LUCÍA

The day I was left alone, I had two options: to run until I choked and fainted, or to carry on huddled beneath the bed so that I could stay alive. I chose to remain where I was, looking out between the tassels of the bedspread and the floor, and everything changed and became unpredictable.

I saw one of those things children are not supposed to see.

That was the first time I wished I could go blind, despite the fact I’d never met any blind people at all, or poets on the stage, spies, paid mourners who pluck out their eyes, prophets, saintly women, or just women who later die, forgotten, in large cities. That night, when I was five, I wished I could go blind simply so that I wouldn’t have to watch my family die again. I’d already learned the expression ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over’, and I thought it was true.

For parents, the time left after their children die is a whole eternity, even if that time lasts only a few seconds. Parents should not have to see how all the life their children had in front of them goes up in a puff of smoke. No. They shouldn’t even have to see it when they themselves are going to die a moment later. Besides the death of my family, I saw the grief painted on a parent’s face when he’s watched his children perish.

It was all because of a robbery. My father worked in a bank and would sometimes bring money home, back then I never wondered why. I found out much later, when I discovered I had inherited two apartments, a bamboo table and a car that didn’t start. But at the time it was all much simpler: he got home that day, as on many others, with a bundle of cash under his arm and, though I don’t remember the details, I’m quite sure it never even entered my head to think that this was not normal. I assumed this was just his job. Five-year-olds don’t have it in them to imagine great swindles, certainly not ones their parents have orchestrated.

The assassins must have been watching him from the morning and, when they saw him come out with a package, followed him. They no doubt assumed that, if he was bringing it home, there must be more there. That was why they didn’t stop asking where the rest was, they didn’t grow tired of sticking their hands up my mother’s skirt and saying, ‘If you don’t tell us, we’ll kill you all.’ They carried out their threat, unaware that there may not have been anything to tell them. The two men stole the bundle of cash, killed my brothers and mother, and ran away. As easy as that.

I shall never know whether, by saying something, my father could have prevented those lives going up in a puff of smoke. I don’t wish to think he kept quiet on account of the money, I don’t think he was prepared to watch his children and wife being strangled just for some cash. Had there been more money, my father would have given it to them rather than allowing my whole family to die and then killing himself. Had there been more money, I’m sure he would have remembered me, huddled under the bed, gazing out through the tassels. He wouldn’t have let me escape like a bolt of lightning as soon as I heard the door slam when they came in. That slam. No way.

I’ve always wondered why they didn’t kill him themselves, why they preferred to let him commit suicide and didn’t even hang around to watch. They disappeared, and suddenly an ordinary silence descended, as if nothing had happened. At this point, my father, tearful and nervous, got up from his chair, taking care not to knock the bowl of soup that had somehow survived on top of the table as if by magic. I deduced he was finally coming to rescue me from behind the tassels of the bedspread, but that wasn’t the case. He went to the drawer, pulled out a revolver he kept there in case there were robbers (how ironic!), lifted it to his temple and shot himself.

He left me all alone. I stayed behind, contemplating the perfect death of my entire family from behind the tassels of the bedspread, as if I’d been at the theatre.

I think that was when my new life began.

That day is my first memory. I remember nothing earlier than the things I witnessed from under the bed. I don’t recall ever sitting on my mother’s lap, or having her spoon-feed me. I can’t even picture her face. I don’t recall holding my father’s hand and going for a walk, or eating orange ice-cream with my brothers during the festivities in the Alameda, under a radiant sun. I don’t recall a single Christmas Eve, or having a vision of Father Christmas leaving me some presents. I can’t recall being read to when I was put to bed, or crying because of a child’s whim. I’m not saying those things never happened. I simply don’t remember anything that occurred in the years prior to my family’s demise. Their faces have been erased; they are mists in which I can only make out some peaks, the bodies of a man, a woman, some kids.

My childhood started with that vision through the tassels as a raised curtain, and most of all at the moment Lucía arrived, took me out and said, ‘Darling, there you were.’ That was why, for years, I thought the first thing people hear when they come into the world is this sentence, as if, instead of being born, we are found. I imagined the doctors who remove children from their mothers’ bellies saying, ‘Darling, there you were,’ with that voice of hers, interspersed with sobs. That would be how people like me started. ‘Darling, there you were,’ and a new life began.

