“Don’t make fun, a drop of water just fell on my nose.”
He gazed at her with a melancholy infatuation that she found disturbing. He seemed to have lost all sense of where they were or the time of day, as if for him the only thing that existed was her shy smile, those eyes of jet, her soft, flaxen hair falling limp on her round shoulders, smelling no doubt of fields in springtime. He must think I’ll always laugh at him when I remember this night, those men, laughing at him always, till the end of time.
They didn’t realize that they were walking again, or that houses were passing them by, or that trees were trailing behind as more appeared, inevitable as fate.
“Oh, I lost the flowers,” she exclaimed, pausing nervously. “Maybe I left them in the doorway when I was playing with the changing colors, or maybe those men. .” She stopped because to speak of the men was to confront him with that troubling memory. She bit her lips. She felt bad that she’d lost the flowers. She would have kept one in a book till it was dry as paper, had lost its perfume — it wasn’t even a gardenia — and when she stumbled across it in the future, it would have always evoked the color of night, the sound of the wind, her eighteen years, the years she felt she had lost as soon as she had gained them.
“The flowers? They’re not worth it.” He waited a moment, then smiled as he shrugged his shoulders and murmured, “Don’t give it another thought.”
The girl looked at him for a moment without speaking. She leaned her head to the side and gestured as if she were about to take his arm. Then she changed her mind.
“I don’t know why you’re upset over such an insignificant incident. It could have happened to anyone. I’m sure my being there made you feel inhibited; without me you’d have reacted differently. Now that you’ve told me things about yourself, I should tell you something about me.”
Her voice was strange, as if it she were straining to speak.
“You know what? It’s not true that I have a lover. I’ve never loved anyone. All my brother’s friends that liked me a little, I found them. . I don’t know how to explain it. It’s difficult to say the things the way we think them or feel them. I mean, all the boys who have liked me up till now left me indifferent. It’s probably that I don’t like young men and older men scare me a bit. Sometimes I’m convinced that I’m suffering from some strange illness, because I feel good all alone in my room, with my books, my thoughts. I know my thoughts aren’t particularly lofty; I’m not trying to sound grand. I don’t really know why I ran way from the party. I went with my brother and his fiancée. I shouldn’t say it, but I don’t like that my brother’s engaged. We were best friends. No brother and sister ever got along better. Nor is it true that I have a heart condition. Sometimes I can feel it beating fast and it’s because. . I’ll never find a substitute for my brother, someone who can be what my brother was to me.”
He felt a sadness rising from deep within him. He’d have given his life to be able to replace her brother.
“When I saw him dancing with her I felt terribly abandoned. I was filled with this furious desire to go home, gather together all the pictures of us when we were little and look at them one by one, to be able to feel myself again in all the places where they were taken. What is true is that I’m going to Paris, but it’s because my father’s French and he’s just signed a three-year contract. He’s an engineer and will be working on a dam. We’ll just be passing through Paris. Then we’ll be cooped up in a sleepy old town, and one day I’ll marry a man just like my father, who’ll come to me, as if he had been born old, with a certain tendency toward obesity. .” She laughed.
They heard a clock strike three, resounding in the night, slowly, forlornly. The air was crisp, the stars twinkled like diamonds, the trees gave off a tender, freshwater scent. “And I’ll have a proper wedding. Or maybe I’ll devote myself to perfecting the education of my brother’s children when they visit us in summer.” She sighed deeply, affected by the insidious magic of the hour and the night. “I won’t marry for love or merely to serve my own interest. Or maybe I’ll marry for both these reasons. I’ll have an orderly house filled with jars and jars of marmalade and summer preserves made for winter and large wardrobes with neatly folded clothes. If I have children, they’ll have what I’ve had: heat in winter and the broad sea in summer. In other words, I’ll be a scullery-maid Titania.”
She gave a tired smile that turned unexpectedly into a laugh that was young and frank, crystalline.
“When I ran into you tonight, I suddenly wanted to invent another life for myself.”
“Me too. I’d been saving my money for three months so I could rent this costume, not even catching the tram, and I live in Gràcia but work on Carrer de la Princesa. When my father was alive we had everything we needed. One day he went to bed feeling very ill and never got up. What little we had disappeared with his illness and the funeral. It was really hard for me. I had to give up everything I enjoyed, all my plans. Everything. We were really alone, and I was the oldest child. I had to make a real show of pretense, so as not to add to my mother’s grief. It’s kind of ridiculous that I’m explaining all this, complaining. It shows a poor spirit. My life would make a great dime novel. Here I’d been saving for three months, thinking I’d have fun with my friends, but as soon as I saw myself in this costume, I was embarrassed. I did go out with my friends, but they were all with their girlfriends; and after we’d been in the park up on Tibidabo for a while, they disappeared without my realizing. I walked for a long time, I sat for a while on a bench by the funicular. . but that’s not true. It’s painful to tell the truth. I went up Tibidabo because a friend of mine works in a restaurant there, and he told me to stop by and see him. He gave me the pastries we ate. I sat on the park bench, thinking how terribly boring life was, and gazed at the night, the lights of the city below me, till I was tired.”
“The kind of things that occur on the night of Carnival, no?”
•
Carnival had ended. The wind and rain had helped it die. We too have died a bit, he thought, or the ghosts we have left along the way. No one would be able to see them at the top of Avinguda del Tibidabo, with the pastries and champagne, by the gate with the perfume of the false gardenias, at the door where they had sheltered during the rain. It was all far away, indistinct, a bit absurd, as if it had never happened.
“Will you give me your address in France?”
“I don’t even know it yet.”
She, however, would never again remember that night. The sound of the train taking her away would erase the last vestiges of it. But he. . he would never find another girl like her, with that smile, that hair. From time to time he would see her blurred outline standing in front of him, her image evoked by a certain perfume, a sigh of leaves, a swarm of ghostly stars at the back of the sky, a silence that suddenly manifests itself.
“You know what I’m going to do one day?” he said, his voice faltering, pronouncing each word distinctly, cautiously, as if walking a tightrope, afraid of falling into the impenetrable void of melancholy.
“No, I don’t.”
“I’ll go to the little square off Avinguda del Tibidabo and I’ll shout ‘Titania’ and listen for the echo. Then I’ll cry ‘Titania’ again and again till I tire. You know, perhaps it’s only when you’re young that you wish so desperately that now would last, that nothing we have would ever end. We wish it even more when what we have now seems the best thing possible.”