The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda

by Mercè Rodoreda

  One day she cleaned the place. I caught a glimpse of the white stockings and the crumpled broom, and when I was least expecting it, part of a blonde braid hung down to the floor and the broom swept under the bed. I had to escape because the broom seemed to be looking for me. Suddenly I heard a yell and saw her feet running toward the door, but she returned with a lighted torch and hid half her body under the bed. She wanted to burn my eyes out. I was slow and ungainly and didn’t know which way to go. Blinded, I bumped into everything: bed legs, chair legs, walls. I don’t know how, but finally I found myself outdoors. I headed to the puddle beneath the horses’ trough and the water covered me. Two boys saw me and went to look for canes and started poking me. I turned my face toward them, my entire head out of the water, and looked them up and down. They flung the canes down and ran away, but they came right back with six or seven older boys who threw rocks and handfuls of dirt at me. A rock hit my tiny hand and broke it. Terror-stricken, I dodged the poorly aimed ones and managed to escape into the stable. She came after me with the broom, the screaming children waiting by the door. She poked me and tried to drive me out of my corner in the straw. Blinded again, I bumped into buckets, baskets, sacks of carob beans, horse legs. A horse reared because I bumped into one of his legs, and I grabbed hold of it. A thrust of the broom hit my broken hand and almost tore it off, and a black thread of drool rolled out of the corner of my mouth. I was able to escape through a crack, and as I was escaping I heard the broom prodding and poking.

  In the dark of night I headed to the root forest. I crawled out from beneath some shrubs that shone in the moonlight. I wandered around, lost. My broken hand didn’t hurt, but it was hanging from a tendon, and I had to raise my arm so it wouldn’t drag too much. I stumbled along, first over roots, then stones, until finally I reached the root where I used to sit before they took me away to the fire in the square. I couldn’t get to the other side, because I kept slipping. On, on, on, toward the willow tree, toward the watercress and my home in the marsh, in the water. The wind blew the grass and sent pieces of dry leaves wafting through the air and carried away short, shiny filaments from the flowers by the path. I brushed one side of my head against the trunk and slowly made my way to the pond and entered, holding my arm up, so tired, with my little broken hand.

  Through the moon-streaked water, I could see the three eels coming. They blurred together: linking with each other, then separating, twisting together and tying knots that unraveled. Eventually, the smallest one came up to me and bit my broken hand. Some juice spurted from my wrist; in the water it looked a little like smoke. The eel was obstinate and kept pulling my hand slowly, never letting go of it, and while he pulled, he kept looking at me. When the eel thought I was distracted, he gave me one or two jerks. While the others played at twisting together like a rope, the one who was biting my hand suddenly gave a furious yank. The tendon must have been severed, because the eel swam away with my hand. Once he had it, he looked back at me as if to say: Now I have it! I closed my eyes for a while, and when I reopened them, the eel was still there, among the shadows and splashes of trembling light, my little hand in his mouth. A tiny bundle of bones fitted together, covered with a bit of black skin. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I could see the stone path, the spiders in my house, their legs hanging from the side of the bed: white and blue, as if the two of them were sitting above the water, but were empty, like laundry hanging on the line, rocked by the lapping water. I saw myself beneath the cross formed by the shadows, on the color-charged fire that screeched as it rose and didn’t burn . . . While I saw all of these things, the eels played with that piece of me, let go of it, snatched it again, and the little hand passed from eel to eel, swirling like a tiny leaf, all the fingers spread apart. I was on both sides: in the marsh with the eels and partially in that other world, without knowing where it was. Until the eels tired and the shadow sucked up the hand, a dead shadow that little by little scattered the dirt in the water, for days and days and days, in that corner of the marsh, among grass and willow roots that were thirsty and had always drunk there.