Mine started with Lucía dragging me out by one foot, the bedspread tickling my nape. Everything began with Lucía’s blue voice and ring that always struck me as enormous, covering my eyes and turning my first few minutes into bluish glints and sounds, convincing me for the first time that sometimes it’s better not to see the things in front of our eyes and, instead, to wish to be blind. All the dead bodies, the blood Lucía must have stepped on in those pointed, high-heeled shoes she always wore, the bits of bread, a bullet lodged in the wall. Finally, we left the house. She carried me in her arms, my eyes hidden behind her hands, in the most absolute silence, tearfully abandoning that sentence, ‘Darling, there you were.’

It was 1928, and fortunately nobody in 1928 would ever have dared to argue with Lucía about whether she should, or should not, make off with a child who had been left all on his own. She picked me up, carried me home, washed me, fed me and, from that moment on, all her efforts were aimed at making me forget what I had seen in the house I had lost. In Lucía’s wealthy district, most people believed the story she told them: I was the son of a cousin of hers in Madrid who had died of tuberculosis, and Lucía was the only family I had left. It sounded believable. A few imagined that Lucía, who was dying to have a child of her own, had arranged my purchase with some poor family. And there may have been those who put two and two together and connected my appearance in Lucía’s house with the news of the deaths in my own, given that, in the district where I came from, they were of the opinion I’d been kidnapped immediately after the incident. After all, Santiago was only a little smaller than it is today and, in the end, everything comes out. But Lucía quickly solved that problem. We packed our suitcases as fast as we could and moved to Coruña. Unlike today, Coruña was so far away that, in Santiago, glimpsing the sea in Orzán was the kind of journey one could only make if one was forced to emigrate.

The truth is no one seemed to mind Lucía taking me with her, whether or not it was legal. In short, people must have been influenced more by the fact Lucía was sweet, clever and rich, never hurt anybody and deserved to have children of her own, according to the old women. Besides, bearing in mind the risks involved in tracking down my captors and rescuing me, no one ventured to come after me, not even the police. So I was left alone and at peace with her, whether or not I was a child who had been bought or the result of a terrible confusion in the house where there had been a crime.

And yet, in my head, the matter was a little more complicated. When I turned fifteen, seeing that age had started to wither my brain, as it does to all teenagers, Lucía told me she’d been planning to steal me for quite some time in order to become my mother, so the question of the armed robbers, despite all the horror and fear, had simply provided her with a convenient excuse and, above all, a golden opportunity to take me for herself. Obviously, she was lying her socks off, Lucía’s presence in the house that day could have had no other explanation than that of blind chance. But I still hadn’t learned how to arrange my head according to the rules of coincidence and, as a result of her stories, I began to think that things had really happened as she explained them and in my life, quite apart from the crime, everything would have turned out as it did because Lucía was bound to turn up the way she did, sooner or later. Young people like things this way, and I was no different. After a time, however, I finally realized this version of Lucía’s could also be the product of chance: why her, and not another? Or why just in time to find me underneath the bed, and not a little later, after they’d extracted my heart with a spatula?

It was her, however, and this coincidence meant nothing was as it would have been had the robbers not entered the house, my mother died and I seen all the things I did. Lucía turned up quite by chance, and my world changed as a result.

With horror etched in her eyes, Lucía always recalled the anguish she felt when she heard shouting in the house and imagined there were children being killed. She said she didn’t know how she had the strength to go in and check whether I’d been killed along with my older brothers, whether, dear God, I was still alive, she thought as she rummaged through the corpses and prayed she might find me somewhere outside the kitchen. And there I was, under the bed, destiny’s gift for this woman who simply wanted to be a mother without having a husband and who didn’t stop asking what human could be such a brute as to kill a child.

How wrong she was! How many children Lucía and I watched die later on! How many children I saw die at the hands of assassins, their own mothers even! No, on that day in 1928 when my life began, Lucía could never have imagined what we would witness later on, and all because we hadn’t gone blind when we still had the chance.

