by Andrés Vidal
“Dimas, this in Inés,” his father said shyly.
She stood up and Dimas came closer, nodding his head slightly in greeting.
“She’s Carmela’s daughter,” Juan went on.
Dimas was paralyzed on the spot. He began to feel the same discomfort in his stomach that had assailed him in the gardens at the casino. Before he could say anything, Juan stood up, took Guillermo’s hand, and said good-bye, telling them he would go to the neighbor’s house for a moment. The boy touched Dimas’s hand as he left, passing just next to him before disappearing down the hall.
Inés was a good-looking girl with big, caramel-colored eyes. Her brown hair, parted to one side, fell down loose over her shoulders. Her cheeks gave her face an angular cast, and her fleshy lips sat over a prominent chin. Her green dress was a little tight. When she got up, Dimas could see the sinuous curves in her body.
“I really wanted to meet you,” she said. “I’d like to talk to you about a few things.”
Dimas didn’t answer. It bothered him that her manner was so easy so soon after meeting him. He had to restrain himself not to shout an insult and run out of the room.
“Do you want to sit down?” Inés asked him, returning to her own chair. “I know the proper thing would be for you to ask me that question, since it’s your home, but I do think it would be more comfortable for both of us.”
Dimas sat down in front of her. He crossed his hands and went on gazing at her defiantly. After a pause that seemed interminable, he asked, “What are you here for, ma’am?” He wasn’t ready to be on familiar terms with a woman he didn’t even know.
“I told you. I want to talk to your father, and to you, too. I think there are some things you should know.” Inés was nervous, but that didn’t stop her from putting up a confident front. She took a sip of the glass of water in front of her.
“I don’t know what you and I have to talk about, ma’am. Did she send you?”
“No, our mother doesn’t know I’m here. And stop talking to me that way. No matter what, we share the same blood.”
“That lady is no longer my mother, and I’m not interested in anything that has to do with her,” Dimas announced. He laced his hands together, feigning calm. The light from the bulb hanging over their heads emitted a buzzing sound like a fly, which struck him, at that moment, as unbearable.
“Look, I love my mother very much and since you made her cry the other day, she hasn’t stopped. Maybe if you listen to what I have to tell you, you won’t think that way.”
“Or maybe I will.”
Inés reached into her plain cloth bag and pulled out a metal cigarette holder. She offered a cigarette to Dimas. He declined. She seemed to relax a bit after exhaling the first mouthful of thick smoke, which stayed there a moment, obscuring her face.
“You could at least try.”
With her thumb and forefinger, she picked away the threads of tobacco that clung to her lips.
Dimas leaned back in his chair, causing the wood to creak. He looked at her for a moment, and she held his gaze with those eyes that seemed to never blink. He decided to give her a few minutes. After all, she wasn’t the one who had ruined their lives.
Inés seemed to understand his perspective. She cleared her throat and began to tell her own story; everyone had one.
“The last twenty-two years haven’t been easy for our mother.”
“Not for anyone here, either.”
“I can imagine. And I’m not trying to deny that; all I know is what it was like for her, because I was there with her.”
Dimas understood that he should stop resisting her. The strength of the woman sitting across from him was like his own: she wouldn’t stop for anything. In any case, he had already decided he would listen, so there was no point in being resentful, hateful, disdainful. It had been hard for her, too; he could see that. He made a conciliatory face and was silent from then on.
“Our mother left here after she became pregnant with me. I wasn’t supposed to happen. Celestí, her boss at her old job, was the one who got her pregnant. He had been after my mother for months and she had always managed to avoid him. She tried never to be at work alone because she didn’t trust him. He was one of those men who doesn’t think anyone has the right to tell him no, especially not a woman. But one day …”
Ines pressed the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray until it was completely extinguished.
Dimas nodded incredulously, rejecting the thought that his mother could have been a victim. The only victims he had ever known before were himself and his father. Maybe Carmela had lied to Inés to awaken her daughter’s compassion. But it would have been too cruel, making the girl believe her birth had been the result of a rape. Inés was silent while she saw the struggle taking place in Dimas’s mind through the reflections in his eyes.
And yet, something didn’t add up: his mother had been in control of her decisions, and she could have told his father everything; he loved her, and he would have helped to care for the bastard child. If she hadn’t spoken, there had to be something else. As if his half sister were reading his thoughts, she continued.
“She didn’t tell anyone. Not that son of a bitch Celestí, not your father. She knew Juan wouldn’t rest until he saw that repulsive criminal six feet in the ground and my mother couldn’t take it. She didn’t want to see the man she loved end up dead or in prison because of his foolish sense of honor. Carmela knows your father well and always told me he would never have just stood there with his arms crossed.”
Dimas thought they must be talking about a different person. His father was no fighter, at least not now. Maybe life had given him so many setbacks that resignation had finally changed his character.
Inés went on with her story.
“This Celestí was not a person to be played with; he was dangerous and very rich. She wasn’t the first one he’d done it to. The son of a bitch must have left children all over the city.” Inés lit another cigarette and then continued. “Forgive my language; my mother calls me out because I say things impulsively, without stopping to think.”
