Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs

‌The Proud Woman of Poitiers

So okay, there was a grain of truth to what Valentino had said that time in the car about our school being a refuge for girls who turned out too ugly to be models or too stupid to become engineers. Put it this way: none of the pupils could have been models and none of them could have been engineers either. Maybe one or two of us, after Sisyphean efforts and several years spent abroad, could have become the kind of mediocre interpreter who works at trade union conferences where the main aim is to keep the delegates from southern Europe happy, a feat best accomplished by a friendly and accessible interpreter, accessible in more ways than one, and vast quantities of food and alcohol. Becoming a translator was out of the question as far as any of us were concerned. You have to have a fiendish degree of self-discipline to be a translator, and we couldn’t care less about anything. Most of us were probably going to lead fairly mediocre lives emotionally speaking and stumble through long marriages while earning only pocket money in temporary jobs. Some of us, like me and Muriel Ruiz, would soon find ourselves drifting onto a very different path. But at that point we were just a gang of happy and carefree girls. We loved watching soap operas, and our biggest goal was to find a man who would allow us to lead a life that was gilt-edged; gilt-edged in the sense that it didn’t have to be sullied by shabbiness, reduced circumstances and other barriers to a full and genuinely glamorous existence. When I look back, I can see that, despite our good intentions, we were really a group of pot-smoking, left-voting philistines. Though we did learn something during those years all the same. The most important lesson may not have been in what was said to us during the classes, but the helping of real life we got served into the bargain.

The best thing about the School for Translators and Interpreters was Muriel Ruiz, and I had the good fortune not only to be in her class but to sit on the same bench and spend all my breaks and free time with her. Muriel Ruiz and I were very unalike both on the inside and the outside but particularly on the outside. For instance, while I tend to keep my eyes peeled like a herbivore that has to keep watch in every direction, Muriel Ruiz’ gaze was always fixed dead ahead, like a bird of prey that knew exactly what or who she was after. And that wasn’t the only birdlike thing about Muriel Ruiz. She was small and slender; her physique remained that of a young girl, in fact, she never really stopped looking like a twelve-year-old, which was an advantage, she said, when it came to men because what men were always after was youth.

‘Men are men,’ she might say precociously and just a bit categorically, ‘and no man is ever any different from another. Men hunger for youth, because their lives are ruled by the notion that youth is something that belongs to them, the birthright they have been illicitly deprived of later in life. The same men can, of course, get terribly bored when they have to spend too many hours in the company of young girls. Once the physical activities are over, they’ve no idea what to talk about. The disappointment is enormous when we, as the young women we are, fail to be impressed when they go on at length and in great detail about old writers, nostalgic fishing trips or exaggeratedly important football matches. That’s when they’re likely to long for someone who has learnt that essential survival instinct of appearing to be listening while thinking about something else. And that’s also when it may occur to them that what they really need is not a delicate, fragile rose but a proper potted plant.’

The school was housed in an old and rather grand building not that far from Parque Güell. You went in through an imposing and spacious entrance, and then there was a wide staircase that led up to all the various floors of the building; our school was situated on the second floor. The main door to the school was made of solid oak and once past it you entered a long narrow corridor with the classrooms on the left and the administrative offices on the right. There was no cafeteria in the school; we had to make do with a coffee machine in the hall. The woman who worked in the office had had her lips operated on and when she smiled they tightened to the point you were worried they would split open (Muriel imagined that what would pour out, if those lips really did split, would be slippery and granular like the pulp of a pomegranate). The headmaster was a nobody and only appeared at the beginning and end of term. Then there was the so-called school caretaker whose name was Camillo Pochintesta and who always wore the same grey shirt, with loads of pockets, that was reminiscent of overalls. A set of keys he kept in one of those pockets would jangle as he walked, and he used to speed along the corridor with short steps and his head raised so you got the feeling he was uncomfortable about something. Or maybe he felt he was being watched.

Domingo was in our class and he was the only guy at the school, apart from Camillo and the headmaster. He had a vibrant mane of red hair that used to glow like a burning bush on those afternoons when the sun shone through the window into the classroom. He was tall and thin, with freckles and small hands, and his nails looked as though they had been filed with an emery board. When we started at the school, he used to go out in the breaks and meet up with other people he knew, to hang around a bar or sit on the tracks behind the station and smoke a joint, or drink the coffee they bought inside the station and then took with them. But Domingo gradually came to feel more comfortable in himself and when the second year began he no longer left in the breaks but stayed inside with us by the coffee machine or stuck bits of gum we had finished chewing on the walls when Camillo’s back was turned. Camillo said that Domingo was absorbing all our bad habits like a sponge. When Domingo was absent, Camillo used to say that only queers studied to be translators and, if you weren’t a queer to start with, you would be after three years at this school where you gained a profound and pitiless insight into the nature of woman.

We didn’t just study; we did a lot of other stuff as well. We read poetry and smoked dope. We promised one another faithfully we would never read Rimbaud unless we were high, just as we would never read Baudelaire’s pornographic vampire poems unless we were having sex at the same time (once again it was Muriel who said this and then she added that the best thing of all would be to have those poems read to you while you were having sex, alternatively you could skip the poems and just stick to the sex (she laughed at this point and you just couldn’t help laughing along with her)). On other days she would say we should stop thinking about sex entirely, and the Arabs were the only ones to understand what the whole thing was about, and giving women their freedom was like shoving a knife in the hands of a murderer.

We also shoved, in addition to the soap operas, a lot of good literature inside ourselves. Latin American in preference to Spanish — Borges, Rulfo, Nicanor Parra (Muriel thought that Cortázar was antiquated and Neruda positively nauseating). At times we just stopped reading trash entirely and focused on what was, according to Muriel ‘worth the effort’. It all went round in circles, as she put it, and the closer to the centre you got, the closer you got to the real truth.

‘As literary anorexics we have to make sure we get some Borges inside us,’ Muriel said. ‘A few words a day, a few words that are like the extremely nutritious parts of the tuna. Those are the bits that will feed us, and those are the bits from which we will be born.’

Later on, one of Muriel’s lovers, his name was Paco Parra and he came from Tarragona, would say that he loved Borges and that to him Borges was literary perfection incarnate. Muriel insisted at that point that he come up with a line from Borges, and when he couldn’t quote a single word, Muriel said he had to come up with the title of just one of his works — it didn’t matter if it was a short story or a poem — and when Paco Parra couldn’t do that either, Muriel said it was impossible that Paco Parra had read Borges because, if he had, the swamps in his brain would have dried out long ago and there could be something growing inside. Someone who reads only Borges can never die of literary starvation, Muriel said as well, and now I think about it I don’t think she has either.

We had two teachers for French, one we called Dauphine and one we called Madame Moreau. Dauphine lectured on French literature, and Madame Moreau taught translation. Domingo said he was attracted to Dauphine; he liked her approach to literature and her body. I couldn’t understand how he could feel attracted to Dauphine. I said to Muriel, I just don’t get how Domingo can feel attracted to Dauphine. Muriel responded: Are you jealous? Domingo’s hardly my type of man, I replied. No, said Muriel, I suppose you prefer people like Benicio Mercader? Yes, I replied. That’s the kind of man I’m going to have. You may have to make do with what’s available, Muriel said, and then she went to Domingo and told him I found him attractive. I tried to avoid catching Domingo’s eye but on one of the breaks he came up to me and asked if it was true that I was attracted to him? I replied that no, that wasn’t the case. I was just surprised that he could be attracted to Dauphine. What’s wrong with Dauphine? Domingo asked. For starters she is over twenty years older than you, I said, and then there’s just something about her I don’t like. What’s that? Tell me what you don’t like about Dauphine. First of all, I said, she’s not just twice as old as you are but she is almost twice as tall as well. What’s wrong with tall women? Domingo asked. There’s nothing wrong with tall women. Only you would have looked like a lapdog next to her. What else disturbs you? Domingo asked. I can’t stop thinking she looks like a monster, I said. Domingo laughed out loud. She looks like a monster, does she? You’ll have to explain that one, Araceli. He looked at me scornfully, and I tried to explain that it had something to do with her way of being happy. So you think women shouldn’t be happy? Domingo asked. I didn’t say she shouldn’t be happy. It’s just there’s something about her way of being happy. There’s something monstrous about her happiness. When she smiles, it’s as if she’s smiling because she could have killed you if she wanted. Do you get it? That’s why. You can see the predator in her. She isn’t smiling at something you’ve said or about something nice that happened. She always smiles the same smile and it’s a mad smile, a smile that would like to kill you. That’s true, Domingo said and stopped laughing. You’re right. Only don’t you see that that’s what’s so wonderful about her? One day I’m going to mount her like you climb a mountain and when I’ve got to her peak I’m going to pound my flagpole into her flesh. I am going to stand on those long bones and that soft flesh, and I will look out and survey all that is mine and be as proud as the first man to land on the moon. You’re sick, I said and started to leave. We’re all sick in our own way, he called after me.

I avoided him from then on.

Domingo also dangled a number of hooks in front of the other French teacher, Madame Moreau, but he was a lot more cautious in her case, and I never heard him say anything compromising about her, or ever even mention her body. He probably didn’t dare. Madame Moreau was not someone you could joke with as a student, not even Domingo joked with her. She was close to fifty and came from Poitiers. She told us on the very first day when she came into the classroom: Je m’appelle Elaine Moreau et je viens de Poitiers. It seemed to be important to her emphasise the bit about Poitiers: she came from Poitiers and it was at Poitiers in the eighth or ninth century that the French had driven back the Arabs who were pushing up from Castile. It was thanks to Poitiers that Europe was still Europe. You could just see it — a horde of Arabs thrusting up from the Iberian Peninsula and Madame Moreau’s town mounting the resistance. You could even imagine Madame Moreau standing on a hill with the French flag fluttering behind her shoulders while she decapitated Moors as they advanced on horseback. Madame Moreau de Poitiers, the proud and resolute warrior. And it was that hard shell of hers that meant you couldn’t stop thinking about her, she was there at the back of your mind the whole time, you imagined what it would be like to get underneath that shell, and be appreciated by her or even have her be kind to you. To win Madame Moreau’s appreciation, to feel her kindness, would be an enormous privilege, like discovering a valley or a landscape that no one had ever seen before and that was exotic and extremely desirable. I could only have a sense of that pull, but as a man Domingo must have felt it all the more strongly. In any case he seemed determined to find a way in, even though he must have realised it would be a huge challenge. To mount Dauphine and capture Madame Moreau really could be likened to being the first man on the moon, planting his flag on a peak like that. The obvious question, though, was whether there was anything erotic about Madame Moreau at all. Or whether, as Camillo put it, Moreau really was completely frigid, one of those rare human beings who never think about sex and can live an entire lifetime without feeling a twinge of desire.

‘The height of eroticism in the daily life of the translator ought to be the undressing of the word,’ she said once. ‘Anything to do with desire simply saps your energy and sows confusion.’

Was she frigid as Camillo said or had she got her fingers burnt? You couldn’t work that out just by looking at her. But Domingo wanted to understand, to force his way in and get to the bottom of it. He was attracted by something outside what he previously considered normal, and when that happens to a person, the attraction can feel much stronger than when you are drawn to something this side of normality. When you allow yourself to be attracted by the repulsive, or rather when you manage to grasp the delight in something superficially repulsive, you are more vulnerable. You can’t share the experience with anyone else. You have been taken over, sort of, by the irrational, and you can’t bring it out into the light of day; you can’t say, ‘I’m attracted to something on the other side and I’m no longer one of you, I’m someone else now,’ but that was what happened to Domingo when he found himself obliged to sit on a school bench facing Moreau on a daily basis, having to look at her body and write down what she said. It wasn’t of course possible to feel desire for the woman who was standing before him, but if you allowed yourself to do it anyway, if you could imagine the repulsive as an option … He fell headlong because there are no manuals for that kind of attraction.

Muriel Ruiz never understood what motivated Domingo. As far as she was concerned although you could certainly give yourself to someone repulsive (she would, after all, do that with Parra, for instance) there had to be a reason behind that, a rationale for lowering your standards. She dismissed Madame Moreau as the biggest joke ever perpetrated by womankind. A freak, an irrelevance, a punctured soufflé, something you put back in the fridge and forgot about. You had only yourself to blame if you made as little effort as Moreau. Muriel’s scornful attitude to Moreau was made worse by the already powerful, not to say desperate, female rivalry that had existed between the two of them right from the start. Muriel must have forced Madame Moreau to re-evaluate one of her most cherished and vital credos, that vanity and talent could only coexist to a certain limit within the same individual and that anything else was a violation of that equation of fairness so fundamental to life. Vanity was the antagonist of talent, two elements that could never share the same individual; they cancelled each other out like the pH of alkalis and acids. According to Madame Moreau’s algorithm, experiencing too powerful an attraction towards your own reflection meant you were a blockhead (‘As far as I know Narcissus’ only claim to fame was as a narcissist,’ she once said.). Muriel refused to be fitted into this scheme, because Muriel was the most self-absorbed person ever to have walked the corridors of the School for Translators and Interpreters, and yet she could read and speak French far better than the rest of us. So there had to be something fishy going on and Moreau kept sniffing around it like a dog that has caught the scent but can’t find the trail.

As I write this, I realise how easy it is to despise someone like Moreau for her narrow and categorical views. It’s just that, looking back, I have no real idea where I stand. In a way I think you ought to be sceptical about people like Muriel Ruiz. If I remember right, she once said about someone else, ‘She reminds me too much of myself. I wouldn’t trust her.’ Muriel came out with things like that, and it was confusing, you couldn’t be sure whether there was a great honesty behind her words, a vast openness that most people are unable to allow themselves because of their fears, or if she was having us all on. But every door was always open to her. People like me, and Moreau for that matter, because you could lump us together in some respects, find it harder to take shortcuts than people like Muriel. Shortcuts do not invite us to take them. No Paco Parras remain with their gaping wallets to act you might say like walking slot-machines. Instead the terrain we find ourselves in is on the periphery (although even there we manage to get by, obviously).

‘So, to the undressing of the word,’ Madame Moreau said, and the light used to fall on her sitting at her desk in front of the class so that half her face was left in shadow, and all you could see was her mouth moving while her eyes were in twilight.

‘If you succeed at the verbal undressing, if, that is, you succeed in freeing yourself from the surface of the text, and manage to undress the words and get at their core, you can spend long hours doing nothing more than savouring that core. Everything you have missed out on — everything you wanted to do, all the wings you wanted to try out — all of that becomes irrelevant. Only when you succeed in laying bare the words, getting rid of all the frippery, all the false connotations and all the senseless monopolies that people, companies and other interested parties have placed on them, can you enjoy them and that is when one of those rare states occurs that Joyce used to refer to as …’

She tried to find the word.

‘Rare what?’ said Muriel.

‘Just wait, it’ll come back to me any moment,’ Moreau said at that point, though it didn’t before the bell had rung.

‘That’s all for today, thank you,’ she said then, and that brought the lesson to an end.

Camillo, who was Italian in origin, was the only person to openly challenge Moreau. He used to call her zitella, which means ‘maiden’. Mo’ viene la zitella, he used to say with scorn in his voice as she came through the door in the morning. And it was as if everything came to a stop when Madame Moreau entered the school. The way Camillo put it, it was as though ‘the cars stopped honking in the street outside, the flowers withered in their pots and the putty dropped off the walls’ when she came in. While that may have been an exaggeration, which it most definitely was, if we were standing by the coffee machine, which was just by the main door, and she opened that door it felt like a little spasm passed through the group; everyone straightened up, we fell silent in the middle of a sentence and stopped laughing with our mouths open. We sipped at our plastic cups, looking down at the floor until she had gone past.

