Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  “You know, if I didn’t exist, you wouldn’t exist,” she caught her mother telling her eight-year-old son one time.

  “Why would you say that to the boy?”

  “Because it’s true,” Mamá shot back. “Or perhaps you think it’s not?”

  Really, it would have all verged on the comical had it not riled her so much. Sometimes, she actually did manage to laugh at the situation when she talked about it with Pablo, but whereas Pablo’s laughter was healthy and heartfelt, hers became more of a sneer when she was alone. That hadn’t always been the case, of course. She could recall that growing up, when she was a girl and a teenager, Mamá’s personality had been nervous and energetic. It had taken guts and determination to raise two girls on her own, manage the fabric shop on her own, after being widowed so young. She wasn’t an ignorant woman. She wasn’t an ugly woman. She’d had a couple of serious suitors after Papá died, one lasting several years. For nearly a decade, the shop had had a long and prosperous life, and Mamá had run it with an iron fist. She remembered one time she slapped a shop girl in front of her for having ruined some silk. She remembered the girl’s chin had started to tremble in fury and in shame and that Mamá’s expression was unsettling, it seemed to exude strength and conviction, and she felt as if it weren’t really her mother she was seeing but—superimposed on her for a second—the face of a woman from long ago, the wife of an emperor.

  Mamá’s decision to sell the shop was one of the most mysterious moments in her life. Around that time, Raquel had just gotten married to her first husband, and she herself had just moved out. Being alone made her feel ashamed, for some reason, just as Raquel’s resolve and Mamá’s grit made her feel ashamed. She lived in a naïve world in which almost everything made her blush or feel ashamed. She’d leave her classes at the School of Law feeling ugly and very small, kicking up fallen leaves. When she got back to the apartment where she lived with two other students, she’d gaze out the window at Madrid, thinking it looked like an enormous set, a façade full of different-sized doors. She lost her virginity to a handsome boy after a party at her place, since that seemed to be the only way to not have to see him again, as though his being handsome were some sort of guarantee that she wouldn’t be able to sustain his interest for long. She’d wanted to lose her virginity. Her innocence bothered her, and she wanted to get it all out, wrench it from inside her. After that episode, she spent four months being ridiculously promiscuous. She punished herself, imposing promiscuity as an attempt to stop being so bashful, but since it didn’t come naturally to her, she ended up getting depressed. Raquel moved to Paris and got separated after three months, and then Mamá called up one day and informed her that she’d sold the shop, just like that, like it was nothing, like saying the price of bread had gone up. She felt a sudden panic at that moment, as though the sale of the shop left Mamá, or her, in a troubling, unprotected position.

  “But, what are you going to do now?”

  “Nothing, for the time being. I’ll see.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I never liked that shop.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “You’ve always been a little slow,” Mamá replied. She neglected to add, she thought then, Unlike Raquel.

  That was also about the time she first met Pablo, in the university cafeteria. She’d noticed him on several occasions, but always in a distracted sort of way. He was the sort of young man who walked in and automatically pretended to be looking for someone, then quickly gave up on the endeavor and sat down alone. No one to get too worked up about, no one to think too much about, just one of many young men who were a little timid perhaps, a little unsociable, who fit in at university the way a pigeon fits in at the park for a limited period of time, who moved awkwardly as though never completely at ease, who disappeared without a trace. He wore a beige overcoat that went down to his ankles, and a brown cap, like a mix between an anarchist conspirator and a Dostoyevsky character transposed into some British film. Perhaps that was one thing they had in common from the start—they both dressed as though they’d been rummaging through the donated clothes bags at the local parish. From up close, he had a peculiar beauty, or a dormant ferocity, which unsettled her more than it attracted her. She didn’t remember when the first time they spoke had been. She did remember, though, that their first dates had been slightly deranged and exhausting, that Pablo had tried to dazzle her by listing out the last hundred pieces of Marxist theory he’d read, and that he’d hardly let her speak. She remembered that they made love after the second night and that she thought she didn’t want to see him again, but that they did see each other again—three, four, five more times—and their dates became increasingly relaxed and enjoyable. On their way out of the movie theater, or on their way into a café, it sometimes struck her that they were two outcasts, and he would occasionally grow pensive and make ridiculous assertions, such as anything would be better than becoming a lawyer—driving a taxi, for example. One of those nights, just after making love, she lay there gazing at his naked body. Pablo had fallen asleep in the same position he always did, forearm flung over his face like someone just startled by an explosion. She remembered that that was when it struck her for the first time. The thought began to form with a texture akin to that of arrogance. She belonged to him. She thought this as if her own body had objectified itself, and that fact brought her a marvelous sense of calm; her body, her desires—everything was an object belonging to Pablo. Love came first as a violent sense of belonging, and then it was as if that sense of belonging had shattered and given her a remarkable gift in return: Pablo’s slightly brusque and quirky kindness, an inconceivable yet commonplace transfer of goods. In those days, when she sat down to study, she’d find herself suddenly overcome by her own joy, as though it had pounced and startled her. At times like that, she didn’t care about Madrid and its dry riverbed, its winter sun, didn’t care about Sunday lunch at Mamá’s (You’re not obliged to come if you don’t want to, I’m perfectly fine on my own), about canon law, about the wallpaper in her ridiculous little college bedroom that Mamá had paid for to start with and that she began to pay for soon afterward herself, working part-time as a secretary at a law firm.

