Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  FATHERHOOD

  GUILE

  FIDELITY

  SHOPPING

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Hispabooks Publishing, S. L.

  Madrid, Spain

  www.hispabooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing by the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Copyright © 2012 by Andrés Barba

  Originally published in Spain as Ha dejado de llover by Anagrama, 2012

  First published in English by Hispabooks, 2014

  English translation copyright © by Lisa Dillman

  Design © Simonpates - www.patesy.com

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-84-942284-7-6 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-84-942284-8-3 (ebook)

  Legal Deposit: M-14896-2014

  To Carmen M. Cáceres,

  may we always

  be young and unwise together

  To Simón,

  because it’s true that behind

  every great woman is always a great cat

  FATHERHOOD

  Whenever people at get-togethers started talking about their childhoods, he almost invariably told the same story: the one about the day his mother took him, age seven, to a casting call for the Sesame Street Encyclopedia TV commercial. He’d been an exceptionally good-looking child, and even now, more than twenty-five years later, some of his childhood photos astonished him, actually produced something akin to anguish, as though a beautiful child—particularly a child who had once been him—were a premonition, the sign of something fearsome. His mother’s ferocious pride at her son’s good looks had been the source of at least a dozen droll anecdotes, and the one about the Sesame Street Encyclopedia casting call had the additional quality, for those who could see it, of allowing insights into a large part of his childhood. And he liked that. By and large, when he told the story, he would describe the mothers first; he would endow each of them with some minor detail or distinguishing trait of his own mother. Dolled up and buxom as hens, they all exhibited some characteristic of hers: one had a grating, derisive cackle; another stood haughty and silent; another—more pragmatic—chatted away in an attempt to be pleasant, praising the good looks of whichever child stood before her, so as to immediately win over a devoted interlocutor; another stood stiff and nervous, her huge, sweaty hand in his. He’d draw out the story, noting that he’d been having stomach trouble for two weeks, that in fact he was still having stomach trouble the day of the casting call. Two weeks of near-constant trips to the bathroom had left his skin with a sallow, olive tone. As a kid—he’d go on, to insure everyone got the point of the story—he had markedly almond-shaped eyes. Usually, after a casting call (at that one, they’d had to sing in little choruses of three, “All the letters, A to Z, come have fun and read with me,” while standing before a table where five adults with an air of unconcealed contempt sat jotting notes), the kids would wait with some of the mothers, who’d be more nervous than ever. That day, he knew he was going to be chosen, because as he was getting ready to leave, he’d overheard a comment.

  “The Oriental boy is perfect.”

  What good would it have done to explain that his supposed Orientalism was in fact just gastroenteritis? He recalled his mother’s jitters when they left and the man’s surprise on asking his name, assuming he was going to hear an Asian surname. On the way home, his mother pranced along, brimming with glee, heels clicking as she repeated over and over, “I knew it, I knew it . . .”

  Every time she said it, she first gazed off into space, then turned to look at him, and then back off into space again, as though she needed his diminutive form to corroborate whatever it was that she seemed to glimpse beyond the enormous buildings on the Gran Vía, some vague, glimmering image, elusive even to her. He recalled the energetic and no longer sweaty squeeze of her hand in his, recalled feeling like a fraud having been chosen for being something he was not. He was afraid to confess, but his mother’s joy was so inordinate and his torment so vast that at dinner that night, on the verge of tears, he finally told her, a knot in his throat.

  “Mamá, they picked me because they think I’m Asian.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “That’s what one of the men said.”

  He recalled that that was the first time his mother’s avarice, a well-concealed avarice, had made itself known to him. He recalled that he’d never noticed it until then, and realizing how wrong he’d been about her made him feel he couldn’t trust the rest of his beliefs or feelings, either. She stared at him fixedly for a few seconds, as though some ominous idea were crossing her mind, and then settled the matter with a simple “well if they think you’re Asian, then Asian you shall be.”

  Again his mother seemed to reflect for a moment, taking three more contemplative spoonfuls of soup, and then, pointing her spoon at him, in an inscrutable tone that might as easily have conveyed threat as inspiration as absolute resolve, she concluded, “I assure you, you’re going to be the most Asian child you’ve ever seen in your life.”

