That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.
So close to freedom.
She doesn’t want to sleep. She believes it’s better to be awake, to keep the tension calmly within her, but she drifts off. She doesn’t know exactly when her eyes close. Well, that’s the proof she’s relaxed. Very relaxed. So relaxed she dreams of happy things, her house, her children. No agitation. Nothing startling. More than surprising, this is all extraordinary. When she wakes up, she finds the first light of day entering her window.
She goes to the master bedroom first.
The wife, Mrs. Laia, is there just like always, lying on her back, with her face mask and one of her silk robes covering her cold body. Her husband, however, must have felt sick because his body is half on the bed, half on the floor, as if he tried to get down or crawl after the life that was escaping from him. His expression is bitter.
Painful.
Felipa looks at him for a while without moving a muscle.
She doesn’t feel a thing.
Nothing.
She goes back to the wife and spits on her. Oh yes.
Then she goes to Miss Vanesa’s room.
And then to Master Pelayo’s.
The girl evidently felt the pain too. She lies on the floor, on her stomach, her hand hooked, a nail chipped. But the boy, just like his mother, seems to be sleeping, seraphic, innocent.
An innocent devil.
Convinced she’s got nothing to fear now, she goes back to the master bedroom and takes some clothes suitable for herself and her mother. She leaves the jewels. She prefers money, the large sum of dirty money hidden in the office. And she doesn’t even grab it all. She doesn’t want to arouse suspicion at the airport. She takes just what she needs to start anew. With the clothes in a bag belonging to the couple, she returns to the children’s rooms and picks through their closets.
The last thing she does before leaving is look out at Turó Parc, the poet Eduard Marquina’s gardens.
This she will miss.
It’s undoubtedly the prettiest park in Barcelona.
She exits the building without anyone seeing her, not even Tomás, the superintendent, who at that time of the day is having his sandwich, away from prying eyes, down in his hideout in the basement. She hails a cab and the driver helps her with her three bags. Destination: the airport.
Felipa Quijano Quilez looks for the last time at the park, at the city to which she’ll only come back if God, in his infinite goodness, wills it. Her face shows no emotion. She doesn’t feel guilty either. In her country, they kill pigs in less pious ways. The only thing she knows, and this certainty increases by the minute, is that she is free.
Free.
For the first time in a long while, there’s a hint of a smile on her face when she sees the airport in the distance.
There’s no problem buying the ticket. There never is if you’re traveling first class. Like a lady. She waits in a comfortable VIP lounge where there’s no lack of anything. And in no time, she’ll be flying back home, to her mother and children.
At long last.
Life isn’t always unfair.
Fucked, yes. Unfair, no. It depends on the person.
She finally laughs when the plane takes off, almost two hours later.
She doesn’t know whether the Philippines has an extradition treaty with Spain, but she doubts very much that they’ll find her in the mountains west of Kabugao, no matter how hard they look.
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
BY IMMA MONSÓ
L’Eixample
Translated from Catalan by Valerie Miles
Don’t you ever just let your mind wander?” her husband had asked when they first met. “Wander? Where to?” she said, surprised. He fell in love with her that very instant. He had been married for years to a perennially dissatisfied woman and had come to think it was a trait shared by all females. When he met Onia, it was hard for him to believe he had been wrong. Onia never said things like If only we would do such and such, and even less: If only we had done such and such. He could count on his fingers the times that Onia had begun a sentence with the words if or maybe.
They’d never had any children because she couldn’t imagine herself as a mother. And because most of the things attached to childhood seemed to her both foolish and silly. She had never believed for a moment that the three Kings came from the East bearing gifts. She had only ever cared to watch the feet of the Gegants*, and from a very early age she had wondered how much they paid someone to wear them and how heavy they were. When she was asked to write things at school she found it an impossible task. Reading stories with even the slightest dose of fantasy was like torture for her.
“I’ll tell stories to the children myself,” her husband would say, since he had wanted to become a father. “But I just can’t imagine what a child of ours would be like,” she’d respond. He was a silver importer; every two years he travelled to Zacatecas, Mexico, and came back overwhelmed by the poverty and the orphaned children there. A friend of his had taken a few of them in so they wouldn’t die of hunger. It was 1980, during the time when Cervantes Corona couldn’t finish his gubernatorial acceptance speech because his voice had broken with emotion at the state of desolation in which his predecessor had left the region. His friend’s wife told him the children needed a family. They were able to provide food and shelter, as if the kids were abandoned kittens, but that wasn’t enough. And so one day, when they were already well into their forties, he said to Onia: “If you can’t imagine a child of our own, then you no longer need to. She already exists.” He told her about the children of Zacatecas, the mining orphans: “Any one of them, or more than one.” Each time he came back from one of his trips to Mexico he told her about the starving children. She had a hard time getting her head around the idea, but since she had no real imagination, she couldn’t find a pretext to oppose it. So she acquiesced. Living with her was easy, everything was so overwhelmingly logical.
