He took her left hand and began to study her palm.
“You’ll live longer than me. Senyora Ramon Esplà, widow.”
“Since we must die, better that we both die on the same day.”
Next to hers, his hands were wide and hard, “a man’s hands.” She was filled with a wild desire to kiss them. At times they reminded her of a bird.
The fat, bald waiter was leaning against a column; he had forgotten about them. He was gazing out at the street, occasionally running a hand over his shiny head.
“Hey! Two beers!”
The man roused and turned around. His eyes were dreamy.
“Right away.”
“There’s something I wanted to mention, but please don’t get angry.” She looked into his limpid and penetrating blue eyes. “I’m nervous because exams are almost here and I’m behind. In order to catch up, I need to study full-time for at least two weeks. I mean without seeing each other. You know what the history professor is like. He acts like he’s speaking at an academic conference and doesn’t realize we’re no more than. .”
“Two beers.”
The waiter placed the glasses on the table and glanced tenderly at the couple.
“How much?”
The boy paid. This way, they could leave when they felt like it, without having to clap their hands. The waiter brought the change, picked up the tip, and returned to his place by the column.
“Do you mind if we don’t see each other for a couple of weeks?” she asked.
“Why can’t we see each other?”
“I’ve just told you, because we’d spend too much time going out, and exams are almost here.”
He looked at her guardedly. She was drinking, her lips puckered around the white foam.
“Why can’t we see each other like always? Are you looking for an excuse? If you don’t feel like seeing me, just tell me.”
“Ramon!” she begged with anxious eyes. She put the beer down on the table and repeated: “Ramon.”
Suddenly he picked up her purse.
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. I just needed to. May I?”
“Of course.”
She watched disconcertedly as he opened it, inspected it, and began to empty it. A wisp of hair fell across his pale, adolescent forehead, and his hands trembled a bit. He placed everything on the table. The lipstick, the green enamel compact with the dragon inlay in the center, the wallet. The address book he had given her the month before. He had been so self-conscious: it was his first present to her.
“Why are you examining everything?”
“Does it bother you?”
His eyes were hard, a look she’d never seen before.
“Not at all, but. .”
He read the addresses of the people he knew. The English teacher with the telephone number and the dates and hours of classes: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday from four to five. The addresses of her hairdresser and her two friends, Marta Roca and Elvira Puig.
After he had removed everything, he put it all back inside. He closed the purse, looked at it closely, then gave it back to her.
“Your turn.”
He pulled his wallet out of the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to her.
“Look at everything; I want you to look at it all.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
She was holding the wallet in her hand, giving it a troubled look.
“Nothing’s the matter. Look at everything. All the papers.”
She hesitated as she pulled out the bills, the tickets, the letters she had written him the year before, when they were mere friends holidaying in Tossa. A picture of her taken at the beach: it was too dark because a cloud had suddenly appeared just when he snapped. She found a tiny slip of paper in the corner.
“You kept this too?”
“I’ll always keep it, I told you so. You see? I remember and you don’t.”
She unfolded the paper. “Yes, I’ll marry you.” She had written it because she was speechless when he asked her if she wanted to be his wife.
As she removed the papers from his wallet, she sensed that he was calmer. Then she put everything back in its place and handed it to him with a smile.
“This is what we have to do, always.” he said, slipping the wallet into his pocket. “There can’t be any secrets between you and me. Ever. We’ll be like brother and sister.”
They left the café, both feeling a bit strange, out of place. The air was cool, clean, filled with colors.
“And after we’ve been married for years, what if you fall in love with another woman?”
“Hush.”
She squeezed his arm tenderly, but she wanted to weep. Houses, trees, streets — everything seemed false and useless.
IN A WHISPER
It was the last day. The very last.
She was wearing a pale blue dress with a wide-brimmed hat, its black velvet ribbons dangling down to the middle of her back. Most of all I remember the velvet bow and the color of her dress, because that is what I saw last. That blue: a sky blue. Sometimes in summer the sky takes on a blue like her dress, a gray, sun-gorged blue. On scorching summer days, a blue as bitter as gentian.
The blue dress. Her eyes with the tiny pupils that were black like the velvet bow, her mouth — all milk and roses — her hands. All of it, the shape and the color, was a challenge, an insult to my propriety. “There are sad loves and happy loves. Ours is sad,” she told me one day long ago with a gray, monotonous voice. It hurt so much that I couldn’t put it out of my mind. “Why sad?” “Because you’re a proper man.” We hadn’t seen each other for eight days, because I had accompanied my sick wife to a village in the mountains, for her to convalesce. A proper man. This man, who lived for a simple gesture from her. Everything about her, everything that came to me from her filled me with emotion.
I can still see the canvas awning at the café that morning (orange with a fringe that flapped in the wind), the bushes by the sidewalk, the notice on the mirror about the soccer match. I can hear her deep, cold voice. “I’m getting married.” She had lowered her head, and the brim of her hat concealed her face. I could see only her lips and her nervously trembling chin. And the toxic blue of her dress.
Everything around me, everything within me felt empty. It was as if I lived in a shadowless, echoless cavern. It was a terrible period of inescapable magic. All the things that might have seemed a signal, might have engendered hope, had suddenly vanished, as if an invisible hand had snatched them away. They had ceased to be.
But at the age of forty, nothing ceases. No. Nothing ends. The child that I wanted was born and will live when I am dead. The last child. A pale child, light as a bouquet of flowers. When Albert went to peek at her, his Latin book under his arm, his mother asked: “Aren’t you pleased to have a little sister?” He looked at the baby with curiosity and disdain, knitted his brow, pouted his arched lips, then left without a word, closing the door without a sound. The last child. I had wished for it darkly, from the depths of my loneliness, hoping to alleviate it, as if I might revive the sweetness that had died, preserve it within a being that was marked and still faltering.
We celebrated her first birthday today. She’s beginning to walk but needs to grasp onto the furniture, the wall. If she has to take a few steps alone to get from one chair to another, she looks around anxiously and bursts into tears. I requested that a blue dress be made for her. I picked her up for a moment, and she laughed, making little cries of joy like a bird. I have concentrated all my tenderness in this little ball of warm flesh, in these tiny hands and feet. It is a bitter tenderness. When the child looked at me with sudden attention and curiosity, I had to close my eyes. Her shiny, black pupils are surrounded by a sky-blue shadow.