This Too Shall Pass Page 6

She finishes her work in silence. She looks at my feet; my toenails are like little flames. When I leave, the beautician-witch gives me two small decanters of essential oil. —You’ll see, they’ll do you good. Take care now.

  I’ll give them to the children, I think, so they can concoct their magic potions. They’re the ones who really understand.

  Elisa shows up sporting a jean miniskirt, white sleeveless top, and silver sandals that just don’t match. She’s very tanned and her hair is down in a long, flowing cloud. She’s dressed for Damián, I think, a little begrudgingly. Dressing up for one particular man is very different from dressing up for men in general, or for nobody, which is how I choose my wardrobe lately. In any case, the most elegant people are those who dress for themselves. Elisa is not tall, but has a nice figure, she’s thin and feminine, and everything gravitates toward that butt of hers. When I tell her I like her hands, they’re thin and nervy, almost as big as mine despite our difference in height, she answers humbly, “They’re hands for getting things done.” And it’s true, they’re practical, realist hands, not the kind for slaying lions, like the hands of the men I like; neither are they hands for slaying souls, or for calling forth the gods and carrying old rings, like yours, Mom, although I’m sure they too can alleviate a fever and shoo nightmares away. If it weren’t for Elisa, I doubt anyone would ever eat. Sofía and I will nourish ourselves by way of yogurt, toast, and white wine, whatever it takes to avoid having to cook. And our children are so healthy and strong that sometimes I think all they need is a little water.

  We’re having dinner at Carolina and Pep’s house and Hugo, Pep’s best friend, who is spending a few days with them, will be coming too. Another man I flirt with dreamily while Elisa and Sofía are talking about shoes.

  Edgar comes up at that moment, long and flexible, his legs and arms bronzed. Nico is still a scrumptious little puppy, but Edgardo is already turning into a deer. His stride is drawled and languid, he sweeps the air as he drags his feet, which is how he’s been walking in my presence since becoming a teenager, as if every place we go is a tedium, as if he’s seen everything a million times before. He talks the same way, too lazy to finish his sentences, to relate, to explain, he’s just alive and that’s it. Suddenly he’ll have a talking spell—it happens about once a month—and he’ll spout on for two hours straight, telling me all his adventures at school. But since he’s almost lost the ability to express himself, at least with me, his words get all tangled up and he splits his side laughing at the same time he’s eating—his fits of grandiloquence usually occur precisely at dinner time; and despite making a staunch effort to concentrate and sharpen my ear, I never understand the majority of what he’s saying. Then suddenly, once he’s repeated each story three times, he looks at me again, as if he’s just realized that it’s his mother he’s talking to, calls me stone deaf, and shuts hermetically up till the next month’s bout. Our other traditional monthly conversation is of the life-is-wonderful variety.

  —Do you even realize how lucky we are? Look how beautiful the trees are. Just look at that street. Breathe it in, I tell them during these euphoric instants that seize me every once in a while, thanks to the wine, the kisses, or my own body, whose physical strength and last drops of youth are gifts on some days.

  Edgar usually looks at me with a long face, Nico pretends to take a deep breath, and Edgar tells me they already know, I’ve said the same thing a thousand times, today’s spectacular street is our same street, the one we walk down four times a day, and what he really wants to do is go to Florence like I promised a few years ago. You always threatened him with not going to Egypt. “If you don’t behave, we won’t go to Egypt,” you’d say to him. In the end, the revolution and your disease prevented you from going. The last trip you wanted to take was to Florence. When I told you I couldn’t take care of both you and Edgar at the same time, that if you had a turn for the worse while we were so far away, I wouldn’t know how to deal with it—in Barcelona, the dance of the ambulances and wheelchairs and late-night trips to the emergency room had already begun—you got so angry with me that you told me I always ruin everything. Marisa wanted to go to Rome and I promised that when she got out of the hospital, we would go. We also planned on spending some time at your house where she would teach me how to make her famous gazpacho and legendary croquettes, since she would never be able to return to Cadaqués and live on her own. But it was already too late. I wasn’t there when she died suddenly, either. I hadn’t been there for two days, completely unaware of how much faster life proceeds inside a hospital, where the wicks burn lickety-split, and life and death run crazed races down the aseptic hallways like the cartoon Coyote and the Road Runner, frantic and frenzied, skidding around the nurses and visitors, screwing up our lives. Maybe we all end up with some untaken trip, we plan journeys when they are no longer possible, as if we were trying to buy more time knowing we’ve used up our own, and that nobody can give us a single minute more. How unbearable to think while our eyes are still open that there are places to which we’ll never return, to realize that an opportunity has closed even before our eyes have.

