Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  Where, in what book was that described? Marina wondered that now, the fourth time they were doing it. She wasn’t referring to the romantic side of things, but the other one. She’d looked at a few porn sites on the internet—in her room, in the dark, with the sound muted—with the painstaking skepticism of an entomologist, and up until now, she’d assumed that the whole coming business was something more or less impossible to control, and bizarrely repeated (consisting, for some reason, of at least three orgasms in a row), and that when it was over, she would be expected to say something along the lines of “God, I needed that!” It seemed, though she chose not to dwell on this detail, that not coming straightaway was some sort of failure; at first, she’d pictured it happening with near-comic speed, now it seemed that there was some muscular element to the whole thing, that the whole experience, more than a wave (why was it always described as a wave?), was full of knees, bones, stomachs, ups and downs, throbbing, and secretions, as though the body’s very nature, or its structure, had proven itself inept when it came to completing the act competently and a kind of lack of finesse were required simply to advance toward a place that made any sort of sense. More than a ripple, it was contorted, painful chaos, at least the first two times. Then, on the third, they did a better job. Now, on the fourth, two weeks before Ramón was going to get fried on his entrance exams, as she felt her own pleasure wend its way through her stomach, and as she turned to him and felt awed by his beauty, it seemed that her pleasure was arcing away in two spirals, one toward embarrassment (at the thought that Ramón might tell the other boys, which was not entirely unlikely) and the other toward a grown-up pride at the studied realization that this was something she was going to be good at, unquestionably good at, that she was going to take pleasure doing it and give pleasure as well. It wasn’t an abstract thought, but one emotionally bound and tied to Ramón, to his strange body, his particular body, his skinny legs and slightly sunken chest.

  “That was perfect,” Ramón said afterward. His face had a sort of athletic beauty, the hair at his temples was matted with sweat as though he’d been playing soccer, or, better yet, swinging on a swing for hours. He seemed a bit solemn suddenly, his declaration rather more well-mannered than truthful. Maybe he felt dirty, or maybe he’d just remembered, with renewed intensity, that they were going to fry him on his entrance exams in less than two weeks. Marina didn’t know how she felt. Just like after the other times, all that thrusting, that contorting and trembling had left her feeling bashful, as if she wanted to put on her clothes as quickly as possible, or to shield herself from her own nakedness by clinging to Ramón. She jumped up and got dressed as fast as she could. As she was pulling on her pants, she heard him say, “What I really should be doing is studying.”

  She would have liked to fire off a more hurtful riposte, but all she could think to say was, “Well get to it, then.”

  Ramón got dressed slowly, pensive.

  “Yeah, I will. I’m going to get to it. I’ll call you in a couple days, OK?”

  “Maybe.”

  Ramón looked at her aghast. The same look he’d have, no doubt, when he found out they’d fried him on his entrance exams. Later, when she went up home (since in order to go home, all she had to do was go up a floor), she climbed the stairs slowly, as though it were impossible to hide the fact that she’d been doing it, and she had mixed feelings. She liked those feelings, even though she didn’t, even though they were unpleasant; they struck her as literary and meandering. If she had to describe them, she thought, she’d constantly have to backtrack and say that what she’d just said was true actually wasn’t, or to add some new, disconcerting, beautiful yet terrible detail, until she’d woven a kind of perverse tapestry. She could still feel pleasure, a sort of vague tingling, as well as shame at not being a little more feminine. She had the sense that her pleasure was unmistakably seeping through her pores, could be seen on her face and in her look, and that anyone even mildly perceptive would pick up on it immediately. For a second, she was afraid. Her mother opened the door, and didn’t notice a thing. Her mother never seemed to notice a thing.

  “Where were you?”

  “Downstairs, reading.”

