“I told my son not to buy him that hoe. He’ll dig up the whole garden.”
Elena raised her head from the sewing.
“Don’t worry. I’m keeping an eye on him. Didn’t you say you were going to the doctor’s?”
“I’ll go another day. With this wonderful weather, I preferred to go for a walk. What could the doctor tell me?” She tightened her grip around her bag with an irritated reflex; she could feel the weight of the cookies. “What could he say to me?”
She strolled over to her grandson and stood there for a while, observing him as he dug.
“That’s it, keep planting.”
She wanted to be alone, to rest. Her room was her world, filled with secrets, with pictures of people that not even her son or daughter-in-law knew. As she entered, the mirror on the wardrobe reflected the mysterious-looking green garden, barely visible behind the slats on the partially lowered blinds, a dreamlike landscape.
She closed the door, took off her coat, and sat down in the wicker chair by the window. She struggled to remove her shoes. With an effort she reached her feet, her bony feet, just a bit of flesh covered the edges of the tendons. She left the shoes by the armchair, stretched her legs, and wiggled her toes, all the while thinking about the cookies. The doctors can go to hell, their diets too. She began to eat the cookies, slowly, so they would remain in her mouth longer. With her tongue she removed the gooey remains lodged in her teeth. Her stomach began to feel heavy, as if a lump of plaster had slowly set up shop inside. She closed her eyes, then picked up the hand mirror, a wedding present from the witness at her marriage. The frame was embossed silver with laurel leaves intertwined with ribbons. She observed the face of a sixty-year-old woman, slightly congested, the delicate skin wrinkled like an old apple, two pulpy, bluish bags under her eyes. She pulled an eyelid up. The inside was damp flesh, pinkish in the center, a brighter color at the edges, the white globe streaked with red veins. “Green eyes and black hair. Enough to drive you wild,” a suitor had said to Roger before he met her. Black hair. The mirror reflected white, yellowish, thinning hair pulled back from her wrinkled forehead. Without letting go of the mirror, she reached for another cookie with her left hand. “Why won’t you dance with me?”
•
Roger didn’t dance that day. He was standing by a window of the drawing room, talking to an elderly gentleman. He seemed uneasy as he watched someone she couldn’t see. Between the dancing couples she caught a glimpse of the gardenia he was wearing in his lapel.
“Why won’t you dance with me?”
Jaume Mas, her husband, had entered her life in that manner: timidly, as she gazed at Roger, remembering that afternoon. She was filled with the terrible wish to scream. Jaume had entered her life too late, but it was at the precise moment when she was losing her bearings. Are you tired? She was gazing at her fan, the mother-of-pearl ribs, the silk tassel. She had had a mauve dress with a lilac posy at the waist made for her. She had it made with Roger’s words in mind. We’ve begun to love each other beneath the sign of the lilacs. You could see clumps of lilacs in the park, and branches of them stood in vases around the room. On that afternoon. If Roger comes near, he’ll see the landscape on my fan, tender apple green with a peach-colored sky. But he didn’t approach. I don’t think he even saw me, and I wanted to scream.
“You don’t want to dance?”
I felt sorry for him, a sudden sadness, as if I had just been shown a condemned man. Had I chosen him as a victim while I watched Roger? Scarcely a month had passed. The man in charge of closing the park had scolded us because he had to wait. The streetlights were beginning to come on and a slight drizzle had started. In the sand near the bench where we sat, I had written “Roger” with the tip of my umbrella, and the drizzle had slowly erased the name.
The waltz was sad. Sad as the light that afternoon when we left the park. She passed me. Agata dancing, her shoulders bare. Agata. Her dress was white as daisies, and she was wearing a ruby necklace, shiny as drops of fresh blood. Lovers. Agata and Roger, lovers. I had only been told a few days before. Long-time lovers. Roger and Agata. Roger. When I scribbled “Roger” in the sand that day. He and I were lovers that afternoon. The first and last afternoon. A few drops of blood on a white sheet. Red as Agata’s ruby necklace. I could still hear Roger’s voice when, with the last embrace, he asked: “Don’t you feel well?” All so far away. The kisses, the blood, the lilac perfume.
I found myself dancing in the center of the drawing room. An expressionless face had drawn near mine, its cheeks too round. It belonged to the man who would become my husband.
•
“Get the watering can, little girl, and help me water the plants.”
“The sunflowers, too?”
Her daughter-in-law must have locked the gate and was probably watering the geraniums beneath the dining room window, as she did every afternoon. Then she would water the chrysanthemums that were beginning to grow tall. She sighed and turned the mirror sideways. She had small, pearly ears with pinkish lobes. One was slashed. When she was breastfeeding her son — she had wanted to call him Roger — she would often wear her long emerald and diamond earrings. The child, who was just beginning to walk, used to take hold of her lips with his tiny hand and squeeze them tightly. Sometimes the hand seemed to be grasping air. One day he pulled furiously at one of the earrings. With the earring in his hand, he continued to suck the blood-splattered breast.
White lilacs adorned the altar the day she married, like lilacs from another world, a world of the dead. She was frightened. She suddenly wanted to flee.
•
I was sinking. Sinking into a dark well. Two invisible hands had grabbed hold of my head and were pulling me down, down, backwards. “Remember when we first met? I asked you: ‘Do you want to dance with me?’” That memory will haunt me all my life. When he embraced me, he said: “Say my name, say it.” In my mind I said, “Roger.” I didn’t say it, only thought it, but my husband moved aside. I didn’t understand what he said. I never knew what he said. I could sense him getting dressed; then I heard the outside door closing, his footsteps walking across the pavement. I wasn’t sad, nor did I feel like crying. It was as if I had turned to stone. I stroked my belly. Roger’s son would live, and I could give him a name. I woke when it was still dark. Someone beside me was weeping. The smell of night and wind reached me. He had returned. I felt the suffering, and it calmed me. He wept with his face close to my back; the smell of wind and night were in his hair. Against my skin I could feel his burning breath broken by sobs. Another breathing, within my belly, burned me. Every drop of blood gathered together to create flesh. I lay very still, observing the shadows in the corners of the room. Dawn would devour them. I held a monster within me, a footless, handless monster. I thought my belly moved, that hands were forming as I watched, determined to emerge. A bitter, sour taste coursed into my mouth. He wept, and I fell asleep.
Beneath the lilac-filled vases lay purple stars; lots of tiny flowers had fallen. Roger was getting dressed. His initials, R.G., were embroidered on the left side of his shirt. I too needed to get dressed, but I lingered, afraid that the most insignificant gesture would shatter that mirror of sad, fragile happiness. As if my dismay could make the afternoon last for years and years. When we went down to the street, we stopped beneath a streetlight and shook hands, as if we were simply friends, and said good-bye. Yet coming down the stairs, we had stopped to kiss on each step. When I was alone again, I thought, “We’ll never see each other again as we have today.” I looked around for something to call my own: the light from the streetlamp, the purple sky, a window with a light. Then I started walking. And later? The dance, Agata, the child, my marriage.