This Too Shall Pass (5 page)

—Your ass is showing, Sofía greets him.

He touches the seat of his pants and lets out a snigger. He speaks Spanish with an upper-class accent from Barcelona, and Catalan like a peasant from the Empordan. His British mother is to blame for his honey-colored hair and blue, romantic eyes, and he has the typical build of a southern man: a square body, strong and stocky, with squat, pudgy hands and brown, sun-wrinkled skin. He's up-front and always looks a person in the eye when talking, probably something he picked up from the dogs. He has an easy laugh; he's vigorous and knows how to take charge. He likes animals, women, poker, and dope. According to Sofía, he has a plantation that stretches a few kilometers beyond the kennels, which is what finances the animal shelter, among other things.

We decide to go and see the puppies before having lunch. We cross a field of fig and olive trees and reach a low building that's divided into cubicles; some are outside and full of puppies, who bobble and wriggle around like mad when they hear us approaching, and others, the newborns, are just inside a shaded courtyard where it's cooler and calmer, removed from the bustle of the older dogs. Something solemn floats in the atmosphere, the wonder that always accompanies birth, whether it be human or animal. There's that fanciful yet nonetheless overwhelming feeling of almost being able to brush the very beginning of things with the tips of your fingers, the eternal bliss. The children can perceive the fatigue, the surrender, the abandon of the mothers who have recently given birth, the disoriented, fragile little puppies, blind and ugly as hairless mice, the nauseating smell of life, and they keep quiet without daring to enter. They ask me to bring one of the older puppies over to them. I consider keeping one of the puppies and giving her your name, and immediately realize it's just the kind of idea I'd have after smoking dope and that I should never have smoked on an empty stomach. I tell the children they should ask Santa Claus to bring them a puppy.

We decide to go and have lunch at a small roadside hotel, a pleasant and simple place, unpretentious, but with very good home cooking, the kind I never had at home when I was growing up. You told me once that when the time for bottles and baby food came to an end, you went to see our pediatrician to ask about nutrition. He was a prominent figure in the field, an attractive and imposing wise man who terrified me—he kicked me out of his exam room once for crying. You explained that you'd never once set foot in a kitchen, and that you had no intention of doing so now. Dr. Sauleda told you not to worry, that with some milk or other dairy products in the fridge, some fruit, crackers, and maybe a little boiled ham, everything would be fine. So we became experts in French cheese well before puberty, and the importance of always having a bottle of champagne on hand, just in case, and it seemed the most normal thing in the world that dinner some nights would be no more than a cake from Sacha, our favorite bakery. Our kitchen was there to heat food when we had guests over, and for the girl to prepare that disgusting boiled rice with liver your dogs liked so much, until they were forced to eat only dry food along with the rest of the canine race. Dr. Sauleda must have been right, though, because we both grew up to be rather attractive young people, strong, healthy, and tall, refined enough to consider—and for me it's still the case—that there's nothing in the world more exotic and succulent than home cooking. We'd literally devour lentils at our friends' homes when invited over for dinner, Cuban-style rice or macaroni gulped down before the astonished and flattered gaze of our hosts, as if they were the tastiest dishes in the world.

After lunch, the children and Úrsula take a dip in the pool while the rest of us have coffee on the terrace. They bring us a bottle of ratafia liquor, a local herb digestif, and little glasses to serve ourselves. Tom is a regular there and has his rituals. He tells us about an important poker tournament he's been invited to.

—My mother loved to play poker, I say.

—Why don't you ask her to join us?

That someone could possibly not know that my mother is dead seems to me as far-fetched as not knowing the earth is round.

—She's dead. She died thirty-four days ago.

He looks at me, surprised and unsmiling. I feel like blurting out “Ehhh, gotcha! I'm just pulling your leg. Mom is fine, as insufferable as ever.”

—Oh, I'm so sorry, I had no idea.

—She tried to teach me how to play poker a million times.

—Well, maybe I can teach you.

—Yeah, that would be great.

Tom has just broken up with his girlfriend—some New Ager nut living up in the mountains according to Sofía—and his radar is on. Some men don't have a sexual radar, or they hardly ever use it, only when they need to, and then they turn it off. Others have it on permanently, even when they're sleeping; in the supermarket checkout line, in front of a computer screen, in the waiting room at the dentist, spinning round and round, sending and receiving signals. Civilization exists thanks to the first category, and the world thanks to the second.

—Why don't we go and see a movie? Sofía suggests suddenly.

We've drunk a little too much, and we all think it's a good idea to wait awhile before getting back on the road.

