Nona's Room

by Cristina Fernández Cubas

  Thinking about it now, it couldn’t all have happened so quickly. There surely must have been some good times when we were all living together. There must have been some moments of mutual understanding and harmony. But however much we delve into our memories we can’t find anything to lend any credence to this theory. Once she was married Barbro had cast off the mask of charm she had worn when we first met her. From one day to the next. She didn’t even try to hide the fact. She put all her energy into weaving a spider’s web around the man we had loved and admired so much. She was his intermediary, his interpreter, his only valid spokesperson. She spoke in his name, gave orders and disagreed with anything we said or did. After all, we were from the South. Even though she had married our father, Barbro sometimes seemed to look down on anything with a mere hint of the South, to such an extent that, apart from being absurd, the situation became grotesque. The North and the South were no longer geographical reference points. They had turned into two opposing teams. The North represented the supreme idea: good; while the South represented ignorance, an absence of the North. Two sides in continuous conflict over any insignificant detail and the inevitable result in favour of the away team. That was the referee’s decision, and the referee was our father. It didn’t matter whether he was enthusiastic or begrudging. Barbro would look over at us with a flash of victory in her frozen eyes.

  We’re surprised by it all now. We’re astonished and wonder how we could have stood for so much foolishness and why we didn’t resort to our old family skill and neutralize her right from the start, to turn her into the dead cat with a frozen stare and, by looking without seeing, transport ourselves thousands of kilometres away. The answer came quickly. It would have been like surrendering, throwing in the towel and leaving the flat to Daddy-Love. It would have been a defeat because, apart from the situation being unacceptable and grotesque, any remaining vestiges of patience and tolerance were being stripped away from us. We didn’t procrastinate any longer, and three weeks to the day from when we started living together we went into action, not in the office this time but at home, all five of us together. Our father had to make a choice. It was either her or his daughters. And he did make a choice: his daughters.

  All the same, it was nothing like a victory. They had it planned this time, too. They had decided to live in a lovely house in the countryside. It would be ready in a few days. The house also had some land, and they would build a bungalow for visitors. ‘You can come whenever you want,’ they said later. They showed us loads of photographs. It was the ideal retirement home. And, although the news was encouraging and put an end to the bizarre status quo, something toxic had been floating in the air from the word go: a dark cloud, a portent, proof of carefully premeditated behaviour. A crime scene with her prints all over it. Because we’d had no idea of their plans to buy a house in the country and the wonderful announcement they were going to make, we daughters got ahead of ourselves. This, of course, wouldn’t have happened if we’d had any inkling of what was coming, but someone had anticipated how we’d behave. We’d shown our hand too soon, and before we knew it we’d walked into a trap. There was the list of grievances and grumbles that needed an urgent solution. There was also innocent Barbro’s feigned bewilderment. She had tears in her eyes, and her face looked like a little girl’s. ‘I had no idea that us being here was such a problem for you.’ Her accent no longer seemed charming. We thought it was false, irritating and artificial. And here she was now, exaggerating her helpless expression and telling us the unexpected news of the move. It was a surprise, she said. They only wanted to surprise us, she insisted. But she wasn’t putting on a little girl’s expression any more. Now she was a lamb. A defenceless little lamb being hounded by three blood thirsty she-wolves. From that day on that’s how our father saw us: three she-wolves. It was too late to turn back. We had put our cards on the table, but Barbro had trumped us with a whole deck. The problem was that we weren’t able to decipher the codes on her cards. Not yet. Barbro was a box full of surprises, and with her there would always be another ‘not yet’.

  So, now comes the coup de grâce. The joker in the pack. Here we are in this awful room, opposite the door they brought us through a short while ago that led to another door. All we can do now is smile. We’re smiling because there was something we didn’t understand and couldn’t explain, but now we’re suddenly beginning to discover a certain mad logic to a mean trick. Because that’s what it was, a mean trick. They collected up their things, packed up the best carpets and some of the pictures that had borne witness to our life and left. There was Barbro next to the lift, talking in her innocent and childlike voice. ‘I cleared out the office yesterday. It’s all clean and tidy. There are just the photos of your mother left.’ Did she say ‘your mother’ or did she dare to say ‘your mum’? In any case, it was normal and quite acceptable. What else could she do but leave them where they were? We would go and collect them some time. But not even that, collecting the photographs, was quite so simple. Mum’s photographs were waiting for us on the shelves of the old office, that was true. But they were naked, the frames had disappeared, and they were piled up haphazardly, one on top of the other.

  It was a fresh tactical gambit from Frozen Eyes. It was vile, contemptible and despicable. We were indignant, but we also started to cringe again. That horrible word: cringe. But now, years later, we’re smiling. Barbro, a sometime thief, had stolen the frames. Because they might be valuable? As a souvenir? To run us through with a dagger? ‘I hate you. I still don’t know why, but I hate you.’ She had stolen the frames, and the shadow of the old photographs had gone with them. Because the chain of events that has brought us to where we are now, sitting opposite the closed door that has opened up so many memories, makes us think of something we overlooked at the time: the likelihood that objects have memories. We didn’t talk about those things at the time. Now we do, as we have no option. Barbro took the photograph frames to her new house, and Mum’s shadow travelled with them. Poetic justice or historical justice. Sometimes it’s almost the same thing.

