“Ah, at last!” the bad girl exclaimed, picking up the receiver. “The damn phone. They finally fixed it. Oui, oui, monsieur. Ça marche très bien, maintenant! Merci.”
Before she hung up I threw myself at her and put my arms around her, holding her as tight as I could, kissing her with fury and tenderness, telling her in a rush, “Do you know the nicest thing, the thing that’s made me the happiest of all the things you’ve said to me, Chilean girl? Oui, oui, monsieur. Ça marche très bien, maintenant.”
She started to laugh and murmured that this was the least romantic cheap, sentimental thing I had said to her so far. While I undressed her and got undressed myself, I said into her ear, as I kept kissing her, “I called you four days in a row at all hours, at night, at dawn, and when you didn’t answer I went mad with desperation. I didn’t eat, I didn’t live until I could see that you hadn’t left, that you weren’t with a lover. The life’s come back to my body, bad girl.” I heard her roll with laughter. When she used both hands to oblige me to move my face away so she could look into my eyes, her laughter kept her from speaking. “Were you really mad with jealousy? What good news, you’re still head over heels in love with me, good boy.” It was the first time we made love and didn’t stop laughing.
Finally we fell asleep, entwined and content. In my sleep I opened my eyes from time to time to see her. I would never be as happy as I was now, I never would feel so fulfilled again. We awoke when it was dark, and after we showered and dressed, I took the bad girl to have supper at La Closerie des Lilas, where, like two lovers on their honeymoon, we spoke softly, looking into each other’s eyes, holding hands, smiling, and kissing as we drank a bottle of champagne. “Tell me something nice,” she would say from time to time.
When we left La Closerie des Lilas, on the small square where the statue of Marshal Ney menaces the stars with its sword, along Avenue de l’Observatoire, two clochards were sitting on a bench. The bad girl stopped and pointed at them.
“It’s him, the one on the right, the clochard who saved your life that night on the Pont Mirabeau, isn’t that right?”
“No, I don’t think it was him.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, stamping her foot, angry and upset. “It’s him, tell me it’s him, Ricardo.”
“Yes, yes, it was him, you’re right.”
“Give me all the money in your wallet,” she ordered. “Bills and change both.”
I did as she asked. Then, holding the money in her hand, she approached the two clochards. They looked at her as if she were an exotic animal, I imagine, since it was too dark to see their faces. She bent forward, and I saw her speak to him, hand him the money, and finally, what a surprise, kiss the clochard on both cheeks. Then she came toward me, smiling like a little girl who has just done a good deed. She took my arm and we began to walk along Boulevard Montparnasse. It was a good half hour to École Militaire. But it wasn’t cold and it wasn’t going to rain.
“That clochard must think he’s had a dream, that his fairy godmother fell from the sky and appeared to him. What did you say to him?”
“Thank you, Monsieur Clochard, for saving the life of my happiness.”
“You’re becoming sentimental too, bad girl.” I kissed her on the lips. “Tell me another, another cheap, sentimental thing, please.”
7
Marcella in Lavapiés
Fifty years ago the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapiés, an old enclave of Jews and Moriscos, was still considered one of the most traditional neighborhoods in Madrid, where, like archaeological curiosities, the swaggering lower-class characters from the operettas called zarzuelas were preserved: flashy young men in waistcoats and caps, wearing handkerchiefs around their necks and tight trousers, and sassy young women in close-fitting polka-dotted dresses, with large earrings and parasols and handkerchiefs tied around hair gathered into sculptural chignons.
When I came to live in Lavapiés, the neighborhood had changed so much I sometimes wondered if in that Babel there was still some authentic Madrilenian left, or if all the residents were, like Marcella and me, imported. The Spaniards from the neighborhood came from every corner of the country, and with their accents and variety of physical types, they helped to give the admixture of races, languages, inflections, customs, attire, and nostalgia in Lavapiés the appearance of a microcosm. The human geography of the planet seemed to be represented in its few blocks.
