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  At other times I’d be secretly embarrassed when she obliged me to go out with her. I’d watch her firmly pull down a dark brown felt hat trimmed with a rooster feather, which gave her hard features a warlike air, and she’d oblige me to wear an old blue hat above my badly cut suit. At that time I couldn’t conceive of any resistance other than a passive one. Held by her arm, I walked along the streets that seemed less brilliant and less fascinating than I had imagined.

  ‘Don’t turn your head,’ Angustias would say. ‘Don’t look at people like that.’

  If I did forget that I was beside her, it was only for a few minutes.

  Sometimes I’d see a man, a woman, who had something interesting, indefinable in their appearance, and who carried my imagination away with them until I wanted to turn and follow them. Then I’d remember how I looked, and how Angustias looked, and I’d blush.

  ‘You’re very uncouth and very provincial, my child,’ Angustias would say with a certain satisfaction. ‘Surrounded by people, you’re silent and awkward, always looking like you want to escape. Sometimes, when we’re in a store and I turn to look at you, you make me laugh.’

  Those trips around Barcelona were sadder than anyone could imagine.

  When it was time for supper, Román would detect the outing in my eyes and laugh. This was the prelude to a poisonous argument with Aunt Angustias in which Juan eventually became involved. I realised he always supported Román’s arguments, though Román never accepted or thanked him for his help.

  When something like this happened, Gloria would emerge from her usual placidity. She’d become nervous and almost shout:

  ‘If you’re capable of talking to your brother, don’t talk to me!’

  ‘Of course I’m capable! You must think I’m as rotten as you are, as he is!’

  ‘Yes, my child,’ my grandmother would say, enfolding him in a look of adoration, ‘you’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘Be quiet, Mamá, and don’t make me curse at you! Don’t make me curse!’

  The poor woman shook her head and leaned toward me, mumbling into my ear:

  ‘He’s the best of them, my child, the best and the most unfortunate, a saint …’

  ‘Would you please not get involved, Mamá? Would you please not bother our niece’s head with nonsense she doesn’t care anything about?’

  By now, having lost control of his nerves, his tone was harsh and disagreeable.

  Román, involved in turning the fruit on his plate into a treat for the parrot, finished supper not paying attention to any of us. Aunt Angustias sobbed beside me, biting her handkerchief, because she not only saw herself as strong and capable of leading multitudes, but also as sweet, unfortunate, and persecuted. I don’t really know which of the two roles she liked more. Gloria moved the baby’s high chair away from the table, stood behind Juan, smiled at me, and raised her index finger to her temple.

  Juan, withdrawn and silent, seemed agitated, ready to explode.

  When Román finished his task, he patted my grandmother’s shoulder a few times and left before anyone else. At the door he stopped to light a cigarette and fire off his final remarks:

  ‘Even your imbecile of a wife makes fun of you now, Juan; be careful …’

  As usual, he hadn’t looked at Gloria even once.

  The result was not long in coming. A fist banging on the table and a string of insults directed at Román that didn’t stop when the abrupt sound of the apartment door announced that Román had already left.

  Gloria had picked up the baby and was going to her room to put him to bed. She looked at me for a moment and proposed:

  ‘Coming, Andrea?’

  Aunt Angustias’ face was in her hands. I could feel her gaze through partially opened fingers. A distressed gaze, dry with much pleading. But I stood up.

  ‘All right, yes.’

  And my reward was a tremulous smile from my grandmother. Then my aunt locked herself in her room, indignant and, I suspect, trembling with jealousy.

  Gloria’s room was something like the lair of a wild animal. It was an interior room almost entirely filled by a double bed and the baby’s cradle. There was a special kind of stink, a mixture of the smells of an infant, of face powder, of clothing not well cared for. The walls were covered with photographs, and among them, in a preferred spot, a vividly coloured postcard showing two kittens.

  Gloria sat on the edge of the bed with the baby on her lap. The baby was good-looking and his little legs hung down, fat and dirty, as he fell asleep.