  We knew a lot about Mum and at the same time not much at all. We knew what our father (when we still called him Daddy) had told us and exactly where and when the photographs had been taken. We also knew, because one of us had reminded the other two, that she liked to read us stories before we went to sleep, how happy and affectionate she was and how much everyone loved her. When she died we were five, four and barely two years old. The eldest boasted about being able to remember the childhood of the other two, the house in which we were born and, in particular, a lot of stories about Mum who, curiously, kept growing in stature with time. Her fantastic memory or our childish desire and imagination did the rest. In our minds ‘Mum’ was the loveliest thing that had ever happened to us. And there she was, anchored in our heads without any crisis or drama. She was a counterweight who provided us with security, an anchor making sure we didn’t lose our balance, particularly at such times as when we discovered the photographs scattered on the shelves. It had shown such a lack of respect, and that was why there would be no reply to Barbro’s challenge. There would only be contempt. And to add to that image of the photographs as junk to be discarded there was another one, very similar but at the same time very different. There they were, just for a moment, the offcuts from a film we had not the slightest interest in imagining. It was a television series starring a woman from the frozen North and a man whose free will had been stolen. We weren’t bothered about the rest of the plot. We’d had quite enough with the pilot episode. So we collected up the photographs, took them home and gave them back their dignity by putting them in the best frames we could find. As for the rest, we weren’t going to lose any sleep over what might happen to the protagonists in future episodes. The decision was made. It was a defensive strategy, a magical resolution. We shook on it and sealed a pact. We would stick together, just like Porthos, Athos and Aramis, the Three Kings or the Witches of Eastwick. That night the three of us slept like
logs.

  Without Daddy-Love the flat returned in large part to what it had been before, a mixture of home and headquarters. We stopped resolutely calling ourselves ‘we’ (as we had begun to do recently) and went back to being Bel, Luz and Mar. We started arguing again, disagreeing about the smallest thing, contradicting one another. It was just as it had been before the Snow Queen came on the scene. It was just as it had been before our father turned into the sad supporting actor in all those fairy-tales that Mum used to tell us and that, thanks to the extraordinary efforts made by the eldest sister, we could still recite by heart: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White. Now, though, they didn’t seem like stories but rather astute treatises on human behaviour. We got used to it with time. That’s what time can do, turn the absurd into normality. Our father phoned every once in a while and, without fail, spoke about us going to spend a few days with them. But either they never built the bungalow or they didn’t really want us to visit. We had only seen the house in the photographs they’d showed us before they bought it and the others they’d sent us after the building works had been completed. We thought it was all normal, reasonable and proper. Although it was a surprise in the beginning, we ended up getting used to having to get past Barbro to be able to speak to our father and also getting used to the people who had once been his closest friends complaining that they had no contact with him at all. Had he been kidnapped or abducted? they asked.

  But let’s cut to the chase. Time is running out, and the period we’re remembering now isn’t especially interesting. Nothing much happened during those years. There were the usual arguments among sisters, and distance did away with any other significant problems. We accepted the status quo because it was easier or because we had no choice. The world was riddled with situations like ours. Some were even worse. We couldn’t complain. In her own way Barbro loved our father and her own way immediately cut off any other relationship, whether with people who were once his friends or with us, who were still his daughters. Her love was possessive and excluded all others. We didn’t know much about her or about her life before she appeared in ours, but there was something that was said a long time ago now, in an office that no longer existed, that gave us an insight. ‘She’s never had a real family until now.’ That was the likely explanation. She had never had a family and hadn’t wanted one either. What was more, she hated what she had never had with a passion. And once she had won our father’s heart she decided to get rid of us gradually – until our relationship was reduced to sporadic telephone calls, which were increasingly infrequent and increasingly half-hearted. Since they had moved to the countryside we hadn’t even spent a single Christmas together. They said they were going to the North. It was the same thing every year. But it was just a half-truth. There was no need to fly or drive thousands and thousands of kilometres along icy roads, as the North had set up home in our enemy a long time ago, and the North lived there within Barbro herself; beside Barbro. We imagined Christmas in a house full of flickering candles, tablecloths with reindeer and sleigh motifs, crowds of guests sampling herring, salmon, mustard-roast ham, mulled wine, saffron rolls. We imagined our father smiling in a corner, full of schnapps and, like a good host, making sure that everything was going well without understanding a word of the babble of languages. We imagined him thinking, even if it were just for a moment, about other far-off Christmases and about his daughters.

