Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  “A man, a boy, killed himself over me, more than twenty years ago.”

  Nelly made this announcement and took a long drag on her cigarette, unaffected, indulgent. Nelly’s mannerisms at critical moments display a sort of syntax of impersonality, though that’s not the case now. She’s not nervous, at least not in any realistic way.

  “You never told me that before.”

  “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

  “What happened?”

  “He sent me letters. Followed me. He was the son of some friends of my father’s. Said he was in love with me. I can’t even remember his face, but I remember that whenever I went out, I was afraid he’d be there. He had this steady, detached expression, blank, a look so empty it was almost the absence of a look. I don’t remember his face, but I remember that look. It was repulsive.”

  The waiter arrives with their pannacotta and two gleaming spoons, one beside the other. Nelly smiles her thanks and immediately plucks up one of the spoons. She plays a little with the pannacotta and finally brings a miniscule portion to her mouth.

  “Not bad,” she proclaims.

  She, too, takes a taste. It’s true, it’s not bad. She’d like to say something, but Nelly doesn’t seem to require it. And she doesn’t want to lie to herself, either—she feels nothing. Or nothing that might contribute to what Nelly just said. The logical thing to do would be to ask for details, tease out some of the morbid particulars: what, exactly, being followed entailed; how he killed himself; what his name was; whether Nelly saved the letters. The logical thing might be even more pernicious and more absurd—to think that Nelly is the way she is because of that. The thought almost makes her laugh. She does feel something, after all: an absolute awareness of how futile it would be to add anything. And something else: despite loving Papá more, she’s always sided with Nelly, and that is disconcerting. She’s always thought Nelly was the one who was right.

  When they leave, they head straight for the ABC Serrano shopping center, to find a gift for Aunt Lu. They each walk alone, really, though not distant, not lost in their own thoughts. The temperature has fallen again. She moves in closer, and when she feels the contact of Nelly’s overcoat on hers, she slips her arm into Nelly’s. The sight of people on the street gives her a strange feeling, as if there were something unbelievable about them, as if they were straightening their knees and trembling, as if, by sheer luck, they’d just been saved from some danger. When she gets like that, she can’t help herself, she imagines all those people in bed, having sex, their faces contorted and then satisfied, the touch of their skin, something bristling inside them; it comes out in a pained, nervous expression, inaccessible, but right now there is something strange about the contact of Nelly’s arm, it seems to be precisely what is keeping her from those thoughts. At times, the thought of having been born of her is terrifying; now, curiously, it is not. She’s always known it and has sometimes used it to her advantage, no doubt in the same way Nelly has used other thoughts about which she knows nothing. But in fact, it is the street that imposes itself on her like a language. Still, she would like to turn to Nelly and say, I wish you were inside me, I wish I never had to struggle to speak, I wish I could believe that you would remember, that I could entrust myself to you, I know this is a corrected version of the truth, I know that and I try to listen, and in your body and the touch of your coat, I know there is a larger truth. But attending to that drawn-out thought, here on the Calle Serrano, beneath a once-more disturbingly bright sky, gives her a vertiginous feeling, like she’s rushing through the air on a swing in the park.

  The ABC Serrano shopping center is soothingly impersonal and mysteriously half-empty. If someone said that she and Nelly were never going to speak again, she’d believe it, because speaking is no longer required, but when Nelly turns to her and says, “How bizarre, don’t you think? There’s almost no one here,” she responds naturally.

  “I know, they must all be having lunch still.”

  Suddenly she is afraid, she doesn’t want to think too much, doesn’t want to think about Papá, about the boy who killed himself over Nelly. Why does it seem so reasonable, this preposterous idea of killing oneself over Nelly? They browse, moving ghostlike through several shops, make the remaining purchases, gifts for Aunt Lu, for some cousins. Nelly is almost always the one to do it, the one to decide, and she sees Nelly as a constant source of interference that makes her need to distrust both the things she feels and those she has no name for.

  What happens next is something she will try to explain several times over the course of her life, without ever succeeding. Every time, this is where she’ll start, but leaving out Nelly’s earlier confession in the restaurant. She’ll say, We were at a mall, doing some Christmas shopping; my father had died four months earlier.

  And, suddenly, we came out of a store and there was this commotion, everyone was uneasy, looking up.

  “What’s going on?” Nelly asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  It’s a bird, they spot it almost immediately. But not just any bird.

  “What kind of bird is that?”

