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  I reached Calle de Aribau when it was already growing dark. When I left the studio I had resumed my long, discouraging trek through the city.

  When I went into my room I found a hot smell of closed window and tears. I made out the shape of Gloria, lying on my bed and crying. When she realised that someone was coming in she turned over in a fury. Then she became calmer when she saw who it was.

  ‘I was sleeping a little, Andrea,’ she said.

  I saw that the light could not be turned on because someone had taken the light bulb. I don’t know what moved me to sit on the edge of the bed and take Gloria’s hand, wet with perspiration or with tears, between mine.

  ‘Why are you crying, Gloria? Do you think I don’t know you’re crying?’

  Since I was sad that day, the sadness of other people didn’t seem offensive to me.

  At first she didn’t answer. After a while she murmured:

  ‘I’m scared, Andrea!’

  ‘But why, Gloria?’

  ‘Before you never asked anybody anything, Andrea … You’re nicer now. I’d really like to tell you what I’m scared of, but I can’t.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I wouldn’t want Juan to know I’ve been crying. I’ll say I fell asleep if he notices that my eyes are puffy.’

  I don’t know what bitter throbbing filled things that night, like evil omens. I couldn’t sleep, which happened to me frequently during that time when weariness tormented me. Before I decided to close my eyes I groped clumsily around the marble top of the night table and found a piece of bread from the day before. I ate it eagerly. My poor grandmother rarely forgot to leave her little gifts. At last, when sleep finally took possession of me, it was like a coma, almost like an antechamber to final death. My exhaustion was terrible. I think someone had been screaming for a long time before those awful sounds managed to penetrate my ears. Perhaps it was only a matter of a few seconds. But I remember that they had formed part of my dreams before they forced me to return to reality. I’d never heard that kind of screaming in the house on Calle de Aribau. It was the lugubrious shriek of a maddened animal, and it made me sit up in the bed and then jump out of it, trembling.

  I found the maid, Antonia, on the floor of the foyer, her legs spread tragically, revealing her dark inner places, and her hands clutching at the tiles. The street door was wide open and the curious faces of neighbours were beginning to look in. At first I had only a comic vision of the scene, I was so bewildered.

  Juan, who had come in half-dressed, kicked the street door so it would slam in their faces. Then he began to slap the woman’s distorted face and asked Gloria for a jug of cold water to throw on her. At last the maid began to pant and gulp more freely, like a defeated animal. But immediately, as if this had been only a truce, she returned to dreadful screams.

  ‘He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!’

  And she pointed upwards.

  I saw Juan’s face turn grey.

  ‘Who? Who’s dead, you stupid woman–?’

  Then, without waiting for her to answer, he ran to the door, racing like a madman up the stairs.

  ‘He slit his throat with his razor,’ Antonia concluded.

  And finally she started to cry in despair, sitting on the floor. It was rare to see tears on her face. She looked like a figure in a nightmare.

  ‘He told me to bring him up coffee early, he was leaving on a trip … He told me early this morning! … And now he is lying on the floor, bleeding like an animal. Ah! Oh! Trueno, my dear child, you’ve lost your father …’

  All over the house you could hear something like the sound of rain getting heavier. Then shouts, warnings. We were paralysed, but through the open door we could see people from the other flats going up to Román’s room.

  ‘You have to tell the police,’ shouted a stout man, the medical practitioner on the third floor, coming down the stairs in a state of great excitement.

  The women in our house huddled together stupidly, trembling; we heard him but didn’t dare react to these incredible events. Antonia was screaming again, and hers was the only voice heard from the strange, compact group formed by her, Gloria, my grandmother, and me.

  At a certain moment I felt my blood begin to flow again, and I went to close the door. When I returned I saw my grandmother making her presence real to me for the first time. She seemed shrunken, weighed down by the black veil that she undoubtedly had put on to go to her daily Mass. She was shaking.

