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  ‘I already told you, kid, I heard you arriving and I went to welcome you.’

  ‘You’re shameless!’ shouted Angustias.

  My aunt’s appearance was pitiful. She had on her immutable hat, the same one she was wearing the day she left, but the feather was twisted and protruded like a fierce horn. She crossed herself and began praying with her hands on her chest.

  ‘Oh Lord, give me patience! Give me patience, oh Lord!’

  I felt the cold burning the soles of my feet and I shivered violently under my blanket.

  ‘What will she say,’ I was thinking, ‘when she finds out I used her room?’ Granny began to cry.

  ‘Angustias, let the girl go, let the girl go.’

  She was like a baby.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s true, Mamá! I can’t believe it’s true!’ Angustias shouted again. ‘You don’t even ask her where she’s been … Would you have wanted one of your daughters acting like that? You, Mamá, you didn’t even let us go to parties at our friends’ houses when we were young and you defend this tramp’s night-time gallivanting!’

  She raised her hands to her head and took off her hat. She sat on her suitcase and began to moan.

  ‘I’m losing my mind! I’m losing my mind!’

  Gloria slipped away like a shadow towards my grandmother’s room just as Antonia came snooping, and then Juan, squeezed into an old overcoat.

  ‘May I ask what all the shouting’s about? Animal!’ he said, addressing Angustias. ‘Don’t you realise that tomorrow I have to get up at five and I need my sleep?’

  ‘Instead of insulting me you’d be better off asking your wife what she’s doing out at this time of night!’

  Juan stopped short, his jaw pointing towards my grandmother.

  ‘What does Gloria have to do with this?’

  ‘Gloria’s in her room, dear … I mean in my room, with the baby … She went out to the stairs to welcome Angustias, and she thought Gloria was going out. It’s a misunderstanding.’

  Angustias looked at my grandmother in a fury, and Juan, gigantic, was in the middle of all of us. His reaction was unexpected.

  ‘Why are you lying, Mamá? Damn you! … And you, you witch, why do you meddle in other people’s business? My wife is no concern of yours! Who are you to stop her from going out at night if she wants to? She doesn’t have to ask permission from anybody in this house but me, and I’m the only one who can give it … so get into your room and stop your howling!’

  Angustias, in fact, did go to her room, and Juan stood biting the inside of his cheeks, the way he always did when he was nervous. The maid was so eager she screeched with pleasure from the door of her lair. Juan turned toward her with a raised fist, and then he let it drop, unclenched, down the side of his body.

  I went into the living room that was my bedroom and I was surprised by the smell of stale air and dust. How cold it was! On the mattress of that divan, as thin as a leaf, all I could do was shiver.

  The door opened right after I came in and once again I saw the figure of Angustias. She groaned when she stumbled against a piece of furniture in the dark.

  ‘Andrea!’ she shouted. ‘Andrea!’

  ‘Here I am.’

  I could hear her breathing heavily.

  ‘I am offering up to the Lord the bitterness that all of you cause me … May I know what your dress is doing in my room?’

  I concentrated for a moment. In the silence I could begin to hear an argument in my grandmother’s distant bedroom.

  ‘I slept there these past few days,’ I said at last.

  Angustias stretched out her arms as if she were going to fall or feel her way until she found me. I closed my eyes, but she stumbled again and groaned.

  ‘God forgive you for the sorrow you cause me … You’re like a crow on my eyes … A crow that would like to be my heir while I’m still alive.’

  At that moment Gloria’s scream crossed the foyer and then the sound of the door to the bedroom she and Juan shared slamming shut. Angustias stood erect, listening. Now there seemed to be stifled sobbing.

  ‘My God! It’s enough to drive you mad!’ my aunt murmured.

