Santiago's Way

by Patricia Laurent

  Vicente lets me go.

  I leave, full of cramps, with sulphurous saliva still in my mouth. My mind is searching through its maps to find where to close the fissure that still has me retching with its poisons. In the taxi I collect the spattered venom from different parts of my body, pile it into a heap and force it into my protesting stomach. I reach home, doubled with pain. My mother hugs me. It takes me days to get out of bed. I visit the doctor and he prescribes antacids and sleeping pills. Two of my back teeth have come loose for no obvious reason and rock back and forth at the touch of my tongue.

  ‘Never again.’ Santiago makes me sign a pact.

  ‘Never,’ I promise, enchanted by landscapes of the French countryside I have been perusing lately.

  12

  Of the trip to Europe there exist only a few smudged photos. My tearing the veil that covered my anger condemned me to oscillate between a vague abstractedness and rare moments of specific lucidity.

  I had little money with me. After my escape from Vicente, I quit my jobs as a translator and as an engineer – I’d never figured out what I was doing in engineering anyway. I sold my car and a jewelled bracelet that Vicente had bought me when we first started going out. Even so, I had little enough to survive on, just sufficient to travel if I stayed in youth hostels. All the castles, rivers, bridges and museums remained in Santiago’s hands like so many old postcards. I was hardly aware of my body as it crossed latitudes and longitudes. I might just as well have been seated in a chair in front of a window, flipping through a book with photos of Europe.

  Except, of course, for a few episodes that a puff of memory can blow into holographic life.

  In Madrid I stayed at the San Lorenzo lodging-house. It was an ancient building, with four floors and sweeping staircases. The third and fourth floors offered accommodation to single young ladies. On the first floor lived a family; on the second Maria de las Angustias, a woman of around forty, the owner of the building.

  When I paid my first month’s rent I was hoping to get a job and move on soon to better accommodation. I had no idea I would be stuck there for two whole years.

  They assigned me a bed in a room with seven other women. They gave me a key to my wardrobe, along with advice on how to avoid being robbed, instructions on how to light the gas and the rules for keeping the bathroom and the kitchen clean.

  In less than an hour after my arrival a blonde Spanish woman adopted me. In her younger days she must have been a beauty. She took me to the market. She introduced me to grocers who wouldn’t put their thumbs on the scale when they weighed out fruit and sausage. She suggested stuff to eat, to wash my clothes with, a coffee pot, a frying-pan, wine sold in cardboard containers. With the velocity of a machine-gun she filled me in on who was who among the forty inhabitants of the two floors that made up the lodging-house: the names, the characteristics of thieves, tarts, domestic servants, hairdressers, clerks and women getting government payouts after being declared redundant.

  I lay on my bed, my only private space in the room. I was planning how to regulate my finances. I had got it into my head that I would circle the globe. On leaving Mexico, I had crossed the Atlantic, so I had to return via the Pacific. In my diary was a diminutive map of the world, the entire planet spread over two tiny pages.

  I marked three key points on it. I would work my way through those places. The first was Spain, the second somewhere in the Middle East, the third Japan. Easy enough to say.

  Santiago was happy. Stretching out his silver cord almost to breaking point, he would soar away from me, up into the stratosphere with his camera. From there he would swoop down on particular targets. He was photographing wars, carnival floats with allegorical dragons, the British parliament buildings, political accords. Sometimes he would press through the tunnels of nostalgia and come back with satellite photos of my mother in her kitchen, wrapped in her crocheted woollen blanket, lighting the stove at daybreak.

  And so winter arrived. I felt few emotions. I plagiarized my feelings from newspaper photos or from guesses made from outer space. I lay on my bed and stayed there. I got up only twice a day, once to give an English class in the morning, once to give two classes in the evening. This brought in enough for me to pay for my lodging, to eat badly and to buy unmarked, home-made red wine by the gallon through a government pensioner named Lola.

  I didn’t feel lonely. Santiago kept himself so busy filling his album with shots from all over the world that he hardly muttered his fears. Time and again, as I lay in bed listening to the other women snoring, he would come stumbling out of his caves with a photo in his hand, to ask me where was this or that person who had featured at some point in the movie of our life. So many questions that they gave my heart palpitations. His nagging would drive me out of bed to grope for the container of wine. A cigarette, a lamp and a book were the best sedative. We would entertain ourselves with photos of writers – Spanish, French or English – until we fell asleep. Sometimes we went to see a movie, but we always came out with our head spinning. We would kill time trying to match the intermittent way our memory worked with the efficient way the memories of the characters operated.

  Months of peace drifted by before the next photo in the album, one that Santiago points to with embarrassment. It is the final days of winter. Already the people of Madrid are strolling the streets in light jackets. Santa Barbara Square is thronging with young men drinking their first cold beer and a few old boys sipping red wine. I come up out of the mouth of the Metro.