  ‘He didn’t commit suicide, Andrea … he repented before he died,’ she said childishly.

  ‘Yes, darling, yes …’

  My affirmation didn’t console her. Her lips were blue. She stammered when she spoke. Her wet eyes wouldn’t let her tears flow openly.

  ‘I want to go upstairs … I want to be with my Román.’

  I thought the best thing was to humour her. I opened the door and helped her, step by step, up the staircase I knew so well. I didn’t even realise I wasn’t dressed and that only a robe covered my nightgown. I don’t know where the people came from who crowded the stairs. At the entrance you could hear the voices of police officers trying to contain that avalanche. They let us pass, staring at us. I felt my head clear for moments at a time. At each step I felt a new wave of anguished fear and repugnance. My knees began their nervous dance, making it difficult for me to walk. Juan was coming down, desolate, yellow. Suddenly he saw us and stopped in front of us.

  ‘Mamá! Damn it!’ – I don’t know why the image of my grandmother unleashed his rage. He shouted at her in a fury: ‘Back home this instant!’

  He raised his fist as if he were going to hit her and the people began muttering. My grandmother wasn’t crying, but her chin trembled in a childish pout.

  ‘He’s my son! He’s my boy! … I have the right to go up! I have to see him …’

  Juan became quiet. His eyes looked around, scrutinising the faces watching him eagerly. He seemed indecisive for a moment. At last, brusquely, he gave in.

  ‘You, niece, downstairs! You haven’t lost anything!’ he said.

  Then he put his arm around his mother’s waist and, almost dragging her, helped her go up. I heard my grandmother begin to cry, leaning on her son’s shoulder.

  When I went into our flat I found that a crowd of people had come in too and spread out, invading every corner and prying into everything with sympathetic murmurs.

  Making my way through those people, pushing past some of them, I managed to reach the isolated corner of the bathroom. I took refuge there, and locked the door.

  Mechanically, not knowing how, I found myself in the dirty bathtub, naked as I was every day, ready to receive the water from the shower. I saw myself reflected in the mirror, miserably skinny, my teeth chattering as if I were dying of the cold. The truth is that it was all so horrible that it surpassed my capacity for tragedy. I turned on the shower and I think I began to laugh nervously when I found myself like that, as if it were a day like any other. A day when nothing had happened. ‘I believe I’m hysterical,’ I thought as the water fell, pounding me and refreshing me. The drops slid along my shoulders and chest, formed canals on my belly, ran down my legs. Román was lying upstairs, bloody, his face broken in two by the grimace of those who are damned when they die. The shower continued to fall on me in cool, inexhaustible cataracts. I heard the human noise growing louder on the other side of the door, I felt as if I would never move from there. I seemed imbecilic.

  Then they began to bang on the bathroom door.

  XXIII

  THE DAYS THAT followed were submerged in the most intense darkness because someone immediately closed all the balconies, almost nailing them shut. Almost preventing even a breath of outside air from coming in. A heavy, ill-smelling heat enveloped everything, and I began to lose my sense of time. Hours or days were all the same. Days or nights seemed identical. Gloria became ill and nobody paid attention to her. I sat beside her and saw that her fever was very high.

  ‘Have they tak
en that man away yet?’ she asked constantly.

  I brought her water. It seemed she’d never grow tired of drinking. Sometimes Antonia came in and looked at her with an expression so full of hate that I preferred to spend all the time I could with Gloria.

  ‘She won’t die, the witch! She won’t die, the murderer!’ Antonia would say.

  From the maid I also learned the details of the end of Román’s life. Details that I heard as if through a mist. (It seemed to me that I was losing my ability to see clearly. That the outlines of things were disappearing.)

