by Adriana V.
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.
The clerk took her time explaining to Onia that she had a son who never left their house. “His whole life revolves around looking out at the sea and the pine trees from the rooftop terrace … But a year ago, they put the land in front of the house up for sale to build an apartment building. I’ve been afraid of this happening for years. Moving to another house would be his death. I felt helpless, desperate … Then one Christmas an angel visited me. A stranger came into the store and asked me for a blue sweater. I had a cobalt-blue cashmere sweater that was two sizes too big, but she took it anyway. She came back the next day. ‘It’s not my size.’ ‘I told you it was too big for you.’ ‘You’re wrong. It’s too small. Lately, everything is too small for me,’ she said. I must have had a puzzled look on my face, because she followed with, ‘Yes, it’s true, don’t look at me with that expression on your face: the customer is always right.’ I processed her return and she left. That very afternoon, another woman came in and asked for a cobaltblue sweater. When I showed it to her, she said: ‘It’s too small for me.’ I argued with her until she finally said: ‘Don’t insist: the customer is always right.’ I thought it was so strange, but what came next was far stranger. I saw three heads coming out through the neck of the sweater, each one about twenty years older than the girl who had pulled it over her head … While signing a check, one of the triplets said: ‘Am I the first customer who is always right?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘The first person to come here to split?’ I nodded my head yes, then I asked: ‘What … what does that mean?’ ‘It’s something they offer on board,’ she said, as the other customer put the sweater back on the shelf. And that’s all. I think nearly all the customers come from luxury cruises. They offer to exchange the average number of years that one has left to live in a linear life into multiple lives, two or three or whatever. Like a road that forks … all you have to do is pass through the sweater.”
Impressed, Onia asked: “And … have you ever felt curious to try it yourself?”
“No! If you value yourself in a certain way, it’s impossible to want to change your life for another, no matter how horrible it might be,” the clerk said sternly.
“How peculiar. I’ve never valued anything in that way … Of course, I can’t imagine what it must be like, so I guess I don’t really care one way or the other,” Onia said.
The clerk folded the sweater, sighed, and said: “I can’t sleep at night. What if someone tries the sweater on by mistake? What if the store owner finds out what I’m doing? That’s why as soon as I finish paying for the piece of land, I won’t let anyone else try it on anymore.”
“Don’t you have a telephone number or some other way to contact the woman who gave the sweater these strange properties?”
“Angels don’t have telephone numbers. Have you never seen one of those movies with angels in them that air at Christmastime? Like the one where James Stewart is going to commit suicide …?”
“I don’t like fiction stories. Anyway, I think what your customers do is closer to the devil than the angels.”
“You think these millionaires have sold their souls to the devil? I don’t see it that way … they only change the way they live: less time but in a variety of lives. Choice is no longer a problem for them. Haven’t you ever thought: I have to decide whether to do this or that, but if I had more than one life I could do both and I would never have to regret anything? Haven’t you ever regretted anything?”
Although she’d never felt anything like regret, Onia remembered that she had once prepared to embark on another life. She could have easily figured out that the clerk had a similar background and age as the children her husband had wanted to adopt. For however small an imagination, it was clear that the boy’s terrace could have been the one they never bought. But Onia didn’t speculate about any of this, and she didn’t ask if the house was in Sitges or if the terrace had art nouveau details. It didn’t even occur to her.
So she asked: “And … your son … you don’t think he would be interested in putting his head into the sweater?”
“He doesn’t know anything about it,” the woman said defensively. She lit a cigarette and shrunk into herself. “Of course he would like to … He’s like you. And like all the customers who are always right: incapable of glimpsing things his eyes don’t see. That’s precisely why it’s so important to save the view of the sea and the pine forest. Having a building blocking the views wouldn’t be such a bad thing for me … I can imagine marvelous things from nothing more than a slice of wall. From a crack in the ceiling or a spot of humidity I can imagine roads, caves, and lakes … But not him, no. For him, a wall is a wall. Nothing else can be borne from his walls. That’s why he can’t live walled in, do you understand?”
Onia listened in silence. She wasn’t disturbed by not seeing flowers where there weren’t any, she didn’t consider this tragic.
As she pressed the doorbell for Cristina to let her in, she suddenly thought: Black market money! How is she going to be able to buy the land with all that black market money? But then she realized that the girl was very clever and would find a solution. Onia could now forget about this bizarre episode.
The clerk saw her enter her house. She regretted having explained everything. Even though she was convinced the old woman wouldn’t say a word. She herself confessed that she was as silent as a grave.
*Large wooden carnival figures brought out during festivals and important occasions to dance with and impress children
PART III
DAYS OF WINE (WHITE LINES) AND ROSES
EPIPHANY
BY ERIC TAYLOR-ARAGÓN
Barceloneta
There’s something that’s been troubling me, a gaze that won’t go away, and when I close my eyes I see this gaze, and sometimes I think I’ll only be able to escape it by moving to a different country or continent or solar system, to some parallel universe where what happened didn’t happen. I’m still not sure what I should have done or whether I did the right thing—but I did it and now it’s done. And now that it’s done, I’m actually glad it’s done. Am I making sense?
