TE22 Potpourri

Manuel Baixauli

UNKNOWN

“A steal,” he said. “No one wants to live here in the winter.”

nearby, stepping into the water with his shoes on, vomiting.

He could barely stand. He asked me to take him home, said that I could show him the drawings there. Not only his breath stank. Following his imprecise indications we reached the nine-story building; he handed me the key, I opened the door, I looked for the elevator. There wasn’t one. “Why do you think it was such a steal?” he said. We walked up the stairs very slowly, he held the banister with one hand and me with the other. It was an old building, one of the first they must have built when Palmeres started to attract property speculation. Everything—the railings, the tiling, the doors—was made of cheap materials. There were a lot of damp patches, the peeling walls evoked maps of undiscovered archipelagos. Inside the apartment, the feeling of poverty and filth only grew. Howcouldhe livewithsomuch junkonthefloor?His fewpieces of furniture were of terrible quality and buried under piles of books and papers. One wall of the living room, the largest one, was flooded with little bits of papers of all sorts, sizes and shapes stuck up with pushpins, each with text handwritten in black pen. The tiny writing was illegible.

“And what do you do in the summertime?”

“Take flight. They won’t catch me back here until October.”

He walks me to my car. As he walked off I saw him, in the rearviewmirror, leaning one hand on the walls to support him. My second commission arrived two weeks later. Before that, I’d received a bank transfer into my account, with not only the money for the drawings I had yet to deliver, but also some for travel expenses. We agreed tomeet in the same café, but Crisòstomwasn’t there when I arrived. At the table where we’d sat was a couple of retired guys playing domino. I wasn’t in the mood for a drink, so I waited for him seated on the low wall of the promenade, looking out at the sea. And as I looked out at the sea, I saw him 96

“Where do you write?” I asked.

He pointed to the kitchen. And, sure enough, there on top of the white marble counter was a laptop computer and a printer, right beside a heap of dirty dishes.

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