Mother had been born to look after her parents, but her parents had died when she was still a teenager, in a terrible fire that destroyed the family shop. She felt lost because she had been educated so that her life would only have meaning if she devoted herself to the care of her elderly parents, an unavoidable responsibility that would fall on her when the time came. Before that, they had had another child, Cándido, to whom they planned to bequeath the family business. Mother and Uncle Cándido had been born with prearranged destinies. Uncle Cándido took possession of his at the age of twenty, after the fire, and it was down to him to raise the family from the ashes and a lack of experience. He found it an enormous injustice to have to devote his youth to rebuilding an ironmonger’s shop that had been reduced to iron, smoke and mud. But this was what he’d been born for, wasn’t it? Devoted day and night to the accursed shop, all he needed was to find someone on whom to vent his frustration. And he found Aunt Natalia.
He found her the day she came into the shop to buy a porcelain coffee pot.
‘Why do we call a piece of enamelled metal “porcelain”?’ Uncle Cándido would ask himself this kind of question whenever he came across the chipped crockery mother insisted on using in the kitchen for years. It hurt him because it reminded him of his lost youth.
‘It’s because of the enamel, which is designed to imitate fine china, real porcelain,’ Aunt Natalia patiently explained.
‘Poor people’s porcelain so they can eat lentils and worms!’ Uncle Cándido grew angry. ‘That’s what we’ve been all our lives, wretched poor people. Why didn’t I emigrate like all the rest?’
I remember these words Uncle Cándido pronounced like a threat whenever he got angry. Even though he knew that, thanks to mother’s decisions, we were really very rich, Uncle Cándido could only perceive an ancient misery due not to a lack of money, but to a lack of initiative. His ‘why didn’t I emigrate like all the rest’ was aimed at mother and, in passing, at Aunt Natalia – who thought the fact she was his wife should be enough to make my uncle happy – the greatest insult he could inflict on either of them. Out of some strange sense of sympathy, Aunt Natalia felt the same as mother in extreme circumstances, even though they couldn’t stand one another. The fact that someone should raise the subject of emigrating, especially if it was Uncle Cándido, became a direct attack on the two of them. But that’s another story.
Uncle Cándido was not at all satisfied with his life, but he’d agreed, without rebelliousness or ambition, to be another link in the history of this business that had been open for a century. Even his name, a name all the firstborn sons in the family received, had been tied around his neck, as they had hung a gold chain with a medallion of Our Lady of Carmel. I think it was because of Uncle Cándido’s name that my grandmother and her family finally broke off all communication. In fact, neither mother nor my uncle would talk about these relatives unless it were to describe them as proud and arrogant. I’ve met people who said I was the spitting image of my maternal grandmother and it was a shame about what happened.
I once went out with a boy who had my mother’s unusual surname. When we realized, we felt so disgusted at being cousins that we had no intention of seeing each other any more. When I went to study in the city, I would bump into him in the morning, on the way to the faculty. We never even said hello, but I was sure we secretly glanced at each other. I must confess I looked at him. He walked straight, tall, dressed in a suit and tie. He carried an umbrella whenever it was raining, an enormous, well-made, black umbrella, and his boots resounded as their soles collided with the pavement. When it wasn’t raining, he would still wear a suit and tie, but not carry an umbrella, and his shoes would be made of soft, brown or black leather to match the suit he was wearing. His life didn’t strike me as so very different from that of Uncle Cándido – the two of them dispassionate, unconsciously reproducing the same daily gestures and ignorant of the fact life was a vast project that existed beyond them. In spite of them.
I think that boy and I, without needing to look at each other, could see the burdens we were lugging on our backs, which didn’t belong to us. But even though we knew this and recognized in each other a certain shared unhappiness, we continued to keep our distance. I remember the only thing I could think of saying whenever we met was ‘we’re innocent’, but I said it under my breath, swallowing the contempt of his proud nose, which was the same as mine, and consuming the sharp angles that always imbued my life with passion and a degree of beauty.
When Uncle Cándido turned five, my grandparents decided it was time to mould a daughter who would care for them in their old age. Once again, they were lucky: my grandmother gave birth to a girl. On the surface, it appeared mother’s destiny was more terrifying than Uncle Cándido’s: he would get a business, whereas she would be educated and tied always to remember she’d been born with the aim of looking after her parents.
