Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  “Spain is the epitome of pretense,” she quips, glancing at the shop’s décor, and then heads to the purses. She looks at them, too. There are some truly beautiful ones with exorbitant price tags, tragic in their luxury. Why has she always found luxury tragic? She’s not sure. It’s like a facet of her conscience, a sort of decadent, slightly harsh truth, a routine experience that, for some unknown reason, she’s never been able to get used to. Again, not so for Nelly. Luxury, for her mother, has always been a sumptuous, kindred thing, a sort of soundtrack to her life that she pays no attention to, or listens to only distractedly, something exceptional and concrete—club insignias, a Corot in the living room (You have no idea how glad I am I never sold that painting), a closet full of colorful shoes like a nest of hungry birds. And order, above all, an infantile order, a blind order that infiltrates her childhood memories of Nelly, pervading everything, as though it were part of her own character despite being contingent upon others—never returning home to find the azaleas on the terrace anything but impeccable (No roses, dear God, that flower is just a mouth inside a mouth inside another mouth), never having to speak of love, only take it for granted.

  “Loewe is like a doting but dull husband,” Nelly says without turning to face her, “don’t you think?”

  “Mm,” she smiles.

  “Which of these two do you like best? The brown?” And she models, hanging it from her left arm. “Or the black?” And hangs it from the right. Then she does an ill-defined little dance in front of the enormous mirror, left to right, this profile, that profile, glancing at herself more than anything, although also—vaguely and sidelong—at the purses in question. She uses this as an opportunity to examine her carefully for the first time. She hasn’t seen her since the funeral, hasn’t seen her in four months. She reflects on that again. She’s spoken to her two or three times on the phone, but hasn’t seen her. It’s true that she looks more at peace, and it’s true that she seems to have recovered that delicacy of hers, that physically delicate quality Nelly has that’s almost sexual, or at least turns her into a sophisticated sex object. She only realized it a few years ago, but this quality of Nelly’s is what drives men wild and has for as long as she can remember, is what must have driven Papá wild (no, that’s not true, Papá was different), and that intimidating lover she had, and the current handsome banker, so like any other potential banker, and the others she never heard about but knows existed.

  “The brown.”

  “Really? I’d say the black,” Nelly responds. “The brown is too pedestrian.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re right, though, she could use the brown one more.”

  Is that a tribute to her opinion or a demerit? She’s not sure. Is it a value judgment on Aunt Mariana? Should they be practical, for once, and pick the everyday purse over the pretty purse and thus renounce all that has been, or should they, from now until the end of time, over and above all practicalities, always pick the pretty and unusable purse, the black purse, the perverse and untouchable symbol of desire? Who do you love the most? And her little-girl reply: Who I love the most is . . . Nelly. A declaration of love. She wondered if her private English tutor later told Nelly what she’d said. Who I love the most . . . (I will not stand for dirty smocks, or scraps of paper on the floor, or messes, or sticky sofas). In the mirror of her childhood, she is spellbound, and the spell is now complete, as though a ball tossed into the air when she was six still hadn’t come down. Had her tutor told her? Had she not? She hadn’t. She had. The mirror of her childhood reflects a woman who both is and is not this Nelly. Something is missing, like a proverb no one bothers to finish because everyone knows how it goes; there’s the Christmas decorations, and the freakish snow flurry over Madrid, and the hustle and bustle of people out Christmas shopping, and Papá has died obediently—is that’s what changed? Papá, obedient now in death?

  “The black, end of discussion.”

  But there had been no discussion. Only the salesclerk, who’s been at her side the whole time and, as Nelly hands him the black purse, says, “If I may, madam, offer my opinion . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “I think you made the perfect choice.”

  When they leave Loewe, snow is no longer falling timidly over Madrid, and all that’s left is the cold. She feels young and strangely old at the same time. She’s only thirty. She has a nice body—but not too nice, a bit heavyset—a gullible, childlike air, needy, and a way of not understanding life and the world around her that gives her more in common with the people walking past her on the Calle Serrano than with Nelly; it’s as though her thoughts were always one step behind her actions. She’s too slow, she thinks, never sees anything coming. That which was a virtue in her father is a defect in her. But, like Nelly, she does have a twisted, dangerous quality, something hidden in the shadows of a back room.

  “What do you say, should we walk up to the Plaza de la Independencia and then come back down? I’d like to stop by Sybilla, I want to treat myself to a little something, and maybe there will be something pretty for you there, too.”

  “Sure.”