She continued looking at him through the veil of smoke that rose slowly to the ceiling. Dimas’s expression was more generous now; he didn’t look angry or afraid after discovering the painful truth.
“Don’t apologize,” he said, finally letting down his guard. “You’ve got reason to feel this way. You never met your father?”
“No!” she shouted, raising her already powerful voice. “It’s never even crossed my mind. What is there to want to know about a person like that?”
Dimas nodded. He hadn’t wanted to meet his mother on the day he did either. At first after she left, Juan lied, saying she had gone to the village and would be coming back soon. Barely six years old then, Dimas often dreamed he saw her crossing the threshold of the house and receiving him with open arms. But soon he had to get used to her absence. The days passed and in the boy’s mind his mother became a mere memory, almost just a feeling. The present was what counted. Then the years dashed by, and his day-to-day reality became work, long shifts at work. And then Juan’s accident happened.
“Our mother is not like that piece of trash,” Inés continued. “She’s a good person, and she loves you deeply. I know you think she gave you up for me, but it’s more complicated than that. She knew Juan would take care of you. It tore her apart to do what she did; she told me she cried for months on end, day and night. When she had me, she couldn’t cry because of the birth pangs, she didn’t have any tears left. She says that’s why I have such a dry personality.”
“Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you have to understand—”
As if afraid that Dimas’s quibbling would lead him to reject her, Inés interrupted him.
“She always talked to me about you. She said that when she remembered you, she could feel a little closer
to you again, and for years she would repeat to me these images of you all that she kept crisp in her memory, just like in a photo album. She told me you were born one morning in winter, when a few snowflakes were falling over Barcelona, and that at first they were going to call you Samuel, but when they saw your angel face they decided on Dimas, the good thief, the only person sainted by Jesus Christ himself.” Dimas knew the story; it was another of those memories that sometimes got confused with his daydreams. “It was the happiest day of her life. She also told me about a toy streetcar they gave you for your third birthday; she said you went crazy when you saw it because you wanted to be a conductor like your father when you grew up.”
He also remembered that train made of tin; he must have preserved that memory in some faraway corner of his mind.
“She adored you and your father, and I used to get so jealous of you for being born into a real family, with parents who wanted your birth more than anything. I wasn’t as lucky as you, Dimas.” Her light brown eyes pierced him like two bullets. “When I was delivered, it was just my mother and the neighbor lady standing in for a midwife in a single room in a pension in El Raval where we lived for a couple of years.”
Inés paused between each revelation, as if to be sure she didn’t leave out any details, and Dimas respected her silence. Those words must have filled her with feeling, and from time to time she would stop, light another cigarette, take a deep drag, and blow smoke up at the ceiling. That seemed to calm her down and give her the strength to continue. Something awakened in Dimas, and he had the urge to hug her.
“You haven’t seen the sorrow in her eyes every time she mentions you. She has never been with another man after your father, and she’s a good-looking woman. She’s only forty-nine, for the love of God. She devoted those twenty-two years to raising me, working like a slave to give me enough to eat, to give me everything she could, until I was finally able to work myself. She was the one who got me work in the casino; I sell tobacco there”—she pointed at her cigarette—“And that morning when she saw you in the hotel, the desire to see you both again flared up. Of course, it was never really gone. She recognized you as soon as she saw you; only a mother’s love can do that after twenty-two years. She didn’t tell me for days, but I could easily see something had happened to her. She sat there so quiet, staring off into space …”
Inés spoke while she waved the hand holding her cigarette from one side to the other. Her personality was different from Dimas’s, who never commented more than was necessary.
“There hasn’t been an easy moment, Dimas. Barcelona is a hard place for a single woman. I grew up fast and I understood early on that you can’t expect anything from anyone; you have to be strong and you can’t let anyone walk all over you.”
Dimas could see that Inés and he had much more in common than he had imagined: She too had lost her dreams when she was only just a girl. He didn’t know exactly when the tension had flowed out of his body, but he was no longer on the defensive. He felt comfortable sitting there, hearing the story of a life not so different from his own.
Inés spoke and spoke about all she had learned and all she had suffered in her twenty-one years of life. Not with disdain or rancor, but with acceptance. What you can’t change, you shouldn’t waste even a second of your life fretting over: That seemed to be the attitude she had taken. But if there was something you could change, you couldn’t stop until you’d made it happen, just as she had done when she’d decided to talk to Dimas: she didn’t hesitate, she didn’t stop to think, she wasn’t proud, and she wasn’t afraid of what that other family, the one that was partly hers, would think.
With the languor of the cigarette smoke and the casual turn of the conversation, Dimas felt more relaxed, sitting there and chatting with his new sister.
CHAPTER 26
“Come on, Guillermo, time for breakfast,” Dimas said from the dining room.
“I’m coming, I’m coming. Hey, have you seen my good shoes?” the boy asked, shouting from the bedroom.
“Me? What would I want with your shoes?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t find them in here.”
“Look harder, man,” Dimas grumbled.
“Start without me,” the boy said.