  Love

  I’m so sorry to make you open the door, just as you were closing, but I was needing a notions store, and yours is the only one I pass when I leave work. I’ve been looking in your window for several days. I guess it must seem amusing for a man my age, covered in cement and exhausted from working on the scaffold . . . Let me just wipe the sweat from my neck. The dust from the cement gets into the cracks of my skin and the sweat irritates it. I’d like . . . Your window has everything except what I want. But then maybe that’s because it’s not a good idea to display it. You have necklaces, needles, all kinds of thread. From what I can tell women go crazy over thread. When I was little I would rummage in my mother’s sewing basket, and I would string the spools onto a knitting needle and play at spinning them around. I was a real devil of a boy when I was little, so it’s curious I’d amuse myself like that. These things happen. Today’s my wife’s Saint’s Day and I’m sure she thinks I’m not going to give her anything, won’t remember. Shops like this sometimes keep what I want in big cardboard boxes. What do I think about giving her a necklace? She doesn’t like them. When we got married I bought her a glass necklace, beads the color of dessert wine. I asked her if she liked it and she said: Yes, very much. But she never wore it, not once. When I asked her—just occasionally so as not to bother her—why she didn’t wear the necklace, she would say it was too dressy. Said she’d look like a showcase if she wore it. I could never convince her otherwise. Rafelet, our first grandson (he was born with a full head of hair and six toes on each foot), used the glass beads of the necklace to play marbles. I can see I’m delaying you, but some things are difficult for a man. I have no trouble shopping for food, any kind, and I’m not embarrassed to be seen carrying a shopping bag. Quite the contrary, I like to choose the meat. We’ve been friends of the butcher’s since he was born. Or pick out the fish. The fishmonger—I mean her parents—used to sell fish to my parents. But to buy things other than food, that’s a different story. I’m like an owl in broad daylight. What would you advise? What do you think I should give her? A few dozen spools of thread? All different colors, but mostly white and black, colors you always need the most. Maybe that would be to her taste? Who knows? She might just throw them at me. Sometimes, when she’s in a bad mood, she treats me like a child. After thirty years of marriage, a man and a woman . . . It’s from over familiarity. That’s what I always say. Too much of the same thing, always sleeping together, too many deaths, births, too much of this our daily bread. Maybe some sewing tape? No, of course not. A nice lace collar? Now we’re getting somewhere. She had one with roses—buds and leaves. The only thing you’re missing are the thorns, I used to say every time she’d sew it on a dress, to make her laugh. But she doesn’t fix herself up any more. Her life’s all wrapped up in the house, a woman who lives only for her home. You should see how she makes everything shine. The glasses in the sideboard: gracious, she must wipe them three times a day with a linen cloth. She picks them up so gently she hardly touches them, places them on the table, and on and on she goes, swirling the cloth around inside them. Then she puts them back, lines them up one beside the other, like soldiers with wide caps. And you should see the bottoms of the pans! It’s like she cooks the food somewhere else, not at home. The whole house smells clean. You think when I get home I stick my head in the newspaper or listen to the news? No, I find a washtub of warm water out on the gallery. She makes me soap down, then rinses me off with the watering can. We have a thick curtain, green-and-white striped, just for this. So the neighbors won’t see me. In winter I wash in the kitchen, and all that water on the floor that she has to clean up. She scolds me if I wear my hair too long. Cuts my fingernails every week. Well, what we said about the collar, I’m not so sure. Some skeins of wool to make a sweater? But I don’t know how many she’d need. And to buy her wool now when it’s so hot, and to give her something that would
mean work for her . . . Let me read the labels so I’ll know what’s inside the boxes. Buttons: Gold, silver, bone, buttons that don’t shine. Bobbin lace. Children’s T-shirts. Fancy socks. Patterns. Combs. Mantillas. I can tell I need to make up my mind or you’re going to push me out of the shop. Now that we’ve gotten to know each other a bit, I can tell you what I’d really like. Some ladies’ underpants. Long, with crimped lace that forms a ruffle on the bottom and a ribbon strung through the holes of the lace (before the ruffle’s made), with the two ends tied together in one of those bows that looks like an artichoke. Would you have that? Here it’s been so hard for me to say it. She’d be just wild with joy. I’ll lay them out on the bed without her seeing me, and she’ll have a wonderful surprise. I’ll say, Go change the sheets. She’ll be taken aback, but she’ll go to the bedroom and find the underpants. Careful, the top of the box isn’t quite on. These big boxes aren’t easy to open or close. There we go. Here I was so worried about nothing. I like the ones with the wavy kind of lace, like foam. Blue ribbon? No. The pink’s more cheerful. They don’t tear easily, do they? It’s because she works so hard, she’s never still. At least they should be reinforced. They look strong enough, and if you say so. It’s cotton, no? Nicely sewn. You can believe she’ll notice, and she’ll tell me so. I like them, she’ll say. Nothing else. She’s a woman of few words, but she says what she needs to. What size? Now I’m really lost. Let’s see, hold them up. She’s, well, round, like a pumpkin. The leg openings need to be as wide as the waist. You say this is the largest size you have? They look like they’re for a doll. They would have fit her perfectly when she was twenty, but we’re old now. Nothing you can do about that. Or me. The problem is I don’t see anything else she might like. She always wants something useful. Now what am I going to do? I can’t show up empty-handed. Unless I buy something from the bakery on the corner. But that’s not the thing to do. A man who works all day has so little time to do things to please, show him in a good light . . .

