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  One day I went upstairs to the little room in the garret. One day when I couldn’t stand the weight of this feeling, I saw that everything had been stripped, miserably. The books and shelves had disappeared. The divan, without its mattress, was leaning upright against the wall, its feet in the air. Not a single charming trinket, of all those Román had kept there, had survived him. The violin cupboard was open and empty. The heat was unbearable. The small window that opened to the flat roof let in a stream of fiery sun. It became too strange not to hear the crystalline tick-tock tick-tock of the clocks …

  Then I knew, beyond any doubt, that Román had died and that his body was decomposing and rotting somewhere, under the sun that was mercilessly punishing his former lair, so wretched now, its former soul dismantled.

  Then the nightmares began that my weakness made constant and horrifying. I began to think about Román wrapped in his shroud, those nervous hands that knew how to catch the harmony and physicality of things destroyed. Those hands that life made hard and flexible at the same time, their colour dark and yellowish because of tobacco stains, could say so much simply by moving upwards. They knew how to express the precise eloquence of a moment. Those skilled hands – the hands of a thief, curious and greedy – appeared to me at first as crudely puffy, soft, swollen. Then, transformed into two clusters of fleshless bones.

  These horrifying visions pursued me that late summer with monotonous cruelty. During the suffocating twilights, the long nights heavy with languid weight, my terrified heart received images that my reason was not strong enough to banish.

  To drive away the ghosts, I went out a great deal. I wandered the city, uselessly wearing myself out. I wore my black dress that the dye had shrunk but that kept getting bigger on me. I wandered instinctively, embarrassed by my shabby clothing, avoiding the expensive, well-tended neighbourhoods in the city. I got to know the suburbs with their sadness of poorly made, dusty things. The old streets attracted me more.

  One twilight near the Cathedral I heard the slow tolling of a bell that made the city older. I looked up at the sky, turning a softer, bluer colour with the first stars, and I had an impression of almost mystical beauty. A desire to die there, off to the side, looking up, under the great sweetness of the night that was beginning to fall. And my chest ached with hunger and unconfessable desires when I breathed. It was as if I were smelling the scent of death and finding it good for the first time, after it had caused terror in me … When a strong wind began to blow I was still there, leaning against a wall, benumbed and half-ecstatic. From the old balcony of a dilapidated house a sheet appeared, and when it was shaken it took me out of my daze. My head wasn’t right that day. The white cloth seemed like a huge shroud to me and I started to run … I was half-crazed when I reached the house on Calle de Aribau.

  This was how I began to sense the presence of death in the house when almost two months had passed since the tragedy.

  At first, life had seemed completely unchanged. The same shouts threw everything into an uproar. Juan kept hitting Gloria. Perhaps now he was in the habit of hitting her for any reason at all and maybe his brutality had intensified … The difference, however, was not very great in my eyes. The heat was suffocating all of us, and yet my grandmother, growing more and more wrinkled, trembled with cold. But there wasn’t much difference between this grandmother and the earlier one. She didn’t even seem sadder. I still received her smile and her gifts, and on the mornings when Gloria called to the drapaire, she went on praying to the Virgin in her bedroom.

  I remember that one day Gloria sold the piano. The sale was more lucrative than the ones she usually made and my nostrils soon noted that she allowed herself the luxury that day of putting meat in the food. Now that Antonia wasn’t there to pry into the stews and make them filthy by her mere presence, Gloria seemed to be trying to make things better.

  I was dressing to go out when I heard a great disturbance in the kitchen. In a rage, Juan was throwing all the stew pots that only a moment ago had aroused my gluttony, and kicking Gloria, who was writhing on the floor.

  ‘You wretch! You sold Román’s piano! Román’s piano, you wretch! You filthy sow!’

  My grandmother was trembling, as usual, holding the baby’s face against her so he wouldn’t see his father like that.

  Juan’s mouth was foaming and his eyes were the kind you tend to see only in madhouses. When he got tired of kicking he raised his hands to his chest, like a person who’s choking, and then he was possessed again by irrational fury with the pine chairs, the table, the pots and pans … Gloria, half-dead, got away, and we all left, leaving him alone with his shouting. When he calmed down – according to what I was told – he sat holding his head, crying silently.

