Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  His mother had only seen the child once, when he turned one and a half, and the mere memory of that day would have been enough to justify her resenting Sonia for all eternity. It only even came to pass because he’d finally exhausted every possible excuse and his mother had begun threatening to show up unannounced at Sonia’s parents’ house and make a scene, shouting that she was the grandmother and nothing was going to keep her from seeing her only grandson, who, as she saw it, had been kidnapped by a band of real estate speculators.

  “I don’t care how much money they have, I’ll kick their door down if I have to.”

  Her indignation had reached the point that he finally insisted, for the first time ever, that Sonia let him spend an entire day with his mother and Antón.

  “I’ll go with you,” Sonia said.

  “You don’t understand. I want us to be alone with him. If you’re there, my mother will feel uncomfortable, and I want my mother to be relaxed, to enjoy being with her grandson, even if it’s only for one day; I can’t believe this is even an issue.”

  In truth, he was afraid his mother would spend the entire day openly insulting Sonia, whom she’d never even laid eyes on. And perhaps he was also afraid to be alone with the boy. Sonia eventually handed Antón over one Sunday morning at eleven—along with a stroller laden with baby food, diapers, lotions, sun hats, and a two-page list of instructions—after having cancelled on him three Sundays running because “it just wasn’t a good day for her.” Sonia’s fear hurt his feelings, it was a fear of leaving Antón alone with him, a fear greater than herself, as though she were knowingly placing her child into the hands of kidnappers or a band of circus gypsies. It seemed to him that Sonia’s entire outlook on society could be seen in that fear, a vision that perhaps she couldn’t help, one that contained unconcealed scorn for people like him and his mother.

  They had decided on a day trip to the town of El Pardo, where they could have lunch outdoors, since it was a beautiful day. He was supposed to meet his mother in an hour. Things got off to a disastrous start. Antón started wailing disconsolately the second Sonia left him in his charge and walked away. Soon afterward, he heard her voice again. In under twenty minutes, she’d already phoned to see how everything was going.

  “Fine,” he snapped, “if I have any trouble, I’ll call you, don’t worry.”

  Still, he had spent twenty minutes pacing up and down the Gran Vía looking for the cafeteria where he’d arranged to meet his mother, pushing a stroller containing a little boy who was wailing so desperately it was impossible to hide. He’d leaned over several times trying to soothe and pet him, telling him it was OK. He got the feeling that every middle-aged woman he passed was staring at him, casting guilt and suspicion. Finally, he took a seat at an outdoor café, the overstocked stroller bursting with bags of additional supplies, positioned Antón so he could keep an eye on him the entire time, and sat quietly. He used a baby wipe to mop up his tears and snot, and the boy seemed to finally calm down, though he kept his gaze on him—cautious, wary. It was hard to believe, but this was the first time the two of them had been alone together. Completely alone. He ordered a beer while he waited for his mother. Those were perhaps the strangest and most insecure moments of the day, the moments he would replay endlessly in his mind, those fifteen minutes they spent outside at the café—Antón solemn and distant and gazing at him the whole time, and he there with his beer, unable to keep from leaning down and giving him a timid stroke, physical contact that Antón didn’t seem to encourage, but didn’t shrink from, either. Finally, he held out one of the toys that Sonia had packed, a small, red, metal car that Antón proceeded to turn over, insert into his mouth, and bang himself on the knee with. He stared at the boy greedily, taking advantage of the fact that his attention was diverted, still a bit afraid. It seemed then, for the first time, that a sort of transference took place; he didn’t know how else to explain it—a boundless well of emotion, and also pain at the fact that intimacy and natural behavior were not possible between them. Until that moment, he’d only ever sensed it in the vaguest of ways, but now it seemed undeniable. He disliked sappiness and melodrama, had no talent for sentimentality, but he had a sudden feeling of general frailty, as though something inside him had shattered and his throat were tightening in genuine distress. He leaned down to give Antón a kiss, which the boy accepted with indifference, faintly inconvenienced, still gazing at his little red car. He felt the urge to speak the word son. He sensed that he was attempting to latch on to the emotion behind the word in the same way a lonely soul latches on to the memory of a happy day.

  “You look very elegant,” he said.

  The boy looked up at him, curious.

  “That’s right, son, I’m talking to you. You look very elegant. Your father’s not as elegant as you are.”

  It was possible that he’d spoken this out loud simply to be able to say those two words. He wasn’t sure. And he didn’t have much time to think about it, because at that point, his mother appeared.

  Recounting everything that had happened during the day for Sonia—in particular recounting what had led to the scrape on Antón’s chin—had taken a titanic effort, and Sonia herself had been more dramatic than ever, watching her son return tearful, raising his little arms up to her like a miniature Ulysses after his short yet interminable voyage. Sonia flashed her most hostile face as she turned to him and said, “You’d better have a good explanation for this.”

  There were no great explanations to give aside from the truth. His mother had been dead set on Antón walking by himself, so he’d stood ten feet away. Antón had taken two faltering steps and then fallen flat on his face. He hadn’t hurt himself, it was just a little bump. They used the restaurant’s first-aid kit to treat him. The bang had been minor, but the scrape looked a little extreme because it was on the upper part of his chin and he’d managed to scratch his lip a little, too.

