This Too Shall Pass Page 9

  Sofía explains to Oscar for the umpteenth time that she manages an important business.

  —How can a crazy goat like her have a job like that? he whispers. —Or is she just making it up so we think she’s interesting?

  And his majestic bull’s head, with its deep, symmetrically square jaw and strong, thoughtful forehead, belts out a laugh that sounds like that of a mischievous child, the way so many men’s laughter does. Just like the children, and like Guillem, whose worn, determined hands have something poignant about them, and look a lot like Oscar’s. And his soft, dark eyes suddenly fade into those of Santi’s, a little more timid, and crazed, and then again they transform into the clearer, more sorrowful eyes of the mysterious stranger I met a little while ago, moving like parts of a magical kaleidoscope capable of summoning the fragments of the past, the present, and the future.

  We don’t have to say anything. As soon as we see each other, even if it’s only to have lunch or go to the pharmacy, we immediately turn into a couple again, as if the sum of the parts couldn’t be found anywhere else, as if we were the exact and perfect formula for something, even though we’ve never succeeded, and maybe never will, in figuring out exactly what.

  —

  —Why aren’t we together again?

  The sun filters in through the faded pink of the curtains, bathing the entire room in a warm, golden radiance with glimmers of red. I feel the silly and irresponsible happiness of waking up after a night adrift in kisses and nibbles. Oscar opens an eye and sniggers at me. I remember one of the first times we slept together—he left early to go to work and texted me a little while later: “I like opening an eye and seeing you by my side.” We jumped headfirst into the maelstrom that turns mere mortals into invincible gods and makes them think they’re not alone. When my relationship with Guillem ended, I thought it meant I would be exiled from that territory forever, and here I was back again for a while, with the same certainty and euphoria and blindness and appreciation as the first time. One of the most amazing things about love is how miraculously it rekindles. I haven’t set foot on that island whose secret location is lost to us all until the day we open our eyes and there it is again, like magic, we’re back.

  —Come here.

  —No, seriously.

  Morning sex takes away the energy that I’ve accrued while sleeping and turns me into a willowy convalescent for the rest of the day, as if I didn’t have any bones. And today I want to visit you in the cemetery.

  —Come here, check it out. He raises the sheet with a sheepish grin and shows me his awakening.

  But I don’t want to jump back into that sea, I need to touch the earth, the gnarled olive trees, feel burning stones, watch the high, anemic clouds.

  —Seriously, Oscar, I want to be your girlfriend, I repeat in a tone that sounds sort of like a girl trying to convince her nanny to buy an ice-cream cone, or let her see a movie meant for adults. It’s a catty blend of plea and command.

  —Blanquita, there’s nothing I would like better, you know that, but after a few days you’ll send me to hell again.

  —No, no. I shake my head vehemently, trying to sweep away all doubts with my straw-like strands of hair. —I won’t fuck anyone else but you.

  Every time we’re together, my body screams out that I’m made for this man, and I still don’t heed its irrefutable evidence. Somehow life always gets in the way, insists on negating that evidence with equal and opposite vehemence.

  —That’s not enough. It’s not bad—he looks at me grinning like a wolf, —but it’s not enough. You know that. He suddenly looks tired, like an actor who’s been playing the same part for years opposite a much younger and less experienced character.

  —But it’s a lot, I say, remembering with a slight shudder last night’s feelings of wonder and plenitude. —We’re still attracted to each other after so many years—that’s a lot.

  —Yeah, it’s amazing. I smile. Give in. Go ahead, give in to the flattery like everyone else, and to the golden light bathing the room, and to his round and slippery shoulders and your own vigorous and supple teenage body, incapable of rejecting anything sensual that’s not harmful.

  —As soon as I see you my mind says: “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  —And we love each other.

  —Yes, we do love each other a lot. He’s quiet for a minute. —But we can’t stand each other. You can’t stand me. And you drive me nuts. I’ve never lost it so entirely as I have with you.

