“Give me the bags,” he said. “I will wait here.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind.”
When I returned five minutes later, he carried the shopping into the apartment for me and placed it on the work surface, next to the fridge. I opened the sliding glass door that led to the terrace. The air was thick and still. He started to unpack the bags. I liked the way he didn’t speak unless he had something to say. He had no fear of silence, and wasn’t embarrassed by it either, even though we hardly knew each other.
I began to put the groceries away. He helped me, passing me the items, one by one. As I reached past him, to place a jar of pickles on a high shelf in the cupboard, my T-shirt lifted clear of my skirt, and he touched me, his fingers brushing the bare skin between my hipbone and my navel. I gasped, as though I’d just been plunged into cold water, then I dropped back onto my heels and turned towards him and we kissed. His hands were under my T-shirt. A car started up below.
We made love on the kitchen floor, the tiles cool beneath me, and then outside, on the terrace. Later, we moved to my bed. At two in the morning, I woke to see his face on the pillow next to mine. He was asleep on his back, one arm flung behind his head. I leaned over and kissed the round bone on the inside of his elbow. Waking, he pulled me on top of him. The smell of his skin, somehow both sweet and sharp, like honey mixed with paprika. The whiteness of his teeth. I asked him what had happened the previous week. What had he been doing in a car park in Sarrià in the middle of the night? Why had he been so upset?
He turned his face away from me, towards the window, and it was a while before he spoke. “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I’m ashamed.”
Once again, I thought of the wet patch on the back of his jeans. This time, though, I felt uneasy.
“There’s no need to be ashamed,” I said, “not with me.”
“Perhaps I will tell you another time.”
“You promise?”
“No, I cannot promise.”
“All right.” I stroked his forehead. “That’s all right.”
We made love again, but gently now, no urgency about it, and no velocity, as if our real selves were sleeping, and we were simply what was left. Then we too fell asleep, and when I woke up it was beginning to get light. Through the half-open bedroom door I could see part of the kitchen. There was still some shopping to put away.
* * *
—
I SWITCHED ON THE KETTLE and made a pot of tea, using the fresh mint I had bought a day or two before, in the market in Galvany.
“You knew I would come,” Abdel said.
I turned. He had been watching me from the bed as I washed the leaves under the cold tap.
“No, I didn’t know,” I said.
“You knew.” He nodded to himself, satisfied that he was right.
My certainty wavered in the face of his. Perhaps, at some level, I had known. I must have been thinking of him, at least.
He pulled on his jeans, buttoned his white shirt, and sat down at the table, waiting for me to bring the tea. The stubborn confidence I noticed in him every time I saw him seemed so at odds with his lack of privilege and opportunity. I wondered where it had come from. I couldn’t ask him, though. It wouldn’t be a question he understood, or knew how to answer. It might even sound like an insult.
I placed the teapot on a tray, along with the cups and the sugar, then I brought it to the table. As I approached, he put his arms round my waist and pressed his face into my belly. My skin began to tingle all over, but I had to hold on to the tray. I couldn’t touch him. I had nothing to touch him with.
Later, when I was sitting with my back to the early morning light, I reached for his hand, threading my fingers through his. “After Friday, we can’t see each other for two weeks,” I said. “My daughter is coming to stay. From England.” He looked curious rather than disappointed, as if I had given him the beginning of a story, and he was waiting for the rest. I searched for words to make my meaning clear. “I can’t see you, not while she’s here.”
“Two weeks.” He stared at my hand, which still held his.
“It will be hard for me too,” I told him.
He looked round at my apartment, and his eyes had the shine and opaqueness of smoked glass.
“No,” he said. “It will not be so hard for you.”
* * *
—
THAT DAY, when I stepped out of my apartment, Senyor Artes was waiting for me.
“Good morning,” I said, careful to address him in Catalan.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.” He was spluttering, his voice thick with outrage.
I locked my door, then turned to face him. He was wearing slippers, and leaning on a rustic-looking wooden stick. His cheeks were red, as if he had been slapped.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
He looked at the floor for a moment, and his jaw moved awkwardly from side to side—his teeth were hurting him, perhaps—then he lifted his eyes to me again. “Your apartment is full of cockroaches.”
“What?” I blushed, despite myself.
“You let all kinds of vermin into the building. You have no morals. You’re filthy—”
“What about your language? Isn’t that—”
“You dare to answer back?” He brandished his stick at me. “You’re nothing but trash. I’m going to make an example—”
I walked straight past him, trying to close my ears against what he was saying, but his threats and insults followed me. When I was halfway down the street I came to a standstill, shaking. He must have seen Abdel leaving the building that morning—or perhaps he had heard us making love. It was already ten o’clock, and I should have been opening my shop. Instead, I went to Caffe San Marco, on Major de Sarrià. I took a table by the window and ordered a trifásico, a coffee with a splash of brandy. The shaking slowly faded. Some people would probably have moved house if they had a neighbor like Senyor Artes, but I refused to consider it. Why should I allow a poisonous old man to ruin my life? Maybe he would work himself up into such a state that he would have some kind of heart attack or stroke. I found myself wishing ill on him. I found myself hoping he would die.
