Nona's Room

by Cristina Fernández Cubas

  NONA’S ROOM

  Six new stories of the bizarre and unexpected from one of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary writers of short fiction.

  A young girl who is envious of the attention given to her sister has a brutal awakening … A young woman facing eviction puts her trust in an old lady who invites her into her home … A mature woman spends the night in a hotel in Madrid and finds herself in a time warp …

  Cristina Fernández Cubas takes us through a glass darkly into a world where things are never quite what they seem, and lurking in each of these six mysterious and suspenseful short stories is a very unpleasant surprise. Nona’s Room is the latest offering from one of Spain’s finest contemporary writers.

  Nona’s Room is a title in the Spanish Season of the World Series from Peter Owen Publishers in association with Istros Books, bringing some of the best contemporary writing from Spain to English-speaking readers. The other titles in the season are Wolf Moon by Julio Llamazares and Inventing Love by José Ovejero.

  Praise for Nona’s Room

  Winner of the Premio Nacional de Narrativa (2016), Premio de la Crítica Española and Premio Dulce Chacón (2016); Book of the year in Babelia, La Vanguardia, El Cultural and ABC

  ‘She blends the commonplace with the fantastic in a masterful way, achieving the essence and vitality inherent in the best examples of this literary genre.’ – Selection Panel, Premio Nacional de Literatura

  ‘There is mystery almost from the first sentence of every story; each detail shatters our inertia and forces us to reappraise a shifting panorama.’ – El País

  ‘Fernández Cubas’s stories create one of the most extraordinary universes in contemporary literature, where the commonplace and the unexpected, normality and the unexplainable intertwine to offer a singular vision of the human experience.’ – ABC

  CRISTINA FERNÁNDEZ CUBAS (b. 1945, Arenys de Mar, Barcelona) lives and works in Barcelona. She is renowned for her short fiction, and since the publication of her first collection of stories Mi hermana Elba in 1980 she has risen to become one of the most highly regarded Spanish authors working in the form, garnering numerous literary awards and accolades along the way. In addition to short stories she has also published several novellas and a memoir. Her work is firmly rooted within the tradition of Hispanic ‘fantastic’ literature and has been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Turkish. Nona’s Room (2015), her most recent collection of stories, is the first of her works to be translated into English.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  KATHRYN PHILLIPS-MILES and SIMON DEEFHOLTS studied Romance Languages and Literature at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and later at Birkbeck College, University of London. They have enjoyed varied careers including teaching, translation, lexicography and finance and have spent several years living and working in Spain. They have jointly translated a number of plays for the Spanish Theatre Festival of London as well as the three works comprising the Spanish Season (2017) in the Peter Owen World Series of literature in translation: Nona’s Room by Cristina Fernández Cubas, Wolf Moon by Julio Llamazares and Inventing Love by José Ovejero.

  ‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.’

  – Albert Einstein

  CONTENTS

  Nona’s Room

  Chatting to Old Ladies

  Interior with Figure

  The End of Barbro

  A Fresh Start

  A Few Days with the Wahyes-Wahno

  Nona’s Room

  My sister is special. That’s what my mother told me at the time she was born in that bright and sunny room in the hospital. She also said, ‘Special is a lovely word. Never forget that.’ I’ve never forgotten, of course, but it’s more than likely that the scene I’ve described didn’t happen in the hospital but much later in some other room and that Nona wasn’t a newborn or even a baby but rather a little girl of three or four years of age. Who knows? I’ve been told that it could be a false memory and that our unreliable minds are full of false memories. I’ve also been told that you don’t usually notice certain singularities (that’s what they call them, singularities) to begin with. All that and the fact that when she was born I was too young to remember anything makes me think that it must be an invented memory or something even more subtle, manufactured, as You-Know-Who would say. Because my life was very different before Nona came into the world. I don’t remember it very well, but I do know it was different. I’ve got loads of reasons to think that it was better, too. Much better. But once Nona was born things changed for ever, and that must be why I got used to thinking that my mother said those words the day she came into the world. That’s the day when I started a new life as well. My life with Nona.

  To tell you the truth, I would have preferred a brother, but it didn’t take me long to settle for Nona. She looked like a doll when she was little. She had very smooth skin, slanted eyes and full lips. When she was asleep her eyes disappeared into a single straight line, and she used to open her mouth and keep it open for ages, as if she couldn’t close it or she was about to tell us something, even though she couldn’t yet talk and it would take her much longer than most babies before she spoke her first words. I loved her mouth. It was so big and fleshy. Granny loved it, too. ‘She’s got Brigitte Bardot lips,’ she said one day as she sat beside the cot. ‘Brigitte is a film star from when I was younger. She’s a French actress.’ Granny was really happy, and she liked to look on the bright side. So, some time later when Nona finally began talking and we realized that she couldn’t roll her Rs properly in her snuffly voice, Granny smiled and shook her head. ‘Just like Brigitte,’ she said. It’s probably because she was so sure and because the smile never left her face that I fell for it hook, line and sinker and did the stupidest thing in my life. At school, that afternoon, I proudly told everyone that my sister was French and she was special. I mentioned it quite a few times – in class, at playtime and on the school bus. I must have bragged about it a bit too much because a few days later some friends came around to my house to play and asked about her. I called her over and straight away, just by looking at their faces, I understood several things all at once. First, Nona wasn’t French and, more to the point, the word ‘special’ didn’t necessarily mean something good.