  White

  Geranium

  Balbina died on a warm night, amidst the last stars, the fog rising from the sea. I was forced to open the door from the dining room onto the balcony to create a draft from the street window, because as soon as death took Balbina from me, the whole house filled with her smell—the smell of decaying flowers. I sat in a low chair by the glow of a candle while Balbina was dying, never taking my eyes off her. From the time she had fallen ill, I watched her like that every day and every night till I reached the brink of sleep. I would lie beside her feverish body and gaze at her almond-shaped eyes: they looked at me unseeing, shining in the dark like a cat’s. The warmth of her protracted illness had kept me company, forcing me to close off the house for so long that it had grown damp and the wallpaper had started to peel. When Balbina died, she had no cheeks, nor flesh on the back of her hands, and the dimples in her knees—I adored them so—had vanished. She was fading, her eyes already protruding, when I lay down on top of her, drinking in her final breath, wanting to steal from her the last trace of life, wanting it for myself. As I was about to open the door to the balcony, still holding the last bit of life in my mouth, I realized that death would not leave. The courtyard cast its spell of sun and mist, and a white geranium petal fluttered into the room. On the railing over the street we kept red geraniums. They were mine. On the railing over the courtyard were the white geraniums, Balbina’s. As I watched the petal, I was reminded that I had waited months and months for Balbina’s death, always spying on her to see if her eyes closed with drowsiness, so I could wake her, keep her from sleeping, and be done with her sooner. The moment I heard her breathing calmly, I would slowly rise and cross the room to the wardrobe, climb onto the medium-sized chair, and take down the trumpet I had hidden at the very top.

  One morning, some time ago, while I was at work chiseling marble curls for an angel, a tall, thin lady with a long nose and dry lips came in. She was holding a boy’s hand and wearing an awkwardly tilted hat with a bird on it. The boy was dressed in a sailor suit, clutching a shiny, golden trumpet with tassels and red strings to his chest. The lady had come to commission a gray marble headstone for her husband’s grave. Above the name and the words, she wanted three white marble chrysanthemums, standing upright, one beside the other, the first somewhat taller, the third shorter than the one in the middle. She wanted it made quickly. My employer told her that I would put aside the angel and make the headstone right away, but not with raised chrysanthemums, as if they had simply been placed on top of the marble, but engraved, gathered together to form a bouquet. But as soon as she had left, he told me the angel was urgent, the angel first, so I went back to pounding out the ringlets. Every evening when I reached home, I told Balbina that I was making an angel all by myself, because my employer had once told her that I wasn’t good with marble and couldn’t be trusted to make a complete figure. When I finished work on the day that the woman ordered the headstone, I noticed the boy had left his trumpet at the foot of a half-finished kneeling figure. The trumpet was so pretty, all gold and red, that I took it and hid it on top of the wardrobe, so Balbina wouldn’t ask me where I’d gotten it. I didn’t think about it again until one night, while Balbina was sleeping, I slid the chair over to the wardrobe, climbed up, grasped the instrument in the dark, and blew into it, just a little, softly, to punish her for her sins. Then I blew harder, and the sound it made was part moan, part grieving wail, part music from another world. I heard Balbina stirring. I replaced the trumpet above the wardrobe and cautiously slipped back into bed. From that moment on, whenever Balbina slept soundly, I would make the trumpet moan. After that first time, I was on the verge of laughter as I waited for Balbina to wake up, thinking she would talk to me in the morning about the strange noise that had troubled her sleep. But she never mentioned that she had heard the trumpet. My eyes used to trail her, fixed on her back as she moved between the dining room and the kitchen. I was trying to see if my dagger-like glance, traveling along her spine, could lead me to the thoughts she kept hidden in her brain, in the corner that held another, smaller brain, which gathers and stores all our secrets.