Moreau walked slowly and in a controlled manner through the corridor, and there was a sort of transparent armour over her eyes. Her entire posture cried out that she didn’t really want to be here, that she came here because someone or something, fate maybe, was holding a pistol to her head and forcing her to take each step. One step, two steps, three, a few thousand steps perhaps until she arrived at the grand entrance and the marble staircase that led straight up to the hell that was us. She strode along the corridor without saying hello to anyone and closed the door to the classroom behind her, refusing to let us enter before she had taken off her red coat and hung it on a rack of hangers in one corner. Then she put out all the books, papers and pens she was going to use on the table in front of her. The pencils were always sharpened and their points were turned outwards, towards where we would soon be sitting on the benches. Then she opened the door and stood silently by her desk, watching us as we went to our seats. Once everyone had sat down, she said: Bonjour, though that word usually sounded so dogged and so seething we couldn’t be bothered to feel we were actually being addressed, so we just mumbled an indistinct response.

She called us by our surnames. ‘Mademoiselle Ruiz! Si je vous vois encore une fois mâcher du chewing-gum, je baisserai vos notes dans toutes les matières, ceci n’est pas une école qui abrite les clochards!’ Or: ‘Mademoiselle Villalobos, votre traduction est très insuffisante!’

‘She’s been dumped or I’m a Dutchman,’ Camillo used to say.

He tended to pass on to us by the coffee machine the rumours he said were going around. The gist was always that Madame Moreau had been abandoned and couldn’t get over it; she was desperate to fill the empty space the absence of a man over so many years had created inside her, and that was why she had devoted herself to the accumulation of theoretical skills. She could read herself into being high, that one, Camillo told us, saying that he had seen her sitting for hours on end on one of the sofas in the staff room with the same book open in her lap. Only she didn’t read like other people, who have to lie down after a while, or have a nap for a minute or two or put something in their mouths or get a cup of coffee. The zitella would sit there as straight as a rake, reading as though she were reading the Bible on a Sunday in church. There was something inhumanly rigid and mechanical about her way of reading, because there was no element of joy to it (however little Camillo might know about that kind of joy). Madame Moreau has read everything there is to read in French and Spanish in that rigid and exaggeratedly attentive way of hers and at some point, Camillo said, all that reading has warped something in the zitella’s head. Her loneliness, her reading and her disdainfulness are totally warped, he insisted.

Madame Moreau must have suspected what Camillo was saying about her, or perhaps her antipathy towards him was spontaneous and completely independent of his dislike, because she made attacks on him as well and they were often more cunning, or at least more calculated, than his attacks on her. She never stopped addressing him with the formal vous, for instance, which was a wall she erected to keep him out. He attempted more than once to use a less formal form of address between the two of them, using tu to her, and you got the sense there was something beseeching about that word, as if he was asking for a chance for intimacy, to get up close and personal maybe, if only she called him tu like she did all the other teachers at the school. But Madame Moreau obstinately denied him any opportunity like that and continued to talk to him using a glacial vous. She also chose to address him in such a way that that vous was repeated several times in the same sentence; thus failing to apply the technique she had taught us of using impersonal constructions so you weren’t obliged to define the exact distance required to the person you were addressing. She would frequently go even further and end her sentences with Monsieur Pochintesta — a phrase that always made the distance between them seem more like a yawning gulf.

On several occasions she also forced him to carry out humiliating tasks in front of the rest of us in the classroom. Monsieur Pochintesta! she might call out. Come and help me put this microphone together; Mademoiselle Ruiz is going to interpret a radio programme for the rest of us. And Camillo would come in then and have to stand before us with his leads and cables, unable to get it to work, while Madame Moreau stood beside him with a smile of satisfaction on her lips as she told us that the caretaker who had worked at the school before Camillo could connect up the microphone in less than thirty seconds. Once Domingo stepped up to help Camillo and soon found out there was a bit missing. I see, said Madame Moreau, dry as dust: Well then, we had better manage without a mike this time. Camillo had to pack the whole lot up and leave the room. During the break Domingo opened one of Madame Moreau’s drawers. And, as expected, there the little piece was.

One day Camillo was summoned to the classroom to help adjust the volume of the loudspeakers prior to our interpreting a congress about feminism we were supposed to translate from Spanish into French. When Camillo realised what the conference was about he said, Right, what a load of drivel. What exactly do you mean, ‘load of drivel’? Madame Moreau asked him, which made you feel that Camillo had been trapped in Moreau’s fingers the way a scientist captures a beetle with a pair of tweezers to study it from all angles. Only Camillo was oblivious to the danger. What I mean, he said, is that all that feminist stuff is drivel. Drivel, drivel and more drivel. We could all see, though Camillo couldn’t, how Madame Moreau’s eyes dropped to the floor and stayed there.

‘Given the curriculum of the male gender over the last two thousand years,’ Moreau began, ‘as the arrangers of gladiatorial games, as witch burners, inquisitors and the perpetrators of abuse against women as a whole, there is of course much to reflect on, and to re-evaluate’ (here she used the French phrase remettre en cause) ‘if men as men are to rediscover themselves as beings that can be allowed in civilised company.’

‘I am reflecting,’ Camillo replied from one of the loudspeaker sets. ‘I’m reflecting, I’m reflecting so hard smoke is coming out of my ears, can’t you see that?’

Moreau laughed out loud.

‘I hardly think that the great male re-evaluation is going to start with Camillo Pochintesta.’

She walked slowly across the classroom over to the window where she remained standing with her back turned to us all.

‘You might as well stop reflecting, Monsieur Pochintesta,’ she said absently, her fingers on her lips. ‘The human race is not very likely to go under because a man like you stops considering the matter.’

Had Moreau turned round at this point and seen the defeated look on Camillo’s face, she might have tried to soften what she said. For a moment Camillo actually looked completely crushed. His damp lower lip drooped sadly as though he had quite forgotten that sucking it in suited him better. His eyes were wide and staring.

Moreau nodded to herself. An ambulance rushed down the street outside and for a few seconds the classroom was filled with the noise of sirens.

‘Have you finished?’ she said and turned round. ‘How could it take so long to fix a couple of loudspeakers? I’ll do it myself next time. Au revoir.’

She shut the door behind him.

When I told them about the incident at home, Blosom said that the kind of warfare being waged between Pochintesta and Moreau was almost bound to be something both of them found rather stimulating and if they really were forced to choose neither of them would want to do without it. I couldn’t say. But even if what Blosom said was true and the conflict had a stimulating effect on all of us, including Camillo and Moreau, Moreau didn’t have the strength to resist the decay that was slowly but surely forming around her person. That sort of decay may have something to do with there being no one who really likes you, and your not playing an essential role in anyone else’s life, and that nothing would come to a stop for even the briefest of instants if you suddenly disappeared one day. There is something unsettling about people who suffer from that kind of decline, perhaps because they have to keep inventing and sticking to a raison d’être for every second of their lives, a raison d’être that in Moreau’s case was nothing more than a few feet of shelving for old books, which are, when all is said and done, just the ashes of other people’s lives and not even proper ashes as most of what is said in books isn’t even true, and the more you think about it truth has no meaning and the only thing you can know for sure is that to really be alive you need far more courage than reading requires, and writing too for that matter. Then again maybe decay isn’t the right word. It was more a matter of neglectfulness, a fatigue she fought against every day, and in her defence you would have to say that the fact that she actually turned up at the school was a sign she could manage the daily battles against tedium. So she was fighting it, but she fought like someone who is being deprived of her weapons one after the other. First the shield, then the sword, then the knife, then the shoes. Muriel said rather pompously that the battle Moreau waged against tedium was like the struggle every human being wages against life itself, you have to make all the deals on your own for the simple reason that you are the only person with any interest in doing so. And at the same time your weapons are taken from you one after the other; you are never really any more powerful than you were when you were born and had an entire regiment of parents and grandparents to protect you, and in the end you are left naked on the battlefield with only your bare hands for weapons while the machinery of war rumbles on around you. That’s when, Muriel said, it’s time to turn your back on it all and leap off the cliff. Though that isn’t really the worst thing, she went on, the worst thing is that just a little bit away, on the other side of the hill or in the neighbouring village, there is an alter ego made of very different stuff who is living that other life you could have lived if you had done everything differently. If you’d chosen to settle somewhere else and learnt to do other things, taken a different job and made completely different friends. And that double will stand there strong and beautiful and happy when faced with the tanks. And if the double has to die, they know how to do so with dignity. The double never dies like a dog.

Whatever. In any case Moreau’s eyes became increasingly armoured the longer term went on, which you could only consider to be proof of a profound inner weariness. Her red coat began to look increasingly drab, as though she couldn’t be bothered to take it to the dry cleaner’s. Her thin, short hair grew out and its split ends hung around her shoulders. She put on weight and her trousers started to pinch across her stomach, now and then you could see a bit of soft white flesh peeping out. She didn’t seem to care. Camillo kept on saying repulsive things about her; he continued telling us all the rumours that were going around and that she had been dumped and how the womb in women who had not given birth could tear away from its moorings and start wandering around the body; that was the origin of hysteria according to the ancient Greeks, and even if you couldn’t see the hysteria in Moreau, it was there under the surface. Camillo said he had a nose for that kind of thing, he could pick up the spoor of repressed female hysteria from miles away. Here in the school it was so thick it made the walls bulge; as a man, it hit you the moment you started up the stairs and you had to steel yourself, to the point of recklessness even, to enter the corridors. The function that armoured gaze of Moreau’s served was to keep all that hysteria at bay, according to him, like a thin lid over a dark well, only there was nothing to say that that lid wouldn’t crack one day from the pressure and then Madame Moreau’s true self would be revealed as scorned, dumped, childless and totally insane.

It was thanks to Domingo that our class finally got to see another side of Madame Moreau. It was also, perhaps, because of Domingo’s kindness to Madame Moreau that everything that followed actually took place, I have thought about that, and while I’ve never mapped out the connections exactly because that would be impossible, I really have given it some thought, and something definitely changed in the whole situation at that point, a kind of descent began. One day Domingo turned up with a tray of petits choux he had bought in the bakery below the school. He also had a bottle of cava and a pack of plastic wine glasses with him.

‘No pastry in the world could sweeten that sour cunt,’ said Camillo when he realised what Domingo was about.

‘You can just keep your trap shut,’ Domingo said then. ‘Just for once you’re going to keep a lid on it, Camillo Pochintesta.’

Camillo was glowering in the corridor while Domingo laid everything out in the classroom. The rest of us sat silently in our seats. Don’t you get it? Domingo said. This is what we should have done a long time ago. Yes, we said. Madame Moreau opened the main door as usual a few minutes before the lesson was supposed to begin, entered the corridor and said a barely audible hello to Camillo who was leaning against the wall grinning at her. When she came into the classroom, she just stood there as though turned to stone while her gaze ranged across what Domingo had laid out. The tray with the pastries, the glasses, the three bottles of cava. And then the rows of seats, the sharpened pencils on the teacher’s desk, us, the windows and the station building on the other side. Then she turned on her heels, said ‘just a moment’, and went into the toilet where she remained for almost four minutes.

When she came out, it was obvious she had put on a dark-red lipstick that made her mouth look different. Her hands must have been shaking when she applied it, because from the second row where I was sitting you could clearly see that one side of her cupid’s bow was higher than the other. But what was really astonishing was that she was smiling as she came back into the classroom. It was a strained, stiff smile, but a smile nonetheless. For the very first time I could see Madame Moreau’s teeth, and they were even and pearly grey, like they end up in very old people or in people who have drunk a lot of tea.

‘So what’s all this?’ she asked, her arms crossed over her chest.

‘It’s just that it struck us how rarely we show our appreciation,’ Domingo said.

‘Appreciation?’ Madame Moreau said.

The last word came out like a gasp. We all nodded at that. Domingo opened the cava with a confident hand and the festive sound of the cork being pushed out of the bottle got us onto our feet and made us walk over to the trays of petits choux and take a glass each. Madame Moreau accepted the glass Domingo offered her and carried it to her lips. She moved over to the window and stood with her back to us looking down at the street. She raised the glass to her lips again. There was a long, drawn-out silence. We were all struggling to come up with something to say because it felt as if the reason Madame Moreau was standing silently with her back to us was that she had no idea how to deal with the situation; she simply had no experience accepting appreciation, and we would have to save her from the embarrassment we were actually responsible for. Then she suddenly said, aloud and without a tremor in her voice:

‘If I’d been more brilliant, I would have become something different.’

We looked at one another uncertainly.

‘Different to what?’ Domingo asked.

‘Something different to what I am today. A teacher. A lonely, mediocre teacher.’

‘Mediocre?’ Domingo said.

‘Mediocre,’ Moreau said, her back still turned to us. ‘It really wasn’t that likely. There was nothing to say I would end up as mediocre as this. I speak two languages perfectly. I have contacts in several fields. I could have done those interpreting jobs, sat in a booth and earned seven hundred euros a day. Here I am instead. Trying to make people out of a bunch of losers.’

She drank from her glass again. We looked at Domingo, unsettled by the sudden confidence and that insult you couldn’t just ignore.

‘Anyway,’ Moreau said and turned to face us. ‘I can see you’ve tried to be kind to me. I appreciate that, and I will pay you back. It has been ages since anyone was kind to me. I can’t actually remember the last time someone was. So I am going to pay you back,’ she repeated.

‘Haven’t you got any friends?’ Domingo asked.

We looked at him. How could he have been so bold? Madame Moreau stared at him as well and for a moment I thought she would send him out of the room, but she didn’t.

‘No,’ she said sadly instead. ‘I haven’t got any friends.’

She laughed, looked out the window and went on:

‘I’m actually terrified of other people. People are really terribly dangerous.’

‘Maybe not all of them?’ Domingo said and smiled at her.

‘No, maybe not all of them,’ Moreau conceded, ‘but the vast majority are judgmental, narrow-minded, cowardly and, what’s worse, they appear to be in it together.’

‘Ha,’ said Domingo. ‘It sounds like you suffer from paranoia, Madame Moreau.’

He’s in for it now, I thought. Domingo is going to get slapped down so hard he’ll never get up again. But he wasn’t. Instead Moreau laughed again and her laughter sounded almost happy this time.

‘Maybe you could put it like that, but then I suppose even a paranoid person can be persecuted, what’s your view on that, Monsieur del Rio?’

‘Sure,’ said Domingo.

‘Do you know what I read on the train coming here?’ Moreau asked while Domingo topped up her glass. ‘They’ve done a study of which marriages survive the best. And get this, the marriages that survive the best are the ones where the partners are able to ignore what the other one says. I mean, doesn’t that tell you something?’

‘It does,’ Domingo said.

‘That’s really creepy, isn’t it?’ Moreau cried and she was standing in front of him.

‘Yes,’ said Domingo and his voice sounded thick.

‘So no, my friends,’ Moreau said, and turned to the rest of us. ‘Take my word for it. It’s best to let your wounds bleed when you’re by yourself.’

Her eyes seemed to be hooded from intoxication. Her lipstick had smudged a bit.

‘I’d just like to say one thing,’ Domingo said and took a step nearer her. He was standing so close that she had to be able to feel the warm air of his words against the nape of her neck.

‘Not a single hair on your head is mediocre. You are the most knowledgeable and able teacher I have ever had. And besides, Elaine, you’re … beautiful.’

