by Andrés Barba
“You know what, you’re absolutely right.”
What a strange sense of triumph—Nelly, conceding a point, what unexpected allegiance. She even repeats it.
“Absolutely right, I’d never thought of that before.”
Why is this little triumph not making her happier? It seems to fade immediately, as though, for a second, she no longer wanted to feel Nelly’s arm resting on hers. She hates that about herself, the way she can be upbeat and then deflated one second later, over any stupid little thing. Desires fulfilled yield sadness, rather than happiness, for her. It was different for Papá—despite his illness, his attention was always focused on Nelly like a bright, unceasing light. Maybe that’s why Nelly left him, she thinks now, because he’d made her life the only purpose of his own. Now she sees that it’s hard to bear being loved unfailingly, regardless of logic, regardless of merit. Being adored is exhausting. I am who I am, you know that, I’ve never tried to hide anything, Nelly says; and once, two years ago, Your father sometimes thinks that everybody can go around gushing with love, morning, noon and night, like him. She remembers that the comment really stung and then immediately stopped stinging—like accidentally touching an open sore—when she took into account that a virtue can also be a defect if you just shift your perspective a few inches. But perhaps she misjudged something, she thinks, and not just Nelly—herself, too. It’s strange, but she thinks she can sense an impending intuition, right this minute, she’s about to have it, about to hit on something she’s never hit on before. And stranger still, her brain has already intuited it but not yet dared to articulate it. Suddenly, it does: Papá knew. The thought is achingly simple—the suede shoes, the ring he’d had special ordered from a jeweler in Denmark, the rug with different shades of red, his job as an architect, the Maupassant novels he liked to read, he knew it, and the Sunday crossword (his only confessable vice aside from alcohol), he knew from the start that Nelly was going to leave him, knew that it was only a matter of time. The thought follows the strange trajectory of thoughts that have been had many times but never fully grasped. Now she thinks she understands—he knew it from the start, the way the rabbit knows upon entering the lion’s cage that it is going to be devoured, so when the first bite comes, it does not whimper, does not squeal, does not make any sound at all, though it cannot help but cower and flail from side to side. The terrible thing about the rabbit is not that it lets itself be eaten but rather its silence, the smile on its wan lips, its turtledove manner, its near-total lack of offense, and, even worse, the absolute knowledge that all of those things thwart any hope of ever being loved by the lion again (Does your mother ever talk about me?), and that is why the rabbit cowers, in his only real act of valor—that of having entered the cage to begin with—and ends up trapped there (Are you trying to prove something, Antonio, drinking like that?), doesn’t betray the slightest sign, doesn’t fall down, doesn’t die, doesn’t change; his lack of resistance is his victory, an uncalculated victory (Your mother looks lovely this evening, doesn’t she?), and the rest of the time, his attention remains focused like a spotlight on Nelly (She never talks about me, does she?), he comes home, shows no sign of neediness but does need complicity, needs for her to accompany him in his love of the lion, needs an accomplice to his insanity, and finds it in his little girl.
When they walk into Sybilla, she immediately revels in the heating, although the warmth, combined with her distressing realization, causes her to give an ambiguous shiver. Nelly lets go of her arm as soon as they enter the boutique and strides to the counter. Immediately, she asks, “Does that girl still work here . . . what was her name?”
Like all good egotists, all utterly spirited women, Nelly possesses this defect: she forever thinks that everyone knows exactly what she’s talking about, as though whatever it was that impressed or seduced her were cause for universal impression or seduction.
“You mean Diana?”
“Maybe.”
“She’s not here anymore.”
“What a shame, that girl was a doll.”
