Here we go again. I closed my eyes to take in the song, paying close attention.
Yet—and this was the strangest thing—I didn’t recognize it. The melancholy piece I had been listening to in Gabriela’s presence had been replaced by another, much slower and more solemn, although equally beautiful song.
This was certainly not the gondolier I remembered. Either the announcer was mistaken or I’d been tricked into confusing a bee getting married with a gondolier—or something like that. Yet another mystery to add to my personal archive.
When the song ended, I started to vacuum the rug as Mishima, hissing and making sideways leaps, took on the noisy machine.
“We’re going to have a chat tomorrow,” I told him. “You’re going to help me with the chapter on feline philosophy.”
—
Once I was done with my household chores, I basically had three options: stay at home reading, go upstairs to Titus’s place, or go out. I checked my watch and saw that it was after midday.
The perfect time for a vermouth. I headed off to the bar. I hadn’t been there for a week.
However, once I’d ventured beyond the bounds of Gràcia, I thought I should go and see Titus. I hadn’t spoken to him since my encounter with Gabriela and had to face up to the painful task of telling him what had happened. That was probably the very reason I’d been avoiding him, taking refuge in my classes and writing Francis Amalfi’s book.
Since all the cleaning had left me exhausted, I took a taxi so I could rest a little on the way to see my friend and confidant.
The driver was a broad-shouldered man with gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the style of an American Indian. Like many taxi drivers, he was a chatty fellow and, after I’d told him where I wanted to go, he gave me an update on the latest news.
“A ninety-year-old woman received a letter dating from 1937. That just goes to show you the speed of our postal services, eh?”
“Really?” I said, trying to sound interested.
“That’s what I heard. Her boyfriend wrote it from the Ebro front. He died on the battlefield, so you could call it a letter from beyond the grave.”
“What did the old lady say?”
“She cried a lot. That’s to be expected: it must have brought back memories.”
“I guess so.”
“And it’s not the first time something like this has happened,” the taxi driver added. “A few years ago they found a whole sack of letters that had been sitting in a cellar for ages. The director of the postal service had to issue a statement in order to avoid a scandal.”
“What did he say?”
“Some nonsense like, ‘No need to worry: there weren’t any love letters in the bag.’”
Dramatic Effect
When I arrived at the hospital, Titus’s bed was empty. They informed me that he had been taken out for some tests. I wanted to wait, but the buxom nurse insisted that I should leave.
“He’ll need some rest after this.”
This reminded me of Valdemar’s space explorations, so I headed off to the bar. As I was walking through l’Esquerra de l’Eixample, I wondered how he made a living. It was hard to imagine him having a serious job of any kind, although his clothes suggested that he wasn’t short of money. If he wasn’t living off an inheritance, he had to be doing something.
When I got to the crossroads, I saw that Valdemar had just gotten up from his table and was picking up his manuscript, about to leave. I caught up with him just as he was striding away to wherever he was going.
“Did you find the piece by Ravel?” I asked him for the sake of starting a conversation.
“I’m not looking for it,” he responded very brusquely. “You told me it was called ‘Le Gibet.’ That’s all I needed to know.”
“So you only wanted to know the name of the piece?”
“Yes, I like calling things by their names. Don’t you?”
As we walked down one side of the Plaça de Catalunya, I remembered the mystery of Mendelssohn’s gondolier and told Valdemar about it.
“Favor for favor,” he answered without slowing down. “Take me to a music shop, and I’ll clear up the mystery for you. I’m very good at reading CD cases.”
I led him to the classical-music shop, and we got there a few minutes before closing time. We were already halfway through the door when, acting on impulse, I pulled Valdemar back onto the street. He wasn’t in the least surprised by my behavior, and we continued striding along together.
“I’ve had enough of music,” I said. “Can I take you to lunch? I know a good restaurant not far from here.”
He nodded slightly. I was trying to slow down my heart, which was racing madly after I’d seen Gabriela inside the shop again.
When We Go to the Moon
I led the way through the maze of alleys to the Romesco, a small restaurant I’m quite fond of in the Raval neighborhood. Valdemar didn’t say a word all the way there, which gave me the opportunity to try to make sense of what was happening.
Then it hit me, and I laughed at myself for not having seen it earlier. It was no miraculous coincidence that Gabriela had reappeared in the music shop. Of course! She worked there.
This realization was comforting in a way, because now I knew where to find her. I didn’t need to go back to sitting on the terrace on the off chance she’d walk by. I only had to go to the shop. Yet this didn’t help me with the main problem—namely, that Gabriela hadn’t recognized me or been at all receptive to my reminiscences of our childhood. As far as she was concerned, I was a stranger, and the most intimate interaction I could hope for between us was my purchasing a CD from her. And that was exactly what I decided to do.
