by Andrés Barba
On the way back to his place, on the metro, Antón seemed to sit as far away from him as possible, hands folded in his lap. Sadness had descended definitively upon them both. They trudged into the apartment. He was so exhausted that he dropped Antón’s backpack by the front door and said flatly, “Do you want to watch a movie? I need to sleep.”
“OK.”
He led him into the living room, took out The Rescuers Down Under, and put it on.
“I’ve seen this one,”Antón said.
“I have another one, too.”
Antón glanced at it with disinterest.
“That’s OK,” he said finally, “this one’s funny.”
He left him there and went into his bedroom. He collapsed onto the unmade bed, a children’s song and the movie characters’ shrill little voices coming to him from far off. He fell asleep almost at once, as though a shadow had settled over him. He had a horrific dream: he was traveling on a train, a white train, absurdly elegant, inside of which were tables with ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. He had the vague sense of not wanting to be there, of not wanting to go to the place the train was taking him, but he couldn’t get off. He heard the rattle of machinery, the metallic clank of the tracks; a metallic sound prevailed throughout the entire dream. A woman entered the coach and sat down facing him.
“Don’t you recognize me?” she asked.
“No,” he answered.
And the woman made a sad face. Suddenly, she was a beautiful woman, fifteen or twenty years older than him. As though his reply had caused her to age in a single second. Next came a man, a middle-aged man.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
“No.”
“You and I were once good friends.”
The old man (suddenly he, too, was old) had a kindhearted look. He would have liked to tell him that he knew who he was.
“Please, don’t forget to give everybody my regards,” he said before getting up.
“I’ll do that,” he replied.
The dream went on, repeating the same pattern. A woman entered, and then another man, and another man. They all asked him the same thing. He didn’t recognize any of them. They came in through the rear of the coach, sat down facing him, asked if he recognized them, and then left through the front. He felt increasingly distressed, as though the train were hurtling along faster and faster or the metallic squeal of the tracks were becoming shriller, more intolerable, until finally he rose and tried to run out through the back of the train. When he opened the door, he beheld a sinister sight: standing, in a long line, were dozens of people all chatting animatedly, but the instant they saw him, they all fell silent, like actors backstage, caught off-guard. He couldn’t explain what made the scene so sinister. He tried to push his way through, but they began groping him in silence with small, sharp hands. He awoke in a state of distress.
For a few minutes, he put all his attention into staring at the alarm clock, attempting to compose himself. In the distance, he could still make out the sound of the movie, and then Antón’s voice, at intervals, as though he were talking to himself. Then suddenly he heard another voice, a female voice. And again Antón’s voice, and a reply from the female voice. He got up and walked into the living room. It was Maite, she was sitting beside Antón, they were both looking at the television. They turned in unison.
“Hello,” Maite said, getting up.
“What are you doing here?”
“I left my cell phone, but I’ve got it now. You have a very good-looking son.”
“Thank you.”
“Maite likes this movie, too,”Antón declared abruptly.
“Does she?”
“I have a nephew his age, I think I’ve seen it eighteen times at my sister’s place,” she replied, and then, turning to Antón, “OK, Antón, give me a kiss, I have to go now.”
“Don’t go,”Antón pleaded.
Maite turned back to him to say goodbye, smiling as though she didn’t want to make a big deal of it.
“I’m leaving, thanks for everything, sorry I just barged in like that.”
“Don’t go, stay awhile,” he said.
“Yeah, stay,”Antón insisted.
“OK,” Maite answered smiling, “I’ll stay, by popular demand.”
First, voice. Then, silence. Their evening, too, has its own initial awkwardness. Actually, they spend the first half hour watching the rest of the movie, all three sitting on the floor. He sits beside Maite, who’s in the middle, leaning slightly toward Antón. Her body seems to emanate a certain warmth, a different warmth than that of the previous night. Because Maite is next to him, she’s the only one he can see. She’s less attractive but more easygoing than the night before, exhaustion has lent her skin a sort of grainy quality but also made her more radiant, more peremptory somehow. It’s as though he never had sex with her. She’s wearing a different style of clothes, less provocative and more youthful: jeans and a blue T-shirt, under which he can make out the contours of a plain bra. They make banal comments about the movie, him in particular, since he’s hardly paying attention, and Antón’s replies come to him from the other side, explanatory and patient. Something seems to have relaxed in the boy’s voice, too. It’s his normal voice again, a voice that shows little excitement but is calm, familiar.
Then, when the movie ends, the three of them get up, and for half an hour, they’re awkward and uncomfortable in their own skin, sitting on the sofa, getting up, going to get a couple Cokes from the refrigerator, Maite asking Antón about his friends, his classes. The boy stands facing the two of them with his jutting lips, his almond-shaped eyes, tired of loving him and tired of not loving him, wrapped up in the presence of Maite, to whom he speaks quickly and constantly, as though needing to make her aware of many things about himself, as though each one of the things he relays holds the magnificent radiance of something pivotal.
Antón says, “Once, I broke my arm, I fell playing football when I went for the ball, and it didn’t hurt at all.”
