by Dan Rhodes
All day he ran errands, his heart pounding as he braced himself for the moment Madalena came into view. She never did. By the middle of the afternoon his deliveries were over, and he began to worry that she would catch the bus back to the city before he had a chance to talk to her. Feeling as if his whole life had been building up to this moment, he gathered his courage and knocked on her door. Her father invited him in. He knew as well as anyone what the young baker felt in his heart, and he thought it would do his daughter good to be reminded that there were other men out there, and that at least one of them thought the world of her.
He sat at the kitchen table, and waited. He heard muffled voices, then nothing. He looked at the clock, and watched the minutes pass. Then, with no warning footsteps, the door opened and she was there. He began to stand up to greet her, but he only got halfway. She didn’t look at him as she walked over to the kitchen table and sat down.
‘Hello, Madalena,’ he said, easing himself back into the seat.
She looked down at her clasped hands. ‘This has to stop,’ she said. ‘You have to forget me. I’m not what you think I am.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean . . .’ She sighed, and after a while she carried on, quietly. ‘I mean, I’m not a great beauty, and there’s no cause for you to feel the way you do about me. Trust me, I’m nothing special. One day you should go to the city and see for yourself what real beauty is.’
‘I’ve been to the city,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there three times for the National Bread, Cake and Pastry Expo, and you’re wrong. I know there are girls there with longer legs than yours, with more lustrous hair, and with smaller waists and more delicate noses, but not one of them is as beautiful as you. None of those girls made me forget you, not even for a moment.’
She carried on looking at her hands. She wished with all her heart that it had been Mauro saying this, not this poor boy she hardly knew. The only words she could think to say seemed to be at once inadequate and overwrought, but they would have to do. She knew she had to at least try to stop him from loving her. Still looking down, she said, ‘I can’t see past my broken heart.’
‘Maybe one day you will.’
She shook her head. ‘Tell me, is there anything on earth that could cause your love for me to die?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Really? There’s nothing?’
‘No.’
‘Then you understand.’
He understood completely. As he looked at her dark-ringed, down-turned eyes, and her slumped shoulders, the declarations and promises he had prepared caught in his throat. There was nothing more to say, but knowing he mustn’t run away, or just sit there saying nothing, he asked her how her course was going.
Without looking up she told him her marks had been high, but that she was going to have some catching up to do when she got back. Quietly, she asked him how his baking was coming along. He told her it was going very well, that business was good, that he was taking on more and more responsibilities, and his father was getting ready to make him an equal partner in the company. She asked him how his great-great-great-grandmother was filling her days when she wasn’t standing in a huddle and silently watching people getting on and off the bus. He started to tell a story about her, imitating her voice with uncanny accuracy as she banged her stick and delivered her prophecies. At last Madalena lifted her eyes, and looked at him as he spoke. He was mimicking her toothless expression, and for the first time in days she smiled. Immediately she felt crushed with sadness that she could never, not even for a moment, return the love of this pleasant, funny and talented boy. By the time he finished the story she was looking at her hands again, her shoulders slumped.
‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘I’m not what you think I am. It’s not just the waist and the nose and all that. There are other things. Things I can’t talk about.’ She didn’t want to tell him, or anyone, about the thoughts that had been running through her mind, thoughts so ugly that she knew they made her unworthy of anybody’s love.
‘You can talk to me about anything,’ he said. He wondered whether he should tell her some bits and pieces about himself, about his box of poems, or how sometimes after work he would climb to the mountaintop and look out at the horizon and imagine how wonderful his life would be if she loved him in return. But he knew he didn’t have to, that all this would have been as clear to her as it was to everybody else. Instead he smiled, and told her what she already knew. ‘My feelings haven’t changed since the day I gave you the doughnuts,’ he said. He told her he loved her, and that he would always be there for her if she needed him.
She supposed this was her cue to tell him that he was mistaken, that he couldn’t possibly love her because he hardly even knew her, but she had learned that things didn’t work this way. She had barely known Mauro when she had fallen in love with him. They had been children, just playmates, and then one day the explosion had happened, but she knew her love had been real from the start. Mauro had told her he had loved Luciana the moment she walked into the room, and that she too had loved him as soon as she saw him. His eyes had sparkled as he said this, and she felt no reason to disbelieve him. Madalena was in no doubt that the young baker adored her with all his heart. ‘Find somebody else to love,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He shook his head, and stood up. ‘Tell me though, before I go, when you’re in the city and you smell baking bread, do you ever think of me?’
She looked up. Her eyes met his, and she nodded. Then she looked back down at her hands and spoke, her voice the faintest whisper. ‘Every time.’
‘Madalena,’ he said, ‘I’m going to ask one last favour of you. If you can find it in your heart to do just one thing for me, please could it be this.’
She didn’t say anything. She dreaded what he was about to ask of her.
Undeterred, he made his request. ‘Madalena, please would you move to an apartment above a bakery.’
He had hoped this would make her laugh, but it hadn’t worked. With one last look at the girl he loved, he wished her well, and said goodbye.