I reached into the back pocket of my jeans and took out a scrap of paper. Earlier, when I told Abdel I couldn’t see him for two weeks, he had carefully written down an address and handed it to me.
“So you can find me,” he said, “when you are ready.”
“This is where you live?”
He nodded.
After he had left, I looked up the address. It was right at the end of the L1 line, not far from where the Ronda Litoral turns into the carretera that goes all the way to France. Two thoughts struck me as I studied that scrap of paper in San Marco. First, it seemed unlikely that the twenty euros I’d given him on the night we met would have covered a taxi ride to where he lived. Secondly, in order to be waiting casually for me outside my building in one of his neatly ironed shirts, he would have to have traveled for at least an hour on the metro.
* * *
—
WHILE I was in the early stages of my pregnancy, Pol started seeing an ex-girlfriend called Raquel. This was at a time when I believed we were destined for each other, and that we would be together for the rest of our lives. He would meet Raquel at lunchtime, or on his way home from work. They would agree on a place for a rendezvous, then drive there and park their cars. That year, we were renting the ground floor of a modernist house in Valvidrera, a village on the hills at the back of the city. There are plenty of quiet streets in Valvidrera, some of them unpaved and leading off into the wild woodland of the Collserola.
One spring evening, I was sitting on a bench in our small garden when I heard Pol’s footsteps on the steeply descending stone steps at the side of the house. The sun had just set behind
Montserrat some thirty miles to the west, its famous jagged ridge a forbidding silhouette against all the delicate pink and orange. Pol had called to let me know he would be late, and this time I knew exactly what that meant. I felt desolate, but calm.
“Isn’t it a bit cold to be outside?” He stood in front of me with a look of mild concern.
“You’re having an affair,” I said, “aren’t you.”
“What?”
I held up the packet of condoms I had found in the car at the weekend, wedged between the driver’s seat and the door.
“Oh,” he said, and almost smiled.
I tossed the packet at his feet and then stood up.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s not important.”
“Have you told her that?”
“Told who?” He stared at me. “What do you mean?”
“Is that what you tell her when you’re fucking her? This doesn’t mean anything. This isn’t important.” Anger had bubbled up inside me, bitter as reflux. “I bet that goes down well.”
He sighed.
“An affair always means something, Pol.” I picked up the cup I’d been drinking from and threw it against the side wall of the house. There was a pretty shattering sound, and fragments of blue china appeared as if from nowhere on the gravel near our feet. I heard a window close in the apartment on the second floor.
“Jesus,” I said. “How dishonest can you get?”
And then, quite suddenly, all his bravado was gone, and he hung his head and bit his lip, as if he knew he was getting what he deserved. As if it was only fair that I should be allowed to let off steam. As if he just had to weather it, and he’d be off the hook. His patronizing attitude lit a fuse in me, and I exploded.
“You know what?” I said. “This is over.”
“This what?”
“This stupid marriage.”
“What?” he said. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“But we’re having a baby—”
“I’m having a baby. You’re off fucking other people in our car.”
A cunning look stole onto Pol’s face. He was like that. He could change in an instant, and smoothly, like the ads on bus shelters. One moment, it’s eye shadow. The next, it’s a betting shop. Or pizza. His voice became soft, insinuating. “This is all a bit convenient, isn’t it.”
Now I was the one who didn’t understand.
“You actually wanted me to screw up,” he went on, his voice still held down, but growing in assurance. “You’ve been looking for an excuse.”
Though I resented the way he had turned the tables on me, as if I was the one in the wrong, I considered what he’d just said. “You know, I think you might be onto something there.”
He stared at me in disbelief, then bent down and began to gather up the pieces of blue china.
“You broke my favorite cup,” he muttered.
Our marriage dragged on for several months, but it was over not long after Mar was born. The separation was amicable, in that there were no fierce arguments over custody and maintenance—my willingness to stay on in Barcelona made things easier—though not so amicable that our friends didn’t have to choose sides, at the beginning at least. So why did I get rid of him? I allowed people to think it was all about betrayal, and they believed it, especially the women, because Catalan women are fiery and proud, and will not tolerate humiliation—as Montse told me once, years later, When Nacho cheated on me, I wanted to tear his heart out and throw it on the ground and stamp on it—but I saw Pol’s infidelity as a symptom of something else, something I found harder to forgive. There was a weakness in him. A craven quality. The way his gloating dissolved into self-pity. You broke my favorite cup. I wanted a man who would stand up for me, and for himself. Was that too much to ask?
I kept remembering how he had accused me of having waited for an excuse to end the relationship, and the look of thinly disguised triumph as he realized he had stumbled on a kind of truth. He had surprised me, but he had also surprised himself. I remembered how he had rounded on me, believing he had gained the upper hand, and how he seemed to crumple when I said he might be onto something. He had imagined I would start denying it, or I would lose my temper, or simply give in, terrified at the thought of losing him…The one thing he hadn’t bargained for was that I would agree with him, and I wasn’t sure he had ever forgiven me for that.
