Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  I remember her. She came over here for a conference once. Yoshie introduced us and we behaved like ladies, which neither of us was. She was, well, pretentious. Affected. Wanting to take up the whole space. Argentinian, need I say more? She seemed keen to show how clever she was. I let her do all the talking. I laughed a few times. Then I left them to it, because they hadn’t seen each other for centuries.

  But hey, no hard feelings. If she shows up here again, I’ll even invite her out for a coffee. That whole jealousy thing seems stupid to me. Other people’s pasts can’t hurt us, can they? We’ve got more than enough trouble with our own. It’s the same with back pain. You can find the stiffness in someone else’s back. You know how to treat it. But when it comes to your own, what can you do?

  * * *

  We met by a fluke, through an architect friend. It was early summer and Yoshie had just arrived in Madrid. Instead of renting, he decided to buy something here as an investment. He’d found a flat in the neighborhood of Los Austrias. The guy wasn’t short on pesetas, he was the director of the Spanish branch of Me—the ones who make the TVs. And my friend was doing the plans for the renovations. She was on a family vacation (just before she and her husband split up, by the way). While the work was being completed, she kindly offered Yoshie the use of her house, on the sole condition that he water her plants. Her entire roof terrace was covered in them. The express jungle, we used to call it.

  My friend lived in a loft apartment in the Hispanoamérica neighborhood, right next to the Colombia station. She had asked me to do her two small favors. To pop in and check on the construction and put her mind at rest, and to check to see whether her Japanese client needed anything. Not only had he paid part of her fee up front, he was new to the city. I didn’t mind the first favor. The second was a bore. But one day I called him on the phone and introduced myself. I offered him my help and so on. In the weirdest accent, he suggested we meet at the new apartment to see how the renovations were going. It seemed like a splendid idea to me. That way I could kill two birds with one stone. I never imagined there’d be three.

  I took the metro to our first meeting and got off at Ópera. I know this because as I walked out into the square and saw the Teatro Real, which was being renovated, I remembered that the architect had dropped dead while showing some journalists around the theater. What a spectacle! The entire country was upside-down. Spain was busy reconstructing, or rather, dismantling itself. We had the Barcelona Olympics, the Expo ’92 in Seville, the whole shebang. I set off in search of the address I’d been given. Strangely enough, it was a few minutes’ walk from where I used to live as a child. I’m not saying I saw that as a sign or something, but yes, it was amusing.

  In that hot weather, it turns out that said gentleman had stuck Post-its on each plant pot, listing their needs in that surgically precise handwriting of his. Frequency of watering. Composting. Flowerings. Leaf removals. Growth. When I entered my friend’s loft and saw what looked like a plant laboratory, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Without asking me, Yoshie came in with a tray. I take tea, he said, smiling, and you coffee, correct? I looked at him and thought, He’s either the ideal man or a lunatic. But I’m a curious person.

  Yoshie enveloped you gradually. In small ways, he anticipated your desires. At first, how can I explain, I found this both flattering and disturbing. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t swept off my feet. He made out like he didn’t notice people liking him. But I think it suited him not to understand a word, that was his trick.

  After each attentive gesture, he would withdraw immediately, as if he expected nothing in return. That wasn’t true, of course, but it left me intrigued. So, I thought, this guy doesn’t want anything from me? Aren’t I good enough? And before I knew it, I was the one who was flirting. I like things to be clear.

  I still remember the look of horror on his face the first evening I invited him over to my place, a modest apartment in Leganés, and he saw my Grundig. A bulletproof German piece of junk. In less than twenty-four hours he had sent me a Me TV. I was really grateful, but what can I say, I was attached to my old set. It had fewer knobs. So I watched that one every day and, whenever he came around, I would switch them out.

  * * *

  He was still settling in and he seemed a little lost. He would get flashbacks to his own country. We’d be walking down Gran Vía, and he would start to tell me about the trips he’d made to Nagasaki. He was fascinated by some volcano there that had erupted for the first time in two hundred years. One day he asked me a very strange question. What use is a volcano that doesn’t explode? Volcanoes have no use at all! I replied. It seemed to me the most sensible answer. Yoshie stopped dead in his tracks and clutched my arm. Exactly, he said, sighing, exactly what my father said.