  Edgar looks at the three of us petulantly from the top of the stairs and quips: —I’m hungry—can we go now?

  Daniel and Nico come up a second later, accompanied by Úrsula, who looks at us and says: —You all look so beautiful!

  Sofía is wearing her spectacular floor-length, wine-colored Indian dress that she bought from an antiques dealer. It’s dusted with tiny mirrored lozenges, and she set it off with a pair of big silver earrings. I have on my baggy faded fuchsia cotton pants, a raggedy black silk shirt with little green polka dots, flip-flops, and one of my mother’s old bracelets that sometimes I love and sometimes feels more like a shackle. Elisa is dressed as if we were going out to dance salsa. And Úrsula has put on a very tight yellow T-shirt with a silver palm-tree motif and purple jeans about two sizes too small. We look like a troupe of clowns. Fortunately, the children have brought a modicum of summer respectability with their polo shirts, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops.

  Carolina and Pep have a small apartment just a little way uphill from our house. It’s part of a summer complex that was built in the seventies, with heavy cement walls painted white and stairways made of reddish wood, long corridors, and huge windows that give fabulous views overlooking the town and the bay. When I was young, the apartments had been a sort of hippie colony, where colorful characters from around the world lived. I remember listening to the music and laughter from my bed at night, the din of that group of beautiful summer castaways who I thought were just the most fascinating and exotic people on earth, who returned to Holland, the United States, or Germany at summer’s end. As I got older, so did the hippies, and the apartments began filling with modern people of the nineties, respectable and rich. But those of us who were lucky enough to catch a glimpse through the keyhole of childhood at the tail end of the spirit of the sixties—the sexual freedom, the freedom, period, the desire to have fun, the empowerment of youth, the sheer audacity—weren’t left unscathed. We’ve all lost some paradise to which we never belonged.

  Pep and Hugo are preparing dinner. They’ve dressed for a summer night. Clean jeans, a perfectly old and faded shirt for Pep and a crisp white shirt with rolled-up sleeves for Hugo. They’re both tanned. Hugo likes to run and he wears string bracelets. He smells a little of patchouli and vanilla and he owns some sort of business. Pep is a photographer, his head is shaved, and he has a deep voice. Tall and thin, he’s the sensitive type, discreet and very funny. You can tell they’ve been close friends for a long time—they even finish each other’s sentences, poke fun at each other, refer to each other as “bro.” There are no fissures, no doubts; they get together every week to watch football and drink beer. Sometimes I envy this kind of male bonding; seen from the outside it seems like a straighter and more effortless style of friendship than what exists between women. Ours is like an eternal courtship, with its rough patches, intense and passio
nate, while theirs is more like a well-matched marriage, without strong emotions, maybe, but without boundless ups and downs, either.

  —So, are we hungry? Pep asks the children.

  —Very, Sofía answers, diving into the hummus.

  We sit at a table in the garden. Hugo opens the wine and sits down next to me, smiling.

  —You look beautiful, he says.

  —Well, Nico told me I looked like cat food this morning. And children never lie.

  —That’s an urban myth. Children lie as much as adults do.

  —I guess. I lie all the time. And it’s not even my worst defect.