  Apparently, on the night before his death, Román had called Antonia on the phone saying he’d just come back from his trip – Román had been away – and that he needed to leave again first thing in the morning. ‘Come up and help me pack and bring me all the clean clothes I have; I’ll be away for a long time …’ These, according to Antonia, had been Román’s last words. The idea of cutting his throat must have been a sudden impulse, a rapid fit of madness that attacked him while he was shaving. His cheeks were covered with lather when Antonia found him.

  Gloria monotonously asked for details about Román.

  ‘And the paintings? Didn’t they find the paintings?’

  ‘What paintings, Gloria?’ I bent over her with a gesture that my weariness made languid.

  ‘The picture of me that Román painted. My picture with the purple lilies …’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I can’t find out anything.’

  When Gloria got better she said to me:

  ‘I wasn’t in love with Román, Andrea … Kid, I see everything you think in your face. You think I didn’t despise Román …’

  The truth is I didn’t think anything. My mind was too exhausted. With Gloria’s hands in mine, and listening to her conversation, I forgot about her.

  ‘I was the one who made Román kill himself. I denounced him to the police and that’s why he committed suicide … They were supposed to come for him that morning …’

  I didn’t believe anything Gloria told me. It was more believable to imagine that Román had been the ghost of a dead man. Of a man who had died years earlier and now had finally returned to his hell … Remembering his music, that despairing music I liked hearing so much and that in the end gave me an exact impression of extinction, of disappearing into death, I sometimes felt moved.

  My grandmother came to me from time to time, her eyes wide open, to whisper I don’t know what mysterious consolations. Illuminated by a faith that could not weaken, she prayed constantly, convinced that at the final instant divine grace had touched the sick heart of her son.

  ‘The Virgin told me so, my child. Last night she came to me in a halo of heavenly grace and she told me …’

  The mental disturbance evident in her words seemed like a consolation to me, and I caressed her and agreed.

  Juan was out of the house for a long time, perhaps more than two days. He had to accompany Román’s body to the mortuary and perhaps, later, to its final, remote resting place.

  When one day, or one night, I finally saw him at home, I thought we’d gone through the worst times. But we still hadn’t heard him cry. Never, no matter how many years I live, will I forget his desperate sobbing. I understood that Román was right when he said that Juan belonged to him. Now that he had died, Juan’s grief was unashamed, maddening, like that of a woman for her lover, like that of a young mother for the death of her first child.

  I don’t know how many hours I went without sleeping, my eyes open and very dry, collecting all the griefs that swarmed, as alive as worms, in the entrails of the house. When at last I fell into bed, I don’t know how many hours I was asleep. But I slept as I’d never slept in my life. As if I too were going to close my eyes for ever.

  When I realised again that I was alive, I had the feeling I’d just climbed up from the bottom of a very deep well and had retained the cavernous sense of echoes in the darkness.

  My room was in half-light. The house was so silent it gave me a strange, sepulchral sensation. It was a kind of silence I’d never heard on Calle de Aribau.

  When I fell asleep I recalled the house filled with people and voices. Now it seemed as if no one was there. It seemed as if all its inhabitants had abandoned it. I looked into the kitchen and saw two bubbling stew pots sitting on the fire. The tiles looked swept and there was a slow, soft, homey tranquillity that seemed incongruous there. In the back, in the gallery, Gloria, dressed in black, was washing a child’s outfit. My eyes were puffy and I had a headache. She smiled at me:

  ‘Do you know how long you slept, Andrea?’ she said, coming towards me. ‘You slept two whole days.’ Then she asked me: ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  She filled a glass with milk and gave it to me. The warm milk seemed wonderful and I drank it greedily.

  ‘Antonia left this morning with Trueno,’ Gloria announced.

  ‘Ah!’

  That explained her tranquil presence in the kitchen.

  ‘She left before dawn, while Juan was sleeping. Juan didn’t want to let her take the dog, kid. And you know that Trueno was her love … The two of them ran away together.’

  Gloria gave a silly laugh and then she winked at me.

  ‘Your aunts arrived last night …’ Now she was making fun of me.