“Start without me! Start without me!” Dimas repeated, seeming angry. “What do you think we’re doing here? I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
“Give him time,” Juan said, and then observed him a moment before adding: “Are you in a rush? Never in my life have I seen you running to make it to Mass.”
“I don’t like to show up late to places,” Dimas said to justify himself.
“To places, yeah. But to church?! Something’s going on with you.” Juan took a sip of his coffee after shaking his head.
Dimas squirmed a bit after his father’s commentary. He was no longer angry after his conversation with Inés, but he and his father had still not talked about the matter. There was always something unavoidable between them that cut it short: Guillermo, work, the late hour … He avoided Juan’s gaze and went to his brother’s room, to see if he could somehow speed up their exit. When he got there, he saw the boy in his underwear, with his clothes scattered all about the room. Dimas was shocked: He thought he’d at least have his pants on. He picked up the clothes that he himself had chosen and placed on a chair: short pants, a jacket of mottled corduroy, and a white shirt with a black tie already tied and ready. Under the bed, beneath the tousled fringe of the bedspread, he could make out the toe of one of Guillermo’s shoes. He took the clothes in one hand and the shoes in the other and held them up, ready to give the boy a stern reprimand.
Guillermo was so happy to see everything ready that he interrupted him before he could get a word out.
“Thank you! I don’t know what I’d do without you. Go finish your breakfast, I’ll be right there,” he said, unworried. Then he stopped a moment, as if suddenly noticing his brother, and said, “Hey, you’re looking handsome today. …”
He picked up his clothing and put it on calmly, seated on the edge of the bed. Dimas looked at the ceiling; there was nothing he could do but shake his head impotently. No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t speed things up. In any case, they had more than enough time.
It was a frigid morning on the thirtieth of November, a feast day in Barcelona. People in their formal clothes mixed with the unhurried passersby carrying out their daily chores, as if it were just an ordinary Monday. In a city so big, often only a few hundred select people were aware of the special events taking place in its web of neighborhoods. The day had started off with a filthy sky coating everything in an irregular gray that seemed to be laid down by a thick brush. It wasn’t often that such clamor gripped the whole city: the arrival of the king, a military parade, a great bullfighter and his wife coming to visit the city … Often the people who crowded in at those events had no idea what they were even trying to catch a glimpse of; they just went to events because they were attracted by the masses of their fellow citizens. For that reason, on that autumn day, a good number of onlookers began to gather around the Sagrada Familia without reason, without anything to gain, without the remotest idea of what was taking place.
Guillermo, Juan, and Dimas arrived with time to spare. The sky began to clear up and an accusatory expression began to cross Guillermo’s smiling face: His older brother had made him wake up early and rushed him along when they still had at least fifteen minutes. Dimas acted as if he hadn’t noticed, attentive to the important personalities in attendance. He was dressed in a black suit with pale, nearly invisible vertical stripes. The white kerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket looked like a flag on his chest and his waxed hair glimmered with iridescent reflections. He had taken care of every detail to look elegant and distinguished.
His father walked at his side. He had already listened to his son’s muffled reprimands about how he tied his neckti
e, the color of his shirt, and the cleanliness and sheen of his scuffed dark brown shoes. Now, near the spiraling staircase that gave access to the crypts, walking at a creeping pace, because of the crowds, Juan Navarro looked down forlornly at those same shoes. The tips were matte in color, under a persistent layer of dust. He rubbed one against his calf, as he’d learned to do as a child in the parish church in Abejuela. Back then, the priest, Don Roque, would walk past them like a drill instructor, inspecting the small number of children who came to class, as Juan had done for a year or a year and a half, he no longer remembered. His life back then seemed so compressed now, so brief in his memory. From the desolate plots and endless fields of his village, to the memory of Carmela breaking his heart, his career, the birth of his son, the tension of waiting, his worries about his wife … And one day all that was obscured by a thin, gauzy layer; his dreams and hopes began to vanish, as if all he’d lived had only been a strange mirage. Luckily, the sensation passed amid the nervous behavior of all those present now, including Dimas and Guillermo, who were anxiously awaiting what the day offered.
The crypt in the Expiatory Temple was decked out ornately for the occasion. The visit of the bishop and other important figures was the motive for the huge crowds attending Mass that day. Garlands made with the colors of the city, Catalonia, and Spain had been arranged behind the altar. On the floor were scraps of colored paper and red flowers and the dank scent of incense impregnated everything with a pleasant but bitter aroma. Though it was early—the festivities were set to start at eight o’ clock on the dot—the quantity of people in attendance was extraordinary. More than two thousand were gathered at the entrance, hunting for a seat inside. The first to come in were the bishop and the authorities, in front of them Enric Prat de la Riba, the president of the Mancomunidad of Catalonia. When they had found their places, a loud murmur coursed between the sacred walls of the temple until Bishop Reig appeared from the sacristy, his manner and expression deliberate. The silence spread out in a wave, as when a judge enters into a courtroom to announce a verdict. All present remained standing, and the ceremony began with a splendor such as great deeds impose on man’s consciousness. The words, divorced from their meanings, resounded in the cavernous stone, penetrating the listeners like the damp in an ancient cave. Mass lasted more than two hours.
