When Charo burst into tears, it dawned on Carvalho that seven years had gone by and she was probably not the same person.
The other Charo would have given in to tears, but this Charo performed them; she felt them, but was putting on a performance as part of a previously imagined scenario. The setting was the same as ever: Carvalho’s office, and Biscuter was the same too. Carvalho had not permitted the slightest change in himself over the past thirty years. But Charo? Charo had changed. Even though when she had left in 1992 she was no longer a young woman, she still looked like one, but now she could pass for a comfortable middle-aged matron returning after a long absence with a changed status and silhouette. Thicker all over, although not by much. Perhaps the oval of her face had become rounder, she had more cheek than cheek-bone, and yet there were fewer rings under her eyes, as if she had been resting for seven years from the accumulated fatigue of a life of whoring, which in her case was true.
‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’ trumpeted Biscuter, who as usual was crying from his eyes and the tip of his nose. Both of them were staring at Carvalho, offering him or demanding from him an emotional response he did not feel. He needed to be left alone with Charo to find out whether he really wanted this re-encounter. To rediscover a space of their own and see if the old reflex actions of the past were still there, to see if he still needed her. But the presence of Biscuter as theatre director feeding him his lines annoyed him. Charo pointed at him, seeking Biscuter’s approval.
‘You’d think he was greeting a girl cousin from his home village.’
‘The boss is sorry, but that’s how he is.’
For a second, Carvalho thought of saying something that would help create a more cheerful atmosphere - welcome home, for example, but he mentally rejected lyric and epic formulas and was about to laugh instead when it suddenly occurred to him he could say: seven years of solitude stare down at you from these walls. Fortunately he controlled himself, and when he finally co-ordinated sounds and silence sufficiently, what came out was:
‘When are you going back to Andorra?’
Charo and Biscuter looked at each other, stupefied.
‘He’s throwing me out!’
Biscuter gestured with one hand as though trying to snatch Carvalho’s words out of mid-air before they reached Charo’s ears, and vice-versa. But it was no use. That wasn’t what I meant, thought Carvalho, I should explain, but he was annoyed at having to do so, and decided instead to thank her for something.
‘Thanks for the cassette you sent me a few years ago.’
‘They’re really cheap in Andorra.’
In order to speak properly to Charo he would have to sacrifice Biscuter.
‘I need you to go to Fuster’s bureau so he can give you some papers I can’t go and fetch myself.’
Biscuter’s face recovered its enchanted expression: he was sure that when they were alone, Charo and Carvalho would rediscover each other. Within two minutes he was on his way out, though not before planting a big sucking kiss, more from a snout than a human mouth, on Charo’s cheek. She stood up, and smoothed her skirt down, preparing to leave as well, then picked up her bag and turned to Carvalho. She went up to him, took him by the arm, pulled him towards her and kissed him on the lips lightly, but with a moist, dense, noisy intensity. A kiss that hit home. The man and woman stared at each other. The slamming of the door behind Biscuter made them jump apart, as if their two bodies were afraid of being so close together when they were on their own.
‘Do you still love me?’
Carvalho did not answer. He wondered if he had ever said to Charo: ‘I love you’. No, he had never said it. She did not respect his silence.
‘Well, I still love you. You’re the man of my life.’