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  ‘I can’t live like this, I can’t …’

  ‘Well you’ll have to put up with it, you shameless cow! And if you ever touch my paintings again I’ll kill you … From now on nobody sells my paintings but me … Understand? Do you understand what I’m telling you? If you ever go into my studio again I’ll break your head! I’d rather let everybody die of hunger than …’

  He began to pace around the room with so much rage that he could only move his lips and make incoherent sounds.

  Gloria had a good idea. She got out of bed, bristling with cold, went up to her husband, and nudged him from behind.

  ‘Let’s go, kid! We’ve bothered Andrea enough!’

  Juan pushed her away roughly.

  ‘Andrea can put up with it! Everybody can put up with it! I have to put up with all of them.’

  ‘Come on, let’s go to sleep …’

  Juan began to look all around, nervous. As he was leaving he said:

  ‘Turn out the light so my niece can sleep …’

  XII

  THE EARLY MEDITERRANEAN spring began to send its breezes through the still frozen branches of the trees. There was a free-floating joy in the air, almost as visible as those transparent clouds that sometimes hover in the sky.

  ‘I feel like going to the country and seeing the trees,’ said Ena, and her nostrils flared a little. ‘I feel like seeing pines (not these city plane trees that smell sad and decayed from a league away) or maybe what I want even more is to see the sea … This Sunday I’ll go to the country with Jaime and you’ll come too, Andrea … What do you think?’

  I knew almost as well as Ena what Jaime was like: his preferences, his laziness, his fits of melancholy – which drove my friend to despair, and charmed her – and his sharp intelligence, though I’d never seen him. On many afternoons, when we were bent over the Greek dictionary, we would interrupt the translation to talk about him. Ena would become prettier, her eyes sweetened by joy. When her mother appeared at the door we’d instantly stop talking because Jaime was my friend’s great secret.

  ‘I think I’d die if they found out at home. You don’t know … I’m very proud. My mother knows only one side of me: the joking, mischievous person, which is how she likes me. I make everybody in the house laugh at the brash things I say to my suitors … Everybody except my grandfather, naturally; my grandfather almost had an apoplectic fit this summer when I turned down a respectable and very rich gentleman I’d been flirting with … Because I like it when men fall in love, you know? I like to look inside them. To think … What kinds of ideas are their thoughts composed of? What do they feel when they fall in love with me? The truth is that thinking it through becomes a pretty boring game, because they play their childish tricks, and they’re always the same. Still, for me it’s delicious to have them in my hands, to confuse them with their own snares and toy with them like a cat with mice … Well, in fact I often have the chance to amuse myself, because men are idiots and they like me a lot … At home they’re certain I’ll never fall in love. I can’t turn up now full of illusions, like a fool, and introduce Jaime … Besides, they’d all interfere: uncles, aunts … I’d have to show him off to my grandfather like a strange animal … then they’d approve because he’s rich, but they’d be desperate because he doesn’t understand a thing about managing his money. I know what each of them would say. They’d want him to come to the house every day … You understand, don’t you, Andrea? I’d end up despising Jaime. If we ever marry, then I’d be obliged to tell them, but not yet. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Why do you want me to go to the country with you?’ I asked in astonishment.

  ‘I’ll tell Mamá that I’m spending the whole day with you … and it’s always more pleasant to tell the truth. You never interfere with me, and Jaime will love meeting you. You’ll see. I’ve told him so much about you.’

  I knew that Jaime looked like the St George painted on the central panel of Jaime Huguet’s altar piece. The St George believed to be a portrait of the Prince of Viana. Ena had often told me about it, and together we’d look at a photograph of the painting that she had on her night table. When I saw Jaime I in fact noticed the resemblance and was struck by the same fine melancholy in his face. When he laughed, the similarity disappeared in a disconcerting way, and he was much more handsome and vigorous than the portrait. He seemed happy with the idea of taking us to the beach at a time of year when nobody went there. He had a very large car. Ena frowned.

