Nada Page 21

  ‘Andrea! … Oh! Andrea, what an idiot! …’

  She made a face as if she were going to laugh and began to cry even harder; it was as if she were doing my crying for me, her tears eased my anguish so much. She held out her arms, incapable of saying anything, and we embraced there, on the street. Her heart – hers, not mine – was racing, pounding next to me. We stood there for a second. Then I abruptly pulled away from her tenderness. I saw that her eyes were drying rapidly and now her smile blossomed easily, as if she had never cried.

  ‘You know I love you very much, Andrea?’ she said. ‘I didn’t know I loved you so much … I didn’t want to see you again or anything else that could remind me of that damn house on Calle de Aribau … But, when you looked at me like that, when you left …’

  ‘I looked at you “like that”? Like how?’

  What we said didn’t matter to me. What mattered was the comforting feeling of companionship, of consolation, like an oil bath on my soul.

  ‘Well … I don’t know how to explain it. You looked at me with desperation. And besides, since I know you love me so much, and so faithfully. Just like I love you, don’t think …’

  She made incoherent statements that seemed full of sense to me. Up from the asphalt came an odour of wet dust. Large hot drops were falling and we didn’t move. Ena put her arm around my shoulder and pressed her soft cheek against mine. All our reticence seemed to erupt. Our bad moments were stilled.

  ‘Ena, forgive me for this afternoon. I know you can’t stand people spying on you. I never did it before today, I swear … If I interrupted your conversation with Román it was because I thought he was threatening you … I know it may be ridiculous. But that’s what I thought.’

  Ena moved away to look at me. Laughter floated on her lips.

  ‘But that’s what I needed, Andrea! You came from heaven! You really didn’t know you were saving me? … If I’ve been mean to you it was because of too much strain on my nerves. I was afraid to cry. And now you see, now I have …’

  Ena took a deep breath, as if this had relieved her of a thousand fiery emotions. She crossed her hands behind her, almost stretching, ridding herself of all her tensions. She didn’t look at me. It seemed as if she weren’t actually speaking to me.

  ‘The truth is, Andrea, that deep down I’ve always valued your fondness for me as something extraordinary, but I never wanted to admit it. True friendship seemed like a myth until I met you, just as love seemed like a myth until I met Jaime … Sometimes’ – Ena smiled with a certain timidity – ‘I think about what I’ve done to deserve these two gifts from fate … I assure you I was a terrible, cynical girl. I never believed in any golden dream, and in contrast to what happens to other people, I’ve been showered with the most beautiful realities. I’ve always been so happy …’

  ‘Ena, didn’t you fall in love with Román?’

  I asked the question in so faint a murmur that the rain, falling steadily now, drowned out my voice. I repeated the question:

  ‘Tell me, didn’t you fall in love?’

  Ena brushed me quickly with an indefinable glance from eyes that were too brilliant. Then she looked up at the clouds.

  ‘We’re getting wet, Andrea!’ she shouted.

  She pulled me towards the doorway of the university, where we took shelter. Her face looked fresh under the drops of rain, and a little pale, as if she had suffered fevers. The storm unleashed cataracts of rain, it came down in sheets, accompanied by violent claps of thunder. We didn’t speak for a while, listening to the rain that calmed me and made me green again, like the trees.

  ‘How beautiful!’ said Ena, and her nostrils flared. ‘You want to know if I fell in love with Román …’ she continued with an almost dreamy expression. ‘I was very interested in him! Very interested!’

  She laughed quietly.

  ‘I’ve never made anyone so desperate, so humiliated …’ I looked at her in some surprise. She saw only the curtain of rain that fell before her eyes, illuminated by flashes of lightning. The earth seemed to boil, heave, rid itself of all its poisons.

