Madrid. It is before 8 AM and the sky is cloudy. It is a Sunday morning in early September. We are in the barrio of Salamanca, the most expensive area in the center of the city. I can see a woman in high heels perched on the window ledge of a brick building, some four floors above a courtyard. The building is modern compared to its neighbors, built in the 1950’s; those that abut it date from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The woman is blond and even at a distance I can tell she is dressed fashionably. She is holding on to the bricks around the window. She is edging her way along the ledge to an open landing, about a meter away from the window. If she stretches, she can just reach the edge of the wall and pull herself into the open stairwell.
I am standing on my roof terrace, peering over the edge, watching the woman.
She is a thief.
A handbag is strung over her shoulder. I am certain that it contains the jewelry that she has stolen from the apartment whose window she has just climbed out of.
I think about yelling at her, about calling the police. I am afraid, though, that if I do the first, it may startle her and she could lose her footing – the high heels she is wearing are far from suitable for second story work. I think about the risk of her falling. Her life would be forfeit if she did lose her balance, the courtyard below is paved with limestone slabs and it is a drop of 30 or 40 feet. If I elect the second course of action, without startling her by calling out, and I just call the police, by the time they come she will be long gone. I muse that the purpose of their response will change radically to an investigation of death by misadventure from presumed thievery if I do yell and she loses her grip and crashes onto the stones below.
A few seconds only have passed and the woman climbs safely onto the landing. She straightens her dress, I notice that she is tall and slender; whether she is pretty I can’t determine, her features are too vague at this distance. I am certain she is Eastern European, probably a Romanian. Or perhaps I am wrong? I have deducted her ethnicity from my experience of the city. It is full of economic migrants; many of them work – as plumbers, carpenters, electricians, maids, waitresses – but many are criminal, pick-pockets, muggers and, more daringly, robbers who climb into carelessly open windows, left so by their tenants, seemingly secure because they are several floors above the street.
In an instant the blond thief moves off down the stairs and I know that within a few seconds more she will be at street level and out of the building. She will make her way down Ayala, which is empty at this hour, to Serrano where there are already a few pedestrians on their way to early Mass or to buy a loaf of bread or a newspaper. She will blend in and vanish.
There is no time for me to go down from our seventh floor roof terrace and around the corner to pursue her; among other things, I am in my bath-robe and I would surely lose her trail if I stopped to change. The alternative, scurrying down the street in my bathrobe and slippers, is embarrassing and I discount the option. I ask myself if my behavior is actually cowardice and am I just looking for excuses for my inaction?
My early morning coffee on the roof, usually a time of inchoate, multi-directional musing, has turned into a period of singular reflection. How have I behaved during this drama? What did I see? Why have I chosen to interpret it the way that I did? Have I witnessed a crime? I saw a woman leave an apartment in an unorthodox manner; she climbed along a ledge and I concluded that she was a jewelry robber, a second-story woman if you will. But, was she? Could she have simply been the resident of the apartment and lost her key which in this case was required for both opening and closing the door, inside or out?
That line of speculation is spurious, I move back from the edge of existentialism. I know that she is a thief and that I witnessed the last moments of her crime – the escape. I have never seen her before. No one would take the risk of death like she had if they weren’t up to no good. There remain a couple of scant possibilities: Perhaps she was leaving a lover? Perhaps she murdered someone inside the apartment and by climbing out of the window she supposed that suspicion would be directed towards someone other than her?
The sun has risen higher and the chilly temperature of the dawn has given way to a pleasant warmth that I can feel through the terry cloth of my robe. My shoulders are relaxed as I lean on the wall that encloses our roof-top garden. I take my coffee and turn away from the scene of the crime and move back to my chair. I sit and look up. The sky this morning is calm. There are a few cirrus clouds scudding about, propelled by winds several thousand feet above the calm at ground level, diverting me by their shape-shifting. I can no longer see the neighboring building, the open window that has been violated is now a mental picture only and what I’ve just witnessed is already fading into a mind imprint that seems unreal. It will be a memory that one morning, this morning, months later, will, without conscious thought, float to the surface of my ruminations.
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