  I am heading back to my lodgings. I don’t know exactly why, but Santiago forces me to stop suddenly half-way across the square. Loaded with his bagfuls of photographs of other people, of strangers with their peculiar odours and foreign ways under an alien moon, he says to me in a tone I have learned to fear, ‘This is no good.’

  Just like that, giving no reasons. He hurls at me the bags of photos, and they create a knot in the nape of my neck. I am still living with one foot over the edge of the abyss, not fully part of the concrete world, a happy position for anyone who has always seen herself as a stranger to life. Hypothetically, without registering objects named by human eyes, I try to move forwards.

  ‘We’ll talk about it later in bed,’ I tell him.

  ‘No. No. And no again.’

  Santiago is determined to harass me. He drums out questions in my encephalic arteries. Where is she now, the absent woman who loves us so? Where is the grave of the cruel old man? Where is Lilia, dancing for joy? Where today, exactly where today, in what part of the garden back home, is the Macho Brigade celebrating the arrival of the weekend?

  ‘We carry them all inside us,’ he hears me say without conviction. The English texts fall from my hands. The people near by scurry away, anxious not to be involved in an embarrassing scene. Everything turns into a silent movie. Beating on his drum and weeping, Santiago begs to be allowed to recognize at least one person in the crowd around us. I tremble uncontrollably. I want to pick up my books, but I manage to do it only in my imagination.

  I plead with him. ‘Don’t do this to me in the middle of the square!’

  Square? What square? There is no square, only an unrecognizable darkness, a sort of grey but not grey, for grey would be a colour that would let me act.

  I don’t know how long I was stranded there, but I felt as empty as I did during my suicide attempt, before Santiago arrived. What did I do? I have no idea. How did I get back to my lodgings with my books under my arm and get into the bed that protected me from all things alien? I have no idea.

  13

  I was recovering from the moment in the square when I glanced in the direction of the dormitory windows. Santiago was nowhere to be seen. Most likely he was dangling from some precipice, trying not to fall. Adriana, a handsome, middle-aged Galician woman with a fair complexion, was standing in front of the windows. She was combing out her long dark hair. Without Santiago’s presence the windows could mean only a vertigo similar to the one you experience when you pos
ition yourself between two facing mirrors. They trick you. At first they provide you with new vistas, but then they trap you in an endlessly dizzying panorama of images.

  The windows, which belonged to the eight women who slept there, overlooked a central patio, with a disused fountain crowned by the statue of a naked child. By day it was filled by birds; at night by tom-cats on the prowl. By now it was already dark, and I could sense the stealthy approach of the cats.

  Stretched out on my bed, I tried again and again to explain to the abyss the reasons behind my trip. Suddenly I jumped up and grabbed Adriana by her long hair. With tears in my eyes I begged her to get away from the windows. Couldn’t she see the danger she was in, visible from all sides, reflected in the windows?

  ‘Look,’ I told her, ‘we’re all able to see you there. Just look!’ I tugged hard on her hair.

  Adriana did what I had done in the photo of Felicitas. She clutched the roots of her hair to lessen the pain.

  I managed to drag her to the floor.

  At that point I would have gone quietly back to bed, but Maria de las Angustias intervened. She took me down to the second floor.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she said in English. She’d have loved to speak entirely in English if she’d known how. How appropriate for a woman of Moorish blood! ‘You know I just adore you. I’ve never allowed anyone to get three months behind with the rent before. You are the sole exception.’ Her words had a hollow ring to them, like a lecture from the boss. ‘But you’ve gone way too far!’

  Where are you, Santiago? Now that I need to find a reply! The weather is still cold, so you can’t be sleeping yet in railway stations or places like that.

  ‘She was standing by the window,’ I replied as my only possible defence.

  ‘Adriana has spent nine years here looking out of the windows.’

  ‘Somebody had to tell her.’

  ‘For some inexplicable reason, I really like you, dear, but there is no way I can allow you to bother another lodger. Are we agreed on that? Good. What would you say to a liqueur or a glass of wine?’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ I replied as before.

  Maria de las Angustias came closer. The smell emanating from her breasts was like my mother’s.

  ‘If you bother anybody again you’ll force me to throw you out. Understand?’

  Without further ado she accompanied me up the stairs back to the lodging area of which she was queen. There she spoke to Vicenta, the woman in charge of the fourth floor. Without asking my opinion, they entered a tiny room beside the kitchen and, between them, dragged out of it old scrap metal, a disused toilet bowl and black rubbish bags filled with something or other. Then they hauled my bed and wardrobe in there.

  ‘This place will suit you better. You’ll have more privacy here.’

  I flopped down on the bed. The room was barely big enough to accommodate the bed, the wardrobe and a coffee-table. It had no windows and the door opened directly on to the kitchen. It was one of the many unused storage cupboards in the building. It had all the characteristics of a coffin.

