Read Online Gasoline by Quim Monzó - Free Book Online

rings twice. Helena picks it up. He hears her speak: it is such a distant whisper that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had to take a train, a subway, and a bus to get downstairs.
    To break the spell, all he has to do is yawn. When he was a child he would endow some gesture with an shamanic power, so that he would get what he was wishing for if he carried out the ritual, like tracing three circles over his belly before going into the classroom where he had to take an exam. He yawns halfheartedly.
    Helena calls out to him.
    “I’m going shopping. I’ll be back later.”
    I’ll be back “later”? One is always back “later” when one goes out. Later than what, then? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have said, “I’ll be right back?” Of course she will buy something so as not to come back empty-handed, but what he’s sure about is that she’s not “going shopping.”
    He hears the front door close. He quickly puts on his jacket and coat, leaves the brushes dirty and the paints uncovered, and goes down the stairs.
    Once in the street, he’s taken aback: he doesn’t see her anywhere. Then he spots her off in the distance: one very blond head among all the others. He picks up the pace. He runs until she’s a reasonable distance ahead. Then he thinks that that distance isn’t, in fact, very reasonable. He slows down. He thinks: “Now I’ll find out who her lover is. Now this is something I find interesting.” But in his heart of hearts he realizes that it doesn’t really interest him all that much, and he’s sorry. In truth, he doesn’t really care if he never learns what the guy who’s going out with Helena looks like, how he dresses, whether or not he’s a nice guy. Helena turns a corner. Heribert follows her.
    •
    Carrying three shopping bags, Helena takes the same path in reverse. Heribert follows her at a distance. She’s gone to a pastry shop, a boutique, and a bookstore, and she spends so little time in each place that it would be impossible for her to have been with a lover, no matter how efficient the two of them might have been.
    Helena searches in her coat pocket for the keys. Heribert watches her from a distance, and when he sees her go in, he goes for a walk so as not to get home right away. He wonders whether to go into a bar. He does. It’s half empty, with wooden paneling and mirrors. Not exactly dark, but lacking in light. He sits down on a barstool, leans on the bar, and when it’s time to order he remembers that not so long ago (today? yesterday? he doesn’t feel like wracking his brain to remember exactly when) he had had trouble in another, different, bar choosing what to drink when the time came. He doesn’t want the situation to repeat itself now, so when the bartender asks him what he’ll have, he looks for something to latch on to. When he sees the beer taps, he feels he’s been saved.
    “Draft beer. A pint.”
    Later on, when he spies the whisky bottles aligned before the mirror facing him (there is a mirror directly in front of him: he’s been seeing his face reflected in it for a while and hasn’t recognized himself until now), he thinks that if he had seen them first he would have ordered whisky. The waiter serves him the pint. He pays up. He licks off the foam.
    •
    Heribert opens the door to the house and goes in. Helena is in the kitchen, and she looks up from the carrots she’s chopping.
    “I didn’t know where you were.”
    “I went out for a walk. I didn’t think you’d be back for lunch.”
    “What about you, are you eating at home today?”
    “Yes.”
    As she prepares the carrots and spinach, Heribert cleans the mushrooms and celery. The morning call must have been Hipòlita, he figures, to warn Helena that he had called last night and she hadn’t known how to answer the questions she wasn’t expecting. Could Helena have thought it didn’t matter? If she has spoken with Hipòlita, she must imagine he has suspicions. Why doesn’t she come up