  Normally, when he told the story, he had the entire audience eating out of his hand by this point. The rest was basically a victory lap—his mother taking him to a department store to buy him a little kimono; the director’s bewilderment on seeing him decked out like that, how he’d shouted, right in front of his mother, What idiot put the kid in that get-up?; his shame at having to return to school and hear his classmates chime in unison, “All the letters, A to Z, come have fun and read with me”. There was something cathartic about describing his own humiliation in such gleeful, carefree terms, and something phony about it, too, and he knew it. The irrefutable proof lay in the peculiar mix of bitterness and compassion he still felt for his mother all these years later, as though the woman he now saw once every three months—the woman who still lived with his aunt in the same old apartment—had been born and raised ill-prepared for everything, mistaken about everything. Her peculiar concept of real life, her wild and often risible ambition had meant that his entire childhood was spent cringing in embarrassment for her, and that embarrassment had later warped and morphed into detached pity and an inability to keep his cool when he saw her. His phase of blaming her for everything had ended long ago, but he hadn’t been able to rid himself of the sense that everything his mother felt—including love, desire, and the urge to prosper—was so simplistic that it was inevitable that she’d never found her place in the very world she struggled so hard to leave a mark on. She was still chatty and ebullient—had been so to an almost histrionic degree during his glory days with the band—but time had taken its toll on her, too; her mouth was a bit more rough-hewn, her breath a bit more labored, her ambitions a bit more moderate. Did all of that come across in the simple Sesame Street Encyclopedia casting call anecdote? He thought it did. Once, he’d actually told it during a radio interview, and on his way out, one of the sound techs had come up to him and told him as much.

  “I can imagine what it must have been like, having a mother like that,” she said.

  “Bet you can’t,” he replied, smiling.

  It began early on, almost from the start—the feeling, the sense he got that music made things solid, the strange confidence he had in his own talent, as though it were easy to see that his intelligence was naturally fleeter than that of most people around him. He spent his days composing, attending university to pass the time and to seek out ot
hers like him. They weren’t hard to find. If his knack for composing was something he’d always seemed to have at his fingertips, something that had been a gift, the knack for finding whoever he was looking for was one he’d honed with confidence and ease. He formed a band that split up after only a few months because each member was convinced he was a rock-and-roll genius. Then another one that lasted a little longer, long enough to record several demos. But they split up, too. Success arrived in the most unexpected way, when he was twenty-eight and had given up on music as a commercial pursuit and formed a new band, one he just wanted to have fun with. A semi-famous director used one of their tracks as the theme song for his movie, and suddenly it was getting played all over—in several different commercials, on the radio, at almost every bar in town. He didn’t get his hopes up, because he knew full well what the music business was like, but for those few years, he enjoyed his minor success like someone who’d suddenly won the lottery—by squandering it all.

  “So what’s it like to wake up one day and suddenly be famous?” a third-rate journalist from a women’s magazine once inquired, after asking the most outrageous place he’d ever made love, his favorite spot in Madrid, and which he liked better, salty or sweet (that, in fact, was the song’s title—“Sweet”).

  “It doesn’t feel like anything, really; you’re still the same old asshole you were the day before.”

  In giving that answer, he was aware of the fact that he was implicitly acknowledging his own fame, that his reply was imbued with the exact quality he had derided in so many other C-list celebrities interviewed by so many other women’s magazines: the pretentious indulgence and oily self-satisfaction of a public swimming-pool Romeo.

  Perhaps the most honest and straightforward response would simply have been to say that he wasn’t famous. Only rarely did a twenty-something-year-old girl stop him on the street to ask if it was him, only rarely did anyone ask him to autograph a record. He didn’t know if that was enough to be considered famous, but he did know that it had been more than enough to arouse the disdainful envy of half of Madrid’s independent music scene. The first and also the most persistent corollary to his minor celebrity had been that experience of envy. It was an ugly, rancorous envy, a neurotic envy that led him to lose both friends and his temper more than once. It tended to manifest itself in veiled, dishonest ways, with insincere compliments or sometimes with comments about how interesting the music he used to make (when he had no success to speak of) was, and how uninteresting the music he made now (when he did) was, or in the even more veiled way of avoiding all talk that had anything to do with what he was currently writing. His minor celebrity had other consequences, stranger and less predictable consequences, too: he felt, during that time, as though many of his desires had been extinguished. Simple, generalized desires that, once satisfied, left an aftertaste akin to humiliation, like when a child who spends all afternoon bawling for cotton candy finally gets it in his greedy little hands and instantly realizes how sticky it is, how excessively sweet it is, how having his wish granted has immediately generated other, ancillary desires: water to quench his thirst, the chance to wash his hands. It wasn’t even really that desire, per se, had been stamped out, more that he got the sense that success had reduced the world to its narrowest conception, to a strange dulling of physical realities, of his views, of music, of his youth.

  That was the year he met Sonia. He’d seen her at two or three of his gigs. She was a friend of a friend of someone or other. As soon as he saw her, he was pretty sure he could get her into bed without too much effort. He’d never had a lot of trouble getting the girls he wanted into bed, and it was even easier back then. The ease with which he triumphed in that arena hadn’t made him vain, had instead made him almost entirely unaware of how most people’s love lives worked. He wasn’t selfish, but he was careless and forgetful; he paid no attention to others’ feelings, but nor did he pay attention to his own. In truth, he lived in a rather numb and lonely world, emotionally speaking. He liked sex, but it only really turned him on when he was absolutely certain that he was giving someone pleasure, and his interest waned quickly, as soon as he suspected he’d really touched something in a girl, something deep and intimate. What’s more, he got along better with most girls afterward. Having sex early on, as soon as possible, seemed to tear down a wall rather than build one up—he felt himself relax and felt that the girls, too, became somehow more open, more at peace. His sex life was one of overwhelming mediocrity, like an utterly unremarkable episode of kleptomania, and he had the reputation of being a Don Juan when in fact he was not.

