by David Trueba
The end of the year never made me feel particularly sad, unlike the way it affected other people, but I couldn’t stop myself from taking stock and trying to put my life in a little better order. For the New Year, I resolved to avoid getting involved in superficial affairs, which in exchange for a brief period of pleasure had done some harm to my partners. I would focus on me, without recourse to other people; I had to heal myself instead of hoping that contact with others would heal me. My only fear was that this change in my habits would drive me to masturbate too much. During my chats with Anabel in her Barcelona apartment, she used to tell me she’d never have children or share her life with anyone. I planned it that way, maybe it’ll be sad, but at least I’ve got things straight, Anabel would say. In life, she declared, you have to get things straight. I didn’t have things straight. Maybe it would be a good idea to start getting things straight. First to get things. And then to get them straight.
Marta’s shadow kept on hanging over me, and one day during the holidays, in the Fnac store in central Madrid, I saw her from a distance. She was with her Uruguayan singer boyfriend, and I was sure she was pregnant. Carlos told me that was one of my obsessions, but I noticed the way she walked and the protective gesture she made. I slipped away without greeting them, which made me feel like a schoolboy who skips an exam because he hasn’t prepared for it conscientiously enough.
And yet, all traces of resentment had evaporated in me. The song that gave its title to the Uruguayan singer’s new album was climbing the charts, and instead of making me sad it relaxed me, it took a weight off my shoulders. One day I even caught myself burbling along with the chorus
Love comes back
Spring comes back
The sleepless nights come back
Your whims, my troubles
And our fate
Bound to the blades of a fan
without any clear idea of what all that might mean, especially the line about the fan. But I let it go, I accepted it, though I sensed that this natural reaction of mine, this hankering after no-fault peace, was not generosity but selfishness, self-salvation, a way of distancing myself from other people. In my growing isolation, a sort of mental shipwreck, I hardly saw anyone during the days I spent in Madrid. Upon returning to Barcelona, I realized that I’d lost my locality, because neither there nor in the city where I’d lived all my life was there anything attaching me, anything I was in a hurry to get back to. As far as I was concerned, all the places I knew were deserted islands.
Several weeks previously, Alex and I had arranged a meeting for the morning of December 31 with the directors of a cell phone company’s app development division. We wanted to show them my hourglass models. By that point we’d rolled out a collection of a dozen models, which ranged from optical illusions to convoluted mechanisms. Everybody’s favorite was an hourglass with a soccer pitch figured in the lower bulb, green grass, white lines, and all. When you turned the glass over, the empty bulb received the sand and formed a new soccer pitch. The time required for the sand to move from one bulb to the other was exactly forty-five minutes. Working out the studies for this design had taken me a good while, and I’d had to change the demonstration model several times, but Alex’s delight in the finished product, and his faith, were overwhelming. That morning Alex and I managed to secure a business offer. We agreed to finish deciding on the details early in the New Year. But it means quite a lot of money, Alex said, for the company and for you. We have to celebrate.
(Illustration Credit 12.1)
Those of us who had come in to work that day — everybody except those colleagues who’d gone back to their hometowns or left on vacation — went out for a celebratory lunch. The talk turned to the New Year’s Eve parties everyone was going to that night. They were all immediately scandalized when I admitted I planned to stay home alone and in all likelihood would go to bed before the bells began to chime. To soothe their consciences, and maybe my own discomfort, I wound up accepting an invitation from my housemate to go with her to the home of some women friends who were having a party. There will be heterosexuals there as well, Anabel informed me. All you have to do is bring a bottle of something. Marga, who’d joined the company as an intern, assured me she’d be going too. In several conversations, Alex had insisted to me that Marga liked me; as you’ve probably noticed, he said, Marga’s under your spell, but I avoided Marga because her name was too close to Marta and her eyebrows weren’t as special as Marta’s, which gave her face a unique quality, a look somewhere between Frida Kahlo and the young Angela Molina.