When you left Calle Ave María, where we lived on the third floor of a faded, ramshackle building, you found yourself in a Babylon of Chinese and Pakistani merchants, Indian laundries and stores, tiny Moroccan tea shops, bars filled with South Americans, Colombian drug traffickers, and Africans, and wherever you looked, forming groups in doorways and on street corners, a number of Romanians, Yugoslavs, Moldavians, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Russians, and Asians. The Spanish families in the neighborhood resisted the changes with old habits like having get-togethers between balconies, hanging out clothes to dry on lines hung from eaves and windows, and, on Sundays, going in couples, the men wearing ties and the women dressed in black, to hear Mass at the Church of San Lorenzo, on the corner of Calle Doctor Piga and Calle Salitre.
Our apartment was smaller than the one I’d had on Rue Joseph Granier, or it seemed that way to me because of how crowded it was with the cardboard, paper, and balsa-wood models of Marcella’s set designs, which, like Salomón Toledano’s little toy soldiers, invaded the apartment’s two small rooms, and even the kitchen and tiny bathroom. In spite of being so small and so full of books and records, it wasn’t claustrophobic, thanks to the windows onto the street, through which the vivid white light of Castile, so different from Parisian light, streamed in, and because it had a small balcony where we could put a table at night and eat supper under the stars, which do exist in Madrid, though diffused by the reflection of the city’s lights.
Marcella managed to work in the apartment, lying on the bed if she was drawing, or sitting on the Afghan rug in the living room if she was constructing her models with pieces of cardboard, bits of wood, glue, paste, coated cardboard, and colored pencils. I preferred to do the translations that the editor Mario Muchnik assigned to me in a nearby café, the Café Barbieri, where I would spend several hours a day translating, reading, and observing the fauna that frequented the café and never bored me, because it incarnated all the many colors of this nascent Noah’s ark in the heart of old Madrid.
The Café Barbieri was right on Calle Ave María and seemed—this is what Marcella said the first time she took me there, and she knew about those things—like an expressionist set from 1920s Berlin or an engraving by Grosz or Otto Dix, with its cracked walls, dark corners, medallions of Roman ladies on the ceiling, and mysterious cubicles where it looked as if crimes could be committed without the patrons finding out, or demented sums wagered in poker games in which knives flashed, or Black Masses celebrated. It was enormous, angled, full of uneven floors, silvery cobwebs hanging from gloomy corners of the ceiling, feeble tables and crippled chairs, benches and ledges about to collapse from sheer exhaustion; it was dark, smoky, always filled with people who seemed to be in costume, a crowd of extras from a farcical play waiting in the wings to go onstage. I always tried to sit at a table in the back where a little more light filtered in, and, instead of hard chairs, there was a fairly comfortable armchair covered in velvet that once had been red but was disintegrating from the holes burned into it by cigarettes and the friction of so many rumps. One of my distractions, each time I entered the Café Barbieri, consisted of identifying the languages I heard between the door and the table in the rear, and sometimes I counted half a dozen in that brief passage of some thirty meters.
The waitresses and waiters also represented the diversity of the neighborhood: Swedes, Belgians, North Americans, Moroccans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, and so forth. They changed all the time, because they must have been badly paid, and for the eight straight hours they worked, in two shifts, the patrons had them carrying and fetching beer, coffee, te
a, hot chocolate, glasses of wine, and sandwiches. As soon as I was settled at my usual table, with my notebooks and pens and the book I was translating, they quickly brought me an espresso with a little milk and a bottle of still mineral water.
At the table I would look through the morning papers, and in the afternoon, when I was tired of translating, I would read, not for work now but for pleasure. The three books I had translated, by Doris Lessing, Paul Auster, and Michel Tournier, hadn’t been too difficult, but I didn’t have a very good time bringing them over into Spanish. Their authors were in fashion, but the novels I was given to translate weren’t the best they had written. As I always suspected, literary translations were very poorly paid, the fees much lower than for commercial ones. But I was no longer in any condition to do them, because the mental fatigue that came over me when my effort at concentration was prolonged meant my progress was very slow. In any event, this meager income allowed me to help Marcella with household expenses and not feel like a kept man. My friend Muchnik tried to help me find some translation work from Russian—it was what I wanted most—and we almost convinced an editor to publish Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or the staggering Requiem by Anna Akhmatova, but it didn’t work out because Russian fiction still didn’t arouse much interest in Spanish and Latin American readers, and Russian poetry even less.
