Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  “I’ll call you soon, as soon as I find someone else,” she said as she was leaving.

  Anita became very serious then.

  “I’m sorry about the other day, I said horrible things to you,” Anita replied.

  “You didn’t say anything horrible.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said immediately, and went on with such authority that it seemed impossible to contest. “Then I wished I hadn’t. You don’t need to find someone else.”

  It seemed odd how little emotion there was on Anita’s face now. It was as though her words reverberated, a slamming door, resounding over those she’d spoken a few nights ago. She sensed an unbreakable pact being formed between them—love, perhaps, but not just any sort of love, a love like soldiers’ love.

  “Have you really thought this through?”

  “Yes.”

  The two weeks that followed went by surprisingly fast—back to work and Pablo, and the boys. They were swamped with divorce proceedings at the office. Divorces were always filed for after Christmas, it was so predictable that it had become an inside joke at the firm. When things weren’t going well before the holidays, her boss would say, “As we speak, plates are being smashed by those who’ll put food on our tables in January.”

  She began at nine, meeting with the plaintiffs (ninety percent of whom were women), asking them to tell her about their marriages and their reasons for wanting to split up. They sat in a small, pleasant room in the office and she ordered coffee for both of them, closed the door, took out a recorder, and behaved in a way that would have been unrecognizable to those who knew her; she’d lean in toward the woman (she’d been through the questions so many times she hardly needed to glance down at the list) and, with great professionalism, ask the questions in a way that drew out her narrative. At times, she felt each question had the effect of an emetic. The women nearly always cried. Sometimes honest sobs, like coughs, like physical, bodily reactions; the women were so wrought with anxiety or with humiliation that they cried—she didn’t know how else to explain it to Pablo when he asked—as though their bodies were ridding themselves of a toxin. Other times, their sobs were theatrical, or almost theatrical. In that little room, it was impossible to tell truth from fiction. They complained of infidelities, selfishness, humiliation, even physical abuse. They all felt they’d been casting pearls before swine. Nearly all of them spoke with disgust—disgust and outrage, disgust and grief. Some, very few, with forsworn resignation, admitting from the start that most likely no one was to blame. She’d always had a hard time feeling sympathy for them. Though she wasn’t a cold woman, it seemed that a slightly cynical instinct kicked in during these sessions, or perhaps it was detachment. The natural distrust that one woman always feels for another, for her pain, for her story, and, above all, for her tears.

  Two years ago, one woman had truly astonished her. She gave off a different air from the moment she walked in, seemed calmer than the others, sadder, too. Sad in a real and bewildered way, like someone who’s suffered through an ordeal that was simply too much for her age or beyond her comprehension. She was very well-spoken, she must have been a very well-educated, upright woman. She looked like she hadn’t worked a day in her life, and that gave her an almost otherworldly air. She was the mother of two boys, seventeen and twenty years old. The elder of the two was a heroin addict. If you took all the real estate her family owned and put it together in one spot, it would have filled an entire Madrid city block. As she ran through the requisite questions and recorded the woman’s responses, she was taken with the way she replied—straightforward, resolute, without trembling, and yet displaying tremendous emotion behind every move she made, so deliberate, so rhythmic. She must have been a beauty when she was young, a natural beauty, unaware of it. She recalled that by the end of their conversation, she was utterly captivated and couldn’t avoid asking where the mistake lay.

  “What mistake?”

  “Yours,” she said, and then added something unusual: “Well, not just yours. Ours, every woman’s mistake.”

  “Well, I don’t know where other women go wrong, but I know where I went wrong, though perhaps it isn’t actually a mistake, in the end.”

  “What was it?”

  “I think I’ve lived a guileless life. Does that make sense?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve lived,” explained the woman, “resourcefully, perhaps; I’m not a stupid woman. I have money, and that’s enabled me to avoid a great number of hardships, and created others that most people don’t generally understand. I have a husband and two sons. One of them very fragile. Throughout my life, even at the worst moments, I’ve always thought that you could get through the hard times as long as you stood your ground, that if you stood your ground, there inevitably came a time when things went back to normal and everybody went back to being good and noble and patient. I’ve always thought that life required a sort of tenacity, I suppose that’s the way I was brought up, and nothing in my experience had refuted that principle, but now I realize that there is one thing I’ve never had. I’ve never had guile. The bad times got worse and I showed no guile, and what’s more, I discovered that it’s not in my nature, and that’s why I’m not sure I can hold out much longer. Now does it make sense?”