The light of Coruña was fascinating at that time. It hit me in the face as soon as I arrived and saw the vast, grey sea beating against the rocks. Back then, everything was big. The air seemed big, the beaches, the boats in Parrote. The shops and wine bars on Real Street looked huge. The ladies out walking in the Cantón struck me as monstrous, together with the blue, metal-wheeled prams. Greetings were enormous; the sun and blue sky, immense. Everything was luminous in that open city, which was why, when I moved to Paris, having lived the light of Coruña, I couldn’t understand why the French (it may have been the Americans) called that grey, drizzly place ‘the City of Light’. The City of Light was mine, the one I’d been taken to without knowing how, sleeping the whole way, not that grim Paris which the purplish glints of the sun dancing on the ocean shunned.

We lived in an apartment Lucía’s family owned on San Andrés Street. I never met this mysterious family that had houses and silver cutlery scattered over half the world, so I quickly deduced they weren’t from there. I never saw them, and the truth is I never felt much curiosity. But nor could I explain to myself what Lucía was doing in Santiago or Coruña when she could so easily have lived somewhere else. She must have chosen it, the way she always indulged her crazy whims, goodness knows why; out of love, perhaps. The truth is, seeing her later in Paris, you realized which was the world that had always corresponded to her.

In 1928, while Fleming was discovering penicillin in the heart of civilization, Coruña was a provincial world in which anyone with a bit of money could be happy. From our home, you could glimpse only a patch of the sea, but I walked along the beach every day on the way to school, something I endeavoured to repeat on days without classes. I attended school almost as an obligation because sums I did at home, and reading was something I did with Casal. Casal was Lucía’s boyfriend. I think he was the only man she ever loved, before she hooked up with that madame in Paris, who turned her head, probably out of spite, after Casal died.

I always remember the day I met him. We can’t have been in Coruña for more than a week. I’d been punished for stealing bait from the fishermen so I could go fishing for squid that evening. It was Saturday, and I wanted to do what older children did. I didn’t know anybody, so I thought that catching squid and turning up in the harbour with a bag full of them would be a great way to make friends. That’s how optimistic I was back then: at the age of five, I was convinced I’d catch a large bag of squid at the first attempt. The truth is I got caught and received a double punishment – for being a thief, and for being arrogant.

Lucía’s punishments were highly creative. In fact, I’ve always been convinced she enjoyed trying out the theories of French psychologist on me, to see how a child could be formed, as if my personality were a stone for sculpting. There was the excuse of the trauma following the crime, it’s true, but most of all it was Lucía’s anxious personality, her desire to go deeper and deeper into the causes and consequences of things.

So, on the day I met Casal, I was carrying out one of Lucía’s creative punishments, which involved counting the dots left by textured paint on a wall. She had marked out a square that was vast, like everything in Coruña, next to the front door, and I had to count out loud. I had just reached 423 when the doorbell rang. ‘Can I stop?’ I shouted. ‘Are there no more than 423 dots in the square?’ replied Lucía from the dining room, and I had to continue counting – four hundred and twenty-four, four hundred and twenty-five, four hundred and twenty-six – until Casal appeared in the doorway and offered me an amnesty for having opened to him.

How ashamed I felt when that man came in and stared at me facing the wall, counting the elevations of paint with my finger! ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’ve been punished.’ ‘Then mark where you’ve got to with a cross and carry on tomorrow. I’ll explain everything to Lucía.’ I did what he said. I took a pencil and drew a cross on a dot that could have been any of them. I was honourable (I was still honourable back then) and didn’t mark a hundred dots further forward, but placed the cross right where my finger had been when Casal came in.

I’m well aware it wasn’t normal at that time, in Coruña, for a woman to invite a man to dinner at home. And yet these were things Lucía permitted herself, perhaps because she was rich. Probably for that reason, because Lucía was such a libertarian, Casal came and cultivated the complicity between them on a daily basis, knowing as he did our secret and the lie about why I was with her in the apartment, and admiring as he did her ability to flaunt freedom in the Coruña of the 1920s and anywhere else she chose to live.

