This Too Shall Pass Page 3

  We go up to the room; it’s simple and clean with white walls and two chaste-looking twin beds with speckled covers that match the same blue of the curtains. A few paintings of sailing boats hang above the tiny desk. I let out a chuckle.

  —Two single beds. You see? The receptionist’s revenge for the little spectacle downstairs.

  —Goddammit.

  But it’s a room with a view, and the sea and the horizon belong to us from our balcony. The beachcomber’s bodies look like ants now, they’ve recovered a smidgeon of dignity. Santi, a builder to the bitter end, incapable of leaving a space be if there’s a way to make it better, takes one of the mattresses out onto the balcony, lays me down and starts undressing me. It’s so bright I can hardly see him. I close my eyes and my head starts to spin. I open them and try to concentrate on his kisses, moving up along my legs, but I’m feeling woozy and all I want is for him to bring a glass of water.

  —You’re really pale. Do you feel OK? he asks.

  I take two sips and start to gag. I want to get up, but can’t stand on my own, so Santi walks me over to the bathroom and I throw up until there is not a solid thing left. I continue retching liquid, and once I’ve gotten rid of all the alcohol, my body remains staunchly devoted to expelling whatever else it can, just in case. My body—yet another paradise lost. I finally compose myself and stop heaving. I catch sight of our reflection in the mirror, my naked body like a gray spirit with glassy eyes and, behind me, Santi all dressed up, the cyclist-skier, he of the red jeans, who can drink and do drugs to no end and never lose his composure, although later he needs all sorts of stimulants and can’t sleep without smoking a joint or taking a sleeping pill. I’m crazy about my asymmetrical body, it’s soft, skinny, imperfect, and disproportionate; I spoil it, I grope it, I give it what it asks for, I follow it all over the place, I meekly obey it, I never contradict it. It’s the opposite of a temple. I have tried, I have tried and never succeeded, just let my head be a temple, but my body always remains an amusement park.

  —Feeling any better? Santi asks.

  He passes a damp towel over my forehead and neck. He brings me my clothes.

  —More or less.

  —I forgot how badly you react to drinking on an empty stomach. I really wanted to spend time with you.

  —Don’t worry, it’s my fault. That last gin and tonic was a very bad idea. If I don’t die tonight, I’ll be fine by the morning.

  Santi loads his bike onto my car and takes me home. I open the passenger-side window and close my eyes. I’m exhausted; all I want to do is sleep. When we get to the front door, he hurries a good-bye peck on the lips.

  —There are a lot of schools in this part of town; I could run into someone I know, he explains, looking around. And before he staggers away, he adds: —Some friends have invited us to Cadaqués, so I’m going up with my family for a few days. I’ll let you know if I can sneak away at some point so we can hook up.

  I close the door and rush up the stairs as fast as I can. I think I’m going to be sick again. I head straight for the bathroom.

  The main entrance of my house is jam-packed with boxes. The maid helped me line them up along the left wall, six rows that reach almost to the ceiling, next to the boxes from my last move nearly two years ago, which I haven’t even opened yet. When we came to live here, we opened boxes until there was no room left to fit a pin, not another book, not another toy, and then we just stopped. They’re all downstairs now, waiting for the day we have a bigger apartment. I can’t imagine what’s in them. Books, I suppose. At times I’ve looked for things and have never been able to find them. I’m sure that when the day comes, some two or twenty years hence, we’ll open the boxes and find all sorts of treasures. Yours are filled with books, china, tea sets, and linens. It hasn’t been easy for me to part with your things, especially the ones I know you loved. There were days when I thought I would get rid of everything, and five minutes later I’d regret it and want to store every last piece of junk. Three hours later, I would rethink it all and determine to give some things away as gifts. I guess it was my way of figuring out how far away from you I wanted to live. It’s a tough balance to strike; it’s easier to keep a distance with the people who are alive. There’s a tall coatrack next to the wall of boxes where guests used to leave their things when we threw parties. Your grayish-blue woolen jacket is hanging there now, the one with the brick-colored stripes. It’s the only article of your clothing I’ve kept. Not because it’s a good one, but because we bought it together at your favorite shop and I saw you wear it a thousand times. I haven’t had the guts to take it to the cleaner’s yet. I guess it still has your smell, though I haven’t been able to check on that, either. I’m a little frightened by the thing; it’s like a dusty ghost covered in dog hair that says hello to me when I walk through the door. I’m still afraid of the dead. When I saw you dead I wasn’t afraid, though; I would have been able to stay there sitting beside you for centuries. It was as if you simply weren’t there anymore, as if the light of the summer morning streaming through the window had nothing in its way, it spilled over the room, over the world, and what remained was merely our residue, your grimace of pain, the silence, the fatigue, and a newfound loneliness, bottomless—as if new floors were opening below my feet as they brushed along, one after the other, welcoming me. If your soul, or something like that, survives, it got the hell out of that depressing room, and I don’t blame you for it, I’m sure mine would have done the same.

