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  He left the balcony. He bumped into my grandmother.

  ‘Who is it? Who is it?’ said the old woman. ‘God save me, Román, you must be crazy, child!’

  He didn’t stop. I heard a door slam. My grandmother, shuffling her feet, approached the balcony. Her voice sounded frightened and helpless:

  ‘Girl! … Girl! Is that you, Gloria, my child? Yes? Is that you? …’

  Then I realised that Gloria was crying. She shouted:

  ‘Go to bed, Mamá, and leave me in peace!’

  After a while she ran to her room, sobbing:

  ‘Juan! Juan! …’

  My grandmother came over to her.

  ‘Be still, girl, be still … Juan’s gone out. He told me he couldn’t sleep …’

  There was a silence. I heard footsteps on the stairs. Juan came in.

  ‘Both of you are still up? What’s going on?’

  A long pause.

  ‘Nothing,’ Gloria said finally. ‘Let’s go to sleep.’

  St John’s Night had become too strange for me. Standing in the middle of my room, my ears alert to the murmurs in the house, I felt the taut muscles in my neck begin to hurt. My hands were cold. Who can understand the thousand threads that join people’s souls and the significance of their words? Not the girl I was then. I lay down on the bed, almost sick. I remembered the words in the Bible, in a completely profane way: ‘They have eyes and see not, ears and hear not’ … My eyes, round with so much opening wide, my ears, wounded with listening, had failed to capture a vibration, a profound note in all of that … It seemed impossible that Román had pleaded with Gloria like a lover. Román, who charmed Ena with his music … It was impossible that he had pleaded with Gloria, suddenly, with no motive, when I had seen him mistreat and mock her in public. My ears didn’t detect this motive in the nervous tremor of his voice, and my eyes couldn’t see it in the dense, brilliant mass of blue night that came in through my balcony … I covered my face so I couldn’t see the excessive, incomprehensible beauty of the night. At last I fell asleep.

  I was dreaming about Ena when I woke. Imperceptibly my fantasy had linked her to the words, the pettiness, the betrayals of Román. The bitterness I always felt in those days when I thought about her filled me completely. Impulsively I hurried to her house, not knowing what I would say to her, wanting only to protect her from my uncle.

  My friend wasn’t there. They told me it was her grandfather’s saint’s day and that she’d spend the whole day in the great ‘tower’ the old gentleman had in Bonanova. When I heard this I was filled with a strange exaltation; I thought it was necessary to find Ena at any cost. To talk to her right away.

  I crossed Barcelona in a tram. I remember that it was a wonderful morning. All the gardens in Bonanova were filled with flowers and their beauty gripped my spirit, which was already too full. I also seemed to be overflowing – as the lilacs, the bougainvillaea, the honeysuckle overflowed the garden walls – so great was the affection, the anguished fear I felt for the life and dreams of my friend … Perhaps in the entire story of our friendship I had not experienced moments as beautiful and as childish as the ones I felt during that useless excursion past gardens on a radiant St John’s morning …

  At last I reached the door of the house I was looking for. A wrought iron entrance through whose grille work I could see a picture of a lawn, a fountain, and two dogs … I didn’t know what I was going to say to Ena. I didn’t know how I would tell her again that Román would never be good enough to join his life to hers, so luminous, so well loved by a good and noble creature like Jaime … I was certain that as soon as I began to speak Ena would laugh at me.

  A few long minutes went by, filled with sun. I was leaning against the metal of the high garden fence. There was an intense aroma of roses and a bumblebee flew over my head, creating a deep peaceful echo. I didn’t have the courage to ring the bell.

  I heard the door to the house – a glass door that opened onto a white terrace – opening noisily and I saw little Ramón Berenguer appear, accompanied by a cousin with black hair. The two boys ran down the stairs to the garden. I suddenly felt terrified, as if my hand had been seized at the moment of cutting a stolen flower. I began to run too. I couldn’t help it, I was escaping … I laughed at myself when I caught my breath, but I didn’t go back to that fence. As impulsively as the exaltation and affection I’d felt that morning for Ena, I began to be overcome by a deep depression. As the day ended, I no longer intended to leap across the distance that she herself had opened between us. I thought it better to let matters take their course.

