Morning comes and she’s irate. It’s how she normally reacts when these kinds of things happen. She’s mad at everything: at herself, at the heat, the sheets, the stifling air, the world. And she’s also mad at Osvaldo, it has to be said, in part because he’s the first person she sees and the most propitious to rage against, to unload her frustrations; and in part because Osvaldo, in the same room between the same sheets, under the same heat of the same summer, slept like a baby—relaxed, content, snoring—while she suffered through the night, wide awake.
The day starts thus: nothing goes well for Florencia and nothing’s going to. She finds the bread damp, the coffee watery, the butter tasteless. Osvaldo knows her well—three years together isn’t nothing—he knows it’s best to leave the house for a while, put a little distance between the two of them, leave Florencia alone and come back later, when she’s feeling better. When she’s had a chance to get at least a bit of rest.
No doubt she’ll be able to sneak in an afternoon nap. An hour, hour and a half, that should be enough. Osvaldo can come back around four or four-thirty and the two will get back to the life they share together. In the meantime, he descends to town, has breakfast in the bar on Anselmo, ambles around for a while, buys a couple things, eats a quick lunch in the service station dining room amongst the travelers and truckers and regulars.
He’s back at four. Florencia isn’t asleep nor has she been able to sleep. He sees her from outside the house; she doesn’t notice him approach. He watches her head to the garden out back, maniacally blandishing the pruning shears as if they were the sword of judgment day. What she does with them couldn’t strictly be called pruning; with furious snips she annihilates the flowers and creepers she herself had kept and cultivated for so long. It’s not hard for Osvaldo to see what’s happening—she’s trying to tear everything down. So he hangs back and decides to wait a little longer. Florencia’s insomnia hasn’t abated yet.
He finds things to occupy himself in town, or he walks around aimlessly, until night finally starts to fall. Then he trudges back up to the house; but Florencia still hasn’t been able to sleep. It’s clear as soon as he leans in the front door, sees her venomous reaction—she hasn’t slept at all and she’s not going to. So Osvaldo backs away, heads to the street and says again to himself that he’s going to have to simply wait it out. There’s not a thing he can do while Florencia’s insomnia persists. If she can’t get some rest, if she can’t get her head together, he’ll have to leave her be, for now.
Osvaldo waits, under the open sky, as night deepens. From outside the house he can hear Florencia’s desperation, her furious insults directed at the entire world and no one in particular. It starts to get late, very late, and Florencia can’t get to sleep. Osvaldo fits himself into the crook of a tree. And even if he's uncomfortable, and even if it’s only for short bursts, Osvaldo is able to nod off. Not Florencia, however. He can hear her wailing, he can hear her breaking things inside the house. She’s still awake. She’ll spend another night the same way she spent the previous.
The following morning, Osvaldo can see, can hear how the situation has worsened. Florencia is beside of herself because she can’t sleep. He makes a move toward coming inside, but he regrets it. He knows now there’s no other remedy at all for what’s happening except for Florencia to sleep, but she’s not going to be able to sleep. The heat is relentless and it has no plans to relent. What clouds there are in the sky, even those that are a little darker, have no effect at all on the heat of this summer.
Osvaldo goes down to the little village again, but even though he’d skipped dinner the previous night, he doesn’t think about breakfast. Instead he decides to go see Matilde, Florencia’s older sister. He tells Matilde what’s happening. Matilde is aware of the problem and understands Osvaldo’s worry. She explains to him what he already knows: that the only thing he can do is wait it out. Oscarcito, Matilde’s husband, listens to the entire conversation and nods in agreement. Florencia won’t talk to anyone. She won’t take a pill and she won’t talk to anyone. Any approach and any offer of help will do nothing but make her even more nervous, will do nothing but exacerbate the problem. Leave her alone and wait for it to pass—that’s the formula to follow.
They invite Osvaldo to stay with them. Luckily they’ve got an extra room they can offer. Osvaldo can’t just hang around another day, they reason, wandering the streets, and he can’t possibly sleep outside again, lumped against a tree like a beggar. He needs a shower and a change of clothes. Oscarcito lends him a clean shirt before heading off for work. That afternoon, Matilde says she can go and check on Florencia. Osvaldo accepts the offer and thanks her. He waits for Matilde to come back with a mixture of anxiety and torment that he doesn’t quite understand. It’s as if he’s also afraid—it’s something that feels like fear—about Matilde coming back. Oscarcito gets home from work before Matilde. He tries to offer Osvaldo some encouragement: most likely, he says, Matilde found her sister asleep, and now everything will go back to normal.
But Matilde returns and Oscarcito was wrong: Florencia still can’t sleep. She laid down and tried but sleep once more proved elusive. Maybe she’ll get some shut-eye tonight, in the silence of the house, nothing to bother her. But no, the silence and the nothing have the opposite effect, they make the insomniac even more desperate, they make it much worse. The night passes and Florencia doesn’t sleep. Matilde comes back with the news a little before midday, because she’d gone up to the house again, to see about her sister. And she’d brought some clothes for Osvaldo, and also his electric razor and a change of shoes. Osvaldo thanks her. This week he hasn’t had to get down to the store; his partner, Albornoz, said he’d take care of everything. But he decides to go anyway, today, to have something to do, to distract himself.