  ‘You’ve ruined the car putting in water and benzine.’

  ‘Yes, but thanks to that I can take the two of you wherever you want to go.’

  We took trips on the four Sundays in March and one more in April. We’d go to the beach more often than to the mountains. I remember that the sand was dirty with algae from the winter storms. Ena and I ran barefoot along the edge of the water, which was icy, and screamed when it touched us. On the last day it was almost warm and we swam in the sea. Ena danced a dance of her own invention in response. I was lying on the sand, next to Jaime, and we saw her graceful figure outlined against the Mediterranean, sparkling and blue. Then she came towards us, laughing, and Jaime kissed her. I saw her leaning against him, lowering her golden lashes for a moment.

  ‘How I love you!’

  She said it in surprise, as if she’d made a great discovery. Jaime looked at me with a smile, moved and confused at the same time. Ena looked at me too, and held her hand out to me.

  ‘And you too, darling … You’re my sister. Really, Andrea. You see … I kissed Jaime in front of you!’

  We came back at night on the highway that ran along the ocean. I saw the fantastic lacework formed by the waves in the blackness and the mysterious distant lights of the small boats …

  ‘There’s only one person I love as much as I love you two. Maybe more than both of you together … or maybe not, Jaime, maybe I don’t love her as much as I love you … I don’t know. Don’t look at me like that, you’ll have an accident. Sometimes the question torments me: which one do I love more, you or …’

  I listened carefully.

  ‘You know, darling,’ said Jaime in a voice that revealed so much enraged irony it approached the peevishness of a child, ‘it’s time you told us the name.’

  ‘I can’t,’ and she was silent for a few moments. ‘I won’t tell you for anything in the world. I can have a secret even from the two of you.’

  What incomparable days! The entire week seemed lightened by them. We’d leave very early and Jaime would wait for us in the car wherever we had arranged. We’d leave the city behind and cross its melancholy suburbs and the sombre power of factories next to which stood tall apartment buildings blackened by smoke. Under the early sun the windows of these dark buildings flashed like diamonds. Flocks of screeching birds, startled by the insistent, hoarse sound of the horn, flew away from the telegraph wires …

  Ena sat beside Jaime. In the rear, I’d kneel on the seat and look out of the back at the shapeless, portentous mass of Barcelona that rose and spread out as we left it, like a herd of monsters. Sometimes Ena would leave Jaime and climb in the back with me to look out too and talk to me about our happiness.

  Ena never resembled on weekdays the rash girl, almost childish in her high spirits, that she turned into on Sundays. As for me – and I came from the countryside – she made me see a new meaning in nature I’d never even thought of before. She made me understand the pulsing of damp mud heavy with vital juices, the mysterious emotion of buds that were still closed, the melancholy charm of algae listless on the sand, the potency, the ardour, the splendid appeal of the sea.

  ‘Don’t make up history!’ she shouted at me in despair when I saw in the Latin Sea a memory of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. And imagined it (so quiet, resplendent, and blue) furrowed by strange ships.

  Ena swam with the delight of someone embracing a beloved. I enjoyed a happiness granted to few human beings: feeling myself carried along in the almost palpable aura radiated by a yo
ung couple in love that makes the world more vibrant, throbbing with more odours and resonances, becoming more infinite and profound.

  We’d eat at small restaurants along the coast or picnic outdoors in the pines. Sometimes it rained. Then Ena and I would take shelter under Jaime’s raincoat, while he calmly got wet … On many afternoons I’d put on a woollen jacket or sweater of his. He had a pile of these things in the car as a precaution against the treacheries of spring. That year, however, the weather was marvellous. I remember that in March we came back loaded down with branches of flowering almond and right after that the mimosa began to turn yellow, trembling on garden walls.