Madame Moreau looked straight ahead. At first we couldn’t make out the expression on her face because the light streaming in behind her was so strong, but then the sun suddenly went behind a cloud and we could make out the exact expression in her eyes. It switched from a kind of total and almost rapt openness into something that actually looked like an attempt at a new smile. Only then a shadow fell across it all and the usual glazed veil was back in place.

‘Since when,’ she said coldly, while turning towards Domingo, ‘since when have Monsieur del Rio and I been on first-name terms?’

The spell had been broken. Domingo gave a little gasp and took a step back. Madame Moreau walked over to her desk and dropped her plastic glass into the waste bin.

‘Make sure you get rid of the dregs. You’re just standing there looking like dogs waiting to be fed. This is over now.’

We helped Domingo pack together what was left.

That was the only time Madame Moreau opened up to our class. The lessons continued as usual after that. She addressed us by our surnames, humiliated Camillo who humiliated her in turn although always in her absence. She failed us on almost all the papers we wrote and sneered openly at us when we were interpreting, either on account of our accents or because we couldn’t memorise the entire contents of what was being read, or because we were dressed too conspicuously, given that a good interpreter should be wearing more or less the same pattern on his or her jacket as the wallpaper on the room where the interpreting is to take place. Not to put too fine a point on it, you could even say she destroyed our self-confidence when it came to expressing ourselves in French. That might sound sad, said Muriel, but the more you think about it the more you realise that self-confidence in expressing yourself in French is completely irrelevant. What does it matter? The heavens are not going to fall because I no longer have any confidence expressing myself in French. I can express myself in other languages. I can use body language or simply stay silent. I don’t really give a damn, I’ve never liked French, I’m glad I speak it so badly.

Which was a lie after all, because Muriel spoke French like a native.

As for me, what I was going to learn from Madame Moreau would be learnt a few months later and in the company of Alba Cambó and Valentino Coraggioso. And that knowledge would have little to do with vocabulary lists and conjugations, but more with something of wider human relevance that might be summed up as the fact that beneath the thick skin of even the most armour-plated person there is always a crack that runs straight to the centre and you should think it over very carefully before raising a hand to signal your willingness to fall inside.

‌

‘The Story of Luci’

ALBA CAMBÓ

Semejanzas 2008:11

The first thing a visitor to Caudal de la Ribera sees of the village is the cemetery. It sprawls around the outskirts almost insolently and then marches unchecked up a hill, and that is why there seems no end to it from the road. Then ‘the club’ comes into view, which is pink. The restaurant comes next and is ochre-coloured, like Leonor Albornoz’ house and all the earth around Caudal for that matter. You can’t see Maderas Del Pozo from the village — you have to go all the way through it and then out the other side — and there by the dried-up riverbed is the timber yard, not painted any colour at all. This yard is the destination for all the heavy lorries that pass through the centre of the village every day; it is at the timber yard the lorries stop and load up. Then they set off again, driving the same way they came except that on the way back they stop at neither the brothel nor the restaurant.

If extenuating circumstances exist for what happened in the village that year when the new priest arrived, they are to be found in the geography. A landscape shapes the people who inhabit it, and it has been said of Caudal — not totally in jest — that it is the last outpost of civilisation before you get to hell. The knife-edged dividing line between pitiless light and dense shadow has become etched into the villagers over the centuries. Their eyes are as steady and as penetrating as tacks; their capacity to arrive at swift judgements and to decide what is right and wrong would alarm anyone from hazier, darker and therefore also more hesitant regions. What they say about an opponent in Caudal is that all they have to do is sit on their steps and wait and soon enough they will see their enemy’s coffin pass by. And there they are, sitting on their steps. The sun starts to climb in the east. It treks across the vaulted sky to linger at the zenith and then sinks with an endless slowness. Every now and then the church bells ring. Often for a funeral, more rarely for a marriage, never for a baptism. No one can remember when a baptism was last held in Caudal. And that makes it easier to understand why, on the night when Leonor rang for her, Daniela Hernandez was feeling such a vast, warm joy the moment she went out of the door of her house. She was looking forward to the childish babble that would soon be filling the church, to hearing it bounce off the walls and purl like a spring in all those old ears. The desiccated and ancient mumbling that normally filled the interior would turn into something very different the day Leonor’s son was christened: something joyous and hopeful.

And so there Daniela Hernandez was, pedalling along, the night Leonor’s child was to be born. The gravel crackled under the tyres; the veil of cloud had broken up and the stars were shining brightly in the firmament above her. She parked in front of the large ochre-coloured house in which Leonor had been living on her own for almost six months and lingered in the courtyard for a moment listening to the night. How silent it all was, she thought. Not a puff of wind, not a single cricket, no cars in the distance. Just peace, as though the entire landscape was holding its breath, waiting for something. It is waiting for the child, she thought. The dry earth is waiting for a little child it can feed. The dry soil is tired of swallowing old bodies. It is sated and bloated, and now it wants to give back something of itself. She picked up her bag and went into the house. As soon as she entered the bedroom, she discovered that the waters had broken long ago and that Leonor was already dilated by ten centimetres. What this made her think was that Leonor had been intending to go through the delivery on her own but had changed her mind at the last minute and rung for help. Daniela Hernandez would have liked to give her a piece of her mind. There was something deeply irresponsible about a plan like that. The entire village was waiting for Leonor’s son; they were waiting like the desert waits for rain. But Leonor had now suffered through almost twenty hours of torment in the dilation phase, and the pain, the fear and rage were plain to see on her face. Daniela Hernandez chose therefore not to say anything at all, but to set to work and get the child out.

Several hours later, however, as she was disappointedly holding a little girl swaddled in towels, she asked Leonor what her daughter’s name was to be. Leonor replied that the child would be called Lucifer.

‘But it’s … a girl?’ Daniela said, perplexed.

‘I made my mind up long ago that the child would be called Lucifer, whether it was a boy or a girl,’ Leonor replied. ‘I never asked for this child. All I wanted was peace and quiet. Now that Arcadio is dead, all I want is peace and quiet. But we all have to sup from the cup of sorrow with our own spoon, and what I got in my spoon was this child. That’s why she will be called Lucifer and that is my last word on the matter.’

‘Arcadio will be turning in his grave to hear you say that,’ Daniela cried. ‘He was a good Christian and would never have let you christen the child Lucifer.’

‘What Arcadio gets up to in his grave is no longer my concern,’ Leonor replied. ‘He’ll be bloating when it rains, I expect, and drying out when the sun shines, just like any other corpse.’

‘Have you got any idea how much everyone in the village has been yearning for a child to be born?’ Daniela persisted. ‘Do you realise how happy everyone is that there’s going to be a baptism in the church at last?’

‘A baptism!’ Leonor cried. ‘Are you all out of your minds? There’ll be no baptism for little Lucifer, over my dead body.’

‘The girl could help change your life,’ Daniela appealed, unable to let go of the image of all those aged, happy faces listening to the childish babble. ‘You’ll no longer be lonely in this huge house. This child could represent something new, she could help you find …’

‘Help me find what?’

‘The kind of thing that makes … things … meaningful,’ Daniela said, already regretting her clumsy choice of words.

‘When the blind lead the blind, they both end up in the ditch,’ Leonor observed. ‘Could you please clear off, now the child’s finally out.’

Her cheeks flaming with annoyance, Daniela Hernandez cleaned up around Leonor. Then she rode off on her bike, shaken and relieved all at once. There was a feeling of sickness in Leonor’s house, a kind of madness lying in wait in the walls.

The first few years Daniela Hernandez saw no sign of the girl. The insults she had been forced to endure were so fresh in her mind she could not bring herself to go over and see how they were doing. There were long stretches of time in which Daniela entirely forgot about little Lucifer, but then she would happen to think of her. Suddenly and unexpectedly, like when you wake in the middle of the night and remember something you had forgotten or a mistake you’d made that had become muffled in the cotton wool of your everyday preoccupations during the hours of daylight, only to loom up like a sharp-edged reef from the bottom of the sea at night and rip huge tears in the keel of whatever thought might be occurring to you. And then she would think: Leonor’s little girl! What has happened to her? Has she become the target of Leonor’s madness? I do have a responsibility; I was the one who helped her come into this world after all.

‘We’ve got to go over there and make sure Leonor’s girl is all right,’ Daniela said one day to the other women of the village. ‘It’s been almost eleven years and I’ve never laid eyes on her, not once.’

The other women nodded. They decided they would go over there one afternoon shortly before Easter. As a pretext for the visit they were going to say they wanted to give Leonor a basket of fruit and nuts. That was hardly customary among them, to be sure, but as one of them said someone else had said, things actually could change over the years. So over there they went: Daniela, Gabriela, Cristina and Julia. The sand was a dark brown colour that day, strewn across the hinterland like a burnt scab.

The house looked as desolate as it had that night eleven years before. Despite its desolation, it was still the grandest house in the whole of Caudal. Unlike Leonor, Arcadio Maldonado, the man who had built it to honour Leonor but who had died a few months before the birth of Lucifer, was popular with the villagers. In the village they said that he had only improved with age, just like really good wine. They didn’t use the expression applied to the other men of the village who had aged well: good cocks make good stock!

‘I wonder how much money he left,’ Daniela said as they walked across the courtyard.

‘Enough to stop Leonor having to get her fingernails dirty,’ Gabriela said.

‘I’ve heard it said he went to the bank and emptied his account only a day or so before he died,’ Cristina interjected. ‘He took it all home with him in large bags.’

‘There’s no end of gossip in our village,’ Daniela said.

‘She can spend the rest of her life lying on her couch,’ Cristina said.

‘No end of gossip,’ Daniela repeated.

They knocked on the door and waited. They had to wait quite a while before they finally heard the sound of someone’s steps on the other side.

‘Hello,’ said the girl who opened the door. ‘Who are you?’

She was darkly angelic as though drawn from a story by Henry James or a painting in some cool marble chapel in Toledo. She was tall for her age and had freckles. Her eyes were bright green. Her jet-black hair fell down behind her shoulders.

Daniela introduced the other women from the village and Luci greeted them guardedly.

‘Could we come in for a moment?’

‘All right,’ Luci said.

They stepped into a hall that led to the central part of the house, which was a garden. A profusion of dark green plants were growing at various heights, and a fountain murmured in the centre of the atrium. The open space gave off a sense of dampness, greenery and shade. The women gasped: never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined something like this existing in Caudal — a leafy garden with water and shade and in the Mexican style in the middle of the house as well. Was this what Leonor had done with the money her husband had left her?

‘Do you attend school?’ Cristina asked when they had sat down at a table amid the foliage.

‘I’ve got permission to study at home,’ said Luci.

‘We never see you in the village,’ Daniela said.

‘Mum isn’t that fond of the village.’

‘But she hardly knows us really,’ said Gabriela. ‘You should come down to the village every once in a while. If you don’t, people will start talking. There are some people who think Leonor has been keeping you locked up all these years, just to give you an example.’

Luci laughed out loud.

‘Mum says if you spend too much time with other people, you end up being like them. You start evaluating yourself by their yardsticks. Because people measure you; they multiply you by unfamiliar denominators and subdivide you and subtract you, they can make you a stranger to everyone including yourself.’

‘You sound like an old book when you talk,’ Gabriela said.

Luci picked up an eraser from in front of her and started to pick it apart into small pieces she then pushed around the table.

‘That’s the only thing there is to do here,’ she said. ‘Reading old books is all there is to do in this place, that and the watering and looking after the plants.’

She made a sweeping gesture towards the greenery around them.

‘Based on what Mum says, things only get worse if you go out. She says there’s no end to the number of fools there are, especially in Caudal.’

The women stared at her.

‘Only I might come down to the village at some point in any case,’ Luci said. ‘I need to see if I can find a man.’

‘You need to see if you can find a man?’ Daniela said in alarm. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’ve only met two men in my entire life,’ Luci said. ‘One is the handyman Mum employs to do things around here, the other is the gardener. They both come up from Madrid once a week. Neither of them likes to talk, and they just do what Mum tells them and then off they go again. I’ve never had a real talk with them.’

‘Well,’ Gabriela said. ‘I wouldn’t bother coming to Caudal if what you want is a real talk with a man. You’ll find it’s not worth the effort.’

Daniela looked at her in reproach. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Luci did come? And if she did, they could look after her and ensure everything was all right.

‘That’s Leonor arriving now,’ Luci said, and her face cracked into a wicked smile.

The sound of tyres could duly be heard on the gravel in the courtyard. Leonor was soon standing in the doorway behind them.

‘What are you all doing here?’ she said.

‘Hello, Leonor,’ Daniela said. ‘We wanted to see how you were doing. We’re just sitting here having a nice chat with Luci.’

‘A nice chat,’ Leonor said. ‘A lot of blather and self-important nonsense is all there ever is to hear in Caudal. Be off with you, you’ve no business to be here.’

Cristina pointed to the basket in the corner.

‘We just wanted …’

‘Get out, I say, before I decide to give the pitchfork an airing.’

The women returned to the village.

*

The visit to Leonor’s house coincided with the arrival in the village of the new priest. The old one had left a few days before, exhausted with age and by funerals. A black car had come from Madrid to pick him up, and a chauffeur had stuffed a large number of suitcases in the boot while the priest sat gloomily in the backseat, muttering ‘little village, big hell’. He ignored the greetings of the villagers standing on parade along the main road as the car rolled out of Caudal.

‘It’s time we had some new blood here,’ they said once the car had driven off. ‘He’d served here long enough, and his sermons were long-winded and boring.’

The new priest arrived without any fuss on the bus from Madrid. As he got off, he appeared to observe the view, the dirt on the buildings, the way the shutters were so firmly shut, and a few dogs aimlessly running around and sniffing at a ditch. He began to walk towards the church. Once he had passed the cemetery and gone up the hill, he stopped in front of the white house with the green door where the old priest had lived. He opened the door and went in. It slammed shut behind him, and the murmuring over at Pepe’s bar rose in volume. Just how old was he? What part of Spain did he come from? The green door was soon reopened and Ignacio Reyes stepped out, locked up and started walking down to the village. Once there he walked uncertainly along the street, looking at the pavement and in the gutter as though he were searching for something. The villagers squirmed in their seats. What kind of priest would just walk around like that? Then he stopped in the middle of the little square that merged with the street and looked around until his gaze alighted on Pepe’s bar. At that point Pepe started cleaning all the tables with a cloth. The locals sat down in their places, alternating men and women. Some of the men remained at the counter because it was possible Reyes would end up there so as not to be forced to choose a particular table and, by doing so, favour one group more than another.

When he finally entered the bar, they tried to feign an unconcerned murmur. He looked around as the door shut behind him. His hair was sweaty and lay across his forehead. He was thin, and the veins on his hands were swollen.

‘A glass of water perhaps?’ said Pepe. ‘And a cup of coffee?’

Gabriela welcomed him. She stood up and said:

‘Welcome, Ignacio Reyes, to our village.’

She raised her glass to him then, and Reyes lifted his hand towards her.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to be here.’

He started talking as soon as a glass of coffee was put before him. First he told them how nice it was to get out to the countryside. How he had always felt a stranger in big cities, as if they weren’t the right place for him. So why did you move to the city in the first place, Daniela Hernandez wanted to ask, but Ignacio had already moved on and was describing La Mancha as a landscape of old castles, and tracks taken by who knows who, that led who knew where.

‘Don Quixote himself might have stepped across the cattle-grids around here,’ he said with a laugh and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

They looked down at the tables.

