by Anne Raeff
“Then let me get you more blankets.” I started to get up.
“Mrs. Mondschein, it’s not that kind of cold. You know, just because you told her that story so many times doesn’t mean she doesn’t remember. What is memory anyway except a feeling? She can feel the cold, feel the darkness, the fear, all those things you told her about. How can you know she doesn’t remember?”
“I know,” I said.
“And why are you so sure? And even if she doesn’t really remember, don’t you think that if I finally do get delirious and start thinking that the SS is coming to get me or that Jesus Christ is really Hitler or whatever crazy thing it is, that all those things will be true on some level?”
“On some level, they will be true, but that’s the point—only on some level. You yourself just said that you know your dream was a dream and not a memory of your birth. False memories might be true, but they won’t be The Truth.”
“Well, I’m not sure I believe in the distinction,” Tommy said and flung his arms down hard on his thighs. “I just wanted to see if I could still feel them. My legs, that is.”
“Can you?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I’m afraid it might only be a memory of feeling that I am feeling.”
“Please, Tommy,” I said.
“Please what?”
“Please don’t joke at a time like this.”
“And what kind of time is it, Mrs. Mondschein?”
“You know what kind of time it is,” I said and I found that I was crying.
“Mrs. Mondschein?” Tommy whispered.
“Yes?”
“I’m so very, very cold, Mrs. Mondschein.”
I pulled the covers up around him as tightly as I could so that all I saw of him was his small, thin head sweating on the white pillow. I could feel the heat emanating from his forehead and cheeks as I tucked him in, so I called for a nurse, who brought a cool wet cloth, which I placed gently on his forehead.
“Why is it so cold?” Tommy asked. His eyes looked as if they were about to jump out of their sockets, as if they were going to make a run for it and escape while there was still time, but, after a few minutes, his eyes retreated as if they were afraid to venture out into the world, and a few moments later Tommy closed his eyes.
Tommy slept rather peacefully for about four hours. I stayed with him, flipping through magazines, listening to him breathe. His breathing became more relaxed, steadier, and his body lay quietly without flinching or twitching. Every once in a while, he coughed in his sleep. And then towards morning, he stopped breathing. One second he was breathing and the next second he wasn’t. There was no death rattle. He took one breath and then he didn’t take the next breath. I must admit that the first thing I thought when I realized he was dead was that I hadn’t finished my story, that there was still so much more to tell, that there were still years and years left until Karl died, until today, and then I burst into tears because I didn’t know what to do with myself now that he was gone and there were still so many things left untold, which made me feel horribly selfish. And then I let myself succumb to that selfishness, and I resumed my story. We could have made it without interruption until the early morning rounds, yet it was different now, as if his ears were walls rather than windows.
“Mrs. Mondschein,” I imagined him saying, “enough is enough.” And so I stopped talking, and only then did I realize I was crying because I would really miss him, and that meant we had been friends, which meant I had lost a friend. It occurred to me that until now I had never really had a friend except for Karl, and I wondered whether Tommy and Karl would have been friends, and, if they had been friends, whether I would have been left out. Then I thought I should play some Mozart before I called the nurse, so I put on the Piano Concerto no. 20 in D Minor. I don’t know why I had never played it for Tommy before because it is one of my favorites. I guess I thought we still had time.
“Sorry,” I said. “Do you know Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20, the one that opens up with the cellos playing the melody that sounds like massive iron ships sailing heavily yet gracefully across a neither stormy nor calm sea?”
“What are they carrying?” he would have asked.
“I don’t know,” I would have said. “Maybe nothing, maybe nothing at all.”
At six a.m. the nurse came in to take his blood pressure. His eyes were still open, his palms, facing limply upwards, were cold. “Mrs. Mondschein,” the nurse said very gravely, “he is deceased.” Then came a flurry of activity in which I was neither given a part nor asked to leave. It was as if I no longer existed too or as if Tommy’s death had made me invisible.
Yet it wasn’t time for me to leave, not because Tommy needed my assistance but because being on the street on a crisp, sunny winter Saturday morning was something I wasn’t quite ready to face. There would be happy, rested couples off to a hearty brunch, and quiet office clerks, newspapers in hand, ambling to their favorite cafés, where they would distractedly read the paper, looking up hopefully every few lines so as not to miss the woman or man of their dreams, who might walk through the door because this Saturday might be the Saturday that would change their lives forever.
The staff must have contacted Tommy’s parents because towards noon they arrived. I tried to feel angry with Tommy for having turned them into villains and I tried being angry with them for not being villains at all. But there was no anger in me, just sadness as I watched them approach the bed. I had imagined they would be large people, but they were small, Italian-small with dark hair gone gray. Tommy’s mother took one look at her son and started screaming hysterically, covering her eyes with her hands. At one point I thought she would rip out her hair, but instead she banged her open palms against her temples. Tommy’s father stood at the side of the bed very quietly, letting the tears slip out of his eyes and run slowly down his face. At one point I thought he was too weak to stand because his legs were trembling, so I brought him a chair and pushed him gently into it. He sat in the chair crying softly while his wife screamed and banged her head with her open palms. I went back to my chair by the wall where I wouldn’t bother them. Then the nurses and the doctor and the social worker arrived and led Tommy’s mother and father away to another room.