  Her memory of the conversation ended there, with the woman smiling slightly by way of apology, and with the sense that her body had become larger than it in fact was, and more elegant as well. Her mind went back to that conversation several times during the course of those weeks. Mamá had stopped speaking almost entirely. Anita had told her as much on the phone several times, and she’d seen it herself the two or three evenings she’d stopped by the apartment after work. It was strange, the physical effect it had on her. She’d walk in and see her looking the same as ever, lying on the sofa in the living room under the Scotch plaid blanket, ask her how she was, and Anita would be the one to reply.

  “Señora has been very relaxed, she’s been sitting there quietly all day. She ate a good lunch, green beans and some yogurt.”

  She got the sense that there was something cold in Mamá’s look, an appraisal of sorts, as though her expression were intended to convey the degree of affection she felt. And the way Anita behaved inside the apartment now seemed strange, too. Now that there was almost nothing for her to do, she seemed busier than ever. She avoided being alone with the two of them and bustled constantly from one place to another, cleaning, making dinner, bringing Mamá a glass of milk, then taking it away as soon as it was empty. In her hands, things seemed to acquire a function different from their true purpose. Sometimes, she thought she was running away, that this excess of activity was her way of running away from Mamá and whatever it was she felt for her; other times she thought it was her, rather than Mamá, that she was trying to punish. In fact, it was all crushingly logical—Mamá’s condition, Anita’s attitude, her own presence in that apartment that had been hers for so many years, a presence reduced now to the role of unwanted guest, a bump on a log.

  When she got home, the residue of those evenings with Mamá and Anita lingered until the moment she closed her eyes, even while making love to Pablo, making her feel somehow orphaned, as though she were not in fact Mamá’s daughter, not in fact anybody’s daughter, and as though the pleasure of making love were somehow divorced from that feeling and yet also a foundation for it. She would feel suddenly distant toward her own children, and that shamed her, as though having smacked them at the hospital were going to scar them for life, scar their consciousness, as if their little eyes, their intelligent eyes, were going to hold on to the event and, when the time came, pay her back, coldness for coldness. Really, she yearned constantly to be touched by them, or by Pablo, or by Anita when she was at Mamá’s place. It was a nebulous feeling but powerfully heartfelt. To be touched—the very desire seemed, by its mere articulation, to contain its own impossibility—to be touched, to be swept away by somethin
g.

  Looking back, there had been nothing special about the last three days of Mamá’s life. It was not in her character to search for hidden signs, and she didn’t do it then, either, not even despite the fact that Anita called more often than usual and that one time when she went to visit, she came out with her to do the shopping and they talked for some time. When they left the supermarket and she asked her if she wanted to have a drink before going back to Mamá, Anita accepted with relief. She told her that Mamá had been more confused than usual and complained often of having a headache.

  “I don’t know how to thank you for what you’re doing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “This, all of this, having stayed.”

  “I don’t have anyplace else to go, anyway. Manolo left.”

  “Your boyfriend Manolo?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  What had happened was simply that Manolo had met another girl and cleared out. And it had been sudden. No, Anita hadn’t suspected a thing. No, she wasn’t sad. She didn’t know what she was, actually, whether she was OK or not. No, she hadn’t told her mother in Medellín, she didn’t get along with her mother, hadn’t she told her that? None of it would have happened if she hadn’t been taking care of Señora. Men, you know, they couldn’t be left alone for very long, they couldn’t help doing these things. Anita spoke with some difficulty but no reproach, seemed insecure but had a strange, all-consuming dignity. Anita was alone in exactly the same way she had previously been coupled, with what seemed like a sudden sort of indigence, as though she’d spent her whole life barefoot and, upon finally reaching that café, had turned around, surprised to see that everyone else was wearing shoes. She’d lived a guileless life. And now here she was taking care of a woman who might die at any moment, but not even that had the power to scare her. She was no longer nineteen but some timeless age. She’d needed each of those events in the same way a person needs small rocks to climb a mountain. And now she was wearing shoes. Was she, was she wearing shoes? It was hard to say. In the days leading up to Mamá’s death, she obsessed over that question. She didn’t actually think about Mamá herself, but something else, something perhaps harder to resolve: Mamá’s loneliness in the company of someone like Anita. She suddenly pitied her, pitied them both.

