Kate stared up into the darkness, trying to picture the Grimmer and Anna Rexia leading the parade, trying to fight off sleep. Much as she wanted to see the procession of children all carrying her Jack’s bright smiling head, she dreaded facing that terrible dream alone.
No Bones About It
by Marc R. Soto[1]
© 2007 by Marc R. Soto; translation © 2007 by Steven Porter
Marc R. Soto was born in Cantabria, in northern Spain, and currently works as a software programmer in Madrid. He uses his spare time to write short stories, and is the winner of several literary awards, including a prize for young talent sponsored by Spain’s largest publisher. One collection of his stories is already in print in Spain, and another is scheduled for release later this year. His work has never before appeared in the U.S.
Irene had one of those insipid and vaguely mouselike faces you immediately associate with religion teachers and old maids who work in libraries: eyes small and dark, slightly watery, as if they were always about to laugh or cry; lips that pursed outwards from her pointed chin when she smiled; hair, fine and straight, cut in a classic bob; teeth, small and even, with no trace of tobacco or coffee. She didn’t have a spectacular figure, nor did she dress in a provocative manner. Everything about her was straight, sober, and calm, like the cloister of a Cistercian monastery.
And in spite of that (or maybe precisely because of it), I fell in love as soon as I saw her in front of me in the queue at Carrefour’s checkout number 4 in El Alisal. I remember the number because when I looked at the sign I realised that was exactly the number of months that had passed since, in an uncharacteristic fit of bravery, I chucked Raquel out. We’d been together for almost seven months, three and a half of which had been total hell. She was so damned insecure! Behind every look that someone gave her, there was criticism; behind every gesture, a lie; behind every silence at the dinner table, an infidelity. With her, it was bound to be stormy. At the end we were falling out on a daily basis, so one day I told her I loved her but we each had to follow our own destinies. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life, and never had I felt more pride or guilt about anything.
Compared to Raquel, the woman who preceded me in the supermarket queue seemed a nun just out of the convent. She was dressed in a brown skirt that fell a few centimetres below the knee, flat shoes, and a beige jacket over which her hair flowed, revealing the smooth curve of her neck once in a while. There wasn’t a great deal in her basket: a lettuce, two tomatoes, and half a dozen apples. It wasn’t necessary to look at her ring finger to work out that she was single.
The conveyor belt carried her shopping into the hands of the checkout assistant. Irene (back then, of course, I didn’t know her name) paid with a brand-new twenty-euro note, and carrying the bag, walked out with short nervous steps. I remained there, resigned to watching how she moved away while the checkout girl scanned the bar code of my new razor blades and said to me in a professional voice, “Four sixty, sir.” I paid, thanked her; she answered, “And thank you,” and got on with her own thing.
When I received my change I saw that Irene, oblivious to the stream of people who were coming and going through the mall, had stopped in front of the window of a shoe shop. I wanted to savour her proximity once more, so I decided to pass next to her before leaving. However, just when I was behind her, she turned around, ran into me, and our bags flew into the air.
“Oh, goodness me,” she exclaimed, blushing. “Sorry. How clumsy I am!”
I smiled while I helped her pick up the apples, which had scattered all around us.
“It was my fault.”
“No, it was me.”
And suddenly we burst out laughing: a man and a woman in their thirties laughing like teenagers in front of the window of a shoe shop in a mall. I know that it’s difficult to believe, but sometimes things happen like that, as if it were written somewhere, in one of those Norma Seller romantic novels.
Anyway, the thing is, we sat down in a cafe, introduced ourselves, and exchanged telephone numbers. We had a long conversation. She kept tucking a rebellious lock of hair behind her ear while fixing her sparkling little eyes on mine. I reeled off the worst jokes in my repertoire one after the other, and she laughed at each and every one of them. An hour and a half later we said goodbye with two kisses on the cheek that left me keen on a third, and promised to phone each other.
On my way to the car, the fresh air of the parking lot made me think again. I didn’t need anybody, thank you very much. After leaving Raquel I had also stopped serving drinks in 7 SINS to concentrate on preparing for the Santander Council entrance exams, as well as on the novel I had been dreaming of since I was seventeen. This was the time when my Casanova lifestyle was to take a U-turn; the last thing I needed was to get embroiled in a relationship. What had occurred in that shopping mall was beautiful and sweet, but superficial, the type of event that tends to get boring when repeated, like a song by Bryan Adams.
With these ideas in mind, I was about to erase Irene’s number from the address book of the mobile when, suddenly, I caught myself writing her a text. No sooner had I sent it than the phone vibrated in my hand and the words “You have 1 message” shone on the screen. My heart thumped in my chest. Our messages had crossed in midair. I opened it, answered, she answered me, and we called each other and laughed like two idiots without really knowing what to say, until we finally agreed to see each other the next day.
During the following months we ate lunch together every day, had dinner almost always, and occasionally made love, slowly and without showing off. She gave night classes in a high school and I didn’t have any schedule, so we used to spend the mornings and the evenings together, walking through the city.
There were aspects of her that I didn’t know about, of course, as well as parts of my life that I tried to avoid. In particular, I never mentioned Raquel or the entrance exams that I was beginning to suspect I would never get through, and she just mentioned Paco, her late husband, in passing until the dinner that I will talk about soon. Irene used to chat about her childhood in Quintanilla del Colmenar, a little village near Palencia that I supposed was made up of a cluster of small adobe houses around a little square with a fountain in the centre, in which the water would certainly freeze in winter. Whereas I spoke to her about the books I had read recently and about those that I was thinking of writing with her by my side. Thinking about it, both are excellent ways for two people to get to know each other.
Sure there were details about Irene that were a little shocking to me, but no one reaches thirty-something without acquiring some quirks. For example, it was strange the way that she tilted her head, as if she was trying to listen to a distant melody that only she could hear, or the way that she sometimes whispered, “What did you say?” when I had been silent. On the whole, though, I took those quirks of hers for little eccentricities, and never gave them a second thought.
Anyway, the months passed and we were still together. The matter seemed serious, so one day I stopped in front of the window of a jeweler and thought, Why not? I went in and bought her an engagement ring. With the ring in my pocket, I called her on the mobile and told her to make herself pretty, that I was taking her out to dinner. And I think with that I gave myself away, because when I went to pick her up, she came out of the high school with an impressive black dress adorned with a golden brooch in the shape of a fish.