  ‘Angustias?’ I asked.

  ‘No, the other ones, you don’t know them. The two who are married, with their husbands. They want to see you, but get dressed first, kid, that’s my advice.’

  I had to put on my only summer dress, badly-tinted black and smelling of home dye. Then I reluctantly went to the back of the house, where that bedroom was located. I could hear a murmur of voices before I went in, as if they were praying there.

  I stopped in the doorway, because everything hurt my eyes then: light and shadow. The room was almost dark and smelled of cloth flowers. Large shapes of well-fed humanity stood out in the darkness, giving off bodily odours squeezed out by the summer. I heard a woman’s voice:

  ‘You spoiled him. Remember how you spoiled him, Mamá. This was the result …’

  ‘You were always unfair, Mamá. You always preferred your boys. Do you realise you’re to blame for this?’

  ‘You never loved us girls, Mamá. You looked down on us. You humiliated us. We always heard you complaining about your daughters, but they haven’t done anything but please you …; this, this is how your sons pay you back, the sons you spoiled …’

  ‘Señora, you’ll have a lot to answer for to God because of that soul you’ve sent to hell.’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. And I couldn’t believe the strange sights before my eyes. Gradually the faces were being outlined, hooked or flattened, like one of Goya’s Caprices. Those people in mourning seemed to be celebrating a strange witches’ sabbath.

  ‘Children, I loved all of you!’

  I couldn’t see the old woman from there, but I imagined her sunk in her wretched armchair. There was a long silence and at last I heard another tremulous sigh.

  ‘Oh, Lord!’

  ‘You just have to look at the poverty in this house. They’ve robbed you, they’ve stripped you bare, and you’re blind to whatever they do. You never wanted to help us when we asked you to. Now we’ve been cheated out of our inheritance … And if that wasn’t enough, a suicide in the family …’

  ‘I helped the ones who were more unfortunate … The ones who needed me more.’

  ‘And by doing that you’ve sunk them deeper into poverty. But don’t you realise the result? If at least they’d been happy, even if we girls were robbed; but now you see, what’s happened here proves we’re right! …’

  ‘And that miserable Juan who’s listening to us: married to a slut, not knowing how to do anything useful, starving to death!’

  (I was looking at Juan. Hoping for one of Juan’s rages. He seemed not to hear. He looked past the window panes at the strip of light on the street.)

  ‘Juan, my child,’ said my grandmother. ‘Tell m
e if they’re right. Tell me if you believe it’s true …’

  Juan turned around, maddened.

  ‘Yes, Mamá, they’re right … Damn you! And damn all of them!’

  Then the entire room stirred with a flapping of wings, with croaking. Hysterical shrieks.

  XXIV

  I REMEMBER THAT I didn’t really believe in the physical fact of Román’s death until much later. Until the summer was turning gold and red in September, it seemed to me that upstairs, in his room, Román still had to be lying down, smoking cigarettes without stopping, or caressing the ears of Trueno, the sleek black dog the maid had carried off like a lover running away with his beloved.

  Sometimes, when I was sitting on the floor in my room, hot like the rest of the house, half-dressed in order to catch any bit of coolness, and listening to the creaking wood, creaking as if the light that turned red in the cracks of the windows was sizzling as it burned … on anguished afternoons like that, I began to remember Román’s violin and its warm moan. If I looked in the mirror in front of me, that parade of forms reflected there … the brown-coloured chairs, the greenish-grey paper on the walls, a monstrous corner of the bed, a part of my own body sitting in the Moorish manner on the tile floor under that symphony and oppressed by the heat … At these times I began to suspect from which corners he had transposed his music to the violin. And I no longer thought the man was so bad when he knew how to capture his own sobs and compress them into a beauty as dense as old gold … Then I was overcome by nostalgia for Román, a desire for his presence that I’d never felt when he was alive. An awful yearning for his hands on the violin or the stained keys of the old piano.