  That was when her illness began. Always in bed, always lying in bed, with her thread of a voice moaning, I’m tired, tired. While I was watching her one night, I heard her breathing calmly, the way trees must breathe, and all at once she opened her mouth and stuck out the tip of her tongue, and with her tongue and lips she made the sound of a trumpet. What I had been patiently funneling into her ears now issued from her mouth.

  When she had been dead for a while, her gaunt cheeks appeared to grow fuller, her lips taking on the shape of youth, her body seemingly at rest. This miracle occurred before I had crossed the room to open the balcony onto the courtyard. As this change was taking place, I noticed the cat lying at the foot of the bed. It had seen me drink in Balbina’s last breath. I grasped it by the scruff of the neck and flung it far away, but a moment later it was again at the foot of the bed, as if it had never moved. While Balbina was still warm, I dressed her, removing all her clothes, particularly the dress she had worn since she first grew ill. It made her look ugly, but I wouldn’t let her change it, not even to sleep. Suddenly I was charmed by the whiteness of her lily legs. My hand circled her knee, round and round, grazing the bone. The cat must have thought that I was playing, because it stretched out one of its paws and touched my fingers. When I had dressed her and combed her hair, I shut her eyes and crossed her hands over her chest; one was so tightly clenched that I had to force it open. Finally, with much grief mixed inexplicably with wild joy, I slowly closed her mouth. I left her side, thinking the cat had stayed with her, but it must have followed me; while the geranium petal was floating in the air, the cat jumped up to catch it before it reached the floor. But I was taller and snatched it. The petal looked like a tooth, smelled like a milk tooth, the same smell as Balbina’s mouth the first time we slept together. Before I realized what I was doing, I found myself standing beside her, a pair
of pliers in my hand, wrenching out a front tooth, a tooth so firmly rooted and so hard that, when it yielded, I thought the whole jaw was slipping out. I held it up. It was clean, and I licked it to remove the red that stained the root, then stuck it in my pocket. The cat watched everything. From that day onward, I never again called him by his name—Mixu—I always called him Cosme, because Mixu was the name Balbina had given him when Cosme brought him as a gift. After I had decided I would call him Cosme, I lifted the dead Balbina’s skirt—with respect, I did it very respectfully—and ran my finger repeatedly over her belly, as if I had nothing else to do, from her navel down to her pudendum. And when I calculated that Cosme had to leave home for work, I pulled Balbina’s skirt down and left the house, the cat trailing me. I told Cosme that Balbina was dead. He couldn’t have turned more pale because his blood had already lost its redness and grown watery from thinking so much about my Balbina, who would never be his, and had never been. Because in fact Cosme and Balbina were in love.

  The gravediggers came and welded the lid of the coffin shut with a large flame, and I thought I must be in hell. Returning from the funeral I stopped at the tavern to drink a glass of red wine, one of those that help build up your blood, and when I left the tavern, wine-filled, Balbina’s tooth in my pocket, the blue chimera began to materialize. It followed me as I entered the house. The cat brushed his belly up against my legs and made me stumble. I gave him a good kick. The moon, the stars, the water flowing from the faucet—everything was blue. Filled with the dream, I sat down at the table and talked to the cat, explaining to him that Balbina would soon be mere bones, and in less than a year her new pink dress, the one in which I had chosen to bury her, the one she had made so Cosme would fall in love with her—it would be covered with bones as white as the marble angel with extended wings and carefully combed ringlets. I showed him the tooth. He stared at it, closed his eyes, his honey-colored eyes, a black line dividing the honey in two, and his whiskers grew stiff. A moment later he glanced at the tooth again. I showed him the tooth every evening. One day, as I was leaning over to show it to him up close, he stretched out his paw, jerking it forward so fast that the tooth fell and rolled into a corner out of sight. I had quite a time finding it. I stuffed the cat in a pillowcase and beat him. Then I made a hole in the tooth and passed a thick thread through the hole. I would dangle it before the cat’s eyes and pull it away when his paw tried to grasp it. We played and played until one day he opened his mouth and swallowed the tooth. A piece of thread was left hanging, however, and with sweet words I tried to calm him, and when I had him nice and calm, I pulled on the thread to bring up the tooth, but the thread, worn and wet with saliva, broke, and the tooth stayed inside him, the cat that Cosme had given Balbina soon after he was born and had always followed her around the house, the courtyard, the roof top.