‘Don Quixote is a book,’ someone finally said, and Reyes laughed again, but then he fell silent as he stirred his spoon while staring into his glass. For a few seconds the sound of the spoon against the sides of the glass was the only sound that could be heard; he put it back on the dish with a clatter. Then his lips moulded themselves around the edge and he drank a quick little sip. He picked up the napkin and wiped his mouth.

‘That’s true,’ he said with a nod. ‘And books aren’t real life, no matter how much you might want them to be. Believing books could be real life is actually extremely unhealthy.’

He nodded at his own words. Then he looked at them. From left to right: Gabriela, Cristina, Julia, Daniela Hernandez.

‘Good coffee,’ he said next. ‘What sort is it?’

‘Bonka,’ said Pepe.

*

Ignacio Reyes started cultivating a garden, a little oasis whose only rival in the village might be the interior courtyard of Leonor Albornoz’ house. But no one could understand where Reyes thought he would get the water from. The Arabs, he told Pepe at the bar. They knew everything there was to know about artificial irrigation; they created gardens in the desert and got them to bloom. He had been reading about how they did it and had visited gardens around Granada, and the Alhambra as well. He was going to do the same thing here. Create shade at various levels: the palm trees at the very top, then layers of vegetation and, once he had created enough shade, he would begin cultivating the soil beneath it.

‘It’s not the idea of a “garden” you should have in mind,’ he told the locals. ‘You should be thinking “oasis” and then applying the principles of an oasis.’

‘The fact it worked somewhere else doesn’t mean it can be done here,’ they said.

‘The fact it worked somewhere else means that the possibility exists,’ Ignacio countered.

‘Even possibilities dry up when they get to Caudal,’ they said.

‘But not hope,’ Ignacio said.

‘Hope is vain and plain stupid.’

‘Yes. It is vain and stupid. But it’s still so powerful it can grow straight out of a cliff.’

Daniela Hernandez also thought that hopefulness was inappropriate for someone like him. As though he had agreed to put on a hat that didn’t suit him and was demeaning to his person. But she couldn’t help feeling curious. Just imagine if it was possible to make something grow around here? She walked over to his house one day when the air was gentle and warm. It was spring, and you felt as though you wanted to walk far and wide, as free as the man in the poem who just keeps walking, through the dusk and the evening, as happy and carefree as a gypsy. The poem sounded rather solemn in her head: Et j’irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien, Par la nature, — heureux comme avec une femme. She walked towards his house and was just about to turn back when he stepped out. He caught sight of her and waved her over. She stepped forward hesitantly.

‘Hello,’ he said when he saw her. ‘I recognise you from church. You live down in the village.’

‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you come in for a cup of tea? I’ve made a pot; I was just going to have some.’

‘No,’ she responded. ‘I don’t drink tea.’

‘I’m sure I could make something else.’

‘I don’t drink anything else either.’

He looked at her. She kept staring stubbornly at the ground.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Daniela Hernandez,’ she replied.

‘Were you born here?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not a very talkative lot in Caudal.’

‘That’s just the way we are. We’re like that in Caudal.’

Silence.

‘You know what,’ he said. ‘I’ve actually been feeling rather lonely since I arrived in this village.’

He laughed, and his laughter sounded hollow.

‘I really miss having someone to talk to. Some kind of companionship. You seem to have each other for that down there. Don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘We’ve always got each other in our village.’

‘You’ve got one another and you aren’t very bothered by anyone feeling left out.’

‘The other priest never felt left out.’

‘But I do.’

‘What?’

‘Feel left out.’

She had no idea how to respond.

‘Over there is where Leonor and Luci live,’ she said, pointing to Leonor’s house.

She stared down at the ground again, not understanding why she had said that about Leonor and Luci. There was silence. The kind of silence that meant you would say anything at all, just so words could be heard.

‘Come in,’ he said and walked towards the house.

When she hesitated, he gestured her on.

‘I mean it. Come in. Don’t stand there.’

She followed him slowly into the little house. There was only one room inside, with a little kitchen attached to it.

‘So this is where you live,’ she said.

‘Yes, this is me,’ he replied.

The bed was unmade, and there was an open bottle and a glass on the bedside table. The walls appeared to be damp, and on the floor was a flame-coloured carpet and on the carpet an open writing book and a pen. He has chosen to turn a cave into a sitting room, was what struck Daniela. She thought of her own sitting room. It was bright. Sickness is quick to find a way in where there is no light, her mother used to say when she was little. Ignacio was pottering about in the kitchen. The bottle-green shirt was faded from washing and his jeans looked dirty. You’ll get ill if you stay here, she wanted to say. Instead she said:

‘I have to go now.’

‘Where?’

‘To the graves.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

She shook her head.

‘Just graves. I look after them so they don’t fall into ruin. Old friends.’

‘So even the dead are treated as part of the community? But you can’t be bothered about the living?’

She tried to snort but the snort sounded like a failed sneeze. She immediately took a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her nose.

‘The way you make things sound,’ she said.

Silence fell once more. He had moved in close, and was now right behind her. She could smell his scent, the odour of sweat and old alcohol. She thought of the old priest whose after-shave you could smell even from the pews. She wanted to move, but just stood there as if turned to stone. She thought: He doesn’t scare me. I’m going to turn round. I’m going to turn round now and look him straight in the eye. And no matter what those eyes of his are saying, I’m going to stay where I am and look straight at them. That’s what I am going to do. I’m turning round. She turned round. In his eyes was something that looked like curiosity. Or was it … a sense of triumph?

She remembered the old priest again. He had been there for as long as she could remember. He was the one who did the talking in church throughout her entire childhood. He would never have made a joke about her habit of going to look at the graves. He would have thanked her, and she would have seen genuine joy in his eyes when he did so. She remembered the time he had caught her as a child cutting the legs off frogs in the rain. She had been out there by the watering hole on the plain with a pair of scissors in her hands, and all of a sudden there he was behind her. She gave a start and looked up at him in all his enormity, angry and a bit sombre, the clouds scudding past on the dark sky behind him. Are you cutting the legs off frogs, child? he had asked. So that’s what you’re up to — cutting the legs off frogs. That’s very naughty of you, Daniela. Just how do you suppose they’re going to be able to jump about when they don’t have any legs? She had replied in an indistinct mumble. To see what would happen, you say, to see what would happen — you have to be very naughty to cut the legs off frogs just to see what would happen, Daniela. I’ve got to find a punishment for you now, my child. Ten Rosaries and fifteen more Our Fathers, that should do it. And you’ve got to promise me you won’t cut the legs off frogs any more. You’ve got to promise me that. Although if you are going to keep cutting the legs off frogs no matter what, you’d better give them to your mother because no one can prepare frogs’ legs the way she can, fried in parsley with garlic and lemon. I don’t mind telling you, Daniela, no one can cook frogs’ legs like your mother.

She recalled that episode with a stifled laugh and suddenly wanted to tell it to Reyes, to let him know how the old priest had put it, the way he had complimented her mother on how she cooked frogs’ legs. She was on the point of telling him, but then she thought someone like Reyes, an educated man from the city who had read Cervantes and talked about irrigation with Arabs, would never understand. He wouldn’t think there could be anything harmless about cutting the legs off frogs. He would look down on her, and then start talking about nerve tissues, pain, animals and human beings. He would say: Animals are people too, or possibly: Human beings are animals, too.

She said: ‘I’m going now.’

She was just going out the door when she felt him grab hold of her shoulder.

‘Wait,’ he said.

She turned her face to him again. His lips pressed against hers. She poked him hard in the chest.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I …’

She stared at him.

‘I’m just so lonely,’ he said. ‘I’m just so bloody lonely, I … you seemed to be so …’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know … available?’

He looked guiltily at her.

‘Did you just say I looked available?’ she asked.

‘Of course you don’t,’ he mumbled. ‘Forgive me, I’m …’

‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ she said and turned around. ‘It was just a mistake. I’m going to forget it ever happened.’

She moved towards the door.

‘I don’t understand why you came here,’ she said before she closed it behind her. ‘You should have gone somewhere else. This isn’t a place for people like you. The people in our village are like dogs. Unless you get the whip hand over them, they won’t just be using those jaws of theirs for talking.’

Then she left.

*

Caudal:

Like extras who have been asked to have a seat and relax for a bit, they sit there staring straight ahead in the heat. The road is dirty. Every now and then a car comes along. The bus from Madrid will soon be arriving and its approach can be heard from far off. The sounds of laughter and chatter can be heard from the greengrocer’s and from The Laughing Turtle bar. The sign for The Laughing Turtle sways slightly in the breeze. This is a blue turtle that has been carved out of wood. There is a smell of frying coming from the bar.

A lady comes out of the grocer’s with a bag of fruit in her hand. A loquat falls out of the bag and rolls across the street. Not one of the people sitting at the bus stop gets up to call out, ‘Hey, I think you dropped a loquat.’ They all remain seated. No one gets up to run over and pick it up and then run after the woman with it.

They all just sit there and look at the orange loquat lying in the middle of the black roadway. A car comes along. It’s a red car, and the driver knows one of the people sitting there waiting because he raises a hand and calls out something through the window that has been wound down. Judging by his smile, he appears not to have any teeth. After he has driven past, the loquat remains on the tarmac. A dog comes running: a stray, a dog without an owner, just looking for a diversion of some kind. It stops and sniffs the loquat and then sticks its tongue out very rapidly to give the fruit the briefest of licks. Then a car can be heard approaching, and the dog leaves the roadway and moves towards the edge. It stops there for a while and looks at the loquat and then turns to look in the opposite direction, where a bitch is coming in fast. The dogs couple in front of everyone. The observers’ eyes wander. Some of them look at the dogs; others keep gazing fixedly at the loquat. One of them looks out over the hinterland. Screwing up his eyes to see better, as if something vastly important were occurring on the horizon.

The bus finally arrives. The loquat is crushed beneath one of its front wheels; the dogs stop coupling and run off towards the cemetery. The onlookers enter the bus, and the bus drives off. For a few moments nothing at all happens, apart from the sign for The Laughing Turtle continuing to sway in the wind.

*

Green shoots started to appear out of the soil in Ignacio Reyes’ garden. He wished he could show them to Daniela Hernandez and that she would come back some day, so he would have an opportunity to rectify the situation and everything that had gone wrong. But Daniela did not come. The girl from the ochre-coloured house turned up instead. One day she was just standing there on the dry gravel path, looking at what he had been growing. And, unlike Daniela and the other villagers, she didn’t seem to have anything against talking. She also turned out to know quite a bit about plants. Have you got a spade? she asked and started digging. You can’t have that here, she had said. You’ll have to replant it and put it over there.

She started turning up more and more often. They dug the soil, talked and sometimes they laughed. The girl appeared not to have the complicated relationship to laughter that the other villagers had, who seemed to think that smiling was a highway to hell. The girl laughed out loud: her mouth open wide, her head thrown back. Sometimes he was forced to look away when she laughed because it was as if she were exposing something of her innermost being in laughter, and that was something he couldn’t possibly be meant to see. I have taken every precaution, he thought. And even so it feels as though certain situations are drawn to me. Those situations are constantly at my back, sniffing at my heels, and if I stop or drop the pace even for a moment, they will bring me down, like a storm brings down a rotten pine tree. But if this is a test, I am going to withstand it. I am gentle and warm, but I can also be hard and cold. Just talking and laughing is innocent enough, and anyway no one can see us up here in my house.

How little he knew them! Of course they could see him. They were watching him the whole time. And if one of them couldn’t see him, another could; if he couldn’t be seen face to face then he could be seen with binoculars from a house on the outskirts. And the girl at his side kept talking. About this flower and that one. This insect or that. About Leonor Albornoz and Arcadio Maldonado, and how one day she was going to take the bus to Madrid and then on to Catalonia. She talked about the intrinsic and inescapable ugliness of the villagers. And a kind of calm settled in the air around them while she talked. But calms can be treacherous; they are dark waters you cannot see through and you really shouldn’t dip your hand beneath them. Reyes would also talk from time to time. He talked about love, and tried not to think about physical love. But when he talked about God’s omnipotent and unconquerable love, confusion got the upper hand and he understood nothing of what he was saying.

*

That day:

The mass began as usual. He read aloud something about love in a confused and prosaic manner, and then fell silent. The doors opened. The sound of the wind outside entered the church, and then the doors slammed shut. It took a few seconds before he could make out who it was standing at the back of the nave. It was Luci. She was dripping wet and her muddy boots had left tracks across the floor. And what was that in her hands? Two plastic bags? Rubbish bags? Filled with something.

He put his sermon down on the edge of the pulpit.

‘What is the reason for this visit?’ he said.

‘Nacho,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the money in these bags. We can leave now.’

The villagers gaped at them from the pews. She called him Nacho. Leonor’s daughter called the priest Nacho. You can’t call a priest by a nickname. And if you do, that can only mean … They kept staring, first at one then the other.

‘I don’t understand,’ Ignacio said, but a blush had already begun to steal across his face. ‘I really haven’t got the faintest idea what you mean.’

‘You said you didn’t have any money, didn’t you?’ the girl said impatiently. ‘But I do. In any case Mum is never going to make up her mind what she’s going to do with it. We should have it. We should go to Catalonia, you and me.’

Every face turned towards the girl and then back to him.

‘The bus is leaving in thirty minutes,’ Luci said. ‘Are you coming?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Reyes said as sweat began to glisten on his forehead. ‘I haven’t got a clue. Here I am holding mass, and you come in and tell me we should be leaving?’

‘But that’s what you said,’ the girl said and looked at him in disappointment. ‘You said we’d get out of here if we had money. Well I’ve fixed that now. We can go.’

For a moment he was filled with an intense feeling of joy. In his mind’s eye he could see himself in slow motion, throwing off his robes and taking the girl’s hand; he could see them running down the aisle of the nave, holding the plastic bags full of money while banknotes were whirling around them in the air; he could see them whirling around those idiotically staring faces that had not yet had the time to judge them and were still simply observing, dumbfounded. They threw open the doors and ran over the plain and, in his vision, it was spring and the petals of the flowers were bobbing merrily in the summer breeze, nodding in fervent accompaniment to their movements. He was running beside her, heureux comme avec une femme. They were headed towards a new life, towards a new spring, towards the first real summer he had ever known.

Even then he was astonished by the image and that he could actually allow it to break through. In retrospect, he will think that the strangest thing about those seconds the image endured is that he never feared there would be punishment, not for one moment.

His voice sounded strange even to him when he finally said,

‘I really have no idea what you are talking about, Luci Maldonado.’

‘Look, we said we …’

‘What I am saying is that I don’t understand any of it.’

Luci stood there looking at him for a little while. Then she turned and walked down the aisle. Her head was hanging and the bags were dragging against the floor. She gathered her strength to open the doors and then they had shut behind her.

Reyes returned to his sermon. He couldn’t bear to feel his flock staring at him. But when he raised his eyes and looked out over the plain around the church during one of the psalms, he saw the figure of Luci. She was walking dejectedly down towards the village; the wind was mussing her hair and her white boots were dirty. The plastic bags dragged behind her in the mud and a few banknotes were whirling in the wind.

A few hours later and she was gone. They searched for her at Pepe’s, by the graves, and then just drove aimlessly back and forth as the people in the car tried to work out where she could have gone. Reyes was among the searchers as well; he walked to the watering hole on the plain as though he took it for granted she would be there, then he wandered around down in the village with his robes flapping around his calves and that unhappy expression on his face.