  The next day Gloria came slowly into my room, whispering as she talked to me about bringing in a doctor and putting Juan in an asylum.

  ‘I think that’s good,’ I said (but I was sure the idea would never go beyond being a plan).

  She was sitting at one end of the room. She looked at me and said:

  ‘Andrea, you don’t know how frightened I am.’

  Her face was as inexpressive as always, but tears of terror filled her eyes.

  ‘I don’t deserve this, Andrea, because I’m a very good girl …’

  She was quiet for a moment and seemed lost in thought. She went over to the mirror.

  ‘And pretty … Aren’t I pretty?’

  Forgetting her anguish, she touched her body with a certain complacency. She turned to me.

  ‘Are you laughing?’

  She sighed. She immediately became frightened again …

  ‘No woman would suffer what I suffer, Andrea … Since Román’s death, Juan doesn’t want me to sleep. He says I’m an animal that doesn’t do anything but sleep, while his brother howls with sorrow. Said just like that, kid, it’s funny … But if it’s said to you at midnight, in bed! … No, Andrea, it isn’t funny to wake up half-strangled, with a man’s hands around your neck. He says I’m a pig, that all I do is sleep day and night. How can I not sleep during the day if I can’t sleep at night? … I come back from my sister’s house very late and sometimes I find him waiting for me in the street. One day he showed me a big razor that he said he carried so if I was half an hour late he could slit my throat … You think he wouldn’t dare to do it, but with a crazy man, who knows! … He says Román comes to him every night and tells him to kill me … What would you do, Andrea? You’d run away, wouldn’t you?’

  She didn’t wait for me to answer.

  ‘And how can you run away when he has a razor and legs to follow you to the ends of the earth? Oh, kid, you don’t know what it means to be scared! … To go to bed when it’s almost dawn, your whole body exhausted, the way I go to bed, beside a man who’s crazy …

  ‘… I’m in bed, waiting for the moment when he falls asleep to let my head sink into the pillow and finally get some rest. And I see that he never sleeps. I feel his open eyes beside me. He throws off all the covers and lies on his back, his big ribs heaving. Every minute he asks: “Are you asleep?”

  ‘And I have to talk to him so he’ll calm down. Finally I can’t stand it any more, sleep comes in like a black sorrow behind my eyes and I let go, exhausted … Right away I feel his breathing close to me, his body touching mine. And I have to be alert, sweating with fear, because his hands move very softly around my neck and then they move around again …

  ‘… And if he was always bad, kid, I could hate him and it would be better. But sometimes he caresses me, begs my pardon and begins to cry like a little boy … And what can I do? I start to cry too and I feel regret too … because we all have our regrets, even me, believe me … And I caress him too … Then, in the morning, if I remind him of those moments, he wants to kill me … Look!’

  She quickly took off her blouse and showed me a large, bloody welt on her back.

  I was looking at the terrible scar when we realised there was another person in the room. When I turned aro
und I saw my grandmother angrily shaking her wrinkled head.

  Ah, my grandmother’s anger. The only anger I remember seeing in her … She was holding a letter that had just been handed to her. And she shook it indignantly.

  ‘You’re both bad! Bad!’ she said. ‘What are you two plotting there, you little villains? An asylum! … For a good man, who dresses and feeds his son and walks him at night so his wife can sleep! … You’re crazy! The two of you and I will be locked up together before they touch a hair on his head!’

  With a vengeful gesture she threw the letter to the floor and left, shaking her head, whining and talking to herself.

  The letter on the floor was for me. Ena had written to me from Madrid. It would change the direction of my life.

