The Four Corners of my Past

by Alaitz Arruti

  I learned to feel at peace, to live in peace. To not label myself or others. I understood the Carpe Diem and took advantage of it.

  How beautiful to be thirty...

  ...how beautiful to be forty.

  If my past appeared barefooted in front of my every day of my life, there was a reason, a name and a date that justified it.

  His name was Gibel and he came out of a corner. Unexpected, without seeing him coming, just as he did nine years ago.

  - What a lovely coincidence to see you on your birthday Elena! – He said with his French accent.

  He was just as I remembered. You could say that time hadn’t changed the image that was repeating itself every morning, sleepy between the blue sheets and the sea shells, of a childish bedroom with a smell of lavender.

  - Hello Gibel – I said hi to him – Mother of mine, how long has it been! – I could tell how many days exactly had passed since that first and last time we saw each other, but I didn’t. – You still remember my birthday?

  - Of course! You celebrated it with me nine years ago Elena – touched and sunken.

  Gibel

  The neighborhood of Gracia was immersed in the mourning of the lowered window panes. The sadness of its closed doors palliated the morning of late dreams, intertwined sheets, alarm clocks on strike, late dawns. It was a spring Sunday, as precise as the eighteen degrees that ran the still deserted streets, preparing to receive the people who would leave at noon, with the mark of the pillow still on their cheeks, to flood the terraces, review the week and to get a tan with the rays of the sun of a month without an “r”.

  My life at that time was as calm as my morning walk, protected by a sleepy town, prepared to explode in a few hours, resting hectic past of nocturnal hours. That’s how I felt, turning thirty-one years old, light on luggage.

  I sat at one of the terraces that decorate the corners of Plaza de la Villa. The trees had gained their life back, the green color of their leaves, the desire to decorate a landscape and the stories of those who, like me, spent the hours under their shade. Spring was breathed, with its allergies, its revolted hormones and the indecision of closets that don’t know whether to dress short or long. The first scents of sunscreen cream were felt, the first start of summer with still cautious bags, filled with handkerchiefs and knitted jackets. It was a month of transition, a time of the year when I could feel my feet tied to the ground, my skin nestled in my own skin. It was nice to be me on that morning of the month of May, in that place and at that time.

  The coffee was turning cold in that small red mug, with the little spoon stained with milk resting next to two sugar sachets. Sweet, very sweet. Two slices of bread decorated the rest of a silver table, almost cold. I looked around me and I didn’t recognize the faces that were sharing the morning with me. Pau, the waitress, the only familiar face, approached me and left an ashtray next to the napkin holder.

  - I don’t smoke, thank you.

  Ever since I stopped smoking I became quite unbearable with fumes and everything that smelled of tobacco, even if it was a badly washed ashtray, it bothered me. In fact, that was the first thing I did when sitting on a terrace, removing cigarette butts and ash from my table. I was grateful to the anti-smoking law and the right not to wash my hair before going to bed after a night of partying. Age made me intolerant, at least in some things.

  I spread the strawberry jelly over the toast full of butter. One of those pleasures I have never resigned to, the taste of summer camps. I had been noticing for a while how somebody, at my back, had been staring fixedly at me. I didn’t know who, but I felt observed, uncomfortable, controlled. What the hell did he want from me? I knew he was a man and I remembered that he was already seated, on one of the wooden benches that delineate the edges of the square when I sat on the terrace, but I hadn’t noticed his appearance. I remembered his figure, a shadow dressed in dark, but not his age or his appearance. I didn’t want to turn around and provoke a visual contact with him but it was irritating me to feel his two eyes on the back of my neck and I hurried to finish breakfast to take off to another place, free of curious, as soon as possible.

  I paid the bill and I got up visibly upset. I passed in front of the looker walking fast, not that I was in a hurry, it was just my way of walking. That was my rhythm, I didn’t know how to walk slowly. It was a really bad habit that I was trying to correct, but I still hadn’t been able to dominate it. I noticed it a couple of years before, when one spring day, very much alike to the morning of my birthday number thirty-one, with sun and fresh air, I signed up to a guided tour around the city that the city hall of Barcelona was organizing just for residents. Not that I needed for someone to show me around the city I had lived in my entire life, but I thought I could learn to view it from a different point of view. And so I did.

  The tour guide, a middle age lady, with a clear, clean voice, good looking and an enviable elegance, was waiting for us at ten in the morning under the Arc of Triomphe.

  - Hello everyone. My name is Elena – she introduced herself and I could not help but smile. I know I am not the only Elena in the world, I would miss more, but I feel a special sympathy for the women with whom I share my name with. – and I want to ask you a favor, look up. Do not be satisfied with looking at your own height, broaden the objective and see beyond.