And, “Sometimes, when I go to sleep at night, I pretend my bed is a sleigh and it’s sliding through the snow.”
And, “The thing I like best in the whole world is drawing.”
He thinks, while looking at him, about how he didn’t always want him, about how there was a point in his life when things were set, and he was happy, and the boy did not exist. It’s a strange, persistent thought, like something pushing him toward a stairway, taking him by the hand, and forcing him up. Maybe if the evening didn’t feel so relaxed, his thoughts would take a different tone—mean-spirited or angry at the world, at the boy, at Sonia—but the light streaming in is beautiful, and as he sits on the sofa, he can feel the contact of Maite’s thigh beside him, though he doesn’t acknowledge it. His hangover is almost gone, all that’s left is exhaustion and softness, like something that spreads over the boy, over the placidness of the sofa, over the objects in the room. Is he the one to blame? Even blame bounces off him like a bogus attempt at blackmail. Of course he’s the one to blame, but it hardly matters.
“Do you have any games?” Maite asks.
“Sure,” he replies, “I have Monopoly around here somewhere.”
Then, at the table, the streets of Madrid arranged around the board, little streets, bright streets, faded streets: Ronda de Valencia, Cuatro Caminos, Alcalá, Serrano. The boy’s hands look a little bigger, he thinks. The boy’s eyes look a little bigger, he thinks. He tilts his head to the left every time he throws the dice, a familiar gesture. He remembers that his mother does the same thing, as though this involuntary tilt of the head could somehow tip the die, make it land on six.
“Try to buy up everything you can on the first round, that’s the trick,” Maite counsels.
Maite is full of tricks.
“And then on the second round, you put a house on everything you bought.”
> He understands the confusion of properties, of little houses. He’s lined them all up in a row, like a miniature housing development. What else could they do but sit there looking happy and charming? The boy seeks out Maite’s touch every time he reaches to pick a card from the stack, and then looks at him, or at least he thinks he looks at him.
“Your turn, Papá.”
But the mood of the day lingers, too; it doesn’t disappear. Or, more than lingering, it’s still going, as if it were something in motion. It’s like he can simultaneously see the boy’s face now and the one in his memory. The motion has changed the boy’s face, which displays a constant look of surprise, like a language comprised of events and intentions, all recent yet keeping quietly to themselves. He lands on Gran Vía and has to pay up. He lands on Cuatro Caminos and has to pay up. The boy collects the banknotes with greedy delight.
“What are you going to do with all that money?”
“Ha!” he responds, stunned, cheeks aflame.
Loneliness becomes a muffled buzz. His own loneliness, but also the boy’s loneliness. It’s as though he’s found his way into some place, as though the staircase has taken him somewhere; it’s a new room. He’s glad Maite is there, glad to have a witness. He’s glad to know that the boy’s body is growing, glad to be there, to be lonely. He’s glad that he is able to get inside the boy’s loneliness, as though entering it were a delicate, complicated maneuver, both stopping and gliding at once. And then he focuses on his face as though for the first time, attempting to describe it to himself: his hair is brown, hangs to the bottom of his tiny ears; his eyes are slightly almond-shaped, like his own; his nose, snub, with wide nostrils, like Sonia’s; his lips, full and round. He focuses on his clothes, on the curve of his arms pressing earnestly down on the table, on his concentrated expression. He focuses on his loneliness. Six, three, four, Jail, a house, and every time they pass Go, the glimmering, long-awaited twenty-thousand-peseta bill. And then, suddenly, he understands.
GUILE
Mamá had phoned four times that morning to complain about the girl who took care of her, and each call had been a bit more distressed than the one before. The most recent one had caught her on her way into a meeting at the office, and she’d had to hang up with a terse “I’ll call you back.” She knew not picking up would have been far worse, would have given rise to at least ten suicidal calls in a row and left her unable to concentrate on anything. It was always the same—whenever this sort of thing happened, she ended up with the same vague sense of having done something wrong, as though she’d inadvertently left the pressure cooker on and then gone out of town. She called her back on her way out of the office.
“She’s gone,” Mamá said.
“Who?”
“Jazmín.”
“Why?”
“Because she steals; I fired her.”
She could hear a fraught voice in the background, that of Jazmín herself—“I don’t steal, Señora.”
“She’s still there?”
“Yes, she’s packing her things, and I’m standing right beside her so she can’t take anything,” Mamá replied.
“Put her on.”
A strange kerfuffle could be heard over the phone, like a bang and then whispering, followed by a distinct “I haven’t stolen a single thing.”
“I know you haven’t, Jazmín, please, don’t go.”
“Not a single thing,” Jazmín repeated in her small, reedy voice, sounding on the verge of tears, “and she wants to report me.”
“Nobody’s going to report you, Jazmín. My mother is an old woman, please be patient with her.”
“Believe me, I am more than patient with her.”
“I know, I’m sure you are, please don’t go.”
Again, an unintelligible whispering and then a long silence, after which came the heart-rending “But . . . I want to, I want to leave . . . Will you still pay me for the five days I worked this month?”
“Of course I will, don’t worry, but please think about staying.”
“I’ll think about it.”