Lucía must have had something for Casal, who was married to a dressmaker on Panadeiras Street, to risk being discovered having dinner with her and an honourable, optimistic, snotty-nosed kid. Most of all because Lucía’s cooking was awful. To tell the truth, I can’t quite remember what she served for dinner on that first evening, but what I do remember as if it were yesterday is that the house stank of some kind of stew or overcooked sauce. He must have thought Lucía was quite special. I have no idea what he said, what pretence he came up with, what story Casal invented on certain afternoons so he could spend a couple of hours with Lucía in her home, he was sometimes there by the time I got back from school. I would look at them, and they would look at each other, smile, and then Casal would sit me on his lap and I would read from the little books he always had in his pocket. How intrigued I was by Casal’s little books! And, in the meantime, Lucía would disappear – who knows where? – to the bathroom perhaps, or some other room. One day, I caught sight of her making the bed just as Casal was leaving.

The night Casal came for dinner and we first met, I remember thinking, wishing with all my heart, I could be a man like him when I was older. How handsome he was! I see the photos now and am still impressed, he was so elegant and tall, and above all he had these deep eyes that searched you out, that still do from the photos, as if they could see the end of things. That was how I wanted to be.

Casal picked me up in his arms, took the pencil out of my hands and carried me to the kitchen – to see whether Lucía had survived the heat, he said. Along the way, he asked me, man to man, if I could keep a secret:

‘Nobody, not even your bestest friend from school, can know I come to see you, in the same way nobody should know that Lucía isn’t really your relative.’

That was the first secret I kept in my life. I nodded. I don’t think I really knew why, perhaps because I felt like a participant in a conspiracy in which I was Casal’s right-hand man, or else I realized, somehow unconsciously, that promising such a thing to Casal meant helping Lucía, who only cooked on his visits, having (for this reason) already dismissed Isaura, to whom I really owed all my growth as a child. Had it depended on Lucía’s cooking, there’s no doubt I would have ended up dying of starvation, and the fact of having saved me from being murdered in my parents’ house would have served for nothing.

We had dinner that night, and suddenly Casal left. I felt as sad as, or sadder than, a girl who wept tears of gold in a novel I once read. I knew he was going to come back because he was Lucía’s boyfriend, and nobody could ever not want to see Lucía again, I thought back then. Casal left at the end of the evening, and I wept until being put to bed, exhausted, without having finished counting the dots in the Square of the Squid. Lucía probably felt just as sad as I did, it was evident from her face, but she concealed it better than me because she was much cleverer. After that, I confirmed that he did always come back, he carried on teaching me to read, taking me into his lap and winking at me whenever he coddled Lucía because she was grumpy. And yet I still felt completely empty whenever he left the house, though I didn’t cry any more, because I imagined Casal’s books somehow needed him to leave and put us off until more fantastical hours in which Lucía would read poems out loud, Casal would talk of politics and I would sometimes just fall asleep. He always left and always came back, except for the last time. The last evening he spent with us, neither Lucía nor I could have imagined we would never see him again. She often remarked on this.

The stories left with him, as did Lucía’s sense of peace and the hours spent in his lap learning how to read from those books I still keep, which were the heartbeat of every day in Casal’s life.

Now everybody wonders where Casal got the money to publish all those books. It was said his wife gave it to him, breaking her back day and night behind the Singer machine, and then selling remnants, so she had a few savings to devote to his press. But it seems this wasn’t enough even for the covers. The one who financed the publishing house Nós in the shadows was Lucía, which is why, a year before we arrived in Coruña, Casal abandoned Leandro Carré, leaving him the other running concern, Lar. This is something I’ve been told about. At the time, the only thing I can remember, whenever they talked about Leandro, is bursting out laughing at his name, which I merrily considered rather quaint: ‘Leandro…!’ Casal would snarl, and Lucía would slap me on the teeth whenever I laughed on hearing Leandro Carré’s name, but even today I can’t help it.

The point is, when Lucía went to live in Coruña, in part because of me and in part to be closer to Casal and his business, it was because she wanted to check in situ that a condition she’d imposed some time earlier was being fulfilled: this Leandro had to remain outside Lucía and Casal’s project, making his own books and meeting up with the bunch of misogynous smokers who wandered around Coruña and gathered at the Cova Céltica on his own account. Lucía, who was a strong character despite her blind love, would only pay for what Casal did on his own or with her, even though Lucía’s name should never appear anywhere, a question of honour, which was so much talked about, with a meaning I could never understand, and still don’t today.

