The ambulance arrived and Arjen couldn’t let the girl go, the doctors had to pull her out of his arms while they asked him if he was alright and whether he had been in the car too. But Arjen couldn’t answer. While one doctor checked his pupils and asked him over and over if he felt any pain, he saw the other doctor treating the girl as if she weren’t dead. After putting her on the gurney and into the ambulance they helped him get in the ambulance, too. Just before they closed the rear doors of the vehicle he heard a fire truck in the distance, and when he glanced up to look for it he saw the figure of his girlfriend pedaling back as fast as she could.
In the hospital they asked for the girl’s name and date of birth.
“I don’t know her, I was just passing by,” he said in a near-whisper. And he got up and walked out of the hospital.
Her
Anneke hadn’t said the woman was a psychologist. We were just going to see someone. When we got there I realized that the woman was more interested in speaking to me than Anneke, but I was just a girl and back then it didn’t occur to me that if she wanted to speak to me it was precisely because she was a psychologist and because Anneke had asked her to analyze me.
“I’m afraid of flying,” the woman said.
“I’m not,” I said.
“Do you know why I’m afraid?”
“No.”
“Because I don’t understand how the plane can stay in the air.” She looked at me expectantly, but she hadn’t asked me a question.“Do you know why planes can fly?”
“They fly because they have wings, like birds,” I said confidently.
“So you’re not afraid of flying?” she asked again.
“No.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“No.”
Anneke wanted to say something but the woman motioned for her to keep quiet.
“Well that’s wonderful, isn’t it, not to be afraid of anything. You’re very brave.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know other people who are brave?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t think of anyone else?”
“No.”
“Is Jan brave?”
I thought this over. The truth was I hardly knew Jan.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“And Anneke? Is Anneke brave?”
Anneke was not brave. She was difficult. That’s what I thought at that moment and that’s what I said.
“Why do you say Anneke is difficult?”
“She’s different.”
“Different from. . . ?”
“Just different.”
I didn’t want to talk about Anneke. Talking about her meant talking about my mother, it necessitated a comparison, one in which Anneke always paled. Anneke knew this, and I knew it all too well. I suppose the psychologist knew it too, and that it was what she was trying to get me to admit. But if I admitted it then we would end up talking about my mother, and that was something I didn’t want at all. I had so little to say about her.
“Why don’t you tell me what home is like?”
“Which home?” I asked sincerely.
“The home where you live now.”
“Anneke and Jan’s house?”
“Yes,Anneke’s and Jan’s and your house.”
“It’s big and white,” I said confidently.
“And your room?”
“My room is also big and white.”
“Your room is big and white?”
“It’s the room I sleep in, but it’s not my room. It’s Anneke’s and Jan’s, because they used to keep an ironing board and books there, but now they’ve moved all those things to the storage room and they bought a bed for me. Now I sleep there.
I slept in the ironing room for years. Living in somebody else’s house. Not my house. Life carried on. I lived in a dormitory and then I found a flat for myself. It was a place to live. It is a place to live. But since I was eight years old I haven’t had a home.
Anneke kept insisting that I see the psychologist. I never saw her regularly, but over the years I saw her a number of times. She always tried to get me to talk about my parents and I did everything I possibly could not to.
In time I learned to tell her the same things over and over again. I was afraid that if I told her everything she was asking me about that somehow I’d be giving her power over my thoughts. I was afraid she would make my memories of my parents disappear, to make room for Anneke and Jan. I was too young. I was alone in the world and didn’t trust anyone.
Sometimes she asked me to draw; a few times she let me draw whatever I wanted, other times she asked me to draw Anneke, Jan, and myself at home. It made me feel like a lab rat. I always drew the same thing: a room with an ironing board, and another room with a sofa. The room with the ironing board was empty. In the room with the sofa I drew two people: a man and a woman. Depending on how much time she gave me to draw, I’d keep going: the room with the sofa slowly filled with a television, a table and chairs, a window with a view of the garden’s trees and flowers, photos on the walls . . .
When I finished she asked me to describe the drawing. I described only what was in the picture. I described my drawing in minute detail, but I didn’t say anything about the people I had drawn. Sometimes she asked me where I was, because I hadn’t drawn myself in the house. I always said the same thing.
“I’m not there. I’m here, with you, drawing.”
The last time I went to see her I was sixteen. When I saw her that day, I knew it was the last time.
It had been a while since I’d drawn for her. In that final session she got me to talk mostly about school and what I wanted to study in the future. I knew that I was nearing freedom, that soon I’d turn eighteen and leave home. I thought that in my room in some dormitory I’d finally find my path, and that was what being free meant. I had grand plans, that I didn’t actually pursue until years later, but at the time I truly thought I’d begin my search right away.
“Would you like to live in a dormitory?” the psychologist asked me on that final visit. That was the day I lost my battle with her.
