You have to see him there on the streets of an old neighborhood in Madrid; you have to look for him, young and tanned, with an open white shirt, specked with some paltry design, a style out of fashion, and with his blue jeans, as he hurries along. You have to see him knowing that his name is Abdul Azad, that he is from Tangiers, and that his name, at this very moment, is rattling around in the head of someone else, who, two blocks from there, has laid a trap for him while Abdul walks along between hope and fear among the blurring colors that mottle the parked cars and filthy storefronts.
And try to imagine what we will never know for sure: what old grudge (since it did not stem from us) and what precise urgency are at the root of everything that is going to happen today, Sunday, within the next ten minutes, in apartment 3L, in the alleyway off 11 Ángel Street, where Rashid is holding a pistol in his right hand.
The only details we have at our disposal are these: 1. That Abdul Azad, nineteen years old, and Rashid Azad, twenty-eight, are brothers. 2. That the minutes pass leaving beads of sweat on their brows, which some time ago in a market in Tangiers were furrowed in tense disagreement. 3. That Abdul rounds the first block while Rashid carefully slides the magazine into the butt of the gun, his hands trembling. 4. That Abdul and Rashid are both thinking about the fate of Abdul. 5. That Rashid releases the safety on the pistol, which he places on the table, as Abdul makes his way past the final corner of the second block. 6. That ten minutes have passed.
With this information it will be much easier to be witnesses to the following events. We will see, with the blue clarity of an April Sunday, Abdul standing before the intercom of a closed doorway with a wooden door, its varnish scarred and pockmarked. And we’ll see that Abdul presses the metal button to ring apartment 3L, which prompts a buzz, followed by a pause, and then a voice.
Rashid tells him to come up, and the door opens. Abdul’s body feels the humidity of the hallway; his spirit, the shadow.
There is nothing to hear but a block of silence, penetrated by the faint clatter of Abdul’s steps as he climbs the wooden stairs to the first floor. The building does not have an elevator; what it does have, though, is a tremulous yellowish light, which it gives off once you press the switch on the landing. Abdul does.
There are still two floors to go. As if it were some faraway music, the foreign odor of a stew, which someone has seasoned with pork fat and soup bones, wafts over to him. We recognize the scent, the stew is familiar to us. While we busy ourselves thinking about where it is coming from, whetting our appetites, Abdul is arriving at the door of apartment 3L.
He looks at the painted door, brown and chipped; he fixes his gaze on the pagan symbol of Christ nailed to the center of a crucifix and set on a plaque on the doorframe where two names appear, those of the presumably deceased Don Antonio Jiménez Cuevas and his wife Doña Antonia.
But he’s more worried about finding out what’s happening on the other side of the door, inside a space that he does not know and which will shortly assume volume and shape before his eyes. He is trying to imagine (in vain) what fate lies in wait for him in one of the rooms once he takes a seat to speak with his brother.
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