There he was at the bottom of the garden, raking the ground and piling up stones in a wheelbarrow. He was wearing the old felt hat we had given him years ago and the leather jacket that he had bought himself when he began taking more care with his appearance and started looking younger. There he was, bent over the stony ground, completely absorbed in what he was doing. He had just taken a hanky out of his pocket and wiped his face with it. It was a grim moment in which the hanky wiped away everything we had believed up until then, about our lives and his. Above all, it was as if time had stood still and we might have believed anything. Had we just entered a time warp? Was what we thought we were seeing actually happening or was it just a memory or the ghost of a memory? Unless it was a game, a joke, a trap. In short, a trick. Who had thought up that comedy of appearances? Why? Suddenly, as if he felt he was being watched, he put the hanky back in his pocket, turned towards the gate and looked at us in surprise. It was only then that we realized he was a complete stranger.
He walked purposefully towards us with a hint of suspicion in his eyes. His complexion was similar to our father’s and he was wearing his clothes, but there any similarity ended. He was rugged with weatherbeaten skin, and the sun and the wind had left their mark on his face. He carried on looking at us suspiciously, perhaps because of the image we presented at the gate: three young women grasping the bars and studying him in silence. Before he could say a word, we asked him about Barbro.
‘The foreigner? She doesn’t live here any more.’
We introduced ourselves. He shrugged. He didn’t know that our father existed and so knew nothing about his death. He had only seen the foreign lady once. It was the day she left the house, and he’d helped her to load piles of suitcases into the car. We insisted. He shrugged again. He knew even less about the new owners. All he knew was that they were foreigners, too, and they’d asked him to tidy up this terrible garden as much as possible. They’d done it through an estate agent, the same one that the foreign lady had used to sell the house. And that’s what he was doing, tidying up all these stones and making it presentable. And if there was nothing else …
We didn’t even need to look at each other.
‘Where did you get the leather jacket from?’ one of us said, pointing a finger at him.
It was a decisive event, an accurate shot, a question that reverberated through the air like the aftermath of an explosion. He looked at the three of us, one at a time. There was no longer any suspicion in his eyes, just a mixture of confusion and embarrassment.
‘The lady gave it to me,’ he said eventually. But he didn’t seem really sure about it. ‘Well, she asked me to throw away everything in the shed.’ There was still silence. ‘Papers, boxes, old clothes, useless things.’ He opened the gate for us and pointed out a small wooden construction. The famous bungalow? ‘I haven’t thrown anything away yet.’
An hour later we left the garden. We would never return. It was a garden full of stones and weeds, the earth cracked through lack of water. It was a garden in which lies had been sown, and it was quite implausible that a rosebush had ever grown there.
We’re getting caught up in the details again. It would have been better to have started at the end, stopped beating about the bush and talked about the shed straight away. But we haven’t seen each other for ages, and perhaps that’s why we need to remember, establish the sequence of events and give the circumstances the role they had at the time. Fate, for example. Fate that was beside us from the very beginning, propelling us towards the house at that exact time. The same fate that made the gardener wear our father’s jacket and foisted his old hat on him. In short, fate made us turn up on that day when a man dressed as our father was tidying up the garden and the ‘useless things’ in the shed still hadn’t been thrown out.