  We both laugh. He says: —Why don’t we go out for dinner sometime, just the two of us? And I try to convince him that I’m a complete mess and that inviting me to dinner isn’t worth the effort. The male technique for seduction involves making a fake list of one’s own defects (I’m a sale item, don’t waste your time on me); it works pretty well, I see, enjoying myself as I eat and play with my cell phone. I don’t lose it all the time anymore. The phone became a diabolical object, the messenger of suffering and anguish during your illness and death. You called every night in the wee hours, demanding that I go to your house, to tell me you were afraid, that the home-nurse tried to kill you. You might have been partly right. I can’t count the number of nurses you went through in the last months, but I became an expert at interviewing candidates, most of whom never lasted more than a few days. You didn’t allow them a minute’s sleep; you’d steal the medication—there were pills scattered all over the house, the floors, in your sheets, in your papers and the pages of your books, I started to fear for the dogs; you fired the nurses two or three times a day, you even punched one of them. What a shame the main character of the story was you. If someone had told us these stories about someone else back in the good old days, we probably would have split our sides laughing. A good laugh was always our best weapon; it’s how we dealt with misery and mean-spiritedness. The disease, the pain that some doctors claimed you invented, turned you into a selfish monster. When I told you I couldn’t leave the children by themselves at four in the morning, you’d get outraged and hang up on me. Most of our conversations during the last few months ended with you hanging up on me. Every time the phone rang and I saw your number, my heart would skip a beat. Finally I disconnected it, I forgot to charge it, I left it everywhere, I lost it on purpose. Occasionally I’d answer thinking, today she’s calling just to tell me she loves me and she’s sorry for having abandoned me, and you’d called to talk about money and to reproach me because I was the one who had abandoned you. I did my best, sometimes I did what I had to do, though not always—I’m not very good at facing despair. I’m sorry. Maybe if you’d been in my shoes, you’d have done a better job. For years, you said that you had never loved your mother, that she wasn’t a good person, that she’d never loved you. It wasn’t until the bitter end that you changed your mind. Those last days in the hospital you mistakenly called me “Mama” a few times. My grandmother had a very distinguished, silent, elegant, and fearless death as befitted her status and character. Yours was total mayhem. Nobody warns you that you have to become your mother when she’s dying. And, Mom, you can’t say you gave me so much satisfaction as your daughter, either. You yourself weren’t an easy daughter.

  But since Santi has reappeared, the cell phone has become something playful again, and we’re always just one message away from what can happen next. And what can happen next is almost always more exciting than what is happening now. I like sex because it nails me into the present time. Your death did too. Not Santi, no, Santi is the same as a cell phone. I’m always waiting for something wonderful to come that never does. He was separated from his wife when we met. She was having an affair with a friend of his, but the affair didn’t pan out, and Santi, who is a very nice man, went back home with the idea of healing the wounds and mending a relationship that had fallen into the trap of substituting comfort, companionship, and children for sex, curiosity, and admiration. And our affair, which had already begun to flag a few months in—most love affairs last either a few months or an entire lifetime—was stirred back to life with the thrill of the forbidden, the unattainable, the fantasy. Both of us swallowed the narrative whole. Me because I hadn’t found anyone I liked better. Him because he realized right away that the relationship with his wife was going right back into the rut it came from, the last page before closing a book. There is no reverse in a love story; any relationship is always a one-way street.

  He texts me that he just got in, he really wants to see me. And so my head once again succumbs to my body, and your death recedes a few more steps into the distance, and as if by magic, my frozen blood begins to flow again. I joke around with the children, I sniff at the food, I lie down on the ground to play with my goddaughter, I hug Sofía, I whisper into Pep’s ear that we have a mountain of dope, I pet the cat, I devour olives like a madwoman, I tell everyone to go out and just look at the moon. I put music on and tell Elisa we should go dancing.

  —He just texted, I whisper to Sofía.

  —I thought so. Your face changed so drastically I knew something was up.

  —It’s strange. I don’t really even like him that much.

  —Blanquita, I think you like him that much, you just don’t want to admit it.

  —Maybe I do, I don’t know.