She, too, loves this boutique, the obsession and the lassitude it produces, the absentminded, covetous touch of the fabrics, the sight of the racks hung first with dresses, then shirts, and then skirts, the antique mannequin, the ochre tones, the parquet floor, the smell of the dresses. Each fabric has its own distinct scent, but in the tiny boutique, they all blend together, like a room that’s been slept in. It’s like entering a personal paradise, one constructed slowly and carefully, something that’s been rehearsed over the course of several months of trials and errors, until finally it’s all laid out with great simplicity by someone who understands that the insignificant things are the only ones that really matter, that excitement is built on others’ transgressions, and that the power of any rhythm or order is, in fact, a courtship. Evening gowns, dresses that change your life, shirts that seem to have been designed expressly for you at some point before the world began—they always look bad on hangers. For a second, she forgets Nelly; it’s a pleasant feeling. She forgets her and enters her own private avarice. The dresses that change your life, that turn into second skins, can only ever be recognized once on the body, never on the hanger. That is the simultaneously unheroic yet erotic reality of these dresses. She loves the perverse surge of power that suddenly shoots through her, like a jolt of electricity, the allure, the siren’s song of the feel of the fabric, not like love but like an impulse and like a flush of feeling, like a burn, like selfishness, and like the best thing in the world, the bestkept lie in history. Being with Nelly now, four months after Papá’s death, brings up feelings from before his death, and she forgets for a second her persistent sense of orphanhood, forgets his sickly contact, scrawny arms, labored breath, the fear, the tormented effort to repress her feelings, and lets herself be carried away.
“Nobody makes evening gowns like Sybilla,” Nelly says, holding up a black one. “I think I’m going to try this on. Have you found anything for you?”
“Not yet.”
Nelly goes into a changing room and a few minutes later beckons her in. Outside, the sun disappears for a second and then returns. The clothes Nelly was wearing now lie on the bench and Nelly is in a black dress, perhaps too young for her—it has a plunging back, revealing her shoulder blades, and hangs to the top of her knees. She was hoping not to be impressed by Nelly, but she is. What else could she possibly be? She’s fought the feeling many times, has hated her, has on occasion proclaimed that she didn’t exist, even tried to behave as though she were dead. And all it takes to tear it all down is seeing Nelly for one second in a black dress in a dressing room four months after Papá’s death, contemplating her endless face, a face that looks chiseled into shape, with infinite concealments that make it impossible to ever see it clearly.
“What do you think?” Nelly asks without looking at her, gesturing strangely, as though trying to smooth down her hips.
“It looks great on you.”
Nelly laughs at herself. A macabre, slightly venomous laugh. There’s no sadness in it, but there is an undulating silkiness that seems to have been previously kept in check and now seeps into that little cave, into the intimacy of the changing room. If she let herself, she might actually be jealous of her, of her body, her way of taking love for granted, her resolve, her awareness. There, beneath that dress, stands Nelly, naked. Why is that idea so intoxicating? It’s a facile, masculine thought. Keeping calm in Nelly’s presence, in the presence of the Nelly in the mirror in a young dress, is no doubt within her grasp, and yet she can’t control it at her discretion.
“I’m too old for it, but I still get a kick out of trying these things on once in a while. Five years ago, maybe, but now . . .”
“Why five years ago and not now?”
Nelly seems piqued by the question.
“Don’t be impertinent, kid.”
“I wasn’t being impertinent.”
“Come on. Out. I’m going to get changed.”
“But I wasn’t being impertinent.”
Suddenly things are tense, and just as abrupt as the good mood the dress initially brought on, the pendulum swings back the other way. Nelly finally turns to her, pausing theatrically. She’s still too powerful. Too powerful and larger-than-life. How might she express her love of that face? How might it be described? It lasts only a second, a second in which she feels she loves her and spurns her, both in half measures, both imperfectly, but also feels that something has changed; she suddenly has the courage of a dog or a madman, she’s got nothing to lose, actually feels a singular strength from within, like the kind seen in those Chekhov plays her father liked to read—the weak character, the one who puts up with all of the others’ selfishness, one strange night, finally takes a stand and speaks. She has often silently admired these particular characters, always female, of Chekhov’s—good-hearted, close-mouthed, thought-provoking women who all of a sudden rise up, electric, and accuse with incontestable authority; she feels that they contain all of life itself, that they tremble with unrivaled independence and freedom, that not even their accusation is resentful, just a perfect execution of justice and order. I never asked you to love me, Nelly would reply straightforwardly, and with that simple statement, that would be the end of it. What would Chekhov say to that?