  ‘Ah! What a pleasure! To know that someone is pursuing you, that he thinks he’s caught you, and then you escape, and he’s outwitted … What a strange game! … Román has a swinish spirit, Andrea. He’s attractive, and a great artist, but deep down he’s so mean-spirited and coarse! … What kind of woman has he been used to? I suppose creatures like the two shadows I saw haunting the stairs when I went up to see him … That horrible maid your family has, and the other woman who’s so peculiar, the one with red hair, I know now her name is Gloria … And maybe someone very sweet and timid, like my mother …’

  She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘You know my mother was in love with him when she was young? … That was the reason I wanted to meet Román. Then, what a disappointment! I began to hate him … Doesn’t that happen to you, when you make up a legend about a specific person, and you see what lies under your fantasies and that he’s really worth even less than you, and you begin to hate him? Sometimes my hatred for Román grew so big he noticed it and turned his head, as if it were charged with electricity … What strange days when we were first getting to know each other! I don’t know if I was unhappy or not. I was obsessed by Román. I avoided you. I quarrelled with Jaime over some stupid thing and then I couldn’t bear to be with him. I think I felt that if I saw Jaime again I’d have to abandon the adventure. And then I felt too involved, almost intoxicated by all of it … If I’m with Jaime I become good again, Andrea, I’m a different woman … If you could only see, sometimes I’m afraid to feel the dualism of the forces that drive me. When I’ve been too sublime for a while, I feel like scratching somebody … Like doing a little harm.’

  She seized my hand and at my instinctive attempt to withdraw it she smiled with indulgent tenderness.

  ‘Do I frighten you? Then why do you want to be my friend? I’m not an angel, Andrea, though I love you so much … There are people who fill my heart, like Jaime, my mother, and you, each in a different way … But a part of me needs to expand and give free rein to its poisons. Do you think I don’t love Jaime? I love him very much. I couldn’t bear it if my life were separate from his. I desire his presence, his entire personality. I admire him passionately … But there’s something else: curiosity, a malignant disquiet in my heart, that can never rest …’

  ‘Did Román make love to you? Tell me.’

  ‘Make love to me? I don’t know. He was desperate with me, so angry he could have strangled me at times … But he holds himself in check very well. I wanted to make him lose control of his nerves. I succeeded only once … It was over a week ago, Andrea, the last time I came to see him before today. I came five times to see Román and I always tried to let somebody know. Because deep down, Román has always inspired a little fear in me. I knocked at the door of your house, when I knew you wouldn’t be there, and I asked for you. Those two peculiar women, who felt a special antipathy towards me as soon as they saw me, suited me very well. I knew they’d be like two bodyguards. But you have no idea how much that charged atmosphere began to amuse me. At times I even forgot the feeling of being continually on my guard. I laughed there, openly, I was excited and enthusiastic. I’d never had a field of experimentation like that … Those were the moments when Román would come over slowly to sit beside me. But when I noticed the heat of his body, an inexplicable rage rose up in me; it was hard to make the effort to hide it. Then, still laughing, I’d move to the other side of the room.

  I was driving him crazy. When he thought I was languid, half-overcome by his music, by the almost perverse confidential tone he gave to our conversation, I’d suddenly stand up on the divan.

  ‘I feel like jumping!’ I’d say to him.

  And I’d begin to do it, almost touching the ceiling with my leaps, the way I do when I play with my brothers. When he heard me giggling, he didn’t know if I was crazy or stupid … Not for a moment did I stop watching
him out of the corner of my eye. After its first movement of involuntary surprise, his face remained impenetrable, as always … That wasn’t what I wanted, Andrea. If you knew how Román made my mother suffer when she was young …’

  ‘Who told you the story?’

  ‘Who? … Ah! Yes! … Papá did. Papá did once when Mamá was sick and talked about Román when she was feverish … The poor man was very moved that night, he thought she was going to die.’

  (I had to smile to myself. In only a few days life seemed different from the way I’d always conceived of it. Complicated and very simple at the same time. I thought that the most painful and jealously guarded secrets are perhaps the ones that everyone around us knows. Stupid tragedies. Useless tears. That’s how life began to seem then.)