“Of course.”
“What are you looking forward to?”
“Freedom.”
“You’re not free now?”
“No.”
“What will you do with your freedom?”
I thought a moment. I could tell her anything. I had no reason to tell the truth, I had already lied to her many times. But for once I didn’t lie.
“Search.”
“For what?”
“People.”
“Which people?”
I looked outside. Hesitating. Through the window I saw her garden, the bare trees, and behind them, her neighbors’ windows.
“They’re not really people. I’m searching for angels.”
She looked at me, taken aback, and I felt the power I had gained by saying those words. She asked me another question.
“When you find the angels, what will you tell them?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I had imagined an encounter in which words were superfluous, everything was so obvious that a mere look would suffice. But maybe she was right, maybe I should consider what I would say to them.
“What will you achieve by finding them?”
I imagined standing in front of him, or her, and feeling what I had wanted to feel for so long.
“What I’ll achieve is peace, reconciliation, closure. A farewell.”
She looked at me triumphantly. She had gotten through to me. I knew she’d want to keep digging along those lines, but I didn’t let her. She asked a few more questions which I didn’t answer. The hour was almost up when she asked one last question.
“Who are the angels?”
And she waited. She
glanced discreetly at her watch, but she didn’t say anything else. We sat there in silence a few minutes. Until I decided to say good-bye.
“I’m moving to Amsterdam soon to study,” I said. “So today will be my last visit.”
She looked at me, worried. She said she’d give me a list of psychologists in Amsterdam, so I could continue my “process” there with another professional. I said that wouldn’t be necessary and bid her farewell. I was on my way out the door when she said, “I’d like you to think about my last question. Who are the angels?”
I knew I would never see her again so I finally told her what she had been waiting to hear for so many years.
Him
We survived that first year in Figueres. The Dutch doctors had told Willemien to rest and be patient, and we dedicated all our efforts to that in the months after our arrival. They had predicted that in time she’d feel better and we clung to this hope.
Despite the fact I thought we had better find a doctor for Willemien in Figueres right away, she wanted to wait a while, to see how she felt after a few weeks. A few months passed, and she kept in touch with the Dutch doctor who had recommended we move south. She had a lot of faith in him, because he was a lifelong family friend, and Willemien said she didn’t need second opinions, they would only be confusing.
In the end, she did improve, very slowly, over the course of that first year. There were days full of ups and downs, good days and bad days, sad days and happy days. But mostly there was hope.
On the bad days, when I came home from the shop for lunch and Willemien was resting in bed, I would sit by her side and listen to her for a while. Because though she had done almost nothing all morning, she had read or written things, and she had much more to tell me than I could tell her about broken televisions and nosy customers. Lunchtime was our time together, the peaceful part of our day, when we shared secrets, smiles, and tears without Arjen, Simon, or Robert interrupting us, because they ate lunch at school.
In our peaceful, silent house I made the meals that Willemien had planned. I learned to cook during those first years in Figueres. Willemien asked me to buy vegetables I couldn’t find at the market, so I bought the ones that seemed most similar to me. Then she told me what to do with them. I botched things a few times, like the day when I mistook a fresh head of lettuce for chicory, though I didn’t know exactly what we were going to make with it. But when Willemien told me to toss the scraps of lettuce into the pan where I had mashed the boiled potatoes, I knew that we’d be eating a crock-up that day.
Then we’d eat, usually at the kitchen table, but occasionally I’d bring her food on a four-legged tray I’d built, if she didn’t have the energy to get out of bed. I ate in the armchair we had put next to the bedroom window, where she sometimes sat to watch the street when she’d had enough of lying in bed.
During meals,Willemien talked nonstop. About a wide variety of things. And I loved listening to her. Some days she talked about art, others she told me about a news article about Figueres that she had read in La Vanguardia or heard on the radio.
Those first months she talked about people she had gotten to “know” by reading them in the papers, since she hadn’t been able to get to know anyone in our new neighborhood. She talked about Dalí and his wife Gala as if they were our neighbors upstairs, and she talked about certain politicians as if they were distant uncles. I realized she needed contact with the outside world, that we’d have to do something so she’d be able to meet people, but it took me a while to find a solution, and I got used to talking about the news as if I, too, were talking about my best friends.
Willemien would expound upon certain topics for days. She could spend a week talking about how Dalí had made one painting expressly for a soccer team that had fallen on hard times, or how the famous surrealist painter had undergone a prostate operation. And it’s not that she was trying to expand upon these subjects, she was just telling me what had been printed in the paper: that Dalí was going to have an operation, that Dalí had had his operation, that Dalí was recovering, and that Dalí had recovered. And after a few weeks with Dalí, she’d begin to tell me about some Dutch artist. Like the time she told me about Wim T. Schippers. I remember that day lunch had turned out really well and we were both quite contented. She said, “A few years ago Wim T. Schippers emptied a bottle of lemonade into the North Sea.”
