Nona's Room

by Cristina Fernández Cubas

  ‘Take a seat, please,’ she said, pointing towards the door at the back of the room with a sign saying ‘NO ENTRY’. ‘You’ll be called in a short while.’

  That was already half an hour ago. In that short while we’ve had time to chat, catch up on what we’ve been doing since we last saw each other, dredge up stories like the dead cat, go all around the houses so that we don’t have to face up to the real reason why we’re here. And, once again, that reason is Barbro. It is Barbro who’s called us to this emergency meeting where, ironically, nothing seems urgent or imminent. But we can’t fool ourselves for much longer. That door will open at some point, and we must be prepared for the worst. Although what could the worst be?

  We don’t know.

  We now think that the worst all started a very long time ago, just like in a fairy-tale. Once upon a time … it was a fairy-tale that lasted only a single day, but that day was happy, there’s no denying it. Barbro, Northern Eyes, came into our father’s life when he most needed some love, and that’s why we welcomed her with open arms and the best of intentions. Our father was still handsome and had been a widower for too many years. As for his daughters, we were all grown up by then and had careers, friends and our own lives. We weren’t at home any more than we absolutely needed to be. We loved him very much, of course we did, but it wasn’t the kind of love our father needed. ‘I’m a man,’ he said to us one day, ‘and you can’t imagine how much I would love to find the right woman to share my life with.’ He wasn’t prone to admitting that sort of thing, complaining about being lonely or including us in his plans, but at the time, in spite of that, we didn’t attach the slightest importance to what he said. We thought (and later on we would remember this more than once) that he said what he said as an excuse, so that we wouldn’t be surprised when, suddenly and unexpectedly, he started going out almost every night, spending a lot of time on the phone or going away most weekends without telling us where. Not only were we not worried, we were genuinely delighted. He’d been a wonderful father, and now it was his turn to have a life. We heard him one evening behind the half-closed door talking on the phone. We thought that he’d joined a club and met up with all his new friends there and that what he’d said about ‘a woman to share my life with’ was just an excuse, a cover-up. He couldn’t find that precious woman anywhere, so he’d decided to have some nights out on the tiles and have a good time.

  He lost ten years in a few months. He bought some new clothes and changed hairdresser. One day he announced, ‘I want to introduce you to a girlfriend.’ A week later he asked us to cook dinner, not a fancy dinner but not too plain either; something between the two that would show off our culinary skills. ‘I’m sure you’ll like her,’ he said with a smile, ‘and I’ll be proud of my three girls.’ That’s who we were, his three girls. So the three of us got to work. We made a monkfish-and-lobster mille-feuille, pork tenderloin with mustard sauce and homemade chocolate-and-raisin ice-cream. Our father was in charge of choosing the wine, and at nine o’clock in the evening he congratulated us on how beautifully we had set the table. We had understood what he had meant absolutely. Nothing fancy and nothing run-of-the-mill either. The table evoked hearth and home. Yes, that’s what he said, ‘hearth and home’. Then he looked at his watch. It was the fifth or sixth time he’d looked at his watch. It was as if the minute hand had stopped and time was standing still and only he, with the power of his eyes, would be able to make the watch hands move again. He was nervous and excited, like a small child. We didn’t want to ask him what his girlfriend was like, how old she was or where he’d met her. We preferred to wait and see. The doorbell rang at a quarter past nine. Our father opened the door, and there on the doorstep stood Barbro’s willowy figure. Back then we didn’t refer to Daddy as ‘our father’.

  We liked Barbro. We thought she was pretty, very pretty. She was casually dressed, and her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail and she looked at us with her enormous blue, almost transparent, eyes. Her beautiful eyes from the North. Her height proclaimed she was from the North as well. In fact, everything about her screamed the North, with a capital N. Beside her, our father was a fine example of the South, with dark hair, average height, dark eyes and silvery temples; a mature gentleman who still looked good with a young and willowy Scandinavian beauty. Barbro was quite a bit younger than our father, although not young enough for someone to ask if she were his daughter. They made a handsome couple and evoked images of yachts, luxury, endless holidays, international travel and, above all, a second opportunity that had been grabbed with both hands. There wasn’t the slightest doubt about that, at least for our father. Wherever she had come from, Barbro was heaven-sent.