That night, Osvaldo goes back to the house. He sees Florencia through the window. It’s obvious she still hasn’t slept. He wants to stay there, close to her, even if it is outside, even if he has to cozy up to the tree again like the first night, but he resists the urge. He has to wait until Florencia can sleep again, that’s all there is to it. So he gloomily descends back to town, toward Matilde and Oscar’s house. He eats dinner with the two. The three hardly say a thing to one another.
Benicia, the maid, works in Matilde and Oscar’s house. And she also works in Florencia and Osvaldo’s house. She goes to each house a couple times a week. What she says is what Osvaldo has feared the most: that Florencia’s insomnia still hasn’t abated. Several days have come and gone now and it hasn’t let up. “And how does she seem to you, Benicia?” Osvaldo asks, his voice trembling. Benicia says that she seems calm, very tired but calm. Haggard, sunken-eyed, yes, and very pale, but in any case not too awful. Of course, she can’t sleep, Benicia says. Nothing in the world can compel her to sleep.
Osvaldo decides that this calmness has to be, without a doubt, the prelude to the end of her insomnia. Now composed, she’ll finally be able to slip into unconsciousness. This hope galvanizes him. But days pass, more days pass, too many days, and Florencia still can’t get to sleep. Matilde told him as much, Oscarcito told him as much, Benicia told him, Osvaldo himself approached the house to spy on Florencia and he saw it with his own eyes. Florencia still hasn’t slept.
Osvaldo and Albornoz’s business is selling farm equipment. People come through their shop every day, most of whom the two know well, though there is the occasional new face. The story now brings in one of those familiar acquaintances, the Mastrangelo’s kid. There’s a young man who’s been visiting Florencia, he says. The young man has been seen going up the path that leads nowhere but to the house. They’ve seen him go in, they’ve seen him there inside, they’ve seen him leave later on. Osvaldo doesn’t bother to ask who this young man is supposed to be. Instead, he thinks something else: that by the end of a few of these visits, exhausted and maybe even satiated, Florencia will finally be able to get some sleep. And life can go back to how it was before.
Osvaldo doesn’t approach the house again. It’s better that way. Why provoke a situation that will no doubt turn ugly, maybe even aggressive? Matilde goes to check on her sister periodically and when she comes back she updates him, as does Oscarcito. Benicia goes to the house twice a week. The news is always the same: Florencia still hasn’t gotten any sleep. No sleep? No sleep. Not even a little? Not even a little. She’s still completely sleep-deprived. The rumors about the kid that comes to visit turn out to be true—it’s Mauricio, the Ledesmas’s youngest. He’s even spent a few nights with Florencia, there in the house. Nights she nonetheless passed without having slept.
The day of the big rain arrives—an apocalyptic storm. But after a relief as brief as it is deceptive, the heat reasserts itself, even strengthens. Osvaldo thinks with this it will be even more difficult for Florencia to be able to get some sleep. Those nights when the temperature never wavers create a general type of insomnia, so what hope does Florencia have, who’s more sleep-deprived, whose insomnia is worse than anyone else’s?
One night, Matilde approaches Osvaldo and says she’d like to have a talk with him. She’s frank—she’s not looking to make the situation more complicated than it already is, but it’s starting to become a nuisance still having him there, both for her and for Oscar. They need their routines; they miss their intimacies. Osvaldo understands. He can’t blame her for it. On the contrary, he tells her how much he appreciates the support, the refuge they’ve provided him. Matilde says that she talked with the Ortiz widow about the situation, that the Ortiz widow has a nice room available in the hostel that she’ll let him have for half the price, no problem, until high season, of course. Matilde gives Osvaldo a hug. She tells him to stay calm—if she, Matilde, and if not she then Oscarcito, and if neither of them then if Benicia becomes aware that Florencia has finally gotten to sleep, they’ll run over to the hostel immediately to let him know.
The room in the hostel is nice: modest but clean. The Ortiz widow lives there like a shadow, the shadow she started to become the day Ortiz died. Her guests offer her company, the occasional conversation. And the view from the room is wonderful: a terrain of lush trees and a slice of road in the distance, where he sees the cars that will never turn off into the town zoom past.
Things are going good with the business. He and Albornoz get along well. Osvaldo spends most of the day there. Sometimes he’s able to distract himself with work to such an extent that, once the day is over and he’s pulled down the blinds and he’s turned off the lights, he starts on his way back to the house, back to Florencia, to the life they’ve always had, where later they’d go to sleep, the two of them, like always. This illusion is broken of course when it isn’t his own house Osvaldo returns to but the Ortiz widow’s hostel, to sit there staring (at the tops of trees, at cars passing by), to sit there waiting (for Florencia to finally get to sleep).
One Thursday afternoon, Benicia walks into the store.
“Mr. Osvaldo,” she says as she comes in.
Osvaldo is happy to see her.
“Mr. Osvaldo,” she says again. “Florencia is pregnant.”
And having said this, Benicia turns around and leaves. She doesn’t even say goodbye. Osvaldo watches her: watches her walk to the door, watches her leave, watches as her figure is lost past the end of the block. Pregnant? he thinks. With whose baby? he thinks. With Mauricio’s, of course, the Ledesmas’s youngest. No doubt with Mauricio’s, the young man she’s been sleeping with. Osvaldo nods, content; he even lets a little smile escape. Pregnancies tire out the body, he thinks, the body and the mind, a woman passes through months of indolence and drowsiness, months of exhaustion, of weakness and lethargy. No insomnia can match it: none, it’s impossible. There’s no way she won’t sleep, eventually. It’s merely a question of time, now. It’s merely a question of waiting.