  I heard the dog howl on the stairs as it came down, terrified, from Román’s room. Its ear bore the red mark of a bite. I shuddered. Román had been locked in his room for three days. According to Antonia, he was composing music and smoking constantly, so that he was enclosed in an excruciating atmosphere. Trueno must have known something about the mood this atmosphere produced in his owner. The maid, when she saw the dog wounded by Román’s teeth, began to shake like a leaf, and tended to the animal, almost howling herself.

  I looked at the calendar. Three days had passed since St John’s Eve. Three more days until Pons’ party. My soul pounded with impatience to escape. It almost seemed as if I loved my friend Pons when I thought he would help me to realise this desperate longing.

  XVIII

  THE MEMORY OF nights on Calle de Aribau comes to me now. Those nights that ran like a black river beneath the bridges of the days, nights when stagnant odours gave off the breath of ghosts.

  I remember the first autumn nights and how they intensified my first moments of disquiet in the house. And the winter nights with their damp melancholy: the creak of a chair interrupting my sleep and the shudder of my nerves when I discovered two small shining eyes – the cat’s eyes – fixed on mine. In those icy hours there were certain moments when life broke with all sense of modesty before my eyes and appeared naked, shouting sad intimacies, which for me were only horrifying. Intimacies that the morning took care to erase, as if they’d never existed … Later came the summer nights. Sweet, dense Mediterranean nights over Barcelona, with golden juice flowing from the moon, with the damp odour of sea nymphs combing their watery hair over white shoulders, over the scales of golden tails … On one of those hot nights, hunger, sadness, and the power of my youth brought me to a swoon of feeling, a physical need for tenderness as avid and dusty as scorched earth with a presentiment of the storm.

  First thing, when I lay wearily on the mattress, came the headache, empty and throbbing, tormenting my skull. I had to lie with my head low, without a pillow, to feel the pain slowly fade, crossed by a thousand familiar sounds from the street and the house.

  This was how sleep came, in increasingly indolent waves, until the deep, complete oblivion of body and soul. The heat flung its breath at me, as irritating as the juice of nettles, until, oppressed as in a nightmare, I’d wake again.

  Absolute silence. On the street, from time to time, the watchman’s footsteps. Far above the balconies, the tiled roofs, the flat roofs, the brilliance of the stars.

  Uneasiness made me jump out of bed, for these luminous, impalpable threads that come from the world of stars affected me with forces impossible to define, but real.

  I remember one night when there was a moon. My nerves were on edge after a day that had been too turbulent. When I got out of bed I saw in Angustias’ mirror my entire room filled with the colour of grey silk, and in the middle of it, a long white shadow. I approached and the phantom approached with me. At last I saw my own face in a blur above my linen nightgown. An old linen nightgown – made soft by the touch of time – weighed down with heavy lace, which my mother had worn many years before. It was unusual for me to stand looking at myself this way, almost without seeing myself, my eyes open. I raised my hand to touch my features, which seemed to run away from me, and what appeared were long fingers, paler than my face, tracing the line of eyebrows, nose, cheeks conforming to my bone structure.
In any case there I was, Andrea, living among the shadows and passions that surrounded me. Sometimes I doubted it.

  Pons’ party had taken place that afternoon.

  For five days I’d tried to store up expectations for that flight from my ordinary life. Until then it had been easy for me to turn my back on what lay behind me, to think about starting a new life at any moment. And on that day I’d had a kind of presentiment of other horizons. Something like the awful tension that seizes me at times in the railway station when I hear the whistle of the train pulling out or when I walk along the port and in a mouthful of air the smell of ships comes to me.

  My friend had telephoned in the morning and his voice filled me with tenderness for him. The feeling of being expected, of being loved, awoke a thousand woman’s instincts in me; an emotion like triumph, a desire to be praised, admired, to feel like Cinderella in the fairy tale, a princess for a few hours after a long period of concealment.