  During the three hours that the visit lasted, I discovered a new city. I was totally wrong, I only knew the Barcelona of my meter sixty. The stores where I used to buy, the restaurants where I used to eat or dine, the cafeterias, the doors of the historic buildings, the streets that united my initial place from my destiny, but I had never looked beyond. I had gotten used to just moving instead of walking, to look at the watch instead of observing, to count the numbers and forget about the history of the city. That morning, among other things, I discovered that near the Portal de l’Angel, practically covered by a new construction, you could still observe the remains of a Roman aqueduct that served to bring water to the city from the Besós river or that the walls of the Sant Felip Neri Church, are the sad testimonial of the death of forty-two people, mostly children, that took shelter in the church’s basement and died when a bomb launched by the aviation of the rebel side during the Spanish civil war, exploded where the square is now the redoubts of the shrapnel can still be seen.

  Barcelona that morning showed me her most human face and I promised myself, not always with the same success, to observe and appreciate her as she deserved.

  - Miss! – I felt a voice calling me – miss!

  The Villa square, was still deserted. The city refused to wake up on the morning in which I was turning thirty-one years old and I wished that the voice heard in the middle of the morning silence was not that of the man who’d be staring at me during breakfast, peaceful and quiet, that ended for not being such.

  - Your purse, miss!

  With all the rushing I had forgotten to grab the purse which, when I sat on the cafeteria’s terrace, I hung on the back of the chair. That was another really bad costume I could not manage to remove, not even when I got robbed four years before while having dinner with some friends from my neighborhood in a restaurant from de Born.

  We were seated at one of the tables that the restaurant had in the inner dining room. It was still too cold to have dinner outside. It was a calm Thursday evening. We did not need a reservation to get an available table. We dined calmly, catching up on the latest news. Life had changed a lot since the time when the same four girls who that night toasting with their wine glasses – to the old times – were playing with a ball in one of the neighborhood squares. It was nice to come back and reunite a couple of times a year, to still be the earth cable that reminded us of who we were and the place we came from.

  It was almost midnight when we stood up with the intention of paying the bill and extend the friendly meeting in one of the city’s trendy bars, but when I turned around, I saw that my purse was not there anymore. I had hunged it from the back of my chair, rest
ing my back on the leather handles that crossed from one side to the other, the highest part of a wooden chair. I didn’t notice any pull, in fact, the leather handles were still crossing the back of the chair. It was the bag that was missing. Someone must have bent down, cut the strap and taken my bag without the two friends who sat in front of me noticed anything strange.

  When we went out of the restaurant and to the nearest police station to put the complaint, the police told us that robberies of that kind were a common thing, - a trendy – he described it. My friends paid for the bill, my mother opened the door of my apartment with the copy of the keys she kept in her house and the handles of my bag ended up in a trash bin in front of the police station. Even so, I did not learn the lesson and kept putting my bag on the back of the chairs, even if it was night time or if ‘I was seating at a square, the Villa square. I didn’t get robbed again, I don’t know if it was a matter of luck or the trend simply stopped.

  - Your bag miss!

  He was the one calling me. From the wooden bench in front of the Campanar de Gràcia. He would be about forty years old, a bit younger perhaps. He was tall and thin-built. Narrow black pants marked his thin legs. He was wearing a dark shirt, with long sleeves rolled up at the elbows, a string of thread around his neck and a photo camera hanging from his left arm. At first glance, I thought he was odd-looking, neither handsome nor ugly. He wasn’t particularly attractive but he was not a man who went unnoticed either. He was funny, just like I was funny when I was a kid.

  The strange man sitting on the bench in the Plaza de la Vila, looked at everything with curiosity, as if everything that happened around him had the capacity to surprise him, to make him fall in love. The children in the car out for a ride, the man dressed as a cyclist who drank water at the fountain, the young woman having breakfast alone on the terrace, the bag that was abandoned on the back of a chair. Mine.

  - Thank you – I said when I passed in front of him.

  - You have a beautiful back – he answered.

  That morning, when I dressed with the intention of walking and having breakfast at the Plaza de la Vila, I chose wide jeans that ended just at the height of my ankles, leaving the end of my legs uncovered, like a horizontal line dividing the pants from the shoes. Before leaving home, I opened my bedroom window to check if the weather was hot or not. I was still barefoot. My mother, used to tell me I looked like an Indian and called me “black feet”. Wearing shoes, for me, was almost optional and at the first chance, I would get rid of them to touch the floor with the soles of my feet.

  When I opened the window I felt the sun shining with strength but spring was still young and the mornings were still cool. It was the time of that undefined halftime in which is neither too hot nor too cold. I decided to wear a long-sleeved body, like those used by ballet dancers. It was made of cotton and it covered my chest and my arms leaving my back uncovered. I knotted a colored handkerchief in my bag to cover myself with it in the event that it cooled off during the day and I went outside with my hair still wet from the shower, my face washed and my lips red.

  I had been painting my lips for a year. My thirties arrived with two big aesthetic changes. The day after my birthday, I went to visit Patty, the hairdresser who had been taking care of my hair since I was three years old and I told her to cut my hair off.

  - Elena... but you have such a beautiful hair!

  Patty, was over seventy years old and resisted retirement, she loved my hair. With good reason, I had always worn an abundant hair, strong and shiny. I didn’t need to take care of it too much and I’d never dyed it, because with the sun I got natural blond highlights that brightened my natural color, chestnut, and welcomed summer. Since I have consciousness, I have always carried the same length, finger up, finger down. The only change had been the curls that came out in the form of sea waves when I turned thirteen.

