Clothes. She opened the wardrobe wide and began to remove piles of clothes. She selected them and put them on the chairs. The nightgowns for Maria: she needs them. These blouses for. . and the dresses? She took out a fox fur and looked at it for a while. The coat I wore how many years ago? Fifteen? A hundred? What was that coat made of? Even if they killed me, I couldn’t say. If you could go back in time, I’d choose that moment. . I forgot the jewelry, Lisa. . My father was so strong! I’ll go get it. . I did the eighty kilometers by sled, with the soldiers. I found the jewelry where my father told me. I’ve never forgotten our house, though I never saw it again. You could hear the canons as I was leaving the village. The last train. I left on the last train, full of poor people with packages and baskets. And the cold. Are you cold? We shared his food. He was tall, young like me, handsome in his officer’s uniform. All night he stayed beside me: he took off my shoes and warmed my feet with his hands. He put his fur-lined coat around me. He was the age my son is now. . Where are the lovers? my husband used to say to me every day when he came home. My son and I were the lovers. We were always, always together. I made him what he is today, if he’s still alive. I helped him with his lessons when he was little. He never went to a concert without me. Here come the lovers. And now, there’s nothing.
She picked up her purse and sat down in front of the table. Opened it and emptied it out. Her identity card. She read out her name: Lisa. She’d had the picture taken in Rouen, before the war, when she was in charge of a dressmaker’s workroom. She left two days before the occupation. She couldn’t find her son in Paris; without letting her know, he’d gone in search of her and then it was too late to leave Rouen. Come on, Lisa. We have a place for you in the car. Don’t stay, it’s dangerous. Maybe I should have stayed in Paris and not listened to them. She opened her identity card: Israeli. It’s been a week now. When will it be someone else’s turn? Every month some are taken away. From her purse full of papers, a franc fell out. She picked up the coin and looked at it. A brief, ironic smile crossed her lips. One franc. I’ve never been this rich. I need absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing. Madame Gendron can keep her rich refugee’s diamonds. With her diamonds, she stood politely over everyone’s poverty. I don’t need anything. Don’t want to struggle anymore.
The cup had stopped steaming; the coffee was no doubt cold. Madame Létard must have been in bed; there was no sound from her bedroom next door. The cat was curled up asleep beneath the stove. Only silence seemed to exist.
Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. She pronounced her name slowly, as if she were saying the name of a dead person. She looked at the wide bed with the lace bedspread and the ledge above the fireplace with the clock in the middle, stopped forever, and the sea snails on both sides. She was hot: the air in the room was unbreathable. She walked over to the window and opened it wide, being careful not to make any noise. A violent perfume from the lilacs entered the room. Close to the window, the air was gently swaying the flowery feathers. Behind the lilacs, further away, stood the river. The water flowed silently, dark, reflecting the streetlights from the bridge. The sky was a brazier of stars all ablaze.
She looked for a long time, without moving. Where are the lovers? The war had passed through Minsk some months before. Where could my son be? The war, snow, canons. When I got off the train with the jewelry, he took my hand. He laughed. Are you cold? They must have killed him. My father said: Thank you, Lisa. It’s all we have left. I would never have returned alive from this trip. He was crying. I had never seen him cry before.
She put her hands around her neck. A rush of anguish rose from her heart. She clenched her teeth; she didn’t want to cry. How cruel. What a cruel moment of loneliness. Surrounded by this poisonous peace saturated with loneliness. . Like an open door.
She removed her wedding ring and left it in the center of the table, the franc on the ledge by the clock. Took a sheet of paper and tore it into four pieces. For Maria. For Madame Létard. For Monica Werner. For Rosa Ramírez. She placed a slip of paper on each pile of clothes. Burn the pictures and the letters. This last paper she left on top of the suitcase. From a corner of the wardrobe she removed two tubes of Veronal. She took one and emptied it in her cup. Had to shake the tube to empty out the last pills. Stirred the cup with the spoon. It was going to be hard to dissolve all the little white disks. She removed the top from the other bottle and emptied it into her cup. I don’t want to ever wake up.
It took a long time to dissolve the pills. She broke them in two with the tip of the spoon, but was afraid of making too much noise. Started cracking them with her teeth. The cup was too small. Took a bowl and poured everything into it. Added water. Half dissolved, half still whole, she drank it down. Horrible, horrible. Less horrible than—. . She became frightened, very frightened. Afraid of what, now? Afraid of what?
THE BATH
She was wearing a muslin dress, in carmine, with a white insert. The broad pleat on the bodice had a bouquet of forget-me-nots. She was wearing white socks, black patent-leather shoes, and a bow in her hair that was the same color as her dress, tied like a butterfly. Her mouth and nose were swollen, and she spoke with difficulty. The day before she had fallen from her grandfather’s bed — it was a meter high. She was doing somersaults and had split her upper lip. It had bled profusely.
Her parents and grandfather were closing doors and windows: the gate by the kitchen, the balcony off the dining room, the double doors on the roof terrace. Her mother had brought in the clothes from the line, still damp. That was the prudent thing to do. In this quiet, isolated area of Sant Gervasi, leaving a house closed for too long gave a sense that a surprise was in the air.
They ran into silly little Felipet on the street, his nose full of snot, his glance sad.
“You’re leaving now?”
What would he do the whole afternoon without Mercè? He felt a little intimidated — this was a different Mercè, a flaming-red Mercè who was going to participate in a comedy. In the last act she was pulled, half smothered, from a strongbox. “Your arms and legs, limp, you hear? You’ve got to pretend you’re dead,” the director told her at every rehearsal, because without realizing, her whole body would stiffen when the man picked her up.
Felipet watched them walking away, up Carrer de Paris. Mercè, her parents and grandfather growing tiny against the backdrop of Tibidabo.
The house was closed, deserted, its well-tended garden with jasmine, camellias, and gardenias, the old olive tree they used on sunny winter days for a pirate ship, or a lighthouse to guide lost ships — all of it, house and garden, seemed alien to him, as if he had never been inside.
•
They were going to “La Flora,” in the Guinardó area. They would pass by Josepets, where the trams were parked, and then by the open land that the neighborhood children used for a soccer field. They would see the square with the palm trees, the gardens along Travessera de Dalt, the flower boxes filled with yellow and pink tulips, lifeless rosebushes, the lilac and syringa by the window grills. The gardens where the wind sometimes carried the deep sound of rustling leaves and the fresh scent of honey, as if a swarm of bees was blending together thousands of scattered perfumes. As a young girl Mercè’s mother had danced at “La Flora.” Here she wore a long dress for the first time, her hair swept high on her head. Here she met her first suitor, had her first engagement. On Sundays, “La Flora” vibrated with polkas and mazurkas, waltzes and the Lancers Quadrille. Declarations of love, complicated intrigues between mothers of soon-to-be-married daughters created a dull, depressing music beneath the outburst of the cornet and the rather viscous violins and double bass. They danced on a red rug that crackled with nutshells. At the entrance a blind woman, short and obese, sold peanuts and bouquets of cardboard pansies in the shape of a heart. You had to walk up a steep slope to get there.