On the appointed afternoon, though, I was overcome by a sudden sense of anticipated regret, if such a thing exists, a feeling of apprehension. I was afraid Yanes wouldn’t recognise me or that I wouldn’t recognise him. I was afraid, above all, that he might be disappointed, because we’re never fully aware of how much we ourselves change over two decades, and a fresh, young student is quite different from a woman nearing forty, with two children clamouring for her attention, children she has to bring up alone, a woman who has led a life of uncertainty and grief and loss (the worst, most paralysing kind of loss, loss with no closure or corroboration). Mentally, I slightly shrank back from the encounter. I tried on several outfits, but none of them looked right. I experimented with various styles of make-up, some of which I found too prim and others too over the top. I viewed myself in the mirror from every angle, but none offered me a flattering aspect, which isn’t how I felt most days; I still thought I looked quite good, and didn’t usually feel insecure, at least not about my physical appearance.
I realised that, with a pair of binoculars, I could see the people sitting outside the café, there were quite a few, enjoying the early-May warmth. And so, five minutes before the agreed hour, I started spying from the balcony. I waited and waited. I didn’t see anyone who could have been him, the man I remembered as if in an old painting, and, at first, it didn’t occur to me that he could be the rather fat chap who arrived on the dot and looked all around him before taking a seat. He was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, rather unusual at the time, old-fashioned. The banderillero had been wearing a hat when I met him in 1969; I’d forgotten that, but now it came back to me; then, the brim had been too narrow. I’d been rather disparaging about the hat, and he’d immediately thrown it in a rubbish bin, saying something along the lines of: ‘Well, if you don’t like it, there’s nothing more to be said.’ And even then, he’d struck me as old-fashioned, not just because of the hat, but because of his dapper appearance, his tie, his long overcoat.
The man before me now was wearing a cream-coloured suit, with a jacket that didn’t quite meet over his possibly late-onset plumpness, its one buttoned-up button clearly under considerable strain. Before sitting down at one of the tables, he undid the button and the jacket fell open to reveal a long tie, which he perhaps hoped might conceal his voluminous belly; the tie was so long that it hung down over the top of his trousers. ‘That can’t be him,’ I thought. ‘He can’t have changed that much. But then twenty years is a long time, and you never know, the years can be very cruel.’ He removed his hat for a moment (it matched his suit, but while his clothes were of the highest quality, they didn’t flatter him in the least), took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed not only at his forehead and temples but at his completely bald head, which was now fully revealed. ‘It can’t be him,’ I thought, ‘he had really thick hair, but it’s easy enough to lose your hair in only a short time, and you can go grey in a matter of days if you suffer great pain or shock, and twenty years allows ample time for all that to happen, for general deterioration or for some unthinkable, unfortunate evolution. Some people age, but remain perfectly recognisable until the end of their days, and others suddenly become someone else, as if another person had stolen their face and body; obesity and baldness in men can perform such miracles or, rather, metamorphoses.’ If he was the banderillero, if he was the manager of novice bullfighters, I really didn’t feel like going downstairs to see and talk to him. He bore no resemblance at all to the handsome young man I remembered and about whom I had often thought, with a vague feeling of nostalgia, as if seeking refuge in that memory. What would I have to say to that fat, bald stranger, whose work didn’t interest me in the least and about which I knew nothing and didn’t want to know anything? And I remembered a sentence I’d read in a book by a contemporary writer called Pombo: ‘Going back is the very worst infidelity.’ Yes, he was probably quite right. If that man was the banderillero with whom I’d gone to bed in my early youth, he’d just ruined a memory that had endured and kept me company for half my life.
I continued peering through my binoculars at the other tables and at the passers-by, in case another man appeared, one who was a better fit with my memory. It was now five minutes after the agreed hour, which was perfectly within acceptable limits, but I would soon have to decide whether or not to go downstairs, whether to abide by the arrangements I had made or leave him in the lurch. Finally, a waitress came over to him and asked what he wanted to drink, and when he smiled broadly at her, I had no doubt then that, despite the transformation, he was Esteban Yanes. The smile was identical to his smile in 1969, he hadn’t lost that. His strong, slightly prominent teeth lit up his face, it was the kind of broad, generous smile that seems to have a life of its own, a bright, charming smile in the middle of those chubby cheeks. However, there was another detail that cancelled out this pleasing, positive effect: when he turned towards the waitress, I noticed on the top of his head a kind of Japanese or rather samurai bun, perched aloft like a pom-pom. A few men at the time were already beginning to wear ponytails, but the bun was an innovation (both those things subsequently proliferated ad nauseam, no longer original but hackneyed). A ghastly innovation, in my view. As far as I was concerned, any man with a ponytail was not to be trusted, and a man with a Japanese bun, well, I would simply cross the road and run away, especially if the bun was intended to compensate for and divert attention from a bald pate. We all have our frivolous, arbitrary side, and I clung to that grotesque adornment as a reason not to go downstairs. It seemed to me the height of affectation and imbecility.