I think I admired Casal because, restless as he was, he was fascinated by this woman who, in spite of her condition, had as much experience of the world as he did and talked to him of people and things he’d never heard of. He who had emigrated, returned, emigrated again and returned again. Lucía sometimes even accompanied Casal to the meetings of the Brotherhood and party, but came back saying she hadn’t enjoyed the atmosphere, there were too many men, and the politics of this country required everything to be reinvented again and started over, because it was their wives, bar one or two exceptions, who provided them with the ideas, money and encouragement to achieve things. How sorry I was to have despised them so much later on, in view of what happened! The fact is, however, it didn’t matter back then, most of all because neither I nor Isaura, the housekeeper, understood a word of Lucía’s rants.

A shame. I found out what all those rants were about so much later on I suppose Lucía died with the conviction I’d forgotten all about them. I was always late in learning things. It was she who told Casal, and others who dropped by the house, what the French and Germans were saying about art and ideas, what Dada was, who people like Arp and André Breton were. Above all, however, it was Lucía who taught them the meaning of Socialism after the War of 1914, what the suffragettes in England were saying, and what Virginia Woolf was writing, whereas people in Galicia were still redeeming fields and emigrating to Buenos Aires, while the women sewed and sang, as in a ring dance. They were all fascinated by Lucía, who was on first-name terms with Ortega and Victoria Kent, even though they sometimes didn’t understand much of what she was saying. Perhaps they couldn’t understand – either during those sinuous days of censorship and clandestinity, or a few years later, when representatives attended Parliament in Madrid with a pistol and ammunition, and miners from Asturias rebelled, having just realized that Karl Marx and Lucía were right. She acted as a rouser of minds for them all, and they would leave our house full of ideas and a rebellious spirit, especially Casal, in whom I, an extra at all these meetings, noticed a quasi-adolescent obsession, a limitless admiration, in which Lucía was the unattainable she had turned him into, to a certain extent, at least. They made quite sure, at the end of it all, that Lucía should not exist and all of this should be forgotten. Including Lucía and me.

When one is five, six, seven or ten, older people don’t matter that much. So all those figures paraded in front of me like theatre puppets. They arrived, I liked them because they gave me sweets, they left, and immediately I forgot all about them until the next time, if they ever came back. If they didn’t, they remained, and would remain for many years, in the most complete anonymity.

When I was five, six, seven or ten, what I did, apart from reading with Casal and wanting to be like him when I grew up, was spend the day on the beach or in the port with Samuel, my soulmate. He was my bestest friend from school, as Casal would say, but at school we didn’t talk to each other. We pretended almost not to know each other. It must have been some kind of secret gentlemen’s agreement to keep our distance at school and to be intimate outside it. So I would get on with playing football with the others while he would get on with his solitude, kicking stones around the playground or getting hit on the hand with a ruler when his sums didn’t add up. Samuel was one of those children who seem sad from the moment they are born, and now I think I only ever saw him laugh when we were playing in Riazor or embarking on an adventure to St Anthony’s Castle.

Out of school, Samuel and I always played the same game: the Battle of Troy. It all came about one day when the teacher, Don Avelino, explained to us (on account of something in relation to the Battle of Coruña) about the Greeks and Helen’s abduction, the king’s wrath and the affairs of Paris and Achilles. We were all astonished. I painted arrows and ships on my slate as Don Avelino talked, filling that winter afternoon with an atmosphere of pipe smoke, and watched out of the corner of my eye as Samuel stared at the teacher in disbelief. You could see the scenes of the Trojan War flitting across his hazel eyes outside that stinking, grey classroom, and I swear at that moment he seemed to smile, despite the fact he never talked and barely ever noticed the other children. On leaving school, as every day, we observed a strict silence, but the next morning, before going in, he said to me, ‘Tomorrow, when it’s Sunday, do you want to play Troy on the beach?’ ‘OK,’ I replied, and we didn’t speak again until the following afternoon.

We must have set a precedent that first time we arranged to meet: talking prior to school and avoiding each other until after it. In this way, Samuel carried on being known for his strange silences, and I carried on doing what I loved most during break: kicking the ball, though this would sometimes rebound against me to the displeasure of Lucía, who had to attend to the wounds on my knees, and Isaura, whose job it was to mend my trousers.