Daniela remained in the background. She would later regret she had not played a more active role from the start. She might, then, not have had to do so afterwards, when events began to escalate. What was the point of a bunch of extras? She would think at that point. There can be no theatre without actors. This is a lesson you have to learn, along with much else, but you always learn it too late to profit from it.

*

Leonor turned up at Pepe’s bar for the first time in many years. Although she didn’t talk about Luci but Reyes. Determined and forceful, she stood there facing the villagers, who seemed to have forgotten all those years she had spent alone in her house looking down on them. She was here now and she was one of them and she was strong and she was telling them to their faces what to do.

‘You know what you do with paedophiles?’ she said. ‘You burn them alive. You butcher them like pigs.’

Gabriela nodded.

‘That’s what you do,’ she agreed. ‘It’s the only way.’

Daniela shook her head.

‘Honestly, I just think he was feeling lonely,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he ever intended to …’

‘You can tell a snake by its spots,’ Leonor interrupted. ‘And I’ve never trusted that priest. I can see him in his garden from my house, and I always think that’s a man you cannot trust, there’s something fishy about him.’

So why didn’t you just go over when you saw your daughter there? Daniela thought. Why did you hide in wait like a beast of prey in the long grass?

‘And that’s why I am proposing that we hold a trial,’ Leonor said.

A murmur swept through the bar. A trial, here in Caudal!

‘A trial?’ Cristina asked. ‘Put the priest on trial? You’re joking.’

Leonor looked at them, one and all, glassy-eyed.

‘Just hold on,’ Daniela said. ‘What is it we’re actually discussing here? We can’t hold a trial without a courthouse. And anyway there has to be some suspicion that a real crime has been committed.’

‘I do suspect that a real crime was committed,’ Leonor said. ‘And I am the mother of the victim.’

‘Just think about this, Leonor,’ Daniela appealed. ‘To have a trial you have to have a prosecutor, a lawyer for the defence and a courthouse.’

‘True,’ said Leonor. ‘True. And we’ve got all that. Prosecutors we’ve got in plenty, since the whole village, with the possible exception of you, Daniela, thinks he is guilty.’

She looked around the bar just to make sure no one was planning on contradicting what she had said. They were all staring silently into their glasses.

‘The only thing we’re lacking is a defence,’ she went on. ‘But then we’ve got you for that.’

‘What?’ said Daniela.

The whole thing sounded crazy to her.

‘You’ll be perfect,’ Leonor said. ‘You’ll be his defence counsel. You were made for the job.’

This is the first time I’ve seen Leonor outside her home, Daniela thought. This is the first time I’ve seen her down here, and she looks crazy and dirty. Only nothing matters to her any more. She’s not a mother defending her child, she’s a captain determined to have her ship. She’s come down here to take the helm — over the rest of us.

‘All you have to do is convince us,’ Leonor said and turned her back on Daniela.

‘What am I supposed to convince you of?’

‘The innocence of that fucking paedophile.’

Leonor laughed savagely, and the others laughed along with her in disbelief.

Daniela went home and rang Del Pozo. She told him something was about to happen, that someone would have to intervene to stop what had been set in motion otherwise someone might get hurt.

‘I never get mixed up in anything that happens in the village,’ Del Pozo said in reply. ‘I’ve always said I won’t get mixed up in anything going on in the village.’

‘They’re going to hurt him,’ Daniela said. ‘At best. I don’t even want to think about what the worst case would be. You’re the only one who can stop it; you’re the only one who can stand up against Leonor.’

Del Pozo sighed.

‘That’s the way it’s always been,’ he said then. ‘People who come from outside never can fit in with us.’

*

Daniela was the last to enter and sat on a pew at the back. Reyes sat tied fast to a chair in the nave, a little in front of the altar. This isn’t happening, she thought. Some things just cannot happen, and this is one of them. One of the windows had been opened and the barking of dogs could be heard, persistent, unrelenting, unsettling. She made an effort not to meet Reyes’ eyes. Just before Leonor stepped up to the pulpit, he asked to be allowed to go to the toilet. Leonor shook her head. Daniela could see this from where she was sitting in one of the rear pews, and so she went up to Leonor and whispered to her that she couldn’t see the point of that.

‘Does his humiliation have to be taken to such extremes?’ she asked.

‘He’ll just have to hold it in,’ Leonor answered coldly. ‘If he can manage that, it might be considered an extenuating circumstance.’

Daniela went back to her pew. Leonor stepped up into the pulpit and declared the assembly open. Leonor was the first speaker on the list. Vincent, Pascal and Paco spoke after her. They all simply repeated different versions of what Leonor had already said.

Then it was her turn. She went up into the pulpit. She set out her arguments without losing her composure, without meeting his eyes. He had come out here, after all, to be with them. He had got his garden started and was setting up the irrigation. He was bound to have felt lonely.

‘After all, we’ve got each other, but he had no one and loneliness makes for bad company.’

Some people nodded thoughtfully. Others stared stubbornly out the windows. She went on:

‘I remember the first day he arrived. He was standing in Pepe’s bar talking about books and castles and tracks across the country. Do you remember that?’

They didn’t look as though they remembered. She lost her bearings and had no idea how to get started again.

‘When all is said and done,’ she said, ‘we all gain by his crime because it makes us appear better than we actually are. If there was a crime, that is.’

She tried to come up with a laugh when she had said this, but no one laughed with her. She could feel the cold tickle of a drop of sweat running down her spine.

‘Can you really not remember what it was like when he arrived,’ she began again. ‘When Ignacio came to join us? It was as though a lord got off the bus and began walking around. What is he doing here, we thought, when we watched him go up to the house?’

‘A lord,’ Leonor exclaimed. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you people down here should have realised right from the start that he had something to hide. A priest who wants company! No good could ever come of that.’

The villagers murmured in agreement. Daniela was letting the situation run away from her. Panic grabbed her by the throat.

‘I just mean we should give him a chance,’ she shouted. ‘He hasn’t done anything after all; he just did some walking around and he dug the soil with Luci, that isn’t a crime.’

‘But it can lead to a crime,’ Leonor responded. ‘That’s exactly what this is all about. If he just wanted company he could have gone down to the bar and chatted with Pepe. That’s what Arcadio always did. That is what any good man would do.’

‘Or pop over to the brothel,’ someone mumbled.

Leonor giggled loudly.

‘But if no crime has been committed then we can’t … ’ Daniela began again.

‘Daniela,’ Leonor said and moved a step closer to her. ‘Isn’t it time we stopped mincing words? Because what is all this really about? Well, let me tell you that as far as you are concerned this isn’t about my little Lucifer or Ignacio. This is about you. Because that old heart of yours is still trotting. That’s what your problem is. Your heart is trotting and if it doesn’t find a stallion to trot with soon, it’s going to start bolting.’

‘That’s right,’ one of the parishioners called. ‘Your old heart is still trotting, Daniela. Trotting like a lame old mare.’

‘You’ve been out walking too much,’ Leonor went on. ‘And when women like you go walking alone, there’s no telling what crazy ideas they’ll get into their heads. The good wife stays at home, that was what the old priest used to say. Do you remember? The good wife stays at home, and the honest maiden considers virtue to be its own reward.’

‘I’ve never … ’ Daniela began but Leonor interrupted her.

‘Leave now,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid your old heart might not survive what is going to happen.’

‘What do you think is going to happen?’ Daniela whispered.

Leonor shrugged her shoulders.

‘Nothing. We’re just going to burn the bastard, that’s all.’

A buzz swept over the pews.

‘I’ll call the police,’ Daniela said shakily.

‘You do that,’ Leonor laughed. ‘When the police get here the ashes will have been swept up and we’ll be having our siesta. It will all have gone up in smoke, as they say.’

‘You can’t do this,’ Daniela cried.

‘Leave now,’ Leonor said and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Go home and forget Ignacio Reyes the same way I have forgotten my vanished Luci. We’ve all got wounds to bear and no matter what we do something will always gnaw away at them.’

‘You never loved that child,’ Daniela yelled. ‘You never loved her. You never loved your child, and that’s why she was lonely as well.’

Pepe stepped towards Daniela who raised her hand to fend him off.

‘I’ll leave on my own,’ she said.

She got up and, without looking Ignacio in the eyes, she walked down the central aisle and out through the heavy doors and started running towards the village.

‌

‘Mademoiselle Villalobos,’ Madame Moreau said to me one day. ‘There’s something I would like to speak to you about. Would you mind coming with me to my office, please?’

I followed her along the corridor and into a small, very tidy room situated beside the headmaster’s office.

‘Please have a seat,’ she said and pointed at a chair in front of the desk. She sat on the other side and picked up a pen.

‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ she began. ‘It has come to my attention that you are Alba Cambó’s neighbour.’

‘That’s right’, I replied.

‘I have read the piece she wrote in Semejanzas. I would very much like to get to know her. Is she a nice person?’

I wasn’t really sure how to reply. Was Alba Cambó a nice person?

‘Nice wouldn’t exactly be the first word that comes to mind when I think of Alba Cambó,’ I said.

Moreau laughed out loud.

‘That sounds good. I don’t trust nice people. In any case I would very much like to meet your neighbour. When I choose a friend, I do so with great care.’

That last bit must just have slipped out as there was something chilly in her eyes the moment she had said it.

‘So I would like to ask you to pass on to her an invitation from me. You would be invited as well.’

I handed the invitation to Alba. She opened it, read it and frowned.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘It isn’t the first time this has happened. Anyway tell your teacher I’ll come and I’ll bring Valentino with me.’

That was how I came to take the commuter train to Sitges along with Alba Cambó and Valentino Coraggioso to have dinner at Madame Moreau’s.

All three of us had got dressed up, not overly so, but Alba had heels on and Valentino was wearing dark trousers and a crisply ironed white shirt. It was when we entered Moreau’s hallway it dawned on us that the way we were dressed couldn’t have been what our hostess had been expecting. The hall hadn’t been cleaned and her shoes had been placed just inside the entrance, and it felt as if she had forgotten we were coming. Not that she had, as she was soon walking towards us and when the door to the kitchen was opened we could see that the table had been laid, and there was the smell of food.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Don’t just stand there. I’ll show you round.’

Moreau’s flat was on the small side and consisted of a narrow hall, a tiny kitchen, a bedroom and a small sitting room. The bedroom was closed, which got under my skin because bedrooms say something about who you are and some of the bits of the puzzle of who she was would have fallen into place if I had been able to look at it. The bedroom is the place you spend the most time in. It can’t help giving away who you are. Was Madame Moreau’s bedroom lined in red velvet and was her bed extravagantly decadent and lit by lamps with gilded feet and naked angels? Did it contain a mirror with a broad golden frame and were there lovely underclothes scattered across the back of a chair? I wanted to be surprised, to have to admit that Domingo was right to fight for her. Or put it this way: I wanted to feel that there was a living creature behind that facade — to see Madame Moreau as someone who had simply put bars around her soul, her decadent bedroom, because it was so precious it could never be shown to anyone. Only the door was closed, and Moreau didn’t offer to open it during the brief tour she gave us.

The rest of the flat exuded a cultivated and dusty femininity. There were double rows of books on the shelves; they were also spread across the table and formed piles on the floor. Soiled lace curtains that had not been hemmed hung across the windows and sagged to the ground. She appeared to collect seashells and little bits of wood carved into different shapes. Papers were something else she seemed to collect, because there were piles of them more than a metre high made up of nothing but newspapers and periodicals. Narrow corridors for walking wove between the piles. There were two large desks in the living room that were also piled high. There was no television. The lighting was bad throughout the flat, apart from above an armchair on which lay a threadbare blanket. Behind the chair stood a large lamp with a shade shaped like a bluebell, and like the blanket, the shade was worn. The lighting in the kitchen, on the other hand, was far too bright. Moreau had the same type of fluorescent tube people have had in our country ever since Franco, which makes all the diners round the table look like patients in a hospital. That was where we were seated after the tour. Moreau had laid the table with a waxed yellow cloth and white napkins and on the tablecloth was a dish of burnt lasagne and two bottles of wine. Cambó and Coraggioso took their seats, and Valentino had an expression of distaste on his face: this really wasn’t the kind of thing you ate in his part of Liguria. And Alba had linen tablecloths and napkin rings and would never have served anything as banal as lasagne.

The roles we had been assigned were obvious right from the start. I had been invited as the connection, and Valentino Coraggioso as the hanger-on, only Cambó had been invited as herself. When Moreau spoke her remarks were addressed solely to her. She asked how Alba was getting on in Barcelona, where she came from originally and how she happened to start writing. Cambó replied in monosyllables. Moreau dished the lasagne onto our plates and poured wine into our glasses. Cambó would ask something about Moreau, and Moreau would reply. The conversation felt laboured right up until the coffee.

Once the plates and the glasses had been cleared away, Moreau suggested we should drink our coffee in ‘the drawing room’. We tacked between the piles of books towards a maroon-coloured sofa. Alba and I sat on the sofa. Moreau sat on a chair, ignoring the fact that Valentino remained standing without anywhere to sit. After a moment’s indecision he pulled over a pile of books and sat on it. Moreau got up and went over to a cupboard that she opened, getting out three balloon glasses.

‘Brandy?’ she said in an exaggerated American accent, holding up the glasses.

Alba lifted a hand in a gesture of refusal.

‘No thanks. I’d rather smoke this.’ She got out a ready-rolled joint from her handbag.

‘By all means,’ Moreau said and poured brandy for herself and Valentino.

Madame Moreau also lit a cigarette and started talking about the School for Interpreters and Translators and about the episode with Domingo and the cakes.

‘And so I enter the classroom,’ she said turned towards Alba. ‘And there they all are sitting in their seats, twenty-four faces, expecting me to be pleased. I didn’t know what to do. That whippersnapper had bought bubbly and sandwiches to make me happy. It was his new trick, you see, as prayers and presents and notes hadn’t worked, he was going to try this out. I could have slapped him, and I should have, except I was surrounded by all the other students and I was obliged to show some kind of gratitude. Gratitude, you understand, in a situation like that!’

Alba said nothing. Moreau puffed at her cigarette.

‘So I promised to repay them for their kindness. It was completely idiotic of me, but I was just standing there and I had to say something. In any case, I promised them some kind of recompense. And now I haven’t got the faintest idea how I am going to get myself out of it.’

Alba looked at her with lidded eyes.

‘You’d better take them on a study visit, hadn’t you,’ she said and shrugged her shoulders apathetically. ‘Show them something they’ve never seen before, something that could offer them a chance. Use your network of contacts.’

‘My network of contacts … ’ Moreau laughed out loud. ‘Do I look like a woman with contacts? The only people who know who I am in this city are my students and the people who work in the store where I shop. I don’t know anyone and I’ve no desire to get to know people just to help a bunch of daddy’s girls get on in life.’

Alba looked at me with a slightly scornful smile.

‘I might be able to help you,’ she said then to Moreau. ‘I’ve got some contacts of my own.’

‘Would you really do that? For me?’

‘Of course,’ Cambó said. ‘I’ll help you if I can. Of course I will.’

Moreau gave Alba a little smile; she was sitting there with a joint in her hand, bouncing her foot as though she could hear some kind of music in her head. Valentino had picked up a book from the pile he was sitting on. He turned it over and then back and leafed through it.

‘Found anything interesting, Tino?’ Alba said to him.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘A book by someone called Luce Irigaray. On the back it says she’s some kind of feminist ur-mother.’

‘That’s right,’ Moreau said tersely, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray on the table.

The smile she had given Alba had disappeared, and the habitually tense expression was back on her face.