  She changed her tone:

  ‘And you, Señorita, I’ll settle accounts with you tomorrow. Come to my room as soon as you get up. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She closed the door and left. The house, growling like an old animal, was filled with echoes. The dog, behind the maid’s door, began to howl, to whimper, and its voice mixed with another of Gloria’s screams, and then with her crying, and the more distant crying of the baby. Then the child’s weeping became the dominant sound, the one that filled all the corners of the house, which was otherwise quiet at last. I heard Juan leave his room again to take his son from my grandmother’s room. Then I heard how he walked him monotonously around the foyer, how he talked to him to calm him down and get him to sleep. It wasn’t the first time Juan’s songs to his son reached me on cold nights. Juan had an unexpected, intimate, almost savage tenderness for the baby. Only once every two weeks would Gloria sleep in my grandmother’s room with the boy so that his capricious crying wouldn’t wake Juan, who had to leave the house before dawn and spend the day in difficult second jobs from which he would return, exhausted, the next night.

  The unfortunate night that Angustias came home was one when my uncle had to get up very early.

  Still awake, I heard him leave before the factory sirens pierced the morning fog. The Barcelona sky was still full of sea damp and stars when Juan went out.

  I had just fallen asleep, curled up and freezing, when I woke under the impact of Antonia’s eyes. That woman exhaled personal amusement.

  She screeched:

  ‘Your aunt says you should go …’

  And she stood, her hands on her hips, looking at me, while I rubbed my eyes and dressed.

  When I was completely awake, sitting on the edge of the bed, I found myself in one of my moments of rebellion against Angustias, the strongest I’d had. Suddenly I realised I wouldn’t put up with her any more. That I wouldn’t obey her any more after the days of complete freedom I’d enjoyed in her absence. The disturbances of the night had put my nerves on edge and I felt hysterical too, weepy and desperate. I realised I could endure everything: the cold that permeated my worn clothes, the sadness of my absolute poverty, the dull horror of the filthy house. Everything except her control over me. That was what had suffocated me when I arrived in Barcelona, what had made me fall into ennui, what had killed off my initiative: that look from Angustias. That hand that quashed my movements, my curiosity about a new life … Yet Angustias, in her way, was an upright, good person among those crazy people. A more complete and vigorous person than the others … I didn’t know why that awful indignation with her rose in me, why the mere sight of her long body and especially her innocent delusions of grandeur cut off the light for me. It’s difficult to get on with people of another generation, even when they don’t try to impose their way of seeing things on us. And when they do want to make us see with their eyes, for the experiment to be even moderately successful the older people need great tact and sensitivity, and the young need to feel admiration for them.

  Rebellious, I didn’t respond to her summons for a long time. I washed and dressed to go to the university, and arranged the papers in my briefcase before deciding to go into her room.

  I saw my aunt right away, sitting at her desk. So tall and familiar in her stiff housecoat, as if she had never – not since our first conversation on the morning of my arrival – moved from that chair. As if the light that formed a halo around her greying hair and exaggerated her full lips were the same light. As if she had not yet withdrawn pensive fingers from her forehead.

  (The vision of that room in twilight, the chair empty and Román’s lively hands, diabolical and attractive, rummaging through the small, prudish desk, was too unreal an image.)

  I noticed that Angustias had her languid, helpless air. Her eyes wer
e heavy and sad. For three quarters of an hour she had been sweetening her voice.

  ‘Sit down, child. I need to have a serious talk with you.’ These were ritual words that I knew all too well. I obeyed, resigned and rigid, ready to jump up, as at other times I’d been prepared to silently swallow all her absurdities. Still, what she said to me was extraordinary:

  ‘You’ll be happy, Andrea (because you don’t love me … ); in a few days I’m leaving this house forever. In a few days you’ll be able to sleep in my bed, the one you want so much. Look at yourself in the mirror on my wardrobe. Study at this desk … Last night I became angry with you because what was going on was unbearable … I’ve committed a sin of pride. Forgive me.’

  She watched me out of the corner of her eye when she begged my pardon with so little sincerity that it made me smile. Then her face became rigid, sown with vertical wrinkles.

  ‘You don’t have a heart, Andrea.’