  —What’s with the scuzzy jacket? Sofía asks when she walks through the door. She’s wearing one of her mother’s old hippie dresses, white linen with red piping. She took it to the seamstress a while ago and turned it into something fresh, graceful and stylish. Sofía dresses fastidiously and with an attention to detail that’s unusual nowadays—I know of only a few older gentlemen who still dress so meticulously—and completely opposite my own choice of uniform, which is composed of faded jeans and men’s shirts. I had already spotted the seemingly loopy, impeccably dressed eccentric one afternoon at the main entrance of our children’s elementary school, even before we became friendly. She showed up wearing a massive wide-brimmed hat to protect herself from the rain, and the next day she had on fuchsia woolen shorts over a black leotard and leggings. We fell into an immediate platonic crush, the teenage-girl kind, when you meet someone who not only shares the same loves and hates, your passion for white wine, and your quirky way of never taking anything seriously, but who has the same way of throwing herself wholeheartedly into life and everything that comes with it—the result of a passionate character and a protected childhood.

  —It’s my mom’s jacket, I declare. —I haven’t taken it to the cleaner’s yet. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, in any case, it’s the only piece of her clothing I’ve kept.

  I go on to describe the last time I saw Elenita, who was the daughter of my nanny, Marisa. Marisa was an extraordinary woman and my second mother. She died of a heart attack two years ago. Elenita was suffering from cancer and already very ill when she greeted me, wearing one of her mother’s flower-patterned housecoats. I recognized it the second she opened the door, and thought how logical that she would wear it, though it also seemed like a terrible foreshadowing for the embrace of death. And I also recall how a friend from school many years earlier, a tall and lanky girl with blond hair, had shown me her yellow socks before running out onto the sports field one day. They had belonged to her father, who had just died of cancer, and reached all the way up to her knees. I was a virgin to death then, and it just seemed so sad and so romantic to me (as a teenager, compassion was as volatile and flickering a feeling as any other). A year later, when I turned sixteen, my father died of cancer. And from then on the dead form a sort of chain, a macabre necklace that weighs a ton, and whose last, closing link will be me, I guess.

  —I think you should have it cleaned and then store it on the highest shelf in the cupboard, Elisa says. You’ll decide what to do with it later,
there’s no hurry.

  Elisa had come for lunch too, though the three of us rarely hang out at the same time—threesomes never work, not even in friendship.

  —Let me go ahead and mix our cocktails now—that’ll make you feel better, Sofía says.

  Sofía is an expert cocktail maker and can be seen strolling around the city with an exquisite ecru-colored canvas bag loaded with the items necessary for preparing them. Elisa has brought the sushi. I pull some dried-out leftover crumbs of cheese from the fridge, and we sit down at the table. We toast to life, to ourselves, and to summertime. Lately, everyone seems hell-bent on raising a glass with me to toast something or other, summoning some future I’m not sure will ever arrive.

  —Well, girls, I say, —I’ve decided to go to Cadaqués for a few days. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Who wants to join me?

  Elisa looks at me with trepidation, and Sofía applauds the decision enthusiastically.

  —Yes! That’s it, let’s go to Cadaqués! she exclaims while Elisa launches into a scholarly discussion of the effects of drugs, Freud, grief, and the maternal figure—great dangers that are stalking me. One is committed to enjoying life and the other to suffering and analyzing it.