  She attempted—replying as she sped past her mother and went straight to her room—to wear the same expression as Clarice Lispector in her photos, a slightly haughty, distant expression conveying that she knew something that no one else knew, and that it was something dreadful. Lately, she couldn’t stand her mother. Her silent, pharmacist’s manner, the way she was just there, taking up space, made her sick, as did the fact that she resembled her a little, which is why she’d unconsciously fashioned all of her mannerisms and expressions to be as unlike her as possible. It was an aversion that had evolved naturally and implacably, particularly over the past two years. It hadn’t always been that way, but it was now; everything was different now, as though she’d suddenly understood the antipathy she felt toward her mother’s indolent life at the pharmacy, which was nothing but a money-making machine, toward her white coat, her slightly phony sympathy, all of that sick people chitchat. She thought she was essentially evil and horrid, evil in a passive way, the evil of those who try to arouse pity.

  Her father got home that night more tired than usual, and more contemplative. Marina was just finishing dinner with her mother; they’d hardly spoken during the entire meal. Her mother had said that since school was out now and she had nothing to do, she ought to be generous and help raise money for a Doctors Without Borders campaign. What irritated Marina, more than the fact that she’d asked her to volunteer for a campaign (which she’d done hundreds of times), was that generous of hers, and the assumption (which, incidentally, was entirely on the mark) that she had nothing to do.

  “Actually, I was planning to start writing a novel; tomorrow, in fact,” she replied, fabricating on the spot with such indisputable conviction that it seemed odd she’d never thought of it before.

  “What about?”

  “About a lake,” she replied with no hesitation, “a lake where time stands still for everyone who goes there. It’s going to open with a group of people who all go on a trip and end up there—”

  But she had no chance to continue, because her father walked in. He had, as usual, two or three books under one arm, new releases he’d no doubt have to review. Even exhaustion looked good on him, gave him a sort of deliberate, arrogant sheen. He had an unbelievably nice body, which meant that all his female friends fell in love with him and always had. He gave them both a kiss.

  “Have you had dinner yet?”

  The two of them said yes, in unison, to Marina’s embarrassment. They were a strange family. They were excitable, becoming enthusiastic without warning, but also bleak and lonely without warning. They were raucous, but only on the inside, and they didn’t know how to handle normality. It was as though they were constantly waiting for something to happen. Something to toss them into the air, something to mistreat them, make them react. Only then did they feel like a family.

  “Don’t worry about me, I’ll throw something together in a bit; I think I’m going to go take a shower.”

  But when he stopped talking, he just stood there, as though awaiting their approval.

  “Right, sure,” her mother said, “the heat today was unbearable.”

  It was like a bad play rehearsal, with all of the actors coming in a few seconds late on their lines, making it all seem unconvincing.

  “That looks good,” her father said.

  “What does?”

  “That, what you just had for dinner.”

  “Oh,” her mother replied, “it was nothing, there’s still some left in the fridge.”

  In the end, she did sign up to volunteer. She had nothing else to do, and at least it gave her an excuse to be out most of the day. They gave her a Doctors Without Borders vest and told her to work the blocks around the Plaza Callao in the mornings.
She was surprised at how sharp and bright the early-summer atmosphere in Madrid was—suffocatingly hot, electrified, and self-absorbed—and at how much personality there was in the Plaza Callao, a place where she’d always felt there was something missing. It was nowhere near where she lived, but was definitely one of her favorite parts of Madrid. The constant sense of there being something missing made her feel frivolous, like the open, contagious, uninhibited laughter of a simpleton. Plus, she got a kick out of seeing people’s guilty consciences when she told them that for the price of just one cup of coffee a day, they could support a family of three in Sri Lanka for a month, especially if she was explaining this to someone just coming out of the Corte Inglés with four shopping bags. They’d been given a series of statistics like that to throw in at just the right point in the conversation, and each one had an abracadabra effect. It was hard to see the human spirit as anything but preposterously simplistic after observing some of these stimulus-response displays. And more so if she provided the information while glancing out of the corner of her eye—furtively but repeatedly, leaving no room for doubt—at their shopping bags.

