Mariela had to clap her hands in The Woman’s front yard to get her to come to the door, because the house didn’t have a doorbell. Josefina looked at the garden, more overgrown now, the roses dying from heat, the lilies drooping, rue plants everywhere grown to incredible heights. The Woman appeared on the threshold just when Josefina spotted the well, nearly hidden among the weeds, its white paint peeling to reveal the red brick underneath.
The Woman recognized them right away and ushered them in. It was as if she’d been waiting for them. The altar was still standing, but it had triple the offerings now, and a giant San La Muerte the size of a church crucifix; lights flashed intermittently inside its eye sockets, surely from a strand of electric Christmas lights. The Woman wanted to sit Josefina in the same armchair where she’d slept almost twenty years before, but she had to run to get a bucket because the retching had started. Josefina vomited up stomach fluids and she felt like her heart was blocking her throat, but then The Woman put a hand on her forehead.
“Breathe deeply, little one, breathe.”
Josefina did as she was told, and for the first time in many years she felt the relief of lungs full of air, free, no longer trapped behind her ribs. She felt like crying, like giving thanks; she was certain that The Woman was curing her. But when she raised her head to look her in the eyes, trying to smile with her jaws clenched tight, she saw sorrow and remorse on The Woman’s face.
“My child, it’s no use. When they brought you here, it was done. I had to throw it down the well. I knew the saints would never forgive me, I knew Añá would bring you back.”
Josefina shook her head. She was feeling better. What was the witch trying to tell her? Was she really old and crazy like Aunt Clarita had said? But The Woman stood up with a sigh, went over to the altar, and brought back an old photograph. She recognized it: her mother and her grandmother, sitting on either end of a sofa, and between them Mariela on the right and an empty space on the left, where Josefina should have been.
“I felt bad for them, so bad. All three of them with evil thoughts, gooseflesh, the damage of many years. I was out of my skin just looking at them, I was heaving; I couldn’t take that evil out of them.”
“What evil?”
“Old evil, child, evil that can’t be spoken,” The Woman made the sign of the cross. “Not even Christ of the Two Lights could defeat it, no. It was old. They were under attack. But you, child, were not. It didn’t attack you. I don’t know why.”
“What didn’t attack me?”
“Evils! They cannot be spoken.” The Woman brought a finger to her lips, asking for silence, and she closed her eyes. “I couldn’t take the rotten part out of them and put it in me because I didn’t have that kind of strength; no one does. I couldn’t make it flow out, I couldn’t clean it. I could only pass it on, and I did. I passed it to you, child, while you were sleeping there. San La Muerte said he wouldn’t hurt you as much, because you were pure. But the saint lied to me, or I misunderstood him. Those three wanted to pass it on to you, and they said they would take care of you. But they didn’t take care of you. And I had to throw it away. The photo, I threw it into the well. But we can’t get it back. I can’t ever take the evil out of you, because the evil is in your picture, in the water, and the photo has rotted away by now. The evils stayed there in your picture, stuck to you.”
The Woman covered her face with her hands. Josefina thought she saw Mariela crying, but she ignored her, trying to understand.
“They wanted to save themselves, child. This one too,” and she waved toward Mariela. “She was green, but already mean.”
Josefina stood up with what was left of the air in her lungs, with the new strength that fortified her legs. It wasn’t going to last long, she was sure, but please, let it be enough, enough to run to the well and throw myself into the rainwater, and please let it be bottomless so I can drown there with the photo and the betrayal. The Woman and Mariela didn’t follow her, and Josefina ran as fast as she could but when she reached the edge of the well her wet hands slipped, her knees grew stiff, and she couldn’t, she couldn’t climb up, and she barely managed to see the reflection of her face in the water before she collapsed to sit among the overgrown weeds, crying, choking, because she was so, so very afraid to jump.
Rambla Triste
Wisely, treacherously, that city
takes its revenge.