  When we met, that volcano had just become active again. It took the Japanese completely by surprise. Looking straight at me, he said it was unbelievable that this force, buried for so long, could reawaken. I thought he was referring to, I don’t know, his youthful ardor. But no. He carried on talking about that blessed volcano. Nobody’s perfect.

  The truth is, I learned next to nothing in Japanese. I remember that España is Supein. Easy. Like Spain. I also know that Madrid is Madorīdo, which sounds like m’a dolido—“it’s hurt me”—pronounced by a Japanese person. Madrid has hurt me. It makes complete sense.

  Yoshie’s spoken Spanish was quite decent. He even read a few of my books. Occasionally he would get in a muddle and start to speak in French, or stick a few Americanisms into a sentence. Since he knew the language, he assumed he would quickly adapt. The poor man was in for a shock.

  You can’t imagine what he sounded like. With that Argentinian drawl of his, and all those y sounds instead of double l’s. Kahs-tee-sho. That was roughly how he pronounced my last name. He had a habit of addressing people as vos, he used it with everyone at first. Which is fine if you’re Argentinian, charming even—but for a Japanese! To top it all, when he tried to correct himself, he ended up using the formal usted with children or dogs. The result was hilarious. I told him to keep it simple, that everyone got what he was saying. No, no, he dug his heels in. I have to adapt, have to learn. He won first prize for stubbornness.

  He made me laugh a lot, sometimes without meaning to. On one of the first nights he spent at my place, I warned him to be careful because of some problem with the retrete—our most common word for toilet. He stood there, stark naked, gazing at me solemnly, as if I’d touched a nerve. Well, I suppose a toilet could be considered a sensitive topic, but in a different way, am I right?

  To cut a long story short, he starts to get all philosophical on me, talks about the passage of time, age, Japanese attitudes towards work, and goodness knows what else. So I interrupted him, and said, Yoshie, sweetheart, this is all very interesting. But what has it got to do with the cistern in my bathroom? It was hysterical, because he asked me the same, Wait a minute, Kah-men. What has bathroom to do with professional life? I was flummoxed. We might as well have been speaking Japanese!

  It took us a while to figure out what was going on. Only when I said váter, váter closet, did he get it. It turns out he was confusing retrete with the French retraite, which means “retirement.” I didn’t even remember that word, I studied French at the convent school a thousand years ago.

  They don’t use retrete in Argentina, he argued. But they do go to the toilet, don’t they? I was pulling his leg. Shit, I hope so. How can I not know this word? he went on. I was taught to say inodoro! Ooh, I said, drying my eyes, that must be in South America. Over here inodoro is an adjective, and it means “odorless.” Adjective, he repeated, even more bewildered. I don’t understand idea. And since we’re on the subject, I said, mischievously, it’s not a very good adjective for a toilet. I was in stitches. Then he started to tell me a tale about two monks who find the meaning of life while going to the bathroom.

  * * *

  I am one of the few people in Madrid who was born in Madrid. My parents
were from Andalusia. My father was from Priego, in Córdoba, and my mother from Beas de Guadix. As soon as they married, the two of them moved here together to try their luck. Just then the civil war broke out. It must have been tough for them starting from scratch in those circumstances, with almost no work available, and with half the family on either side of the conflict. I discovered that later on. They never really liked to talk about it.

  We lived in cramped conditions on Calle Segovia, which ended at the river. But they didn’t let me stray that far when I was little. Our house was in the city center, back when that meant almost the opposite of being filthy rich. Apart from Atocha and one or two other streets, it was a pretty poor area. Lavapiés was a slum with no bathrooms. It had communal toilets (oh, retretes!) and a sink in the yard, and even then, you considered yourself lucky. House prices there have only recently started to go up with the property boom and rezoning. Real wealth has always been in the Salamanca neighborhood.