The sun went down to the sound of a dented euphonium. Madalena lay on her bed, her eyes closed. She covered her head with a pillow, but it was no use. She could still hear it. It was more beautiful than ever, and more desolate, and she wanted it to stop.
On the bus back to the city her family’s voices rang in her head, telling her it was not the end of the world, that she had so many good things in her life and that in time this trouble will pass. They had seen somebody who was going through an awful experience but who was going to get better. She wished she had a way of telling them how she really felt, and of some of the thoughts that had gone through her mind, thoughts that had frightened her, really frightened her. After a few hours she supposed she should eat something. Her mother had given her some fruit and a small loaf of bread for the journey. She took the bread from its paper bag, and saw that it had been baked in the shape of a love heart. She broke a piece off and put it in her mouth. It was the best bread she had ever tasted, and before long only crumbs were left, and she brushed them to the floor. She rolled the paper bag into a ball, and put it in her pocket. She looked out of the window. A milestone told her there was still a long way to go.
The day came when she had arranged to meet Mauro and Luciana. She had hardly slept, and she sat at the back of the room as her professor wound up his morning lecture. She hadn’t been able to concentrate, and had written only a few lines of notes. She read them back, and they made no sense. She couldn’t work out what she was doing there. This course had been part of the dream she had built up with Mauro, with her pharmacy on one side of the street and his optician’s shop on the other, but the dream had turned to dust, and she felt she was wasting her time.
The professor told them that in the afternoon they would be going to the laboratory for a lesson about professional standards in the handling of acids, about preventing injuries and dealing with mishaps. She pictured
a bottle of liquid as clear as water and as vicious as fire, and she thought of Luciana, and imagined herself taking the bottle and emptying it into that perfect face, right there in the middle of the bar. She pictured her screaming and falling to the ground, her skin a mess of burns and blisters.
This image had flashed through her mind for just a few seconds, and when it was gone she was furious with herself, and ashamed, and frightened of where these thoughts might lead. She tried to concentrate on the professor’s voice. With the lecture over he was making jokes, and the people around her were laughing as they packed away their books, but she didn’t hear anything amusing in what he was saying. As she closed her bag and stood up, she thought of her next lesson, of the gloves and the goggles, and of a bottle small enough to slip into a pocket and take into the world.
Mauro had introduced Madalena to a lot of his girlfriends. On hearing that their lover’s best friend was a girl they smiled just a little too much and felt their nails harden, but as soon as they saw her their worries evaporated. They thought it was lovely that he had kept his friend from the small town he had grown up in, and they started to wonder if they knew any unremarkable but good-hearted boys they could introduce her to.
Luciana’s nails had not hardened when she heard about Madalena, and she had not over-smiled, but like the other girls she liked her as soon as she met her, and started to mentally pair her off with various cousins. Madalena, the dark rings around her eyes disguised by make-up, found the strength to chat quite amiably as if nothing was wrong, but all the time she felt as if rats were eating her from the inside. She had been wondering whether there had been some trick photography used by the magazine, but even dressed in jeans and one of Mauro’s shirts Luciana looked as flawless as she had on the page.
Mauro’s other girlfriends had been pleasant and polite, but their conversation had consisted of little more than descriptions of the fabulous hotel rooms they had stayed in, and recitations of long lists of luxury brand names and exclusive shops. Luciana, though, seemed to have only a passing interest in the glamour that surrounded her, and at the point of the conversation where the girlfriend would normally be delivering a monologue about her favourite spa treatments, she was instead telling a series of humorous anecdotes about a heronry on her uncle’s farm. At one point she even did an impressive impersonation of one of the birds, and Madalena noticed that Mauro was laughing along, not in the I’m-only-laughing-because-you’re-so-pretty way he had with the other girls, but because he was really finding her amusing. He and Luciana were compatible to the point where it seemed they were the only members of their own extraordinary species, and Madalena wished she could feel happy that they had found one another. It just wasn’t possible though, and while she smiled on cue she hated Luciana more than she had ever hated anybody. She hated her, and she hated her uncle and his fucking herons.
When Mauro left the table to go to the toilet Luciana confided in her as if they had known one another for years. ‘I’ve never been so happy,’ she said. ‘I always wanted to meet a man like Mauro, but my friends said I never would, that no such man exists. But look,’ she gestured towards the empty chair, ‘he does.’
As Luciana carried on, Madalena smiled and slipped her hand into her bag. Her fingers ran over the edges of her keys, then moved to the sharp end of her eyebrow tweezers before resting on a small, square bottle. Her thumb slid along the glass until it found the metal cap. The bottle contained only perfume, but she took comfort in the thought that it could have held enough acid to strip the skin from Luciana’s face. That afternoon she had held a phial in the laboratory, and been sure she could have taken it away without anybody noticing. She hadn’t, though. Next time, she thought. And then, with horror, she thought, No, not next time. Not ever.
‘But enough about us,’ said Luciana. ‘How about you? My cousin Rui is visiting in a couple of weeks – I think you would like him. We could go out together, the four of us.’