I stayed to watch the orderlies remove Tommy’s body and then slipped out, past the nurses’ station. Waiting for the elevator, I half dreaded, half hoped someone would pat me on the shoulder and say, “Mrs. Mondschein, please don’t go,” but no one witnessed my departure. Then the elevator opened and I stepped in, and then, before I knew it, I was out in the winter sun.
Judith and Holofernes
Once Marisol managed to convince my mother to model for her paintings, they were always together. I avoided going into the Barbieri because it was where they would go to take a break from their work. I saw them walking across the Plaza de Lavapíes one afternoon. They were talking and laughing and Marisol’s black shirt and jeans were splattered with yellow and red paint. After that afternoon, I went out of my way to avoid Lavapíes altogether. I spent more time in the apartment practicing the cello and reading. My father was making up for lost time with his research, so he rarely came home until eight or nine at night. Sometimes my mother would join my father and me for a late dinner, but usually she didn’t come home until midnight or even later. My father didn’t seem to mind that she was never around and neither did I. He didn’t have that much time left to finish his research and I was happy to be practicing seriously again. In the evenings I still walked over to Tirso de Molina to hang out with George Liddy. It was nice to be out in the cool night air and to be around people and talking after spending most of the day inside.
Late one afternoon, about a week after my mother started modeling for Marisol, I found that I was not in the mood for practicing or reading. I tried to sleep, but I was restless, so I walked over
to Tirso de Molina, hoping to find George Liddy. After checking all the bars on the square, I headed down the hill towards Lavapíes, forgetting that Lavapíes was dangerous territory. The next thing I knew, I was standing right in front of the Barbieri. It was like something was pulling me towards it like some kind of siren-like magnet, half singing sweetly, half pulling violently. I went inside. My mother and Marisol were at their usual table, Marisol wearing her paint-splattered clothes, my mother smoking again, the smoke seeping out of her slightly open mouth like wholesome breath on a crisp winter day. I pulled up a chair and sat down.
“How’s the modeling going?” I asked, feeling completely comfortable, chatty, like George Liddy after three maybe four drinks.
“It’s very difficult to sit still,” my mother said, laughing girlishly.
“What’s the painting about?” I asked Marisol, avoiding my mother’s giggly eyes.
“It’s not finished yet,” she answered.
“I’m not allowed to look at it until it’s finished,” my mother said as if this were the most incredible thing in the world.
This time I wasn’t afraid to ask. “Are you posing clothed or unclothed?”
“Clothed,” Marisol answered and my mother almost giggled again, but she bit her lip. I saw her bite her lip.
“Why can’t you paint from memory?” I asked once again. I guess I wanted to prove she wasn’t a good painter even though I knew she was.
“I can, but I don’t choose to,” she said, full of her usual self-confidence. “I like the communication between the model and the painter. If you paint only from memory, your subjects have no thoughts of their own, they are only you, but if someone is sitting right in front of you, thinking, restless, that gets into the painting.”
That’s what I hated about Marisol: she wasn’t stupid. I would have liked to talk to her more about such things, but I knew that if I had the opportunity to talk to her seriously, I wouldn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell her that maybe it was kind of like the difference between playing the cello for an audience and playing it alone, just for oneself. Instead I raised my eyebrows as if what she had said was really pretentious, which in a way it was, and she and my mother laughed.
“Do you paint with music or without?” I asked to change the subject, though I already knew the answer.
“I prefer silence.”
“Except for the sound of the air conditioner,” I said, looking at my mother to see if she’d notice, but she was looking up at the ceiling as if she were watching a spider making its way across the room.
“I don’t even hear it,” Marisol said, but I didn’t believe her. I wonder if her paintings would be different if she opened up the windows and let the street noises and the oven-blast heat in. I wonder if instead of yellows and browns and reds, she would paint in purples and blues and greens.
Some woman whom Marisol knew came up to the table to say hello. She looked a lot like Marisol—thin, short dark hair, white, white skin, somewhere around thirty, but maybe younger. I’m really bad at ages. They talked for a while about a mutual friend who had just come back from Scotland, and my mother kept staring at the ceiling, so I got up and walked out the door without saying goodbye. I knew both of them saw me leaving, but they didn’t say anything, so I didn’t feel the need to say anything either.
Again I found myself with no place to go, so I decided to see if George Liddy was at his pensión. I practically ran all the way there, so anxious was I to see him.
“Just in time for some flan,” Pilar said the second she opened the door.
“Is George Liddy home?” I asked, out of breath, ignoring her offer.
“Not yet. Please, come have some flan. It’s my grandmother’s recipe, with orange peel. My grandmother was a very imaginative woman. She was always putting strange things into food, but it always tasted delicious. Everyone said she was crazy, but I don’t remember because she died when I was only ten, and when you’re ten, you can’t really tell who is crazy and who isn’t.”