  I laugh, although it’s been many years since I considered the ability to infuriate my significant other as something of merit, or one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of passion.

  —Do you remember that time on the motorcycle when you got so angry—I don’t remember why—and you made me get off and you left me standing there in the middle of the street?

  —And you threw the helmet at my head and almost caused an accident?

  —Let’s get married, I say frivolously and with the lightness I usually use when I talk about serious things. I’m only able to talk seriously and for hours about nonsense. For the important things, like love or death or money, I always have to joke, raise an eyebrow and let out a nervous cackle, maybe out of modesty, or because I have a weak, lethargic character. Oscar is aware of it, and he’s too clever to take a proposal like that seriously, which for one reason or another—love, jealousy, fear—we’ve had on the table for many years.

  He hoots.

  —Are you nuts? Where would we live? I don’t fit in your house.

  —Ah. I consider how the presence of a man might upset the status quo of the loft where I now live with the boys. It’s like a cozy little burrow hanging between trees, smelling of currants and roses, butter cookies, wood and pepper and moss. I could never leave my loft, my wooden, light-filled loft. It’s something I love.

  We’re quiet for a minute.

  —You see? You’re incapable of making sacrifices for anyone.

  —That’s not true, I protest weakly.

  —Incapable of renouncing anything from your disorderly, infantile life, always trying to be different, doing the opposite of what everyone else does.

  —Not true. And what about you, so rigid and uncompromising? I saw the look on your face yesterday when the children were eating a third chocolate crêpe.

  —Because it’s completely idiotic. Three chocolate crêpes does not a dinner make. And I don’t see why you have to eat out every night. It’s like spending money just to spend it.

  I remember the endless arguments over whether Nico really needed another pair of sneakers, and my blatant profligacy with money—it was always my own money, never his—and how the children shouldn’t leave the table until they’d eaten everything on their plates, and they shouldn’t be allowed to watch more than an hour of television a day, or they shouldn’t be permitted to sleep in our bed, or they shouldn’t have too many toys. And the cleaning lady who didn’t steal, but she was so incredibly lazy that he would pay her a few days late to show disapproval with her performance. And yes, the restaurant is charming but we could have eaten the same thing at home. And the day it snowed in Barcelona and we had to rescue the children from school, walking all the way across the city. I lived the experience as an adventure—the heroine whose boots were soaking wet battled the elements to save her young, who couldn’t get home with the babysitter because the subway stopped working and there wasn’t a single taxi, amid a cottony and festive chaos where the cars’ lights, like Christmas lights, illuminated the tiny snowflakes that stuck to my lips and eyelashes—and you thought the whole thing was just a huge nuisance. The scaffolding that structures Oscar’s life—being reasonable, realistic, and doing what’s obligatory—are like prison bars to me. And my constant tidal waves are tantamount to all that’s trivial, haughty, and reckless in the world.

  —All right, lovers it is, then.

  —No. For me it’s all or nothing.

  —Wait a second. Let’s talk this through.

  —We’
ve talked it through a thousand times, Blanquita. You don’t want a relationship. He says it jadedly, quietly. —At least not with me, he adds in the neutral tone that cuts to the quick, and in the same fell swoop takes off both our heads. —And anyway, I have to leave, I have a lot of work in Barcelona.

  I know it’s not true, it’s Friday, it’s summer, and that lately he spends the weekends with his girlfriend.

  —You’re going out with that bitch again, right? I don’t want to feel sorrow; it’s too fine an emotion, it’s modulated and deep, and long-winded. I prefer to get angry.

  —She’s not a bitch. She’s actually really nice, he says.

  I jump out of bed groaning.

  —Oh, “nice.” Well, isn’t that just a stimulating virtue? I murmur. And slam the door behind me, turning a deaf ear to his joking pleas.

  —

  For the rest of the morning, Oscar cheerfully attends to his cell phone, sending and receiving text messages. He leaves after lunch.