  XXV

  I FINISHED PACKING my suitcase and tying it tightly with the cord to secure the broken locks. I was tired. Gloria told me that supper was on the table. She had invited me to eat with them on that last night. That morning she had leaned towards my ear:

  ‘I sold all the mirrors with candelabra. I didn’t know they’d pay so much money for that old, ugly junk, kid …’

  That night there was an abundance of bread. And white fish. Juan seemed to be in a good mood. The baby prattled in his high chair and I realised to my amazement that he had grown a great deal during the year. The familiar lamp was reflected in the dark window panes to the balcony. My grandmother said:

  ‘Naughty girl! Be sure you come back soon to see us …’

  Gloria placed her small hand over mine, resting on the table cloth.

  ‘Yes, come back soon, Andrea, you know I love you …’

  Juan intervened:

  ‘Don’t pester Andrea. She’s doing the right thing, leaving. At last she has an opportunity to work and do something … So far you can’t say she hasn’t been lazy.’

  We finished supper. I didn’t know what to say to them. Gloria piled up the dirty dishes in the sink and then went to put on lipstick, and her coat.

  ‘All right, give me a hug, kid, in case I don’t see you … Because you’re leaving very early, aren’t you?’

  ‘At seven.’

  I embraced her and, strangely, I felt that I loved her. Then I watched her go out.

  Juan was in the middle of the foyer, watching, without saying a word, my struggles to place the suitcase next to the street door. I wanted to make the least noise and cause the least bother possible when I left. My uncle put his hand on my shoulder with an awkward amiability and looked at me like that, separated by the length of his arm.

  ‘Well, niece, I hope things go well for you. In any case, you’ll see how living in a house of strangers isn’t the same as being with your family, but it’s a good idea for you to have your eyes opened. For you to learn what life is like …’

  I went into Angustias’ room for the last time. It was hot and the window was open; the familiar reflection of the streetlight extended over the floor tiles in sad, yellowish streams.

  I didn’t want to think any more about what surrounded me and I got into bed. Ena’s letter had opened up for me, and this time in a real way, the horizons of my salvation.

  … There’s work for you in my father’s office, Andrea. It will allow you to live independently and attend classes at the university as well. For the moment you’ll live here, but later you can choose your own place, since it’s not a question of keeping you sequestered. Mamá is having a very good time getting your room ready. I can’t sleep I’m so happy.

  It was a very long letter in which she told me about all her concerns and hopes. She told me Jaime was also coming to live in Madrid that winter. He’d finally decided to finish his studies, and after that they’d be married.

  I couldn’t sleep. I found it idiotic to be feeling the same eager expectation that a year earlier had made me jump out of bed in the village every half hour, afraid I’d miss the six o’clock train, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t have the same illusions now, but the departure moved me as if it were a liberation. Ena’s father, who had come to Barcelona for a few days, would pick me up the next morning and I’d go back to Madrid with him. We’d travel in his car.

  I was already dressed when the driver knocked discreetly at the door. The entire house seemed silent and asleep in the greyish light coming in through the balconies. I didn’t have the courage to peer into my grandmother’s room. I didn’t want to wake her.

  I went down the stairs, slowly. I felt a strong emotion. I remembered the terrible expectation, the longing for life when I climbed them for the first time. I was leaving now without having known any of the things I had confusedly hoped for: life in its plenitude, joy, deep interests, love. I was taking nothing from the house on Calle de Aribau. At least, that’s what I thought then.

  Standing beside the long black car, Ena’s father was waiting for me. He extended his hands in cordial welcome. He turned to the driver to give him some instruction or other. Then he said to me:

  ‘We’ll eat lunch in Zaragoza, but first we’ll have a good breakfast.’ He smiled broadly. ‘You’ll enjoy the trip, Andrea. You’ll see …’

  The morning air was stimulating. The ground seemed damp with night dew. Before I climbed into the car I looked up at the house where I had lived for a year. The first rays of the sun were hitting its windows. A few moments later, Calle de Aribau and all of Barcelona were behind me.

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  Copyright © Heirs of Carmen Laforet, 1945

  English translation copyright © Edith Grossman, 2007

  Introduction copyright © Mario Vargas Llosa, 2004

  Carmen Laforet has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This work has been published with a subsidy from the Directorate-General of Books, Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture

  First published by Ediciones Destino in 1945

  First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker in 2007

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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