—
We managed to grab the only unreserved table in the restaurant before a horde of low-budget tourists swarmed through the whole place. They serve simple dishes there, so I asked for salad and fish for both of us, plus a bottle of white wine.
“I don’t have much time,” Valdemar said.
“They’re very quick here. Don’t worry. Where do you have to go?”
“I have to get back to my research.”
He tasted the wine, his index finger drumming on the thick manuscript that lay on the table. He then wiped his mouth with the napkin and announced, “A marvelous future is in store for humanity.”
At first I didn’t know what to say. As if I was experiencing a new déjà vu, I had the feeling that this wasn’t the first time I’d heard such nonsense.
Then I said: “Now, that’s certainly an optimistic viewpoint. But what’s that got to do with the book?”
“A lot. I’m working on this book because I haven’t been able to do anything else since I started feeling nostalgia for the future.”
“You’ve talked about this before. You know where you’ll be at some point in the future, but you can’t see the moment you’ll get there because that will be incredible. Am I right? But what’s it got to do with the moon?”
Valdemar stabbed a morsel of white fish with his fork, lifted it up, and inspected it carefully before inserting it into his mouth. Then he said, “The book’s been through several mutations. It might even be incorrect to call it a book, because by that we understand a finished, closed object. This is something else. It’s a monster that keeps getting bigger and more and more deformed as new paths keep opening up. Let’s call it destiny. Let’s call it life.”
“Does the title The Dark Side of the Moon refer to the huge rocky mass up there in the sky, or is it symbolic?”
“Both.” There was a flash of enthusiasm in his eyes. “Let’s say I started out with a purely scientific inquiry but then it branched out to other levels.”
“So, are you a physicist?”
“Something like that. I’m a selenologist, but they kicked me out of academia. I began to have problems with my colleagues
because of a theory I came up with. Scientists are a conservative bunch. You get the impression they’re searching for truth, but in reality they’re afraid of discovering anything beyond the limits of what they’re prepared to accept. They prefer to close their eyes.”
“Did you see something? What was your theory?”
“Well, actually, it was no more than a supposition, a working hypothesis. I came to the conclusion that people don’t age on the moon.”
“What was the basis of your conjecture?” I was fascinated. “I mean, nobody’s ever lived on the moon. Astronauts have been there only very briefly, right?”
“So they say. You’ve hit the nail on the head, Samuel. At the time, I was trying to demonstrate that there is a direct relationship between cellular oxidation and the earth’s gravity. When I began to study the data collected by the various lunar missions, I began to doubt that any human being had ever set foot on the moon. I found too many gaps in the information. This would explain the fact that, despite the vastly superior technology we have nowadays, there have been no more trips to the moon. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to prove anything, because these missions either didn’t happen in reality or their results were so insignificant that they might as well have not existed.”
“How long have you been interested in the moon?”
“Since I was a little boy, when I dreamed of going there. In the sixties we were convinced that everyone would be able to travel to the moon in a couple of decades. That’s why I feel I’ve been hoodwinked.”
“Yet you’re still going on about a marvelous future.”
“Because I’ve realized that we’ll get there in the end. There’ll be a cataclysm on earth, and we’ll have no choice but to colonize the moon. Then we’ll discover that we’re immortal. Happy ending.”
House of Mirrors
After lunch, Valdemar took off into his own world, and I was left with the bill and two hours to kill before the music shop opened again.
Faced with a bunch of ravenous people who wanted my table, I got up without knowing where I should go with all my troubles. Wanting to avoid the masses of people pouring down La Rambla, I stayed in the Raval, wandering past Pakistani-owned international-call shops and video-rental stores.
On autopilot, I ended up at Marsella, a beautiful but run-down bar I hadn’t been to since my student days. It had been my favorite then because of the mirrors covering all its walls and its bohemian atmosphere.
I went inside out of pure nostalgia, and to check that there’d been no major changes. But it still had the same scruffy mirrors, hoary old bottles covered in dust, ancient posters with warnings to customers: SINGING IS PROHIBITED and NO PARKING.
Sitting at one of the many tables that were free at that hour, I remembered that I’d read somewhere that this was Barcelona’s oldest café. A waiter with a South American accent brought me a coffee.
I checked the time. Half past three. In just over an hour I’d see Gabriela again. The mere thought of it made my hands break out into a cold sweat and my pulse race.
Seeing her again earlier today had been almost physically painful, and at the same time I had experienced a feeling of vertigo, as if I were about to fall into an abyss and she was the only thing I could cling to. Right then, I thought I’d die of grief if I had to give her up.
As I was pondering all this and getting a bit teary, I saw that an old drunk at the next table was observing me with a maternal expression as she smoked her rank cigarettes. She was coughing between drags, but I could see in her eyes the empathy of someone who has consumed all her passion and is finally free.