Nevertheless, I continued to watch for a while longer, for quite a lot longer. The minutes passed. I saw how he kept looking around, glancing at his watch numerous times, I saw him light and smoke three cigarettes, I saw him ask for another cup of coffee, put on and take off his hat several times. And then, suddenly, I thought he’d spotted me, that he’d seen me in the distance, on my balcony. He didn’t have the benefit of binoculars, of course, and so he screwed up his eyes in order to see me more clearly. He put on his hat just in case (and he did so exactly the way a bullfighter puts on his bullfighter’s hat), and then stood up, his gaze fixed on me, or so I thought. Peering through those magnifying lenses made me feel that I was now being scrutinised. He waved his hands at me in greeting or as if to say: ‘Hey, if you’re Berta, I’m here, it’s me,’ or so I thought. I felt I’d been unmasked, and I blushed, filled with alarm. I stepped back from the balcony into the apartment, I hid, like a spy who suddenly knows she’s been seen. I gradually calmed down, though; after all, he couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t even seen my face, which was covered by the binoculars. And I, too, had changed, although infinitely less than he had. I allowed a few minutes to pass before cautiously going out onto the balcony again, trying to remain as invisible as possible. He wasn’t there, I couldn’t see him. Then the phone rang, and I jumped. ‘Perhaps he’s gone into the café to phone me, I did give him my number, that was a mistake, he has it now and will continue to have it.’ I decided not to answer; it rang ten times; then it rang again, five times, he had obviously lost confidence that second time. I waited a little longer before creeping out onto the balcony once more, and when I did, I saw that I’d been right: he’d returned to his table, he wasn’t standing up or waving; he’d sat down and stayed sitting, tirelessly, patiently smoking, and drinking more coffee.
I looked at my watch, that man had now been waiting for forty minutes; when would he get fed up, when would he get annoyed, when would he realise that I wasn’t going to appear at the rendezvous I had instigated and arranged? This thought upset and embarrassed me. ‘What a fickle, unreasonable woman I am. I was the one who went to his house, asked him to call me, suggested we meet, and now I’ve just dumped him and all because, physically, he’s changed for the worse. Nothing more. Of course, before, his looks were all he had going for him – well, that and helping me and being a real gentleman. And, more especially, sleeping with me, thus putting an end
to my virginal state, of which Tomás, the silly man, was far too respectful.’ Into my mind came the idea of going to bed with that fat forty-something and I recoiled. It made me feel quite sick. Although, who knows, perhaps if I went down and talked to him, if I saw again that undimmed smile, I would quickly become used to his new appearance and end up seeing through it to the person he was before. ‘It’s unlikely though,’ I thought, telling myself: ‘The other reason I’m standing him up is because he called me “love” and because of that stupid samurai bun. Poor man, it’s probably just his modest way of still feeling like a bullfighter, he hasn’t got enough hair at the back for a pigtail, and with a belly that big, how could he possibly stick banderillas in a bull? He did say you have to be quick on your feet.’
And then I realised that I was making a kind of transposition. The last time I’d seen Tomás was far more recent – it had been seven years now – but that was long enough for him to have changed radically too; if he was still alive and if he came back, like the characters in novels or in real life, like Colonel Chabert and Martin Guerre, he might have changed even more than Esteban Yanes, if he’d suffered hardship and persecution, if he’d been constantly on the run, if he was a deserter whom everyone was out to get. I had a kind of foreshadowing of what a hypothetical meeting between him and me would be like, and this only confirmed my own misfortune: I couldn’t abandon that irrational hope, because I still vaguely, dreamily believed he would come back. ‘It would be better if he didn’t,’ I thought, in order to drive away that hope. ‘It would be better if he didn’t turn up looking like that manager of novice bullfighters, whom I summoned here, and who has been waiting in vain with incomprehensible tenacity; Tomás might perhaps be fat and bald like him and utterly transformed; embittered and taciturn and elusive and not interested in anything, not even in telling me what became of him; knowing that any future would seem dull in comparison with the emotions he’d experienced in his days of travelling and plotting; immersed in the long years, now consigned to the past, of suffering and danger and abominable deeds, or perhaps eaten away by remorse or, on the contrary, grown unbearably hard and proud of his exploits and of having unleashed plague and cholera wherever he went, of having sown discord and spread fires, of having led his enemies to their deaths or strangled them with his own hands or killed them with a gun or a knife, I’ve no idea, and I’ll never know. Yes, coming back is the worst infidelity, and after too much time has passed, no one should come back. And no, I’ll never find out.’