  She is awestruck at the bird’s beauty. Flapping around the shopping center’s small, domed ceiling is an animal the size of a child’s torso, with iridescent green, yellow, and red plumage. Its beauty is unquestionable, majestic, all the more majestic for the outlandishness of its present location and the unusual silence it has occasioned. For a second, it is as though there were no yuletide flurry, no canned Christmas carols.

  “It’s a bird of paradise,” someone says.

  “What’s it doing here?”

  She turns to Nelly. She, too, is gazing up at the bird with intense emotion. In the silence, she gets the strange feeling that she can see the veins in her face the way you see veins in a wooden flute. Then she looks back at the bird. It has flown up to the top of the domed ceiling, attempted to fly through it, and collided with the glass. Now it flies down several feet, flapping wildly, and makes a second attempt. This time there is a dull thud, and the bird plummets vertically, as though aflame, onto a third-floor railing. Someone lunges for it. There is a sharp intake of breath. It attempts to take flight once more, this time wearily, losing some of its golden tail feathers. And now it falls to the floor, where it begins a crazed, circular flapping around the food court tables. Several people try to approach it, but the bird takes off again, determined this time, flapping up to the third floor, and from there into the dome once more, this time making no attempt to fly through it. Time is suspended for a moment, majesty renewed, as though it were rising once more. That, too, is something she will attempt to explain, that sort of second dignity of the bird in all its splendor, its flamboyant plumage fanned, and God knows how many other things, things that she may not even have felt at the time but that later filtered through to her memory, the image of the bird like a sieve—Nelly’s presence like white noise, like the hum of electricity, the hushed cacophony of Christmas, people’s faces flushed from the heat in the mall, their shopping bags heavy with Christmas presents; it all takes on a strange texture again, a melancholy dignity, a perception like the soft buzz of a presence. That’s when Nelly says, “It’s marvelous.”

  “What is?”

  “That creature. Don’t you think it’s marvelous?”

  “Yes,” she responds, without thinking. In fact, she feels vaguely afraid of the bird of paradise, as though there were something captivating yet evil about it, something obscene, something uncontrollable, an aggressive overabundance.

  The bird of paradise swerves and lets out a tremendous squawk, attempts to change the course of its flight but stops, flaps up anxiously, vertically, making it eight or ten feet, and then collapsing in a single tremendous crash amid the tables where people had been eating. Everyone recoils, alarmed, as though rather than a bird, it were an Aztec curse befallen them. Someone screams, and then a squawking, green
shadow begins to run and flap like a chicken through people’s legs. It runs back and forth, its squawks becoming shriller, and at that moment, certain it’s headed for them, she instinctively draws back. This, too, is something she will recall: she grabs Nelly’s arm as though trying to protect her, and Nelly doesn’t move. What’s more, there is something unnatural about how rigid Nelly stands, as though she’s been seized by something. The bird of paradise flaps distractedly toward where they stand and passes with a ruffling of wings and a strange, acidic, animal smell. Then it stops in a corner and retucks its wings. It’s like a deranged grande dame with crazed eyes, unnaturally widened eyes.

  She recalls every move: the way Nelly bends down to deposit the shopping bags on the floor and then straightens, slowly, silently, with great care, a care she’s never seen in her before, will never see again; the way she approaches the bird firmly but at a glacial pace; the way she reaches it and leans over, as though absorbed in silent observation; the way she places a hand on the bird of paradise’s puffed-up chest; and the subtle way the bird responds, with an almost imperceptible shudder, and then submits. Nelly begins to stroke it, but there is nothing sensual in her touch, just something that seems to howl like the wind or shriek like a child. And then she has an unflinching, impossible thought—How will Nelly die, when she dies?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANDRÉS BARBA MUÑIZ (MADRID, 1975) is a Spanish novelist, essayist, translator, scriptwriter and photographer. He is the author of a total of twelve books of literary fiction, non-fiction, photography, art and children’s literature. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Premio Torrente Ballester de Narrativa (for Versiones de Teresa), the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo (for La ceremonia del porno) and the Premio Juan March de Narrativa (for Muerte de un caballo). He was also shortlisted in the XIX Premio Herralde de Novela (for La hermana de Katia, made into a film a few years after by Mijke de Jong). In 2010 he was featured in Granta’s magazine as one of the twenty-two best young Spanish-language writers. His works have been translated into ten languages.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  LISA DILLMAN translates from the Spanish and Catalan and teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. Some of her recent translations include The Mule, by Juan Eslava Galán, Me, Who Dove Into the Heart of the World, by Sabina Berman, and Christopher Domínguez Michael’s Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature. She’s currently translating Yuri Herrera’s The Transmigration of Bodies.