Chapter Seven — The Mirror

He woke at five-forty by the habit of a man who had been waking at six in Hong Kong for five years, and the room was the room it had been the night before except that the pillow beside him had the long dent in it of a person who had not been in it for some time.

The light was the grey light that came up in the second-floor bedrooms of the house at that hour. The shutters were half open. He had not opened the shutters. Neither, he understood, had she.

He lay on his back and listened.

The house was doing what the house did at five-forty on a weekend, which was almost nothing. Somewhere a floorboard. Somewhere, farther, the cough of a boiler that had been coughing like that since his grandfather's time. He heard no other person.

He got up.

He had slept perhaps three hours. He had slept them well. He did not remember the middle of the night in the order in which it had happened. He remembered a thing and not another thing, and then something slower, and the small Galician rain that had started against the glass somewhere in the hour after it had happened, and that was enough. The rest he did not need.

He went into the bathroom.

#

The bathroom was the bathroom. The mirror over the basin had the small chip in its lower left that had been there since he had broken it against a cabinet door at fourteen. He turned on the tap. He washed his face. He dried it on the towel that was hanging in the same place Encarna had been hanging that same towel, he thought, since he had been in this bathroom for his tenth birthday.

He looked at himself.

The man in the mirror was a man who had been on planes for most of the last decade, and who had been his father's son before that, and who had, in the last three hours, been the lover of a woman ten years younger than he was in a country house in Galicia on the second night of her acquaintance with him.

He looked well. He did not look young.

"I am too old," he thought, "for this pace. I think I am too old."

He went back into the bedroom. He put on the shirt he had hung over the chair. He pulled on the trousers. He did not find his belt. His belt, he remembered, was in a shoebox in Madrid, because of the soldier.

He went downstairs.

#

The stairs were cold under his bare feet. The living room was the living room the morning after a party, which was to say the cushions had been straightened by someone — Encarna, probably, by three — and the glasses had been collected and the windows had been opened for one hour against the tobacco and then closed again. The room smelled of sugar and wood. On the leftmost sofa, under a blanket, slept one of his childhood friends, with one foot outside the blanket and one sock off. Jon did not look at him long enough to identify him. It did not matter. Someone would drive him home at ten.

The corridor to the kitchen was long. Jon walked it.

#

Maribel was at the kitchen table.

She was dressed. She was, specifically, in the grey travel coat she had been wearing when she had come to his door in Madrid the previous afternoon — not worn, just on, the way a woman wears a coat in a house that is not hers when she is considering something. Her hair was up. Her hands were around a cup. The cup contained black coffee, which she had evidently made herself from the old stovetop moka Encarna kept in the second drawer and not the filter machine that everyone else in the house used. She had put nothing in it. She had not taken any of the bread that was in the bread basket on the table. She had, he saw at a glance, been up for some time.

She did not look surprised to see him.

"Jon."

"Maribel."

She indicated the moka on the stove with a small tilt of the head.

"There is coffee."

"Thank you."

He took a cup from the rack. He poured from the moka. The coffee was the blackest coffee Encarna could be persuaded to permit in this kitchen, which was to say black by European standards and polite by Portuguese ones. He drank it standing at the counter.

She watched him.

#

He had, in his head, a number of things that were in principle available to be said. Most of them were questions. He said none of them.

She was the one who spoke.

"Your father said," she said, "that you import things from China."

Jon looked at her. The kitchen light was on behind her. The early morning outside the window was Galicia in April, grey and damp and about to rain again. The coffee in the cup in her hand had almost certainly gone cold by now. She had not taken another sip.

"I did," he said. "I do. I am not sure what I do now."

"What did you import."

"Many things. Lights. Electronics. Boards for small mechanical things. At the end, parts for other people who were making robots. Mostly it was the parts."

"Robots."

"The actuators. The drive trains. Pieces of legs, you could say. Pieces of arms."

"The capacitors in the brown box," she said, "would be for this."

Jon paused.

He had not, until that moment, registered that she had registered the box. The box had been in the back seat of a plane on a previous day and an hour and a half's flight from here. She had been in the right-hand seat in front of it. She had not turned her head when Jesus had put the box behind her.

"How did you—"

"Your father carried it in from the plane," she said. "He set it in the hall by the stairs. I looked at it on my way down. The brand on the foam is a Japanese brand I know. I studied it for a paper last year."

"You studied—"

"Mechanical engineering."

"I thought," Jon said carefully, "that you had told me you would be studying mechanical engineering within the year."

"I did tell you that," Maribel said. "I am going to. But I have done some of the reading."

She lifted the cold coffee to her lips. She held it there for a beat. She did not drink.

"Jon," she said.

"Maribel."

"You are going to want to talk to me about your idea."

"Am I."

"You are. You are not going to know, for a few weeks, that you want to. You do not have to know it yet. I am telling you."

Jon set his cup down on the counter.

He looked at the kitchen clock above the sink. It was five past seven. She had been awake, he now understood, for a long time.

"Okay," he said. "I will talk to you about my idea."

"Good," she said. "Not now. This weekend is not for that. But soon."

"Soon."

She put the cold coffee down on the table. She stood up. She walked past him without touching him. She stopped in the doorway to the corridor, a step away, and turned her head back over her shoulder just enough that he could see the line of her cheek.

"I have decided," she said.

"Have you."

She did not answer.

She went back upstairs.