  When he was asleep, Gloria put him in the cradle and stretched with pleasure, running her hands through her brilliant hair. Then, with her languid gestures, she lay down on the bed.

  ‘What do you think of me?’ she often asked me.

  I liked talking to her because there was never any need to respond.

  ‘Aren’t I pretty and very young? Aren’t I?’ … She had a foolish, ingenuous vanity that I never found unpleasant; besides, she actually was young and knew how to laugh madly as she told me about the things that went on in the house. When she talked about Antonia or Angustias she was really amusing.

  ‘You’ll find out about these people; they’re terrible, you’ll see … Nobody here is good except maybe Granny, and the poor thing’s half-crazy … And Juan, Juan’s very good, kid. Do you see how he yells so much and everything? Well he’s very, very good …’

  She looked at me and when she saw my reserved expression she began to laugh …

  ‘And I am too, don’t you think?’ she concluded. ‘If I wasn’t, Andreita, how could I stand all of them?’

  I saw her move and talk with inexplicable pleasure. In the heavy atmosphere of her room she lay on the bed like a rag doll whose red hair weighed too much. For the most part she’d tell me humorous lies mixed in with real events. I didn’t think she was intelligent, or that her personal charm came from her spirit. I believe my fondness for her began on the day I saw her naked, posing for Juan.

  I’d never gone into the room where my uncle worked, because Juan inspired a certain wariness in me. One morning I went in to look for a pencil, on the advice of my grandmother, who told me I’d find one there.

  The appearance of the large studio was very curious. It had been set up in my grandfather’s old office. Following the tradition of the other rooms in the house, in it, with no order or arrangement, was an accumulation of books, papers, and plaster figures that served as models for Juan’s students. The walls were covered with harsh still-lifes painted by my uncle in strident colours. In one corner, inexplicably, an anatomy student’s skeleton hung on its wire frame, and on the large rug stained with damp spots the baby crawled with the cat, that had come in to sit in the golden sun from the balconies. The cat, with its flaccid tail, looked moribund, and feebly allowed itself to be tormented by the baby.

  I saw all of this around Gloria, who sat naked and in an uncomfortable posture on a stool draped in curtain fabric.

  Juan painted laboriously and without talent, attempting to reproduce, brush stroke by brush stroke, that slender, elastic body. It seemed like a useless task to me. What appeared on canvas was a cardboard doll as stupid as the expression on Gloria’s face when she heard any conversation between Román and me. Gloria, in front of us, without her shabby dress, looked incredibly beautiful and white in the midst of all that ugliness, like a miracle of God. A spirit both sweet and malevolent quivered in the graceful form of her legs, her arms, her fine breasts. A subtle, diluted intelligence along the warm surface of her perfect skin. Something that never shone in her eyes. This call of the spirit that attracts us in exceptional people, in works of art.

  I had gone in only for a few seconds but stood there fascinated. Juan seemed happy with my visit and spoke quickly about his pictorial projects. I didn’t listen to him.

  That night, almost without realising it, I had found myself starting a conversation with Gloria, and I went to her room for the first time. Her insubstantial chatter seemed like the soun
d of rain that one listens to lazily, with pleasure. I became accustomed to her, to her rapid unanswered questions, to her narrow, devious mind.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m good … don’t laugh.’

  We were silent. Then she came closer to ask me:

  ‘And Román? What do you think of Román?’

  Then she made a special face to say:

  ‘I know you think he’s nice, don’t you?’

  I shrugged. After a moment she said:

  ‘You think he’s nicer than Juan, don’t you?’

  One day, unexpectedly, she began to cry. She cried in a strange way, disjointed and fast, wanting to get it over with quickly.

  ‘Román’s an evil man,’ she said, ‘you’ll find out about him. He’s done me terrible harm, Andrea.’ She dried her tears. ‘I won’t tell you all the things he’s done to me because there are too many of them; you’ll find out in time. Now you’re fascinated by him and won’t even believe me.’