In the Trojan War, Samuel was always the Amazon queen Penthesilea. The only character I ever took was Achilles, so I had no choice but to strike him down (or her down) with an arrow each afternoon we played. Our passion for our heroes was stronger than the logic of friendship, so playing with Samuel was, in spite of everything, a bit sad, since after some time I began to hate always having to slaughter Penthesilea. We’d spend the whole of Saturday afternoon designing bows and arrows, stretching rubber bands, chiselling arrowheads with edges we thought were artistic according to the norms of classical sculpture. And Samuel would insist on stuffing a sock inside his shirt, making out on the other side he had (or no longer had) the Amazon’s amputated breast. It wasn’t easy placing the bow on the hollow of his tit while the other arm kept bumping into an overprominent sock. And so he would transform into Penthesilea completely, with his bow, a single breast, hazel eyes observing my foot from a distance, knees covered in scabs just below his shorts and the hair on his forehead acting as a telescopic sight. This is how I always remember Penthesilea.

It never occurred to me he might want to be another character from Troy. Samuel never made any effort to become Hector (though I would have had to floor him the same) or King Agamemnon (even knowing, while he was at war in Troy, his wife was cuckolding him) or even Paris (someone at the time I considered to be especially brave for daring to make off with the wife of a king). Nothing. Samuel became fixated on the Amazons and only ever wanted to be them. We didn’t mind not having a Helen to rescue at any stage in the game, since we had no knowledge of Coruña girls and not the slightest bit of interest in them, nor were we greatly bothered about the epic story itself. We altered it at will. So sometimes Achilles wouldn’t die, since I’d told Samuel my mother had dipped me whole in the Stygian Lake and this stuff about my heel was just a Thracian legend, which meant I wasn’t vulnerable at all and, excepting the passing of the years and the infirmities of old age, I was pretty much on a par with the immortals. Samuel accepted this because otherwise we’d have always had to play the same. Achilles’ immortality allowed us to keep the Trojan War going for weeks on end, on the beach and at sea, a finger’s reach away from the happiness of living outside the world.

And yet Penthesilea always died. We could reinvent Achilles as much as we liked, we could even put him on board Jason’s ship and have him marry a siren, but there always had to be some excuse for Samuel to appear with his sock, his Doric arrows and tense bow, throwing down a challenge and obliging me to kill him. There was no way to keep Penthesilea alive, even though most Sundays she seemed to rise from the ashes and reappear so Troy could be ours and no one else’s. At school, on the other hand, Troy and the Greeks, Hector with Helen, Paris, Achilles and Penthesilea, seemed nothing more than shadows out of Don Avelino’s book.

Don Avelino’s book had other stories, like that of Esau’s lentils, or Jehovah’s seven eyes as described by Zechariah, which gave me unconfessable nightmares when I thought how many things Jehovah could see with his seven pupils and how often for this reason he would prefer to be blind. Don Avelino (in my memory, short, stout, swarthy, round lenses in front of soft eyes) spent the afternoons telling or dictating stories from his book while in the rain outside we saw the floods that led Noah to be the first ecologist or the girls running around the playground to be Bathshebas, Judiths, even that Helen of Troy who never figured in our games. On some of those afternoons, out of Don Avelino’s book came Delacroix paintings.

Just as Samuel was entranced by the Trojan War and the story of Penthesilea, I loved the way Don Avelino went into great detail about how St Lucy lost her eyes, becoming patron saint of the blind. She was Sicilian and her name meant ‘bearer of light’. Don Avelino managed to capture my childish attention because I saw the same light in Lucía when she rescued me from behind the tassels of the bedspread like a luminary.

