Read Online Mapuche by Caryl Férey, Steven Randall - Free Book Online

them in a plastic bag before going back down the spiral stairway.
    On his way, he picked up the shoemaker’s card in the ashtray, went into the vestibule and took out the clothes that had been stuffed into the washing machine. They had not been washed. He inspected the pockets and found a crumpled cigarette paper at the bottom of a jeans pocket, with a few words scribbled on it in pencil: Ituzaingô 69 . . .
    He’d already been there for half an hour. Ruben looked around the loft one last time. It was impossible to tell whether someone else had already searched it, whether María had left in a hurry, or why she was no longer giving any sign of life. He had seen no scratches on the lock, and so the front door had not been forced, but something was bothering him; he could not say what it was. He glanced into the toilet room before leaving—the cat litter was dirty—and noticed a strange series of pendants on the door, artistic compositions in plastic hanging on a string. Her specialty, it seemed. A series of humorous ready-mades, some with punning titles, others without. Then Rubén saw the pregnancy test hung on the toilet door: “
Terme au mètre.
”
    The pregnancy test was positive.

4
    Rubén didn’t have a cat. Cats spent their time crawling all over him, curling up in his clothes if he’d been so unfortunate as to leave them lying around, rubbing them with their muzzles as they looked for the armpit, and he much preferred the company of women, even if it was episodic. The fact that he had never lived with anyone did not change his image of women, his desire for new romantic adventures: women just didn’t last, that’s all. He had spent years reconstructing himself after his detention. The balance was fragile, and certainly unpredictable, so what. Rubén lived in a pit of archives, faces that had disappeared, too much dust, file folders, with corpses between the pages and on the walls, a cage from which he watched women pass by. None of them had stayed long, or he had not held onto any of them, which for him amounted to the same thing: Rubén told himself that at the age of forty-seven it was too late. He was not expecting anything in particular and his solitude didn’t need anyone. The time for affairs en passant was over, his father’s poetry, which he knew by heart, would be of no use to him, he was reduced to silence, to nothing, words had long since betrayed him, and the stars didn’t give a damn.
    He was attached to the void. As for seeking a kindred spirit, it was already there, in the closet, near the bed where no woman would ever sleep again.
    Rubén put on a Ufomammut CD to drown out the noise of the air lane that passed over the intersection of San Juan and Peru, aired out the bedroom where he woke up, and had a coffee-croissant-cigarette breakfast that struggled to compensate for too little sleep. The business with the cat continued to bother him: if the building’s concierge had found it meowing on the landing, María Victoria must have deliberately put it out so that it would be taken in—in which case she had fled without even taking the time to leave it with the concierge—or else it had escaped. How? The loft’s windows were closed, but the animal might have been able to sneak out when the front door was opened. Had it been frightened by someone breaking in?
    Sparrows were chirping excitedly outside the window, charming little monsters imported from France that had driven out the native
calandria.
Rubén gave them the remains of his breakfast, took a shower, and mentally drew up a list of his leads.
    â€“A telephone message left the day before from a cell phone (“Miss Bolivia”).
    â€“The photos of a singer that were hung on a string.
    â€“A crumpled piece of paper in the bottom of a pocket of a pair of jeans thrown in the dirty laundry, with what looked like an address (“Ituzaingó