“I don’t like flan,” I said and immediately regretted it because I have nothing against flan.
“I’m sorry,” Pilar said.
“Sorry for what?”
“That I made flan.” She was on the brink of tears. “My brother hates our grandmother’s flan, so I rarely make it.”
“Well, maybe I’ll like this kind of flan since it’s so different.” Her face brightened up. She brought the flan to me on a little porcelain tea saucer with pink flowers on it and watched me eat every bite. “Mmm,” I said enthusiastically. “It’s completely different from any other flan I’ve ever tried before.”
“You like it then?” she asked, full of hope.
“It’s delicious.”
“Do you want some more?” And I had to have more as a punishment for my previous insensitivity.
“Where’s your brother?” I asked to stop her from watching me eat so closely.
“He went to his meeting,” she said like it was something really, really stupid.
“What kind of meeting?”
“Oh, I don’t know, but he never misses one of his meetings.” Then I became really intrigued with Manolo’s meetings and kept asking Pilar all sorts of questions. I guess I just needed to talk and that’s what there was to talk about. “Are they political? Religious? Is it some kind of club or professional organization?” But she just laughed and said she had learned at an early age not to be too curious about Manolo.
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“Because he’s a pathological liar.”
“Does he lie about everything?” I asked.
“Not everything, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. Just yesterday he told me he was going out to buy fish for lunch, but then he changed his mind and bought chicken instead, but I knew he was lying, that he was planning on buying chicken right from the beginning.”
“How do you know that’s a lie?” I asked, wondering why anyone would lie about something so insignificant, thinking that was probably the trick, to make up really boring lies, catch people unaware so you could slip in some really unlikely ones, too.
“Because we had fish yesterday,” Pilar said.
“Maybe he liked it so much he thought he wanted it again but changed his mind when he was at the market and saw the chicken,” I offered.
“Maybe,” Pilar said, but she was just humoring me.
At that point the door opened and Manolo himself walked in. He was wearing his usual training outfit and his pants went ft, fttt, ftt as he walked across the room. “How was your meeting?” Pilar asked him.
“What meeting?” he said and she winked at me. “What meeting?” he said again.
And she said, “Your meeting.”
“Oh,” he said, “my meeting. It was fine.”
It was as if the meeting were some kind of cue because Manolo walked over to the CD player and put on this very strange Gallego folk music. It was a song with about one hundred bagpipes and a large chorus of what sounded like very old women—very old women on their deathbeds. I had an image of a large ward packed with hardly any space between the rusty hospital beds, the women propped up on graying pillows, singing at the tops of their lungs. Pilar and Manolo started dancing a slow-motion folk dance that was kind of like the Hora, but much slower, like they were dancing in a pool. The song went on and on, repeating itself, coming to what seemed to be a climax, but not ending like Beethoven. They danced opposite to the music: when it got faster and seemed as if it were drawing to a close, they danced more slowly, and when the music slowed down, they danced faster. Their eyes never made contact with mine even though they were looking straight at me the whole time.
For a while I thought they were trying to hypnotize me, that they were just waiting for me to fall into a deep sleep a
nd then they would steal my money or worse, but I didn’t feel at all tired or entranced. I tried really hard to sit still and just watch, relax, get into the music, but my stomach and neck muscles were too tense. Then I thought I should join their dance, but that would have been too weird.
When they finally stopped, sweat was running down their faces and they were breathing heavily. Obviously the dance required incredible physical effort despite the slowness. Perhaps dancing so slowly, holding back, made it more difficult. They sat down on the sofa in front of me and grinned. Pilar wiped the sweat from Manolo’s brow with a handkerchief.
“That was a very beautiful dance,” I said.
“It was not meant to be beautiful,” Manolo said, his voice filled with sadness.
It seemed especially quiet in the room after the dance was over and the music had stopped, but no one said a word and, after about five minutes, Pilar got up and put the television on. It was some kind of game show. The contestants were blindfolded and had to figure out what certain food items like octopus and melon and fish and strawberries were just by touching them. Pilar and Manolo thought it was really funny and I watched along with them for about fifteen minutes to be polite, and then I thanked them for the flan and the dance and told them I had to get home. I was surprised to find both my parents at home. They were sitting together on the couch having a predinner glass of wine while they were waiting for the trout to bake—my father was cooking trout with fresh figs and apple. Perhaps it was because I had not expected to find my mother at home, and I was even more surprised to find a special dinner cooking and wine being drunk, but I certainly had no idea I was going to sit down in the chair across from them, look my mother straight in the eye, and ask my mother if she had fucked Marisol.
Maybe it was because my mother smiled at me in what seemed to me a patronizing way, like she knew everything about me, and my father was making his wine glass sing, licking his finger, passing it slowly around the rim of the glass, so I felt as if I were in some kind of sick play, like they had just murdered a small child and shoved her under the Thai couch and were trying to act very calm and wise and happy.