  With Nelly, there’s never much need to talk. Not even when she was six and Nelly left home was there much need to talk. She remembers the living room in their apartment, now rented out, and the creaking parquet floor, the lonely-girl game she played with each creak (Captain, it’s sinking, our ship is sinking)—it was comforting to imagine that a storm might hit Madrid and flood the streets all the way up to the fourth floor (they lived on the fifth), that she would be able to jump out the window and into the water; then suddenly she sees her father’s profile, the living room, two coffee cups and, on one of them, Nelly’s lips (Nelly’s spellbinding lips stamped on cups, cigarettes, Papá’s cheek, next to his lips, almost at the corner of his lips, as though everything she touched were somehow branded). I’m going to go away for a while, kid. The scene suddenly has a certain mystique to it, as though it’s been slathered with a layer of shiny varnish—Nelly gesturing, her father motionless. Come now, don’t cry, I’m not going off to live on the other side of the world. Was that tasteless, or was it not? The lover, the leaving home, the taxi awaiting Nelly (the two of them were, in fact, going off, but to London)—suddenly it all seems tasteless and fictional, the skeleton of a scene from a bad, sappy movie. But her love is no skeleton. Her love is reborn every day. She and Papá often sit in the living room—he with a whisky and a blank stare, she playing dead, not blinking, picturing everyone gathering around her and screaming, terrified, She’s dead, she’s dead! and she herself motionless, cloistered inside her own body, laughing to herself (You won’t be happy until your liver rots, until it turns to mush, is that it, Antonio?); they don’t take Nelly’s photos down, how could they? Their love is a spellbound expanse, their game, slightly deranged. She remembers the two of them talking about Nelly almost every day—how pretty she is, how much they love her, how much they miss her, whether or not she’s going to come back. She’s not sure whether she becomes an adult or her father becomes a child in those conversations, all she knows is that they keep the fires burning, the fires in the temple of Nelly-love, and that neither of them can help it. It’s only now, twenty-five years later, that she sees it was lunacy to have played such a game with a little girl, but she doesn’t hold it against him. It’s like having witnessed and enabled someone else’s weakness, simply because it coincides with your own. Sometimes a postcard arrives or the telephone rings and it’s her. Then her heart pounds furiously, she can’t speak, she gives monosyllabic responses to everything. Is that all the happy you are to hear from me?

  “You’re so quiet today.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “The initials.”

  “What?”

  “We forgot to have them monogram her initials.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Let’s go to Sybilla first, then stop in again on the
way back.”

  “How do they do it?” she finally asks. It’s the first genuine question she’s managed to ask all day.

  “The monogram? With heat, I imagine. The purses are leather, so it must be like branding a horse.”

  How extraordinary, how apt those words suddenly seem—branding a horse. Is it surprising that they still haven’t spoken about Papá? Of course not, but when she left home, she thought for a second that today they finally would, that it would come up naturally in conversation. They’ve never spoken about him in any serious way, and now he’s dead, so isn’t it about time? But she wouldn’t even know where to begin, sadly; the enormity of the topic is such that there could only be vast, generic, open-ended questions—Why? Questions that no doubt Nelly would find in poor taste to answer—What do you mean, why? Why what? How long was she away from Madrid? A year? More? And the whole time in London. In her memory, London took on the form of a chosen city, a glimmering paradise, because Nelly was there. The postcards that arrived every once in a while, addressed to her, all had that bright, emblematic London red on them someplace, a red so like Nelly’s lips. Here I am, kid, this is an amazing city. And her little-girl game: covering the rest of the sentence and reading, again and again, here I am, turning over the postcard, seeing Hyde Park; here I am, turning over the postcard, seeing Battle Abbey; here I am, turning over the postcard, seeing the London phone booth her mother might have called her from; here I am, turning over the postcard, seeing a string of plasticky clouds and an ivy-covered cottage in the shady background; here I am; here I am; here I am. Now, not then, imagining Nelly with that lover (A son-of-the-count-of-something-or-other); from their window, they could see migratory birds, Papá knew what almost all of them were—storks, herons, ducks—planning all the things she’d tell Nelly when she called, writing them all down on a piece of paper (Sofía didn’t invite me to her party; I lost a tooth, it fell out at school, at lunch, and I almost swallowed it; We went to the zoo and the thing I liked best was the dolphins), her mind racing through the conversation she’d worked out in advance, the things she’d say to her, the thrill of almost having swallowed but not swallowing her tooth, the electrified, almost humiliating indignation of not having been at Sofía’s party, the dolphins’ iridescent skin, saving for last the fact that they’d been allowed to touch them, describing what it felt like, so unexpected, so plastic, so detached, but her real voice choked on the words, her real voice and the clear, slightly gravelly sound of Nelly’s voice in the distance, in London, brought out her monosyllabic replies. Is that all the happy you are to hear my voice?