  —I’ll always be here for you, he said on his way out, —you’ll never lose me.

  —Really? I respond.

  —Of course. Nobody will ever love you the way I do, he answers with a serious expression.

  —Well, someday someone else might think the same thing.

  Acting as if he hasn’t heard me, he says: —Life goes around and comes around. Anything’s possible.

  —True.

  Our relationship has probably taken all the turns allotted it in life, and the roulette wheel stopped this one last time on a losing number. We are completely penniless now. I’d love to rebuild the world, or an almost-world, with the pieces I have left, put the puzzle back together and bring things back to the way they used to be, not have to go outside again, but I guess there are just too many pieces missing now.

  He tries to kiss me on the lips, but I turn my head.

  Guillem shouts as soon as I close the door, happy to be the only adult male once again (Damián, being merely a guest and without a sentimental relationship with me, doesn’t count).

  —Thank God he’s left—he’s so stiff, I don’t understand what you see in him.

  I try to laugh. —Yeah, you’re right—the other day he wanted to stop the boys eating three crêpes for dinner.

  I give the children an outrageous amount of money to go out and buy some pancakes with Argentine caramel at a place near the church. I tell myself it doesn’t really matter, that it’s true about how life goes round and round. But I feel as though I’ve swallowed a piece of glass.

  The boys, exhausted after spending another day on the boat, head straight for bed. It’s almost pitch black on the terrace, and the town’s warm, happy, summery sounds hover in the air. The church looks magnificent, illuminated like a theater set, as if exacting revenge on the sea for taking center stage by day. But the sea submits now, becoming a dusky, taciturn pond, reflecting the silvery moonlight and the streetlight’s yellow shades. The houses spiral about the church’s whitewashed wings, as if they were under its protection. Damián and I, like two sick children taking a dose of mother’s cough syrup, smoke the joints that had been so industriously rolled by Elisa. I watch them whisper in each other’s ear on the opposite side of the terrace. She collects herself, and talks without looking at him, while he listens to her and looks out over the horizon, smiling. Guillem and Sofía are drinking—I’ve never seen Guillem smoke dope, or Oscar either, for that matter—and he’s trying to talk her into helping him weed the back garden. Some of Damián’s friends are here, people I’ve met on several occasions at dinners and social events. I watch them from a distance, through the cruel and petty lucidity that comes with alcohol and dope, and the black ideas provoked by Oscar, and now Santi, whom I’ve arranged to see tomorrow. The men are friendly enough, if a bit uptight, and use culture and a very calculated sense of humor as a way of protecting themselves from the world, and to compensate for being physically unattractive and uncomfortable in their own skins—which of course doesn’t stop them from being crude and implacably harsh judges of feminine beauty. A sort of affected and condescending gallantry becomes a substitute for good manners. They’re dressed very tidily, conventionally, as if their mothers still chose their wardrobe and ironed their clothes. Their weapons of choice are intelligence, sarcasm, and an infallible eye for detecting the defects in others. Two of them are writers. The girls are pretty and slim, clever, cautious, and modest. They don’t say much, existing sweetly and with suspicious affability, all the while sneaking glances to register what’s around them. They’ve brought a guitar. Juanito, the shorter, funnier, and more aloof of the bunch, starts playing and singing and the women join in. They render South American love songs with grace and enthusiasm. Maybe they’re playing that song you liked so much at that snack bar on the beach, who knows? Sofía belts out the lyrics of the first ranchera she knows, and she and Guillem start dancing. Pedro, Damián’s other friend, comes up to me, as considerate and affectionate as ever. He talks about the last time he was in New York, his children from different mothers, scattered around the world, one here and the other in Amsterdam, and how much money they cost. We’ve had lunch together a few times and he always made a show of paying, maybe too much of a show.

  —How are you holding up? he asks.