That said, I still can’t quite understand why she was made patron saint of dressmakers as well. When I mentioned this to Lucía, she smiled a little bitterly, perhaps because she thought how annoying the details of a myth can be (as well as a child’s inability to keep silent on certain themes). I’m convinced my own Lucía – who wasn’t exactly a saint – would have loved the dressmaker who slept beside Casal every night to have gone blind or shed blood through her eyes, to have dropped them through the eyes of her sewing needles, so that she, Lucía, patron saint neither of the blind nor of dressmakers, could have the dressmaker’s husband. I’m sure Lucía would have liked to deprive the dressmaker of all her mystical halos and steal, in order to keep it under lock and key, the same sense of hope that left with Casal every time he walked out of the door in order to feast on the sumptuous dinners his wife prepared for him. She played the role of a devoted, irreproachable, deeply Catholic wife and consigned to the lining of her skirt all that libertarian angst that spills out of the pores of women like Lucía who want to be themselves and no one else, without having to live at the beck and call of a convenient husband such as Casal.

Lucía sometimes invited Samuel for tea in our house, but he was never allowed to come. When I found out it was because of Lucía, I really did want to slaughter Penthesilea and cut off the other breast if at all possible. The Saturday I understood my soulmate was really a traitor, the first thing I did was pull out his sock and hurl it as far as possible into the sea. He started crying, saying he also didn’t agree. ‘But I’m not going to go against my parents!’ he screamed while swimming to retrieve his sock. I realized then that Samuel had another world inside him.

Samuel’s mother belonged to the local Sisterhood, which, I suppose, could not accept Lucía because of what she was. Casal’s wife was also a member of the Sisterhood, a fierce anarchist and a more committed politician even than her husband. That said, she gave him her talent (or simply threw it away) the day she married him in front of a priest. All the sisters loved Casal’s wife and, as a result, abhorred Lucía.

The contempt between them was mutual. Lucía always used to say they were certainly women, they may have been sisters and they may have been Republican, but they didn’t have a clue about anything else. When Isaura turned up with a pamphlet from the Sisterhood she’d picked up in the street, Lucía served her a cup of tea and offered her a private meeting, saying she would start to believe their political doctrines the day they put them into effect in their own homes and got their husbands to prepare the lunch, since, in reality, the members of the Sisterhood were enslaved to their husbands and brothers, Ánxel Casal among them. They may have liked to consider themselves feminists, Lucía would remark in her bouts of malice, but none of them had ever stopped getting married, or stopped sewing, cooking and ironing so that their husbands would be the impeccable envy of all the women in Coruña; none of them asked where their husbands had been or who they had seen while they were putting the children to bed and preparing the dinner. None of them – not even María Miramontes de Casal (she sometimes signed her name like this, with that give-away ‘de’) – had ever thought to tell their husbands that the money they earned would go towards what they decided. They placed their work and intelligence at the service of the politics (their) men put into practice and probably spent the day wondering what on earth would become of them if their husbands didn’t climb into the pulpit or on to the stage.

And yet, in spite of all this, Lucía was the free woman who only ever got to sleep a siesta with Casal, while María Miramontes was the one who had him by her side until the last moment. The same old story. I sometimes wonder whether it wouldn’t be more beneficial to form part of the Sisterhood than to be plain old Lucía.

The members of the Sisterhood, clustered around the universally adored María Miramontes, had it in for Lucía. They who were so free and feminine, so egalitarian, so political and in favour of women’s suffrage, practically called Lucía a ‘whore’ to her face. She didn’t mind this because she had Flora Tristan among her books, reminding her at night, when Casal had left, that whores may well have more to say than well-to-do Coruña ladies, the same who allowed themselves to be relegated to the silence of the history their own husbands wrote while they were praying in churches. What Lucía did mind, however, was things like Samuel’s mother not letting him play with me because I was her son. They (who were so just, so female) did the same as pious women at the collegiate church and kept their children away from the one they took to be Lucía’s child.

This was even more difficult to understand because of the way María Miramontes gave me sweets whenever she saw me pass in front of her shop of cloths and remnants, or was sweeping the street and spotted me on the other side. This happened most of all after one particular day, a little after the arrival of the Republic, when she rescued me from a group of people who had gathered in front of a house on Panadeiras Street to greet a minister on his balcony. I know this because they told me about it, I wasn’t even able to raise my head in such a large gathering and glimpse who was standing on that Panadeiras balcony. I would have been crushed had it not been for María Miramontes, who grabbed my hand and pushed me into her shop to wait until the popular fervour had died down. When I was six, seven, eight or ten, I must have been pretty irresistible. Or else María, deep down, had resigned herself to thinking I was something like Casal’s lost son, even if she couldn’t enjoy me herself and clutched her stomach every time I laughed while taking her sweets. She had decided Casal was to be shared and, despite doing her best to sully Lucía’s reputation throughout Coruña, she couldn’t blame me for it. She must have noticed, I imagine, that Casal was fond of me. Psychoanalysis sometimes demonstrates why wives give sweets to the children of their husbands’ lovers.