—Sure, yeah, Tom says. He looks at me and says: —We can sit next to each other and play footsie.

We crack up. And even though I'm not really attracted to him, I flirt away anyway. And I feel the honey start to flow, all liquid and sunny, two kids about to steal a bag of sweets and run from the shop laughing and feeling frightened all at the same time. It's not the thick kind of honey, the slow, dark variety, the kind you would go straight to hell for, but it's honey all the same, an antidote against death. Ever since you died, and even for a while before that, I've felt as if all I do is plunder love, take off with the slightest crumb of it I find in my path, like hoarding little nuggets of gold. I'm completely ruined and I need someone to steal what's left, relieve the weight. Even the smile of the cashier in the supermarket, the wink of a stranger on the street, a trite conversation with the man at the newsstand, I make use of everything, there's never enough, and nothing ever works.

The movie is about a boy whose dog is hit by a car and killed, but his young owner miraculously resuscitates him, only for him to die again and be resuscitated one last time. We sit in two rows, the adults in front and the children and Úrsula behind us. Tom grasps my hand and we spend the whole film that way; he kisses it once very discreetly and brushes my neck with his lips. I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes for a few seconds. He caresses my knee; I let him, it's nice but not electrifying, we're both just there. Maybe there has to be a minimum amount of desire before you attain something. We both cry at the end of the film and we both pretend to hide it. I haven't been this civilized with a man for a long time. The children have a great time and now they want a dog more than ever. We return to Tom's house as the sun begins to set and Edgar asks permission to pick a few ripe figs. The stray dogs run through the prairie, stepping on the last rays of light filtered through trees and clouds. Rey comes near to greet me parsimoniously, the old, dethroned, flea-bitten monarch.

—Why don't you keep him? Tom says. —He's a good dog. He likes you. No wonder.

—I like him too. But I don't know, I think the children might prefer a puppy. None of the dogs I've ever lived with have been truly mine—either they belonged to my mother or one of my exes. My mother said I was incapable of taking care of a dog. I admire what you're doing here; the fiends who abandon their dogs should be thrown in jail.

—Thanks. Well, if you change your mind someday, you know where he is.

He hands us a rolled-up plastic bag tied in numerous knots before we head off. Sofía opens it, laughs, and shows it to me.

—So it's true about the plantation!

—I thought it might be nice for your holiday. See you around!

It's late by the time we get to Cadaqués, and we march the sleepy children straight off to bed. I leave my friends on the terrace drinking gin and tonics and go to sleep. Before lying down, I see that I have a missed call from Tom. I don't answer it, he must be looking for someone, but not me. I hug my pillow. I ask it for a quiet night, although I know I won't get one. There's a howling deep inside that usually leaves me well enough alone by day, but at night, when I lie in bed and try to sleep, it rouses and begins snuffling around like an angry cat, scratching my chest, tightening my jaw, hammering at my temples. Sometimes, to appease it, I open my mouth and pretend to scream in silence, but I'm never able to fool it—it stays there, frenzied, trying to break me. The dawn, the children, the modesty of everyday tasks, soothe and tame it for a few hours, but then night falls once more and I'm alone, and here it comes again, right on time for our rendezvous. I close my eyes hard. I open them. It's back.