They both received a similar education. They attended the same primary and secondary schools. They read, one after the other, the same books that made up the family library, which comprised a selection of Reader’s Digest condensed classics and the catalogue of the Círculo de Lectores. They saw the same films and only ever hung out with children from their district. They were both clever and curious: they could have done anything with their futures, had it not been for the constant warnings about being born for a specific purpose. I suppose they both dreamed of running away from home and seeking refuge with that part of the family they didn’t get on with, and did so with the same furious, useless imagination as when they dreamed they were the children of a superhero who would come rushing to rescue them from their childish sadness.
As soon as he finished school, Uncle Cándido started working in the ironmonger’s shop. He was a good student, but it never even entered his mind to rebel and break the chain. He couldn’t. His body had been branded with the same name that, in iron letters, had been clinging to the lintel of the door of the shop for years. ‘Cándido Ironmonger’s Ltd’. Mother was still at school when the fire happened. She must have been about fifteen, a teenager with long, blonde hair. After school, she attended a dressmaking academy because grandmother was well aware any woman whose destiny was the care of elderly parents had to have some understanding of sewing, embroidery and, at a push, dying and cutting hair. Any other necessities could be learned by themselves, on the job, at the precise moment when they were needed.
The fire left her feeling amazed, stuck in front of her future and unable to react. Instead of feeling liberated, she decided to look for someone to whom she could devote the ten fingers on her hands, the joints of her bones, and the tenderness that at some distant point had congealed in the honeycombs of her belly.
One day, many years ago, sitting behind the counter with his head in his hands, Matías the porter tried to find an explanation as to how that enormous, papier-mâché whale had entered the building. He hadn’t seen anyone bring the monstrosity in. He was convinced he was far too old for such surprises. ‘Whoever brought it in will come and fetch it,’ he said to himself and ordered the post so he could deliver it to the various apartments at the end of the afternoon. He never took the lift. He found it increasingly difficult to climb the stairs, but forced himself to do so at least once a day. Go up and down the stairs.
‘Who could love such a frightful object?’ he asked himself on the first-floor landing, as he gazed down at the animal’s back.
He carried on climbing with the sensation the whale reminded him of someone. As he pressed our doorbell, he clasped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed:
‘Ramón!’
On coming back down to the entrance of the building and finding the huge whale still there, he tenderly stroked its head and leaned over to gaze into its eyes. He even found it beautiful.
Painfully beautiful, like Ramón’s dumb happiness.
Matías kindly opened the door and wanted to give me a big hug. He was a nervous man, spindly as a dancer, and was so old I felt ashamed to allow him to take my suitcase on wheels. He insisted, feeling offended, and I ended up letting him.
‘The girl is back! The girl is here!’ he exclaimed, moving his head from side to side and on the verge of laughing out loud. ‘The girl! I still remember that blasted animal you put inside the entrance.’
‘It gave you a really good scare! Do you honestly still remember?’
Aunt Natalia called the lift while Matías and I chatted in the lobby.
‘How could I forget? I remember the day you were born.’
He shook his head, stared at the ground, at the ceiling, at me. I observed him with curiosity and surprise, wondering how old this little man, who also remembered the day my mother had been born, could be.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother…’
He fell silent and seemed to shrink. Aunt Natalia took the suitcase out of his hands and we entered the lift. We ascended in silence. I examined every nook and cranny of that compartment I knew like the back of my hand. They hadn’t even bothered repairing the mirror on which I’d smashed a frightful china doll mother had given me years earlier. I wanted a Barbie and she gave me a dead doll with lots of frills and a bodice. I wanted an orange, plastic watch and she gave me a lady’s watch with a thin, metal strap. I wanted nothing and she gave me a slap.
‘Are you feeling calmer?’ asked my aunt. I didn’t reply. She held me in her hands again, pinched my cheeks and in a low voice, a whisper in my ear, repeated the words ‘calm and relaxed’.
‘She won’t eat you. Nor you her, I hope.’
Felisa was waiting for us in the doorway. Matías must have lost no time in informing her. Felisa: small, round, agile on her heels. Conceited and a little vulgar, as always, she welcomed me by giving me a hug and squeezing me against her breasts, which felt soft on my hips. The top of her head reached to my neck and I could see a bald patch hidden under hair that had been dyed violet, stretched, folded, fluffed up to give the few remaining strands more substance. She soaked my camisole in tears and saliva and, had she not been so broad and weighed so much, I would have picked her up and thrown her into the air like a spinning top. Or a kite. She was heavy, however, clung on and kept whimpering.
Ever since I stopped living in that apartment, my meetings with Felisa had filled me with dread. Wherever she might find me, she would stick to me like a tick and there was no way of escaping her embrace.