It’s odd that the three of us remember that stranger with something approaching affection. He seems like a borrowed character, someone from a different story, someone sent by destiny to dispel doubts, to save us paperwork and put an end once and for all to a nightmare that had lasted too long. ‘That’s everything there is … Help yourselves.’ Because that was exactly what there was: papers, boxes, old clothes. They were things that would probably be useless to anyone who wasn’t us: forgotten photograph albums; files full of correspondence; documents we might need one day; and, in among all the papers, unexpectedly, there were the title deeds to a cemetery plot in which Mum and our grandparents are buried. The family plot. This was the latest snub, which sent us back to that distant day when certain photographs were yanked out of their frames and piled up any old how on the shelves in an office. But this time none of us bothered to ask, ‘Why didn’t she let us know? It wouldn’t have cost her anything.’ Neither would we bring to the table long-winded explanations about a fictitious rose bed or the amazing care, according to the one and only version, our father constantly gave the rosebushes. ‘Bloody liar’ was the heartfelt compliment we paid her. And it was the only one. We stopped there. Let no one think of calling her ‘sick’, let alone ‘mad’. You feel sorry for sick people, and you forgive mad people in the end. There was nothing further from our minds than feeling sorry for her and nothing more ridiculous than to think, even for a few seconds, of forgiving her. Forgetting all about her, that was another thing. Forgetting about her as soon as possible, wherever she was. Whether she was constantly travelling, going back to where she came from or setting up in some other country to cause more havoc. We condemned her to obscurity, to the most complete silence, as if she were dead and buried. We managed to do it, too. We managed it for six and a half years. A little bit of everything happened during those years. We fell in love, there were weddings, separations, divorces and more weddings. During those years one of us moved to a different city, another to a different country. They were years during which we never bothered to remember plots and affronts. Nor, from a distance, did we try to discover the reasons for such inexplicable behaviour. Not until this very morning, the first Christmas we have decided to spend together after a long time, has her name been heard. Like a sonic boom. Barbro, at the most unexpected time, has insisted on showing signs of life – or, to be more precise, signs of death.
We don’t really know how these things work. We don’t know if the door will open to reveal a stretcher with a body covered with a sheet or if we will have to go into a room full of boxes identified by letters or numbers. We’ve seen it in the films. There are these gigantic drawers the attendants pull out in front of members of the family or friends who say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Sometimes they also scream or faint. If we are allowed a choice we would prefer them to bring the body here – although ‘prefer’ really isn’t the right word. We don’t prefer anything. But of the two options we think the second one is worse: a whole archive of dead people, perfectly classified and numbered and bitterly cold. Even in the cinema the cold emanates from the screen and freezes the audience.
Neither do we know exactly what happened. Perhaps they’ll tell us or perhaps they won’t. The only thing we do know is that there is a body and it could be Barbro and that we are here for two possible outcomes: either to identify her positively or to state that we don’t recognize the body. The fact that they need us here means that they’re not sure, we think. They’re not sure about one possibility or the other. They weren’t very clear on the telephone this morning. There had been a multiple accident, a mix-up of documents and it was absolutely essential that we came here this afternoon. They didn’t use the word ‘morgue’ but rather ‘Institute of Forensic Medicine’. They’ve taken us so much by surprise that we haven’t been able to ask about certain points that are intriguing us now. The first is how they have found us so quickly and the second is what happens in a routine identification. Will they let us stay together all the time, or will we have to go through the ordeal separately? These details are probably not in the least bit important. We are here, and that’s all that counts. If we are here it is down to her. It is because of Barbro, because of the w
oman we’d naïvely buried in our memories.
But, as we are seeing now, the memory isn’t a high-security tomb. Merely mentioning her name has unearthed images that are more graphic than ever. And, once again, we’ve begun to feel angry, indignant and powerless. We thought we’d left these emotions behind, and it’s only now that we’re able to find the explanation for them that escaped us at the time. Barbro never committed a crime against us that was punishable by law. But she did ridicule the person we loved more than anyone; she invaded our territory; she stole our best memories; she made fun of everything we respected; and she treated us with utter contempt. And now – a leopard can’t change its spots – she’s reappeared at the most unexpected time, and she’s not prepared to spare us a single thing. Not even the final thing – her corpse.
