waiters, as if I were just another waiter, a female one. His observant wife made a similar gesture when I left – always after him and before her – on the same two occasions when her husband had been courteous enough to do so. But when I tried to return that gesture with my own even slighter nod, both he and she had looked away and didn’t even see me. They were so quick, or so prudent.
During the time when I used to see them, I didn’t know who they were or what they did, although they were clearly people with money. Not immensely rich, perhaps, but comfortably off. I mean that if they had belonged in the former category, they would not have taken their children to school themselves, as I was sure they did before enjoying that brief pause in the café; perhaps their kids went to a local school such as Colegio Estilo, which was very close, although there are several others in the area, in refurbished houses, or hotelitos as they used to be called, in the swish El Viso district; indeed, I myself went to an infants’ school in Calle Oquendo, not far from there; nor would they have had breakfast almost daily in that local café or gone off to their respective jobs at about nine o’clock, he slightly before and she slightly after, as the waiters confirmed to me when I asked about them, as did a work colleague with whom I discussed the macabre event later on, and who, despite knowing no more about them than I did, had managed to glean a few facts; I suppose people who like to gossip and think the worst always have ways of finding out whatever they want, especially if it’s something negative or there’s some tragedy involved, even if it has nothing to do with them.
One morning towards the end of June, neither of them appeared at the café, not that there was anything unusual about that, for it did occasionally happen, and I assumed that they must have gone away somewhere or were too busy to share that brief pause in the day which they both clearly enjoyed so much. Then I was away for most of a week, dispatched by my boss to some stupid book fair abroad, mainly to press the flesh on his behalf and generally play the fool. When I returned, they still did not appear, not once, and that worried me, more for my own sake than for theirs, because I was suddenly deprived of my morning fillip. ‘How easy it is for a person simply to vanish into thin air,’ I thought. ‘Someone only has to move jobs or house and you’ll never know anything more about them, never see them again. All it takes is a change in work schedule. How fragile they are, these connections with people one knows only by sight.’ This made me wonder if, after spending so long endowing them with such joyful significance, I shouldn’t perhaps have tried to exchange a few words with them, not with the intention of bothering them or spoiling their moment of togetherness nor, of course, with the idea of establishing some kind of social relationship outside of the café, that wasn’t what I wanted at all; but merely to show them how much I liked and appreciated them, so as to be able to say hello to them from that point on, and to feel obliged to say goodbye to them if, one day, I were to leave the publishing house and thus cease to frequent that particular area, and to make them feel slightly obliged to do the same if they were the ones to move on or to change their habits, just as a local shopkeeper would forewarn us if he were going to close or sell his business, just as we would warn everyone if we were about to move house. To, at least, be aware that we are about to cease to see people we’ve grown accustomed to seeing every day, even if only at a distance or in some purely utilitarian way, barely noticing their face. Yes, that’s what one usually does.
So, in the end, I asked the waiters. They told me that, as far as they knew, the couple had already gone on holiday. This sounded to me more like supposition than fact. It was still a little early to go away, but there are people who prefer not