  Sonia was like all the others. Girlish and pretty, she tried not to come off as too available or eager but was entirely unsuccessful. Her beauty had something malevolent and self-conscious about it. She’d just moved out of her parents’ house, now lived alone in a miniscule loft on the Calle Madera, and was five years younger than him. The first thing she’d said to him was that she loved his music but one of his most recent songs was absolutely terrible. Half an hour later, they were outside kissing, and two hours after that, he was undressing her at his place. She had a small, tight body, more hang-ups than she wanted to admit, a loveliness that was bony and fresh, and the tip of one of her nipples turned in.

  “It just doesn’t want to come out,” she said, smiling, when he took off her bra. Sonia’s technique for coping with hang-ups back then consisted of overtly stating them as quickly and as head-on as possible.

  She moved boldly, as though attempting to convince herself she was an enormously sexual person, contorting too extravagantly, talking dirty in a way that seemed forced, and then falling silent, awaiting a reaction to each of her assertions, as though some object in the room might move in response.

  “You have such a juicy cock.”

  He couldn’t help laughing. When she stopped playing the nymph, he liked her more, actually. There was something categorical about her, something taut and affirmative; she was a true rebel, though he didn’t know what she was rebelling against. He didn’t see himself falling in love with her, but he couldn’t help feeling an immediate affection for her. When he watched her up close as she slept, he sometimes became absorbed in the tiny, ordinary beauty of her face. He liked having her there, liked that she talked so much, that she pretended to be mysterious and have somewhat extravagant appetites. She was, actually, mysterious, though not in the way she intended. She skirted the topic of her family at every turn. So much so that he began to assume there was a truly dark episode buried there. When he asked her directly, she would simply say that they didn’t really get along.

  “Like most families,” she’d conclude, making light.

  Then, four months after he met her, it happened. She turned up at his place early one morning, looking like she hadn’t slept much, and blurted it out in the doorway, before he’d even invited her in.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You can’t be.”

  “Of course I can.”

  The start of the conversation had rattled him so much that he hadn’t even stood back to let her through. He stepped aside and Sonia marched purposefully in, talking to herself.

  “I can’t be, he says . . .”

  “Alright, relax.”

  “I am relaxed.”

  “Do you want to get an abortion?”

  She had her back to him, he remembered, and at that exact moment, she whirled to face him with an entirely unfamiliar air.

  “Do you think I came here to be saved by the likes of you?”

  There was genuine disdain in Sonia’s question. Her face seemed to be glowing, she wore a twisted smile. It was only an instant, a few tenths of a second, but he realized at that precise instant that no matter what they did, nothing would ever erase that expression. It bore the full weight of authenticity, and some part of Sonia had been inscribed there,
indelibly. The idea of help, or love, or simple companionship didn’t enter into it. Nor did the question of whether or not Sonia was going to have the child. Of course she was going to have it. Her of course contained, or so it seemed to him at the time, something that passed him over, out of shame, as though he were a half-man incapable of assuming the most obvious fundamentals of responsibility. He felt nothing, really, nothing he could express in words. The baby was still something too abstract to be conceived of, and the twenty-four-year-old Sonia—in an anxious rage—was all too concrete. He felt as though he weren’t physically there, in his own living room, as though the simple objects that made up his home had become somehow incomprehensible. An hour later, he was holding her in his arms, and two weeks after that, she’d moved in. It was a nearly unilateral decision, and he put up no resistance. Sonia arrived with three suitcases, two new lamps, and a monumental urge to rearrange all of the furniture.

  For several months, they played the happy couple. It was an unnatural and somewhat ludicrous game. They slept together. He would turn over and she’d spoon him from behind. They didn’t talk about the baby. He couldn’t remember what it was that they talked about. He did, of course, remember that there were times when he’d suddenly become aware of Sonia’s presence, a strange presence that he’d inadvertently overlooked and that then became palpable once more. They went to the movies, she tagged along to concerts, and afterward she’d have a beer with the band, pretending to be the happily pregnant rocker’s wife. He didn’t feel tense or trapped by the situation, instead felt weightless and a bit indifferent, as though he still believed the whole thing were simply a transitory circumstance. And really, he only felt connected to her in a fraternal sort of way, through mild, conventional affection. They rarely made love. Sonia seemed no longer to need it, and he was finding it increasingly odd, as though the child—the presence of the child, a presence that was increasingly tangible—had absolved them of the obligation.