I left the restaurant fairly loaded and went walking aimlessly around the city until I eventually reached the long avenue called La Rambla. I liked the Rambla, despite the massive tourist presence. One day in La Boqueria market, I’d heard someone complain about the hordes of tourists and get reprimanded by a fruit vendor: the way I see it, the whole population of Barcelona can go fuck themselves, as long as the tourists stay, because they’re the ones who leave money here, they’re the ones who come and spend. I found this assessment interesting, and it taught me never again to look down on tourists. After all, I wasn’t from there either, and what attracted me about that avenue was that nothing like it existed in my hometown. Maybe I knew, like Chekhov, that one’s interest in new cities isn’t so much in getting to know them as in escaping from those that preceded them.
Lost in thought, I didn’t see the street mime approaching me until he launched into an imitation of my pensive expression for the amusement of those who were watching him. I stopped, and the mime did the same. I smiled a smile bright with the Christmas spirit, although I had an obscene urge to slap his face. The mime hid behind my back, and when I turned around to catch him at it, he turned around too, a classic move that made me the laughingstock of the gathering. Then I put the briefcase with my papers down on the ground and started imitating a mime trapped inside transparent walls. Although my level of mimetic skill was pretty pathetic, the mime stopped and watched me and then began to applaud and even gave me a coin he took out of his little cap and told me to be on my way. He looked amused, but he didn’t want me to steal his business, and he didn’t much like my reaction and what he saw as the cheapening of his craft. Some tourists in his audience applauded me as I walked away.
I saw a blue airport bus picking up passengers in Plaza de Cataluña and headed for the stop. I’d bought a bottle of vodka in the Colmado Quílez, close to our apartment on Calle de Aragón. I was carrying the bottle in my briefcase, which bulged obscenely. Several people I passed looked at the bulge in my briefcase the way they’d look at a hyperexcited penis inside a pair of trousers. I climbed into the bus unhurriedly, chose a seat all the way in the back, and settled in to wait a few minutes before we got under way. The same impulse that had saved me from the mime had made me get on the blue bus and now it took me to the terminals of the Barcelona–El Prat Airport. I looked for a cheap airline that advertised flights to Mallorca. The ad featured a photograph of a well-known model who looked icy and perfect, while the landscape looked fake and cardboard-like. I bought a one-way ticket. There was no line at the check-in counter, but the airline employee told me I couldn’t board the plane with that bottle of vodka on me. So I checked it and watched it disappear on the conveyor belt, adorned with the airline’s baggage tags, which indicated the liquor’s destination. In the newsstand closest to the departure gate, I bought two architecture and design magazines to peruse during the two hours I had to wait until takeoff. I fell asleep about a minute after we left the ground.
In the Son Sant Joan Airport in Palma de Mallorca, I went directly to the taxi stand, where I found several drivers in the midst of an animated discussion. I showed them a photograph on my cell phone and asked if any of them recognized the place in the picture. It was the shot I’d taken of the postcard on Helga’s refrigerator, the one showing the unnamed cove. One of the taxi drivers, a bald-headed man, said he recognized it and explained how to get there to the driver whose turn it w
as. Once we’re in the area I’ll tell you where to let me off, I said after getting into his cab. I told him I was looking for someone, and I’d stop and ask in some shop. There’s not much in the way of shops there, he said; if you want, I could drop you at the tennis club. I told him to do that, but when we arrived night had fallen, and the club looked abandoned and deserted, with two or three skinned tennis balls lying forgotten next to the rusty fence, and so the cabbie took me to a nearby hotel.
I went in, stepped up to the reception desk, and inquired about the hotel’s rates. The desk clerk’s suspicious look discouraged me from getting a room. I asked her if she knew a German woman named Helga who usually spent the Christmas holidays in this part of the island. The clerk told me she didn’t know people with houses in the area, just regular tourists. I’m afraid I can’t help you, the girl said apologetically. Undaunted, I asked her about the cove and the houses overlooking it on the postcard, and she was generous in her explanations. She pointed to one end of the cove and said, from this point it’s all a cliff, there aren’t any houses.