  I recalled a dream I’d often had in my childhood, when I was a sallow, skinny girl, one of those whom visitors never call pretty and whose parents receive vague consolations … Those words that children, pretending to be absorbed and removed from the conversation, eagerly pick up: ‘When she grows up she’ll certainly be a pretty girl,’ ‘Children can surprise us as they grow up’ …

  Half-asleep, I saw myself running, stumbling, and at the impact I’d feel something detach from me, like a dress or a chrysalis that breaks and falls, wrinkled, at one’s feet. I saw people’s astonished eyes. When I ran to the mirror, I contemplated, trembling with emotion, my astonishing transformation into a blonde princess – blonde, just as the stories describe – immediately endowed, through the grace of my beauty, with the attributes of sweetness, charm, and goodness, and the marvellous one of generously scattering my smiles …

  This fairy tale, repeated so often during the nights of my childhood, made me smile, as with lightly trembling hands I tried to arrange my hair elegantly and make my least old dress, carefully ironed for the party, look pretty.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, blushing a little, ‘that day is today.’ If Pons’ eyes found me pretty and attractive (and my friend had said this with awkward words, or more eloquently without them, very often) it was as if the disguise had already fallen.

  ‘Perhaps the meaning of life for a woman consists solely in being discovered like this, looked at so that she herself feels radiant with light.’ Not in looking at, not in listening to the poisons and stupidities of others, but in experiencing fully the joy of her own feelings and sensations, her own despair and happiness. Her own evil or goodness …

  And so I escaped from the house on Calle de Aribau and almost had to cover my ears in order not to hear the piano that Román was tormenting.

  My uncle had spent five days locked in his room. (According to what Gloria told me, he hadn’t gone out even once.) And that morning he appeared in the house, scrutinising the changes with his penetrating eyes. In some corners he noticed the lack of the furniture that Gloria had sold to the rag dealer. Cockroaches scurried around those clear spaces.

  ‘You’re stealing from my mother!’ he shouted.

  My grandmother came to the rescue immediately.

  ‘No, child, no. I sold them, they’re mine; I sold them because I needed to, because it’s my right …’

  It was so incongruous to hear that unfortunate old woman talk of rights when she was capable of dying of hunger if food was scarce so there’d be more for others, or of cold so the baby would have another blanket in his cradle, that Román smiled.

  In the afternoon, my uncle began to play the piano. From the door to the gallery I saw him in the living room. Sunbeams branched out behind his head. He turned towards me and saw me too, and also gave me a lively smile that covered over all his thoughts.

  ‘You’ve become too good-looking to want to listen to my music, hmm? You run away, like all the women in this house …’

  He pressed the keys with passion, forcing them to give the sense of a splendid spring. His eyes were red, like those of a man who’s had a good deal of alcohol or hasn’t slept for several days. When he played, his face filled with wrinkles.

  And so I ran away from him, as I had done on other occasions. On the street I remembered only his gallantry. ‘In spite of everything,’ I thought, ‘Román makes the people around him come to life. He really knows what’s going on. He knows I’m full of hope this afternoon.’

  Linked to the idea of Román, the thought of Ena came to mind involuntarily. Because I, who had so wanted to prevent those two from ever meeting, could no longer separate them in my imagination.

  ‘Do you know that Ena came to see Román on the afternoon of St John’s Eve?’

  Gloria had told me this, looking at me out of the corner of her eye:

  ‘I saw her myself when she ran out, down the stairs, like Trueno was running the other day … The same way, kid, like she was crazy … What do you think of that? … She hasn’t come back since then.’

  I covered my ears, there on the street on my way to Pons’ house, and looked up at the treetops. The leaves already had a hard green consistency. The fiery sky shattered against them.

  Back in the dazzling street, I again became an eighteen-year-old girl going to dance with her first suitor. An agreeable, lighthearted expectation completely silenced those echoes of other people.