Just then, the waiter came over to her table with the house special, a glass of diluted absinthe with a burning sugar cube. The old woman stopped looking at me to concentrate on the flames.
The scene reminded me of a book of poems by Bukowski. He’s never been one of my favorite authors, but I believe he deserves a place of honor in world literature just for the title of the collection:
BURNING IN WATER, DROWNING IN FLAME.
Chinaski and Company
I gulped down what remained of my coffee and left Marsella feeling jittery, planning to wander around for a while and think about what to do when I saw Gabriela. I came to the conclusion that the best course of action would be to tell her I was sorry for my idiotic babbling—which essentially amounted to apologizing to her for the fact that she hadn’t recognized me—and then behave like a regular customer.
In order to take my mind off that scene and the anguish its memory provoked, I started thinking once more about Bukowski, a German who’d landed in the United States in the early years of Nazism. I’d never really liked the grotty adventures of his alter ego Chinaski, but on reading an anecdote about him I discovered what a great man he was.
Once, when he was traveling by train along the West Coast, a small boy sitting next to him looked at the ocean and said, “It’s not pretty.” Bukowski shivered and thought the child was a genius because he’d never noticed this before.
Right from the moment of our birth we are made to think that the sea is pretty without being allowed to decide for ourselves.
I was walking along, lost in thought, when someone tugged at my sleeve. Emerging from my daydream, I saw a young man dressed in a djellaba. He was in a phone booth, and he was holding the receiver in his other hand.
“There’s still some money left,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s still got thirty cents. If I hang up, the phone company will get them, and I don’t want them to. Come on, call your girlfriend.”
He gave me the receiver and walked away, whistling. I didn’t even have time to thank him. Since I didn’t have a girlfriend, or any friends for that matter, I had to think about whom I could call in order to not waste the man’s kind thought.
I remembered that I’d jotted down the number of the Hospital Clínic in case I needed to speak to Titus and decided to use the call to find out how his tests had gone.
After being put on hold for almost two minutes, I heard his cavernous voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m fine. You don’t have to worry about me. How’s the book going?”
Damn. The truth was that I’d written very little, so I quickly changed the subject, launching into a summary of recent events.
“I met this man,” I told him. “His name is Valdemar, and he sounds like you when he talks about science.”
“Must be a sign of the times,” Titus remarked. “And what about Gabriela?”
“I tracked her down at last. She works in a music shop. But I don’t stand a chance. She doesn’t remember me.”
“That doesn’t matter. For the time being, just go and buy some records. You know what they say—”
But I didn’t find out what they say, because the money ran out and the call was cut off. I searched my pockets for coins, but I only had ten cents, not enough for a local call.
I left the phone booth none the wiser and went on my way, as agitated as a soldier going off to the front.
Songs
They say that just before the curtain rises even the best actors go through a moment of excruciating tension that evaporates as soon as the play begins.
Something similar happened when I reached my destination. All of a sudden I felt calm, ready to rummage through the CDs like any other classical-music lover. Borne along by the strains of a very slow string quartet, I went to “M” for Mendelssohn in order to solve the mystery of the gondoliers.
I knew she was there, but my tactic was to focus all my senses on that section as if my life depended on it. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help feeling apprehensive when I noticed Gabriela gliding toward me like a gentle shadow. As I flipped quickly through the CDs, I saw out of the corner of my eye that she was watching me with a faint smile on her lips. I turned toward her. I’d decided to play the part of a cus
tomer who is irritated at not being left to browse in peace. But, the moment we were face-to-face, the words that came out of my mouth were not at all those I had in mind.
“I’m sorry about the confusion the other day . . .”
“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling. “Can I help you at all?”
You have no idea.
I had to stick to my script.
“I’m looking for something you were playing here last week. It’s one of the piano pieces from Songs without Words. I thought it was ‘Venetian Boat Song,’ but now I’m not so sure.”
“Which one?”
“So there’s more than one?” I was trying to put on an appearance of calm, which was completely at odds with my actual state of mind.
“There are three or four songs by Mendelssohn with that name.”
“Well, I’d like to get acquainted with all those gondoliers.” I was trying to be funny. “Which version would you recommend?”
Gabriela carefully flipped through the CDs. I took the opportunity to admire her long, dark, beautifully wavy hair, with highlights so black they were almost blue.
Finally she said, “There are two very good versions: the whole set by Barenboim and a selection played by András Schiff.”
“I’ll take the Barenboim. I’d like to have all the songs.”
“We don’t have it in stock at the moment. I’ve got only the Schiff recording.” She handed me the CD, which had a photo of a rosy-cheeked man and the title Lieder ohne Worte.
I held it in my hands for a few seconds, wondering what to do. I wanted to take the songs home, but if I did that, I’d be throwing away the chance of seeing her again. There was a compromise solution that would end up costing me twice as much.
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