  —Have you noticed how she dresses like a Cuban now that she’s dating one? Sofía whispers.

  —You’re totally right…

  Elisa is wearing a white flared short skirt, her flip-flops have a platform heel, and her top is covered in red polka dots. Her long, dusky cloud of undulating hair is loose and there’s red polish on her finger- and toenails. She seems as happy and pert as a five-year-old. We all look younger when we’re happy, but in Elisa’s case, she can go from five to five thousand in a two-minute flash. She’s almost never in between; when she’s older, she’s going to have the face of a shrewd squirrel, I think, as she continues talking with a news anchor’s gravitas.

  —With an ass like that, it was only a matter of time before a Cuban got ahold of her, Sofía goes on, using her inside voice.

  The problem with Elisa, I tell myself, is that underneath that gorgeous Cuban ass, or more like above it, there’s a brilliant and highly analytical French existentialist philosopher’s mind that never sleeps, and that makes her life a tad complicated. The poor thing, she’s always trying to balance her Cuban ass with her French philosopher’s head.

  —You should come with us, and bring the Cuban too, I say when she finally finishes.

  —I’ve told you a thousand times, his name is Damián, she answers.

  —Oh, right, Damián, Damián, Damián. I always forget. Sorry. He is Cuban though, isn’t he? The only one I know.

  Elisa looks at me earnestly and doesn’t say a word. My relationships with my friends are always impassioned and often a little troubled, though it’s subsided a bit with my mother’s illness. I wonder how long it will take for them to go back to the way they were.

  —Yeah, why don’t you come with us? Sofía exclaims. How’s it going with Damián, anyway? Are you happy?

  —Yes, but he’s very demanding sexually. Truth be told, I’m exhausted.

  Elisa can turn any subject, even sex with her new boyfriend, into something brainy and intellectual. Sofía, on the other hand, turns everything into the frivolous and festive, and inevitably everything revolves around her. Each one of us carries our own leitmotif in life, a common strand, a motto, a signature fragrance that envelops us, a background music that accompanies us wherever we go, abiding, silenced every now and then, but enduring and imperishable.

  —Who else is coming? Sofía asks.

  —Let me think. Oh, um, yeah, my two ex-husbands!

  —What? they both cry in unison.

  —You’re going to Cadaqués with both of your exes? Are you joking? And you think that’s normal? Elisa says.

  —I don’t know if it’s normal. But you both spend all day telling me I shouldn’t be alone, that I should surround myself with the people who care about me. Well, I think both Oscar and Guillem love me.

  —I think it’s a great idea, Sofía says. Normal is boring. Let’s drink to being abnormal.

  —Here’s to being abnormal! I shout, and we hug.

  When Sofía’s had a few too many, she starts kissing and declaring eternal love to whoever is sitting closest to her.

  —Oh, and Santi will be there too. With his family, I add quickly.

  This time even Sofía looks at me dubiously.

  —It’s going to be fun—just wait and see.

  They both stare at me with eyes like dinner plates. I laugh.

  Taking off for Cadaqués is always a sort of expedition. The three children are sitting in the backseat, Edgar, Nico, and Daniel, Sofía’s boy, together with Úrsula, the babysitter. I’m driving and Sofía occupies the copilot’s seat. It still seems bizarre and even a little absurd that I should be at the head of the excursion, the person who decides what time to leave, who gives Úrsula her instructions, who picks out the clothes the children will wear, who drives the car. At any moment, I think, as I peer through the rearview mirror and catch the children fighting and laughing at the same time, someone’s going take my mask off and send me back there with them, where I belong. I’m a total fraud at being an adult, my efforts to progress beyond the playground at break time have all been resounding failures. I feel as if I’m still six years old; I see the same things, the little jumping dog whose head appeared and disappeared from the frame of a ground-floor window, a grandfather holding out his hand for his grandson, handsome men with their radar on, the charms on my bracelet reflecting rays of sunlight, lonely old men, couples locked in ardent kisses, beggars, suicidal old ladies crossing the street at a turtle’s pace, trees. Each of us sees different things, but we always see the same things, and what we see defines us absolutely. Instinctively, we love other people who see the same things that we do, and we recognize each other immediately. Place a man in the middle of a street and ask him: “What do you see?” It’ll all be there, in the way he responds, like in a fairy tale. What we think isn’t so important; it’s what we see that really counts. I’d hand in this pathetic cardboard crown of adulthood without thinking twice—I wear it so ungracefully anyway, it’s constantly falling off and rolling down the street—if only to be once again sitting in the backseat next to my brother, Bruno, with Marisa the nanny and Elenita, who always joined us on holidays, our two dachshunds, Sapho and Corina, and Lali, Marisa’s giant poodle, that ungainly, flea-bitten, hysterical dog who hated Cadaqués and the refinement of our own dogs.

