“I’m surprised, I heard rumors but I didn’t believe they were true.”
“Now you understand my father and my grandfather’s reluctance to get involved. But survival was more important then than pride or loyalties, so my father and two cousins acted as fronts for the duration of the war.”
“Incredible! But let’s go back to Anna Brawner. Tell me, Mr. Cánovas, did she ever threaten you in any way?”
“No.”
“Do you know if she ever threatened either of the other two businesses?”
“Not that I know of, but I’d be surprised if she had. Whenever we were going through rough periods, she was the first to relieve us of the responsibility to pay until we were back on our feet.”
Teresa Puig-Grau nods her head before addressing Gómez Triadó. “We both went to the German School, inspector. Anna was my friend until she discovered what her father had done. He was dead but she lived with her in-laws. It had been months since the birth of the twins—”
The inspector interrupts to make sure he heard right. “Excuse me, did you say twins?”
“Yes, identical twins. They weren’t even a year old when Anna discovered, amid her father’s papers, a list of the Jews that her father had turned over to the Gestapo and the SD. The real tragedy was that her husband’s four brothers were on that list. That’s when I saw her for the last time, when she asked me to meet her at the Samoa. She was completely destroyed. Her father was not only a traitor to his race but also the man who’d turned in her in-laws. She decided to disappear. I tried to persuade her, convince her she had nothing to do with any of it, but it was useless. Anna had always been a woman with very particular ideas about morality, about religion. She never spoke about her German origins, or about her Jewish heritage. She had created a lifestyle for herself, in her own way, and she followed its rules obsessively. I couldn’t do a thing. And I never saw her again.”
I know that he killed my mother, our mother. It’s still the dead of night and the rain is trying to wash the air. He walks ahead of me, under an umbrella. He isn’t out for a meal and instead heads directly to La Palla Street, where he tries to hide at Zimmerman Antiquities, the store owned by his grandfather, my grandfather. He flees because he feels accosted. He reads my mind and finds a vengeful anxiety just as I read his for rage and pain. I want him to die the way he killed my mother, his mother. When I arrive, he has lowered the store’s metal door and I know it won’t open again until ten. I make my way to a tiny café with only five bar stools. There’s barely any light, which is probably a tactic to hide the stuff on the floor, which sticks to my shoes, and the greasy gumminess of the bar itself, where I only dare to place my elbows. At first, I’m all alone. I order an expresso with a drop of milk, which I drink in small sips as I contemplate, through the glass, a few folks enveloped in shadows walking hurriedly toward their destinations. Slowly, the pedestrians begin to change and now they’re kids on their way to school, alone or with their mothers. A ray of light cuts through the bar’s window and bits of dust, robbed of their privacy, worry their way to the floor, the furniture, my shoes. My stomach demands solid food and I’m amazed I can still be hungry. I think about my mother and the question hits me again: why did she pick me? I could have been that other one, now tormented, filled with anger toward her and the chosen one. How could she do that? Make a choice! Condemn one of us to live in a world of absences, passed over, cornered, secret.
It’s ten o’clock now. I get up, dropping a fifty-peseta coin on the bar. I wait for my change. When I go out to the street, the sun has completely taken over the alleys between the buildings.
I feel stupid with empty bags in my pocket. I bought them at the gas station yesterday. They’re wide, made of thick plastic, and very manageable. I tremble a little and have to remember my hate in order to regain some strength. I’ve never gone inside the store though I’ve passed it without even a glance; it’s still dark, he hasn’t turned on the lights. When I open the door, a sound like a bell goes off and announces my presence. Then there’s silence. I move inside with short steps, cautious; I have to calm down, every shadow cast by the furniture frightens me; I think of my dead mother to firm up my pulse. I grab one of the plastic bags in my fist. Suddenly, the lights come on and the brightness blinds me. I glimpse the figure of the old man who attended the funeral, my grandfather. He walks by some old cretonne curtains and stands in front of me, quietly, impassive, looking at what I can’t see because I’m hypnotized before him.
The pressure of the plastic on my face and a quick jerk to cut my oxygen make my hands fly to my neck to free myself; I lose a few seconds before realizing all I really have to do is pierce the bag, but I don’t have time to do it, my grandfather immobilizes me, circling me under his arms with the kind of strength produced only by hate or love. As he squeezes, he whispers in my ear a lullaby my mother used to sing: “Mama sings you the loveliest song / you were born at night, like the stars …” I try with all my might to get him off me. “I love you, my son / my sweet light / you’re the prettiest star in the sky.” When I’m just about loose, my brother kicks me and I drop to the ground. Pain races to my head and is transformed into a violent scream full of impotence and rage.
I remain inert and I hear my grandfather cry. There’s barely any air left in my lungs and I can’t distinguish anything through the plastic, just a milky fog that vanishes when I close my eyes.
THE PREDATOR
BY SANTIAGO RONCAGLIOLO
Barri Gòtic
At thirty-nine years of age, Carmen was resigned to her loneliness. She wasn’t pretty but she wasn’t ugly either, and averageness extended to every part of her life: neither rich nor poor, neither dumb nor exceptional. Carmen had such normal attributes—so few attributes—that she blamed her lack of having a partner on her demanding temperament and on luck. Not necessarily bad luck. Just her luck.