“Why don’t you go outside and wait for me there?”
And this time it is she who is enraged by the question. She manages to hold out a few seconds before leaving—her final act of subversion.
“Fine.”
She’s more upset than she realized but also weaker than she realized. Her hands are shaking a little as she puts on her coat. She doesn’t even acknowledge the shop assistant, simply obeys Nelly—she goes outside. The air is colder now than it was, or that’s how it feels, and as she walks out, she suddenly considers the possibility of leaving altogether. For a few seconds, that shimmering fantasy beckons—keep walking and leave her there, in that boutique. But of course that, yet again, would amount to a failure on her own part, not Nelly’s. She feels a tingling of fear and displeasure. In the last four months, since Papá died, it’s been almost constant but not fully articulated, as though she were shielding herself from a thought she doesn’t dare to think—she, too, has been a coward; she, too, ran away from him. It’s not an entirely unfounded suspicion. Her mind stores it like a tangible object—she, too, tired of his desperate, full-frontal love, a love so like that of a child. And his months in the hospital, those were another strange journey. Thoughts come in flashes, and the body grows accustomed to doing what it must to get through the day, actions do not become more spaced out but, on the contrary, more compressed, days become an inventory of things in the enumerative eyes of the patient, force of will leads the power of recollection wherever it can in order to survive: hands; tongue; hair; chest; transfer of assets; evenings glossed with optimism; respect; hope; physical exhaustion; the inability to speak; the simplicity of a map of life unfolded on the table—This is where I . . . All of it necessary. But when it’s over (and now it’s over, and thank God she wasn’t there when it happened), there comes something like a visionary insight into the deceased, like a long, seductive line, like the white strip of the horizon on a beach. The deceased (no longer Papá, impossible to keep calling him Papá) is as pervasive as a splatter, as electric sparks, he disappears and suddenly reappears here, in full force, on the way out of a boutique, in the cold, he was forgotten and now suddenly barges in as though to demand this: Don’t misinterpret me, don’t fabricate me, don’t make of me what you need. It is important to be loyal to the deceased, but it’s not that easy, and she’s not that strong. While waiting for Nelly and still savoring the possibility of running off and leaving her there (what face would she make?), she recalls Nelly’s reactions over the course of those months: How does he look? Papá didn’t ask Nelly to visit, but he yearned for it. The scope of Papá’s yearning was astonishing, the whole fraudulent and frivolous range of motives and, deep down, the knowledge that he would arouse no pity, the assurance that he would produce only disgust and hostility (Antonio, at least admit that you basically did this to yourself), but when it comes to yearning, risk doesn’t matter. At times it is hateful, that morass of yearning tinged with love. It bursts in without warning, the two press against one another, each inhaling the heat of the other, like a fix, a drug, and she knows that Papá’s mind is focused solely on that image, as though his entire will to live were contained within it, a will that, given the circumstances, is now starting to seem unnatural and resemble a tantrum, resemble childishness. How could anyone suspect something so base, so shocking as this: the idea that death itself, in the end, would seem like a tantrum. And yet Nelly—What does he look like? Is he recognizable? He looks swollen. I don’t know if I’ll go see him. What would be the point, at this stage? It was eerie, too—Nelly’s words betrayed no fear, none of the predictable distress that a dying body produces in a healthy one, none of that aversion, only a feeling of contractual obligation to her own life in the here and now and an utter lack of awareness of the conventional understanding of loyalty. It was actually an authentic reaction—What would be the point? But one that does nothing to quell Papá’s longing, in fact nourishes it; day after day, he wakes, and she knows that the thought grows in him (Air out the room a little, it’s stuffy, don’t you think? Just in case she stops by).
“Oh, there you are, I didn’t see you,” says Nelly, coming out of the boutique, holding a bag.
“You bought the dress?”
“I did.”
