarm rang and announced that she felt awful. It was a discomfort that she knew well, that she often suffered, especially come morning time, in that state of awakening sleep, just rising from the limbo of dreams. A certain level of confidence in the world in and in oneself is necessary to suppose that reaility moves on, on the other side of pressed eyelids. One waits patiently to be awoken. That day, Zaraza was in no mood to trust existence, and she lay there waiting with her eyes shut, afraid to look and to see. She lay flat on her back in bed, still in a daze, not yet finished assembling her daily personality, and the world semed to rock around her, gelatinous and instable. She was a cast away tossed onto a raft in a sea teeming with sharks. She made the rash decision to not open her eyes unitl reality regained its solidity. Sometimes, returing to life was a difficult voyage.
From the shadows came a long groan and Zarza squeezed her eyelids a little tighter. Yes, in fact, it was an animal-like moan, a hoarse lament. She could still hear it. An anxious murmor, a teary soliliquy. And then, a shower of sighs. Suddenly, the rapid creaking of wood, like a sail being thrown in the wind. Mens' voices. Shouting. The echo of strikes poundingg on flesh, and more rythmic crashing. A few meters from Zarza's closed eyes, from her body, from her bedroom, there was a couple making love. It was possible that they'd just finished making a baby. At these times, she thought only with cruelty and displeasure. On the other side of her wall, there life was exploding, while Zarza emerged heavily from her sea of Jello. The noise of clashing bodies continued, all that exaggeration, all that mushy racket. Reduced to neighborly din , broken down into rubbing and shaking, sex was ridiculous and absurd. A kind of muscular spasm, a necessary exercise. The shreak of her alarm blended with the pair's final screams. Annoyed, Zarza opened up one eye, and then the other.
(p.11-12)
At 8:14, Zarza got in the shower. There was something in the repetition of small quotidian minutia that consoled her. Sometimes she entertained herself by imaging how many times in her life she would turn on the hot water faucet in the same exact way, how many times she would remove her watch and then put it back on. How many times she would squeeze the tube of toothpaste over her toothbrush. How many times she would coat her armpits with deodarnt or warm milk for her coffee. All these trifles, lined up one after the other, resulted in the construction of something like a life. They were the exoskeleton of existence, routines to forge ahead, to drag on, to breathe and not thinkg. The days would slide forward like this softly on the flanks of time, happily bereft of meaning. For Zarza the fact that the rest of her life might reduce down to a fistful of automatisms didn't disturb her. For all she cared, her biography could read like a dusty tome of routine gestures annotated by some annoying beauracrate for all she cared: "Upon her death, Sofia Zarzamala brushed her teeth 41, 217 times, fastened her bra on 14, 239 occasions, clipped her toenailes 2, 053 times..." But at 8:15 that day, just as she started to soap up, something unexpected occured that rattled the inertia of things: the phone rang. The phone rarely rang at Zarza's place, and never that early. She shut the water off and leapt out of the shower, grabbing a towel on the fly, leaving a hurried trial of water on the floor all the way to her nightstand.
(p.15)
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