I’ll make this quick. It was right after I broke up with La Princesa, a crazy Spanish girl. I was busted up, in a bad way, moping about, drinking and feeling like life was worthless.
We all know that the end of love is like wartime. It’s like being bombarded. People who can’t take it throw themselves off bridges, shoot themselves in the mouth. You look for a bunker, you look for shelter, refuge, solace, distraction. And then, just when you think it’s safe to come out, you see or hear something—it might be something as innocuous as a bird—or a cell phone ringtone, or a TV show, or a piece of music, and the memories come flooding back and suddenly you hear the whistle blast of bombs, the
crack of sniper rifles, the drone of drones. Anyway, there was a TV in the corner of this bar, and when I glanced up at it I saw an ad for dish soap. Our dish soap. The dish soap we used to use when we lived together. Nina, mi Princesa, I thought … My breath got jagged, I felt like I’d been punched in the solar plexus. I held onto the bar to keep from falling down.
I was sitting on an old rickety stool in l’Electricitat, an old-school bodega in Barceloneta, drinking vermouth after vermouth, spending the last of my meager savings. This is a fisherman’s bar, mostly locals. The people leave you alone. That’s why I like it. Every now and then I looked in the hazy mirror behind the bar. I looked bad. Dark circles under the eyes. Stubble. Disheveled hair. A wild, hunted look. I think I had my little notebook out and maybe every now and then I’d scribble something down, something foolish, something I’d come across in a couple of years and be terribly embarrassed by … I was probably writing to La Princesa about how much I loved her and how I’d change if she took me back. I was probably writing to myself, telling myself to get a grip, to ride it out, to try and be normal and content and full of loving kindness (which is the hardest thing of all).
Looking back, I think the final straw was when I threw a typewriter through the café window in Borne. I mean, who the hell walks around with a typewriter these days? So then I spent the night in jail and I called her afterward and she said, “You did what with the typewriter?” and I told her again, “I threw it out the window,” and then she started to laugh and replied in English, “You’re joking!” and I said, “Who’s Joe King?” This is one of our little jokes, but suddenly she wasn’t laughing anymore. She said, “I think we need to take a little break …” Her name was Nina and I loved her and she’d put up with a lot, even supported me financially for a time, and now she wasn’t up for it anymore. I apologized, I groveled and told her I would reform and be a better human being, and she said, “That’s what you said last time, and the time before that.” Nina is beautiful, with a remarkable bosom and a little birthmark in the shape of an upside-down teardrop just below her right eye, as if she’s crying in reverse. Anyway, that night I was thinking about all this and was feeling depressed in l’Electricitat and being devastated by dish soap ads. That was when I met Luca.
He was slight of build, with thick eyebrows perched over big, sensitive eyes, the kind of eyes that a dog flashes at you just after you’ve kicked it. There was a soccer match on, and a few other people in the bar, but we were the only non-Catalans. He asked me for a cigarette and I told him I didn’t smoke and he asked me where I was from and I said, “Peru,” and he said, “Ah, Peru,” and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve always felt a deep connection with the Incas,” he declared then, looking at me keenly.
The things you have to put up with from Europeans. He told me he was Italian, from Rome, and then later, out of nowhere, he said, “You must like perica,” and truth be told, I haven’t done much cocaine in my life, just enough to know it would be dangerous for someone of my personality type—and given that I’m having enough problems with this existence thing, I generally stay away. I shrugged and he told me, “Tonight we will do perica together,” as if this were a major step forward, as if he were proposing some sort of vision quest.
And then Luca told me that I seemed sad.
“A broken heart?”
I nodded.
“I thought so,” he said. “So maybe you can understand my problem.”
And then he told me he was in love too, and that it had all exploded in his face. That it was all ruined, a mess. I was a bit surprised to have someone open up to me like this. In fact, I almost felt as if I’d met my analogue, my doppelgänger, my mirror image. I listened attentively, hoping for clues that could help me out of my abyss.
But before I go on, I’d like to describe him a bit more. His laugh was sharp, almost a bark, and his face was intelligent and he had bright white teeth with, if I remember correctly, rather pronounced canines. His eyes were hazel-colored, and this I’m sure of, because when he died, I tried to close them, you know, like in the movies, but they just wouldn’t close, they kept popping open. This much I remember, in fact I can’t forget it.
He wore a wrinkled dark blue linen jacket (what they call an “Americana” around here) and blue jeans, and while we were drinking, I knocked over his beer by mistake and he caught the bottle in midair, just before it hit the floor, and then he went on talking like nothing had happened. He was the sort of person who didn’t move across the street, he darted; he didn’t look over at someone, he shot them a glance; he didn’t get up from a chair, he sprang to his feet. That was his energy, which I felt immediately—and this is what made what happened later so shocking.