It’s an emphatic I did, assertive, and seems to convey, Don’t you dare say a word. She’s aged a bit now, she thinks. Now that she’s bought the dress, she’s aged a bit. This is Nelly’s first false step. There must have been others, surely, but this is the first one that she can see clearly, and it alters the temperature on the street a little, alters her own temperature, and her own fear. A minute ago, she was on the verge of storming off, now she’s glad she didn’t go, so that she can witness the apparently innocuous scene—Nelly’s failure on leaving Sybilla with a dress she will never wear, a dress bought for the Nelly that was, not the Nelly that is. When she was seven years old, Nelly gave her the doll she’d wanted when she was six, brought it from London with great fanfare (You won’t believe what’s in this bag); she remembers her spellbound fascination, the needless torture of not being allowed to open it until after lunch, and, on opening it, the sense of vanquished yearning, the object of her desire presented once that desire had been extinguished, the absurd blondeness of the doll insulated in her clear plastic box, the long-gone yearning, and the shame of having been dying at one time for that blonde, sun-kissed doll, a shrunken Veronica Lake. At fifty-six, Nelly has bought the dress she would have wanted at fifty. She’s angry with herself and doesn’t feel like talking, so it is she who speaks now, instead. The air is heavy with something akin to kindness, and to sadness. Now that she is more pathetic, she loves her more, but it’s a detached love. If she could at least turn to her and s ay, What an idiot, can you believe it? I actually bought that dress . . . But she can’t, and the fact that Nelly can’t speak is an extension of the failure of having bought it, in the same way that her defunct love for the doll penetrated and distended the actual body of the doll she no longer wanted. And that is why she is the one who now speaks, as though this were an act of graciousness, as though this were the only act possible—pretending she doesn’t know what’s going on. Is that what love is? She has an evil way of being kind. She has an evil way of loving her.
She says, “We could go to Yves Saint Laurent to find something for Aunt Lu.”
And, “Look, I think it’s starting to clear up.”
And, “I love the white light of Madrid.”
Nelly nods at almost everything, glances alternately at her and the sky; she, meanwhile, thinks the bag with the dress begins weig
hing less heavily, becomes gradually lighter and lighter, and, for a moment, becomes almost imperceptible, a phantom weight mysteriously counterbalancing the weight of Madrid. I don’t like games, I don’t like people who don’t say what they mean, Nelly often says. And she remembers one time when she returned from a trip to China (The most frightful country I have ever visited in my life) and told a story about a pit with the statues of two traitors inside it, statues that had been put there seven hundred years ago, and to this day, when people pass by, they spit in it. They were shiny, you know? Those statues . . . people had been spitting on them for seven hundred years. What makes her think of that now? It’s like the prickling of an intuition, the fear that scorn might extend beyond the grave, the fear that there’s no way to clean the Calle Serrano—which they have now returned to—and no way to clean the hospital sheets, no way to clean her memory. She’s done nothing with her life. She is thirty years old and she’s done nothing with her life—study business, spend two years living in Paris, take care of Papá, adore Nelly, spurn Nelly, try to live as though Nelly didn’t exist, forget about her, even. The secrets, frustrations, and accomplishments of a poor little rich girl, a spoiled child.
Yves Saint Laurent is a bruised and battered world, a stifling world—nothing like the restraint of Loewe or the sensuality of Sybilla—a distended, slightly hostile world, and Aunt Lu is the most difficult of all her aunts to buy for. Nelly deals with it the way she deals with all things difficult: by going with the first thing that pops into her head and reacting with incredulity to any displeasure or disappointment—I thought it was absolutely perfect for you. Despite being a fussy person herself, Nelly cannot comprehend the fussiness of others; she is a complicated woman yet finds it absurd that others’ needs are not simple. Did that signal a lack of imagination, or selfishness? She’s not sure. The annoyance she’s sometimes felt at this character trait of Nelly’s has dissipated. Sometimes Nelly requires the same sort of patience as a child everyone knows is sweet, or rather, not that bright. Or maybe the patience required for a truly pure child. And when she shows that kind of patience, out of the blue, she suddenly feels herself slip, and she can see Nelly’s face, a face as unfathomable as that of an animal. The store is shockingly vile, as though Yves Saint Laurent’s designers had all lost their minds and begun making clothes for government officials’ mistresses—tacky, provincial women, old hens strutting around like spring chickens.