  “Don’t worry, this won’t be happening again,” Sonia replied, furious.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what it sounds like, that this will never happen again. Look at him, he’s terrified, I’ve never seen him like this before.”

  He really did look terrified, he had to admit Sonia was right this time.

  “My mother bought him a couple of toys, I put them in the bag.”

  Sonia made a face, opening the bag with a total lack of curiosity as to what was inside, and then curtly said goodbye and turned to go. He watched her walk off a few yards, bending constantly over the stroller, and then lost sight of her after she turned at an intersection.

  He never told her what had actually happened that day: the boy had been afraid of his grandmother from the start, been afraid of her and rejected her, been afraid of her and perhaps disgusted by her. His mother had pounced on the boy with such ill-concealed desperation that she’d terrified him from the get-go, and Antón didn’t take it well. At that point, he realized instantly that not having Sonia there had been a very bad idea, but there was no turning back. All day, his mother behaved like the somewhat unhinged woman that she was, overexcited one moment and deflated the next, first fawning over him and reviewing her entire family tree in search of resemblances (she spent half an hour swearing up and down that the boy was the spitting image of her great uncle Alfredo), and then gazing at him in melancholy silence, registering the fact that she would never be allowed to take part in his life. Her body was tense, trembling with the immense effort it took to not give in to reality. The boy was a walled city, but his mother approached the day as though the next several years of her life were riding entirely on the success or failure of that afternoon. She’d made plans. Eccentric grandmother plans. He knew exactly what she was doing. He pitied her, but his pity was useless, like all pity. She was fifty-six at the time, and her body was rigid, its presence fierce, more fierce than he recalled having seen since his own childhood. It was unpleasant and hear
t-rending and difficult to see that the years had not mellowed her in the slightest and that her eccentric nature made her persist more anxiously than ever, made her attempt to find some motivation for her actions, made her insist obstinately. It was in the middle of one of these outpourings that she insisted that the boy take his first steps in her presence and Antón fell flat on his face on the second step. Then, after they fixed him up, she withdrew, and despondency got the best of her.

  “I can’t get excited about a child I’m only going to see once a year,” she announced solemnly, “of course he’s afraid of me. How could he not be? And that’s how it’s always going to be. I don’t know what I was thinking all this time.”

  On the way home, in the car, her cruel streak came out.

  “I’d rather just pretend he doesn’t exist,” she declared, but then, as she was saying goodbye to him and Antón, she started to cry and kissed the boy once again and insisted on running into a store full of cheap Chinese imports to buy him a few toys, “so at least he’ll have something from me.”

  She bought Antón a plastic tractor and the one and only rubbery figurine that had piqued his interest, a horrid and undoubtedly toxic Martian of some sort that he spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to keep him from sticking in his mouth. He called her that same night, and the following day, and the day after that. His mother didn’t answer the phone for a week.

  He began to focus on his job, on promoting other bands. He began to enjoy life again. His band had split up for good, to no one’s great sorrow. The members had all started getting older, settling down, leading normal lives, some more so than others. One by one, they’d shacked up or had kids, changed jobs and even changed cities. There was a new generation of musicians who had more energy than they did, and more affectation. It was a generation he understood relatively well, a generation at times more concerned with its image than with its music; they were less free-spirited and more anxious for success, but also had more energy and more drive. They lived under the ominous boot of novelty and thought they had invented almost everything, because they’d listened to almost nothing, but still, their energy did at times lead to moments of splendor. They were self-centered and ignorant, but they made him laugh, and he got along with them. He could hardly believe he’d been at it for four years. Four more years gone by. During the course of that time, he discovered some things about himself that he’d never suspected: he loved his job. He loved the new relationship he had with music, a relationship that was slightly tangential and yet constant, and he’d developed a singular talent for musical arrangement. In truth, he felt incapable of ever composing another song, and yet he was crystal clear about what the songs he heard were lacking. He loved coming across a poorly made demo recorded in some rehearsal studio and discovering the seeds of a band therein. He and a partner took some savings and launched a small record company and started producing a few bands. The first year, they managed to cover expenses, and by the second, they had already turned a small profit and positioned themselves as one of the new independent labels. He thrived on being in the eye of that tiny hurricane, on feeling himself surrounded by the energy of the clubs once more, by the drive of the musicians, their tantrums, their drugs, their petty love affairs, their dramas, jealousies, and triumphs.

  His relationship with Sonia, too, had changed significantly over those four years. The episode with his mother had been a turning point. They’d kept their distance for a time, during which Sonia built up a perhaps unavoidable resentment toward him. Resentment at feeling trapped by Antón, at not readily finding someone new, which then led to exaggerated man-hating that she took out on him and expressed via clichés unbefitting her psychological insight.

  “Men. You’re all sons of bitches, every last one of you.”