‘It’s certainly the case,’ said Valentino and put the book down on the table, ‘that feminism is a breath of fresh air in our society.’

‘I wouldn’t want to buy a second-hand car from you,’ said Moreau and shook out a new cigarette.

‘How’s that?’

‘What I mean to say is: why should you think that feminism is a breath of fresh air?’

‘Why not?’ Valentino said and shrugged his shoulders.

‘If I’d been born a man, I wouldn’t think feminism was a breath of fresh air.’

She lit a new cigarette and continued:

‘The way I see it: why be a hypocrite? It’s the duty of a prisoner to try to escape, but the guards are obliged to do their duty as well and that is to go on keeping the prisoners locked up, to check that the fence is intact and there aren’t any holes to crawl through.’

Moreau turned towards Valentino and looked at him in challenge as if she was expecting some riposte. None came. Then she said:

‘Being phoney just spoils the fight. We shouldn’t pretend. We ought to meet as real enemies.’

She reached out her hand to Valentino, and she actually had a smile on her lips. I had time to think that this was only the second or possibly the third time I had ever seen her smile, before the extraordinary happened. Valentino stood up and was about to go over and take Moreau’s hand, and as he stepped towards her he turned his head slightly to catch Alba’s eyes (she looked at him with a puzzled expression on her face as if she was saying no, I don’t understand any of this either). Then he took another step onto a magazine with a shiny cover (Semejanzas?) and the sole of his shoe slipped on its surface and he lost his balance and fell. If you’ve ever seen a tall body fall in a small space you know how crazy it looks, as though all the proportions have been put out of whack or gone haywire. His long arms were fumbling for something to grab hold of and when he couldn’t find anything they windmilled through the air; he put his hands behind his back only to move them quickly to the side but it was no use because all control over his body had been lost. He fell headlong and with the full weight of his body onto the floor; the back of his skull struck the hard cement because, of course, there wasn’t a book or pile of magazines that could have lessened the blow on the particular spot where his head came down. At the point of impact Valentino’s head encountered only the stone floor of Moreau’s flat. The sound of his head striking the stone was muffled and horrible: a person being hurled at the mineral. Alba and I sat motionless throughout the duration of the fall. Moreau was still standing there with her hand extended to Valentino, and the smile vanished from her lips yet again. Once Valentino was on the floor, it felt as though we had frozen in our seats. We stared at him. A moment later Alba was leaping up to get her bag and her telephone, only then Moreau reached her hand out to her and said:

‘Wait a bit.’

Alba’s hand dropped and she looked at Moreau in confusion.

‘Just wait,’ Moreau said again. ‘Let’s just sit here for a bit. He’s bound to come round in a little while. I’ve worked in hospitals and I don’t think that was a dangerous fall. Nothing was crushed in on the way down. At the very worst he’ll have a swelling.’

They sat down slowly on the sofa. Moreau’s hand was on Alba’s arm. At first they sat there without moving then Moreau picked up the bottle and poured some brandy into Alba’s glass and then into her own. Alba looked blankly at me and I had no idea what to do and responded with a shrug. Alba leant over to her handbag mechanically and took out a fresh joint; Moreau picked up a lighter from the ledge under the table and handed it to Alba.

‘But we can’t just leave him lying like that,’ Alba said.

‘Just let him rest. He’ll come round soon. I told you I’d worked at a hospital. I’ve seen this kind of thing before.’

There was complete silence for a few moments.

‘We could go out one evening,’ Moreau said then. ‘I could take you to a nice place here in Sitges. We could drink mojitos and margaritas, smoke joints and have a good time. I go out so rarely nowadays.’

The whole thing just felt completely impossible to take in. Alba was sitting there quietly smoking, and my teacher Moreau was sitting facing her while Valentino lay unconscious on the floor. Moreau was saying: We could drink mojitos and margaritas. Smoke joints and have a nice time.

‘That’s right,’ Moreau went on. ‘There’s a bar I know where we could spend all night dancing. We could just dance like crazy, everyone does. Then we could sit outside the church while the sun rises. You’re only four or five metres to the sea from the church in Sitges. It’s lovely — you’ve got the sea and the sky straight ahead. We’d be sitting there as the sun’s first rays spread across the sky and the surface of the water. We’d still be half drunk and for a few moments we’ll believe we …’

‘Elaine,’ Alba said then. ‘We can do that. But there’s something I want you to know if you really are entertaining ideas about you and me.’

‘Yes,’ said Moreau.

‘I’m ill and I’m going to die.’

‘What?’ Moreau cried and her cry sounded hoarse and out-of-control.

‘That’s the situation: I am ill and I’m going to die. I’ve got a few months left, and I’m trying to live them as well as I can.’

She looked at Moreau and smiled at her a touch reassuringly, as if she wanted to say that it wasn’t as bad as it sounded, that was just the way it had turned out.

‘So I’d love margaritas and dancing and anything else Sitges has to offer. But in six months I’ll be gone, just so you know.’

Alba smiled resolutely and raised her glass to Moreau. Moreau raised hers a bit hesitantly and they met with a little clink.

‘Santé,’ Alba said. ‘Let’s drink a toast to the time that remains. Let’s drink to the fact that I’m bound to be alive for another two months.’

Moreau adapted rapidly to the new state of affairs.

‘I hope you haven’t started baking cakes, cleaning the oven and going to church,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I hope you won’t mind if I speak frankly. All the women I’ve ever met who’ve been told they’re going to die have started baking cakes and being nice in a way they never were before.’

She paused for a bit.

‘Until the pain starts getting serious, that is.’

Alba looked at Moreau uncertainly.

‘It’s just that what I mean,’ she went on, ‘is all the women I’ve met who have been told that have become more accommodating than they ever were at any time in their lives. It’s as if that final shutting down of any other option forces us back into the trap. They bake, cook, turn into supermums and superwives, just so they can feel they have done some good, so their lives haven’t been entirely in vain. As if showing concern for other people was the only thing that would remain of us when we are gone.’

‘But there might be something in that,’ Alba said.

‘Rubbish,’ Moreau exclaimed. ‘You ought to be the person you always were — even when you’re going to die. It’s not that hard. Lots of people have died before us. There are more dead than living in this world, if you want to look at it that way.’

Alba laughed aloud.

‘You change when you’re dying, Elaine.’

‘You change because you’ve been given the time to change. That’s what actually happens. As for me, I want to die hard, violently and fast. I’m commanding fate to kill me that way. I don’t want to have the time for regrets and for trying to put things right.’

‘So you don’t want to have time to make sure of the love of your nearest and dearest?’ Alba asked.

Only the question seemed redundant as Moreau presumably didn’t have any.

‘It’s as if cancer was something the patriarchy had invented for women,’ Moreau asserted. ‘We turn into the very thing they want us to be. That is very humiliating, Alba. Don’t forget the humiliation and always act proudly when confronted with it.’

Alba laughed again.

‘Maybe you think I should kill myself?’

‘I really can’t say that I do. But if someone like me had been asked, I would have helped someone like you.’

‘We ought to have a look at Valentino,’ Alba said.

She sat down on the floor and took Valentino’s head between her hands.

Coraggioso hadn’t died. He hadn’t been blinded or paralysed either. He didn’t seem to have come to any harm, not anything immediately visible in any case, and after a while he woke up, his head between Alba’s hands, and looked at each of us, one after the other. Then he sat up and laughed; he felt around his head with his hand as though he were trying to find a wound.

‘Have you got a cushion?’ he asked Moreau.

Moreau turned toward me.

‘In my bedroom, Araceli. Could you fetch one, please.’

I went to Moreau’s bedroom. I opened the door expectantly. I let it swing back cautiously and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Only what I saw inside was not the room I had imagined on arriving. What met my eyes instead was the saddest bedroom I had ever seen. A narrow bed stood along one of the walls, and it was obvious that only one person could sleep in it. There were books inside as well; periodicals and newspapers in piles, and clothes were strewn across the piles. I recognised some of them. There were mounds of clothes by the foot of the bed and a lamp without a shade was placed at its head. Everything that emerged out of the gloom seemed functional and somehow makeshift, and held nothing of what I had been hoping for. The air was stuffy — the way it gets in a room that is never aired but still has to absorb last night’s effusions. I grabbed the only cushion I could find off the bed, which was a flat pillow with a dirty case, and returned to Alba, Moreau and Valentino.

Once Valentino had woken up, taken a walk around Moreau’s sitting room and drunk a few glasses of water, we got ready to go. Moreau drove us to the station and for the thirty-five minutes of the train journey we passed the villages along the sea until we got to Paseo de Gracia. We walked towards Joaquín Costa and not one of us said a word. I was thinking about the evening we had just spent. About Moreau’s small flat, about Alba’s cancer as an invention of the patriarchy, and the way they let Valentino lie on the floor.

‘There’s nothing there,’ I would say to Domingo the next day. ‘You’ll look in vain for those valleys and hidden landscapes. There is nothing behind that facade.’

And even though he was bound to retort, ‘You’re just judging by appearances, Araceli; you think that the map is the territory,’ I would stick by what I had to say:

‘There aren’t any unexplored ravines behind that facade, Domingo, there’s just a vast and grubby nothing.’

‌

Moreau kept her promise about paying us back for the ‘kindness’ we had shown her. One day when she got to school, she told us she had arranged a study visit for us with the trade association for Catalonia’s timber suppliers. They were not insignificant, she said. The timber market was huge, and almost everyone who worked in the timber field was completely ignorant when it came to foreign languages. It would give us a good opportunity to get those first commissions we could then use as a step up the ladder when we applied to interpreting agencies for larger and more important jobs. You can only find real life out in the real world, she said. You have to get out there. Like tadpoles you’ve got to start swimming with the big fish, and those of you who don’t get eaten up are the ones who will survive. I am going to give you this opportunity and I want you to take it. I want you to make a start; mine will be the hand that takes you out of the jar and plops you into real water and there you’ll have to swim for your lives. Okay? Okay, we said.

At home I told them about the opportunity Moreau had promised us. Blosom looked sceptical the way she always did when told something new was going to happen. Mum responded by asking why we had to be so negative, after all it was nice of the school to give us a chance, to take us somewhere the real opportunities could be found, wasn’t it? That was all very well, Blosom replied, you had to earn money because money was like air; life felt light and easy when you had it but when you didn’t just getting around was difficult. I didn’t tell them about Moreau’s simile of the tadpoles, the jar and the big fish. But Blosom wouldn’t take her eyes off me and said, Watch out, Araceli, don’t let them sell you like a bag of meat along the chain from one supplier to the next. People like that only think about their commission, about interest rates and deliveries, and I find it hard to see what you little piggies would have to offer them. They’re bound to need help understanding one another, aren’t they, Mum said, seeing as they do deals with people from other countries? Blosom shook her head and said that people like that were only bothered about the nitty-gritty and the only thing that mattered was whether you were going to buy the goods or not. It was never any more complicated than that. She kept looking at me; I got up and went into the kitchen, and I could feel those eyes like two nails in my back the whole way through the living room.

The trade association lay a bit outside town towards Badalona. It was in an industrial zone along with quite a few other businesses, small factories, each of which seemed to make a particular product while the one next door produced something quite different. Some of the facades had been tiled in various colours. Domingo said it looked as if someone’s wife or mum had made an effort to decorate them, only there was obviously something doomed about the attempt because where the tiles had fallen off in places and were lying in pieces on the road in front, no one had bothered to pick any of them up. Moreau had prepared us about every conceivable aspect of the timber trade; we had learnt the names of a great many kinds of wood in four different languages and also read the documentation she had got direct from a contact in customs and which showed you the kinds of timber that were being imported, where they came from and how they were transported. She had also gone on a bit more about the tadpoles. There is no future for most of you, she said laconically, her eyes fixed rather gravely on the floor. We just smiled at her, because none of us felt what she was saying was being addressed to us in particular; the future lay ahead of us like a freshly swept path. We thought all we had to do was start moving.

We took a bus there and had to walk the last bit. The sun was still low in the sky and it was that time of the morning when the smells are not yet at full strength, when a little coolness still lingers and there’s a faint odour of oil and gravel along with a hint of detergent, and nothing has been completely taken over by the heat. There was no shade to be had anywhere. It was almost two kilometres from the bus stop to the factory. Madame Moreau went first, and her face was bright red. Domingo walked beside her, carrying a pile of papers she had brought along. Once we got to the trade association, we had to wait outside for almost half an hour while Moreau negotiated with the watchman on duty who then had to go off to get confirmation that someone inside really was expecting a class from the translators’ school. Eventually we were let into the entrance, which turned out to be a vast hall in which wooden pallets were piled on top of one another and forklift trucks moved back and forth. Some of the workers were standing in one corner having a smoke. We were shown in through the hall and up a narrow staircase covered in close-fitted blue carpet. Complete silence reigned upstairs. We were in a corridor that had posters on the walls, on the one right in front of us it said Maderas Del Pozo and underneath the name was an aerial photograph of an enormous timber yard. We have the range to meet every need, it said in italics above the image. A man came out of nowhere to say hello to Madame Moreau; they appeared to know one another, because Moreau looked relaxed and smiled at him several times while looking back at us, as though explaining to him that all she was asking was for us to be taken under his wing for a while. The man gestured to us to follow him. We walked down several long corridors with people sitting along them in little offices that were separated from the corridor by huge panes of glass. There were no windows or other sources of daylight anywhere. We finally came to an auditorium and the man asked us to sit down. We took our seats while the man stood at the front looking at us quizzically, then he began talking about the structure of the Spanish timber market and how much was imported from various places and what was made from the different sorts of timber. Muriel poked her elbow in my side and pointed at a cockroach running across the floor. The talk was over pretty quickly, and Madame Moreau looked slightly embarrassed. Domingo asked several questions of the man who gave the talk, and he responded briefly. It was obvious he wasn’t interested in having lengthy discussions with us. In the end the man pulled down a map that showed where the largest concentrations of timber-processing industries were to be found. The map was old and looked as though it had been hanging in a classroom for many, many years. Domingo asked which languages they most often used interpreters for and the man replied that it was mostly Chinese at the moment. Can you speak any Chinese? he asked, and we shook our heads. He finally said he didn’t have any more time as he had a meeting to go to. The class got up and followed Madame Moreau out, only Muriel and I went in the opposite direction because Muriel had seen a sign for a toilet and needed to go. I waited for her outside. When she came out, the man who had given the talk was walking towards us along the corridor. Your class has gone down to the lobby, he said, pointing away from us. That turned out to be a short visit, Muriel said. There’s not much I can tell you, the man said. I’ve no idea why you came to us in the first place. Madame Moreau wanted to give us a chance to get out into the real world, Muriel said. The man laughed. We need jobs, Muriel said. We’ve been staring at those walls for ages, and we’ve had a whole load of different scenarios staged for us, only none of them were real.

The man looked at us. Then he said:

‘Well, in that case … if it’s the real world you want … perhaps you could … in that case maybe I could …’

We stared at him.

‘What do you mean?’ Muriel said.

Moreau and Domingo were once again at the front when we walked back to the bus stop, but Domingo must have been ordered to leave the papers at the trade association because he was walking freely and easily while chatting to Moreau; they appeared to be having fun and we could hear them laughing now and then from where we were at the back. Muriel said: Domingo’s hair is really incredibly red. I was wondering about how to tell them at home about my day; I wasn’t worried about Mum, but Blosom had a sixth sense for anything you were keen to hide. I hadn’t picked up on that to begin with, but then I noticed that if you tried telling a lie there would be something odd in the air afterwards. Mum might have swallowed it but the ensuing silence was always just that bit too long, you couldn’t talk your way out of it and if you looked round you would find Blosom with her eyes fixed on you as though she was saying: I’m not going to stop looking at you until you tell your mother the truth. You could stare right back at her with a look that said: You can keep staring at me as much as you like but you can’t make me say anything at all, and you’ve got no proof that what I said is a lie. It usually ended with my turning my back on her and popping out for a bit. When I got back her eyes would be less insistent but they would still be fixed on me — for a few moments longer than felt really okay.

