After this explanation, he grabbed 10,000 pesetas from a purse his wife kept in the wardrobe – just so he could get through the first few days – a change of underwear, which he put in a supermarket bag, and, last of all, a photograph of Margarita Vega, the greatest treasure in his unprodigious heritage, munificence fate had placed in his path as the symptom of an encouraging future full of mulberries and broom and sweet honeywort to relieve the bitterness of his acidic past.
He had to switch destiny, alter the absurd, monotonous, ever-to-be-repeated sense of his existence, not allow tedium to bully his physique and feelings down well-trodden byways. Destiny, he thought, can change, all we need is character and perseverance. “You know that well,” he said to the photograph of Margarita Vega, “you who’ve put up with my most accurate confessions, tears and desperation, who’ve never spoken to me and yet seen the iron lines the blade of days has engraved on my skin, quiet Margarita, muse of my brokenness, companion of so many nights shut up in the bathroom, in silence, so as not to disturb the sleep and roar of the magnificent lady occupying two thirds of a bed that was never nuptial, you, Margarita, invisible romance of my dreams.”
He stopped talking to the photograph. He squeezed his eyes tight in the hope they would swallow, like mouths, the tears that struggled to make it to the surface. He insisted. Again and again. And got what he wanted. Tears were muddy rivers that would sometimes obstinately visit his face, his soul, he thought, the only place the laments and perfidious fits that sometimes gnawed at his wounded heart could resort to. For this reason, he had jotted in his notebook: “Tears can only slide over the soul, that is why soul and skin are one and the same, they are united, indissoluble. A human’s great and perpetual emotions, those emotions that build us up and destroy us, are part soul, part skin.”
After this thought, he wrote those emotions he considered to be fundamental to a human being, the emotions that build him up and destroy him, saving emotions. And after writing them down, he thought of the first of them all, primary and primitive: love. Love, buried deep down, had kept him intact thanks to Margarita Vega, the only woman who for so many years of unhappy marriage had been capable of keeping the flame of the passion in his shipwrecked interior alive and fervent.
It was necessary to exercise oneself in the task of love on a daily basis, not to forget it, to go back to it with obstinate stubbornness. He once thought only the one who loved without future, without hope, the man or woman who placed their anxiety in the impossibility of ever meeting their loved one, could know true enjoyment. He was a living case in point: he may never have come across Margarita. That pain may have been a clear sign that he would, one day, come face to face with such longed-for happiness.
And yet this wasn’t the time to be wandering along the quivering blade of reflection. He needed to activate his interior, his skin, his soul. “Let’s go, let’s go!” he said a couple of times, easing his determination by clenching his fists, whisking the air with his arms, robotically moving his head. He was tired of the impetuous butcher, the one in the basement, who didn’t stop banging cleavers and knives on a solid board of stony or acerric wood, fed up of his refrigerated chambers that were constantly on the hum, the doors and blinds, the lorries unloading tender, bloody calves in front of his polyvalent butcher’s establishment, the pies and meatballs set out in the glass display case on a Saturday morning, forcing him to enter the shop, to ask for one of those golden rectangles that enveloped tasty viands or ampulous spheres of meat in rich sauce his wife never gave him.
He was tired of her, of his wife, Matilde. He thought about the Galician word for “wife”, esposa. Nobody could have come up with such an exact term for his situation, they must have had it in mind when convention and the arbitrariness of speakers gave birth to such a strict and precise syntagma. He had consulted every possible dictionary, and they all gave the same horrific definition for the plural of the word he was thinking. Esposas were handcuffs or manacles, an iron object that served to secure a prisoner’s wrists, to prevent movement. Matilde wasn’t esposa, she was esposas or even alxemas, a pretty word that blurred its rhythmic sound to take on a meaning it should never have had: irons used to tie a human being’s wrists together, to prevent them from moving freely, to deprive them of the possibility of giving nuance to the voice with the movement of the hands, of applauding the joy of a new day announced by an orange sun sprouting in the east, of caressing the skin or hiding the eyes so as not to cry, not to cry. Those two words, esposas and alxemas, had nothing to do with one another. Twenty years of ill-fated marriage that had been consumed in an ignored Tartarus inhabited by alxemas, the glow of prematurely disturbed little eyes.
He was fed up of wasting his talent on machines and computers and greetings and paltry payslips and grey desks and grey chairs and grey men and taciturn words in a vulgar office, as an administrative assistant specializing full-time in managerial matters, with a curriculum replete with various courses of perfection or intensive recycling in his peripatetic profession and with years and years and years of experience, an ample and immaculate track record that probably listed all his multiple merits: honesty, punctuality, docility, acquiescence.
He always had his books and set number of films etched in his memory, that much was true, but he had recently begun to doubt their compensatory power and had reached the conclusion that life cannot settle in the pages of a novel, nor wisdom inside the confused, well-documented borders of a large scientific essay, nor the Seventh Art in the numerous frames printed on lackadaisical celluloid moving at twenty-four images a second. Life had no angels earning their wings by helping the extremely correct – God rest his soul – James Stewart, aka George Bailey, the magnificent citizen who loved his wife and country in It’s a Wonderful Life. He wasn’t George Bailey. And nor did Matilde have anything in common with the kind-hearted Mary of the film. Life found its justification in itself, in the unknown, in the grace of disregarding what will happen moments later, in the good fortune of ignoring the most immediate future or else in the joy of inoculating air by means of the lungs, of opening the window and seeing a new day has slowly begun with the promise of lashings of uncertainties and challenges. That was the one thing he shared with George Bailey: their desire to live out adventures. James Stewart couldn’t do this, he wasn’t allowed. But he had no desire to be James Stewart, to waste his time playing a role invented by some well-paid screenwriter, to wear a cowboy hat so he could finish off the baddies at the end of the film, to serve a liberal, business, capitalist system with a solid structure and dollars, thousands of millions of dollars, thousands of profit. To live out adventures, that was his desire. Life, adventure: neither could exist without the other.
His thoughts delayed his imminent departure. He went on the alert because his wife, Matilde, would be back soon from her meeting with her friends. This get-together consisted of a game of briscola accompanied by coffee with milk and saccharin to digest – not increase – the multiple proteins and carbohydrates of lunch. The game and coffee, however, were just a pretext to veil the real reasons behind such meetings: flaying alive anyone who was not to their taste, insulting, rebuking, cursing, excommunicating and coming up with other, assorted commentaries on various recent events: “The priest spoke well at Mass on Sunday, he wasn’t drunk.” “No, no, he wasn’t drunk, how strange!” “Your neighbour is a shameless hussy!” “Who, the one from the supermarket?” “Yes, her.” “My dumb husband spends the whole day working.” “I love your dress.” “Pretty, isn’t it?” “One coffee with milk, waiter, yes, I don’t know why you adopt that stupid expression, with saccharin.” “What did you want to be when you were a girl, Matilde?” “A tamer.”
