B0040702LQ EBOK

by Margaret Jull Costa;Annella McDermott

  © I'Institut d'Estudis Catalans

  Translated by Annella McDermott

  Merce Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908-Girona, 1983) was one of Spain's principal women writers, and many of her poems, plays, stories and novels are specifically about the lives of women. Rodoreda lived in exile in Geneva for many years, and it was there that she wrote a number of her books, including her best-known novel, La placa del Diamant (1962; Time of the Doves, tr. David Rosenthal, Graywolf Press, 1989). In 1980, she was awarded the Prize of Honour in Catalan Letters, and in 1981, the City of Barcelona Prize. `My Cristina' is the title story from La meva Cristina i altres contes (1967; My Christina and Other Stories, tr. David Rosenthal, Graywolf Press, 1984).

  I had gone to that quiet little university town at the invitation of a friend, who had been appointed to the Chair in Philosophy there a year earlier. The University had set up a little theatre and it was felt that I could usefully contribute a lecture on my experiences. I was very happy to accept the invitation. A play of mine had just opened to some acclaim - it was my fourth piece, my career in the theatre having begun with a play on an anti-war theme - and I was in the mood for a few days' quiet and rest. Besides, there were other reasons why I welcomed Dr. H.'s kind invitation: I had been stationed in that same city during the war, twenty-two years earlier, and had never gone back since, but, with the passing of time, what was once a dreadful experience had become a nostalgic memory. On the train, as we drew nearer to our destination, I began to relive some old, forgotten sensations. The feel of the rough khaki shirt on my skin: I was a bookish student. The smell of baked-in grime that pervaded the barracks where I spent the first three months of my life as an infantry officer. I even seemed to hear, as we passed through a tunnel, the shots from our pistols as we practised in the yard, against the wall. It was raining. Out of the window I could see a damp green landscape that also held a place in my memory: for the parks of the town for which I was bound had been like that too, green and damp, and probably still were. As night fell, these feelings continued, to the extent that I completely forgot that I had intended to sketch out a mental plan for my lecture in the course of the journey. When it got dark, I had the impression that the young foreign woman sitting opposite me had not closed her eyes, but was staring at me in the faint light that came in from the corridor. Who had put the light out? I hadn't noticed. Suddenly, the last night came flooding back to me, I mean, the events of the night the bombs fell. I had drunk a few glasses of wine (too many, if the truth be told) with a fellow officer, in our usual tavern, opposite the barracks, and next to a dark, moss-covered square. When the sirens went, my friend and I left the tavern. It was night-time. The searchlights were sweeping the sky, and there was a wind on my face. For reasons I can't explain, I felt surprised when I looked at the flagpole on our barracks opposite. Stripped of the flag - which had been lowered - the flagpole gave me a feeling (how can I put it?) that there was something odd. People were not hurrying: they had got used to air-raid alarms.) A dispatch rider sped past on a motorbike, his siren wailing. My friend and I crossed the road and went into the barracks. We made our way across the barracks square, where the anti-aircraft guns had been hastily moved into position, and went into the officers' mess. It was deserted and half in darkness. We looked at each other, and it was then that I realised we had both drunk too much: my companion wore a look of foolish abstraction. I realised he had no idea what was going on, and when I heard the sound of the Junkers I began to tremble.

  The barracks was hit by a bomb and the roof of the officers' mess collapsed in on us. Soon afterwards, in the hospital to which I was taken, I learned that my companion had been killed in the bombing. As for myself, when the region where the hospital was situated fell (it happened so suddenly there was no time for evacuation), I was taken prisoner. When I was freed, the war was over, and I was alone, with no money to finish my education. How I began to write for the theatre, and the circumstances by which I became a well-known playwright, have no relevance to these pages. In any case, that night in the train, my thoughts always came to a halt, over and over again, no matter how hard I tried to cross the barrier, at the night the bombs fell.

  I arrived at my destination somewhat tired from the journey. My good friend Dr. H. met me with a group of students. My friend and I embraced, and the young people greeted me warmly, to which I responded in kind. I realised at that point that my plays and critical essays were considered significant in that little world. I had noticed something similar on other occasions, on other journeys, when young people would gather round me, as though I had managed to express something they felt was important, and they wanted somehow to let me know.