  —Not well. Tired. I miss my mother. Maybe I should have lied, I think. Told him that everything is fine, all is under control. Truth is a door I open only once in a while; otherwise, I keep up the high, slippery wall of fibs and courtesy. The quick smile also protects me like a blanket, but today I have neither the strength nor the willpower to raise the wall. —Sometimes I feel as if I’ve lost everything, I add, expecting him to respond with the usual silence that meets all circumstances dealing with death. I take another hit of the joint. I look at Damián, who is also smoking slowly, like my reflection on the other side of the terrace. His eyes are bloodshot and yet twinkling, and they look into mine as if through a mirror darkened by smoke, as if we were trying to recognize each other. I smile; he must be a good drinking buddy, enthusiastic and fearless; I suspect Elisa—as well as sleeping with him, and acting like his mother—protects him from himself.

  —Oh, come on, Blanca, you know perfectly well that’s not true, Pedro interrupts me, breaking the drugged, sleepy, and unanticipated link that was tying me to Damián. —You don’t look like a person who’s been left with nothing, he says brusquely, opening his eyes like a cunning monkey, as if suddenly he’s aware that he’s talking to someone a lot stupider than he thought.

  —Nearly every person I’ve most loved in my life has died. I’m losing so many of the important places of my childhood and adolescence, I explain.

  —But you observed these people and these places when they belonged to you, right? he continues with the slightly irritated tone of a professor before an unexpectedly disappointing pupil. I realize that both of us are completely stoned.

  —Yes, of course. I could describe each and every corner of my mother’s house. I know and remember the changing colors of the mahogany shelves where she kept her books, from mahogany to garnet and finally black according to the time of day and when dusk fell. I know the exact temperature of my father’s hands, like bread fresh out of the oven, and in a snap I could draw you the half-empty glass of red wine he always kept in the kitchen. Want me to draw it for you? I could do it right now. Go on, get me a pencil and paper and I’ll draw it for you.

  —Sweetheart, he continues as he stands by my side, —love is not the only thing that makes things belong to us, it’s also our power of observation; the cities we’ve visited, the adventures we’ve lived, the people, everything. Everything you’ve done or experienced without indifference, attentively, they belong to you. You can call them up whenever you want. His thin face, like Captain Haddock’s butler, scrunches into an ugly grimace. I feel like smoothing it out softly with my fingertips, but instead I pass him the joint.

  —No, dude, no. I’ve never called him “dude” before. —I think there
are certain things that we lose forever. In fact, I think we’re more a sum of the things we’ve lost than of the things we’ve kept. I look up at the darkness of your bedroom, whose door Patum has been guarding since we arrived. I never went to the cemetery to see you today, in the end.

  Slowly but surely, a thread weaves its way among those of us who are getting more and more stoned, like a delicate spider’s web, unwittingly excluding those who remain sober. I smile at Damián from the fog and he seems so far away. I feel Elisa’s immediate, inquisitorial glare, a person who barely drinks and doesn’t even smoke cigarettes any more, full of a kind of relentless scrutiny for anyone except her boyfriends. It glides over me like something slightly oily and unpleasant, but I continue the mute, absurd conversation that my eyes are engaging in with her ever-fuzzier boyfriend. I make the sign for him to come over, afraid he might dissolve away entirely and disappear forever into the mist. He sits down beside me and chats with Pedro. For a second, it seems as if all is well, nothing is lost and Pedro is right. Music blends with my friends’ voices and the rumour of the sea is like a familiar and protective nanny. I rest my head on Damián’s shoulder and close my eyes.

  I wake up with an epic hangover. It must be late because I don’t hear the children, who must have left for the beach already, and because of the brazen, unforgiving light that’s streaming through the window. Closing my eyes does nothing to stop it from perforating my eyelids and temples. I put on my Lady of the Camellias dressing gown and move as little as possible to keep my steps from reverberating in my head. I prepare an herbal tea and browse through an old newspaper. That’s when Elisa shows up.