* * *
—
IT WAS ANOTHER HOT, airless night, and Mar had gone out. She was seeing friends in Castelldefels, and I had let her borrow my car. When she told me she’d probably be late, I suggested she stay over and bring the car back in the morning. I didn’t want her driving drunk—I’d always been strict about such things—but at the same time I sensed an ulterior motive on my part. Sometimes your body understands before you do. I showered and changed into a clean T-shirt and a pair of jeans, then I walked to the metro and caught a train that was going downtown. When I got off at Plaça Catalunya, I almost lost my nerve. Suppose I took an escalator up to Las Ramblas, as though that had been my intention all along? I could wander the streets of the Barri Gòtic. Drop in on my friend Neus, who lived near Santa María del Mar. But then I thought of Abdel, and something inside me tightened. I stood in the circular concourse, with people milling all around me. I had told him we wouldn’t be able to see each other for two weeks, and he had done as I had asked and kept away. What if it had been too easy for him? What if he had forgotten about me? I was happy to have my daughter back—of course I was—but there had been something barren or hollow about the last few days, as though I’d been on a sort of hunger strike. I had to see him, if only for a minute…
Turning my back on the escalator that led up to the street, I followed the signs to the red line, direction Fondo. On the platform, the air was heavily spiced. Mingled smells of burnt coffee grounds and sweat. Fried garlic too. I stood by the wall, one knee bent, the sole of my shoe flat against the tiles. Fondo. In some ways, it was an obvious name for the last station on the line, since one meaning of fondo was “end.” But it could also mean “stamina,” and it could mean “essence” too, or “heart,” in the figurative sense, as in “the heart of the city.” There was nothing about the word that didn’t feel relevant. A train slammed out of the dark tunnel, pushing my hair across my face. The silver doors slid open. I stepped into a carriage and found a seat. The middle-aged South American woman sitting opposite smiled at me. It was as if she knew what I was up to, and approved. I smiled back. Though the train was air-conditioned, the gleam on the woman’s skin told me how hot it was outside. I lifted my eyes to the map of the L1 line. Thirteen stops to go.
I thought of my daughter driving down the coast road to Castelldefels, past the Repsol petrol station with its dusty, sunlit forecourt, past the cement factory at El Garraf, a Heath Robinson–like arrangement of pipes and chimneys, past shady nightclubs like the Saratoga and the Riviera. I took out my phone. Seeing I had a signal, I called her number.
“Mum?” she said. “Are you all right?”
I felt a sudden rush of love for her. It was physical, like a lump in my throat, and I had to speak past it. “You’ll stay over if you drink, won’t you.”
Mar laughed. “That’s about the fifteenth time you’ve said that.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. Where are you, anyway? I can hardly hear you.”
“I’m on the metro.”
“You didn’t say you were going out. I wouldn’t have taken the car if I’d known.”
“I didn’t know I was going out until after you left—and anyway, I like the metro.”
She was laughing again. “You’re crazy. I’ve got a crazy mother.”
But it was true, actually. I did like the metro. All those names, so exotic and unpronounceable—to start with, at least: Urquinaona, El Putxet, L
lacuna, Gorg. And the way the faces changed, according to which line you traveled on. Even after twenty years in the city, I often felt like a tourist.
When I got off at Fondo, it was clear that I had reached the end of the line. The paved area outside the station was littered and desolate, and the facades of the buildings crawled with graffiti. For a moment, I felt like turning round and taking a train straight back to Plaça Catalunya—
Wait, I told myself. You’re here now. You don’t have to do anything. Just find out where he lives, then go…
But my insides twisted at the thought of seeing him.
While at home, I had studied a map of the city. It was a ten-minute walk from the metro to the address he had given me. I’d decided not to bring the map, though. Instead, I’d learned the route by heart. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I appeared not to know my way around. I set off up the main road. An apartment block loomed overhead, most of its windows open. People were washing up, arguing. TVs were on full blast. Sound systems too. There was a bar on the corner, its door ajar. An old man in a white vest gestured to the woman leaning on the counter, his movements so slow he might have been underwater. It seemed hotter out here, on the city’s edge. To cool myself down, I lifted my hair away from my neck, then let it drop.
In no time, I left the apartment blocks behind and found myself in an area that was even more neglected. The curbstones broken, potholes everywhere. I took a right turn into a narrow street that ran uphill. Brick buildings stood on one side. They looked as if they might be used as garages or storage units. On the other side was a row of shops, their metal grilles drawn down for the night and padlocked at ground level. Up ahead, in the fall of light from a streetlamp, I saw a long table set up on the pavement. The plastic chairs were all different colors. Sun-faded pink, ocean blue. Mint green. I moved closer, then stopped. Half a dozen North African men were sitting about in T-shirts and flip-flops, some playing cards, others smoking hookahs. The air smelled of sweet apple. Among them was Abdel, his leg dangling over the arm of a chair, one hand against the back of his head. My heart seemed to leap inside me and then dive deep, leaving ripples to spread through me, and in that moment a tall man in a djellaba said something, and all their faces turned in my direction, curious, but not inhospitable.
Barcelona Dreaming Page 3