The Unexpected at Number 10
By Calders, Pere
The unexpected comes to number 10 early in the morning. A couple of policemen armed with shotguns and two members of the social brigade threaten to batter down the first door on the second floor. One policeman shouts in a voice immediately identifiable as an officer’s. It’s his mission in life.
The drowsy monarchist emerges, somewhat taken aback. He is wearing a white suit and straw hat, no doubt the second straw hat of the season.
“It seems incredible, such an unhappy man…” the concierge remarks to a third-floor resident (where an adulterous drama is mounting in secret).
The twelve families who live in the building recognize the immense significance of his arrest. The fact is nothing unusual has happened from top to bottom floor in twenty-five years and, victims of their lack of expertise, they are ill equipped to deal with something different. That morning, the up and down of items, breakfast and newspapers coincides with the police visit, and the neighbors seek each other out and the insights gossip offers.
The unexpected continues. It has apparently come to stay. It shifts from door to door unraveling old situations and creating new.
Two shots ring out on the third floor. Someone has fainted: an old Cuban woman, obviously unable to withstand any more excitement in one day. Loss of consciousness interrupted her fulsome eulogy to the arrested monarchist. Any other day of the year, her fainting would have been properly celebrated. But all attention is now riveted by the shots from the third floor.
A band of neighbors, appointed by their own self-importance, walk up extremely gingerly. Their progress is halted halfway by the appearance of the third floor gentleman coming downstairs alarmed and brandishing a pistol he suddenly throws away, muttering words that rubbish his wife’s moral standing. In full flight he lets slip a remark which reveals the married couple on the third floor isn’t what people thought, and adultery makes an unexpected appearance. How extraordinary!
The shots hit no one, and the wife walks out on the landing flourishing a wine bottle: the least gesture she makes is under the influence of alcohol (so much is evident). Immediately after, she spots a ghost embedded in the enamel work on the staircase wall, and launches the bottle at it, that shatters into a thousand shards. A rabid attack of nerves then lays her low on the floor.
The residents’ committee, halted momentarily in its tracks by the stir from above, re-forms when silence resumes. They all head upstairs, pick up the lady and place her on a bed in her flat. Half an hour later, the third-floor gentleman arrives contritely. He’s holding an unwrapped, fake pearl necklace. He clearly wishes it to be known his fingers are clinging to a truce. At a stroke interest in the incident evaporates, and each neighbor withdraws to his flat.
Nonetheless, the unexpected, for once in an eternity, holds sway over number 10. Soon after, the cogs in the brain of the old woman on the first floor, which have malfunctioned throughout her lifetime, seize up entirely and lock on a single idea. She steps furtively on to the stairs, knocks at her neighbors’ door and invites them to witness one of the wonders of the world. The neighbors, who’ve reined in their imaginations in the course of the day, follow the old woman to her flat where, after locking and bolting her front door, she leads them to a chest and points to a useless spinning top inside a glass cheese dish.
“I found it in church. It’s much finer than it looks. But don’t think I took it illegally. Ever since it came into my possession, I ask everyone who comes to our flat: ‘Have you come for a spinning- top?’ Nobody so far has claimed it back, so it is definitely mine.”
“It was obviously meant to be,” remark the neighbors pretending to admire the top before making their exit. The old woman’s lunacy would have astounded the whole staircase in other circumstances, but today it constitutes mere light relief.
Besides, while a number of neighbors engage in the spinning-top adventure, the rest are brought running to their balconies prompted by bloodcurdling cries. A shopkeeper on the mezzanine, the source of the din, is whirling a cat around apparently about to fling it on to the road. Which indeed he does, not before the animal’s claws posthumously take out a handsome chunk of his cheek. Then the shopkeeper bawls with a vengeance calling for all present to show a little curiosity.
After that, the unexpected permits an hour’s truce, time enough to assess the situation and take up positions.
Chance has also decided that the eccentric scientist on the fourth floor would today discover what he was looking for. He steps out on the stairs exclaiming jubilantly, one hand holding steaming black stuff, that was apparently what he’d been trying so tenaciously to concoct (finally, the neighbors have a clue to what he was up to). The scientist takes a huge leap on to the next landing, his legs suddenly get into a twist, and hurtles down, his head violently splitting a wooden bench before he’s spread-eagled. First on the scene is the loudmouthed shopkeeper. He remarks portentously: “He’s a bit one track-minded. Although things are happening today and he’d not shown his face…”
He gesticulates in disgust at the scientist’s black stuff and orders the concierge “to throw that filth away at once.” She obeys, while people remove the inventor’s inanimate body.
This latest incident has upset hardly anyone. As the day proceeds and incidents accumulate, the residents at number 10 have become inured. By mid-afternoon they are convinced only really sensational incidents can make an impact. Hence the episode of the elderly lady and the lift causes hardly a ripple. Present on the stairs as an occasional visitor, clad severely in black, spangled in sequins at various key points, wearing a hat crying out to be used for target practice, the lady is tetchy, touchy and overbearing. She enters the lift intoning a prayer to her personal integrity. However, the lift has a character of its own and is oblivious to social proprieties, and stops suddenly between landings. The lady tries unsuccessfully to open the door and frantically hits at the glass in the lift with her umbrella; everything is covered in broken glass. She immediately emits agonizing howls that rent the soul. The neighbors gather on the stairs and encourage her to stay calm while they mount a rescue. Seeing the caged lady’s startled state, one lady suggests supplying her somehow or other with a medicinal cordial. The lady receives her first succor, a small bottle on the end of a long cane, through a hole in the glass. But her mind’s blank, she’s not with it and arbitrarily sprinkles the liquid on her head like eau de cologne. When it is possible to set the lady free, they haul her out on their arms.
