Fiction: Antonio Muñoz Molina's ‘Your Steps on the Stairs'

Wall Street Journal

17-04-2025

What is the saddest sentence in literature? My candidate comes from the second volume of Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time': 'We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.'
In Antonio Muñoz Molina's 'Your Steps on the Stairs' the narrator—he is unnamed until the book's final pages—is in Lisbon, preparing his new apartment for the arrival of his wife, Cecilia. The couple lived together in New York City until the narrator lost his corporate job for reasons he leaves murky. Suffice it to say that he is happy to enter early retirement in a beautiful new city with his dog and the woman he loves.
So he hires a handyman to make countless improvements that will ensure Cecilia's comfort. Meanwhile he settles in to practice the 'craft' of waiting. He cleans; he reads (ominously, his book of choice is the polar explorer Richard Byrd's survival memoir, 'Alone'). To sharpen his anticipation, he sometimes lays out two settings at the dinner table. 'There's a moment when waiting reaches a kind of chemical purity,' he says. 'It's when I sit by the window and do nothing but wait.'
In a cool, controlled translation from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer, 'Your Steps on the Stairs' builds to a crescendo of suspense by enveloping the reader in the narrator's memories, obsessions and, it becomes increasingly clear, delusions. Though the absent Cecilia is enigmatic, we learn that she works as a neuroscientist, which allows Mr. Muñoz Molina to reflect on optical illusions and 'cognitive mirages.' As the narrator's unreliability becomes more pronounced, his grip on reality loosens and the story slides toward the outermost limits of self-deception. This novel possesses the eerie melancholy of a work of crime noir, where the nemesis is some truth too intolerable to face with open eyes.