  To be honest, I didn’t think I was fascinated by Román, almost the opposite, I often examined him coldly. But on the rare nights that Román became amiable after supper, which was always stormy, and asked me: ‘Are you coming, little one?’ I felt happy. Román didn’t sleep in the same apartment as the rest of us: he’d fixed up a room in the attic of the house, which turned out to be a comfortable refuge. He’d put in a fireplace made of old bricks and some low bookcases painted black. He had a divan, and beneath the small jalousied window a very pretty table covered with papers, and inkwells from different periods and in different shapes with quill pens in them. A rudimentary telephone served, he said, to communicate with the maid’s room. There was also a small ornate clock that struck the hour with a charming, distinctive chiming of bells. There were three clocks in the room, all of them old, rhythmically embellishing time. On the bookcases, coins, some of them very unusual; little Roman lamps from the late period; and an antique pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle.

  The room had unexpected spaces between the shelves of the bookcases, and all of them held small curiosities that Román gradually showed to me. Despite the quantity of diminutive objects, everything was clean and in relatively good order.

  ‘Things are comfortable here, or at least that’s what I’m trying to achieve … I like things,’ and he smiled. ‘Don’t think I’m attempting to be original, but it’s the truth. Downstairs they don’t know how to treat them. It seems that the air is always filled with shouting … and the things are responsible for that, they’re asphyxiated, grief-stricken, heavy with sadness. As for the rest of it, don’t make up any novels about it: our arguments and shouting don’t have a cause, and they don’t lead to any conclusion … What have you begun to imagine about us?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I know you’re always dreaming up stories with us as characters.’

  ‘No.’

  Román, in the meantime, had plugged in the espresso coffee pot and brought out, from where I don’t know, magic cups, glasses, and liquor; after that, cigarettes.

  ‘I know you like to smoke.’

  ‘No; I don’t like it.’

  ‘Why do you lie to me, too?’

  Román’s tone was always frankly curious about me.

  ‘I know very well everything your cousin wrote to Angustias … In fact, I read the letter, without any right to, of course, just out of curiosity.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like smoking. In the village I did it just to annoy Isabel and for no other reason. To shock her, so she’d let me come to Barcelona because I was impossible.’

  Since I was flushed and annoyed, Román only half-believed me, but what I told him was true. Finally I’d accept a cigarette because his were always wonderful and I did like their aroma. I believe those were the times when I began to find pleasure in the smoke. Román would smile.

  I realised that he thought I was a different kind of person, much more cultivated, perhaps more intelligent, and of course hypocritical and filled with strange longings. I didn’t want to disillusion him because I felt vaguely inferior, a little insipid with my dreams and my burden of sentimentality, which I tried to hide from those people.

  Román had enormous agility in his slender body. He spoke to me as he squatted beside the coffee pot, which was on the floor, and he seemed wound up, filled with springs beneath his dark muscles. Then, suddenly, he was on the divan, smoking, his features relaxed as if time had no meaning, as if he never had to get up. Almost as if he had lain down to die smoking.

  Sometimes I looked at his hands, dark, like his face, full of life and nervous currents, slender, with fine knuckles. Hands that I liked very much.

  Still, sitting on the only chair in the room, in front of his worktable, I felt very distant from him. The impression of being carried away by his likeability, which I had when he spoke to me the first time, never returned.

  He prepared marvellous coffee, and the room would fill with warm fumes. I felt at ease there, as if it were a calm retreat from the life downstairs.

  ‘It’s like a sinking ship. We’re the poor rats who don’t know what to do when we see the water … Your mother avoided the danger before anybody else by leaving. Two of your aunts married the first man who came along so they could get away. The only ones who stayed were your wretched Aunt Angustias, and Juan and I, who are two reprobates. And you, a little rat gone astray but not as unfortunate as she appears, now you’ve come.

  ‘Tell me, don’t you want to make some music today?’

  Then Román would open the little cabinet at the end of the bookcases and take out the violin. At the back of the cabinet were a few rolled-up canvases.