The word ‘corpse’ sounds strange within these four walls. It sounds strange because it sounds familiar. Here, there are only mortal remains, lifeless bodies with no histories, waiting for an employee to pull open the drawers to show them to the visitors, and then, with a bit of luck, perhaps they can recover their lost individuality. The awful moment, the posthumous gift from the woman our father called Love, still hasn’t come around, her final wishes – the pleasure of spoiling things from beyond the grave. We suddenly exchange glances, and there’s a flash in our eyes. We don’t say a word and can only smile. We know what this means. That flash is an old friend. The first time it appeared, a long time ago, was in the bar on the corner where we used to go every day to drown our sorrows and thrash out ideas. And just like back then, like the day we ended up brandishing the title deeds to a home taken by assault, that flash is telling us ‘Danger! Wipe that thought from your minds! Forget about it!’ But we’re too quick. We understand each other almost without saying a word. We don’t need words to understand that this time Barbro (whether the body is hers or not) won’t get her own way or that we won’t have to go through a rough time. It all seems so simple now. How reassuring. We must have realized it before we even came into this room where we’ve been waiting for the best part of an hour. We realized it without realizing that we realized it. That happens a lot. That’s why as soon as we arrived we invoked scenes from the past – or, rather, certain moments suddenly took root in our minds to show us which path to follow. And here is the path. It’s sharp and clear. We don’t care about anything else. What happens to the bodies that no one can identify? Are they buried in a common grave? Or is that now outdated and they are given a pauper’s funeral as in many other countries? A grave with no inscription? A modest burial niche with a blank tombstone in some sunny cemetery … in the South?
We’ve already mentioned that we don’t know how these things work, and neither do we care too much. The fact is that we’re not thinking about our Mum and her sweet memory nor about our previous wish for justice – or at least an apology. We’re not even thinking about our father. We’re simply thinking about ourselves. And about her. For the first time ever she and the three of us seem quite similar. Who would have thought it? Technically, no one can accuse her of having committed any crime. And, for our part, no one will be able to claim we have lied. Because we will not lie. We will not need to falsify anything. We’ll be asked if we recognize the body lying on the stretcher, and we’ll say ‘No’. It will be the plain unvarnished truth. It doesn’t much matter which of us three it was who one summer’s day discovered the skill that we quickly turned into an art. We’ll be here without really being here once again. We’ll look without seeing. And now, as the door with the ‘NO ENTRY’ sign finally begins to open, we get up and don’t say a word. But we’re already looking with unseeing eyes, and repeating the same words silently to ourselves ‘dead cat, dead cat, dead cat’.
A Fresh Start
She had decided to make a fresh start. She had to make a fresh start. And as soon as she arrived at the small apartment-hotel, chosen at random and booked in Barcelona through a travel agent, she thought it was the ideal place to allow her to stop wondering ‘How do I go about it?’, ‘Where do I begin?’, ‘What’s the recipe for starting a new life?’ The room was large and bright. There was a kitchenette, a big bed and the bathroom had everything she needed. There was a sofa, armchairs, a dressing-table attached to the wall and a large window looking out on to Gran Vía. The fact that there hadn’t been a single room available for these particular dates at her usual hotel in the Paseo del Prado, the one she always went to, had been a stroke of luck. The same thing had happened with all the other alternatives she resorted to whenever her usual hotel told her on the telephone, ‘I’m very sorry. We’re full up.’ Something had to be going on in Madrid during those first few days of spring – a particularly important conference, trade fair or symposium. Now she was glued to the window, protecting her eyes from the sun behind dark glasses and watching the activity in the street, fascinated. It was as if she were watching a silent film with a huge budget. There were thousands of extras, all the colours of the rainbow and lots of action. Some of the actors were trying to attract more attention and play a bigger role. She had seen one stylish passer-by cross the road at least four or five times. Where on earth was that man going – if indeed he was going anywhere? She moved away from the window and opened her suitcase. Two nights. She would be there only for two nights. But perhaps she would stay longer another time, for a week or a month. She turned on the television and put on the music channel. Then she switched on the air conditioning. For a minute she thought this really was her usual hotel and felt a hankering for what she had lost a long time ago – the urge to read, write, turn the dressing-table into a writing-desk, cook, stock up the fridge, go to the theatre and the cinema. More than anything, she wanted to come back. She wanted to come back to that bright room every evening, and, given the choice, she wouldn’t change a thing. It was hers. She had been given a room that belonged to her.
