After so many months, the evening walk was an everyday routine, an invariably wander in the streets of the neighborhood and nearby parks.
The custom traces itineraries. Thus, although one is allowed to go at random, the steps themselves conformed to the gray monotony of the sidewalks and always led to the same destinations, with identical returns.
Except for sporadic encounters with a neighbor, or unimportant incidental conversations, nothing ever happened.
But that Saturday afternoon - the same could have occurred on a Sunday or a Tuesday - there was a change.
Like so many other days throughout the tedious and endless period of convalescence, I had gone for a walk around the neighborhood. Once back, trying to put the key in the door to enter the old building where I lived, I saw him. Something about him caught my attention, and so I watched him with some curiosity.
He came to my side and stood there as if waiting on me to open the door to enter the courtyard. I did so with a gesture inviting him to cross the threshold, which he did fairly quickly and without the slightest sound, as if made of mist or the intangible essence of dreams. Then he took a little while next to the mailboxes, but never opened one of them. For a moment I thought that he might be a deliverer of advertising, but I rejected this idea, noting that he had no papers in his hands.
I walked past him, muttering a dull "farewell" and received no reply (a very common thing in this beginning of the twenty-first century) and began to climb the forty-eight steps that separated me from my home, from the terrible and unyielding loneliness that I have stiffly built over the last two years.
I soon perceived his light footsteps, undecided, behind me. I was growing increasingly convinced that he did not belong to the building, I feared that I had been followed by a thief (a few days ago an event of that sort had happened to a neighbor in the third floor), but I found that thought insanely absurd. The boy was slim, about six feet and three inches tall. The traits of his porcelain face made it difficult to think of him holding a knife or a gun.
I rejected this view and went up slowly, with that slowness that is given by the exhaustion, the exhaustion born from the infinite repetition of the daily acts. When I finally got near the door of my house, he stood behind me, less than four feet away, looking down in silence.
I felt awkward. I did not know whether to introduce the key in the lock or turn around and go down again forty-eight steps, or maybe face him and ask for the significance of the persecution or staying there. Neither option satisfied me. I was sure I would fluff, regardless of what I ultimately decided to do.
Leisurely, hoping it was him who would be forced to make a decision; I reached into my pocket and took a few countless seconds to find the keychain. Then, with an almost ceremonious parsimony, I selected the indicated key and put it into the lock, turning twice and finally opening the door gradually, with apparent calm (but my heart was a battlefield, a clash of conflicting feelings without solution).
When I was inside my house, I turned a little to check his reaction. He was still there, across the doorway, motionless, looking at me with those blue eyes, deeply, as if waiting for an invitation (I was reminded, don’t know why, those stories of vampires, in which the vampire cannot enter a home without the permission of the dwelling).
But his eyes did not hold a plea, or a question. Nothing. His eyes were a haven of calm water. As if his presence out there, right beyond the door, was the most natural thing in the world.
It is impossible to specify the duration of that scene. I looked at him, questioning his eyes, constantly making difficult conjectures about their motives, hoping he would say something, trying to convince me of the desirability of closing the door and leave him in that same spot with his unbearable silence and his short, shaggy blond hair and the abysmal mystery of his pupils that kept looking at me. He was waiting on a gesture.
The bad thing about decisions is that one should always choose a path and discard the rest. One never knows what might have happened if one has chosen otherwise. The suspicion of having chosen the worst option is frustrating. Consequently, I did not shut the door; neither did I invite him to pass. I turned around and entered the hall, compelling him to decide.
He did not hesitate for even an instant. Askance, I corroborated that, from the inside he closed the door very delicately, as if trying to avoid the slightest noise. I smiled.