  ‘Can you paint too?’

  ‘I’ve done everything. Don’t you know that I began studying medicine and left it, that I wanted to be an engineer and never applied for admission? I also began to paint as a hobby … I was much better than Juan, I assure you.’

  I didn’t doubt it: I thought I saw in Román an endless store of possibilities. At the moment when, standing next to the fireplace, he began to move the bow, I changed completely. My reservations, the light coating of hostility towards all of them that had been forming on me, disappeared. My soul, extended like my own hands, received the sound as if it were rain on dry ground. Román seemed a marvellous, unique artist. He wove in the music a joy so fine that it went beyond the limits of sadness. That nameless music. Román’s music, which I’ve never heard since.

  The small window opened to the dark night sky. The light of the lamp made Román taller and more immobile, breathing only in his music. And it came to me in waves: first, innocent memories, dreams, struggles, my own vacillating present, and then, sharp joys, sorrows, despair, a significant contraction of life, a negation into nothing. My own death, the feeling of my total despair turned into beauty, an anguished harmony without light.

  And suddenly an enormous silence and then Román’s voice.

  ‘You could be hypnotised … What does the music say to you?’

  Immediately my hands and soul closed up.

  ‘Nothing, I don’t know, I just like it …’

  ‘That’s not true. Tell me what it says to you. What it says to you at the end.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He looked at me for a moment, disappointed. Then, as he held the violin:

  ‘That’s not true.’

  He lit my way down with his torch because the stairs could be lit only from the porter’s room, and I had to go down three floors to our apartment.

  On the first day I had the impression that someone was going down ahead of me, in the dark. I thought it was childish and didn’t say anything.

  On another day the impression was even stronger. Suddenly, Román left me in the dark and focused the torch on the part of the stairs where something was moving. I saw a clear, fleeting glimpse of Gloria running down towards the porter’s room.

  IV

  SO MANY UNIMPORTANT days! The unimportant days that had gone by since my arrival weighed on me as I drag
ged my feet on the way back from the university. They weighed on me like a square grey stone on my brain.

  The weather was wet and the morning smelled of clouds and damp tyres … Lifeless yellow leaves fell from the trees in a slow rain. An autumn morning in the city, just as I had dreamed for years that autumn in the city would be: beautiful, with nature entwined along the flat roofs of the houses and the trolley poles of the trams; and still, I was enveloped in sadness. I wanted to lean against a wall with my head on my arms, turn my back on everything, and close my eyes.

  So many useless days! Days filled with stories, too many troubled stories. Incomplete stories, barely started and already swollen like an old piece of wood left outdoors. Stories too dark for me. Their smell, the rotting smell of my house, caused a kind of nausea in me … And yet they had become the only interest in my life. Gradually, before my very eyes, I had begun to occupy a second plane of reality, my senses open only to the life seething in the flat on Calle de Aribau. I grew accustomed to forgetting about my appearance and my dreams. The smell of the months and visions of the future were losing their importance, while each of Gloria’s expressions, each hidden word, each of Román’s insinuations, grew to gigantic proportions. The result seemed to be this unexpected sadness.

  When I walked into the house it began to rain behind me and the porter shouted at me to wipe my feet on the mat.

  The entire day passed like a dream. After lunch I sat huddled in my chair, my feet in large felt slippers, next to my grandmother’s brazier. I listened to the sound of the rain. With their force the streams of water were cleaning the dust from the windows to the balcony. At first they had formed a sticky layer of grime, now the drops slid freely along the shiny grey surface.

  I didn’t want to move or do anything, and for the first time I missed Román’s cigarettes. Granny came to keep me company. I saw that she was trying to sew one of the baby’s outfits with clumsy, trembling hands. Gloria came over a short while later and began to chat, her hands crossed at the back of her neck. Granny talked too, as always about the same topics. Recent events, like the war, and distant ones, from many years ago, when her children were small. In my head, which ached a little, their two voices combined in a ballad with a background of rain, and made me drowsy.