He had come down from the mountain on horseback. He was tall and compelling. Without dismounting, he said he was our neighbor from up the mountain and asked to see the owner of the house. I told him the owner wasn’t home, which of course he already knew—he wouldn’t have come over otherwise. He might have been drunk; it was early afternoon, in autumn. He took the opportunity to look around the patio and let his horse unload a pile of manure atop the few marigolds that had survived the first frosts of the season. I didn’t cry “the marigolds!” although I should have.
“My yellow marigolds!” Although they weren’t mine.
“Tell him next time he kills one of my horses I’ll set the house on fire,” he said before he left.
At four or five in the morning, the same morning I started working as an IKEA shelf-stacker, I heard rumors about our section manager. But when I asked about the rumors, nobody would give me any details. The lady cult kept their distance during the breakfast everyone was so proud of. They clenched their teeth and chewed nonstop. They were proud because the breakfast was free, not too greasy, served in a clean room with the walls painted in warm colors. The moment I saw it, it was obvious to me that all IKEA stores across the world would have the same breakfast room: the same floor plan, the same light fixtures, the same furniture arranged in exactly the same way. This narcotic notion of “pleasantness” was disturbing to me; if, back in Málaga, half-seated on a beach towel with my feet in the sand, I’d had a sneaking suspicion that everything around me was made of painted cardboard, the sea and the song of the water crashing against the coast, then imagine how much worse the feeling was there in the IKEA breakfast room, with the members of the lady cult selecting their pastries and exchanging their thoughts on the latest sale at some department store or another. A little further away, sitting in a beam of yellow light that silhouetted his head perfectly, was an older man—Turkish, judging by his moustache—smoking cigarette after cigarette, every so often submerging the moustache in a cup of coffee. That first morning, he signaled for me to come over. I sat down at his table and he offered me a cigarette, which I accepted, although I don’t particularly like to smoke. He observed me for a while as I ate my bread and jam, asking the obligatory questions exchanged like baseball cards between foreigners the world over, feigning interest. He smoked, fasting, and condemned the coffee in hushed tones. I ate my bread and studied the consistency of the jam, no doubt recalling the jars of preserves that had adorned the shelves of the bakery in Heidelberg, the ones customers had asked me for with such desperation, repeating over and over: “A jar of jam, that jam! I want to buy it!” And all I could think was: “What on earth is that? A jar? Such mysteries …” The Turk looked sideways at me. That same day, or maybe the day after, he must have decided that I was of absolutely no use to him.
“What do you mean you threw the chairs, the tablecloth and the lamp into the canal?” Julia screamed at me.
“I couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.”
“You couldn’t bear to look at them!”
Then she caressed my shoulder.
• • •
Let’s say you work in a bakery. And a baker comes in. There’s no reason for you to tremble. If a baker comes in and he’s carrying a tray of croissants, even less reason. Because he’s not carrying a knife, or a pistol, or a baseball bat or a shotgun. He’s just carrying a tray of croissants. So there’s no reason for you suddenly to start trembling like a leaf. But that’s how it was. It wasn’t fear but rage that made my body shake that way when the baker would come in with his tray of croissants, or empty-handed from out the back, his voice thundering, calling for me.
The policeman insisted I head into town to sleep, but I ignored him. I’d gone into town the day before, and things had not ended well. I looked at his crew cut as he said goodbye, then at the thick iron hand he extended to me.
“I don’t understand, why all this effort?” Alexander said when I let slip, as though by chance, that I was looking for a new room to hide my bones in at night. I didn’t dare announce it openly to him, preferring to murmur something in the middle of a conversation about the following week’s class timetables (let’s say), or about the movie we planned to silence ourselves with in a few hours’ time. He didn’t understand why, so I made up reasons: the neighborhood wasn’t central enough, there weren’t enough windows in my bedroom, the heating howled in the walls. The next-door neighbors had eyes. On one occasion—the last—he suggested I move into his apartment. We were in the university café, opposite the old main square, where we always met for coffee. Summer or winter, there was always someone sitting on the edge of the fountain. Why won’t you look at me? Alexander asked. I certainly hadn’t received any better offers: Alexander’s apartment was spacious, it had a room that saw the afternoon sun, and that room would be for me. There could be no greater luxury. And the bearings start to move laboriously inside my head, setting a mechanical rhythm, making me believe that a life with Alexander might be possible, a life spent mutually buttering our toast at the breakfast table. What more could a woman hope for? A foreign woman, what’s more. Here was a man, poor at first glance, but good at heart—a European man, with family somewhere on the Baltic coast and the German state at his back. Alexander knew me well, and tried to explain that this would be a temporary arrangement, purely provisional, that there was no need to worry because as soon as his studies were over we’d be out of there. We’d go wherever I pleased, do whatever I pleased. That night we went to the cinema to see an old movie (French, in all likelihood) which delighted him and bored me half to death. On the screen a woman was crying while some other woman, or maybe a man, insisted “she’s crying, she’s crying,” but in my head, beneath the dry bearings of my thoughts, ideas were circling restlessly. They were all wrong.