MANUEL DELGADO
It was possible that her stuffy nose—she always caught a cold on planes—was distorting her sense of smell; that had to be it, but once she blew her nose and could take in air, the smell got even worse. She didn’t remember Barcelona being so dirty. At least, she hadn’t noticed it on her first visit, five years ago. But it had to be a cold, maybe the stench of stagnant mucus, because for blocks at a time she smelled absolutely nothing, and then suddenly the odor attacked her and made her stomach heave violently. It smelled like a dead dog rotting beside the road, like rancid meat forgotten in the fridge and turned wine-purple. The smell would lie in wait, and then blasts of it would ruin the prettiest streets, the quaint alleys with clothes on lines from one balcony to another so you couldn’t see the sky. It even reached the Ramblas. Sofía looked intently at the tourists to see if their noses were wrinkled like hers, but none of them were visibly disgusted. Maybe she was imagining it because she didn’t like the city anymore. The narrow little streets that had seemed romantic before now made her feel afraid; the bars had lost their charm, and now reminded her of the ones in Buenos Aires, full of drunks who shouted or wanted to start up stupid conversations; the heat, which before had seemed so Mediterranean, dry and delicious, was now suffocating. But she didn’t want to talk about these new impressions with her friends; she didn’t want to be the typical haughty Argentine tourist superciliously pointing out all the defects of the paradise city.
She wanted to leave.
Maybe it was all because of the girl.
Five years earlier, Calle Escudellers had been packed end to end with junkies lying on the sidewalk on piles of their own dirty clothes. They weren’t there anymore; they must have been driven out by the police, by fines and citations, not to mention the trucks that cleaned the city all night, spraying water on any spot where a person might sit innocently and drink a beer and eat a kebab. Now you had to keep walking or go into the bars; the street was only for movement. Walking the route she knew through Raval, she avoided creepy Calle Robadors—dark and full of criminals, said the legend perpetuated by its name, which no one dared discredit—and she came to Marquès de Barberà, wider and better lit. A girl was walking ahead of her, somewhat unstable, with jeans too low and tight on her hips so her flaccid belly spilled out from under her short shirt—a roll of chalky, stretch-marked flesh that would have been easy to hide with a long, baggy shirt, but the girl clearly wasn’t worried about aesthetics. It was early, barely eight in the evening, but the street was oddly empty; not even the tourists from the hostel beside the internet café had come outside.
Suddenly the girl turned around, looked Sofía in the eyes, and said, with a thick Catalan accent but in very clear Spanish, “No puedo más.” I just can’t. Then, she pulled down her pants and defecated on the sidewalk, an explosive, painful diarrhea that made her scrunch up her face from the twisting cramps in her intestines. Then she collapsed against the wall. She missed falling into her own shit by a fraction of an inch.
Sofía tried to get her up, asked her where she lived, if she had a phone to call someone who could come and get her; she asked the girl what was wrong, what drugs she was on. But the girl only stared at her with frightened eyes, unable to speak. The smell was no longer imaginary and Sofía’s eyes teared up as she fought back her gag reflex. Ten minutes later two policemen came and took the girl away; Sofía answered the officers’ questions and stayed to be sure they treated her well, but she didn’t stick around waiting for someone to clean the st
reet. She lit a cigarette to banish the smell of shit, and she almost ran to Calle de la Cera, to Julieta’s apartment, where she was going to spend those ten days in Barcelona. She used her own key to get in. The building’s entrance was undergoing construction, because it had caught fire some months before. The lock on the front door didn’t work well, and some vagrants had come inside to sleep; the fire they lit to ward off the cold had gotten out of hand. Luckily, Julieta hadn’t been in the apartment when it happened, but she’d also had her own problems with fire. Just a year before, in the middle of winter, she’d ended up in the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning because the apartment’s heater didn’t have an exhaust to the outside.