  I was afraid I’d misunderstood what she said at first. That the fantastic announcement of emancipation wasn’t true.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Then she said she was returning to the convent where she’d spent those days of intense spiritual preparation. It was a cloistered order, and for many years she’d been accumulating the dowry she needed to enter it, and now she was ready. To me, however, the idea of Angustias submerged in a contemplative environment seemed absurd.

  ‘Have you always had a vocation?’

  ‘When you’re older you’ll understand why a woman shouldn’t be alone in the world.’

  ‘Do you mean that a woman, if she can’t get married, has no choice but to enter a convent?’

  ‘That isn’t my idea.’

  (She moved uneasily.)

  ‘But it’s true there are only two paths for a woman. Only two honourable paths … I’ve chosen mine, and I’m proud of it. I’ve acted as a daughter of my family should. As your mother would have done in my position. And God will understand my sacrifice.’

  She was lost in thought.

  (‘Where has it gone,’ I was thinking, ‘that family that gathered in the evenings around the piano, protected from the cold by ugly, comfortable green velvet drapes? Where have the modest daughters gone, wearing their enormous hats, who, when they set foot – chaperoned by their father – on the pavement of a joyful and swift-paced Calle de Aribau where they lived, lowered their eyes in order to look secretly at the passers-by?’ I shuddered to think that one of them had died and that her long black braid was kept in an old wardrobe in a village so far from here. The other, the older one, would soon disappear from her chair, her balcony, taking her hat with her – the last hat in the house.)

  Finally, Angustias sighed, and I saw her again, just as she was. She brandished the pencil.

  ‘For all this time I’ve been thinking about you … There was a moment (when you first arrived) when it seemed to me that my obligation was to be a mother to you. To stay at your side, protect you. You failed me, you disappointed me. I thought I’d find an orphan longing for affection and I’ve seen a demon of rebellion, a creature who stiffened if I caressed her. You, child, have been my final hope and my final despair. All that’s left is for me to pray for you, and oh, how you need it, how you need it!’

  Then she said to me:

  ‘If I’d got hold of you when you were younger, I’d have beaten you to death!’

  And in her voice I could detect a certain bitter gloating that made me feel I’d been saved from certain danger.

  I made a move to leave and she stopped me.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you miss your classes today. You have to listen to me … For two weeks I’ve been asking God for your death … or for the miracle of your salvation. I’m going to leave you alone in a house that is no longer what it was … because it once was like paradise and now’ – Aunt Angustias had a flash of inspiration – ‘with your Uncle Juan’s wife, the evil serpent has come in. She has poisoned everything. She, she alone, has driven my mother crazy … because your grandmother is crazy, my child, and the worst of it is that I see her throwing herself into the chasms of hell if she doesn’t change her ways before she dies. Your grandmother was a saint, Andrea. In my youth, because of her, I lived in the purest of dreams, but now she’s gone crazy with age. And the hardships of the war that she apparently tolerated so well have made her crazy. And then that woman, with her flattery, has made her lose her mind completely. I can’t understand her attitudes in any other way.’

  ‘My grandmother tries to understand each person.’

  (I thought of her words: ‘Things are not always what they seem’, when she tried to protect Angustias … but did I dare talk to my aunt about Don Jerónimo?)

  ‘Yes, child, yes … And that suits you very well. It’s as if you’d lived on your own in a Red zone and not in a convent of nuns during the war. Even Gloria has more excuses than you in her yearning for emancipation and disorder. She’s a little street slut, while you’ve received an education … and don’t excuse yourself with your curiosity to know Barcelona. I’ve shown you Barcelona.’

  Instinctively I looked at my watch.

  ‘You listen to me like a person listening to the rain, I can see that … you wretch! Life will batter you, crush you, flatten you! Then you’ll think of me … Oh! I would rather have killed you when you were little than let you grow up like this! And don’t look at me so surprised. I know that so far you haven’t done anything bad. But you will as soon as I go … You will! You will! You won’t control your body and your soul. You won’t, you won’t … You won’t be able to control them.’

