Rafa had no idea how many spirits passed back and forth in between them, scooping up the echo of their words, as he looked into Nora’s cloudy, faraway eyes, gone somewhere he couldn’t even reach to pull her back. He sat silently waiting for her to re-emerge, and when she did, her voice was a sarcastic whimper. “For the first seven years of my life, we — me and the woman who raised me — used to look down on him from above. Sometimes he’d send me a bar of candy, noting down its price in his list of goods that had gone past their expiration date, but apart from that all I shared with him was that yearly feast-day breakfast of cheeses, olives, and date paste. When I took off the plastic tablecloth, the annual encounter would end, and I’d run back upstairs to the woman I regarded as my second mother.” Nora avoided using names so that she could see her past self from a stranger’s perspective. “People don’t die of old age, they die from cutting all the threads that link them to the living. That’s exactly what my father did.”
“If there are threads that tie us to those we love, then my mother is a spider web that guards me. I can still feel her all around me, even now.”
“A bodyguard guarded by the dead!”
He looked up, stung, expecting derision, but he was received by her enveloping seriousness instead. He was moved.
Insomnia
“I CAN’T SLEEP.” THE WORDS ESCAPED HER INVOLUNTARILY, AND HER ASSISTANT stopped what she was doing. It was the middle of the night, and they’d just gotten back from the hotel swimming pool where Nora, in her knee-length swimsuit, had struggled bravely in the water for hours. When she was defeated in her attempts to swim, she floated on her back and let time settle and clear around her. Only rarely during her stay at the hotel had she had to share the pool with anyone else at that late hour.
The deep wound on her left knee floated inside its bandage and the waterproof layer around it. Three days earlier, Nora had given them all a fright by disappearing from her hotel suite while her bodyguard wasn’t paying attention. She’d woken up very early and slipped out without telling anybody, heading to the British Cemetery; the short time it’d taken Rafa to guess where she’d gone and catch up with her was enough for something to happen. When Nora reached the poplar tree where the gravestone with the key was, she’d found the homeless man — the one who usually wandered around placing yellow flowers on the graves — chiseling at the gravestone, bent on destroying the inscription. Her sudden appearance startled him, and for a moment he remained crouched where he was, staring into her eyes. The empty look sent chills down her spine, giving him the chance to lunge at her. He shoved her and she fell back, her knee crashing against the broken gravestone.
When Rafi arrived, he saw blood on the gravestone and the grass, and in the gaping wound across her knee. Nora sat watching in shock as Rafi knelt down in front of her and lightly but deftly smoothed the torn flesh back over her knee, then tore his white shirt into strips to wrap around the wound and stem the bleeding. Shock had numbed the pain and all Nora could do was watch like an onlooker. The words she did manage to string together didn’t mean much to Rafi: “The hobo with the yellow flowers…”
When they took a look at the tombstone, they discovered that the old key was missing, leaving only a depression in the gray stone, and that the name had been chipped away entirely, except for a few letters: “Sh … i.” Luckily Nora’s wound — her knee needed ten stitches — wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
“Don’t worry,” Nora’s assistant hurried to comfort her sleepless, frightened boss, picking up the clothes Nora had just taken off and watching her nestle into the hand-embroidered bed sheets. She left the light above her and the light in the corridor leading to the bathroom on. The assistant had never seen anyone who slept bathed in so much light. “I could make you some chamomile tea and run you a hot bath if you want.”
“I just want you to check on me every half hour while I’m sleeping. I’m worried that if I sleep too deeply, I’ll go into a coma and die …”
A sympathetic fear welled up in the assistant’s heart and she quickly reassured her. “I sleep as lightly as a bird; I fall asleep in a second and wake up just as easily. I’ll sleep on the sofa in the sitting room and leave the door open so I can watch you all night.”
The assistant’s self-sacrificing promise coaxed Nora to confide further. “I’ve been scared of sleeping alone since I was little. I used to sleep glued to my second mother’s ribs, and I’d make her hold me tight. Whenever I felt sleep pulling me toward death, I would hear her murmuring God’s names over me and I’d resurface.” She paused to push away an apparition, “I was sleepy all the time.”
The assistant relaxed at this easing in her mistress’s mood — though she couldn’t claim to have gotten used to those fickle changes of temperament, which were getting even more pronounced lately. “How about I make a doctor’s appointment for you?”
Nora didn’t say anything. The assistant unobtrusively finished what she was doing, then left.
The night passed like an interrupted dream, in flashes of light in which her assistant hovered over her breathing to make sure she was still alive and then went out again.
It was eleven in the morning when the honking of saxophones outside woke Nora. A stream of protestors stretched from El Retiro and the Prado down to the Palacio de Congresos, stopping traffic, and they’d dyed the Fuente de Neptuno fountain bright green on their way. They were demanding raises for municipal workers. When Nora stepped out of her hot bath, she looked radiant and fresh; she walked barefoot across the thick carpet, delighting in the feel of handwoven silk. Her breakfast was waiting on a tray on the table in front of her beside a few embroidered cloth bags her assistant had lain there.
“I went out for a walk this morning and came across an old Turkish woman who was selling these handmade purses.” A sharp look pecked at her momentarily, then relaxed. Nora picked up her coffee and calmly took a sip, looking out the window at the demonstration below. She picked up one of the bags; in her mind’s eye she could see a similar purse tied around her waist and hanging down to the right. Her words flowed out like she was picking up an old story.
“The woman who brought me up invented a little bag like this for me to tie around my waist. She made it out of the fabric of my feast-day dress. She believed that every girl should start with a little bag that the world could pour good luck into!” Down below on the street, one of the striking workers delivered a speech to the entire city over a PA system in enthusiastic Spanish.
“She was so noisy and cheerful, dancing, praying the Ramadan night prayers and singing all in the same breath.” Nora picked up another little purse, this one adorned with blue eye beads and tiny palms to ward off envy. “What would a girl like me put in a purse like that?” she snorted.