I couldn’t tell if I liked Madrid or not. I didn’t know the other neighborhoods of the city, where I barely had ventured on the occasions I went to a museum or accompanied Marcella to a show. But I felt comfortable in Lavapiés, even though I’d been mugged on its streets for the first time in my life by a couple of Arabs who stole my watch, a wallet with some change, and my Mont Blanc pen, my last luxury. The truth is I felt at home here, immersed in its ebullient life. Sometimes, in the afternoon, Marcella stopped by for me at the Barbieri and we would walk through the neighborhood, which I got to know like the back of my hand. I always discovered something curious or odd. For example, the shop and radio studio of the Bolivian Alcérreca, who learned Swahili to better serve his African customers. If they were showing something interesting, we’d go to the Filmoteca to see a classic film.
On these walks, Marcella talked without stopping and I listened. I intervened very occasionally to let her catch her breath, and, by means of a question or observation, encouraged her to go on telling me about the project she wanted to be involved in. Sometimes I didn’t pay much attention to what she was saying because I focused so much on how she said it: with passion, conviction, hope, and joy. I never knew anyone who gave herself so totally—so fanatically, I’d say, if the word didn’t have gloomy memories—to her vocation, who knew in so exclusionary a way what she wanted to do in life.
We had met years earlier in Paris, at a clinic in Passy where I was having some tests done and she was visiting a friend who had recently had surgery. During the half hour we shared the waiting room, she spoke with so much enthusiasm about a play of Molière’s, The Bourgeois Gentleman, being shown at a small theater in Nanterre where she had done the set designs, that I went to see it. I ran into Marcella at the theater, and when the play was over I suggested having a drink at a bistrot near the Métro station.
We had lived together for two and a half years, the first year in Paris and after that, in Madrid. Marcella was Italian, twenty years younger than me. She had studied architecture in Rome to please her parents, both of whom were architects, and while still a student began to work as a theatrical set designer. Her never having practiced architecture offended her parents, and for some years they were estranged. They reconciled when her parents understood that what their daughter did was not a whim but a true vocation. Occasionally she would spend some time with her parents in Rome, and since she didn’t have much money—she was the hardest-working person in the world, but the designs she was hired to do were of small account, in marginal theaters, and she was paid very little, and sometimes nothing at all—her parents, who were fairly well-off, sent her occasional money orders that allowed her to dedicate her time and energy to the theater. She hadn’t triumphed, and it wasn’t something she cared about very much, because she—and I as well—were absolutely certain that sooner or later theater people in Spain, in Italy, in all of Europe, would come to recognize her talent. Though she spoke a great deal, gesticulating like the caricature of an Italian, she never bored me. I was fascinated to hear her describe the ideas that whirled inside her head about revolutionizing the sets of The Cherry Orchard, Waiting for Godot, Harlequin, Servant of Two Masters, or La Celestina. She had been hired for the movies as an assistant decorator and could have made her way in that medium, but she liked the theater and was not prepared to sacrifice her vocation, even if it was more difficult to move ahead designing for the theater than for films or television. Thanks to Marcella, I learned to see shows with different eyes, to pay careful attention not only to plots and characters but also to places, the light in which they moved, the things that surrounded them.