  Ena turned toward me, and I don’t know what ideas she saw in my eyes. Suddenly she said:

  ‘But don’t think I’m better than I am, Andrea … Don’t try to find excuses for me … That wasn’t the only reason I wanted to humiliate Román … how can I explain what a thrilling game it became for me? … It was an increasingly fierce battle. A battle to the death …’

  Ena was surely looking at me as she spoke. I thought I could feel her eyes on me the whole time. I could only listen while I stared at the rain, whose fury ebbed and flowed, increasing at certain moments and then almost stopping.

  ‘Listen, Andrea, I couldn’t think about Jaime or you or anybody then, I was completely absorbed in this duel between Román’s coldness and control of his nerves and my own malice and safety … Andrea, the day I could finally laugh at him, the day I escaped from between his hands when he thought he had firm hold of me, was something splendid …’

  Ena was laughing. I turned towards her, a little frightened, and she looked very beautiful, her eyes shining.

  ‘You can’t even imagine a scene like the one that ended my relationship with Román last week, St John’s Eve, to be precise, I remember it very well … I escaped … just like that, running down the stairs, almost killing myself … I left my bag and gloves in his room, even my hairclips. But Román stayed there too … I’ve never seen anything more abject than his face … You want to know if I fell in love with him? … With that man?’

  I began to look at my friend, seeing her for the first time as she really was. Her eyes were shadowed under the discordant, changeable lights coming from the sky. I felt I could never judge her. I ran my hand along her arm and leaned my head on her shoulder. I was very tired. A multitude of thoughts were becoming clear in my mind.

  ‘This happened on St John’s Night?’

  ‘Yes …’

  We didn’t speak for a while. In that silence, without being able to avoid it, the image of Jaime came to me. It was a case of thought transmission.

  ‘The person I’ve treated the worst in all of this is Jaime, I know that,’ said Ena.

  Her face was childish again, a little peevish. She looked at me and there was no more defiance or cynicism in her glance.

  ‘Each time I thought about Jaime it was such torment, if you only knew! But I couldn’t control the demons that had taken hold of me … One night I went out with Román and he took me to the Paralelo. I was very tired and bored when we went into a café filled with people and smoke. I thought it was a trick of my imagination when I saw Jaime’s eyes looking into mine; he was behind the smoke, behind the heat, and he didn’t say hello to me. All he did was look at me … That night I cried a long time. The next day you brought me a message from him, do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t want anything else but to see Jaime and reconcile with him. I was so moved when we met! Then everything went wrong, I don’t know if it was my fault or his. Jaime had promised to be understanding, but in the course of our conversation he became agitated … Apparently he’d followed me and found out about the life and miracles of Román. He said your uncle was an undesirable involved in the dirtiest kind of smuggling. He explained that business to me … Finally, he began to make accusations, desperate because I was “at the mercy of a bandit like him” … It was more than I could stand and the only thing I could think of to do was to begin an impassioned defence of Román. Hasn’t that awful thing ever happened to you? You become enmeshed in your own words and then you find you can’t get out? … Jaime and I were in despair when we separated that day … He left Barcelona, did you know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe he thinks I’ll write to him … do you think so?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Ena smiled at me and leaned her head against the stone of the wall. She was tired …

  ‘I’ve talked so much, haven’t I, Andrea? So much … aren’t you sick of me?’

  ‘You still haven’t told me the most important thing … You still haven’t told me why, if you broke off with him on St John’s Eve, you were in my uncle’s room today …’

  Ena looked out at the street before she answered. The storm had eased and the sky looked stained and turbulent, its colours yellow and grey. The sewers swallowed up the water that ran along the kerbs.

  ‘All right if we leave, Andrea?’

  We began to walk aimlessly. Our arms were entwined.

  ‘Today,’ Ena said, ‘I risked everything when I went back to Román’s room. He wrote me a few lines saying he had some things of mine in his room and wanted to return them to me … I understood he wasn’t going to leave me alone so easily. I thought of my mother and had the notion that, like her, I’d spend the rest of my life running away if I didn’t make a stand … That was when I had the idea of using what Jaime had learned as a safeguard against Román. With that as my only security I went there. I was prepared to see him for the last time … Don’t think I wasn’t afraid. I was terrified when you arrived. Terrified, Andrea, and even regretting my impulse … because Román is crazy, I believe he’s crazy … When you knocked at the door I was about to collapse, my nervous tension was so high …’

  Ena stopped in the middle of the street to look at me. The street-lamps had just gone on and were glistening on the black ground. The washed trees gave off their green fragrance.