  —Hey, boys, what do you say we buy a Ping-Pong table for the garage in Cadaqués?

  They all readily approve the idea.

  —But you have to be careful of the dogs and the Ping-Pong table, OK?

  —Why? What for? Nico and Daniel ask at the same time. Edgar, like a typical teenager, is messing around with his mobile not saying a word, though I can tell he’s paying attention, he always is.

  So I tell them how Marisa’s psychopathic dog Lali used to have these sudden hyperactive fits in Cadaqués, how she’d bolt off, galloping full speed down the stairs, while Elenita, Marisa, and I chased after her shouting and trying to catch her. She’d be practically at the garage, when she’d jump out into the open space of the stairwell that was some four meters down, and crash-land onto the Ping-Pong table where my brother and his friends would be peacefully hanging out and playing. The sudden shock of such a huge black dog crashing into the table sent the children running in all directions, terrified, and as the summer advanced, Bruno was left without Ping-Pong pals. He was convinced that it was me who taught Lali to throw herself down the stairwell and onto the Ping-Pong table, just to annoy him.

  —Yeah, right, Edgar says, looking at me sideways. —Grandma used to say, “Bad, Blanca, you’re so bad.”

  —Grandma never said that, I lie.

  —She said it every time she saw you.

  —She was just joking. Grandma adored me.

  —Yeah, sure.

  Grandma
was frightened; the fearless woman began living in fear when her strength began to fail her, followed by her head, her friends, the entourage who always hovered around her (“Know what one of the toughest things about growing old is?” she asked me one day. “Realizing that nobody cares what you have to say.”), when she saw that her time was winding down, that everything was coming to an end—everything, that is, except her eager desire to live. Grandma never gave up—she fought every battle and was accustomed to winning. She never accepted that the game was over until the very last day. I told her not to worry once, sitting on the bed with her in the final hospital, a place I still visit in my nightmares (though not as often as the assisted-living home where she had spent the previous two months, where I learned how realistic the films are about the living dead—the directors don’t make that stuff up). It was her third bout of pneumonia, she’d recover from this one too, I told her. I’ll be fine, don’t worry, the children will be fine, everything’s in order. She looked at me and didn’t say a word, she couldn’t speak anymore—what sort of dying person is in the mood to utter a last sentence? I guess the ones concerned with posterity, though maybe all the fuss about a person’s last words is just another load of nonsense—then she started to cry, without making a noise, without moving a single muscle of her face, just staring straight at me. Ana, her best friend, was in the room at the time and I suppose to protect me she said it must be the air conditioning irritating her eyes. But I know you were saying good-bye to me. I didn’t shed a tear, just squeezed your hand gently and told you again to just be calm, we’re all fine. A few months earlier, when your death was still something inconceivable to me, and still is now, we were at your house chatting. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you stood up to get something from the bathroom and said, without even glancing over at me and as nonchalantly as someone saying “I need some toothpaste,” that “it’s been an honor to know you.” I made you repeat it twice; at that time our love had grown painful; I thought you didn’t love me and I wasn’t sure if I still loved you. So I burst into tears, told you not to say such silly things, and within two minutes we were back to fighting again. I think you already knew by then that the time of the ellipses, the suspension points you hated so much, was coming to an end. Here we are now at the full stop, like a dagger, like an oxygen cylinder.