  14

  Sitting on the edge of the bed Santiago and I pulled out photos that left us brimful of nostalgia before we fell asleep, body and soul. The first one we looked at left me staring up at the ceiling of my closet-room. It showed the death of my father. After all he had suffered it had come as a relief both to him and to us. Of course nobody with his level of vanity could die a straightforward death. He had to sidle into it, surreptitiously, sinking into a coma after an operation for appendicitis that had serious complications. For the two weeks he was in the coma, he wore an expression of pain. Tears rolled down from his shut eyes whenever we spoke to him. According to the doctor, chatting to a patient increases that person’s will to live and to rouse himself from his comatose state. My siblings and I surrounded his bed at all times. By this time I was in secondary school. I made up stories about my teachers that I knew would amuse him. In my father’s judgement, every teacher in the world was an idiot, apart from the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius and my father himself. All of humanity had produced only two engineers worth their salt: Albert Einstein and himself.

  I can still see his face, toughened and creased, the enormous beer belly, the skinny legs. He is curled up in the foetal position, apparently unconscious. That is how we left him, Santiago and I, when we passed on to other photos.

  Then I get off the bed and stand up. In my wardrobe are big bottles of wine and plastic cups. As I uncork a bottle and pour out a drink it occurs to me that I should apologize to Adriana.

  In a moment or two I’ll take her a glass of wine and we’ll raise a toast together in honour of her forgiving me.

  Santiago grumbles at the idea. ‘Get some sense!’ he tells me. ‘That woman is as shallow as they come. She’s not worth the trouble.’

  ‘You sound exactly like my dad,’ I smile. ‘Say what you like, I’m going to ask her to forgive me.’

  ‘What you should do is apologize to Maria de las Angustias. God! Where the hell did she get a name like that?’

  After stifling his laughter Santiago reels off the benefits she has given us: our own room, her open affection, her fondness for my personality, especially for my look of an orphan in a strange land.

  ‘You call this a room?’ I snort. ‘It’s a storage cupboard, and I know she stuck me in here to punish me. Look at those stairs. God knows where they lead.’

  Santiago gives a nervous jump.

  ‘Look at them. Over there.’ I am determined to rattle him.

  I step out of my ‘private room’. The kitchen reeks of the lingering cooking smells of the government pensioners’ supper. And it’s already way past 10 p.m.! According to the rules, the kitchen is closed by ten. It still stinks of garlic, fry-ups, sausages and strong coffee. The small door to the little staircase is half-open. I open it fully, and the hinges squeak. Nothing is visible inside. Santiago pulls out his photo of the staircase where the Kid with the Candle stalked.

  Was that taken before or after my night on the patio? It had to be after. A house with a patio would have been too expensive for my parents to rent by that date.

  After a squabble with his superiors – they were all a bunch of sly, incompetent frauds – my father picked up some work in land-surveying and drafting, but he didn’t earn enough to allow us to predict whether we were going to meet our monthly expenses or whether we would be living without electricity or gas and dodging the rent-collector.

  My father then lost those two jobs, but that just tripled his vanity. What he didn’t lose, for sure, was his sense of humour, as cruel as an adolescent king’s.

  I have already said that I had gaps in my understanding. In this photo I see myself listening one night to one of my father’s innumerable stories. My brothers and my sister are clustered around him. By the look of it we’ve just moved into a new place. There are cardboard boxes everywhere. My mother opens them and silently arranges plates, fruit bowls and plaster ornaments. My father has gathered us around him to give us some ghastly news: this is the apartment where a little boy died at the very time he was about to make his first communion. Dropped dead! Boom! Here he was, rehearsing his part in the ceremony and then, for no reason, he just fell down dead! And now his ghost haunts this place, carrying a candle in its hand, most often appearing on the stairs leading up to the apartment.

  ‘If any of you see him,’ whispers my father, ‘there’s no need to be scared. All you have to do is recite the “Our Father” three times and zip’ – my father snaps his fingers – ‘he’ll disappear. And if he doesn’t, just keep on praying.’

  Pray? Appear? Disappear? ‘Our Father’? I don’t get it. I stare at the horrified faces of my teenage siblings. Dear, all-knowing Lilia, do you know the ‘Our Father’? If you do, I’ll soap your back for a whole week when we take a bath together. I won’t steal your crayons ever again. And I’ll scra
tch your back in bed as well!

  ‘Well now,’ says my father with a gravity that would fool anybody. ‘Let’s put that aside and you, Javier,’ he addresses my brother, the one with the little hand that comes and goes, ‘I want you to slip down to the store and get me some beer.’

  My brother cringes visibly. Leaving the apartment means going down the spooky staircase, which has no electric light. The light sockets in its majestic walls are so high that when a light bulb fuses it stays fused. Daylight reveals that the heights are thick with cobwebs. My brother begs for mercy and bursts into tears.

  ‘Don’t be soft!’ my father yells at him. ‘That’s all I need, a queer in the family. Get moving, you cry-baby!’

  My father gives a superb imitation of righteous rage before sneaking off to chuckle behind our backs. But it is only years later that I twig this. Right now he has his eyebrows arched, a stare like a dagger and his lips narrowed, squeezed tight under this thick, ponderous moustache.