‘Oh, thanks, but I’m . . .’ She knew she had to kill this plan as quickly as possible. ‘. . . I’m already seeing somebody.’
‘Hey, that’s great,’ Luciana’s eyes shone with real delight. ‘Tell me all about him.’
Madalena felt her life draining from her body, but somehow she found the energy to appear sprightly as she told Luciana all about the boy she was supposedly seeing. For some reason, she had no idea why, she called him João.
When Mauro returned to the table Luciana started telling him about Madalena’s João, how they had met at college and been friends for a while, and how they had secretly liked each other for a long time and had been out on three dates, and how it all seemed to be going very well.
‘That’s fantastic,’ said Mauro, thrilled by the news. ‘Let’s all go out, the four of us.’
Madalena shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet. It’s early days, and I don’t want to frighten him. Maybe in a few weeks.’
‘Oh, go on,’ said Luciana. ‘It’ll be fun.’
‘Well . . . why not?’ She was desperate for this assault to end. She had gone bright red, and at last they stopped asking her about this João, believing her blushes to be a symptom of blossoming love. She hated that they were so happy for her. She had never felt so stupid. Now the only person she wanted to throw acid over was herself.
She lay on her bed, and picked up the magazine that Mauro had given her. She turned to a photograph of Luciana. The thought of what she had wanted to do to her made her stomach feel as if it was shrivelling to the size of an artichoke heart. She ran to the sink, and vomited. She hadn’t eaten for hours, and spatters of what was left inside burned her throat. She cupped her hands beneath the cold tap and took a drink of water. She rinsed the sink, and tried to tell herself that she would never have gone through with it, that all she had done was cling to the idea that she could do it so she wouldn’t feel powerless in the face of such perfection. She had no way of knowing if this was true, but she couldn’t hide from the knowledge that she had made a detailed plan to disfigure somebody, and that was all she needed to know for sure that she was a horrible person. She covered her face with her hands as it came back to her that she had invented a boyfriend. She had given him a name and a life, when really there was nobody. She was dangerous and ridiculous.
She lay back on the bed and opened the magazine, looking from one picture of Luciana to the next, and hating her so much it hurt. When she couldn’t stand it any longer she turned to a random page. Here there were no pictures of beautiful women, just an item called It’s a Crazy World!, a collection of oddments sent in by readers on their travels. One of the items caught her eye. It was a paragraph about a museum in Germany. The magazine seemed to be making fun of the place, but she didn’t see what there was to joke about. She wanted to go there. She had to go there. She needed the museum to tell her that the decision she had made was the right one. She had no idea how long it would take to get there, but she started packing a small bag. Once again she set her alarm for early morning. She would make sure she was on the first train out of the city.
V
The certainty of her damnation became too great a burden for Hulda to bear on her own. She was determined, though, that it must not dominate her days, that life must go on in spite of her inevitable destination. She knew she needed to find ways of making sure she never allowed the despair to defeat her, and she decided that the best thing to do would be to approach the wisest-looking member of her congregation and ask for advice. One Sunday not long after her eighteenth birthday, she had caught up with him as they filed out of the church. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, ‘but I wonder if I could talk to you about something.’
‘Of course.’ He smiled kindly through his large, white beard, and Hulda knew at once that she had found a friend.
They walked a short distance to a small park in the shadow of the castle, where they sat on a bench. He listened to her story, and when it was over he confirmed that she was beyond all hope of salvation. ‘But you are by
no means alone,’ he said. ‘There are more of us than you will ever know.’
‘More of us?’
He nodded. ‘Many years ago I made the same mistake as you, young Hulda. That’s right,’ he chuckled, ‘even I, even old Herr Friedleben, shall be heading downwards when the time comes.’ He told her that his circumstances had not been as dramatic as hers, that he had merely been a wayward young man with a loose tongue, who drank and cursed with little thought for the consequences. By the time he realised what he had done it was too late. ‘Just as it was for you, the moment the first unforgivable blasphemy passed my lips I was lost.’
Hulda felt awful for him, but she knew he was not inviting pity. ‘Maybe I will see you down there,’ she said.
He sighed, and shook his head. ‘I don’t think the Devil will allow us such comforts as glimpses of familiar faces. It’s best to be realistic, Hulda: Hell will be an eternity of unremitting agony for both of us.’ She nodded sadly, and he took what looked like a business card from his pocket, and began to write. ‘I am going to invite you to a meeting. Twice a month a few people with our difficulty have a little get-together. We have all accepted that we have no chance of getting into heaven, but we share a determination not to fall into the trap of living our lives the wrong way. As we lie dying we shall know in our hearts and minds that we have not allowed Satan to be our master until the very last moment. This way we shall leave with a small sense of triumph. These meetings help us to maintain our resolve in the face of temptation and despair, but more importantly than that, they give us a good excuse to eat biscuits.’
He handed over the card, and smiled. ‘We are called the Union of the Damned. We don’t like to draw attention to ourselves, and I am sure you understand the value of discretion, so please tell nobody.’