‘Have you got the business card?’ Muriel whispered when we parted outside the school.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Who’s going to go first?’ she asked.

‘You?’ I said.

‘Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

Did she even hesitate? Or did she just pick up the phone and call? I’d have liked to see her with the card in her hand and the phone to her ear. ‘Hello? I’m Muriel Ruiz and I’m ringing because of a business card I was given by a man at the trade association for timber products I’ve just been visiting with my class.’

If she even dithered at that point, there was no sign of it the next day at school. All she told me was that the agency wasn’t your standard agency. I didn’t understand exactly what she meant by ‘standard agency’: she made it sound as if there really was such a thing, but she managed to make clear to me what was different about the agency whose name was on the business card. It dealt with contacts of any and every kind and passed them on to its members. Business contacts, potential customers, data companies, interpreters and translators — the whole lot. But also companions you could hire for various trips or even in the city you lived in. Pure gold if you wanted to earn a bit on the side, the person who answered had told her and added that if Muriel felt like it they could arrange some work for her.

We hesitated. For a few moments we were unsure about what Moreau’s real motive had been in arranging the study visit. Was this what she had meant when she said we were tadpoles who had to find deeper waters if they were going to swim and that those who could make their own way would be the ones to survive? Was this a way of getting one foot in the door, a way of starting from the bottom and working your way up? We’ll just have to try it and see how it turns out, Muriel said and rang the number again.

‌

The first (and perhaps the only) man Muriel was put in touch with through the agency was not married and not particularly flush either. She described him as completely average overall, so average ‘it makes it seem inconceivable he’s being exploited’. He wasn’t especially well travelled either and he didn’t have an exciting past. No hobby to make him stand out. But he has a good heart and a flat right on the seafront in Perellot, Muriel said.

They saw one another once, twice, three times, then they realised that they really did like each other, or enough at least to go on seeing each other, and after that it was a regular thing, and taken for granted sort of, even a bit bourgeois as well. They started going to the cinema together on Wednesdays and to restaurants on Fridays. He drove her to the school sometimes; he had a clapped-out car he used to park on the other side of the street and he would stay inside and keep an eye on her as she crossed the road and went in through the entrance. You couldn’t see his face from the window of the classroom but you could make out that there was someone inside, a slightly shrunken shadow that put the car in gear afterwards, accelerated and drove off.

The first time we met Paco Parra together was a day at the beginning of April. A light rain was falling as we walked towards Parque Güell. Muriel said, ‘This falling rain is soothing our acne-inflamed noses, Araceli.’ She had masked her spots and pimples with some cheap concealer she would soon be exchanging, thanks to Paco Parra’s income, for a more upmarket variety, while I made do with what I could get my hands on in Mum’s and Blosom’s bathroom cupboards. It had stopped raining by the time we got to Parque Güell and so we sat on a park bench placed under a makeshift roof and waited for Paco Parra who was supposed to turn up after a lunch meeting. There was still a kind of dampness to the air and the dust felt sticky against your skin.

‘We’re eighteen years old,’ Muriel said, ‘and we’re the smart ones and the young ones and the soon-to-be rich ones as well. So life belongs to us.’

‘You may be rich already now you’re seeing Paco Parra,’ I said. ‘Second-hand rich.’

‘We’ll get there someday,’ Muriel said then.

‘How do you mean we’ll get there someday?’

‘When we sort the money.’

‘Money’s not everything, Muriel.’

‘Money counts for a lot.’

‘There’s things you can’t buy with money.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Muriel said. ‘Money bought me, and I’ve had the greatest respect for it ever since.’

I laughed.

‘I’m never going to sell myself for money,’ I said.

‘You can sell your body,’ Muriel said. ‘Selling your soul on the other hand, that’s prostitution of a very different character. You’ve got to make sure you stay hungry, and once you’re hungry you’re your own master. Not some other bastard who comes along and tells you what to do.’

‘It could be like that, I suppose,’ I said.

‘A day will come when neither you nor I will have to think about money. People like you and me shouldn’t have to. We are going to find solutions, Araceli, I promise you.’

It really did feel as if we were going to find those solutions when we were sitting there. Barcelona lay at our feet and Gaudí’s merry roofs were shimmering all around us in different colours. There was the scent of resin coming off the pine trees and warmth was rising from the soil.

‘When’s he turning up?’ I asked.

‘Soon,’ Muriel said.

‘It’s not polite to keep your lady waiting,’ I said.

‘He’s an important man,’ Muriel said.

He did turn up finally. You could see from a distance that he wasn’t exactly an intellectual. He wore a grey suit and had rather long, shuttered eyelids. His nose was determined and his skin was large-pored. His lips were thin and a few old nacreous teeth peered out from behind them when he smiled. His hips were narrow and his trousers were draped sadly across them and would have slipped down if it weren’t for a brown belt firmly keeping them up. He had thin hair and a receding hairline. There was no way he had the kind of haircut George Clooney had, like Muriel had said.

‘That’s one sick old lover you’ve chosen,’ I whispered to Muriel.

‘Ssh,’ she said and put her index finger to her lips.

When he arrived, he spoke with a thick Catalan accent. He appeared to be the silent type: his eyes stayed on you and didn’t glide away, as if he was waiting for or even demanding you speak first.

‘Paco Parra,’ he finally said and offered me his hand.

‘Araceli Villalobos,’ I responded, shaking his hand which was soft.

We chatted. Paco Parra seemed quiet but well intentioned. It was obvious he wanted me to like him. He must have realised how important it was to be in well with the best friend and even though that didn’t entirely redeem him it took the edge of the hostility I had been feeling towards him from the outset. When I asked him what he liked to read, he said he didn’t have time to read, he was a senior civil servant. That’s how he put it:

‘I am a senior civil servant,’ while laughing at the same time, as though it was something those around him should obviously forgive him for.

Okay. When we complained about our spots, he said that he thought spots were lovely, that wrinkles were much worse, and that if he got to choose he would much rather walk beside a girl who had spots from being young than an older woman who was wrinkled with age. His words were almost more welcome than the spring rain and our faces felt less inflamed and we were able to smile and laugh. Now the ice was broken, Paco Parra repeated several times that we were really first-rate and had lovely laughs, and Muriel laughed and said ‘you old goat’.

Then he talked about the system he worked in. He said he carried out its every whim.

‘If the system tells me to get it some coffee, I do. If it tells me to massage its feet, I do that as well. If it asks me to satisfy it in some other way, I do that too, until the slow currents of its turgid thought processes are running through me.’

Muriel looked at him scornfully.

‘That’s not the kind of thing you should joke about,’ she said.

‘Life is full of limitations, Muriel. You have to accept the one thing to get another. You give something and you get something back.’

‘The dog has spoken!’ Muriel yelled.

‘The dog?’

Parra looked at her offended.

‘Well you’re talking just like a dog. You’ve been indoctrinated into conditional love. Just like a dog, you’ve learnt from childhood on that love is conditional, that love is something you have to earn, and if you make mistakes you can end up being … excluded from it.’

‘I think what you’re saying is hurtful,’ Parra said. ‘I’m not a dog.’

‘So are you going to withhold my pocket money now?’ Muriel asked, giggling.

‘The things you say,’ Parra said and looked at the ground. ‘If I’m a dog, then that sharp tongue of yours makes you an adder.’

‘Only then there are the cat people,’ Muriel said without taking any notice of the adder comment. ‘The cat person loves unconditionally without demanding any kind of compensation from his or her beloved. The cat person is a wonderful, if unreliable, kind of human being.’

She stretched out in the sun and remained lying there on the bench between Paco Parra and me with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips. Parra and I glanced at one another, then we sat there looking straight ahead until Muriel sat up again and went on talking as though the issue of dog and cat people had never been brought up.

Muriel used to say that there was the possibility of a father (and not for your children but for you) within every man. And she consumed these fathers almost compulsively, as if men were a perishable commodity with an expiry date. Unlike the others, Paco Parra remained a fixture in her life and that was because money has no expiry date and money was the key to freedom in Muriel’s world. The equation was a simple one, as she said. The older, stiffer and more frozen they were, the greater was her added value. The effect was exponential. Exceptional, as well. And when he met Muriel Ruiz, Paco Parra had got his figures burnt more often than almost anyone I had ever met, as I realised that very first afternoon when we met in Parque Güell. He told us about his ex-wives. The first one he had married in order to have sex because both he and she came from strict Catholic families; he married the second because he was in love with her (and that was the biggest mistake he had ever made); the third, because he had become practical and realised he needed someone to take care of him.

‘What about Muriel?’ I said.

‘Muriel is party time,’ he replied.

He came out with other stuff as well, Paco Parra. He knew how to twist things around to make them sound good. For instance, he said to Muriel Ruiz that what he longed for was a great tenderness. That Great Tenderness, he wrote in a letter to her. The Great Tenderness that will illuminate the holes in my soul, that will water the chapped surface of my earth. And as for Muriel herself, he said she was like Bach — beautiful on the surface and even more beautiful the more you listened. Other people were like Mozart — easy listening and fun, but they never had that seriousness you could find in Bach. Muriel clearly believed what he said. That was the way she was — if you said something flattering about her she simply took it as the truth, if it was criticism, she would turn it over and over in her mind until finally discarding it as falsehood. That’s true of everyone, by the way.

On the days we didn’t go to Parque Güell, we went to the steps in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. When you sit there above the Plaza de España with La Fira to your left and right and look straight ahead, Tibidabo hits you in the solar plexus, both the church and the amusement park. It is dead ahead of you, as though someone had drawn a line with a ruler through the air from the steps and placed it right in front of you, a few tens of kilometres away and on the other side of town. Paco Parra had brought soft drinks with him and a bag of crisps. He sat down on a bench and loosened his tie. A gypsy was playing a few yards away. People stopped to listen. They stopped and stood still for a while just taking in the music.

‘So fucking beautiful,’ Muriel said and Paco Parra nodded.

When the man stopped playing Muriel started to cry. She sat there with the sticky bottle of pop in her hands and bits of crisp at the corners of her mouth and the tears flowed across her cheeks. Black trickles of mascara ran into her mouth.

‘Why are you crying, Muriel?’ Paco Parra asked.

‘It’s so fucking beautiful. It makes me feel so sad.’

Then she started talking about the sadness that came over her when it was raining or when last winter’s leaves rustled on the oak that stood outside her window and ‘I just can’t work out why those leaves are still on the branches — they should have fallen long ago because they’re dead, aren’t they, and they keep clinging on all the same to a life that is already over.’ Then she talked about the sadness that came over her when she went walking in nature. And how when everything around her was beautiful and untouched, she could fall to the ground and ‘dissolve into an intense bout of weeping’ that sort of came out of nowhere and just filled her with an enormous melancholy.

Paco Parra put his arm around her.

‘You’re so sensitive,’ he said. ‘That’s lovely.’

‘It’s painful,’ Muriel said.

He patted her on the head.

‘Do you want cigarettes? I could go and buy some.’

She dried her tears and sniffed theatrically while nodding. Paco Parra got up and walked over to the kiosk. He looked pleased. As if he was thinking he had the whole package now — a child who was a precocious and sensitive woman at the same time.

‘Watch out, Muriel,’ I said when Parra had gone to the kiosk. ‘You’re throwing your heart on the dungheap.’

‘You don’t know him,’ she replied.

‘You’re manipulating him.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘If I don’t, someone else will.’

‘Only when you’re twenty, you’ll be too old for him and he’ll find someone new, someone who’s like you are now. Think about that, and the fact that everyone is replaceable and all he wants is youth — and not you.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said then. ‘When I turn nineteen, Paco Parra will be dead of old age.’

Paco Parra returned with cigarettes for Muriel and a bag of popcorn for me. That was one of the good things about Paco Parra. He never forgot about me and always made sure I was taken care of, having realised that was the smart thing to do. I think he must have felt a certain liking for me as well, because otherwise Muriel Ruiz would not have asked me the next morning at school if I wanted to go with her to the seaside for the summer. Paco Parra had asked her to bring a friend along.

‘Is that because I’m going to be set up with someone?’ I asked.

‘Of course not,’ Muriel said. ‘It’s so I’ll have someone to be with when he’s working.’

‘What am I supposed to tell them at home?’ I asked.

‘Tell them you’re going to the beach with me and my uncle.’

Mum asked if Muriel’s uncle was going to be there as well.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then I think it sounds like a really great idea.’

Blosom didn’t ask any questions. She probably thought it would be nice to be on her own with Mum so they could watch their soap operas and drink port in the afternoons, discussing the plots during the adverts, and then sit outside in the evenings listening to the conversations between Valentino Coraggioso and Alba Cambó.

A few weeks later when Muriel and I came out of the baggage hall at the airport in Alicante, Paco Parra was there waiting for us. He was wearing a mint-green shirt, and I could see he had sweat rings under the arms when he embraced Muriel. He took my hand and I got the feeling I no longer appealed, or maybe it wasn’t that he had anything against me only now I had arrived he didn’t like the fact I was there after all, it took something away from Muriel and him, and his smile turned stiff, and was anything but welcoming. He packed our cases into the car and then we drove to his house in Perellot. I got carsick on the last part of the journey because Paco Parra kept driving fast along winding roads beside waterlogged rice plantations. The flies that had come in through the open windows flew stubbornly at the screen once Parra had closed the windows and turned the air conditioning on. Paco Parra kept on talking and right from the start it felt like he only knew how to talk about stupid things. For instance, he told us there had been a long-standing war between the various authorities in the town over who would do the rubbish collecting and that there was a lot of money in rubbish collection.

‘There’s money to be made in refuse,’ he said, nodding.

There was silence in the car after he said that. Then he told us about an article he had read in the paper about Jesus and his disciples actually being castrati. Does that mean we have based our entire civilisation around the morals of a few castrated men? Paco Parra asked. If that was true, he said, he couldn’t take it in. It was just too much to swallow, even if it did explain a great deal.

Muriel must finally have realised that Parra could only talk nonsense because somewhere around Valencia she interrupted him to say that she couldn’t make up her mind who was the handsomest between Brad Pitt and Leonardo di Caprio. And she couldn’t decide either which she liked more, orange or lemon Fanta, or which lip gloss was best, Lancôme’s or Clinique’s. Paco Parra was silent. For a brief while beads of sweat were pooling on his nose, although he soon wiped them off with a handkerchief he kept in the breast pocket of his shirt. He listened to her after that and soon he was nodding at everything she said. The expression on his face when we arrived was enough to make you think that Muriel Ruiz was the smartest chick he had ever met.

He parked in the street. Everything looked shabby and greasy. There were oil stains on the pavement and all the balconies on the building had cleaning things on them. It was unbearably hot with not a breath of wind; it felt like being in hell.

‘I thought there’d be a breeze by the sea,’ I said.

‘It’ll feel better up there,’ Paco Parra said.