  “And listen to this, the plastic from those bags—not even the contents, just the cost of the plastic itself—would provide for a month’s worth of breakfasts.”

  Sometimes she risked ludicrous exaggerations. And her idealized Sri Lankan family—that marvelous, sketchily outlined family, with an adorable little boy whose face was covered in grime, a tireless father who cut cane all day (did they even have sugarcane in Sri Lanka, one woman actually asked her), and a mother who cooked nothing but white rice every single day—did the rest; the whole family emerged, as if swimming up through the waters of the collective consciousness, their faces slightly malnourished (not overly so), their eyes pleading unbearably as they then plunged into the Madrileños’ hearts, but just for a second, and Marina knew it, just for the second it took the Plaza Callao to restake its objective claim on reality—the late-June heat, the twisting looks of giddy lust as the air vent on the Calle Preciados raised women’s skirts, revealing what were almost always cellulite-ridden bottoms, panties that had seen better days, and run-of-the-mill legs that were nonetheless enthusiastically celebrated. Solidarity, for all these people, was luxury and collective shame combined.

  But after awhile, she’d get bored and wander into FNAC to look at books and CDs. If she was in the mood and could find the metallic security strip without too much trouble, she’d fantasize about stealing them. Theft (the mere idea of theft, in fact, almost detached from the object that had aroused her greed) exerted the same captivating influence over Marina as sneaking glances at other people’s diaries, emails not addressed to her, and letters. That was why she liked writers’ collected letters, especially if they leaned toward the intimate or embarrassing. That morning, she’d spent almost fifteen minutes skimming through the love letters of Dylan Thomas, curled up in a corner on the floor, until someone came over and told her she couldn’t sit there like that. “You mustn’t look too grown up, because you’d look older than me; and you’ll never, I’ll never let you, grow wise, and I’ll never, you shall never let me, grow wise, and we’ll always be young and unwise together,” Dylan Thomas said to Caitlin Macnamara in one of his love letters. Marina thought some day she’d steal that line from Dylan Thomas and use it on someone.

  It happened one of those mornings when she was just about to go home for lunch. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred all morning—she’d taken down twelve people’s personal information, handed out fifty or so pamphlets, and a man of about forty-five had flirted with her a little. She was planning to tell Ramón, to make him jealous—those things made Ramón absolutely furious, set him off instantly, like an allergic reaction. That was when she saw him.

  At first it was just a fleeting image. Maybe the way he walked was slightly different, or his attitude, or his arm around the girl’s shoulder. Even his size seemed different, as though he were bigger or something inside him had swelled, which wasn’t the case at home. They passed right by, almost brushing against her, as she was sending Ramón her third text. He had several books under one arm, like at home, and the girl had a cloth bag and a summery, floral-print dress. She was no good at guessing ages. She thought the girl was probably about thirty. She hadn’t really been able to see her face. She had a nice body, legs that were maybe a little on the short side but slender and graceful, and unusual hips that moved almost as though she were giving a little skip with each step, and as though that demonstrated some sort of female intelligence on her body’s part. Her father’s head moved back and forth slightly, first toward the street and then toward her; he seemed to be telling a story. They looked like a normal couple, perhaps a bit lopsided in terms of age, but nothing shocking. Marina felt her blood pound, as though for a second she were on the verge of fainting. The Plaza Callao became hyper-real. The paving stones on the Calle Preciados suddenly became inexplicably dense, as did the buildings, and the heat. The forcefulness of each and every object flickered and permeated the crowd, seeming to leave only the two of them intact, as they glided through it all as though on a moving walkway. The flowers on the girl’s dress had a hypnotic effect. The dress was pretty, but only just, verging infinitesimally on being ugly, and her father . . . her father both was and was not himself—or perhaps he was more himself than ever, perhaps his everyday expressions, those he made at home, were nothing more than a self-conscious rehearsal for these ones, the real ones. So that was how he really walked, that was how he really spoke to people, that was his real smile. He had the vim and vigor of a self-assured man, looked more attractive yet more distant. She began to follow them as though in a dream, as though all of the stubborn sounds of the street had been turned off and others had been turned on, new sounds, sounds emitted at a different frequency.