They lived in L’Eixample and so they thought they should look for a quieter neighborhood for a child—or even better, a house in the country near Lleida, where Onia was born. But the task of finding the house of their dreams fell to her husband, as she didn’t do such a thing as have dreams. In Sitges: “It has an enormous rooftop terrace with views of both the sea and a pine forest.” When they went to see it together, the art nouveau details weren’t much to her liking. But the views were very nice and it was basically fine with her. They put their apartment in L’Eixample up for sale.
The week they were supposed to sign the mortgage contract, she found a job that allowed her to put her accounting studies to good use. It was a well-paid job near their home, for a pest control company. It put a stop to their plans: they couldn’t go live in Sitges if her job was in Barcelona. At that time it was still a long commute. So they put off their plans to move indefinitely. As time went by, they also dropped the subject of adopting. So they stayed in L’Eixample and didn’t act on the one and only big decision that could have changed the course of their lives.
It took him a long time to give up the dreams he had built around the house and child. For the first time, he was seriously bothered by the fact that she didn’t have any dreams of her own, that her feet were so firmly planted on the ground. But when he would reflect on the horrible life he had shared with his ex-wife, he would go back to admiring Onia. What incredible common sense she has, he often thought. One time he asked her: “I already know that you never daydream, but what about when you sleep?” She told him that she rarely remembered a dream. And when she remembered anything, it was entirely uninteresting; fumigating fleas, adding up invoices, retying her scarf. To her, not dreaming at all and dreaming such things were one and the same.
Thirty years went by after the decision that was never made. This year Onia would turn seventy-nine. She had no regrets and thought very little about the past. She had just remodeled her dining room, which opened out on the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Passatg
e de la Concepció. It had previously remained closed. Now she spent her days there, as she could no longer walk around without help and so tended to go out very little. Despite the fact that she’d just bought herself a brand-new wheelchair. “The Ferrari of wheelchairs!” the salesman exclaimed. “Just imagine all the things you can do now!” She shot him a stern look and replied, “Why, imagine it yourself, young man.”
One afternoon, and quite unexpectedly, Onia felt as though there was something missing inside of her, like there was a great big hole in her life. She had never really noticed this empty space before, and if she hadn’t lived for so many years, she would have died without ever feeling it. But that afternoon, all of a sudden, perhaps because she now had unlimited free time (she couldn’t imagine that she’d actually die one day), she decided for the first time ever to follow her teacher’s advice, the one who had made her write about trees with secret doorways and daisies that zoomed away from their flowerpots on rollerskates. She was never able to just come up with these sorts of things, and so the teacher used to tell her: “Start with reality and then go beyond it. Change it, distort it, don’t write things as they are, but as they could be, or as they could have been.”
So she started that very afternoon. She sat down in front of the window that looked out over Passatge de la Concepció, not over Passeig de Gràcia, which she loathed because it was so lit up and conspicuous. Luxury stores, tourists, colors, everything en masse and uncontrolled. In the Passatge, however, things were less hectic. There were only a few stores. From her window she saw the corner façade of Santa Eulalia; customers went in through the doors that open onto Passeig de Gràcia, so there wasn’t much of interest to observe there. She could also see the restaurant Tragaluz, where celebrities often showed up with their court of paparazzi. But Onia didn’t think this would do much to stimulate her thoughts and set them wandering. In any case, the restaurant was closed in the afternoon, which was when Onia spent time looking out her window. There was a small store between Tragaluz and Santa Eulalia which sold sweaters. It had belonged to her husband until he passed away six years earlier and she had decided to sell it. Shortly afterward they opened Tot Cashmere, which is still there today.
She sat down at three o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t move from her spot. The method consisted in watching any person who entered the Passatge and trying to imagine their name, their job, their family, their origin, and their future. She tried with more than twenty people but nothing occurred to her. It’s supposed to be quite easy, something a five-year-old can do. But no, not for her. She just couldn’t see herself doing these asinine things. At five-thirty she decided to give herself one last shot. A tall woman with a long black braid and sunglasses turned the corner from Passeig de Gràcia and entered the Passatge. Onia tried to imagine which one of the stores the braided woman would enter. She had stopped in front of the show window of Santa Eulalia: Onia had a few extra moments to call up her fantasy, but the woman walked into the sweater shop. Onia didn’t give up hope. Since the woman would be in the shop for a bit, she had some time to make up her story: Who is she? Where does she live? When will she come out? What will she buy? Why? Where will she go when she comes out?
Twenty minutes went by and Onia still couldn’t find any answers to these questions … She searched for a way to open her mind with visions of this unknown woman’s immediate future, but she couldn’t do it … When over an hour had passed, the woman with the braid had still not come back out. This fact alone would have given anyone else plenty to imagine. But Onia simply felt surprised. She had stopped trying to stimulate her imagination twenty minutes earlier. She didn’t feel like fantasizing: now all she wanted was for the woman to come out.