  I saw in the mirror, out of the corner of my eye, the image of my eighteen arid years, enclosed in an elongated body, and I saw the beautiful, shapely hand of Angustias convulsed on the back of a chair. A white hand, with a plump, soft palm. A sensual hand, brazen now, shouting louder with the clenching of its fingers than my aunt was with her impassioned voice.

  I began to feel moved and a little frightened, for Angustias’ delirium threatened to enclose me and drag me along too.

  She finished, trembling and crying. Angustias rarely wept with sincerity. Weeping always made her ugly, but the hideous sobbing shaking her now didn’t cause repugnance in me but a certain pleasure. Something like watching a storm break.

  ‘Andrea,’ she said at last, gently, ‘Andrea … I have to talk to you about other things.’ She dried her eyes and began to work out the accounts. ‘From now on you’ll receive your allowance directly. You’ll give your grandmother whatever you think appropriate to help pay for your food, and you’ll take care of budgeting to buy what you need … I don’t have to tell you that you should spend as little as possible on yourself. On the day my salary’s gone, this house will be a disaster. Your grandmother has always preferred her male children, but those sons’ – here it seemed she grew happy – ‘are going to make her suffer penury … In this house we women have known how to maintain dignity.’

  She sighed.

  ‘And still do. If only Gloria had never come here!’

  Gloria, the snake woman, slept curled up in her bed until noon, exhausted and moaning in her sleep. In the afternoon she showed me the marks on her body from the beating Juan had given her the night before; they were beginning to turn black and blue.

  IX

  LIKE A FLOCK of crows perching on the branches of the tree where a dead man hangs, Angustias’ friends, dressed in black, sat in her room during this time. Angustias was the only person in our house who still grasped desperately at society.

  Her friends were the same ones who had waltzed to the rhythms of Granny’s piano. The ones whom years and vicissitudes had distanced and who now came back, flapping their wings, when they learned of Angustias’ chaste, beautiful death to the life of this world. They had come from different corners of Barcelona and were of an age as alien to their bodies as adolescence. Few of them had maintained a normal appearance. Swollen or skinny, their features tended to look small or large
depending on the circumstances, as if they were fake. I enjoyed looking at them. Some had white hair, which gave them a nobility the others were lacking.

  They all remembered the old days in the house.

  ‘Your father, what a fine gentleman, with his full beard …’

  ‘Your sisters, how vivacious they were! … Lord, Lord, how your house has changed.’

  ‘How the times have changed!’

  ‘Yes, the times …’

  (And they looked at one another, flustered.)

  ‘Do you remember, Angustias, that green dress you wore the day you turned twenty? The truth is, that evening when we got together, we were a group of good-looking girls … And that suitor of yours, that Jerónimo Sanz, the one you were so crazy about? Whatever happened to him?’

  Somebody steps on the foot of the chattering woman, who falls into surprised silence. A few anguished seconds go by and then all of them start talking at once.

  (They truly were like aged, dark birds, their breasts throbbing after flying so much across a very small piece of sky.)

  ‘Kid, I don’t know,’ said Gloria, ‘why Angustias hasn’t gone away with Don Jerónimo, or why she’s becoming a nun when she’s no good at praying …’

  Gloria was lying on her bed, where the baby was crawling, and she was making an effort to think, perhaps for the first time in her life.

  ‘Why do you think Angustias is no good at praying?’ I asked in surprise. ‘You know how much she likes going to church.’

  ‘Because I compare her to your granny, somebody who really knows how to pray, and I see the difference … Mamá’s outside herself, like she was hearing music from heaven, at night she talks to God and the Virgin. She says God can bless all suffering and that’s why God blesses me, though I don’t pray as much as I should … And how good she is! She’s never left her house and still she understands all kinds of crazy things and forgives them. God hasn’t given Angustias any kind of understanding, and when she prays in church she doesn’t hear any music from heaven but instead she looks around to see who’s come into church in short sleeves and with bare legs … I think in her heart she doesn’t care any more about praying than I do, and I’m no good at praying … But the truth is,’ she concluded, ‘I’m so glad she’s leaving! … The other night Juan hit me because of her. Just because of her …’