The place where Julieta lived wasn’t really an apartment: it was an office that was rented out as housing, without a bathroom, just a shared toilet and sink in the hallway outside. But it was large by Barcelona standards, cheap, and since it was a “penthouse,” it had a balcony that was fantastic in summer. Sofía didn’t know what Julieta had come to Spain looking for, but probably neither did Julieta. She’d been there eight years now, making animated shorts and videos for whoever hired her. When she got bored, she took unemployment. She got bored often.
She was making a salad when Sofía arrived. Julieta had become vegetarian as soon as she got to Europe, among other reasons because her first home was a squat where eating meat was considered a mortal sin. At first, she embraced her new friends’ vegetarianism with militant passion. When she broke with them, disillusioned, she rejected the whole squatter lifestyle, except in the matter of nutrition. Sofía didn’t mind sharing her host’s diet; plus, she could always go downstairs to buy a delicious chicken or beef shawarma.
Sofía sat down on the red sofa that at night opened up to become a bed, and she told her friend about the girl and her diarrhea. Julieta tossed the salad and said that was normal for Barcelona.
“No other city in Spain has more crazy people. There aren’t as many in Madrid, and even fewer in Zaragoza; my brother says not in Seville either. It’s only here. Full of crazies on the loose, I don’t know.”
She served the salad onto two plates, sat at the table, and explained how that wasn’t all: the crazies also came out in certain seasons. The hair-clip lady, for example. She was a woman who wore so many ornaments on her head you almost couldn’t see her hair, and she only turned up in summer. The crazy guy with dreads, a fifty-something man who used a stick to bang on the metal shutters over closed businesses—he only showed up for the holidays, around Christmas. An awful racket, said Julieta; the banging sounded like gunshots and sometimes it sent the tourists running. She was used to it by now, but the first time she saw him she thought he was going to attack her, because in addition to banging with his stick, he yelled. And, she said, you’ll get to see the old man from around the corner: he comes out in shifts, in the morning and afternoon, and he walks about fifty yards round-trip, sometimes shouting, sometimes grumbling softly, always waving his hands like he’s trying to convince an invisible person of something very important. Julieta’s theory was that his family made him go out for walks every day when they got sick of listening to him complain in the apartment, which, if it was on that block, had to be very small. The strange thing was that Julieta had never seen him come out of any door; she had to pay more attention, maybe, wait on the opposite sidewalk to figure out which house was his, mostly to shake off a strange feeling she got from the old madman. And not just that old madman, but all the crazy people in Barcelona who were concentrated in Raval.
“It’s as if…What I’m about to say is insane. But whatever. Sometimes I think the crazies aren’t people, they’re not real. They’re like incarnations of the city’s madness, like escape valves. If they weren’t here, we’d all kill each other or die of stress, or, I don’t know, we’d go after those asshole city guards who won’t let you sit on the steps of the museum, or in the Plaza de los Àngels…have you seen them? The fuckers go on raids, and around here it’s ‘antisocial behavior’ to sit on the sidewalk and drink a beer.”
“They just started that!” The shout came from the balcony. It was Daniel, Julieta’s boyfriend. He was also Argentine, but had been living in Barcelona for twelve years. Sofía hadn’t realized he was home. Daniel came in, dried his hands on his pants, and started his diatribe. How when he got to Barcelona, the city was glorious. A lot of hard partying, maybe, but it was cool. Now it was a police city.
“Listen to this garca bullshit,” he said, and he started to flip through a pile of newspapers until he found La Vanguardia. Sofía realized her friends made every effort not to speak the Spanish of Spain. They didn’t call the apartment a “piso,” but a “departamento”; they would never call anything sketchy “chungo”; something could be “malo,” but never “mal rollo”; a mess was a “quilombo,” never a “mogollón.” She remembered how before, on her first visit, she’d laughed at how many “guapas” and “vengas” came out of the couple’s mouths. Now they seemed to have completely erased all local words, unless one slipped out by accident. It was surely intentional; a kind of Argentine fundamentalism, a mixture of nostalgia and genuine unease.
