There’s a flake of soot on the edge of my plate. It must have blown in through the window from the courtyard. What this table needs is bread and, above all, it needs Pili.
Why are you ill, Pili? What’s wrong? What is the name of your illness? Where does it hurt you?
Pili is ill. It’s nothing serious. It will pass. But the illness hangs around nonetheless and turns up another day. And she obeys the illness and goes to bed. She obeys the mystery. It’s as if the word “woman” bruised her body. Perhaps Pili isn’t just ill occasionally, perhaps she’s permanently ill, perhaps I married a sick woman.
“I brought you a sweet, Pilarín. Here, you choose. The cherry one? All right. That leaves me with the lemon drop. I’m going to keep you company, here on the camp bed. I won’t talk. I feel a bit tired myself.”
The camp bed. I sleep here some nights, when she’s not well. When you’re married, it’s quite a privilege to have a camp bed all to yourself. I didn’t like it at first. But now it’s my old and faithful friend, and I feel free when I lie down on it, very free, like a lone sailor. I enjoy having a camp bed, leaving my wife to set sail on the double bed.
It’s really pretty, this sweet paper. Cheerful. I like looking at it, and it seems a shame to just scrunch its colours up in my hand. On one side, near the edge, there’s a lemon tree out of which springs, into the very centre of the wrapper, a ripe yellow lemon, framed by green leaves and a white flower. Yellow and green. Yellow, green and white. The taste of this lemon drop has something to tell me. It’s about to speak. As if the taste, years ago, on a certain day, was already there, locked up in time; a day that this sour, lemon-flavoured saliva is seeping back into in order for it to be filled with light and discovered anew. My saliva slides into my body, sour and hot, and reaches a point where a long-lost picture suddenly lights up, a corner that, for years now, has been waiting for this viscous rain to allow it to remember. It’s as if a bubble from the lemon drop had set the bubbles in a glass of lemonade fizzing. And all it takes for everything to fill with sunlight is this sharp, sour ache in my jaw and the accompanying yelp of delight from my taste buds. And my nerves spring into action and my brain busily furnishes the memory stored away in my memory bank with the necessary information.
A long morning in the village, with the smell of food scorching the air, which, perfumed with stews, warms the earth and the paving stones and the grains of wheat in the cracks in between. Soap. Mass. Posters. Women’s scent wafting along the pavement, the cigarette smoke from the men standing on the corner, breathing out a breath of sadness at the passing children. Short trousers with creases as stiff and straight as a pencil and very tight behind, and my party shoes gnawing at my heels like a little dog. Creases. Wet hair that continued to drip all the way down Calle Realejo de San Juan. Laura. Yes, now I remember what happened with Laura. I never wanted to do it; it made me sad. She would close the blinds and get dressed in the dark of her bedroom. She would kiss me and squeeze me and rub me against her legs, then open the window and start combing my hair. And afterwards, in the kitchen, she would melt some wax for me over the heat and make a ball of it for me to play with.
One day, a lady arrived. My mother said she was her niece. My mother had nieces who weren’t my cousins. She would adopt them when we went to the seaside or on some trip or other. “No, he hasn’t been a good boy today,” my mother said. “Don’t give him anything.” Although it wasn’t true. I was sure that I had been good, but then I would remember Laura, and a watery knot of grief would rise from my throat to my eyes, and two tears, the tears of a condemned man, would moisten my eyelashes or run down my cheeks onto the floor. She smiled, my mother’s niece. She was pleased to see me. She liked me, even though I had just emerged, pale with fear, crumpled and sad, from Laura’s inexplicable bedroom. She had a really beautiful mouth. Afterwards, I would often stand alone in front of a mirror, imitating her mouth, her expression, trying to copy that charming click of the tongue she made whenever she laughed over certain words. She opened her bag. She gave me a sweet. That sweet burned my mouth with its juice and filled my small body with oversize dreams. I was a little devil, my mother often used to say. But she never suspected that I was a reluctant devil to Laura and a semi-divine, redeemed and loving devil to her niece. When the niece opened her handbag, it gave a perfumed sigh. The same perfume she left on my hand. The hand that, later on, I did not wash before sitting down to lunch. How long did these things go on for, I wonder? I haven’t seen her since. Or perhaps I have. Was she Amalita, perhaps? No, more likely a sister of hers. I remember Amalita really well. I was fourteen or fifteen by then.
When the other thing happened, the visit and the sweet, I was still a child. What I remember from that time are the days when there were bullfights. Perhaps there was a bullfight on the day of that visit, perhaps that was why she came. We used to go to my grandmother’s house, which was in the same street as the bullring, to watch the people going past. An hour before the bullfight, the street smelt of blood, cigars, sweat and horse dung. I used to like going and standing on the balcony that looked out over the courtyard where the women did their ironing, because my mother’s shouts took longer to reach me there. Did I perhaps feel that my mother was getting on a bit? Later, I would hear my father downstairs, loudly praising Armillita’s skills as banderillero, imitating Cayetano going in for the kill or giving his views on Juan Belmonte’s latest bulls. And the afternoon would be fading, and the last swallow would leave and the first bat arrive, and slowly, very slowly, the metal clothes lines out in the courtyard would grow cold.
The lemon drop! Gone all too soon. And yet the mystery remains. And I really can’t say why it stirred so many memories. I revisited a world that, afterwards, I left behind for ever. Wasn’t I the boy who was going to write Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? Something very valuable was cut short. And something perhaps far more ordinary was set in motion.
There’s probably a sweet somewhere that would remind us of our wedding night and one that would take us back to the Christmas when we won the lottery and the one that would make us relive the happy week when we were about to be made head of personnel.
If Pilarín knew what I was thinking… But I won’t tell her. I feel as if I’ve been unfaithful to her with that lemon drop. No, I’m not well. I just wish I could sleep.
THAT NOVEL
LUIS IS AN HONEST LAD, with arms strong enough to lift just about any piece of luggage onto a roof rack or help out the mechanics or force open a jammed door or pick up an old lady, however fat and ungainly, and either heave her onto the bus or save her from falling. Luis inspires confidence; he has a clear, clean, honest laugh; his arms exude human warmth and sweat. “I lost my mother when I was only three,” I told him once, quite why I don’t know. His eyes misted up and he had to go and sit in a corner to hide his tears. He still has his mother and his sisters and wouldn’t hesitate to use his fists on anyone who harmed them. He’s an ordinary lad, but extraordinary too, graced with old-fashioned moral notions, with the kind of simple beliefs and affections that have always made life more pleasant. He’s a bright lad, and anyone who’s ever had anything to do with him would always want the best for him: a decent boss, good luck, happiness and success, and the chance to make his mark on the world.