  “I haven’t been to Sybilla in eons. Do you think that sweet salesgirl still works there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nelly moves close, takes her arm. She switches the bag holding their first purchase to the other side, to make herself more comfortable. She feels the touch of Nelly’s body against her own, the contact of Nelly’s hip against her own, her whole leg, almost, keeping stride with her. For a second, they walk in silence. For a second, Madrid seems beautiful. More than beautiful—deferrable. As though that were the most agreeable, most lovable quality a city could have, the most genteel quality, that of being deferrable. And there’s another quality, too: suppleness. Everything seems as though it could sink into Madrid, into that yawning stomach, and be absorbed and digested, even a stone. The cold confers a peculiar beauty on the faces of the passersby, makes them taut and pure, as though they were marble, as though they had been very finely buffed. She doesn’t think of herself as more intelligent or happier than any of those people. She thinks, in fact, that she’s not very intelligent, that she’s not very happy, that perhaps she’s not even good, but she’s tired of constantly conjecturing about herself—I’m this, I’m that. Since Papá died, she’s hardly even read a book, hardly gone out; the only thing she does, the only thing she wants to do—though she wouldn’t tell Nelly for anything in the world—is make love. Fuck. She’s been doing it these past four months with one ex-boyfriend and one lover, a married man who calls when he can and shows up at her door with a hungry look, spends the obligatory quarter of an hour talking to her, and then proceeds to undress her right there in the kitchen, in the bathroom. It’s almost better with him than with the ex-boyfriend. The other day, they were doing it, and out of the blue, he just spat in her face, and then she spat on his, and they spat on each other for a while without knowing why, and she felt the urge to be hurt, an urge as seductive and pulsating as failure, and she came three times, and when they were done, after he left, she wanted to call him and beg him to come back and fuck her again, fuck her all afternoon. It was terrible and lighthearted and fragile and surprising all at once to see the way an unexpected action led to an unexpected surge of solemn, electrifying feelings, trapped inside themselves like capsules. Sometimes, she liked for it to hurt a little. Sometimes, she liked to take it up the ass. She liked to feel another person’s hunger, first anxious and then intent on its own gratification; she liked behavior that seemed destructive and then became caring, and then destructive again, digging in its heels with a frenzied determination to get something and then dissolving as though it had never existed, leaving only the desire to do it all over again, anew. Every repetition was proof of defeat and proof of success; she stopped thinking about Papá, about Nelly, and she felt the way these people passing her on the street were feeling now—cold, beautiful, unable to resolve anything but full of desires—the people of Madrid, laden with bags, laden with expectations. Is it the contact of Nelly’s arm that makes her pity them all? Though it’s not really pity, just as the contact of Nelly’s arm is not only contact. It’s an expanse. The sidewalk on the Calle Serrano is an expanse, and the sight of the Puerta de Alcalá, off in the distance, and the tinkling in people’s eyes, and the snippets of Christmas carols that can be heard when a shop door opens here and there—it’s like catching only one bit of a conversation in which someone suddenly says a babe is born.

  “The mayor has absolutely lost it,” Nelly says, referring to the construction work. “The other day, a friend of Rafael’s from Paris said to me,‘Madrid is a charming city, but it will be even more so when they finally find the treasure.’”

  Nelly turns to her, amused, as though needing to explain the joke to her.

  “You know, buried treasure.”

  “Well, at least all the drilling drowns out the sound of the Christmas carols,” she retorts, because she knows Nelly will like that joke.

  “Don’t be so sure, Christmas carols are emitted at their own unique frequency, they’re indestructible. My idea of hell is a record stuck on ‘The Little Drummer Boy’.”

  Finally, she makes her smile. Nelly, she now knows—though she only recently figured this out—has a truly sexual quality about her when she laughs. For many years, Nelly’s sex life has been a mystery to her, and she’s only gotten a glimpse of certain events, milestones: the lover she left Papá for, another man she saw with her several times, a friend of her father’s who was constantly admiring her beauty, her current husband, the ridiculously naïve and ridiculously handsome banker. How many men have there been in Nelly’s life? She thinks of Aunt Mariana’s advice: If you want to know how many men a woman has had, make a reasonable guess, and then add five. Looking at any one part of Nelly is like looking at all of her, her whole body, there’s always some sort of sound that interrupts her gaze, a sound that is her body, and her body is indisputable, but does not project itself in any one direction in particular. In her mind, she calls up some of the sexual looks Nelly has given men; they seem out of context now, and back then she didn’t know what kind of looks they were, but now she gets it. Nelly’s sexual look is the same as the smile a woman gives a grocer when he quotes her a price that’s too high—it’s like a sharp fluttering in her cheeks, or her eyelids, a note of suspicion and premonition, and perhaps of commitment. It’s like sex is something Nelly owes to no one but herself, something unrel
ated to anybody else in particular, which is why she and no one else—and maybe Nelly knows this, though most likely she’s never even stopped to consider it—is the only person capable of truly picturing her in certain positions, doing certain things. No, not even the men she’s been with, the men who have seen her. No, not even Papá. And she’s also convinced that she’s been misinterpreted. And she is sure of this: there is something Nelly doesn’t like about herself, something physical, she can feel it, like something she can put her hand on and stroke, something that over the course of a very long time has faded like a distant memory, or like a defect that first leads to a hang-up, then to anxiety, then indifference, then pride, and then nothing.

  “I love Madrid in the winter, Madrid is a winter city,” Nelly says.

  Something, perhaps the Christmas carol joke, has put her in a good mood. Nelly’s good moods always require a counterpoint, it’s the fulcrum on which her social self rests. And she knows exactly what is required of her in order to encourage this mood: disagreement.

  “No,” she replies, “it’s a spring city.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, every city is a spring city.”

  “No, wait,” she fires back immediately, “I know what Madrid’s season is: September to November, early autumn, that’s when Madrid really comes to life.”

  Nelly takes a few steps in silence. She feels her pull away slightly, then lean back in, feels the reverberating contact of Nelly’s arm once more, slightly tense. She turns to her.