  And so there arose the usual situation, which in this case I would have liked to avoid: I was accompanied everywhere I went - first of all to my hotel, where they had reserved a magnificent room for me - and I was showered with attentions; there were constant questions, innumerable demonstrations of respect. I would have preferred to be alone for a few hours, to wander by myself round my old haunts and relive some of the feelings of that time when, amidst the horrors of war, we dreamed of a better world and mingled with so many people we would never see again. Yet how could I desert these young people, with whom it was, in any case, so pleasant to walk and talk? Eventually, in the late afternoon, I gave my lecture on the artistic and social function of university theatres, and after dinner, I said my farewells to everyone - I would be leaving early the next morning - and told Dr. H. that I felt like going for a stroll around the town on my own. He thanked me for coming and promised to be at the station the next morning to see me off.

  So I walked off down the main street, where the darkened doorways, for some reason, gave me an unpleasant feeling. `Terrifying places,' I said incoherently, as though remembering something. I was approaching familiar territory, the area surrounding my barracks. What would I find in its place? Had it been rebuilt? Beneath a street light that I thought I recognised was a street name I did not. Apart from that, everything else - the slope of the street, the coat of arms above the door of a large house, the clock tower - was exactly the same. `Some things,' I thought superficially, `never seem to change.' That thought consoled me a little for the melancholy I was beginning to feel, as I had on other occasions, about the passing of things we love, the death of cherished objects. This feeling has always made me fearful of returning to places I have been before, places where I've known people or loved someone. It began when I was a child and ever since then I have continued to experience in similar circumstances the same anguished emotion. On my way home from school as a boy, I was often afraid I would find the main door half-closed, and that would mean someone in my family had died. Once, when I was older, for I was in secondary school at the time, I did come home to discover the door half-closed: terrified, I rushed upstairs, to find everything as I had left it, and my mother smiling. I nearly burst into tears. And all through my life, as I say, I've had the same reaction. I tremble when I approach the scenes of my childhood. I rejoice in every tiny item that has not changed, it makes me feel relieved and hopeful, and I'm scared to go on looking, exploring more surfaces, because I know I'm going to find signs of deterioration and evidence of the ravages of time. I realise that everything tends to decay, and what I can't understand is how we manage to endure. Anything that is worn or dilapidated arouses this anguish in me; for example, wrinkles appearing on the faces of those I love. My heart turns over whenever I see someone I love falter on a staircase, or begin to breathe a little heavily after an exertion. `Come on, chin up,' I think, nearly in tears; `we mustn't give up just yet; hang on a bit longer, I need you and I wouldn't know what to do, where to look, if you weren't around. The fact of the matter is, when I think about death, my only consolation is that it will happen to me too. I couldn't bear to be the one left behind. If death has to come, let it take me too.'

  What was I going to find that night? So many years had passed, I was surely going to find myself in another world. Ever
ything I remembered - the tavern, the moss-covered square - would have gone; like so many things from that period, when I was still happy, because I had not yet learned to experience time as something that ravaged the soul. I was, I recalled, a sort of Epicurean in my modest way; I lived each moment and enjoyed or suffered every instant according to what chance brought my way; I was unaware of the past (I forgot it, let go of things as they faded and never thought of them again) and I felt no anxiety about the future; I could see nothing of what lay before me; I was blind to it and to everything else beyond the horizon of the immediate. What horrible destruction was I about to encounter? The passing of so many years is like a cataclysm. What would be left standing?

  No, it was all just the same. When I reached the square, I was convinced that instead of the barracks, destroyed in the bombing, I would find a park or a tall building, or maybe another barracks built in a modern style. Or a convent. But no, the barracks had been rebuilt on the site, following the plan of the old one. The high tower . . . The sentry box, from which, no doubt, a pair of eyes was watching me now ... the flagpole, with the flag at present lowered ... I remembered my surprise on the earlier occasion, but I felt nothing special on seeing it now. I stood and gazed in delight at everything in the square. I felt the joy and relief that I mentioned earlier. I wanted to believe that, within existence, there are fragments that are incorruptible, and if we could somehow lodge in one of those we would be safe from destruction and decay. I was standing before one of those fragments now. Of everything present, only I had aged. How wonderful to see the green grass. I refused to contemplate how much of that lawn had died and been reborn in the intervening years. At eye-level, everything was exactly the same: the bronze statue, the bay windows on the houses, the bus stop, the door of the old tavern, on whose lintel one could read the notice, painted in ox-blood red: Wine Retailers.