I wake up early the next morning and go up to the terrace to look out over the Mediterranean. Memories tangle into a tight blanket that for once doesn't smother me. I guess that's what an ancestral home is for, a place in which everyone's lived at one time or another, where everything's happened. Life, our life, was such a privileged one. My grandfather used to bring boxes of fruit up from Barcelona, Remei would carry the dirty clothes to be washed, Pepita de la Galiota would bring huge batches of custard pudding to our house on trays, there was Marisa's gazpacho, and the eternal bread-and-butter breakfasts, the railing bedecked in a colorful garland of drying beach towels, the naps that were taken only reluctantly, dressing up to go into town, the afternoon ice cream, archery practice. Then the first time we got tipsy, the first loves, the first sunrises, the first drugs—sliding through the silky water after dropping acid, the characters in the paintings hanging in the living room coming to life and turning into monsters, dancing at dawn in the deserted town square with a girlfriend until we ran into a tree—nights without sleeping, wild laughter, the excitement of never knowing what was going to happen, the absolute certainty that the world belonged to us. And when I learned what a boyfriend was for, boyfriends. When I conceived my first son. Coming to Cadaqués with the children. The children cracking their heads open against the sharp architectural styles of the seventies, as my brother had done every summer, decades earlier. And then came the separations. Your dotage, when the doors to the house that had forever been thrown wide for everyone—even at night they were left open—started closing, pressed shut by some invisible wind. And happiness, little by little, stopped being what it was despite the unbroken routine of breakfast, boat, lunch, nap, and games of cards. And seeing my drinking buddies now, all with children and a haggard look in their eyes. When you're young, even though you're exhausted, your eyes never take on a weary expression; there are days now when I can't even lift my gaze from the ground. And then Marisa's death. And then her daughter Elenita's a few years later. And I felt obliged to accompany you to Cadaqués for a few days, even though I didn't really feel like it, and then, nothing. I watched the house grow old with you, be left alone, and then become you. And yet, there's the pinkish-white light of the morning, the gossamer air and the sparkling calm of the sea that belie all the world's tragedies and strive to announce that we are happy and that we have it all. If I don't look back, it could almost seem as though life were just beginning—the landscape is almost identical to when I was twenty. I look up at your bedroom, the most spacious and beautiful room of the house, with the best views. Every once in a while you'd station yourself at the top of the stairs with your wild gray hair, wearing one of your long, threadbare summer tunics—bought by the maids at the street fair, since you didn't care to pick them out yourself, so sure that elegance is a state of mind, not an aesthetic—and from here you looked like a general leading his troops, all day long telling everyone what to do. Sometimes we'd be on the terrace swinging in the hammocks and chatting quietly, when suddenly you'd butt in with some hilarious or wicked comment from your bedroom. Nobody uses your room anymore; maybe I'll let Guillem stay there with Patum. I just can't go in there.

I leave the house before the others wake up—I need coffee and I'd like to visit the cemetery. The town is full of summer visitors, but it still seems quiet at this hour, when the early risers are buying bread and the newspaper, planning lunch before taking off to sail or doing chores with their children. Mornings in which the most important decision of the day is what to have for lunch, and don't forget the children's sunscreen. There are nearly no young people in the street at this hour. I guess they're all sleeping. I miss that about being young, being able to sleep so soundly. Now when I get into bed it's as if I were lying down in my coffin. Some days, I fall asleep curled up on the couch to avoid that feeling. Finding sex is relatively easy—finding someone who will hold you through the night is another thing altogether, it's different, and not even that is a guarantee for a peaceful night's sleep; some men can be very uncomfortable. The warm morning breeze ruffles my rice paper–thin silk dress, which swells and floats lightly atop my skin. How to be rid of the weight and how to reduce the burden of other things, when sadness makes everything weigh two tons? At the newsstand in the square I've been going to since I was a little girl, the owners offer their condolences, again, discreetly, and almost apologetically. I appreciate it when people don't make a spectacle of their sympathy, or solidarity, though with love it's more difficult to do, there's something fluorescent about young lovers, as if they existed smack in the eye of a vortex, and no wind could pull them away. We're never as formidable as when we're in love and our love is reciprocated. At least in my case it's an experience that sets the bar so high that only the brief spark of sex can offer any substitute; low-intensity love doesn't do the trick, because it doesn't exist. As I'm walking along I run across Joan, the mayor, dressed in navy blue Bermudas and an impeccably white shirt. He's tanned and always seems to be happy. We've known each other since we were kids, and he responded very kindly when I wrote to let him know that you wanted to be buried here. He said yes, that he could arrange everything, and that as long as there's life, nothing is lost. I knew that everything was perfectly lost, but I thanked him for his words and support. I think you're buried in one of the most beautiful places on earth and someday, soon, now that I can still look death in the face from the pedestal of good health and forty years of age, I'll buy the niche next to yours. You can see the sunrise from there; we won't even have to get up.

Joan is handsome, well mannered, and seductive, even a little too sexy to be a politician. Whenever I see him, I ask if he's truly the mayor of Cadaqués. It always cracks him up. Flirting moves in mysterious ways. The idea that one of my friends is now mayor seems outrageous and totally incompatible with my idea that we're all still in the playground at recess, skipping around and staring at the clouds. My father used to say that being the mayor of Cadaqués has to be the best job on earth, although I never actually heard him say it, you were the one who told me. I don't remember ever being with him in Cadaqués, I was so little when you separated. Most of what I know about him, I learned from you. I remember one day when I was visiting at the last home you were in, the one they expelled you from for bad behavior: really it was the Parkinson's devouring your brain and the dike had a hole in it, and without your extraordinary head controlling things, the floodwaters came pouring in. Truth be told, by then you were already too ill to live in that luxury assisted-living place for the elderly, even though you insisted that it wasn't true out of rage and desperation, more rage than anything else. I tried to reason with you, told you it was time to hand over your weapons, stop refusing our help, that if this is the end, let's do it right, like we always said we would, with dignity, calmly and in peace. And I gave my father as an example of his fortitude before illness and death. They said—you said—that one day in the hospital, when he was already very ill, he commented, “Considering how life is a bitch, mine has been pretty good.” And from the shadows you answered me: “Your father's death wasn't like that, not like what you think.”