  - I want a change Patty – she didn’t agree with me and she refused to pick the scissors – If I don’t like it I’ll just let it grow long again anyway, easy fix – I insisted.

  Patricia Pérez Martín, whom we all knew as “The Patty”, was to me one more of the family that the inhabitants of the neighborhood formed. She was my grandmother Helen’s age and the energy of a ten-year-old girl. She had been working her whole life and she still had that same illusion as when she arrived at Barcelona at the age of fifteen, with a half-broken suitcase and the hope of the big city. She left behind the memory of a small town in the province of Huesca, the snow, the dry cold and the smell of homemade bread that came out of the wooden stove owned by her father.

  Patty, attended her business six days a week. Her hairdresser was her home and the place in which she most received affection, because Patty was one of those women to whom life gave back all of the goodness and happiness that she always gave between the people that had the pleasure of sharing our daily lives with her. We, her clients were her family. She had watched us grow up, get old, prosper or fail. Cried the losses and the absences, celebrate with her the moments of happiness. She wrote her story alongside ours, morning after morning, from Monday through Saturday, on rainy days and sunny days.

  To us she was like an untimely symbol. The years passed and “The Patty” was still there, with her hair salon, waiting for us to come and visit her, that one of us maybe brought her flowers from the market, Easter candies and souvenirs from countries she never thought about visiting. When we got back from our vacations, she would listen attentively to every detail of the days we spent outside the borders of her hair salon, in a place where surely the landscape would be more beautiful but we where we could never receive so much love.

  - I'll cut it off but I will not change the color! – she said accepting my request without giving her arm to bend.

  The new look favored me a lot. True, it did make me look a few years older, my long hair rejuvenated me, but it gave me a more sophisticated look. Besides, it was also much cooler and more comfortable for the summer.

  The second one of my changes was the lipstick and it came attached to the first one. In the few meters that separated Patty’s hairdresser from my apartment, I inevitably walked searching for a reflection of my new look on any door, showcase or mirror, on an effort to recognize the appearance of my new me. When I got home, I sat in front of the dressing table that I bought in an antique market that was organized in Cadaqués and that it had become one of my treasures since the day the transport company took it home and placed it on the right side of my bed, next to the window of the room. It was blue, like the sea shore on Costa Brava and over the waves of its legs it had little starfish engraved by hand.

  I stared at myself in the mirror for several minutes trying to recognize me in the new reflection. I felt something was missing, a complement to my new image. I was never a person who put on too much makeup, but since I started going to the university and specially since I started working aat Beauty Building Company, few were the times when I got out of my house with my face “completely clean”. I think it was a matter of habit, rather than aesthetics, although it’s difficult to know. I never knew where the line was between what I do by my own will and what I do stimulated by all the information I received through publicity, stereotypes and social pressures.

  I could say that I only put makeup on for habit. But I would be lying if I said I’d thought about assisting a business meeting without a drop of makeup. That would have been inadmissible. First (and most regrettable) for me and then for every people accompanying me, because an image free of makeup, would show disinterest, little cure, lack of professionalism. So, why did I put makeup on? Who did I put makeup on for?

  That morning, in front of the new image the mirror of my room gave me, I grabbed one of the lipsticks I kept in the center drawer of the dresser and painted my lips red to see how it looked. I discovered that that was what was missing and from that day on I replaced my makeup for that unique color of my lips, in a natural but refined style. With age I learned to feel beautiful with comfort,
to be less a slave to appearances, to like myself in every way.

  - Forgive me if I have upset you – said the man in the bench seeing I had ignored his comment and was walking away from Plaza de la Vila – but you have a beautiful back and I couldn’t resist photographing it.

  I stopped. If he wanted to get my attention he just nailed it.

  I looked at him and before I had time to say anything, he went ahead. He came close and held out his hand to me as he said:

  - Forgive me, I have not introduced myself. My name is Gibel, I am a photographer and I am French.

  His answer was so funny that I loosened my frown and exchanged it for a big laugh. The way he introduced himself using his nationality as a complement to his person seemed brilliant to me. Surely it was not funny and I’d swear he didn’t do it to make me laugh, but I, suddenly, inexplicably, was in a good mood. Despite having forgotten my bag on the chair and a stranger photographing my back.

  - I am Elena – I introduced myself – and today is my birthday.

  I finished my sentence with information as unnecessary as his but I wanted to make him a wink.

  - Then we have to celebrate – he proposed with a remarkable French accent.

  - You and me? – First he stares at me, then he photographs me and now he’s inviting me to celebrate my birthday, I thought.

  - Yes, you and me. Or do you have a better plan?

  Not really, no, I didn’t have a better plan, or if I did... I still didn’t know. I would have to go eat with my mother at one thirty like every year. We always celebrated together, who better than with her to celebrate my birth. We were both the protagonists of a magical moment, as mine as hers and we promised each other that whatever happened we would always be together on that day.