  These torrents of light pouring into my life because of Ena were embittered by the dismal hues that coloured my spirit on the other days of the week. I’m not referring to events on Calle de Aribau, which hardly influenced my life any more, but to the unfocused vision of my nerves that were put too much on edge by a hunger I almost didn’t feel because it was chronic. Sometimes I’d become angry with Ena over a trifle. I’d leave her house in despair. Then I’d come back without saying a word and begin studying with her again. Ena pretended not to notice and we’d go on as if nothing had happened. Remembering these scenes sometimes made me weep with terror when I thought about them on my walks along the streets in poor districts, or at night when the ache in my head wouldn’t let me sleep and I had to remove the pillow for it to go away. I’d think about Juan and how I was like him in many ways. It didn’t even occur to me that I was hysterical from lack of food. When I received my monthly stipend I’d go to Ena’s house with flowers, buy sweets for my grandmother, and I also acquired the habit of buying cigarettes, which I saved up for the times when food was scarce, since they alleviated the pangs and helped me to dream up incoherent projects. When Román came back from his trips, he’d give me cigarettes as a gift. He watched me with a special smile when I wandered through the house, when I stopped at the kitchen door, sniffing, or when I lay in bed for hours at a time, my eyes open.

  On one of the afternoons when I became angry with Ena, my indignation lasted longer than usual. I walked, frowning, carried along by a lengthy, impassioned interior monologue. ‘I won’t go back to her house.’ ‘I’m sick of her superior smiles.’ ‘She follows me with her eyes, amused, convinced I’ll be back again in two minutes.’ ‘She thinks I can’t do without her friendship. How wrong she is!’ ‘She plays with me the way she does with everybody else’ – I thought unjustly – ‘her parents, her brothers, the poor boys who fall in love with her, the ones she encourages so she can enjoy watching them suffer …’ My friend’s Machiavellian character became more and more evident. She seemed almost despicable … I got home earlier than usual. I began to organise my class notes, nervous and almost in tears because I couldn’t understand my own writing. At the bottom of my briefcase I found the card Gerardo had given me on my first night of freedom, when I met him in the darkness around the Cathedral.

  The memory of Gerardo distracted me for a moment. I recalled that I had promised to call him so we could go out and visit the picturesque corners of Barcelona. I thought perhaps this could distract me from my thoughts and without thinking more about it, I dialled his number. He remembered me right away and we made a date to go out the following afternoon. Then, although it was still very early, I went to bed, and I fell asleep watching the dawning of lights in the street through the rectangle of the balcony, a deep sleep, as if I were recuperating from the fatigue of difficult labour.

  When I woke it seemed that something was wrong. I had a sensation like the one I would have felt if someone had told me that Angustias was coming back. It was going to be one of those days that in appearance are like all the rest, inoffensive like the rest, but one on which a very faint stroke suddenly changes the course of our life and moves it into a new period.

  I didn’t go to the university in the morning, possessed by a stupid insistence on not seeing Ena, although with every hour that passed it became more painful for me to be angry with my friend, and I thought about her best qualities and her sincere affection for me. The only spontaneous, disinterested affection I’d known until then.

  Gerardo came for me in the afternoon. I recognised him because he was waiting at the front door of the building, and he immediately turned towards me, keeping his hands in his pockets, as was his habit. His heavy features had been completely erased from my memory. Now he wasn’t wearing a coat or hat. He had on a well-cut grey suit. He was tall and robust and his hair looked like a black man’s hair.

  ‘Hello, beautiful!’

  That’s what he said. And then, with a movement of his head as if I were a dog:

  ‘Let’s go’

  I felt a little intimidated.

  We started walking side by side. Gerardo talked as much as he did on the day I met him. I noticed that he spoke like a book, constantly quoting from works he had read. He told me I was intelligent, and that he was too. Then, that he didn’t believe in feminine intelligence. Later, that Schopenhauer had said …

  He asked if I preferred going to the Port or to Montjuich Park. It made no difference to me. I walked beside him in silence. When we crossed streets he took my arm. We walked along Calle de Cortes to the Exposition gardens. Once there I became more cheerful because the afternoon was blue, gleaming on the domes of the palace and the white cascades of the fountains. Crowds of spring flowers nodded in the wind, invading everything with their flame of colours. We lost our way on the paths of the immense park. On a little square – dark green because of the clipped cypresses – we saw the white statue of Venus reflected in the water. Someone had coarsely painted the lips red. Gerardo and I looked at each other, indignant, and at that moment I liked him. He wet his handkerchief and with a surge of his powerful body he climbed the statue and scrubbed the marble lips until they were clean.