  Now, driving Mamá back to her place for the nth time, it struck her that maybe that’s where it had all begun, at some point during those years. Pablo and Mamá had never hit it off, even at the start; Mamá had purposely rebuffed them by fabricating illnesses the first two summers they were married; she had her first son, and then her second, exactly one year later. Idleness had changed Mamá, turned her into another person, a scheming, sedentary conspirator with a few contradictory melodramatic flourishes thrown in for good measure.

  Your own mother, and you don’t even respect me, she’d say every time she tried to skip Sunday lunch to go to the country with Pablo and the kids. Their phone calls became indistinguishable, facsimiles of one another (What did you have for lunch?), osteoarthritis gave her a constant topic of conversation (Like dogs sinking their teeth into my legs), and each time she went to pick her up, it seemed like the same old living room was no longer the same old living room, like Mamá’s body was no longer her same old body, as though there were something suspended in the smell of the apartment, something stale, and Mamá’s body had shriveled inside it like a houseplant exposed to too much sun.

  Her real life took place on another plane, one that ran parallel to Mamá’s. She discovered that she was a rather eccentric, festive mother. She took joy in seeing that her kids were happy, that they got dirty playing outside; she looked at herself in the mirror and thought that motherhood had given her face an open, natural look. Sex, too, had changed. She needed it with an anxious, ecstatic compulsion; those were the years when they liked to talk dirty in bed.

  Yes, she was sure now, it must have been then—when she was too wrapped up in her own happiness to notice anything—that Mamá had started down the slippery sl
ope of self-righteousness and constant criticism, had started with the attention seeking, the lying, the conspiring with Raquel; it must have been then when the house got cold.

  A week later, they had interviewed ten new women. The process had a certain complexity to it, so, in the past, Raquel had sometimes flown in for the weekend to lend a hand. The first step involved going to the parish and to two legitimate-seeming NGOs to ask if they knew of any women looking to work as live-ins with an elderly person. She’d leave an abbreviated and slightly mendacious description looking for someone young, friendly, with experience to care for an easygoing, elderly diabetic woman. She offered lodging, obviously—a small, charming, light-filled room (the charming part had been Raquel’s idea) where no visitors were allowed—a salary of six hundred and fifty euros a month, one day off a week, and the possibility of a contract if she stayed in service more than a year, after an initial three-month trial period. Sometimes, reading over the more than a year part, she almost wanted to laugh. For a week, a string of Daysis, Jazmíns, Saras, Déboras, and Nicoletas had been parading through Mamá’s living room. She’d give them a tour, and they would meet the Señora, who dressed for the occasion in a suit they would almost undoubtedly never see her wear again. Mamá would buy a little spiral notebook and a pen and jot down her impressions.

  Margarita

  Ugly

  Ecuador?

  Looks like a thief

  3 kids in . . . Ecuador?

  Talks too much

  After a little while, in would come María, or Mónica, and the entire operation would be repeated. She tried to imagine for a minute what it must be like for any of those young women to walk into a cold living room, see an old woman in a suit sitting there with her collection of fans, jotting things down in a notebook while her daughter attempted rather unsuccessfully to come off as pleasant. At times, she felt all she was doing was putting on a performance, setting a trap, like a children’s story in which, after entering the house-cum-prison, the unsuspecting innocent would discover to her horror that the walls were no longer made of marzipan, the doors were no longer candy but had turned into solid metal bars. But these women were stronger than that, or at least they seemed to her to be, with their tacky dresses (most likely, Mamá would never see them wear those again, either), their overpowering perfume, and their reedy voices. What they were doing, in that charade of benevolence and good intentions, was nothing more than sizing up the opponent before combat, something she didn’t think a man would understand. Mamá would get up from the sofa to show her her room, or the Daysi of the hour would go to her side and rush to help her up as though anxious to begin working, when in fact what she wanted was to touch her, to find out if she was going to be able to stand it, to take stock of her scent, her texture. Then Daysi would walk down the hall in front of Mamá, and it would be Mamá’s turn to take stock of her.

  Daysi

  35 but looks 45

  Do I like Peruvian food, she wants to know (!)

  Selfish

  Every time a new woman walked into the living room to be interviewed, she worried that her anxiousness to get it over with, and perhaps her feeling of being a fraud, would be detected. Despite being forty-four years old, she’d never learned to lie, and when forced to do so, she felt like the world or the room were closing in around her like a stomach. The truth was that almost all of them seemed fine to her, the sweet, polite ones because they were sweet and polite, the more reserved and organized ones because she thought they’d hold out longer.