  No, in spite of everything, we didn’t harbour a grudge against him. That would not have been possible. We never stopped loving him, and when one sad day, seven years ago now, he went into hospital at death’s door, we hardly ever left his side. He seemed to want to tell us something. He was struggling to trap the words that were trying to escape. He was looking at us with his eyes wide open as if he wanted to warn us, reveal a secret, tell us something of the utmost importance. But we weren’t fooled. All dying people do the same. Or perhaps it’s us, the loved ones who are desperate to find some significance in their incomprehensible babbling that doesn’t actually exist. All that was happening was that he realized he was dying and needed to show us he loved us. He said our names ‘Bel, Luz, Mar’ over and over again. He smiled and held our hands. In contrast he looked at Barbro with confusion, and once, when she’d just left the room and he could still speak, he asked with his eyes wide open and looking like a little boy, ‘Who is she? What does she want? Why does she call me Daddy all the time?’

  The official has just come in, and she’s holding her list.

  ‘I’m sorry. We made a mistake and your appointment was too early, but you can go through soon. My apologies. This time of the year…’

  And off she goes with the same smile on her face as when she came in.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ one of us murmurs when the woman is halfway down the corridor.

  It’s true. We don’t mind. We’re not in a hurry at all now. Quite the opposite. We need to get our memories straight and clarify our ideas. But where were we? It doesn’t take too long to pick up the thread again. We were in the hospital, beside the bed, reliving the days when we lost and recovered our father all at the same time. It was a strange time, full of conflicting emotions. It was also when we decided to wipe the slate clean and to support Barbro with anything she needed. He had chosen her; no one had forced him. And she, in her own way, had loved and cared for him. All the same, deep down, we still harboured a grudge. Why had she let us know so late in the day when nothing more could be done? But none of us asked the question. It was too late to do anything about it.

  Barbro went back to the countryside with our father’s ashes in an urn. She told us she would scatter them in the garden, in the flowerbed where he’d grown his roses with such dedication. She told us about grafting and pruning, fierce battles against blackfly and beetles, about his total commitment, which we would never have believed possible. But she didn’t invite us to the ceremony. Perhaps she thought that scattering ashes over the ground wasn’t a real ceremony. She did cry, though. She didn’t stop crying. In our memories those tears have turned into icicles, although at the time they may have seemed real. We don’t know if we were confused back then or if we’re mistaken now. And we shrug our shoulders. We’re human after all. It’s difficult for us to be objective and to recover scenes from the past without being tempted to interpret them in the light of later events. But we’re making an effort. We do try. So, let’s return to the image of Barbro holding the urn and her eyes full of tears. Let’s go back to a serene Barbro a few weeks later with her hair tied back in a severe bun. And back to the day we went to the notary public’s office. And back to the various procedures we had to go through that took up most of the following months. We’d never seen each other so often, and, sharing the memory of our father, we managed miraculously to smooth things over. We treated each other with the utmost politeness, almost with affection.

  ‘Give me a few months,’ she said as she left. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve sorted your father’s papers out.’

  We were pleased that this time at least she had stopped calling him Daddy. We were also pleased that she was so willing, without us having to ask her, to go through his documents and give us the ones that belonged to us. And we thought (how ironic) that with his death our father had brought us all the peace he hadn’t been able to give us while he was alive. Once again, we were mistaken. Barbro vanished. She vanished into thin air just like in a mystery novel. She disappeared without a trace. She became invisible. She never telephoned once and never bothered to pick up the phone or answer any correspondence. We weren’t indignant any more, just fed up. For how much longer would we have to dance to her tune?

  We tossed for it; we cheated; we ended up baring our feelings. None of us was willing to go to the village to look for the house we had never been invited to visit, to knock on the door and quarrel with Frozen Eyes. So, once again, we decided that all three of us should go and surprise her. We would be Porthos, Athos and Aramis again, the Three Kings, the Witches of Eastwi
ck. A whole host of trios to which we added a few more along the way: the Three Tenors, the Three Bears, the Three Little Pigs. On the journey we also fantasized about the likely reason for her silence, but we couldn’t come up with any that justified such inexplicable behaviour, apart from death. We didn’t know how far away the house was from the village, if Barbro got on well with her neighbours or if she was isolated in the middle of the countryside. The address mentioned only the name of a country lane. And that wasn’t exactly encouraging. We counted out loud. It had been six months since our first unanswered telephone call, five months since we wrote to her for the first time. It was better not to get ahead of ourselves. Not yet.

  We didn’t have to search for the house, as it was suddenly there before we reached the village. It looked the same as it did in the photographs. We left the car at the side of the road and started walking along the path without much conviction. Our objective was about fifty metres away, but now, as we were getting closer, something akin to fear was urging us to turn around, to find some excuse, to go back to the car and drive far away. Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to go to the police or go to the village and ask around? But we’d almost reached the garden gate. There was no harm in looking, we said to ourselves. Almost immediately after that we heard the soothing sound of a rake followed by the clunk of some stones dropping into something. We ran to the gate and looked through the bars. We rubbed our eyes incredulously. It was impossible. How could the three of us be seeing the same thing?