After a while he told me he wasn’t from Rome but from Naples. He talked about Naples and his family and he called himself an exile, saying, “I can’t go back,” with a tone of finality. And when I asked him why, he ordered another round and told me it was a “problema d’ amore,” very, very complicated, and then he looked down at the bar and seemed to sink a little and then he held his head in his hands like a watermelon and then set his head on the bar and said, “CamillaCamillaCamilla.” And then he looked up and laughed. “You see, I fell in love with the wrong woman, like a stronzo, like an idiota. The daughter of a capo, my boss—and what’s even worse is that she fell in love with me too.”
He’d been a low-level front man for the Camorra’s real estate business in Naples. A crooked nobody. A white-collar foot soldier in the di Lauro clan. One day he’d received a call to show a flat to one of the capo’s lieutenants. The man showed up with a beautiful young woman. It was Camilla. She was small-boned and had short, curly hair and eyes that were shy and curious at the same time. The man was her bodyguard. In the middle of the tour, the man received a call on his cell phone and rushed away, telling Luca not to let her out of his sight, and to stay in the apartment. The Neapolitan mafia had been in a civil war for the last year and things were tense.
“The bodyguard was only gone for about an hour and a half,” he said, “but it was enough for me and Camilla to fall in love. We talked as if we’d known each other our entire lives. I know it sounds like a cliché, but what can I do? It’s there. I lived it. She was sublime. Perfect. We arranged to meet a few days later. And then, over the next couple of weeks, we made all sorts of crazy romantic promises, exchanged e-mails and text messages, met quickly and in secret. We said we’d die for each other, that nothing would stop us, that we would find a way, even if we had to leave Naples. It really seemed real. We convinced ourselves that it was going to happen. That it would all turn out alright. We’d have children, make a family, grow old—all the stupid things you promise when you’re young and in love and from the south of Italy. And we kissed only once, in a little bar by the port. But someone saw us.”
He banged the bar with his fist. My empty vermouth glass gave a little hop. He had big hands, long pianist fingers, and flat broad nails, bitten to the quick.
“What it comes down to is that I’m a coward. When I had my chance I failed. Or maybe it was doomed from the start. A month after we met, I was leaving the office when I was grabbed by three men and thrown in the back of a car. They took me to an abandoned building, and beat and kicked me until I just lay there bleeding and broken, half dead. And then they said, ‘You had better leave Naples, the boss doesn’t like you seeing his daughter.’ I had over thirty stitches”—here he pointed to some scars on the back of his head, his brow—“and two broken ribs, two black eyes, and a broken jaw. They told me the only reason they didn’t kill me was because Camilla had threatened to kill herself if anything happened to me. She told me this later, that she’d threatened her father with suicide, slashed at her wrists. After my beating I stayed in the house of a cousin in the country and then my family bought me a ticket here. Here, I’m like a ghost. I have no friends, no family. We managed to communicate by e-mail for a while, but not anymore. And today I found out why. She’s getting married to Giov
anni Malatesta, another mafiosi. I am now officially nothing. It’s over. And I’m too much of a coward to do anything about it. I’m not a ninja, I’m not Arnold Schwarzenegger—I’m not even Woody Allen. This is not a movie. They would kill me. And I’m a coward and don’t want to die.”
Suddenly he let loose his barking laugh, “Ha ha ha!” He laughed for a long time, as if he’d just come to a realization, as if something had finally become clear to him, and then he stood up and said, “I must make a phone call.” He went outside, teetering a bit. There were a few old grizzled men standing at the bar, one was leaning against a slot machine. He was stout with large forearms and was smoking a stub of a cigar, while his potbelly pressed against the formidable stomach of another man and their heads were at least a meter apart. They were arguing about soccer and spoke in grunts and deep, aquatic bellows, like foghorns or something. It was as if these hard-living ex-fishermen had sprung from the floor of the bar itself, as if they were intrinsic to the place, like barnacles on a whale. A man came in with an empty plastic Coke bottle, handed it without a word to the barman who then went to a huge wood barrel on the left side of the bar, near the back, turned the spigot, and filled it up with a deep red wine. The man dug around in his pocket, stuck two coins on the table with a loud ringing sound, and then he took his Coke bottle and walked away. There was an ad on TV for Burger King. Luca came back in, he smiled. He sat. We continued hanging out. Luca was no longer talking about his girlfriend and I no longer talked about mine. The mood had changed. In fact, he seemed quite cheerful all of a sudden. We got the bartender to fill us up a bottle of wine, paid the bill, and strolled toward his house.
A breeze had picked up and all the clothes hanging in the balconies fluttered and danced in the wind and a dog ran by, almost got hit by a little red Renault which swerved and honked and did not slow.