We went up to his flat and Muriel and he installed themselves in Paco Parra’s bedroom, which had a large four-poster bed with a shiny red bedspread. He showed me my room as well, which was the smallest room in the flat and barely had enough space for the bed on which a crocheted orange blanket lay. After that he said we were going to celebrate our arrival and he got out wineglasses from a cupboard in the sitting room. We drank a toast and Paco Parra opened the doors toward the beach and the sea. Muriel walked round the flat in the meantime, exclaiming with exaggerated enthusiasm at what a lovely place he had, it was so cosy and, then, what a view over the sea (she would say to me only an hour or two afterwards that a house without a woman’s touch was like a body without a soul).

‘Chin chin,’ Parra said to us.

All three of us looked out over the sea. You could see some sailboats on the horizon.

I realised right from the start that it was going to be a difficult summer. The days were going to be long and stressful; the air would be stagnant with humidity, and the staircase in Parra’s building would smell of fried fish and tortillas. I would fall asleep and wake up in the little room Parra had assigned me that was the size of a broom cupboard. It had a small window that looked onto a minimal courtyard and at night the wind used to cause an acoustic phenomenon in that drum-shaped space. It made a sound like a major mechanical catastrophe, and trying to fall asleep to the noise of an airplane engine coming apart was clearly going to get on my nerves, it was going to be a long hard summer, the only thing to do was grit your teeth and bear it.

Only a few days later and I would be proved right about almost all the negative vibes I had got off Paco Parra. By the afternoon of the second day I had realised that the man my best friend was sharing a bed with was nothing but flaws. He ate too quickly and too much and belched loudly when he thought no one could hear him. When he sat at the table he did so with an expression that said where is my food and where is my wine and where is my woman? He talked a lot, but always about petty subjects such as the women who had betrayed him or the money he had never got his hands on for a whole host of reasons. Sometimes it seemed as though the women and the absence of money had ganged up on him, as though they had conspired to do everything they could to knock him out of the game. At those times he had admitted to defeat at the hands of what he said were ‘superior forces’ and ‘circumstances’; that was what you did when you were a good sport like him.

I used to giggle when he said things like that, but then Muriel would look at me angrily and at the same time in appeal as though she were saying, okay, I know he may not be the hippest guy on earth but would it really cost you so much to give him a chance, for god’s sake, Araceli?

I kept quiet then, picking crumbs off the rolls and dropping them on the floor and the evening breeze would pick them up and you could watch them rain down in a little waterfall over the neighbour’s balcony.

Sometimes Parra walked down to the beach and sat there, all on his own, a hundred metres away, and looked out at the sea. From the terrace where we were sitting you could see sand, sky, the sea and Paco Parra’s back.

Muriel might ask:

‘What are you gazing at?’

And I would reply:

‘Paco Parra’s back.’

She used to smile then as if she believed I was seeing the person inside him at last. I was actually thinking that it was incredible that a back, just one human back, could radiate so much loneliness. He never turned round either, which was just as well because the eyes, as they say, are the mirror of the soul.

I think back on him once in a while and feel sad to the bottom of my soul. When you looked him in the face that summer, it sometimes felt as though he was completely naked. The person inside him peeked out all over, like a body that is bursting the seams of the clothes it is wearing, allowing the flesh to pop out, letting it blossom through the hems and bloom like chubby fingers. Loneliness and sleeplessness were etched on his eyelids as was the strain age was starting to inflict on him, and then there was, of course, his total lack of ease. His lips were too narrow, his eyes were too bright, his body too large and pale. When he used to sit in the sun on the terrace he looked like a real porker. It was as if the light had found its way inside him, but couldn’t get out. I couldn’t work out if he had laughed too little or if he had had too little sex. Muriel said I was cynical and superficial. I retorted that I might be cynical and superficial, but no matter how cynical I was it hadn’t stopped me from realising the truth about Paco Parra and the light around him: he absorbed it, mutely and completely, like a foam mattress.

But it was the vulgarity that shone through everything he did that meant I didn’t have that much to worry about. Muriel could never really be seriously in love with Paco Parra.

After a week or two there was no avoiding the fact that Paco Parra wanted Muriel all to himself. That was why he recommended a different beach to me, a beach that lay a bit further away; all you had to do was take the bus to the next village. Muriel shrugged her shoulders and said it was only for a few days, then he had to go off on a job and we would be alone again. So each day after breakfast I took the bus for about a kilometre. I had books and magazines with me and there was a bar right by the beach and I really didn’t have anything to complain about. I came home in the evening and then we spent a little time together, before Muriel and Parra would go out dancing or to a restaurant. Parra always had the foresight on those occasions to arrange for someone to bring me food from the bar.

Now and then they would ask me if I wanted to go out with them, but I declined.

Only one evening when they got back, everything was different. Muriel came into my room, sat at the furthest end of the bed and said everything had gone wrong and the only thing to do now was pack up and go home tomorrow. It had all turned to shit with Parra and that was the end of the sweet life both for her and for me.

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t got a fucking clue how to boil it all down for you. There are intimate matters involved. The kind of thing you don’t talk about to outsiders.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Then would you mind turning off the light when you leave and letting me sleep?’

‘Hang on,’ she said then. ‘I’ll tell you.’

It had all begun with her telling Parra about Andrés, her former boyfriend. He couldn’t cope when she broke it off with him because of Parra. He went crazy, started beating his fists against the wall and screaming that he couldn’t handle being without her. That’s what she did to men, Muriel. She warped their frontal lobes for them and they were never quite normal again for the rest of their lives. Andrés was no different.

‘Stop it now,’ she told him. ‘I’ve found someone else. A fifty-five year old man who is a lot richer than you.’

It was a really stupid thing to say, as she realised afterwards — only everything was excused when you were in love, wasn’t it. And she hadn’t realised, had she, that Andrés was so deeply in love with her? Or that he had already planned out the whole of their lives together and even been to check out a house in a posh neighbourhood, and in that sense was already living the life he had staked out with Muriel. So that was why he couldn’t cope with her saying goodbye. He had jumped her and attacked her. That was a really stupid thing for him to do, Muriel said, though at the same time it was all part of a kind of game they played.

‘Hard to explain,’ she said. ‘Anyway it turned out the way it did. And I didn’t think about it that much afterwards.’

But recently one morning she had told Paco Parra about Andrés. What happened when she ended it, how he had attacked her and how it had all gone wrong. Parra had got up (they had been lying on a sand dune on the beach), brushed the sand off his Bermuda shorts and said, Fucking hell, Muriel, fucking hell, I just can’t believe what I’m hearing, I can’t live with the idea that someone did that to you. That is the lowest of the low, and blah blah blah — a load of moralistic drivel that didn’t sit well in a mouth like his — like picking a lovely rose and putting it on top of a rubbish dump or a dungheap, is about how appropriate those words were in Parra’s mouth, Muriel said.

‘We’re going to get through this together,’ he said as well. ‘You’re going to tell me exactly what happened and then we’re going to deal with it, we’ll get through it together and I will be there to support you all the way, you’re going to lean on me and I’m going to make sure you get over this.’

And Muriel started telling him what had happened, how Andrés had gone crazy and hit the walls and then come at her like a blazing torch. And what happened then? Parra said in her ear and his breathing just kept getting faster, what did he do then, how did he do it and in what way, to the point that he was so excited he got on top of Muriel and asked her to keep on telling him about it. And Muriel, who had been pretty shocked at first about how the whole thing was developing, soon stopped telling him exactly what had happened, because as she said she didn’t really have anything against Andrés (he was an arsehole just like most men but no better and no worse), and began making things up instead.

So while the toad was lying on top of her, panting in her ear, she invented a new version of the whole thing and added a lot of details she wouldn’t want to admit to in the light of day, though maybe later on, until Parra came and he was lying beside her and he told her that that was the best fuck he had ever had.

He had asked all sorts of questions about Andrés. How long they had known one another, where he lived, what he looked like.

‘Ok,’ Muriel said. ‘That I could deal with. It got him off, and that was fine by me. So far so good. I could live with that.’

She shook her head.

‘It’s what happened afterwards I can’t cope with. It was what happened next made me see red.’

The next day when Muriel got out of bed, it turned out that Parra had fixed her this killer breakfast. A load of weird yellow fruits that he peeled and fed to her. Then he dipped his fingers in the vanilla croissants and asked her to lick it off his fingers. Like a cat, he said. Do it like a cat. And Muriel had replied she might be able to do that at some other time of day but not in the morning because mornings were best reserved for your own needs. That was just the way she was. And if he didn’t like it, there was nothing she could do about it. In that case he had better put her on the bus and send for someone else. She couldn’t compromise on mornings.

‘Of course,’ said Parra then. ‘You’re so right, Muriel. You are the most mentally healthy person I have ever met.’

After that he left her in peace the entire morning and Muriel had another sleep, then walked down to the beach and checked out a guy of her own age who had been checking her back and then they had lain there continuing to check each other out until Parra suddenly appeared with a parasol and lilos and those yellow fruits that he had peeled once again and fed to Muriel. Then he had got out the vanilla croissants and said she could lick it off his fingers now, couldn’t she, and she had done it and the guy of her own age she had been checking out while lying there had turned his head away as though he found it disgusting. He hadn’t checked her out again after that and she had been feeling pretty pissed off even then, she said. The fact that he revolts me is one thing, she said, but ruining what could be my immediate future is not ok. So she was already feeling a bit annoyed. Then evening fell. Muriel and the toad went home and fucked as per usual. Then they had a shower, brushed their teeth (though that goes without saying, Muriel said to make things clear, sort of), and then they went and had dinner at a posh restaurant that must have been getting financial support from Paco Parra’s department to judge by the fuss the waiters made. They ate in peace and quiet, emptied a bottle of wine that Parra ordered and then they drank coffee and ate truffles.

‘And then he suddenly announces he’s got a surprise for me.’

And Paco had got up, pulled out her chair, and she had gone ahead of him in the direction he was pointing and the waiters had bowed to them even though Parra hadn’t even paid. They had gone out the back way and into an old warehouse at the rear.

‘What’s happening?’ Muriel said.

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ the toad had replied. ‘Just trust me.’

At that point he had got out a black bandage and tied it across her eyes. Muriel said it felt like being in a gangster film. Then he had let her into a different room and it had smelled of fear, damp and diarrhoea inside.

‘Voilà!’ he had said finally. ‘Voilà, my darling.’

And then he had taken the bandage off from over her eyes and there on the floor, tied up and cowering in one corner, was Andrés.

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Muriel said. ‘I couldn’t fucking believe it was him. And so fucking scared. You should have seen his eyes. And it smelled really bad besides. I bet he shat himself.’

And what Muriel was thinking, standing there, was that the toad would force them to fuck each other in front of him. He would sit in a chair, light a cigar and watch. And Muriel said she must have been so unbelievably shocked by the entire situation because all she could think about was that Andrés had shat himself and that the floor which was made of cement would be cold.

‘Though,’ she said. ‘I could have put up with that as well. If Andrés had been allowed to clean himself up and if the toad just wanted a bit of a show, I could have handled that too.’

Unfortunately it wasn’t that kind of little show the toad wanted. Because soon he was coming over to her, holding something behind his back and wearing a secretive expression on his face.

‘Here,’ he said and handed her a baseball bat.

Muriel didn’t have a clue. She just stared at the toad.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Here,’ said the toad. ‘Just let him have it.’

‘What?’ she said again.

I can just see her standing on that cement floor with the baseball bat in her hand. Her heels and those curls of hers that would have stopped bouncing around. Her obscenely narrow legs and the toad with his permanent erection pressing against the lining of his trousers. Andrés in his leather jacket, scared stiff in the corner.

‘You want me to hit him?’ she said to the toad.

‘Depends what you mean,’ the toad had said then. ‘It’s not about what I want, Muriel. It’s about what you need.’

‘What I need?’

‘That little bastard raped you.’

‘Yes.’

‘He abused you.’

‘Okay.’

‘You can get your own back now. He can’t do anything to you. You should beat him black and blue. That’s what you ought to do. I can’t do it for you because it’s your anger you need to deal with. Only now I am giving you the chance, it’s my present to you because I love you so bloody much. I love you so bloody much, Muriel, that some days when I wake up it hurts in my chest. And I am who I am, with all my failings, all the other baggage that being a person entails, but I want to give you this now. If you want to humiliate him in some other way, just say the word. I can ring Vincent and Álvaro and they’ll come and help. It’s your night, my darling, you decide. Your night, tonight.’

And Muriel stood there looking from Andrés to the toad and back to Andrés again.

‘I could have hit him myself,’ the toad said again. ‘But there are things no one else can do for you, things you have to do on your own.’

That’s when Muriel felt the anger. So she said. That’s when I felt the anger, and it came burning up from my toes and it was red-hot. It flew up my legs like buckshot. I felt shaky all over and as if I was about to fall over my platform shoes. Then I raised the baseball bat. And I can still see the expression on the toad’s face, that self-satisfied toad grin, thinking he’s done something right and I’ll suck him off again tonight. I can remember that look and how lost and sort of distorted it got when he saw I wasn’t walking over to Andrés but towards him. It was so incredibly fucking satisfying, Araceli, to be able to drive that bat into Parra’s face. Fuck, it was so bloody satisfying, Ara, let me tell you. And she had thumped him as hard as she could until Vincent and Álvaro ran in and helped their boss get away from her. She must have screamed as well because in the car on the way back Vincent told her she had broken his eardrum and that Parra was legally obliged to pay damages for that.

When she had finished telling me, we lay there in silence. I asked if he was lying in there, all bruised, and if we would be going home tomorrow. Only Muriel didn’t answer me. Instead she said she could tell me the deepest and truest truth about men, a sort of open sesame I could carry with me forever. If I swore not to tell anyone, that is. I swore. I lay in bed and she leant over me and I was expecting her to whisper something perverse in my ear. Along with the sea outside that would be one of the most perfect moments of my holiday.

But Muriel didn’t whisper anything. Instead she spat in my hair. A big thick gob flowed slowly down my temple.

‘You idiot,’ I said.

‘I was supposed to tell you the big secret about men, wasn’t I?’ she said. ‘That is all there is to say.’

‘You idiot,’ I said again.

I wish there was nothing more to say about the Paco Parra episode. It would have been nice, desirable even, if that had been the end of the story, but there was one more thing. Something had been going on between Paco Parra and me. The last few days on the beach in Perrellot, Paco Parra had started showing me these little kindnesses. It made me uncomfortable. I became aware of it one day when I was in a cafe on the square and saw him go into an ice-cream parlour. He ordered a tub of ice cream, with pear and coconut (Muriel’s favourite flavours) and rum and raisin (which is mine). When the lady in the shop explained that they didn’t have any rum and raisin, he asked her where he could get some. The other place will have some, she said then. When we opened the tubs later that evening, he said nothing about having had to drive to the other bar which was several kilometres away to buy that flavour for me. He said nothing at all, just opened it up and served the ice cream. This made me more observant of the way he was behaving towards me and I discovered in him a kindness I hadn’t felt from him before, and which I didn’t feel he showed even to Muriel. To her he was openly adoring, to me he was secretly kind. I noticed it in the little details, how he seated me at lunch so that I had a view, how the sheets on my bed got changed, or in the little things he put in my lunchbox those days I went to the other beach. I felt confused, not understanding what it was about, and that led in turn to my feeling inhibited in his company. I always thought about what I would say before I said anything, and I was terrified of asking him for something he wouldn’t be able to give me. Is he interested in me that way? I turned that idea over in my mind again and again, but always had to reject it as an impossibility. I couldn’t work out what he wanted. His good intentions frightened me.

And that was why, more than anything else, it was a relief to get the train back to Barcelona.