She looked at the key. Room 404. She had liked the number straight away. Four plus four equals eight. The symbol for infinity, she remembered, is a figure 8 on its side. An isolated zero, she thought, in principle has no value. It’s nothing. Or perhaps it is something. Perhaps it’s not a number but actually a letter. An O for oxygen, for example. She took a deep breath and turned off the television, the music channel and the air conditioning. Then her mind went back to the figure 8, to the key she was still holding in her hand. Four plus four equals eight. Eight months had already passed since he had gone. Eight months that time hadn’t measured in the usual way. Sometimes those eight months seemed like an eternity, just like the figure 8 on its side. And sometimes they simply seemed like smoke-rings jauntily colliding in the air between puffs on a cigarette. That’s what her eight months had been like – interminable and empty.
She went out, and now she was part of the film, too. She was one more extra, one among many thousands. Perhaps at that very moment someone from a double-glazed window, from a sound proofed room in some hotel, was watching her among the crowd. She liked the thought that whoever was watching her – whether it was a man or a woman – would suddenly feel strangely relaxed and happy, just like she did now. She walked down Gran Vía and thought how lucky she was – the room, such a beautiful day, wanting to get down to work again, to start living again. She had barely walked a block when she stopped in a square. She was surprised that what she thought was a square actually had a street name, calle de la Flor Baja. But that morning wasn’t like any other. She’d decided that it wouldn’t be like any other. She sat down at a table outside a bar, opened her diary and wrote ‘Flor Baja’.
She ordered a beer. She was sure she would never go back to the old hotel in Paseo del Prado. ‘Flor Baja’ could very well be the starting point for a new itinerary. She would have new interests, start new habits, and perhaps her new life was beginning just at that very moment. She looked through her diary. She had arranged to have dinner with a friend that evening and had to go to an office to sort out some paperwork the next day. Suddenly the very idea of the dinner felt like torture,
and it seemed as if the paperwork had just been a pretext to spend a few days in Madrid and have a change of atmosphere. She wrote down, ‘Cancel dinner and send documents by post.’ She looked at the things she had written down on previous days. There were sayings, suggestions, reminders to be optimistic and how to behave. She smiled as she noticed that in a fit of fury she had ended up striking them all out for being useless. Only two of them had escaped the carnage: ‘Live for the day’ and Einstein’s words of condolence to a friend’s widow, ‘Your husband has departed this world a little ahead of me, but you know that for me, as a physicist, neither the present nor the past exist.’ She couldn’t remember the friend’s name or his wife’s, but she did remember how many times she had read those words in amazement, as if they were meant exclusively for her. The past, the present … of course the past existed. The only problem lay in what exactly the past was. Sometimes it insisted on disguising itself as the present. Voices, laughter, whole sentences often made her turn around hopefully in a cinema or in the middle of the street. Just as they would make her toss and turn anxiously when waking up from a dream. But now… she called the waiter over and quickly paid for the beer and didn’t wait for the change. What was happening now?
She had just seen him. Him. The man who had left this world almost eight months earlier. The man with whom she had shared her whole life. He was wearing an old beige jacket. That beige corduroy jacket! He was absent-mindedly crossing the square in the middle of the calle de la Flor Baja. She followed him cautiously. She was right. Although the similarity was remarkable, she knew it could only be an illusion. But that morning, she’d decided, wasn’t like any other. She’d felt that immediately, as soon as she’d walked into room 404 and felt it was hers. It was a morning unlike any other, and he was now walking down Gran Vía, and she was following in his footsteps like a shadow at a sensible distance. A few seconds later he stopped at a news-stand. She saw him hand over a few coins and pick up a packet of cigarettes, and then he moved off again. No, she said to herself, that’s not possible. He gave up smoking years ago. Although ‘neither the present nor the past exist’, she remembered, and it was only then that she thought she understood the reason she’d once written down that sentence to which she repeatedly returned. Perhaps in her new life she would do nothing more than follow any stranger who looked like him. She had no time to feel sorry for herself, to turn around or even to realize that she was behaving like a madwoman. He, whoever he was, had suddenly turned around as if her eyes were burning into the back of his head, and she had no option but to hide in a doorway. She was quick. He didn’t see her. But the look on the doorman’s face made her realize that she was acting ridiculously. Or was she? She told herself that she wasn’t. What was wrong with following someone you love? The man who, defying all the laws of the universe, had reappeared in Madrid in the full light of day one sunny morning delightfully confounding his own past.
Nona's Room Page 8