I left the hotel with an uncertain promise to be back. I walked along the street, which was paved but badly lit. There were houses on the mountainside, and if I went all the way to the end of the cove, I figured I could get a more general overview. But I didn’t know the exact address of the residence I was looking for, or even what it looked like. There were lights on in some of the houses, and I could see Christmas decorations, but the only sound that broke the silence came from the headstrong waves, which were smashing themselves against the rocks below.
I kept going for a while and then took a road flanked on both sides by pine trees. I came upon a restaurant with an empty swimming pool and beach umbrellas on poles, topped with dried palm leaves. There were also some big, heinously arrogant houses. I remembered what Helga had said about her house, but I was beginning to harbor doubts about whether this really was the place she’d told me about, the cove where she usually went at the end of the year.
I walked back to the main street and saw a water truck parked next to the gate of a large house. The driver had finished making a delivery and was rolling up the thick plastic hose. He was a ruddy-cheeked young man who wore his blond hair cut short. I’m trying to find a German lady, I said. Her house is around here somewhere. When I said the word lady, I felt myself blushing slightly. Around here is full of Germans, the kid said, going on with his work. She and her husband are divorced, but she always comes down here alone for New Year’s Eve. She lives in Munich. Helga? the youngster asked immediately, securing the hosepipe to the back of the water tank.
Seized by a not-altogether-rational enthusiasm, I accepted his invitation to climb into his water truck. He could drop me off at Helga’s house, he said. Actually it’s her husband’s house, she doesn’t come here much. Are you a relative of hers? Yes, her nephew. She’s a really nice lady, it’s not easy to find people like that around here, believe me. You gotta watch out with Germans, they’re mostly a pain in the ass. Her children come more often. Yes, her son’s a big guy, huh? I know him. For a moment I imagined that the young driver had also had an adventure with Helga, that she was a man-eater always setting up “accidental” meetings. The idea terrified and fascinated me at the same time. Then I looked at the driver more carefully, and my idea seemed like a ridiculous fantasy. The kid lacked sufficient imagination to see in Helga anything other than a retired German lady living her golden years.
He left me at the blue wooden gate of a small house. I couldn’t find a doorbell of any kind, so I opened the gate, stepped onto the property, and went up to the door. The house faced the sea, and although now I did see a switch that might have been a doorbell, I preferred knocking on the door, which looked like a rear entrance, little used. I could hear sounds and music inside, and I kept knocking and calling until someone came up the stairs.
A German man, one of those reddish German pensioners you find in Mallorca, welcomed me cordially. For a moment I thought he might be Helga’s husband. He seemed not altogether sober. There was less than an hour to go before midnight ended the old year and began the new one. When I asked for Helga, the German made a gesture to indicate that I should wait and ran back inside, calling her name. I heard her footsteps coming up the same stairs the man had disappeared down. I stepped back so she couldn’t see me until she was standing in the doorway.
Her face changed from a vague smile to genuine surprise. She might have been expecting a neighbor, or maybe even some working person. Never me. I said one word, hello, and her reply was as shy as my greeting. I remembered you always spend New Year’s Eve here, I declared, and that was all I said. Do you want to come in? Helga asked. I’ve got some of my neighbors here. I opened my bag and pulled out the bottle. I brought some vodka, I said. I don’t know whether she recognized it as the same Polish vodka we’d drunk that first night in her apartment, the bottle with the little blade of bison grass inside.
There were two German couples of around Helga’s age, among them the man who’d opened the door. Besides them, there was an older German lady, sunburned and as red as a lobster. She appeared to be alone and tipsy from the wine. Helga introduced me to the company in German, and I didn’t understand very well what she added about me. Maybe she lied to them too, maybe she told them I was a Spanish nephew of hers. I was handed a plate with leftover salmon and salad, they gave me a glass and filled it with white wine, and every time one of them passed me, he or she insisted on clinking glasses and toasting. Prosit. The television was on, its sound drowned out by the music on the radio. It was a Spanish TV channel, and at that very moment, the tower clock in Puerta del Sol filled the screen.