It’s evening and he comes in and she is in my bedroom, in my house, checking the bed, the wardrobe. And he asks her what she’s looking for. And her response must be: “My necklace.” Then they hear noises, and he goes to the living room, et cetera.
On a scrap of paper I sketch out the periodic table, with atomic numbers and abbreviations: hydrogen, helium, lithium; H, He, Li. This is a deeply satisfying task. Afterward I look out the window and remember that I am in Buenos Aires, that many years have passed, and I let my gaze wander among the gray rooftops.
I thought about how, if I were to accept Alexander’s offer of living together, we would eventually go shopping together, to IKEA or another department store, to find a piece of furniture for a particular corner of the apartment, or a new set of plates and cutlery, or maybe even cups and glasses, the very same ones I’d spent entire mornings stacking onto shelves just a few months ago. And even if it weren’t IKEA, even if it were some other emporium, and even if it were curtains instead of glasses, or any other mundane thing—a piece of cling-wrapped meat in the supermarket, that we’d take home and cook on the same stovetop as yesterday, and the day before that, and the week before that. I thought about how it would always and forever more be the same curtains, the same stove, and I told Alexander this, and Alexander said what did it matter if it was the same stove and I didn’t answer him because it was a mystery to me too, but a hard one, like a stone hat I was wearing and couldn’t take off.
Nevertheless, when we emerged from the cinema I agreed that it was a good film and consented to go for a beer with some of his student friends, all of them approaching or beyond thirty, who like us had wandered lazily out of the cinema and loitered somewhat indecisively on the footpath, not daring to go home. There were two men and a woman. One of them mentioned a café on the Neckar, by the second bridge, so we walked in that direction, taking the avenue that runs along the riverbank. Only when we arrived at the café did I manage to see their faces properly, despite the poor lighting. And although I loved Alexander, and everything about him felt familiar, including his apartment, his love and his furniture, these friends aroused an enormous suspicion in me—one of them in particular. Tall and att
entive, he wanted to know why I was working as a sorter of used car parts in a factory forty kilometers away if I’d studied biology and was still able to recite, by heart, the periodic table and the strange secret of morphogenesis. Why didn’t I take advantage of the university? Didn’t libraries inspire any pity in me? They inspired tremendous pity in me, in fact, libraries and laboratories alike. I would have liked to tell him this in Spanish, in order to express my skepticism with a hint of (perhaps overly facile) irony, but stranded as I was in his linguistic territory I was forbidden the luxury of subtlety and had to settle for a simple “no.” We were sitting at a table illuminated by three candles. Beside me, Curious George wanted to know if I had really studied biology or if I was just a teacher, or if I’d in fact dropped out of my degree. As I trawled the menu for coffee liqueur and apple and pear tart he persisted: was I a biologist or was I a used-car-parts sorter, he asked with visible delight (perhaps he was the one being ironic now). All four of them studied social sciences and reveled in meticulous semantic details, so the conversation advanced along these lines without anyone giving another thought to me or the auto-parts factory or my mysterious past on the other side of the Atlantic. The night’s argument had been set in motion, and the biological sample that I represented could now be discarded in a swift antiseptic gesture. Every now and then Alexander caressed my knee under the table, and I let him.
“You should have stayed,” chided Julia. Easy for her to say. It was one of those nights of fasting, standing there in the kitchen of her apartment. We’d unintentionally embroiled ourselves, as we often did, in a conversation about extraneous issues that didn’t concern us in the slightest, like the fate of the woman who lived across from us, or the new shoe shop that had opened in a neighboring suburb, which we did not intend to frequent. But, like a creeping vine, our conversation eventually curled its way to our own issues, and being women, and enjoying as we did pointless quarrels and the divulging of secrets, we set to reeling off the names and lost intentions of people we hadn’t seen in a long time: old friends and lovers. When it was my turn and we got around to the story of Alexander, she told me that, when he’d invited me to live with him all those years ago, back in Heidelberg, I should have accepted immediately, should have moved in that very day, since moving house meant so little to me anyway. Settle in Heidelberg? Wherever, but with him. Because she, Julia, was certain that he’d loved me, and that I—well, what was the alternative? For me it would have been the best thing to do.