  There are only about three years between me and Nona, and until she was four years old we used to play together and sleep in the same room. Then something happened that changed everything, and I turned into the little sister. Nona started snoring. She ate a lot. She ate voraciously. They put her on a diet, so she raided the fridge at night. She also kept food in her new room in a kind of secret pantry, and even though we searched and searched her room for it we never found it. She was constantly chewing and cramming food down her throat, and she didn’t just get fatter (as my parents had feared), she also got taller than me. I didn’t like that. No one in my position would have liked that, particularly as it had the immediate effect of turning me into the little sister, the hand-me-down girl. From then on any clothes that were too small or short for her were passed on to me. How embarrassing.

  You-Know-Who says my parents really messed up with that. (Perhaps I’ll tell you about You-Know-Who later.) Although people didn’t waste their money on luxuries back then and passing things down in families was quite normal, they should have thought about my age. Once again, he’s quite right. After all I was still a little girl, too. Just a child who protected her sister until everything changed. It wasn’t simply that we were now sleeping separately in our own rooms or the extra weight that Nona had put on or her sheer size. I sometimes think (and then quickly wipe the thought from my mind) that Nona got fat on purpose in order to dis
tance herself from me, to get ahead of me or to make fun of me because all the changes coincide: the new room, the constant eating, snoring at night and withdrawing into her shell. Everything happened at once, and I had no time to take it all in. The worst thing of all was that she gradually turned her room into a separate world and I didn’t mean anything at all to her any more. She turned me into a stranger, a nuisance. ‘No entering my room without knocking,’ she said once. ‘Don’t even think about it.’ She said it in that odd accent of hers without rolling her Rs. ‘No entewwing my woom’. She must have had such a burning desire to make herself understood that this time she didn’t even bother to hide her impediment. Nona never used the word ‘dress’, for example, but rather ‘outfit’; she never said ‘bedspread’ but ‘quilt’. The words ‘grass’ or ‘grassland’ weren’t part of her vocabulary; she used ‘meadow’, ‘field’ and ‘lawn’ instead. Her arsenal of alternative words was amazing and proved once again, just in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, that my sister had always been very clever – ‘special’, as my mother used to say.

  Mum always took Nona’s side; even she knocked on her door before going in. She did persuade her not to lock herself in and, whether she was at home or not, to let Crispi the cleaning lady into her room once a day to clean and make the bed. Nona had no choice but to agree, but once she could do all that by herself Crispi was only allowed in once a week for general cleaning. When she was at home Nona would sit down patiently waiting on a bench outside her room. If it was a school day the first thing she would do when she got home was to shut herself away in there. I imagine she would then carry out an inspection and check that all her things were in the same places she had left them. I imagine, because you can only imagine what went on inside her room. I often used to rap on her door and push it open, sometimes all at the same time, catching her by surprise, but all I managed to glimpse was Nona’s face, trance-like, dreamy and lost, as if she wasn’t really in her room but far, far away on another planet. Although she reacted straight away and blinked her slanted eyes, for just a few seconds I had caught her in that faraway secret world of hers she didn’t want to share with anyone. Then she came down to earth. She was good at coming down to earth, at breaking off from her train of thought, accepting that an intruder had desecrated her sanctuary and acting as if nothing had happened. Pretending.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ my father told me one day. ‘She’s happy in her room with all her things. Don’t bother her.’

  I had to keep quiet because I knew what would come next: the whole litany of all Nona’s qualities and how I had to behave like a model older sister by being patient, considerate and caring. Then the same old sign-off. That frightening afterword, the reminder that Mum always managed to slip in with a smile. ‘After all, you’re the reason she was born.’

  Now I know it wasn’t down to me. It was pure coincidence, but they tried to make me believe it, and for a while I did. I was proud of it. I told all my friends what they’d told me I’d done (and that I’d almost forgotten). I told absolutely everyone. One day they took me to church. I saw a statue of the Virgin there, a very beautiful Virgin with a baby in her arms, and I suddenly put my hands together and started praying. I copied the grownups: hands together and speaking softly. Later, when they asked me what I’d asked the Virgin for, I resolutely replied, ‘A little brother.’ I do remember that, or, rather, I remember Mum going all gooey-eyed, the big hug she gave me and what she said. ‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Virgin granted you your wish.’ And she did, but I didn’t get a little brother, I got Nona. Then, time after time, Mum would remind me that Nona was born because I’d asked for her. ‘She did the right thing so that you wouldn’t be jealous,’ You-Know-Who told me one day. ‘So that you’d be involved in teaching her.’ Rubbish! I was never jealous of my sister. It was the other way around. When she was little and looked like a doll, I used to spend hours and hours with Granny beside her cot watching her sleeping. On the other hand, he could be right about the other thing because I do try to teach her things even though she doesn’t let me. She hasn’t let me since she suddenly got taller and fatter and I turned into her little sister. I sometimes think that I’ve got a bit of a grudge against her because of everything that happened, because my friends made fun of me when they saw me wearing Nona’s cast-offs and Nona wearing brand-new clothes. But only sometimes, because I scrub those thoughts from my head straight away, and if they don’t go completely I talk to him, to You-Know-Who, and he listens to me with a smile on his face.

