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At this time of night, the armored helicopters fly over the city, the bats flutter in the office windows, and the rats scurry among the desks engulfed in darkness, all the desks but one, his, with the computer turned on, the only one that’s on at this hour. The clerk feels a swift brushing against his shoes, a faint, fleeting squeak that continues on its way along the carpet and slips away into the blackness. He moves his eyes from the computer screen. He sees the winged shadows in the night outside. Then he checks his pocket watch, stacks some files, places the checks that the boss will need to sign tomorrow in a folder, and gets up to leave. The slowness of his movements isn’t due only to fatigue. Also to sadness.
The computer takes a while to flicker off. At last the screen grows dark, sighs. Carefully he arranges his work implements for the following day: pens, inkwell, stamps, stamp pad, eraser, pencil sharpener, and letter opener. He gives the letter opener preferential treatment. He polishes it. The letter opener looks harmless. But it could end up being a weapon. He looks harmless, too. Appearances can be deceiving, he says to himself.
He likes to think that, despite his meek character, under the right circumstances he might be fierce. If the proper circumstance presented itself, he could be someone else. Nobody is what they seem to be, he thinks. It’s merely a matter of the right opportunity coming along and allowing him to reveal what he’s capable of. This line of reasoning helps him put up with the boss, his co-workers, and his own family. No one knows who he is–not at the office and not at home. And if he considers that he doesn’t know himself either, it makes him feel dizzy. One of these days they’ll see. When they least expect it. It frightens him to dwell on the fact that, just as his boss, his co-workers, and his family don’t know what he might be capable of, he doesn’t know either. Sometimes when he’s copying the boss’s signature—and he copies it to perfection—he wonders who he is. He copies the boss’s signature, secretly. Just because one person can copy another doesn’t guarantee that he is the Other. More than once he’s asked himself who he is, who he can become, if he can become someone else, but it scares him to find out. More than once he’s thought about forging the boss’s signature on a check, cashing it, and running away. If he hasn’t done it yet, he reasons, it’s because he has no one to share the haul with. An extraordinary deed should be motivated by passion. In movies the hero always has a motive: a woman. If he were crazy in love with a woman, he wouldn’t hesitate.
He puts away his working implements, each one in its place. He arranges them with fanatical precision. And every so often he looks behind him. He looks at the desk behind his, where his closest co-worker sits. Although he’s not his colleague’s subordinate and has tasks demanding fewer responsibilities, one day, when the clerk is no longer there, that man will surely be the one to occupy his desk.
On more than one occasion the clerk has caught him writing in a notebook. When the other man noticed he was being observed, he stashed the notebook in one of his desk drawers, flashing an obsequious, embarrassed smile. At last he confronted him. What are you writing, he asked. Frightened, the colleague replied that it was a diary, that he kept a diary, a personal one. The clerk didn’t know what to say. Keeping a diary is a woman’s thing, he thought. Maybe his co-worker was gay. He didn’t look it, but he might be. With other people, you can’t tell. Keeping a diary sounds very interesting, he stammered. It had never occurred to him that the life of someone who spends his entire existence at a desk could be interesting, he thought. But he didn’t say it. One night like this, alone in the office, he rummaged through the drawers of the desk behind him. The notebook wasn’t there. Then he imagined that there must be something directed against him in those pages. It was quite possible that his co-worker had been assigned to track his movements. If that were true, he said to himself, even though he had always thought of himself as a helpful colleague and an ordinary citizen, he now found himself under surveillance. After a while he calmed down: if his co-worker had been an agent and he a suspect, it wouldn’t have been too long before he disappeared. The roles had been reversed. He’d gone from being observed to being the observer. His swift turn and the other man’s haste in closing the notebook with that apologetic little smile was a game that eventually bored him. Since then he’d been convinced that his colleague, if he could, employing that same little smile, would take advantage of the tiniest error on his part just to move up one desk. Around here nobody can trust his own shadow. And the co-worker behind him, he thinks, is his shadow. A threatening shadow, even if he does flash a friendly grin and is always ready to work on any file the clerk happens to toss his way.
The clerk focuses on the letter opener. If he plunged it into his colleague’s jugular, it would be lethal. He upbraids himself for these sorts of fantasies. They debase him, he realizes. They make him feel vile. As vile as the others. Because deep down, he’s convinced that he’s better than the others. If the right opportunity came along, he could prove that he’s above the rest and that his superiority, to put it bluntly, consists of not pulling the rug out from under someone else’s feet just to garner a raise, a promotion. If he considers himself better than everybody else it’s precisely because in the years he’s been here, he’s never tried to make himself stand out at the cost of harming the next guy. Not only that, he says to himself, but his behavior could be considered a stubborn desire to go unnoticed. Deep down, he reflects, if, in spite of his seniority in his position, he’s never been the object of punitive action and still remains at his desk, it’s because of his way of fitting in, which has ensured that no one takes too much notice of him. Sometimes he wonders whether, in order to have his colleagues think him harmless, he hasn’t had to convince himself of the same thing first. When he reaches this point in his ruminations, he grows bitter. There’s still the possibility that, after exerting so much effort to make himself appear like a man incapable of killing a fly, he’s really become that man. But, at the same time, he thinks that anyone like him, with the talent to think of two contradictory ideas simultaneously, is not just superior to the rest but also a person to be feared, someone who, when least expected, can commit an act of rage that will leave the others to confront their own cowardice. Watch out, he says to himself. Watch out for me. Because I’m someone else. The fact that I don’t show it now doesn’t mean that, if an opportunity arises, others have the right to put me down. And among the others, the one who should be the most careful, of course, is my co-worker.
When he’s finished straightening up his desk, he walks over to the coat rack, takes down his overcoat. It embarrasses him to wear this overcoat, which, besides being threadbare, has lost its shape over the years. But as cold as it’s been these past few weeks, with the temperature dropping more every day, he has no choice but to wear it. Every morning, before entering the building, he takes it off, folds it, and keeps it folded over his arm, revealing the new lining he had put in last year at the Bolivian tailor shop in his neighborhood. At the office, looking to both sides, he stealthily hangs it up on a distant coat rack, in a corner, way in back. And he walks away immediately. In his haste he fears that someone may notice his uneven gait. In general, he manages to minimize his limp with a measured way of walking. But when he leaves his overcoat on the coat rack, it’s hard for him not to rush off, as if the overcoat belonged to someone else. However, at this time of night, alone in the office, he takes down the overcoat and slips into it calmly. He turns off the lamp, and, shrouded in darkness, decides to leave. He can walk blindly between the desks: so great is his familiarity, his instinctive memory of the place, the cabinets, the nooks, and odd corners.
But certain sounds stop him in his tracks. It’s not the rats. It’s footsteps.