  Although we went through hard times, I have a few happy memories. Don Vital’s grocery store with its shiny cans of tomatoes, chickpeas, herring, and dried cod that made me retch. He kept a jar of candies beside the till. If you smiled at him nicely, he would give you one. Or the cobbler’s shack. He was as skinny as the shoelaces he sold. I don’t know why, but I always loved the smell of leather and glue. Or our Sunday visits to the churros stall. They would skewer them on reed husks. Or the bakery that smelled of ovens and hills. I think there’s a Mexican restaurant there these days.

  Goodness, and the coal merchant’s! With that noisy shovel and the darkness in the back. They sold us ice in summer. My brothers and sisters and I hated being sent to fill the coal bucket, because on the way back it weighed a ton. It was the worst chore you could be given, that and watching the milk boil. You had to get up earlier than the others, and stare at the pan without getting distracted. We used to draw straws to decide whose turn it was. One day I discovered that my older brother was cheating. Instead of snitching on him, he and I came to an agreement.

  It was the opposite with the waste paper. We would fight over who took it to the depot. They paid by the kilo, and whoever went earned a few coins. The owners were called Don Justo and Doña Pili, and they went everywhere together. They were both blind as bats, which was a blessing, as they would occasionally overpay.

  Most of all I remember the mattress stripper, a hefty man with a bald, pointy head. He came in without saying hello. Took our mattresses outside. Tossed them on the sidewalk. Sliced them open. Ripped out the wool just like entrails. Pulled it apart by the handful. Put it into piles and then beat it with a club. Hard. Again and again. Then he stuffed it back into the mattresses. Sewed them up. And on top of all that butchered wool was where we slept.

  As the postwar period faded, I saw shantytowns spring up on the outskirts. People arrived from the countryside and farmers became laborers. I remember San Blas, Fuenlabrada, Móstoles, Getafe, those places that are still producing footballers. And of course my current neighborhood, Leganés, which also started life as a suburb, and now is a city within a city. Nowadays, the trains will take you to those places in no time. The subway never stops expanding either. Like a fist opening. The friend of the Generalissimo, the one who built the Valley of the Fallen, invented whole neighborhoods, with no transport network, nothing. In the end, we are governed by bricks and mortar.

  When I was a child, Madrid was full of holes. This terrified and delighted me. Night was night. There were men with long poles who lit the gas lamps and night watchmen who went around with big bunches of keys. In my imagination, they opened all the doors to the city. At dawn, the farmers started to come in from the nearby villages. They would spread out their tarpaulins and sell their produce right there. Melons in the summer, turkeys at Christmas. We bought a lot of melons. As for turkeys, that depended on what sort of year we’d had.

  People no longer remember and Yoshie found it hard to believe, but five minutes ago Madrid was a rural capital. The whole country was rural, in fact. I saw with my own eyes the way every strip of land was filled in with city. Beyond La Castellana there was nothing, only Chamartín Stadium. In those days, it wasn’t even called the Bernabéu and it didn’t have any towers, either. They were built later on, for the World Cup, during the era of shopping malls. Plots of land were infected as if by the measles. Madrid was different then, Spain was different. Or not, it depends.

  * * *

  My brothers went to school at the Santísimo Corazón del Espino, which had a good reputation. My sisters and I were taught by the Siervas de la Extrema Caridad at a convent school called Nuestra Señora del Continuo Amparo. It was on the other side of La Latina, at the bottom of Carrera de San Francisco. We were surrounded. On one side we had the city’s largest seminary. On the other, the Capilla de los Dolores. And on a third, the basilica where Franco attended official ceremonies. The holy trinity.

  My one nearby relief from all this was Las Vistillas. I learned to roller-skate in those gardens. Roller-skating was the closest thing to running away, you could outpace the people who were chasing you. On weekends, if we got good grades, my father would take us for a picnic in Parque del Retiro, which was like a real country retreat. Cars would drive right into the park. We went to mass at an Opus Dei church that later belonged to the diplomatic corps. In fact, my eldest sister ended up joining them. Opus, I mean, not the Foreign Office. Pupils who couldn’t afford the monthly fees had a different study regime. They dressed them all in black, and they came in through the back door, where no one saw them.

