“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror, Vicky?”
“More than I would have liked, sweetie. Don’t get at me.”
“You don’t look well,” says her friend. “You ought to stay in bed. Why don’t you let Violeta go on her own?”
“Huh, on her own! How many years is it since you’ve been dancing, my love? There are so many louts around! It sends a shiver down my spine just looking at them.” She rolls her eyes, lined with mascara and a sense of the injustice of life, and adds: “Young people today are so cruel, Paqui.”
She raises her shoulder and rubs it against her ear in a stroking gesture that conjures up luxurious furs caressing her neck, then sighs and searches desperately in her bag until she pulls out a packet of Chesterfield. She stands with the cigarette pinched between her fingers, but doesn’t light it. Instead, she skilfully rolls it to and fro, lost in her thoughts.
“Your daughter is freezing out there in the street,” says Señora Paqui. “Why don’t you tell her to come in?”
“She prefers it out there.”
“I can’t understand why you don’t let her in.”
“I would let her, but she doesn’t want to.”
“Go on, tell her I’ll give her a coffee.”
“Me? You do it. Go out and tell her, see what she says.”
“Why? What’s her problem?”
“I think it’s because of those boys at the table football. She says they make fun of her, that they’re filthy pigs. She can’t even bear to see them, and she’s right. Kids today are a worthless bunch.”
“But they aren’t here. They left a while ago.”
“It doesn’t matter. You know how stubborn she is.”
“I reckon she doesn’t like seeing you in here, Vicky.” She fills her glass of soda water to the brim. “Here. This is the only thing you should be drinking.”
“Oh no, you can pour that away.” She giggles nervously: “I’ve cut soda out of my diet, sweetie. It gives me heartburn.”
“I don’t think that’s funny.”
“Oh, Paqui, how boring you can be! Yours truly here has got her responsibilities, hasn’t she? My husband in hospital, unsure whether or not they’ll have to operate, and me running up and down all the blessed day. And if you knew how little I want to go dancing in this cold. But I have to bring a little happiness into her life, don’t I? What else can I do? She’s so strange, poor thing. How are we going to find her a boyfriend if she never goes out?” she observes her daughter in the street through the steamed-up glass of the door. “Look at her. She’s pretty when she makes an effort, don’t you think, Paqui?”
This scene is repeated every Sunday, with very few variations, with or without permed hair, with or without fake-luxurious furs on her shoulders, but always with Violeta waiting out in the street for her, the habitual prelude to dancing. Also during the week, at any time of day. Whenever Señora Mir is coming or going past the bar, she stops and enters, and asks the eternal question, the real and only reason for appearing, the question she doesn’t appear to want to give up on, however often she is disappointed. It frequently precedes a greeting or any other kind of polite formula, even her urgent desire for a drink:
“Any news, Paqui?”
For the first time, Señora Paquita allows a hint of hostility to appear in her reply, despite her friendly tone:
“News, what news, darling?”
“Goodness gracious! My letter: what other news could there be?”
“There you go again! No, I haven’t had any letter.”
“What’s the matter, princess? Are you annoyed at me?”
“I’m. …weary, Vicky.”
“I only asked a question. Won’t I even going to be able to ask you now?”
“I warned you, I told you not to get your hopes up …”
“Oh my, that’s a good one! What you told me is that I had to wait, don’t you remember? That’s what you told me … Or do you know something more you’re not telling me?”
“Of course not, Vicky. But if I were you I’d forget that letter for good … I mean, I wouldn’t keep on waiting for it. Not now.”
“Ah, but I’m not you, sweetie!”
She says this with a defiant smile, the unlit cigarette rolling between her red, shiny fingernails, but her friend knows that behind the smile lies deep distress, a persistent anguish that she finds hard to explain after such a long, useless wait, when disillusionment and resignation would be more natural. Nothing has changed in her obstinate attitude over the past six months, apart from her appearance, which is rapidly deteriorating. Despite all the make-up and the wide variety of hairdos. Stiffly erect on her stiletto heels, she controls a slight shiver at the back of her neck. She has one hand on the edge of the bar, and the other on her waist, like a bird about to take flight, and looks over her shoulder at the regulars playing cards under a gently rippling cloud of blue mist floating above their bent heads as they concentrate on the vagaries of the pack. Glancing in their direction, she catches the occasional mocking grin that possibly makes her think they are gossiping about her again, but there is no ill-feeling or bitterness or resentment in her gaze, nothing more than a mixture of disappointment and smiling bewilderment. The wide-open blue eyes are those of a woman who has suffered a kind of hallucination, somehow agreeable, but basically inexplicable.
A little beyond the domino players, sitting at another table with a book open in front of him, Berta’s boy deliberately turns away from her to stare fixedly out into the street, and for a moment Señora Mir’s gaze falters. Oh my lad, my lad, where’s your manners, he might read in her face if he dared glance at her, aren’t you ever going to keep your promise? Is that why you’re refusing to look at me?
“What a lovely song, Paqui!” she suddenly exclaims, listening hard. “I like it because … because … I’ve no idea why!”
“What song?”
“Are you deaf? The one on the radio.”
She smiles at nothing for a moment, her heart and memory connected to a musical thread only she perceives. The radio is silent at the far end of the bar, with a napkin and a toothpick holder on it.
“What nonsense you talk, Vicky. The radio’s switched off.”
“You’re the one who’s switched off!”
The gaudy cockatoo can hear the song because she carries the tune the whole time in her swinging hips: this no doubt is what the domino players near the bar would think if they still paid her any attention, if they were still trying to outdo one another with the crude jokes and vulgar gossip they indulged in so frequently at her expense the previous summer. Today the scatterbrain’s hair is a mass of blonde curls like a young girl’s. Take a good luck at her, look at her shiny poppy red lips, at the rouge on her flabby cheeks, at the mascara daubed on her eyelashes. Like a wedding cake.
“All I want is that someday my daughter will be able to look after herself,” she says after another sip of brandy. “That’s all I want, Paqui. That to be happy she doesn’t have to wait for some heartless rascal to decide he wants to sleep with her, if you follow me. Nowadays girls don’t know what they want, they have no values.” She wets her lips with the brandy again, then goes on: “I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve been through it too … Do you remember Ricardo, Paqui? That handsome Ricardo Taltavull, the one who used to click his tongue so disgustingly. How could I fall for a man who rummages in his ears with a matchstick and makes strange noises with his mouth, as if he always had phlegm in his throat? Too disgusting for words, don’t you think? I must have been blind not to see it! And even so, I was crazy about him for almost a year. There’s no explaining that sort of thing, but it does happen.”