It’s also not like she was a spinster or a prude. She’d had partners throughout her adult life. Some were quite pleasant. At the very least, they were steady. Most of her relationships had wasted away over time, and those that survived for several years tended to vanish when it came time to take the next step to marriage or parenthood. It wasn’t, like her mother said with malice, that men refused to get married. It was actually Carmen who could rarely seem to make the commitment beyond six or seven weekends. She understood that she’d rather carry her tedium alone than share it. And if her sheets were cold, she preferred a hot water bottle to a tepid companion as a solution.
Anyway, to fill up her immediate world, she had her officemates. Carmen worked near Comercio Street in a travel agency. The biggest part of her job wasn’t to send people out into the world, but to organize the tourists—each time more numerous—who came to visit Barcelona. In a way, the agency was not a starting point but rather a finish line, the last stop, which was underscored by its physical location: lost in the tangled alleys of Born, boxed into a dead end, under a vaguely ancient archway, practically invisible to the pedestrians; the office seemed like an enchanted cave in a forest.
The advantage in this was that clients tended not to even come to the office, which created a certain closeness among the staff. Carmen’s four colleagues—Dani, Milena, Lucía, and Jaime—had established a warm camaraderie that was respectful of each others’ private lives and allowed them to share their joys while avoiding intimacies. So when Milena’s mother died, they all went to the funeral to be with her. And when Jaime got pneumonia, they all took turns bringing him soup at home. But when Carmen found out she had cysts that were affecting her kidney, she didn’t want to bother anybody with her medical problems. And when her last boyfriend left her—Carmen remembered him well because he really hurt her when he split—she spent days locked in the bathroom crying, but never got it off her chest with her colleagues. She didn’t even tell Daniel, the gay one, with whom she shared the most confidences. Carmen knew she could count on his support for small things but she was afraid that if she asked or need
ed more, it would cross the delicate line from collegiality to emotional blackmail.
The personal calendar at the office included festive events of which the most important were birthdays. Five times a year, after closing time, the group celebrated one of its members’ birthdays. They would collect money among themselves so they could offer the honored one a significant gift, usually a bottle of fine perfume or cologne. And they blew out the candles on the cake, although since the girls were always on diets, the chocolate cakes had been reduced to muffins and coffee. Each time, these ceremonies included the retelling of the same jokes and, though it wasn’t an orgy of fun, Carmen enjoyed them: she loved the certainty of small everyday rituals which made life easy to manage, free of surprises.
When she turned forty, the day coincided with Barcelona’s Carnival and someone in the office—maybe Lucía, who could be a little over-the-top sometimes—had suggested dressing up in costumes and going out on the streets together, barhopping. Carmen thought Carnival was colorful and she’d been to it several years ago, but simply to watch, dressed as herself, protected by her normality while surrounded by the most extravagant and ugliest masks. She was willing to do it again on those same terms, with a kind of prophylactic barrier between her and the Carnival, smiling at the clever costumes in the same way she would smile at a spectacle on a stage. But the problem, to her dismay, was that the office staff had announced a surprise, which no doubt included a mandatory costume.
Carmen hated all that: surprises, costumes, and what she called “street madness.” They struck her as childish entertainment wholly inappropriate for responsible adults. But to refuse would have meant introducing an element of confrontation to her secure work environment, and she wasn’t willing to risk the stability of her tiny universe. Plus, to be honest, there really was no Plan B for that night. If she said no, she’d have to eat dinner with her mother. And she would do anything, even go out in the streets dressed as a monster, to avoid dining out with her mother on the night of her birthday.
As long as Carmen could remember, her mother had ruined her birthdays. She was a woman with an extroverted personality, who loved parties and party guests, and who always had a house full of people. As a result, she tried to turn each of her daughter’s birthdays into a great social event for kids. She would move all the furniture out of the living room, buy tons of food and drink, and send out invitations every which way, even to girls who weren’t Carmen’s friends or, worse, who were declared enemies. If Carmen protested, her mother responded by saying that there’s no better place to make friends than a party, and that there couldn’t be too terrible a problem between girls her age anyway.
But Carmen—perhaps precisely as a response to all that—was a retiring and timid girl who would hide out in a corner while the other girls had fun and her mother bantered with the adults. Sometimes, while she tried to make herself invisible, she went from being a hostess to being her guests’ victim. When the more seasoned girls would realize that she wasn’t reacting to any of their verbal provocations, they’d come up with other ways to torment her: they pulled her braids; they shoved her; they laughed at her; they stuck jelly candies on her clothes; they stole her gifts. And later, when her mother approached them, they would pretend that everything was fine and force Carmen to smile and pretend as well. Of course, the first few times Carmen tried to tell her mother, but she just said, “Dear, you have to learn to relax. Your friends are only playing.” With those words, she forced her to play as well. She told Carmen she had to learn to get along.