Unexpectedly, I burst into tears, although admittedly this was something that happened quite often, I just couldn’t help it sometimes. A brief fit of crying would come upon me without warning, even in circumstances that were normal, or what you might call neutral. It wasn’t always brought on by my own errant thoughts, as on that occasion. The tears would come unbidden, while I was at the cinema or watching the news on TV, while I was laughing with friends or teaching (and then, of course, I had to hold them back), while I was walking alone down the street doing my shopping, or playing with the children, who were not so very young now, and if I didn’t manage to suppress my tears in front of them, they would look at me, greatly concerned, for it always upsets children to see their parents helpless, because then they feel there’s no one to protect them. They never saw their father either happy or sad; as they got older and asked more questions, I gave them the official version, the version provided by Bertram Tupra, the Foreign Office or the Crown, that he’d been another casualty of the Falklands War, one more death in that small, unheroic war, another of the fallen whom almost no one remembers, in that absurd battle, which ended in ignominy for the Argentinian military and greater glory for proud Thatcher, who did very well out of it. A waste of lives, a few squandered deaths, the usual story.
When I next looked out, sixty-five minutes had passed since the banderillero’s arrival at the café; I wouldn’t have seen anything with my eyes full of tears, and so I waited until I’d stopped crying, which took a while, and then splashed my face with cold water. Sixty-five minutes, and he was still there. The phone had rung again, ten rings, he was presumably trying to contact me, although without wishing to be overly insistent. I was touched by such patience. Was it so very important to him to see me? Was he so very excited at the prospect? Had he thought about me often over those twenty years, after that brief, chance fuck, which wasn’t even his first time, lost in the dark night of times yet to come? I hesitated for a moment. Since he was still there, I still had time to go down and meet him, to invent some excuse for my unforgivable lateness and chat with him a little. His loyalty saddened me. He couldn’t have much to do if he could afford to spend more than an hour waiting for a complete stranger, a ghost from the past who might also have grown fat and worn and faded, so desperate that she’d gone to the trouble of tracking him down. I hesitated and hesitated. And I was still hesitating when I saw him ask the waitress for the bill, seventy minutes from the beginning of that failed rendezvous at which he had arrived so punctually. He paid and stood up, exchanged a few words with the young woman (perhaps he was embarrassed at having waited in vain and was making his excuses), gave one last look around, adjusted his hat, fastened the one buttonable button on his jacket and set off towards the Palacio Real, to Bailén, slowly, very slowly, feeling perhaps defeated and disappointed.
He didn’t ever call me again. He didn’t try to arrange another meeting, to ask if I’d forgotten or if he’d got the wrong date, hour or place. He didn’t want to know, or to make things awkward for me by asking if it had been me standing on a balcony in Calle Pavía. He accepted what had happened, or understood.
Yes, 1990 and 1991 and 1992 came and went, the latter with all its Olympic Games hoo-ha and the optimism that spread throughout Spain, a country that suddenly imagined itself to be prosperous. For me, though, it marked the tenth year since Tomás’s departure, since our temporary farewell at Barajas airport on 4 April. It seemed impossible to me that a whole decade had slipped by, and his leaving seemed both distant and recent, recent and distant, but when it was recent, it seemed like only yesterday or the day before. The previous September I’d turned forty, and I couldn’t believe that either, I felt simultaneously much older and much younger, as if I were an ageless woman who has already experienced everything she was intended to experience, when, in reality, she’s only covered a short stretch of the journey, with her life simultaneously finished and only just begun, simultaneously a spinster, a widow and a married woman, with her life suspended or interrupted or strangely postponed. It was as if time wasn’t passing, even though it always, always does, even when we think it’s waiting for us or has kindly offered us a moratorium. There are hundreds of thousands of people who linger in their adolescence or youth, who refuse to abandon either of those states and cling to the belief that all possibilities remain open to them and that nothing is affected by the rocky road of the past because the past has not yet arrived; as if time had obeyed them when they distractedly, quite mildly, said: ‘Stop, be still, stop, I need time to think.’ It’s a disease so widespread that nowadays no one even thinks of it as a disease. This wasn’t quite how I felt, it was more as if a parenthesis had opened in 1982 and I’d never found the right moment to close that parenthesis. I’d had to teach Faulkner in my classes (very superficially), and I learned that, on one occasion, when asked why he wrote such long-drawn-out, interminable sentences, he’d replied: ‘Because I’m never sure I’ll stay alive long enough to begin the next one,’ or something like that. Perhaps it was the same for me and that infinite parenthesis: if I closed it, I was afraid I might die, or, rather, that I might kill, kill Tomás for good.
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