I didn't have the courage to ask then how it had been. And you didn't say anything else, just left that poisoned sentence hovering between us; you stabbed me with it, and I couldn't tell if in a fit of lucidity or of madness. Now I'll never know, and I don't want to know if Dad died screaming, terrified, or with the heroic dignity that helped the stupid little girl I was then live better for so many years.

I walk into the Maritim to have breakfast and find all the regulars at their habitual tables—the tourists all sit at the edge of the beach—close to the glass dividers that provide shelter from the wind and allow a view of the people who come and go, like that beautiful, mysterious stranger who was at your funeral. I recognize him instantly, that great and formidable head, his lively, quick gaze that gives away a touch of the jocose, his chestnut beard and blonder hair, all thick and tousled, his big nose and plump lips camouflaged by the beard, and long, lean but solid build. He's poring over the newspaper but looks up when he notices that someone is approaching. A smile escapes my lips and we both immediately look the other way. Anyway, I'm not really in the mood for more condolences, or to impose my own sadness and exhaustion on a stranger. And yet, I can feel myself perk up; I remove my sunglasses and pull the hem of my dress up just a tad. I think I share with most other women on the planet, and maybe the pope or some other religious leader too, the wild idea that love is the only thing that can save us. Men, and some clever women, know that work, ambition, effort, and curiosity can also save us. But I believe that nobody can live without a minimum effective dose of love and physical contact. There's a point below which we begin to rot. Prostitutes are essential; and there should be prostitutes of love too. But love is too difficult to reproduce, and faking it properly is too labor-intensive, long, and subversive. Not to mention ruinous.

—Who are you flirting with now? Sofía asks, as she plops down next to me and places her huge straw hat on another chair.

—Why do you think I'm flirting?

—You're assuming your trademark flirting position: perky, straight-backed and sinuous. And your underwear is showing.

I giggle. —That's not true. And it's my swimsuit.

—Oh, but I think it's just fine. And turning to the waiter, who is carrying a tray laden with croissants and buttered toast: —Would you bring me a draft beer, please? A little one. And she measures a minuscule size with her forefinger and thumb. —I'm a little hungover.

I watch her from the corner of my eye, so tiny, with her pleated shorts, striped shirt, and butterfly glasses. She has her dark hair as impeccably combed as always; she washes, dries, and flat-irons it every day, wherever she is. Her skin is uniformly brown. Her mouth is perfectly shaped with a tiny freckle on the upper lip. She has expressive eyes and a lean, wiry body that is well proportioned.

—Remember what I said about a beautiful man I didn't know being at the funeral?

—Yeah, I remember.

—Well, he's here.

—Get out. She looks around with the type of frenetic expression one imagines an ornithologist would have after being told there's a long-extinct bird crossing the sky. A smile comes to her face. —I know which one he is. The one over there, sitting beside the glass divider. Do I know you to a T or what?

I giggle again. —How'd you guess?

—Easy. He has all your favorite features: big nose, strong but lean body, the relaxed elegance of people who feel comfortable anywhere. Simplicity. His worn, faded T-shirt and espadrilles. Holes in his jeans. He's not out to prove anything, no outward displays, no bracelets, tattoos, caps or expensive watches. He's your type. Why don't you go and say hello?

—You're nuts. No way, I'd die of embarrassment. He might not even remember me. I wasn't at my best the day of the funeral.

—What do you mean? You were gorgeous; though you seemed sad and self-absorbed, which hasn't changed much since then.

—It's called depression, I answer. —I wonder why he was there at all, if he knew my mother.

—Why don't you just go over and ask?

—No, it doesn't matter, some other time.

—Are you sure there'll be another time?

—There's always another time. Well, maybe not always. But I'm sure this one lives here.

—Right. You're just chicken.

Just then the beautiful stranger gets up. Sofía nudges me with her elbow and we both stare at him, speechless. He takes a few steps toward the exit, looks over in our direction, stops, and nods a timid farewell. Sofía responds by waving her hand effusively as if she were waving good-bye to thousands of passengers on a huge transatlantic cruise ship.