  ‘And you are…’ she said with a smile and trying to put the three names she had only heard of to faces, ‘Bel, Luz, Mar.’

  She got it right, and we were about to greet her with a kiss but she got there first and held out her hand. She did kiss our father on the cheek, though. We remembered that in many cultures some types of familiarity are limited to family members or very close friends. It looked as if our father already belonged to the latter category.

  ‘It’s all really lovely,’ she said in a charming accent. ‘What a beautiful flat!’

  The dinner turned out just as our father had wanted. There was warmth, that feeling of hearth and home that, according to him, began with the table-setting. Barbro praised the wine and tried all the dishes. She loved the monkfish with lobster and asked for the recipe. She said she envied our father because we looked after him so well and congratulated us. We were excellent cooks and adorable girls. He looked happy and was proud twice over: proud of his three daughters and proud of Barbro, too – or, rather, proud of the good impression Barbro was making on his three daughters. Because that’s what happened. His Scandinavian girlfriend won us all over from the moment we first saw her, and we understood, without having to ask, that something similar must have happened to him. That was the reason he looked at her entranced. That was the reason his eyes thanked us for the dinner being so successful. We also guessed that barely one week earlier, when he’d spoken dreamily about how much he would love to find a woman to share his life, he’d had to make a big effort to pretend and to hide his happiness. That woman already existed, and her name was Barbro.

  We said goodbye, and this time we were the first to hold out our hands, and we said that we should all meet up again soon. Our father called the lift and said he would go down with her. We could hear him laughing behind the closed door and asking her in a louder voice than usual, and sounding slightly tipsy, what she had thought of his three girls.

  ‘My three gorgeous girls,’ he said.

  ‘They’re lovely,’ Barbro swiftly replied, then she added slowly, very slowly and in a half-affectionate, half-teasing voice with an exaggerated accent and tone of admiration, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’

  We didn’t want to hear any more. The lift had just stopped on the landing, and, blushing with embarrassment, we left our spying post at the door. We were going to tell him as soon as he got back; he had to conceal his pride and, more than anything, he had to stop calling us his ‘girls’. At least in certain circumstances, and the circumstances that night had been particularly special. Did we need to remind him? We cleared away the coffee cups, poured ourselves a drink and waited for him, sitting around that table he’d praised so highly for evoking the feeling of hearth and home. After a while, however, we decided it was best not to mention it and to leave things as they were. After all, he wasn’t the first or the last father in the world who adored his daughters, and, joking apart, the best thing was for Barbro to understand that from the off. Then we started laughing. Why were we waiting for him as if he were a small child? And why were we afraid of becoming a hindrance? A hindrance to what? The dinner had been a complete success, all the work had been worthwhile, and we felt happy but exhausted. So we called an end to the soirée and went to bed. But that wasn’t the end of the story, and none of us could sle
ep a wink that night.

  They got married a week later. It was a very private wedding, held in the utmost secrecy. We were the first to hear about it, not counting the registrar and the witnesses. ‘We’ve just got married,’ they said. ‘What do you think?’ We didn’t think it was a good thing or a bad thing either. We weren’t happy or sad. They didn’t give us time to feel anything either, as after telling us the news the doorbell rang and there was the caretaker. He came in with four suitcases, several bags, an exercise bike and some coats in see-through covers. The poor man made three trips before the lift was empty. And it was then, only then, that we began to understand it all. We understood that we were witnessing a premeditated invasion, that no one had bothered to ask us and that it looked as though our opinion would count for nothing in the future. And we stood there like statues, stunned, speechless. Like statues and lost for words, because statues can’t talk and can’t feel any emotion. Statues are made of hard and compact mineral substances, just like the three of us that day: three statues standing in the sitting-room. And all the while they were humping suitcases down the corridor, laughing and whispering to each other, cooing like a pair of brooding turtle doves. That was what upset us more than anything and broke the spell and brought us back to life. It was a type of cooing that made us feel embarrassed. It made us cringe. Perhaps it was the first time that we understood what the word ‘cringe’ really meant. Because of all the cooing and cringing we decided to go down to the bar on the corner. We hardly spoke a word and didn’t dare look each other in the eye, but with a few drinks inside us we sorted through our thoughts and memories as if they were scenes from a film fast-forwarding at a frenetic pace and featuring only two protagonists: Barbro and our father. And when we remembered her appearing on the doorstep barely a week earlier it seemed as if years and years had gone by. They weren’t the same, and neither were we.