“A man who loves you that much …”
I was surprised by the sudden lapse into romanticism, so far removed from her usual feminist battles, from the equanimity she so proudly applied when judging the mental hearts of her patients. Julia thought of herself as a practical and sensible person, and here she was arguing that Alexander would have cured me. Of what? Was I unwell? From my symptoms, from my “suitcase syndrome.” We arrived at a stalemate, each silently reproaching the other for her lack of understanding. I went to my bedroom and started to prepare my clothes for the next morning: freshly ironed trousers draped over the back of the chair, shirt arranged on top of it, shoes at the foot of the bed. Julia knocked at my door and entered without waiting for a response. She walked a few laps of the room, studied the curtains that fell all the way to the carpet. She said they were dirty and that we could wash them this weekend, if the weather was nice. Then she sat down on the chair and leaned her back against my clothes. What if we went to that party we’d been invited to? A few hours earlier we’d decided against it, but Kolya could always spend the night in the apartment across the hallway, with the old lady and all her oxygen tanks, leaving the two of us free to waste another night of our lives. What harm could it do? Leaving for work early in the morning with bloodshot eyes was a regular practice of ours. I said no, I wanted to sleep. I asked her to please leave. But when she left I didn’t put on my pajamas or turn the lights off. I went to the wardrobe and threw all my clothes onto the bed, in great piles and balls, and I pulled the suitcase down from its home on top of the wardrobe and untied the few bags I’d scrunched up behind it. Only when everything was packed up—right down to my ornaments, my two perfumes, my little embroidered wall hanging—did I go to bed. It didn’t make sense to get under the covers; it didn’t make sense to sleep without them either. But it wasn’t the blanket or my anguish or my sadness that kept me from slipping into the warmth of the bed—in fact, I doubt I could have managed to shed a single tear. It was a sense of victory—and who would dare to sleep with victory in their throat?
“This necklace,” Madame Cupin said to me one day in her grand dining room, “is an antique treasure my husband brought me from Paris. Nobody knows where I keep it. But I’m telling you, my dear, because I trust you.”
Once the last door has closed, once we’ve survived the last victory, we board a train or a taxi or a tram and we deliver ourselves to an age-old chagrin, forged in gold and silver, that we cherish like a precious coin. The new is always the same.
Back in Argentina, years later, I understood what Julia had tried to tell me. Only two weeks had passed since my arrival at the Del Monje farm in Las Golondrinas, at the foot of the mountain. The house was old-fashioned and smelled of mold. There was a large table in the kitchen, a wood stove and orange furniture from various decades. I’d been promised the house would get cold in winter, and that promise had comforted me; my heart, which is no good, appreciated it. At the back of the house, looking out over hectares of pasture, were the two bedrooms. The kitchen and the living room, filled with glass and plants, looked out onto the patio, toward Marco’s house, and, just beyond that, Marco’s mother’s house. After two weeks on the farm the dogs already knew me, and the cats would meow at me for food. I’d go out to the patio and whoever was about, even if it was just the solitary sheep tied up under the walnut tree, would meander over and ask me, in her own language, for something to eat, as all country animals are wont to do at every opportunity, regardless of whether or not they are actually hungry. The afternoon I finally understood what Julia had said to me, I was sitting in the shade of the eaves watching the sheep graze the little strip of grass that constituted her territory. Earlier on, she’d spent a while bleating at me to share with her some of the vegetables I’d just harvested. Before taking them inside I’d thrown her a lettuce leaf, in the hope of cementing our friendship. There were three seeded plots belonging to the Del Monje farm; I saw Marco advancing from the farthest one, the one I never went to. He held the shotgun absently in his hand, as though it were a stick or a rope. He came toward me and leaned the shotgun on the patio, instead of going to his house and putting it away as I’d seen him do once before. Smiling, he asked me if I was enjoying the work and if the peas were green yet; I answered yes to both questions. I invited him to sit down in the empty chair, in the shade, instead of standing in the sun looking at me without even shielding his eyes. He ignored me and kept talking about the vegetables that would be ready to harvest tomorrow or the next day, and how we should divide the work with the farmhand: who would pick the broad beans and who the raspberries. Such matters interested me less and less, and as he spoke I concentrated on savoring the details of his face, his gestures, his whole presence. What about the chilies? And the basil? What did I know. Again I offered him a chair, but he murmured something and went over to the tap to wash his hands and arms. It was hot, that end-of-summer heat. Only after he’d washed did he accept my offer of a chair and a glass of water, which I fetched from inside. As I walked over to give him the water I saw that his shirt was stained. I mentioned this, and he replied that it was possible he’d got blood on it because he’d just shot a horse. I recoiled. Which horse? The neighbor’s horse. The blond one? That’s what I called him, because he had a long gold-and-ocher mane. The blond one, yeah. Clean shot to the heart, so it wouldn’t suffer. Now the animal lay sleeping in the tall maize.
All My Goodbyes Page 4