  She’d had two frustrated attempts at relationships and now lived alone with Antón in a place that was too big not to feel lacking in inhabitants. She was a good mother, but a tortured mother. Her attitude annoyed him, but he understood it, just as he understood that there was a struggle going on inside her. Sometimes, trying to talk to Sonia was like venturing into a minefield. She’d decided to quit her job in order to devote herself to raising Antón and making financial investments. She financed the opening of a new restaurant and put money in the stock market. It all went fantastically well, and she made even more money than she had projected. She seemed to have inherited her father’s shrewd business sense, to have come to terms with that side of herself with cool but efficient detachment. After careful observation, he’d come to the conclusion that the only thing messing Sonia up psychologically was her emotions, that her way of conducting her love life was the only thing that hadn’t changed since he’d met her when she was twenty years old, and that as soon as she approached her love life with the same coolhandedness she approached her professional life with, it would all fall into place—she’d meet someone who was also perhaps a bit detached but nevertheless determined to enter into a pact, and they’d shake hands and get hitched.

  Antón was now five years old. He saw him whenever he saw Sonia, every three or four months. It pained him to note how draining, how excruciating those encounters were, for all three of them. Antón had grown into a boy of silent, unsettling beauty. He was vaguely effeminate, perhaps as a result of having been raised solely by Sonia. He gave monosyllabic replies. His body had begun to develop and increasingly resembled his own. He took note of this with uneasiness, this resemblance. As if it somehow made him more aware, in turn, of his own body, and as if the boy’s preciosity—a preciosity which could only be seen in certain expressions of his and which he found difficult to describe or even recall—dwelled inside him for weeks after he’d seen him. He had the feeling that anything precious was a sign of fragility, like a distinct tic. The grand total of fifteen or so days that they’d spent alone together over the past four years had all been slight variations on the same day. He’d taken him to soccer games several times, to the movies often, and to visit his mother again on occasion. Every time he saw him, it was like he was both a totally different child and the exact same boy. Every time he saw him, he brought a gift that only seemed appropriate for the previous child, the one he’d been the last time he saw him. And because he never knew what to talk about, he asked conventional questions, to which Antón gave mechanical replies, memorized like the eight times table. They both had a bad time of it, yet they both wanted to see each other.

  Thinking of Antón had become as natural as breathing. It was always there, clinging to him like the slimy flesh of a clam, like something possessed despite a total lack of effort to possess it. It was a constant feeling, albeit blunted by a huge number of distorting and mitigating circumstances. Often, it made him feel guilty and jinxed, as though wafting up from the whole situation was an unpleasant odor that was impossible to eliminate. It wasn’t a matter of not being friendly. They were friendly to each other, but something inside them had stopped getting needlessly excited at little gestures and overtures. At times, he felt almost like he was waiting to see signs of his own childhood surface in Antón so that he could finally place a hand on his shoulder and say, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

  And yet they hardly touched. A peculiar sense of physical modesty had developed between the two of them. If their hands accidentally came into contact, he sensed that Antón blushed, and one time, when they were at a soccer stadium trying to leave quickly to beat the crowds, Antón ran all the way around the row of bleachers to avoid having to be picked up. It was hard for him to picture his everyday world, his day-to-day life with Sonia, and at school.

  Once, Antón broke his arm, and when he went to pick the boy up, he found him with a cast on his arm and one of Sonia’s long scarves tied around it like a sling. The cast was covered in drawings and shaky signatures in children’s writing. It struck him, looking down at the cast, eyeing it, that this, like some age-old cave painting, was a reflection of Antón’s e
veryday life, of his friends.

  “Where did you get all those signatures?”

  “The kids in my class.”

  “They’re nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are your friends’ names? The ones who drew all those pictures.”

  It was strange, then, to hear the sound of those unknown names—Pablo, Bárbara, Manuel, Javier, Lola, Rita, Diana . . .

  Sonia finally met someone. Though met might not have been the word. She’d fallen so head over heels that she was virtually unrecognizable. They’d met at a party seven months earlier, at the beginning of winter, and had been practically inseparable ever since. She talked about him in such rapt yet realistic terms that it made him envious. A thirty-four-year-old lawyer, his name was Javier; he was cultured and sociable, happy and reasonably attractive. Once when he went to pick up Antón, he saw him leaving Sonia’s building and knew immediately that it was him. It gave him a good feeling, and he examined the man’s face carefully, searching for something that might be a sign, as though examining goat entrails, but all he saw was a man of his age, perhaps a little more timid than him, but expressive.

  “Can you believe it? Me, falling in love like this, now?”

  Love—a love that Sonia swore up and down was the only truly genuine thing in her life aside from Antón—had completely transformed her. Softened her and made her generous, or at least that was how it seemed to him, and maybe even made her smarter, as though she’d developed some form of perceptiveness he’d never known her to have. She looked prettier, too. The explosion of human warmth and joy lent a certain roundness to her cheeks, tinged them with a sort of vibrant glow. It was odd—she spoke less, listened more, showed more patience, seemed finally at peace. At first, he was happy for her and congratulated her sincerely. Then her happiness began to unsettle him in a curious way, as though it were reflected onto him like a shadow, diluting some things and underscoring others.