Conto em Inglês

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Los Angeles by Gaslight

She said her name was Laura and that she worked part-time as the manager of the Sterling apartments. I thought she was impossibly pale and looked like she would slow-dance her kisses like a Vargas pin-up.  We met on a burning hot July night that reeked of steam and desperation.  I had been sleeping for a couple of days in what remained of an abandoned Buick that had been marooned on Yucca when I was woken by the brush of her lips.
“Do you need a place to stay?” 
She took my hand and I left the Buick behind, not even bothering to close the door. 
The building loomed ahead, a darkness more than night.  Laura smiled and  led me to the entrance.  The Sterling was one of those few remaining ‘faux-chateau’ apartment towers, built in the Twenties, that still haunt the wasteland between Franklin and Hollywood; a reef of stucco gargoyles and old Art Deco angles that spiralled into a needle topped by a flickering neon sign.
I followed her into the lobby.  A chandelier had dimmed to a faint twilight and echoes of a clarinet oozed from a radio.  A poster of Astaire and Rogers dancing on air.  Rental ads used to describe these buildings as having ‘an East Coast flavour’, but to me they always looked, and felt, like Los Angeles incarnate.  The elevator was stuck between the lobby and the first floor.  Laura didn't even glance at it.  I followed her up the stairs blindly, the steps creaking beneath my feet as we ascended.  On the fourth floor I caught a glimpse of a child standing at the end of one of the corridors.  I winked at him.  The boy laughed and ran inside one of the apartments.  Laura looked at me. 
“Do you mind children?”
“I like children,” I said.
Laura never mentioned credit checks or security deposits, which suited me fine because in prison they don't give you either.  The attic was slightly more spacious than my cell at Pelican Bay, a spare room suspended over the rooftop world of old Hollywood.  You could see the parking lot at the back of Musso & Franks  and the glare of the boulevard like a curtain of glitter beyond.  There was a single bed, a wardrobe, and a table with two chairs.
“I'll take it,” I said.
To be perfectly honest, after three years in the joint my sense of smell had given up on me and the voices whispering within the walls didn't strike me as anything new.  Laura would appear every night, like the breeze slithering from the windows that smelled of gasoline and dust.  Her cold skin and her icy breath were the only relief on those hellish summer nights. Before sunrise Laura would disappear downstairs, always sliding away in silence. 
During the day I would sleep well into the afternoon.  Sometimes I would sit on the fire-escape to smoke a cigarette and watch as the lights flared up at dusk.  There was a guy in the nearby Montecito apartments who  seemed to do the same every evening and eventually we started waving to each other.  The other tenants of the Sterling had that meek friendliness only slow-cooked misery and a permanent lack of cash can teach you.  I counted six families, some of them with kids, and a few old folks who smelled like soot and wet soil.  You rarely find kids and old people in Hollywood anymore.  I used to think something that, come nightfall, some kind of fairy of the frail must spirit them all away so that the rest of us don’t need to remember we were ever born, or that we're on our way out.
          My favorite neighbor was Mr. Fredericks, a tiny little old man who lived right below me and painted dolls for a living.  We had good talks.  Mostly I would say stuff and he would listen, smiling.  He once told me he’d been born in Vienna and that he’d been married to the same woman for forty-five years, but not any more.  He asked if I had ever been married.  I lied and he knew I was lying and didn’t care.
For weeks I didn’t venture outside the building - I had no reason to.  Spiders would weave arabesques at my door. Another neighbor, Ms. Lambert, would always bring me something to eat.  Mr. Fredericks lent me old magazines and engaged me in endless chess battles that he would invariably win.  The kids in the building would persuade me to play hide and seek, and although I never found them, they loved to game.  Nobody seemed afraid of me.  For the first time in my life I felt welcome.  At home.  One time I started to cry for no good reason, and Ms. Lambert just sat by my side and held my hand until I calmed down.  Her fingers were as cold as Laura's, her smile as sweet.  “Now, now,” she whispered.
At midnight Laura would bring her nineteen years wrapped in white silk, and would give herself to me as if it were our last time.  I would love her until the break of dawn, searching her body for everything life had stolen from me.  Later I would dream in black and white, like dogs and the damned do.  I suppose even scum like me gets a peek at happiness once in a lifetime, no matter how brief.  That summer was mine.
          The guys from City Hall came in early September, along with the Santa Ana winds.  At first I took the men to be cops, sent by my parole officer, but  they seemed  as surprised as I was to find me there.  One of them looked like the kind of man born to be in charge.  His name was Hendricks.  A clean-cut guy.  What they call a ‘people person’.  He explained to me that he was a demolition engineer, and that he and his crew had nothing personal against squatters but a job was a job and his was to blow the damn building to smithereens, with or without me inside.
“There's gotta be some mistake,” I mumbled.
All the chapters in the tacky soap opera of my life seemed to have begun with that sentence.  I rushed upstairs to try to find Laura in the manager's office on the first floor.  All I found was a broken coat hanger and an inch of dust blanketing the hardwood floors.  I ran to Mr. Fredericks' unit on the tenth floor.  Fifty eyeless dolls sat rotting in darkness.  I ran from door to door, looking for just one of the other tenants.  Long corridors of silence piled under fallen roofs and scattered debris.  Children cried within the walls.
I peeked out of the fire escape window on the third floor and saw a police car parked outside, its lights flashing in silence.  They were waiting for me in the lobby.  I recognized two of the officers from the Wilcox station, and I could tell that they recognized me.  The engineer stepped between us, smiling.  He looked too young to be blowing things up, but I guess these days the younger they get them, the better. 
“The building has been closed since the fire,” the engineer said.  The fire had killed them all and had damaged the structure beyond repair.  “It’s dangerous for you to stay here.”
Some words were exchanged, the wrong kind.  Mostly mine.  I think I pushed the engineer down the stairs leading to the basement.  It was a steep fall.  This time Judge Ryan had a field day.  At sentencing she promised I wouldn't be seeing her again for a long time.  The boys at Pelican Bay had kept my bunk ready.  After all, you're always back for supper, they said.
Rick, the library guy, found me the story the L.A. Times had run on the fire.  The article said it was suspected arson, and even mentioned a guy with my own name as the prime suspect, but Rick couldn't find any follow-up stories after that one.  Nobody cares when the forgotten burn in the alleyways and backstreets around Hollywood boulevard.  In the photo you can see their bodies lined up in raw pine boxes, their features disfigured by the flames or the fall from eleven stories of melting glass. But they were still recognizable. Laura is shrouded in pristine white, her hands over her bare breasts.
It's been two years now, but in prison you live and die by your memories.  The guards think they've got all the angles covered, but she knows how to sneak in like a breeze.  At midnight, her lips wake me as they did on the first night we met.  The cell is cold and I can see my breath curling between her pale fingers.  Laura brings word from Mr. Fredericks and the others.  They miss me, and I miss them back.  Then, when all is dark and silent, we make love until dawn burns its way through the mist.  Before she leaves I taste her icy tongue and see myself in her black pupils.
“You'll always love me, won't you?” she asks.
And I say yes.

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