  From that moment on we were able to talk more cordially. We took a very long walk. Gerardo spoke to me at length about himself and then he wanted to find out about my situation in Barcelona.

  ‘So you’re all alone, eh? You mean you don’t have parents?’

  He began to annoy me again.

  We went to Miramar and sat on the terrace of the restaurant to look at the Mediterranean, which in the twilight had wine-coloured reflections. The huge port seemed small, for we had a bird’s-eye view of it. At the docks the rusted skeletons of ships sunk during the war broke the surface. To our right I made out the cypresses in the South-west Cemetery and could almost detect the smell of melancholy facing the open horizon of the sea.

  Near us, at the little tables on the terrace, people were eating. The walk and the salt air had awakened that cavernous sensation of hunger I always had when I was drowsy. And I was tired. I looked at the tables and the appetising dishes with avid eyes. Gerardo followed the direction of my glance and said in a contemptuous tone, as if my answering in the affirmative would be barbaric:

  ‘You don’t want anything, do you?’

  And he took me by the arm, pulling me away from the dangerous place, on the pretext of showing me another splendid view. At that moment he seemed hateful to me.

  A short while later, with our backs to the sea, we were looking at the entire imposing city spread out below us.

  Gerardo stood erect as he looked at it.

  ‘Barcelona! So proud and so rich, and yet how hard life can be there!’ he said pensively.

  He was saying this as if it were a confession, and I suddenly felt touched because I thought he was referring to his earlier coarseness. One of the few things I was capable of understanding in those days was indigence, no matter in what guise it appeared: even under Gerardo’s good suit and linen shirt … In an impulsive gesture, I placed my hand on his and he pressed it, communicating his warmth to me. At that moment I wanted to cry, not knowing why. He kissed my hair.

  Suddenly I stiffened, though we were still close together. In those days I was foolishly innocent – in spite of my pretended cynicism – about those matte
rs. A man had never kissed me and I was certain that the first one who did would be chosen by me over all the rest. Gerardo had barely brushed my hair. I thought it was a consequence of the emotion we had felt together and that I couldn’t be ridiculous enough to reject him in indignation. At that moment he kissed me again, gently. I had the absurd feeling that shadows were passing over my face, as if it were dusk, and my heart began to pound furiously, in mindless indecision, as if I were obliged to put up with those caresses. I thought something extraordinary had happened to him, that suddenly he had fallen in love with me. Because at that time I was foolish enough not to realise that he was one of the infinite men born only to be studs, men who with a woman cannot understand any other attitude. Their minds and hearts can go no further. Gerardo suddenly pulled me towards him and kissed me on the mouth. I was startled and shoved him, and felt a rising wave of disgust because of the saliva and heat from his heavy lips. I pushed him with all my strength and began to run. He followed me. He found me trembling slightly, trying to think. It occurred to me that perhaps he had taken the pressure of my hands as a proof of love.

  ‘Forgive me, Gerardo,’ I said with the greatest innocence, ‘but, you know? … I don’t love you. I’m not in love with you.’

  And I felt relieved at having explained everything to him satisfactorily.

  He grasped my arm like a person recovering something that belongs to him, and he looked at me in so vulgar and contemptuous a way that he left me frozen.

  Then, in the tram we took back, he gave me paternal advice concerning my future conduct and the advisability of not wandering around like a madwoman and going out alone with boys. I almost thought I was listening to Aunt Angustias.

  I promised him I wouldn’t go out with him again and he was somewhat taken aback.

  ‘No, kid, no, with me it’s different. You see I’m giving you good advice … I’m your best friend.’

  He was very satisfied with himself.