  Now for the difficult bit. I felt anxious just thinking about the interior of the tavern. Everything material might still be there, the stone, the metal, but what about the people? I thought of not going in, staying outside, and by not going in to find out, preserving the illusion that Senor P. would still be joking behind the bar. But what if it was true? What if Senor P., though now very old, was still there? It would be wonderful to see him, strong as the iron railings my tired gaze now rested upon. I went in. No, I did not notice any great change. The atmosphere was just the same as it had been in my time. It was as though I had only been away for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. There stood Senor P's daughter, apparently wearing the same apron she always did, and not looking noticeably different. `So there are people, too,' I thought, `who never change.' All the same, I was certain she would not recognise me. I looked her straight in the eye and ordered a glass of wine in the bantering manner we young officers had used. I meant it as a joke, to jog the girl's memory. To my surprise she carried on the joke with complete naturalness: `One glass of wine coming up, Lieutenant.' She had recognised me too. We both laughed then and I stared down at my wine, somewhat shyly. I was playing for time, turning it all over in my mind. I noticed that the girl was wearing black; probably for her father, though I seemed to recall that she had always dressed that way. So there was still room for hope. But how could I ask her? What if my question revived a dormant grief? I took a sip of wine and the taste had a magical effect, like one of Proust's madeleines, or the feeling Cocteau describes in his Opium. Revisiting the district where he lived as a child, as he ran his fingers over the walls of the houses, at the height a child's hand would reach, he heard the sound of memory playing in his head, like a gramophone record. The wine, of course, was the same wine as before. The local wine. There was nothing strange about the fact that it was the same, nor that the taste of it, associated with so many things from the past, should bring some ghosts to life. Helped by the atmosphere of the place, with its echoes of military life: that officer sitting in front of a glass of beer writing a letter, whom, at first glance, in the dim light, I had taken for one of my former army comrades. The uniform, the way he sat! ... nothing surprising about those, either. I ordered another glass of wine, then another; and it was only then that I realised how fond I had once been of wine. Yet this time, I felt it was doing me no good, indeed it was making me feel queasy. I now believe it was the wine that finally persuaded me to ask the girl, with feigned casualness: `What about your father? Where is he?' `He's inside, having a bite of dinner,' the girl answered. `He'll be out in a minute.' This was great news, and it persuaded me to order another glass of wine and drink it exultantly, with a toast to those things that never die and a nod to good old Parmenides, whose poem on the subject I tried in vain to recall.

  So then I turned my attention again to the officer writing the letter and again I thought to myself, more forcibly this time, that he was very like my friend, Lieutenant R., the one who had died in the bombing raid and whose air of abstraction, in the empty officers' mess, I now recalled with a shudder. It was a searing vision. I stared fixedly at him and he seemed to feel my gaze on the back of his head. At any rate, he turned round, looking annoyed, but his face immediately cleared when he saw me, and I realised that it really was him. R. - for there was no doubt it was my friend - moved his lips and some words could be heard, in a tone I recognised, although I immediately noticed something odd: the movement of the lips did not initially correspond precisely to the words spoken, as though there were a slight fault in synchronisation, as sometimes happens with films; but on this occasion, the fault was quickly corrected and everything began to work smoothly. Lieutenant R. had greeted me by name and promised to finish his letter quickly and join me in a couple of glasses of wine and a chat. Though shaken, I agreed, so as to have time to think about what was going on; these strange events could hardly be blamed on the wine I had drunk.

  The girl invited me, as usual, to have one on the house, and I was transfixed with fear on noticing my arm, resting on the counter; around it was the sleeve of a uniform on which I noticed the dull gleam of a lieutenant's stripes. So I did not initially register the fact that Sr. P. had come out into the bar, until I heard his voice commenting with his usual joviality on some aspect of the war, probably the scarcity and cost of everything. I raised my head slowly, hoping to see in his face something that would rescue me from this dreadful delusion into which I was sinking; but my shipwreck continued relentlessly. Senor P. was the same as ever, an elderly man smoking his famous pipe with youthful delight: `So, Lieutenant,' he said to me, `how goes the war? Will the front hold?' I tried to answer politely, but I could tell him nothing; perhaps because I was befuddled with wine, or perhaps because it had been a long time since the events he was asking about (if, indeed, I ever knew the answer). I stammered out a foolish reply and Senor P. must have realised how drunk I was, for he discreetly dropped the subject, puffing instead on his briar pipe and slowly exhaling the smoke.