The Street of the Three Beds by Roser Caminals-Heath

lived.
    From that moment on, Maurici’s movements became mechanical. He went in without greeting the doorkeeper, who gave him a puzzled look, and stopped at the foot of the stairway holding his breath. For some reason he couldn’t have explained, what happened next didn’t surprise him in the least. The woman climbed to the second floor, knocked on the door, and told the maid who opened: “Tell Mr. Aldabò Mrs. Prat is here.”
    * * *
    Maurici left the building, this time greeting the doorkeeper like an automaton, and walked past the first corner. At that point his mind drew a blank, basking in the privilege of not thinking at all; it simply vegetated and sifted reality through the senses: the trickle of the fountain in the garden that ran through the middle of the avenue, the warmth of the sun, the whisper of the leaves on the trees, a window that opened, a woman who carried a box of baked goods, a girl who left a scent of rose water as she passed him by on the broad sidewalk. He stood on the corner, in a contemplative state that enabled him to believe he could sit on the fence watching events unfold or even suspend them indefinitely. He lit a cigar and inhaled the blue smoke of the first puff. His memory traveled back to a remote December when the entire family had gathered at the midnight church service, waiting for the bells to toll the end of the nineteenth century. After the last ringing echo died out, eight minutes slipped past unrecorded by any watch or calendar; eight minutes that, poised between two centuries, didn’t exist; eight purely biological minutes without history or chronology, of which the world would make no mention and have no knowledge. Maybe the last eight minutes had also been unreal; maybe they too could be stuffed in that same sack of oblivion that remained closely tied and impermeable to the filtering of time.
    A gust of cool wind blew and closed the parenthesis with a shiver. His watch and brain were ticking again. He leaned against a building, bending his knee. Apparently Mrs. Prat—at last she had a name—knew his father. That had been the discovery of the day. Fine. There was no need to rush to premature conclusions. His father had contacts and stakes in many businesses in Barcelona. Was it so surprising that a manufacturer of silk stockings had dealings with a lingerie retailer? In principle, thiscircumstance had nothing to do with Rita. The fact that his mother periodically should send her seamstress to La Perla d’Orient was also to be expected: if Roderic Aldabò had shares in the business, it made sense that his domestic staff did the shopping there instead of going to the competition.
    In any case, he must consider what he’d been doing for the past few days as nothing but a game. An exciting game at times, he had to admit, but also an unsuitable one for his temperament and station in life. A game in which he pretended to be another Maurici walking in a different skin and living an alternative life, just as Don Quixote, when bored with his, set out in search of chivalric adventures on the plains of central Spain. It was impossible to take his incursions into the sordidly picturesque seriously: the afternoons spent at foul-smelling taverns, the ridiculous stakeouts under the stairway, the trailing of the two grotesque characters, the repetitive circular wanderings in the old city, the worthless data scribbled in his notebook. As he reviewed these recent activities, he judged them so childish and absurd that he almost had to repress a smile. Let’s face it, that was not the real Maurici: it was a clone that lived at his expense. What would his factory clients say if they knew that the other Maurici wasted his time and energy trying to decipher nonsensical riddles? And how his friends at the Equestrian would laugh if they saw him plunge into shabby surroundings for any purpose other than to titillate his taste buds! It was hard to believe