  Her Doctors Without Borders vest was like a modern-day brown trench coat and low-brimmed hat. She was actually following them at a very short distance. She could have gotten even closer and they wouldn’t have noticed, at least not her father. The two of them burst out laughing in unison once, and then a second time, at which point her father lifted his arm from the girl’s shoulders, allowing her to catch a glimpse of her profile for the first time. It struck Marina that, without that dress, in the wintertime, in a long coat, the girl would have been as invisible as she herself was now in her Doctors Without Borders vest. She was the kind of woman who only seemed to exist in springtime, or early summer, the kind who are sallow in wintertime and by the end of summer are so tan that they look cheap. Right now (did she herself know this, she wondered?), she was in all her splendor. Her father walked beside her as though in desperate and continual need of her contact, placing his hand close to her waist without touching her, just to graze her dress, leaning in. He was solicitous and animated, all of his gestures rejuvenated. They stopped at a doorway, in the Plaza de las Descalzas Reales, and her father grabbed her by the waist and kissed her. Heat seemed to bubble up from the ground. Then they spoke for a second, almost in a whisper, she fished in her cloth bag for her keys, unlocked the door, and they went inside together. The enormous door banged shut like a performance coming to a close.

  She took hours longer than usual to go home that day, too intent on identifying what she felt to let anyone’s presence distract her. In fact, Ramón sent two texts in a row that she didn’t even read. She forgot entirely about being hungry. She went back to the Plaza Callao, told the volunteer coordinator she’d be back the next day, handed in her Doctors Without Borders vest, and walked down the Gran Vía with the unsettling feeling that every single person she passed had been touched by a secret. First she replayed the whole scene in her mind. The images had an unshakeable, insistent quality about them, and the fact that they were so simple made them somehow gravid. Her father was having an affaire. She repeated affaire as though she’d read it in a French novel—une affaire de coeur.

  Marina had been drunk only a few times in
her life, smoked marijuana a couple of times, and snorted cocaine once. Of all those artificial states, the one that most resembled what she felt at that moment was the cold, ramped-up clairvoyance of cocaine. She held the images in her hand, toying with them. She didn’t feel indignant, didn’t feel disgusted, didn’t feel worked up, either, or pleased; there was nothing pleasurable and nothing hateful, simply a cold, unsettling distress. It took her nearly half an hour to ascertain that what upset her most about the whole thing was not that her father was being unfaithful to her mother (which struck her as reasonably understandable, after all) but that she hadn’t recognized him at first; it was the simple fact of having seen, not half an hour ago, several gestures that were totally new to her and yet utterly true-to-life, gestures that she herself could have invented from the cache of already familiar, habitual gestures she’d seen in her father. She felt a tremulous, malignant curiosity about that person.

  When she got home, she was surprised to find that she felt nothing for her mother. She was in the living room, hadn’t been home long, and was cursing the heat. She’d changed into a comfortable dress and was watching television in the living room, taking little sips of iced tea. She liked history programs, that was almost always what she watched, with great interest but without retaining anything, as though they were just white noise. Iced tea and the ecclesiastical confiscations of Mendizábal. She sat down with her for a second, still anxious, as though the image of what she’d seen a few hours ago might somehow impregnate her mother’s tranquility, destroy it, like those geranium moths that laid eggs inside the flowers’ stems, allowing their larvae to then devour them from within. The documentary showed priests and nuns being expelled with crestfallen, humiliated faces from convents, as though it were a costume party that had come to an abrupt end. Her mother smelled like pharmacy, an odd, neutral smell, and sat with her arms in her lap, the glass of iced tea cupped between her hands (the same way of holding it when it was hot as when it was cold).