Incident dizzily follows incident. A fourth-floor resident is celebrating her birthday and her husband gives her a pressure cooker that is “a hundred percent safe” according to the stimulating accompanying brochure. In practice, the cooker demonstrates a terrible tendency to be independent. Its innards quietly reach record pressure. When it starts to hiss, signaling it’s come to the boil, it screams stridently; but this is its swan song, its farewell to life. The final explosion inflicts severe burns on the neighbor and impales a handle in her generous husband’s forehead.
A harmless mental defective has lived on the stairs for some time. He’s had a brainwave today: he severs a section of water pipe in order to make a flute.
When the flooding betrays his flash of ingenuity, the neighbors find him up to his knees in water playing a fiery military march on his lead flute. For a few moments, attention switches back to the third-floor adulterers. At the height of their orgy of reconciliation the couple have swallowed the fake pearl necklace in their wine. The man is barely strong enough to make it to the landing to ask for help. An ambulance dramatically picks up the passionate duo.
To maintain the momentum, one of the neighbors plans his own happening. An aging, squat and ugly dog, the property of a retired carabineri sergeant, is weak in the mind and puts its head through the wrought iron bars on the balcony to attract the attention of passersby. When it’s had enough and tries to withdraw, it falls victim to a nail on the rim of the balustrade and can’t retrieve its head out however hard it struggles. The terrified dog’s howls cut to the quick. No friend of lukewarm solutions, the former carabineri frantically tries to jerk the beast free. But the iron rim won’t yield its prisoner, and the forceful sergeant fills the dog’s head with lead, thus putting an end to its suffering.
An hour and a half of calm follows and this peace has the virtue of putting fear into every resident. All are resigned to the idea that the sequence of incidents must climax in a final, definitive catastrophe and that the later it happens the worse it will be.
So when they hear a big explosion on the staircase, in their heart of hearts, nobody is shocked. Each neighbor greets his respective pile of rubble with resignation. Only the old Cuban lady revolts against destiny; a most venerable image she’d hung over her headboard disappears with the explosion.
All the neighbors (seemingly the bang hurt no one) assemble on the stairs. They all concur in their comments: from first to last, they were expecting the big one, and “that” was just what had happened. They rush downstairs. The grand guignol aspect of the lobby, the concierge’s hideously contorted cubbyhole, set in a definitive rictus, satisfies their imagination. All believe with more or less conviction that this must the finale, the “end of the series” and in that expectation they begin a collective investigation. The piles of rubble still give off a strong stink of gas enabling the neighbors to determine the nature of the explosion. The concierge suddenly puts in an appearance, shouting out her son’s name. No one doubts the boy is buried under the rubble, and everyone starts searching frantically. In the midst of this activity, however, the porter’s son arrives downstairs, jumping two steps at a time, clean, combed and intact. As soon as he is able, he says there are thieves on the roof terrace, they’ve tied his father up and are stripping the clotheslines bare. A couple of female residents, slightly under the influence of the gas, take advantage of his news and faint. People are beginning to amass in front of number 10. They all agree that to stand and spectate, even for a few hours, is worth the candle. The small battle being waged on the roof ends with the thieves taking flight over the roofs with the clothes.
All in all everyone now realizes the final incident has yet to come. Each flat opens its front door and each landing has a permanent council of alert neighbors at the ready. The unexpected, however, while compressing twentyfive years of pent-up tasks into one day, has achieved little so far, and the neighbors are determined not to be caught napping. They make comments, expound theories, and try to gaze into the future. The mezzanine committee is particularly important, because of the presence of a celebrity: a schoolmaster fond of quotations and profound insights, an internationally renowned encyclopedic commentator who is also partial to predictions at which his fantasy excels. Self-engrossed, responsible, serious, sounding out the impending future, the man paces interminably from one end of the landing to another, not saying a word. He suddenly stops, convulses the committee and gives his diagnosis: “I have it. This house is one that will disintegrate…”
The unexpected meets a sudden death. The news spreads chillingly to every floor. Each individual pretends to pack up and start to flee but the revelation has come too late. The house groans, cracks and crashes, fragmenting into a huge neighborly stew.
-Translated by Peter Bush
PERE CALDERS (1912-1994) lived for more than twenty years in Mexico after escaping from Catalonia at the end of the Civil War. He is probably the best-known Catalan writer of short stories. In 1968 he published Tots els contes, but “The Unexpected at Number 10″ comes from his first volume, El primer arlequi, which appeared in 1936. A selection of his stories has been published in English: The Virgin of the Railway and Other Stories (Aris & Phillips, 1991).
Copyright Review of Contemporary Fiction, Inc. Spring 2008
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