Cristina’s voice called from the kitchen: “It’s eight-thirty, do you want me to make supper now or wait until later?” Onia didn’t answer her, she was suddenly feeling extremely curious. She knew the shop space very well—it was tiny and there was no other exit. The sales clerk had turned out the lights and was preparing to leave, alone, peering at herself in the window. Cristina walked into the dining room to ask the question again. “I’ll have supper later,” Onia said distractedly. But then she turned to the girl and asked, “Could you do me a small favor, dear? Would you go down to Tot Cashmere and see if there is a woman with a black braid inside? Go quickly because the sales clerk is closing up.” Cristina, who immediately imagined a dozen motives for such a strange request, hurried down the stairs two-by-two, crossed the Passatge as fast as she could, and reached the store just as the sales clerk began lowering the metal security grille. Onia saw the two women talking, and the clerk immediately raised the grille again, opened the door, and they both went into the store. Ten minutes later, the two of them came back out and closed up the shop.
“There was nobody inside,” Cristina said.
“Then how did you convince her to open the door again after she had already closed it?” Onia asked.
“We used to greet each other when I was working in the café next to the store … so I told her that I needed a green sweater to match a purple skirt with green trim to wear to a party tonight where I’ll see some old school friends—”
Onia interrupted her: “You could simply have told her that I asked you to check something for me, you didn’t have to go into so much detail.”
“But it isn’t true, I don’t have a purple skirt with green trim or anything like it, I just thought it would be more believable than if I told her that you had asked me to go running down and stick my nose into her business.”
Onia grew impatient: “Did you check to see if there was another door? Maybe they remodeled the interior …”
“I checked everything,” Cristina said. “I didn’t see a single door. Why?”
Onia took a deep breath and told her the truth: “A woman went in two hours ago and never came out.”
Cristina’s face went blank. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think your imagination is playing tricks on you,” she said. Onia didn’t take it the wrong way. But neither did she take it well. She’d clearly never had an imagination. Her sight or her memory could trick her, yes … she was seventy-eight years old. But no doctor had ever mentioned any such problem, and since nobody had ever mentioned one, she couldn’t imagine there being one. The next day she continued watching the store and she saw two more disappearances. After a few more days, she was absolutely sure there were some people who had walked into the store and never walked out.
“What do you know about the sales clerk in Tot Cashmere?” she asked Cristina.
“Not very much. I know she works during the day, and then in the evening she takes care of her son who is in a wheelchair and who doesn’t like to leave the house. She came from Mexico years ago and began working in the store when she finally got her papers. The son is seventeen, I think. He didn’t come around very often when I worked in the café. She complained often about having problems paying her bills.”
Onia didn’t know what to think. She didn’t have the resources to judge the story: she never went to see thrillers or read mystery novels. She never read science fiction, didn’t believe in ghosts, and had never been interested in people who disappeared, except for the real cases she heard on the news. It was still very hard for her to believe what she had seen. So one afternoon she grabbed a paper and pencil: she counted the people going in, and when they came out she crossed them off the list. By evening she realized that there was something still stranger yet: not only did some of the people who went in never come back out, but some of the people who came out had never entered in the first place. Contrary to what she had suspected, more shoppers had come out than had gone in.
Since she had no fictional references to help her unravel the strings of the story, the next day she decided to go see the sales clerk herself and ask questions point-blank. She went straight into the store and without beating around the bush declared: “I am an old woman who is overwhelmed with curiosity.”
The store attendant said: “What do you need?”
Onia explained everything she had seen through the window, and for reasons she couldn’t quite understand, the clerk was effusively kind and attentive in a way that seemed entirely out of place.
Finally, she responded: “I know you will keep my secret.”
And Onia answered: “You can be sure of it. I am as silent as a grave.” The young woman pushed the wheelchair to a spot behind a stack of pashminas. Onia could see into the dressing room through a tear in the curtain. Not even a minute later, she heard the happy sound of a door opening and her heart began to beat quickly.
A middle-aged woman with red hair asked for a cobaltblue cashmere sweater. The clerk went straight to the shelf and took down a very large green garment.
The customer said: “I think it’s too small.” The clerk looked her straight in the eyes and said: “No.”
But the woman responded: “Don’t you know that the customer is always right?”
Then the clerk grabbed a cobalt-blue sweater from another shelf. It was very silky, with a high neck, and was as ample as the first one. The woman brought it to the dressing room while the clerk locked the front door. Through the tear, Onia saw her arms search out the sleeves with a little difficulty, and for a minute that felt like an eternity, she watched as the woman appeared to be choking inside the sweater. From behind the pashminas, Onia could hear her breathing hard and saw that her head still hadn’t appeared through the collar. So that’s it. They suffocate to death inside the clothing. But then what happens? she thought.
Finally, a shock of red hair shot through the wool neck. The hair was dry and discolored. Then a piece of yellowed parchment emerged, which turned out to be an ear. Suddenly the whole head emerged, an aged head, followed by a second one. Two heads. And two bodies. Twins. Old twins.
The two women finished removing the sweater and smiled at the clerk. One of them approached the cash register and signed a check. The clerk put the check in the register but kept the sweater. Onia watched as one old woman put her checkbook away, while her twin left the store, moving aside for a young man coming in to buy a scarf. When the young man exited the store, Onia came out of her hiding place.
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