Since the human world was hostile, Carmen would take refuge in the toy world, especially the world of stuffed animals, which she loved. Her collection included a bear with button eyes, a zebra, a very fat cat, and a cow with a fat pink udder, among many that hung from her walls and filled her closet. Carmen treated these toys like friends. She’d gather them in a circle in the middle of her room and pretend to have tea. She’d let them decide what they wanted to play. She slept with them, and when there were too many to fit with her under the sheets, she’d give them her bed and sleep on the rug. They deserved it; at least they deserved it more than people.
Her favorite was a dark brown little wolf her father had brought her from Germany. She called him Max. When her mother once asked where she’d gotten such a name, Carmen replied, “That’s what he wants to be called.”
In fact, sometimes it seemed that Max the wolf had his own life, and he’d pop up in the most unexpected places: in the kitchen knife drawer, under her parents’ bed, in the tub. At the same time, Carmen seemed to have a lot less of a presence. When she got home from school, she’d lock herself in her room with her stuffed animals and would have to be dragged out for dinner. When there were visitors, even children, Carmen would hide under the bed with her stuffed animals. As each day passed, she seemed to communicate more and more exclusively with them, delegating the role of spy in the outside world to Max.
If she had to communicate with adults, Carmen would do so representing the stuffed animals. She didn’t ask for chocolates for herself, saying instead, “Max wants some.” If she didn’t want to go see her grandmother, she’d offer that the bear or cow was sick as an excuse. (The wolf was the only one with a proper name but he never got sick.) Even in her letters to the Three Wisemen, she only asked for gifts for her stuffed animals. The one she wrote when she was nine years old went like this:
Dear Wisemen,
Please bring a scarf for the bear because he gets cold, and a hat for my giraffe who’s very tall and bumps her head on the ceiling, and a girl wolf for Max because he’d like to have little wolves, thank you.
Her mother was really upset by that letter. For her, there was nothing worse than being condemned to isolation, and the girl was bringing it upon herself. To try and combat it, she took Carmen on excursions to Costa Brava, the volcano at Olot, the steam baths at Montbui. She would add other kids to the trips, as many as possible, until she filled up the family car. When they got to each place, she’d let them out, like a pack of hounds, so they could run all over the grass and hunt bugs—basically, so they could show off that they were full of life. But it was useless when it came to Carmen. The girl behaved with a proper but distant chilliness. She obeyed orders but participated in the games without complaints or enthusiasm, as if she were tackling a school assignment that wasn’t too difficult. And she did this with her mind elsewhere—undoubtedly in her closet full of toys.
For her tenth birthday, her mother decided to try to use shock therapy. She organized the biggest party ever. She rented a local games place for kids and invited more than fifty people, quite a feat considering how few friends her daughter had. She bought the girl a pink dress and spent days teaching her how to look sociable and happy.
The day of the party, Carmen spent all morning consulting her stuffed animals about what to do. She’d gotten so enmeshed with them that their games were real meetings, with debates and turns to speak. That morning, a few of the animals suggested she get ill. Others, Max among them, advised straightforward insubordination: a refusal to attend.
But Carmen couldn’t do that to her mother. She’d seen her running around from one thing to another in preparation for days and knew how much this party meant to her. Besides, Carmen had developed a kind of protective shield that allowed her to function in the outside world in exchange for returning safely to hers, and she didn’t mind using it when necessary. Frankly, that was the safest bet because it guaranteed that, as long as she knew how to behave, nothing would change between her stuffed animals and her. So, against her toys’ wishes, she opted for the most diplomatic solution: she’d go to the party, then come back to her stuffed animal world, to hibernate until her next birthday.
The biggest surprise was that she actually liked the party. Busy with the trampolines and the rides, her guests didn’t torment her, and she was able to get over her fears and play some of the games too. Aware of her love of stuffed animals, and unaware of her mother’s worries, a
few of the guests had given her stuffed animals as gifts: dogs, monkeys, chickens, deer. But, for once, Carmen was more interested in people and was able to have fun with them. That night, she came home with her heart swooning over her discovery of parties and her reconciliation with the world.
But when she went to tell her stuffed animals, they were no longer in her room.
Or in her closet.
Or under her bed.
Carmen looked all over the house. She rummaged through boxes. Peeked under rugs. Called aloud for each of her stuffed animals, especially for Max. Finally, fearing the response she already knew, she asked her mother what had happened to her friends. That’s what she called them, friends, as tears rolled down her cheeks. And her mother’s words hit her like anvils hurled down from the sky.
“You’re too big for such things, dear. It’s time you found other pastimes.”
The day she turned forty, Carmen opened her eyes ten minutes before the alarm and let time ease by until the moment to get up. When she was getting dressed before the mirror, she realized that wrinkles were starting to show on her neck, her armpits, and between her breasts. She felt as though her body came with an expiration date. To celebrate the passage of time with joy struck her as a supremely tasteless custom.
As the day went on, her colleagues behaved with studious normality, which only made Carmen more nervous. Every now and again they exchanged complicit looks amongst themselves and she was tempted to pretend she was getting a chill and just go home for the day. In the afternoon, a client approached to wish her a happy birthday and winked at her. Carmen felt as if the whole city knew, as if she were walking the streets with a sign on her forehead that said: Today I’m a year older.
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