  I grew up very fast because of the nuns. If you got a question wrong, they would make you wear donkey’s ears, and if they caught you talking in class, they stuck a cardboard tongue in your mouth. With rebellious girls like me, they used a carrot-and-stick approach. Until you’d do anything just to keep receiving a pat on the head. I must admit the nuns taught me well. They turned me away from all religious temptation.

  I’m not sure how badly behaved I was. All I know is that they made my life impossible. My sisters’ less so, at least that’s what they tell me now. I went to bed and woke up feeling guilty. Guilty for playing games, for laughing too much, for raising my voice, for listening to the radio, for failing to do my homework, for doing it badly. For painting my nails, which was a sin. For lying to Sister Gloria. Everything at school made me feel guilty. That’s why I never repent for anything now.

  Sister Gloria! She spoke to us about the devil, because she was diabolical. My friends and I would pray for her to catch a cold so she wouldn’t come to class. One of those really bad colds that went on for ages. One day our prayers were answered, she caught a vicious pneumonia and was carted off to the hospital. That’s when we began to believe in the Virgin Mary. At my school, Yoshie once told me, the devils were Chinese.

  When I was fifteen, my parents enrolled me at a typing academy at the Glorieta de Bilbao in case I wanted to be a secretary, or rather, so that I would become one. I had great difficulty persuading them to let me stay on at school. I was determined to go to university. For the same reason that I loved my mother so much, I didn’t want to end up like her.

  In the end I studied nursing, the only subject my parents deemed respectable. I discovered that unlike the students of other subjects, our lectures took place in a separate building, away from the male students. What a test! It felt like being back at the convent school, except that we were champing at the bit.

  Although I’d planned to become a nurse, as soon as I heard about physiotherapy I was hooked and there was no stopping me. I felt a mixture of fascination, fear, and liberation. Treating the whole body. All by myself. Muscles, skin, joints. Moving, pulling, touching, and seeing what happens.

  The French were years ahead of us. Over here, the field of physiotherapy was still in diapers. First you did basic nurses’ training. Then you were supposed to specialize. But what you actually did was start work at a hospital as an auxiliary on a nurse’s wage. I cut my teeth at a few clinics, until
I switched to my actual specialty. We physiotherapists weren’t organized. No one understood our job, including us, really. The whole country was injured, and we didn’t even realize it.

  In the first hospital I trained at, I was finally able to work alongside men. I thought I might burst with fear, dizziness, overexcitement, everything. I got used to it more quickly than I’d imagined. Before going out with Enrique, I went crazy for a year or two. Let’s say I did a crash course in urology. I never told Yoshie about that.

  From that moment on, the city seemed like a different place. I started going to places I didn’t even know existed, where it was considered bad taste to be sober, and it was the done thing to kiss anyone you wanted. I would leave our family apartment with my hair scraped back, in a knee-length skirt, my blouse buttoned to the neck, and wearing a bra from my grandmother’s day. Sixty seconds later, I would step outside with my hair loose, my skirt rolled up, two buttons undone on my blouse, and without a bra.

  Not long afterwards, at my second hospital, I fell in love with my dearly departed, a very handsome orthopedic surgeon. The family photographs don’t do him justice. We met at the same hospital where we said goodbye. That’s what I call loyalty to the public health sector.

  Enrique and I fell madly in love. We could never see enough of each other. On our days off we went to Casa de Campo with a couple of sandwiches and our wandering hands, or to Café Comercial. Whenever we could borrow a friend’s car, we’d take off. That was our dream. To run away somewhere. Any place that wasn’t here.

  We ended up getting married quickly. I wasn’t getting any younger and my mother was constantly in a state of nerves, because I was the only member of the family who wasn’t leading a respectable life. We wanted a civil wedding but our parents kicked up such a fuss that we agreed to a brief ceremony at the Iglesia de San Sebastián Atravesado.