  Raquel hadn’t come to Madrid to lend a hand that time, but she phoned daily. Interminable, late-night phone calls during which she and Mamá ran through each candidate and then Raquel passed judgment, as though her intuition were infallible over a five-thousand-kilometer radius. The two of them belittled all ten women with Raquel having no other information to go on than Mamá’s notes, and she ended up having a bitter conversation with her sister in which Raquel repeated ad nauseam that it was Mamá, not her, who would have to live with the woman in question. It was always the same with Raquel—everything seemed more or less under control, until suddenly the conversation veered sharply and became personal.

  “You know, this would all be far more straightforward if you were a little more concerned about Mamá.”

  “That’s easy for you to say; you’re in London.”

  “In London or in Kuala Lumpur, it’s equal, the blame is yours.”

  Raquel’s conversation was always peppered with incomprehensible phrases that sounded like literal translations from another language. Raquel herself was like a literal translation from another language, but she still felt increasingly pent-up frustration at these continual misunderstandings with her sister. There were times she wanted to put an end to the whole little drama and ask, honestly and genuinely, Why is it that we’re incapable of loving each other? But rather than a step toward reconciliation, the question itself would have been an open recognition of failure.

  Anita turned up the following day, one of three young women sent from the Hispano-Colombian Center for the interview. Actually, all three of them arrived together, and they had to make them wait in the entryway for Mamá to interview them one by one. From the very beginning, her eyes were drawn to her, mesmerized. She couldn’t have been even twenty years old. Her shoulders were slightly hunched, and she had a strange adolescent body, small, ratlike eyes, and fidgety hands that spent the whole interview winding themselves around a hairband. Instinctively, she’d saved her for last. When she walked in, she had the lost look of a new girl being left at an orphanage, and then, all at once, she toughened, as though she’d switched on some entirely different person residing within her, the one she needed. With Anita—although she didn’t know it at the time, she discovered it later—that’s the way things always were; it was as though a new person sprung up from inside her, a different person, and yet the impression she gave was not that of someone who’d suddenly overcome her inherent shyness but that of someone so neutral she could become sixty different people with equal conviction. She asked her where she was from.

  “Medellín, Colombia.”

  She asked her how old she was.

  “Nineteen.”

  She asked her if she had any family.

  “Yes, my mother, my boyfriend, Manuel, and my son, Lolito.”

  Mamá jotted Has a son in her notebook, and then vacillated, pen quivering slightly over the paper, not entirely sure whether or not to add an exclamation point, which, in the end, she did.

  She asked how old her son was.

  “ Two.”

  “Don’t you miss him?”

  Anita did something indecipherable then, something that made her feel ashamed of her own question. She turned to the window, then to the photos Mamá had displayed on the bookshelves, and then, without skipping a beat, turned back to them with her unreadable brown eyes. And she smiled. A tenuous smile, so unrelated to the question that she seemed not to have heard it, or to have ignored it. She became convinced, then, that there was something far worthier in Anita. It wasn’t just that she was a far worthier person—maybe she wasn’t—but that something inside Anita was far worthier than Anita herself even, worthier than her nineteen years, than her tiny, mysterious brown eyes, than her black hair that hung down to her shoulders; it was as though each part of her body were independently alive—her fingernails, her hair, her eyes, those eyes that sat watching her, watery and wide open and small. The smile was neither dismissive nor haughty; she would make no attempt to answer an obvious question with an equally obvious response. Anita smiled the way an Egyptian mask smiles out from the display case in a museum—genteel and vacant, as though she served wiser gods than the ones there. She tried to hide her nervousness.

  “Did the people at the center tell you what the salary is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to see your room?”

/>   “Of course.”

  When Anita got up to leave the living room, she turned to Mamá to see if she’d written anything else in her notebook. She hadn’t. The entry was a brief one.

  Anita

  Has a son(!)

  And without knowing why, without even so much as consulting with Mamá, when she walked her to the door, she put a hand on her shoulder and said simply, “The job is yours, if you want it. Could you start tomorrow?”

  Anita smiled again.

  “Of course.”

  Mamá didn’t say a word.

  The two times she tried to describe to Pablo what Anita was like, she failed miserably. It wasn’t about her personality, which she knew nothing of, or beauty, which Anita didn’t possess. The person who’d moved in to Mamá’s place as caregiver, rather than winning out over a cohort of candidates, had laid claim to the position as if by right. When she tried to recall her face, she got lost in a strange haze of impressions. And she felt like the girl had fleeting, mysterious bouts of solemnity; she occasionally seemed distracted, or perhaps frightened, but not by anything occurring around her; it was as though she were abruptly overcome by a thought that was just too sad or too somber. And then she’d snap out of it. She was back. Sadness left behind.

  Mamá behaved for the first few days with Anita the way she always did when there was a new caregiver, with a wait-and-see attitude, not revealing her hand. Anita did the laundry, was a decent cook, served lunch and dinner, accompanied Mamá on her walks when it wasn’t too cold, cleaned enough so that everything looked spotless on the surface, although on close inspection, it was easy to see that she’d put in just enough effort. She had seen her twice when she went to visit, and thought she was almost born to be a maid—housework made her swell, she flitted gracefully from one side of the apartment to the other like a true maid, simply serving and providing; if she undertook a task requiring physical exertion, she panted slightly, but when she got up, she’d look fresh as a newborn cub.