  Because on that memorable night barely a week previously everything had turned out just as our father wanted. We liked Barbro. We thought she was pretty, very pretty, with her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, casually dressed and looking at us with her enormous blue and almost transparent eyes. Her beautiful eyes from the North. But there was something that kept us awake that night and which the following day we put down to being tired, proud of a job well done, all the time we’d spent in the kitchen at the cooker, keeping an eye on the potatoes, or the mille-feuille, or in the dining-room selecting the crockery, the tablecloth and the cutlery. That’s what we thought at the time, but now we knew it wasn’t because of any of that. There had to have been something else that perfect evening, some detail, gesture or word that didn’t quite fit. A discordant note, something that grated slightly, something inappropriate perhaps that we refused to recognize because we were so elated. And it appeared in the night disguised as insomnia. Camouflaged. We ordered another drink and carried on picking over the events of the evening. That was what we needed to do. The objective was to determine what it was we’d foolishly brushed to one side when it should have put us on guard. But we also had to cheer up and find enough courage or detachment to go back home and accept that there would be five of us in the apartment, whether we three liked it or not.

  It was a lack of respect.

  Or perhaps, to put it more accurately, she had trampled all over us. Once we’d got over the initial shock Barbro’s presence began to feel unsettling, and in an unexpected way it reduced us to the most degrading anonymity, as if we didn’t exist, as if we were non-speaking extras on a stage that belonged to us fairly and squarely. Then our earlier cringing over their behaviour turned into embarrassment over ours, because there are some things you shouldn’t think about, and if you do the best thing is to try to forget all about them. But there were three of us, and we couldn’t disguise the flash of anger in our eyes. We couldn’t resist the urge to complain loudly that our home belonged to us, to the daughters, and that although the law permitted the beneficial owner a lifelong interest it would have been a good idea to discuss it among the four of us. Like always. As we had always done when it came to important matters. But that particular day wasn’t like always. Infected with so many mad ideas, for the first time in our lives, as daughters, we had pulled out the title deeds to our inheritance and used them as the final argument.

  ‘How embarrassing!’ one of us said.

  We did feel embarrassed, but our anger and astonishment were even more powerful. We had a last drink and began fantasizing about petty acts of vengeance. What if we asked our boyfriends to move in? What if the flat suddenly turned into a lodging-house, a grotty hostel with four couples crammed into it? What if we decided to practise a dance routine in the sitting-room or set up a percussion orchestra in the kitchen? Not even these infantile fantasies could calm us down. In fact, quite the opposite. As we filled the flat with our friends and imagined the common areas full of kettle drums and maracas, we grew even angrier and more resentful. We ran through the events of the dinner one more time looking for that tiny detail that would explain our father’s unexpected behaviour, the hint as to what would happen next. We agreed that they must already have decided on everything before that night. Well, nearly everything. We remembered beautiful Barbro’s entrance, with her ponytail, her enormous transparent eyes that grew even bigger as she wandered around the sitting-room and said in her charming accent, ‘It’s all really lovely. What a beautiful flat.’