“Here it is, listen to this,” Daniel said triumphantly, and he settled into the chair to read:
“The Plaza de los Àngels, when good weather arrives, recalls the Barcelona of two summers ago, when it bore the stigma of antisocial behavior. From nine o’clock at night on, countless bottles are scattered over the ramp and stairs in front of the MACBA, while a small army of vendors swarms the area hawking cans of beer. The efforts of the cleaning crews—more active and efficient than they were two years ago—still aren’t enough to fully eliminate the piles of bottles, bags, and leftover food strewn over the pavement. Warm weather inspires a desire to enjoy the fresh air. Patronizing an outdoor terrace to drink a beer with friends after work seems appetizing, but there are those who would rather sit on the ground in the Plaza de los Àngels, the stage for an improvised street party. The young people arrive before dinner with drinks they’ve picked up in some nearby supermarket. But if they forget, they can always turn to the many vendors who offer beers for only a euro, much cheaper than in any local bar.
“One street vendor explained to this newspaper that he usually nets approximately thirty euros a night. The vendors set up schedules and territories so they don’t compete. They buy cans for seventy cents and earn thirty selling them at a euro. They’re taking a risk, because the public space ordinance sets fines of up to five hundred euros for the unauthorized sale of alcohol, in addition to possibly suffering the loss of unsold merchandise. Those who buy from these vendors are also taking a risk.
“That’s how we live, with this snitchy journalism and in the middle of all this shit,” huffed Daniel. “The other day they slapped a fine on a guy who was drinking a Coke in a plaza. They charged him like two hundred euros because he didn’t want to get up when they went to hose the place down. They spray water all the time. And now you can’t smoke in bars. Yeah, I know that’s happening everywhere, but a bar isn’t supposed to be a healthy place, goddammit. It’s a place you go to scheme, to relax, to get wasted. But not here. The rents are scandalous: they only want rich people to live in this city, no one else. It’s for tourists. They’re cleaning the graffiti! There were some that were really beautiful, no other city in the world had graffiti like Barcelona’s. But just try to explain to those brutes what art is. The fuck. They ruin everything.”
“A friend of ours was arrested because he painted a slogan that said, ‘Tourists, you’re the terrorists.’ They gave him like four months. Poor guy,” said Julieta.
“You don’t even know how bad we want to go to Madrid. But we have work here. I’m sick of this city. I don’t even go out. I’d rather be bitter at home.”
* * *
—
After they ate, they went out for a walk. The night was beautiful, and Julieta and Daniel wanted t
o show Sofía the new bars that hadn’t been there on her first visit to the city, and some old ones she hadn’t seen on that trip. That brought them to the Yasmine. Sofía tried to read the poster that apparently told the story of the Madame Yasmine the place was named after, but the lights were too low and she couldn’t see well without her glasses. She asked Daniel, who tended to know the old stories of the Barrio Chino, but he couldn’t remember. “But if they called her Madame, she must’ve been a whore,” he declared. Then he asked them to wait a second, and returned in a bit with Manuel, a friend from the neighborhood. Daniel introduced him as one of the few cool Catalans he knew. Manuel had short dreadlocks and wore a black-and-white-striped shirt. Julieta explained that he worked with them in sound design on videos. “Our Argentine friend here wants to know the legends of the Barrio Chino,” Daniel told him. Julieta asked him about Madame Yasmine, the bar’s eponym.
“Let’s see if I can be of service to the lady,” Manuel said, smiling. He was a little drunk. He said that Yasmine’s story was famous. She’d been born in the Barrio Chino at the end of the nineteenth century, the daughter of a flower vendor. And, of course, she was poor, and turned to prostitution. The Barrio Chino was a reeking hellhole then, and she was the madam in a brothel frequented by poets and anarchists. She fell in love with one of the anarchists and they had a child. But Franco’s followers killed him—the anarchist—and she opened an opium den. Then the child was killed, decapitated by a cart on Las Ramblas, Manuel told them. He didn’t have any more details about the death; the legend said only that a cart had cut off the boy’s head, but nothing about how it happened.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Page 5