  You-Know-Who has got a name just like everyone else, but I prefer to call him You-Know-Who. All I’m doing is following the family tradition. In our house we give our own names to different things. I don’t know who started it, but there are lots of words we simply don’t use and some other worse words that are completely forbidden. Once, a lady, a friend of the family, stroked Nona’s hair then waited until she left the sitting-room and blurted out one of those words. She’s never been back. Mum gave her a dirty look and asked Crispi to see her to the door. We don’t want to hear anything about foreign surnames or diseases or calamities and even less about things said in whispers or to see pained expressions. Here, everything is special. Whether you like it or not. Just like Nona herself. That’s why, because she’s a special girl, we take her to a special school as well. Special people have their own singularities. I said so before. Singularities. It’s a word I’ve known since I was small, and once I could use a dictionary I understood it even better. Because singularities (which means more or less the same as ‘characteristics’, ‘peculiarities’ or ‘oddities’) go very well together with special people. It is only to be expected. You’re special because you have singularities. Or you have singularities because you’re special. It’s all a bit circular. Like the way whiting is sometimes served, curled around so the fish bite their own tails. The other day Crispi made them for lunch, and I stayed in the kitchen for a while to watch. I thought it was a good way to explain the world. At least in a way. Nona was the whiting and the circle made by putting the end of the tail in its mouth was her room. You can’t understand one without the other and vice versa. I watched as Crispi carefully put the tails between the fishes’ teeth and how she skilfully squeezed the heads to make sure the tails would stay there. Then she dusted them with flour and fried them two at a time so that they wouldn’t stick together. Then she put them on some kitchen paper to soak up the oil and finally placed them in a china dish garnished with slices of lemon and a few sprigs of parsley. I would have stayed in the kitchen much longer thinking about all this, but you have to eat fried whiting straight away, whether they’re biting their tails or not. You have to eat them before they get cold. And that’s what we did. I sat down at the dining-room table and carried on thinking about Nona. I thought that my sister was like a dragon protecting its treasure, circling every part of its lair and not letting anyone see inside. I also thought that if I could release the pressure of the teeth on the tails an opening would be created, a door or a crack through which you could enter the forbidden room and discover all its mysteries. My parents were eating heartily, and soon there was nothing left in the china dish but the garnish of slices of lemon and sprigs of parsley. I didn’t tell them what I’d been thinking about. Just in case. They might have thought it was funny, or perhaps not, which would have been worse. But I would tell You-Know-Who. I would tell him that my parents had swallowed up their own daughter (just a joke) and how I thought the whiting and my sister Nona looked like each other – that was the important bit. You can tell You-Know-Who almost anything. I like that. But that’s also why I have to protect him and protect myself. I don’t want anyone to go searching around in my things, discover his real name and start putting two and two together and bothering us. So I keep him secret. Just like his photograph. In school the other day while we were talking in the small classroom that is sometimes used as an office, I thought of taking his photograph. I asked permission, of course, but I didn’t tell
him the truth. I was embarrassed. I didn’t tell him he looked really handsome in his light-blue polo shirt and that I was desperate to have his picture on my mobile for ever. Instead I told him that I was doing an end-of-year project and needed silhouettes and backlight. He smiled and stood up and went and leaned against the window, and I clicked the shutter. It wasn’t a silhouette that came out, of course. He came out, which is exactly what I wanted. Nona’s got her big secrets; well, so have I!

  We know very little about the special school. At least, I don’t. Nona doesn’t really let on anything about what she does there, but I don’t think she likes it very much. When she comes home each day her face lights up when she gets to her bedroom door. In she goes and doesn’t come out again until dinner time. What on earth could be in that room to make her so happy? When I’m in bed I sometimes put one ear to the wall and wait for a while. Apart from snoring Nona sometimes talks in her sleep. She talks to herself, and recently we’ve heard her laughing a lot, as if something very funny was happening and she was having a great old time. I’ve known she’s had a boyfriend for a while now, or perhaps it’s a girlfriend. I’m not sure. Mum told me one day when we heard her talking to herself. It’s an invisible friend or the imaginary friend that children who feel lonely sometimes make up; an only child, for example, or children whose brothers and sisters are much older and don’t want to play with them. According to Mum it’s not a bad thing, in fact, the opposite, as it encourages creativity. There are even some famous artists who had imaginary friends when they were small.

  ‘It really isn’t a bad thing,’ Mum says again to convince herself.