Free The Plimsoll Line by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

few droplets on his forehead as he dragged himself in the direction of the phone to call for help, in the presence of Polanski, who gazed at him impassively from the other side of the window. And so he realized he only had time to lie down on his back and observe that strange, beautiful firmament. But these were mere tricks of the imagination, strategies of anxious free time. After a while, he learned to listen to his body and pressed his ear against his skin, filled with a comfortable sense of moral insensitivity.

    Through its eyelids, the cat watches the man knead his blackened arm. It can hear the blood flowing under his skin with an electric hum. And the animal is aware, before it happens, that he will push back the chair and stand to face the window that looks out onto the forest. Though parallel, the gazes of the man and of the anonymous observer converge at a particular point on the other side of the garden fence, perhaps at the foot of the yew that grows at the edge of the forest and at nightfall seems to become more somber than usual. The man’s gaze remains at the foot of the tree, and the anonymous observer appears to lean against the back of the chair. Beneath his chin, the man’s head glistens, his forehead bulging slightly in the shadows, the space between his eyebrows illuminated by the flame of a lighter he has just flicked on to light a cigarette. The man keeps his eyes on the yew, because he has a certain sense of sympathy for this tree, which forms a natural border between the house, the surroundings of the garden, and the forest, that other territory he imagines as being crisscrossed by moles, inhabited by nocturnal birds, though he’s never gone inside it, perhaps because he feels a primitive, superstitious respect for the oak forest, so leafy and dark on winter nights. So the yew is the point of division, the marker. The cat’s green pupils dilate at the same time as the man extinguishes the flame on the lighter, and the shadow’s silhouette seems to protect him, leaning toward him over the crown of his head and the hood of his frayed bathrobe, but the man moves over to the window, opens it, and squints at the triangle formed by the top of the tree and the ground covered in undergrowth, at the shadow that is cast by the yew, or that seems to break away from it and spread with gaseous suavity, leaving the forest, approaching over the lawn, weightless between the orange spotlights. He remains standing at the window, his arms hanging at his sides, in a gesture of incredulity at
that
which seems to fill the light and the branches of the oaks, and he senses an impulse of laughter or mourning rising from his stomach, a gentle convulsion, because, in front of him, there is an undulation of breath. The cat narrows its eyes when it sees the man lean against the window frame, overcome by a fit of sobbing that has nothing to do with sadness, or sorrow, but with an internal crumbling, like the collapse of a wave breaking on the shore of his skin and sweeping away his memory. Leaning against the window frame, his chin resting on his chest, he notices how everything that surrounds him is strange, he perceives the breath of each leaf that has yet to grow on the bare branches, and the breeze that has sprung up, bringing with it the scent of moist earth. There is amazement in his eyes when he observes his hands, and the displaced chair, alone in the semidarkness of the kitchen with the almost metaphysical quietude of an abandoned object, and Polanski purring on top of the fridge. He reaches the chair and falls into it. The cat discerns a line of shadow from which emanates something akin to a smile, and it closes its eyes again, because
drip
,
drip
,
drip
, the bathroom faucet is dripping into the bathtub, each drop crashing onto the ceramic surface, just as the drops of rain,
drip
,
drip
,
drip
, crashed against the floor of the porch on the night the woman thought she saw Laura in the hallway.
    The cat mewed in the