  We have dinner in the garden outside. The candles are lit and there are a few Chinese lanterns swaying from the branches of the olive tree. Their shadows sway over the pristine crust of the salt-cooked fish the men have prepared; there’s tomato and cucumber salad and croquettes, and recently baked olive bread. Children and adults alike are tanned and happy, the relaxed, tired bodies and dreamy eyes of a day spent boating, in the sea and the sun. We share stories, the same ones repeated a thousand times by people who have spent large portions of their lives together and still like one another. For a fleeting moment, I consider having a quiet coffee and not responding to the message. Nina, my goddaughter, is sleeping in her mother’s lap. Edgar is trying to sneak a little swig of beer, but he stops when Elisa looks at him threateningly. Nico is paying attention to the adults’ conversation while little Dani is playing with his collection of trains. Hugo accuses me of being a bore. Carolina comes out in my defense and Pep starts telling stories of Hugo’s poor girlfriends, left behind every morning while he goes out for his sacred run. I can’t imagine life having any meaning without these summer nights. I get another text from Santi and he proposes that we meet up in front of the church so he can give me a good-night kiss. I get up, as if I had been sitting on a spring.

  —I have to go out for a minute—be right back.

  Everyone looks at me with surprise.

  —Anything wrong, dear? Are you OK? Carolina asks with a worried expression.

  —Yes, I’m fine. I’m just going out to buy cigarettes, I say with a giggle.

  —Yeah, Sofía says.

  Carolina looks at me from the other side of the table without smiling. She’s the only one of us who has had a long-term relationship with a really wonderful man, and though she’s never expressed it, I know she considers my dating a married man not only a waste of time but also in some way a bit of a betrayal of her too.

  Hugo picks up and wiggles a half-full pack of cigarettes at me, which he had put out on the table a little while ago.

  —That tobacco’s stale. Seriously, it’s totally unsmokable, I say.

  He laughs. —When you told me you fib a lot, I imagined you’d be a little better at it.

  —I do what I can.

  —Don’t take too long, we’ll be bored without you, he adds.

  Sofía accompanies me to the door.

  —You don’t really like him that much, huh?

  I skip down the hill with a spring in my step. You always said I walked like my father, as if there were something pushing me upward, as if our feet barely grazed the ground, and how before seeing us you already knew we were coming by the u
nmistakable pattern of our gait. I still recall how angry you got that one time when I was near the end of my pregnancy and you saw me lumbering.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re going to change the way you’ve walked your entire life, just because you’re pregnant.”

  If you were to see me now, you’d know perfectly well that I’m on my way to meet a man. But you never tried to stop me. You believed that love justified the type of quirky behavior that under normal circumstances you would have roundly disapproved of. If a waiter brought you the wrong dish, or spilled soup on you, and in response to your complaint the maître d’ would say that it’s on account of his being in love—you alone were able to squeeze these kinds of intimate details from others—you would have looked at him with a kind face and said, “Oh, well, in that case…” And gone back to eating, happy as a clam, with a soup stain on your skirt. But if someone dared give you information, assuring you it was right, and it turned out to be wrong, or showed up late for a meeting, you’d stare at them as if stupefied, and they’d lose your respect forever. I spent my entire life fighting to gain that respect without ever knowing whether I succeeded. I still run late, no matter where I go.

  Unexpectedly, I find the beautiful stranger approaching me in long strides. He’s alone, walking a little hunched forward, like most tall, reedy men do, as if protecting themselves from invisible gusts of wind, as if it were always a little blustery up there in the air they inhabit. I’m walking so fast and feeling so restless that one of my flip-flops accidentally falls off. I recover it just in time to see that he’s caught me in the act, which elicits a teasing smile. Again, just wave good-bye to the femme fatale I’ve always aspired to be. I smile back at him as we pass by each other, and he whispers: —Later, Cinderella. I think, what if I stop and suggest having a drink (and we get drunk together and spill our life stories to each other eagerly and in little episodes while we stroke each other’s hands and pinch each other’s knees dreamily, and look searchingly into each other’s eyes a split second longer than is appropriate, and then we kiss, and then we fuck impetuously in some corner of the town like when we were young, and fall in love and travel together and be forever spooning each other and we have a few more children and, yes, in the end we save each other), but I continue walking and don’t look back. If men only knew how many times women play that film over and over in their heads, they’d never dare ask us for a light.