She was small, with light hair, green eyes, extremely white smooth skin, and a joyful smile. She exuded energy. She dressed very carelessly, most of the time in sandals, jeans, and a worn sheepskin jacket, and she used glasses for reading and the movies, a pair of tiny rimless glasses that made her expression somewhat clownish. She was unselfish, uncalculating, generous, capable of devoting a good amount time to insignificant jobs, like the single performance of a play by Lope de Vega put on by the students at an academy, with a set consisting of a few odds and ends and a couple of painted canvases to which she devoted herself with the perseverance of a designer working at the Paris Opéra for the first time. The satisfaction she felt more than compensated for the small or nonexistent monetary reward she brought home from that adventure. If anyone was described by the phrase “working for love of the art,” it was Marcella.
Less than a tenth of the models that smothered our apartment had appeared onstage. Most had been frustrated by a lack of financing; they were ideas she’d had after reading a work she liked and for which she conceived a set that didn’t go beyond a drawing and a maquette. She never discussed fees when she was hired, and could turn down an important contract if she thought the director or the producer was a pharisee, uninterested in esthetics and attentive only to the commercial side of things. On the other hand, when she accepted a contract—generally from avant-garde groups with no access to established theaters—she devoted herself to it body and soul. She not only had a great desire to do her work well but collaborated in everything else, helping her colleagues to find support, locate a theater, obtain donations and loans of furniture and costumes, and she worked shoulder to shoulder with carpenters and electricians and, if necessary, swept the stage, sold tickets, and seated the audience. It always amazed me to see her so involved in her work that I would have to remind her, during those feverish periods, that a human being doesn’t live by theatrical sets alone but also by eating, sleeping, and showing a little interest in the other things in life.
I never understood why Marcella was with me, what I added to her life. In what interested her most in the world, her work, I could help her very little. Everything I knew about theatrical set design she taught me, and the opinions I could offer were superfluous, because like every authentic creator, she knew very well what she wanted to do without any need for advice. All I could be for her was an attentive ear if she needed to express aloud the rush of images, possibilities, alternatives, and doubts that would assail her when she began a project. I listened to her with envy for as long as I had to. I went with her to consult prints and books in the Biblioteca Nacional, to visit artisans and antiquarians, and on the never-failing Sunday excursion to the Rastro. I did this not only out of affection but because what she said was always novel, surprising, at times inspired. I learned something new with her each day. I never would have guessed, without knowing her, how a theatrical story can be influenced so decisively, though always subtly, by the set design, the lighting, the presence or absence of the most ordinary obj
ect, a broom or a simple vase.
The twenty-year difference in our ages didn’t seem to trouble her. It did trouble me. I always told myself that our good relationship would diminish when I was in my sixties and she was still a young woman. Then she would fall in love with someone her own age. And leave. She was attractive in spite of how little time she spent on her appearance, and on the street men followed her with their eyes. One day when we were making love she asked, “Would you care if we had a baby?” No. If she wanted one, I’d be delighted. But then I was immediately attacked by distress. Why did I have that reaction? Perhaps because, in my fifties, and given my prolonged adventures and misadventures with the bad girl, it was impossible for me to believe in the longevity of any pairing that worked smoothly, including ours. Wasn’t that doubt absurd? We got along so well that in our two and a half years together we hadn’t had a single fight. At most, minor arguments and passing annoyances. But never anything that resembled a break. “I’m glad you don’t care,” Marcella said then. “I didn’t ask so we could have a bambino now, but when we’ve done some important things.” She spoke for herself, someone who undoubtedly would do things in the future worthy of that description. I’d be happy if, in the next few years, Mario Muchnik could get me a Russian book that would require a good deal of effort and enthusiasm to translate, something more creative than light novels that disappeared from memory at the same speed with which I rewrote them in Spanish.
No doubt she was with me because she loved me; she had no other reason. To some extent I was even an economic burden for her. How could she have fallen in love with me, since for her I was an old man, not at all good-looking, without a vocation, somewhat diminished in my intellectual faculties, whose only aim in life had been, since boyhood, to spend the rest of my days in Paris? When I told Marcella that this had been my only vocation, she began to laugh. “Well, caro, you achieved it. You must be happy, you’ve lived in Paris your whole life.” She said this affectionately, but her words sounded somewhat sinister to me.
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