When she got to Mamá’s, all that was left of Jazmín was the cloying trail of her perfume in the air, an unmade bed, and several bottles of makeup remover in the bathroom, beside a hand towel bearing the imprint of an eye, like some sort of relic. Mamá was on the living room sofa, watching television from beneath the Scotch plaid blanket she’d given her last Christmas. For months, she’d been feeling cold all the time, or maybe it was the apartment that was cold. It was impossible to know for certain whether the problem was the heating or Mamá being so immobile, whether it was in fact cold or whether it was only natural that anyone who sat as motionless as Mamá did in that place would end up with the same chronic chill. Often, when she walked in, she found she couldn’t believe she’d once lived there, been a girl and a teenager there in those rooms, with that furniture. There hadn’t actually been any major changes since she left at the age of twenty, yet somehow it seemed to have fallen into decline, it was almost as though everything there were sending some sort of message.
“Did Jazmín leave?”
“I dismissed her,” Mamá responded regally.
“You can’t keep doing this to me,” she said, slipping up. She hadn’t meant to add to me. Doing this was what she’d meant to say. You can’t keep doing this. Mamá fired back at once.
“ To you?”
She paced the living room, without taking off her coat, avoiding both the question and the eyes that, she was sure, were looking her up and down. Mamá’s eyes were another thing that had changed over the past two years. They were now covered in a very fine, white film, as though someone had taken an eyedropper and administered two tiny drops of milk. Far from giving her a softer look, though, she felt as though the whiteness had actually hardened Mamá’s expression further still, made it more distant yet more intense, too—the look of an animal with cataracts. On the bookshelves were photos of her as a girl, of her father (who’d died when she was ten and of whom she retained almost no memories), of her and Pablo’s wedding, of Raquel in London, Raquel in Istanbul, Raquel at the Perito Moreno glacier. Smiling images, frozen in time like crags on a cliff.
“Raquel phoned,” Mamá sallied forth. “She says she wouldn’t have anyone who stole from her in her house for one second.”
Raquel lived in London now, worked for a communications firm, and had married her second husband—a milky, skittish-looking Englishman by the name of Donovan—three years ago. She could imagine the conversation perfectly. Raquel only put in appearances in Madrid when it was time to play the brilliant prodigal-daughter. She always stayed with Mamá and always turned up laden with gifts for one and all, like an off-kilter, out-of-season Father Christmas. For longer than she could remember, her relationship with her sister had alternated between frustrating, all-pervading silences and fleeting get-togethers full of phony emotion that left her drained because her personality was so ill suited to pretense. Pablo always referred to Raquel like a hurricane. “When is Raquel touching down this year?” he’d ask. In her wake, Hurricane Raquel left a trail of unwearable attire for Pablo, indecipherable little statuettes and porcelain figurines—usually black or metallic—for her, and too-small underwear for the kids. And for Mamá, nine times out of ten, what she left her was the absolute certainty that she wasn’t getting the love she deserved.
“Mm. I know what Raquel says.”
“You don’t believe me, you always side with the Romanians,” Mamá insisted, sitting up in indignation, “you never believe a single word I say.”
The Romanians was her term for all caregivers, Romanian or not, for every woman who had looked after Mamá, lived with her for a brief period of time. As far as actual Romanians, there had only been two, though they must have made quite an impression, because she spoke about them as though they were the epitome of all things evil.
“Get your things, I’m taking you to my place.”
Mamá adopted a plaintive, melodramatic tone at times like that.
“How long for, daughter?”
“A day or two, until we find someone else.”
“We’re not going to find anything in two days.”
“We’ll see. Get your things. Unless you’d prefer to stay here on your own?”
“Lord, no.”
She tried to contain her fury as she watched her trundle off to her room to pack a little bag; she paced up and down Mamá’s living room a couple of times, glanced out the window, and finally sat down on the sofa, flushed, with her coat on and an urge to bury her face in her hands and weep tears of rage and despair. Pablo would get angry, Raquel would call eighteen times that night, she would end up feeling anxious in her own home yet again, feeling like she couldn’t get enough air, Mamá would dream up urgent needs every other second. Then would come the guilt, the tears, and with them Mamá’s insults—or what was worse, her piteous voice calling down the hall like a doleful puppy, asking whether or not she loved her. The whole sequence would be unleashed like an inevitable chain of events, the same as always, and she would once again be trapped.
Every time she brought her mother home with her, she asked herself the same question: Where did it all begin? She’d stop at a traffic light, glance at her out of the corner of her eye, light a cigarette, and become distracted, wondering: Where? There had to be a place, a moment, a specific day when things had gone awry. A wave of fear rippled over her, like an electric surge, the ludicrous fear of becoming like Mamá, of turning into her. Mamá’s emotional world, like so many of her worlds, revolved solely around herself, but in a sort of limp manner, she could find no better way to describe it. Yes, limp was the word, like some worn-out rubber trinket that keeps flopping over no matter how many times it’s righted. But inside that limp rubber object was a hard heart, a heart that was angry at the world, ready to cause harm if necessary, to cheat, to blackmail, to spurn.