  Pons lived in a splendid house at the end of Calle Muntaner. In front of the fence around the garden – so citified the flowers smelled of wax and cement – I saw a long line of cars. My heart began to pound in a way that was almost painful. I knew that in a few minutes I’d have to enter a happy, unthinking world. A world that revolved around the solid pedestal of money, with an optimistic view I knew something about from listening to the conversations of my friends. It was the first time I was going to a society party, since the gatherings at Ena’s house, which I had attended, had had an intimate character imbued with a literary and artistic purpose.

  I remember the marble entrance and its pleasant coolness. My confusion before the servant at the door, the shadowy foyer decorated with plants and vases. The scent of a woman wearing too many jewels who came to shake the hand of Pons’ mother, whose indefinable glance at my old shoes crossed the yearning look of Pons, who was watching her.

  She was tall, imposing. She smiled as she spoke to me, as if the smile had come to rest – forever – on her lips. It was too easy then to hurt me. In a moment I felt anguish because of my shabby clothes. I placed a not very certain hand on Pons’ arm and went into the living room with him.

  There were a good number of people there. In a small adjacent room ‘the adults’ devoted themselves principally to eating and laughing. A fat woman is set in my memory, her face congested with laughter at the moment she puts an almond pastry in her mouth. I don’t know why I have this image eternally fixed in the midst of all the confusion and movement. The young people were eating and drinking too, and talking as they constantly moved around. There was a preponderance of pretty girls. Pons introduced me to a group of four or five, saying they were his cousins. I felt very shy with them. I almost felt like crying, for in no way did this emotion resemble the radiant sensation I had anticipated. I felt like crying with impatience and rage …

  I didn’t dare to move away from Pons, and in terror I began to sense that he was becoming a little nervous as he faced those pretty eyes full of malice that were observing us. Finally someone called my friend over for a moment and he left me – with an apologetic smile – alone with the girls and two young boys I didn’t know. For all that time I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t having a good time at all. I saw myself in a mirror, white and grey, dowdy among the bright summer dresses all around me. Absolutely serious in the midst of everyone’s animation, and I felt ridiculous.

  Pons had disappeared from my visual horizon. At last, when the music filled the room with a slow foxtrot, I found myself completely alone by a window, watching the others dance.
r />   The dance ended with the sound of conversations, and nobody came over to me. I heard Iturdiaga’s voice and quickly turned around. Gaspar was sitting with two or three girls to whom he was showing I don’t know what plans and explaining his future projects. He was saying:

  ‘Today this rock is inaccessible, but to reach it I’ll construct a cable car and my castle-house will have its foundations on the same peak. I’ll marry and spend twelve months a year in this fortress, with no other company but that of my beloved wife, listening to the hum of the wind, the scream of the eagles, the roar of the thunder …’

  A very pretty young girl, who was listening to him open-mouthed, interrupted:

  ‘But that can’t be, Gaspar …’

  ‘What do you mean, Señorita? I have the plans! I’ve spoken to the architects and engineers! Are you going to tell me it’s impossible?’

  ‘What’s impossible is your finding a woman who wants to live with you there! … Really, Gaspar …’

  Iturdiaga raised his eyebrows and smiled with haughty melancholy. His long blue trousers ended at shoes that shone like mirrors. I didn’t know if I should go over to him, for I felt humble and desperate for company, like a dog … At that moment I was distracted by hearing his name, Iturdiaga, spoken with absolute clarity behind me, and I turned my head. I was leaning against a low window, open to the garden. There, on one of the narrow paved paths, I saw two men walking and undoubtedly talking about business. One of them, enormous and stout, bore a certain resemblance to Gaspar. Their discussion was so animated that they had stopped a few steps from the window.

  ‘But in that case, do you realise how much we can make in the war? Millions, man, millions! … This isn’t child’s play, Iturdiaga! …’

  They continued on their way.

  A smile came to my lips, as if in fact I’d seen them riding across the reddened sky of evening (a magician’s hood covering the worthy heads of important men) astride the black spectre of war flying over the fields of Europe …