  ‘Do you understand, Andrea, do you understand, darling, that I couldn’t say anything to you, that I even insulted you on the stairs? Those moments seemed erased from my existence. When I realised that it was I, Ena, who was alive, I found myself running down Calle de Aribau, looking for you. Finally, when I turned the corner, I found you. You were leaning against the university garden wall, very small and lost under a stormy sky … That’s how I saw you.’

  XXII

  BEFORE ENA FINALLY left to spend her holiday at a beach in the north, the three of us, Ena, Jaime, and I, went out again as we did in the better days of spring. I felt changed, however. Each day my head grew weaker and I felt softened, with tears in my eyes over anything. The simple joy of lying under a cloudless sky next to my friends, which seemed perfect to me, escaped at times into a vagueness of imagination similar to dreaming. Blue distances buzzed in my brain with the sound of a blowfly, making me close my eyes. When I opened them, I could see the hot sky through the branches of the carob trees, heavy with the chirping of birds. It was as if I had died centuries before and my entire body, turned to fine dust, was dispersed over oceans and broad mountains, so scattered, light, and vague was the sense I had of my flesh and bones … Sometimes I found Ena’s troubled eyes on my face.

  ‘Why are you sleeping so much? I’m afraid you’re very weak.’

  This affectionate concern regarding my life was going to end as well. Ena was supposed to leave in a few days and wouldn’t come back to Barcelona after the summer. Her family planned to move directly from San Sebastián to Madrid. I thought that when I began the new term I’d be in the same spiritual solitude as the year before. But now I carried a larger burden of memory on my shoulders. A burden I found somewhat wearing.

  On the day I went to say goodbye to Ena I felt terribly depressed. In the din of the station, Ena appeared su
rrounded by blond brothers and hurried along by her mother, who seemed possessed by a feverish haste to leave. Ena threw her arms around my neck and kissed me over and over again. I felt my eyes filling with tears. It was cruel. She spoke into my ear:

  ‘We’ll see each other very soon, Andrea. Trust me.’ I thought she meant that she’d return shortly to Barcelona, married to Jaime, perhaps.

  When the train pulled out Ena’s father and I were left in the large railway station. Ena’s father, suddenly left alone in the city, seemed a little overwhelmed. He invited me to take a cab with him and seemed disconcerted when I said no. He kept looking at me with his kind smile. I thought he was one of those people who don’t know how to be alone with their own thoughts even for a moment. Who may not have any thoughts. Still, I found him extraordinarily likable.

  I intended to go back to the house from the station, taking the long way in spite of the humid, oppressive heat that gripped everything. I began walking, walking … Barcelona had been left infinitely empty. The July heat was awful. I passed the closed, desolate Borne Market. The streets were dirty with ripe fruit and straw. Some horses, hitched to their wagons, were kicking. I suddenly thought of Guíxols’ studio and went down Calle de Montcada. The majestic courtyard with its dilapidated carved stone staircase was the same as always. An overturned wagon held traces of its load of alfalfa.

  ‘Nobody’s there, Señorita,’ the concierge told me. ‘Señor Guíxols is away. Nobody comes any more, not even Señor Iturdiaga, he went to Sitges last week. Señor Pons isn’t in Barcelona either … But I can give you the key, if you want to go up; Señor Guíxols gave me permission to give it to any of you …’

  It hadn’t been my intention when I went there, following the thread of my memories, to go into the studio, which I already knew was closed. And yet I accepted her offer. It suddenly seemed like an attractive prospect, being protected for a while by the empty peace of the house, the coolness of its ancient walls. The enclosed air still had a faint smell of varnish. Behind the door where Guíxols usually kept his provisions I found a forgotten bar of chocolate. The paintings were carefully covered with white cloths and seemed like spectres wrapped in shrouds. Souls of the memory of a thousand happy conversations.