  It happened at two thirty in the morning, on a Tuesday in early February. It was unspeakably cold, and she remembered using exactly the same words with Pablo that Anita had used with her over the phone:“She had another attack; she’s dead.”

  She remembered how austere the cold felt when she got into the taxi, and her sense of stupor, and that she phoned Raquel three times before managing to wake her up. Her own voice sounded metallic, as though they were both suddenly very strong.

  “Mamá died. She had another attack.”

  “Are you with her?”

  “No, I’m in a taxi, on the way. The girl called me.”

  The girl. She remembered that she’d never used that expression to refer to Anita before and that she did it then for the first time more out of shame than aloofness, as though feeling the need to protect a loved one. The girl. She remembered that for the first time in her life, she’d felt sorry for Raquel, for some reason. She imagined her lying there sleepily, Donovan by her side—or perhaps her lover by her side, it didn’t really matter—getting out of bed heavily, a middle-aged woman who’s lost her looks and knows it but still clings to the gestures of beauty, as though she’d momentarily forgotten.

  “I’ll catch the first plane I can. Don’t move her from the house, I don’t want to see Mamá at the mortuary, I want to see her at home. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  She remembered that she’d hardly noticed Anita when she arrived, that it didn’t seem strange for her to be out on the street waiting for her. Mamá was in bed, lying on one side but with her body leaning in the opposite direction, like someone who’d turned and reached over early in the morning to hit the alarm clock but fallen back asleep. One of her eyes was open and the other one closed, and she closed the open eye with her thumb, feeling, as she did, a cold, electric distress. The hair on the back of Mamá’s neck was sweaty, and it was thicker than she’d thought it was. She remembered having taken note of that—how odd it was that Mamá’s hair was so thick. Had it always been like that? She remembered, too, that something inside Mamá seemed to still be throbbing, a sort of tenacity on her body’s part, and that she saw then that her legs were curled up under the blanket. She smelled a bit like fart, like the faint fart of a child, and her face didn’t look contorted, didn’t seem to indicate any great suffering in her final moments. She looked, rather, like she’d been smothered, or like something had simply pushed her into bed. She was shocked, holding Mamá’s body—suddenly she realized that she was full of bones, that from one day to the next, she’d become noticeably heavier, or harder. She settled her back down onto the bed and left the room. All at once, she was afraid—of the dark, of Mamá’s body, of her smell, of the yellowy light of the bedside lamp. She left the room knowing she wouldn’t go back in there alone, thinking that she needed Raquel, and as she turned to go, she discovered that Anita had been in the doorway the entire time, watching her. Just as Mamá’s face ultimately still looked familiar, Anita’s had changed completely. As though she’d had a terrible fright. Her face had withered and hardened, as though everything that constituted Anita had shriveled up inside her body, become miniscule.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Anita immediately started to cry. She went to her and put a hand on her shoulder, Anita’s tiny shoulder, like a little spring, bobbing up and down with her sobs.

  “It’s OK, it’s all right,” she said, and thought, No, nothing is right. But there’s nothing left to go wrong.

  Anita clung to her. Her breath smelled of meat, and she felt it on her neck for five interminable minutes. Something had shattered her love for Anita, too, something cold and rational; she felt nothing for her.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Señora had called out to her in the middle of the night, told her she didn’t feel well. She was scared. Señora had asked her to come closer and grabbed her hand. Anita had let go and run away. Then she’d come back, and Señora was dead, she’d stopped breathing. She went downstairs and ran outside, distraught, phoned her—that was it. She spoke through sobs at first but was stoic by the end, nearly recovered, and asked if she could go now.