  Perhaps it was then, at that exact point, when our guest added a detail to what had already been decided. They would get married and live together (all very normal), but they would live together (what a fantastic idea!) in our flat. Nowhere else would do. That’s why when we revisited that moment it no longer occurred to us to describe her eyes as enormous and beautiful, blue, from the North (and a whole host of other adjectives) but simply as greedy. We were now convinced that Barbro had been wandering around the sitting-room with greedy eyes.

  Was that what we had picked up on without realizing it? We shrugged our shoulders. Perhaps it had been. Perhaps it had not. But if it had been (the alcohol made everything we thought about seem credible) then the rest was easy to imagine. With all her sweet-talking Barbro hadn’t taken long to persuade our father. He was an easy catch, much too easy. And the question ‘Can a man turn into a fool from one day to the next?’ was still floating in the air, although no one took the trouble to answer it because the answer was ‘Yes, of course he can’. And he can go off the deep end, too, as we had seen up there in the flat we’d be returning to in just a few minutes. Our flat. We didn’t feel embarrassed any more, and we weren’t cringing either. We were as drunk as lords. We couldn’t stop laughing as we left the bar. We went in through the street door, called the lift and went up to the flat. We struggled to put the key in the lock, but when we finally managed it we walked in silently, in slow motion, gesticulating as if we were in a silent film. We stopped at the door to the sitting-room, prudently, selfishly, because we didn’t have the slightest intention of having a chat and being polite. We did the right thing. A few seconds later everything fell into place: the reason behind our sense of rejection, the thing that didn’t quite fit. A few casual words that should have put us on guard but we’d mistakenly interpreted as having been spoken in jest, a playful joke between lovers, echoing the affection our father had shown towards us. There they were, the two of them. They thought they were alone and hadn’t noticed us. He was sitting in his favourite armchair, his eyes were half closed and there was a happy smile on his face. She was standing behind him, massaging his neck, caressing his shoulders and whispering, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’

  She called him ‘Daddy’ and he called her ‘Love’. It was impossible to live with Daddy-Love. At first we avoided the communal areas, the kitchen, the sitting-room and the dining-room, but it was no use. Love and Daddy went through walls. Their laughter filtered through the cracks, and shut away in our bedrooms we gradually saw our dominions shrinking while there were no limits or borders to the rapid advances made by D
addy-Love. The bar on the corner became our new home, and in a way we left the field free for them – but only in a way. We had breakfast there every morning and met there again in the evening. We always sat at the same window table, which looked out on to the street. It was a great lookout point and meant we could keep an eye on the entrance to our apartment block and see who was going in and coming out. That was important. The idea was to avoid bumping into her when she was alone in the flat. This was more than likely as our father worked late in the office during the week. It was even worse than when the two of them were at home. There was no one for Barbro to seduce or dazzle, so she stopped her purring and affectionate caresses and turned into someone else: someone cold, mysterious and distant. On her own, Barbro was frightening.

  That was why one afternoon, in an attempt to avoid any unpleasantness, we turned up unannounced at his office. He had to see reason and understand that nothing good could come out of everyone being forced to live together. He had to fix a deadline and start looking for a flat for the two of them. But he completely disarmed us as soon as we saw him. He was happy and smiling and delighted by our visit. For a moment he was Daddy once again. He was a father pleased to see his ‘three girls’. ‘How lovely,’ he said. ‘What a surprise.’

  He was sincere. And so were we, very sweetly so. We made a superhuman effort so that nothing in our voices would betray the slightest loathing or the least annoyance when we mentioned Barbro. Until we realized it was useless.

  ‘You’re not being fair,’ he said. ‘You’re being selfish, too. She’s never had a real family until now.’ Then, out of the blue, like a medium, like someone reciting something they’ve learned by heart or passing on someone else’s message, he said, ‘You three, on the other hand, you’ve never wanted for anything. I’ve spoiled you, and I’m ashamed of it.’ It had all been an illusion; our senses had deceived us. Daddy had got lost again while that man we called ‘our father’ had suddenly once more taken on his most recent stage role, that of a possessed and bewitched victim, a puppet operated by his wife: Frozen Eyes.