The streets of Madrid seized on Nora’s loneliness, enticing her to respond to those endless alleyways and their unceasing clamor. Like every other morning, she’d rushed straight out into the street before eating anything at all or even washing her face, letting the morning cold peel the sleep from her face. Nora walked faster than she breathed, her footsteps racing the air in her chest, as if the ground was about to be stolen from beneath her feet before her next step.
It was five in the morning when Nora stumbled across the Chocolatería San Ginés in the very heart of Madrid. It was famous for its churros with Spanish hot chocolate.
The young waiter swiftly and gracefully led them to a table in the far corner, all the while eyeing Nora approvingly. With an imperious look, Nora indicated that Rafi should join her at the table, and he had no choice but to comply, seeing that she needed him as a shield. He observed how she was aware of her reflection repeated in the surrounding mirrors as she sat down. The waiter returned with a tray of small appetizers and chocolates wrapped in brightly colored paper, leaving it on the table with a flirtatious wink at Nora.
Nora waited, avoiding looking at her reflection mingled with the reflected crowds. When the waiter reappeared, he spread his palms on the marble table with obvious pleasure and leaned shamelessly toward Nora. “We don’t have a menu,” he purred, taking a thick card out of his back pocket. “Just this.” It showed a photo of their specialty churros con chocolate. “Hot chocolate and fried dough fingers are an inseparable pair. You dip one in the other for a taste of Spanish pleasure unlike anything you’ll ever try again. So, heh, want to try? Spanish stallions like me feed this to their lovers for breakfast … Heh, so? Don’t miss the chance, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience!” He went on flirting until he managed to get Nora’s smile to become a grin.
The chocolate finally came, in a ceramic bowl almost as big as a soup bowl with a row of droplets, like melted chocolate, drawn around the rim. The thick, not-too-sweet liquid sent a delightful charge through Nora’s body and burnt her tongue — she insisted on drinking it straight from the bowl, leaving a chocolate smear across her upper lip. Only at the end did she dip the fried fingers into the liquid and crunch on them with enjoyment, as Rafi sipped his coffee in silence.
When she stood up, ready to leave, Rafi stopped to pay the bill. He always paid for everything she needed, small or large. “This is a woman whose bills are paid for her,” he thought. “She picks what she wants, and they settle the bill and carry the stuff. Her purchases are lined up in her hotel suite or stacked in her bags, which are always packed ready to leave.” She seemed bored of shopping; she rarely stopped to buy anything but ice cream — usually passion fruit flavor. Whenever she had one she was reminded of those words from somewhere in the recesses of her mind:
For you, this herbal shampoo, with chamomile, aloe vera and flower of pain
That was how the import company chose to translate passionflower: flower of pain!
RAFA FOLLOWED NORA’S ATTEMPTS TO PENETRATE THE LIFE AROUND HER, SLIDING through scenes and occurrences, mingling with people and groups who seemed happy and engrossed in their own stories: kids on school daytrips running around, spinning and shrieking all at once, while one skinny child sat alone on a bench at the entrance to the Prado, scribbling trees on a piece of paper. The sight awoke a longing in her fingers for the blankness of paper or walls. Then there was a group of six people — three men and three plump women wrapped in headscarves, popping kisses on the face of a groom in his flowing morning suit while the bride’s short improvised veil flapped in the wind like a fountain on top of her head. Inside her own head, two veils and two brides chased Nora and her heart began to pound. She stood alone in the street, watching, while Rafi watched her; cars and motorbikes sped by aimlessly without stopping or glancing back. Nora couldn’t stand looking back. She fought off a headache. She wanted to plunge into life and the depth of its currents, but could only manage to float on the surface of the endless waves of that city. She’d lost no time in getting to know the place but she remained bobbing like a cork, trying to catch up, because when she returned to her own city — which had plenty of time, or rather froze its time — she’d find herself on hold, like those houses left as charitable endowments whose name, awqaf, suggested they’d been paused—waqafa, to halt — until who knows when. Nora chased away the word desperation and walked on.
Her story featured lots of departures. Her sheikh had moved her from a zone of heat to a zone of frozen waiting. After each temporary departure of his she would always return to her hotel, to the emptiness, then go out to face the world once more, buy a stack of paper, and sit for hours in the cemetery trying to write (what a strange relationship she had with pen and paper!) and extract something comprehensible from what was happening to her and around her. Rafi felt the stuttering of the words, which suddenly became long lines stretching the length of the page. He thought, if he was meant to be guarding her from her past, then at moments like these he was failing abysmally, moments when she disappeared off his radar with the same calm as that faint smile of hers, which floated over the world, never engaging.
One morning he found out she was left-handed. He allowed himself to go a little closer to her, and from three meters away, he watched her sketch.
“You’re really good at that,” he marveled. “You draw like you’re digging up treasure, or like you’re writing in braille. I could close my eyes and follow your lines with my fingers.”
She looked back at him impassively.
“You know, there are lots of cultural events in Madrid. If you want, you could start by going to see the big modern art collection in the Reina Sofia.”
Nora didn’t reply. Her hand moved rapidly back and forth over the paper, inking words that became bodies, speaking into the paper. Her left hand didn’t stop chasing the words.
Only when she’s agitated does her left hand sweat. She’s left-handed: her lines take the shortest route from the heart.
She started creating a girl with open arms and a fluttering braid but short legs planted in the ground.
When the hand turned and twisted, and she wanted a hug, I realized with embarrassment that my darling had started to menstruate.
My darling’s foot freed itself from the earth’s gravity and entered the gravity of the facing body.
She started coursing with a desire for a body we cannot see.
SOMEBODY LEFT THOSE WORDS IN HER HEAD, AND WHEN THEY FELL SILENT, NORA realized she was totally alone. She’d spent most of her life pretending to be mute. She hadn’t uttered a word for months; was that pretense or really muteness of the heart? In that cemetery of outcasts she was able to stand outside herself and look back in on the forgotten head she carted around with her, on the words stacked carefully and infinitely on the walls of her skull. If she pulled one little word out, the whole stack would collapse. At the base of those shelves she found anger, like shards of glass inserted into the archive of her words. In her relationship with her father, anger had been the only spark that could ignite his attention and make him see her. One day, she’d awoken to find that her little face had lost its ability to make him angry, so she hurried to shove her body out of childhood, and freed her female hormones early one morning, alone, allowing her features to mature, her lips to fill out, and her eyes to shoot sparks. It happened in one night, with a single leap from childhood to the peak of femininity. She hoped he’d wake up to feel the threat of that femininity, resume his anger, and see her.