I looked at her, surprised.
“It was a performance,” she explained, without explaining anything. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time. It was in the early seventies, but I’ve known about it for years now, ever since I stopped painting and began paying more attention to the world around me again.”
I don’t know what the point of knowing that a Dutch artist emptied a bottle of lemonade into the North Sea is, but it’s a fact I know. I know he did it, and that Willemien enjoyed knowing that he did.
After three months in Figueres a letter from Mariana arrived. She had never written me a letter before. So when I received the letter postmarked in Plasencia the first thing I thought was that Antonia’s handwriting had improved a lot since the last time she’d written to me.
It was a spring morning, one of those days when you can sense summer is on the way, though the pavement still held the chill of winter. I opened the envelope without a thought and removed the neatly folded sheet of paper, which was covered with writing on both sides. I realized it wasn’t from Antonia when I began to unfold it: after all those years I still recognized Mariana’s small, confident handwriting. My heart jumped and I folded the paper back up. I was certain that in the letter there would be words that would carry me back to the distant past. I was afraid, so I didn’t read it.
For days I wondered what Mariana had written about. I recalled the exact moment when I lost her, her words, and the pain in my gut. My thoughts carried me even further away, to the day, a few months before that, when I had started to lose her, the day I lost Pedro forever.
I considered which pieces of our past I could tell Willemien about, and which I could not share. In the end I decided that my past with Mariana was just that, the past, and since it wasn’t going to become part of the present it made no sense to worry Willemien about it.
One afternoon at home, when the boys were unusually quiet and Willemien was sleeping peacefully, I opened the letter, which I had kept hidden in a book for days, and read it three times through.
Mariana told me that things could have turned out differently. That life is full of decisions and forks in the road that determine our future. What she was really saying, twenty years too late, was that when she decided to stay with Pedro and not with me, things could easily have gone the other way. That some decisions are impossible; that she would have been happy with me, too. And that she was truly happy I had found in Willemien the woman of my life. That knowing I had been fine without her made her happier than anything else.
That’s when I realized that, though for years I had lived with Mariana’s ghost and wondered what my life might have been like if she had made a different choice, things had been even more difficult for her. I had no mistakes to regret, I just had to learn to accept her decision, and though it had been difficult, it was over once I had accepted it. But for her it was different: as the days and months and years passed, while she watched me from afar and wondered what she had lost, she knew that whatever she had lost, it was her own fault.
For the first time I realized that my bad luck of falling for women who were torn between two men relieved me of a huge burden: being the one who has to choose. Fortunately I never had to choose between Willemien and Mariana. Mariana chose Pedro, and Willemien chose me. And that’s how I’ve been able to remain faithful to my wife, while Mariana retained a special place in my heart.
I finished hiding Mariana’s letter just as Willemien called me from the bedroom. I felt dishonest.
There’s no such thing as a life without secrets. Coupl
es have secrets, families have secrets, cities have secrets, countries have secrets. And I have mine. But it’s also true that sooner or later, secrets eventually come to light.
A few weeks later another letter from Mariana arrived. I read it the moment I found it in the mailbox, in the doorway of our house, while the neighbors passed by, wishing me a good morning. Mariana was surprised I hadn’t answered her letter. It hadn’t even occurred to me to. She spoke as though I had made a decision to remain silent, when the fact is that the possibility her letter could be the beginning of a dialogue hadn’t even crossed my mind. For Mariana, it was the first in a series of confessions.
In the months that followed more letters arrived, filled with glimpses into my brother’s life. Mariana used these letters as a way to reveal things she had never dared say to anyone, and for my part they brought me closer to my brother. I stopped seeing him as a rival. At some point I think I even began to develop a little sympathy for this man who would struggle all his life to keep such a beautiful woman at his side. A woman who clearly would continue to dream about his idealized older brother.
I never wrote back to Mariana.
Her
I went out into the street during lunch for some fresh air. The sky was clear and the pavement was wet. I ate my sandwich while I walked around the depressing business district. Groups of people, with and without sandwiches, were walking everywhere. It seemed like it was customary for people who were walking and eating to greet each other. Even a smile or a nod would do. I disregarded these shows of fellowship: these people weren’t my colleagues, why did I need to be friendly to them? I walked along staring into space, like I was lost deep in thought, when the only thing I was thinking about was trying to find a street where there were no pedestrians.
My path through the wide streets was unpremeditated, at each corner I decided which way to turn. When a quarter of an hour had passed I turned around and traced my way back along the same streets to the office. The return trip was quicker, perhaps because I had finished my sandwich and I just focused on avoiding other pedestrians. I was two blocks from my office when I stopped at an intersection. When the light turned green I didn’t cross the street. I stood there looking at the buildings surrounding me.
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