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “I don’t know, anywhere.”

  “No, you stay with me.”

  It wasn’t a request, or a plea, but an order: You stay with me. Was that what her money got her, then? She sensed that what she felt coursing through her veins at that moment must have been very similar to what a man felt in a brothel. They sat in the kitchen, and Anita made coffee like a maid, moving like a maid, movements that were slightly obtuse and rather dismissive. She found it touching how naturally Anita navigated Mamá’s kitchen, the same kitchen in which she herself would have struggled to find a spoon. She wondered what they were going to do with all that stuff. The four hours she spent with Anita in Mamá’s house that night were a blur. She remembered that they didn’t speak much but also didn’t part for even a second, that they were both scared, that she felt unable to contemplate Mamá’s death, and that Anita would burst into tears for no apparent reason. She asked her what she was planning to do now, and Anita said she’d try to find another live-in position, most likely. They did practical things: Anita wrote down her address and bank account details so her last month’s pay could be deposited, since it had always been Mamá who paid her, up until then, and she’d done it by check. Every little while, she’d remember with a flash that Mamá was dead there in her room and have absurd thoughts—it made no sense for the bedside lamp to still be on, for instance. Anita told her she was going to go pack her s
uitcase, and she offered to help. She’d never thought about it until then, but Anita had spent those last few months sleeping in her room. Actually, all of Mamá’s caregivers had, and if she hadn’t minded—or even thought about it, really—it was only because not even when she was sleeping there herself had it seemed like her room. Now, suddenly, helping Anita get her things together with Mamá lying dead in the other room, she felt the same way again; she recalled, with almost asphyxiating intensity, having been a miserable teenager between those four walls and having left them with the same sense of relief Anita was displaying at that moment. She was shocked at the sparseness of Anita’s suitcase—three T-shirts, two sweaters, four pairs of panties, and several pairs of tights. Six novels, one picture of Lolito dressed as Spiderman, one picture of Manolo, an alarm clock, and a toiletries bag. That was it.

  The events of that night faded as dawn approached. Raquel arrived sans Donovan early the next morning, on the first flight from London, and when she walked into Mamá’s room, she was at her side. After that, everything flew by at dizzying speed—the mortuary, the burial, a strange sense of permanent submission to all of the realities that death unleashes, the filing of death records, the exhaustion, selecting a coffin, opening Papá’s tomb (Raquel did that part with Pablo; she had refused to be present), the day of the funeral, the mass held at the cemetery at Raquel’s insistence. At each of those steps, there seemed to be a copious excess of logic, broken only by a few exceptional instances—the moment her boys arrived at the mortuary and hugged her, Pablo’s kiss, the touch of Raquel’s hand when Mamá’s coffin was lowered on an industrial-strength pulley system and it inexplicably screeched, making everyone suddenly flinch and shudder. She couldn’t remember when she’d said goodbye to Anita, if indeed she had. She recalled having seen her for the last time at Mamá’s place, as they were leaving for the mortuary, and that she’d been so flustered that she didn’t think about her again until two weeks after Mamá’s death, and then only because she’d forgotten to deposit her last month’s pay. They’d made the most of Raquel’s last few days in Madrid, closing out Mamá’s bank accounts and deciding what they were going to do with the apartment, which in the end they put up for sale. Raquel spent almost a week in Madrid, returned to London for two days to work, and then came back for the weekend. She stayed in a hotel the whole time, and each morning, she went there to pick her up. She’d go up to her room, and Raquel would make her wait on the bed while she finished getting ready. She remembered Raquel’s sleep smell emanating from the bed, mingled with the soap smell coming from the shower—the intimate details of her sister, so mysterious yet so everyday. They talked about . . . she wasn’t sure what, but they talked a lot over the course of those days, especially Raquel, as though there were something inside her suddenly rousing her spirits. It occurred to her that now, they could be friends. A thought that encased another, perhaps sadder, thought: that it had been Mamá who had kept them from being friends until then. In a way, she seemed younger, or at least younger than the last time she’d seen her, just back from Argentina. She remembered that one afternoon, they’d spent almost an hour debating who was better looking, Robert Redford or Paul Newman.