I didn’t speak very much with anybody, nor did Helga come close to me for a private exchange that might perhaps have made the others curious. Every now and then she helped translate something someone was saying to me and explained what they did or how close their house was to hers. When the bells began to strike midnight, everybody joined in the countdown to the New Year. They should use an hourglass to celebrate the end of the year, right? Helga suggested to me with a smile. The Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes, one for each stroke — las doce uvas de la suerte, the twelve grapes of luck — was ignored, there wasn’t a grape in sight, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask for any. It was the first December 31 in my life when I didn’t eat grapes to welcome the New Year, so I settled for taking twelve sips of wine. I skipped worrying about my future prospects, my Zukunftsperspektiven, too. Ein glückliches neues Jahr, I repeated with them, while they laughed at my pronunciation. Then they set off firecrackers and a couple of rockets, just as the people in nearby houses were doing.
The farewells began around two in the morning; the lobster lady was the last to go. She’d more or less disintegrated on the sofa, and Helga invited her to stay, but she shook her head and pulled a little flashlight out of her purse and showed us how she was going to find her way home in the dark, like a witch in a fairy tale about to take off on her broom. Helga escorted her up the stairs to the front door while she kept on saying Nein, nein to every suggestion that she could sleep in one of the bedrooms in Helga’s house.
When Helga came back to the living room, I was out on the deck. From there I had an unobstructed view of the bright stars shining down on the dark and boundless Mediterranean, whose mighty roaring never stopped. The cove, a natural refuge shaped by the wind and the tides, looked like a hand cupped to receive the sea, or like two long arms extended to receive it in a rocky, hospitable embrace. The vodka bottle had remained untouched, so I’d opened it and poured myself a little glass, and Helga filled one for herself and came outside. She and her guests had danced for a while, but I’d turned down their frequent and insistent invitations to join in, preferring to watch them from a certain polite distance. It wasn’t my party.
What a pretty spot this is, I said. She confined herself to a few words of agreement and then followed the direction of my gaze. I was walking around in B
arcelona this afternoon, and all of a sudden I thought about coming here. It sounded like an unsolicited explanation that didn’t make much sense. It’s cold, she said, as if she’d rather interrupt me than listen to more self-justifying. She ducked into the living room and came back out with the blanket that had been draped over the armchair. She put the blanket around her shoulders and held out one end to me. It was soft and plush — camel hair, I would have said, if I’d been able to tell the difference between that and any other fabric; it was surely not some low-quality Chinese synthetic. I moved closer to her, each of us clenched a fist around one end of the blanket, and we stood there side by side, fists pressed against chests, clenched hands touching. In German we call this cove Blitz. Lightning.
Illustration Credits
1.1 © Berta Risueño.
1.2 © Berta Risueño.
1.3 © Berta Risueño.
1.4 © Berta Risueño.
1.5 © Berta Risueño.
1.6 Half-Nude, 1926, © Otto Dix, Neue Galerie, New York, NY.
1.7 Half-Nude, 1921, © Otto Dix, Otto Dix, Stiftung, Bevaix, Switzerland.
1.8 Woman with Red Hair, 1931, © Otto Dix, Museum Gunzenhauser, Chemnitz, Germany.
1.9 © Berta Risueño.
9.1 Allegory of Good Government (detail), c. 1340, Siena, Palazzo Pubblico, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, © 2014, Photo Scala, Florence, Italy.
12.1 © Berta Risueño.
DAVID TRUEBA is a film director and screenwriter as well as a novelist. He is the author of Cuatro amigos, which sold more than 100,000 copies in Spain, and his English-language debut, Learning to Lose, which won Spain’s National Critics Prize in 2009. Trueba’s latest film, Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed, which he wrote and directed, was long-listed for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2015 and won Goya awards for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, among others.