Samuel’s mother, on the other hand, wouldn’t even offer me a cup of water and kept Samuel on a tight leash. We would meet up in secret, like ill-fated lovers, just so he wouldn’t get his ears pulled and, when Lucía felt sorry for us and tried to hide us in the apartment on San Andrés Street with a succulent tea, poor Samuel would spend the whole time glancing over his shoulder at the front door, afraid he was committing a crime and at any moment his fearsome mother might turn up and drag him off by the hair. It was absolutely forbidden to set foot in our house. A house which, by the way, all the husbands were dying to enter, eager as they were to hear everything Lucía could tell them and to peruse the books she lent out.

So Samuel and I turned the beach into our play room. Even when it rained, he was Penthesilea, and I was heelless Achilles. I was still deeply upset about Samuel’s mother, and I must admit I always considered him a traitor for not taking a stand, he who savoured the chocolate Isaura prepared for us and loved dancing flamenco on the boards of our apartment on San Andrés. On days like this, I would have liked to do away with his parents, to bury them in lime.

But, the afternoon I threw Samuel’s sock into the sea and he swam out tearfully to collect it, as he walked towards me, putting the sodden sock back in its place, I decided, whether or not he was a traitor, that Samuel was one of those friends who can be forgiven everything and you can only have when you’re a child. Samuel deserved Isaura’s chocolate, so, having humbled him to the core by making him swim out after a tit among the waves of Riazor and defended my measly sense of honour, I always took him ounces of chocolate I would steal from the larder, and we would nibble them on a rock, looking out to sea.

‘You know something, Samuel? When I grow up, I’m going to be an adventurer and conquer an island in the Caribbean so I can live there and drink coconut milk all the time.’

‘Well, I’m going to be a courier.’

‘A couturier.’

‘You know what I mean. I’m not such a fan of coconut milk…’

‘And on my island I’m going to make books, like the ones Casal makes.’

‘Who’s going to read them?’

‘You know I might need someone to make my clothes…’

‘OK then, while I’m doing the sewing, I can read your books. And we can play Troy all the time.’

‘That’s right, how wonderful! And I’m not going to allow any schools. Don Avelino’s not getting anywhere near my island.’

‘I like your idea about the Caribbean. But we might get tired of being all on our own.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll take Lucía and Isaura with us.’

‘Yes, of course. We’ll be like royalty, living in the Caribbean.’

‘I’d prefer there not to be any kings. When I grow up, I’m going to discover an island without any kings.’

The day the Republic arrived, Lucía let me toast it with champagne. I wasn’t quite sure what we were celebrating, but didn’t ask and used the occasion to get a little tipsy. It was a Tuesday. I remember this very well. It was a Tuesday because, on Tuesday afternoons, the teacher would let us little ones do some drawing. On that day, I drew my parents’ murderers as I imagined them after so many years. Don Avelino found my drawing so repulsive he angrily rubbed it out, and I went home, terribly afraid Lucía would give me a scolding or make me count the dots of paint on the wall. This didn’t happen. All she said was, ‘Children don’t paint the kind of things you do, my darling, and Don Avelino doesn’t realize that what you’ve painted isn’t a lie. Don’t hold it against him.’ She fell silent for a moment. ‘But I’ll pull your ears out if you ever tell him, or anyone else at school, anything at all about what happened in your house, got it?’ she declared with flashing eyes and a hand that hovered perilously close to my right ear. I reached the conclusion that Lucía could be the most persuasive person in the world.

Apart from the champagne and what must have been my first bout of drinking, I didn’t notice much about the new State. All I know is that the name of my street was changed to García Hernández, Real Street became Fermín Galán, and finally there were to be no kings. Apart from that, neither I nor Samuel (who told me he’d also been given champagne to drink at home and didn’t have a clue, or know anyone that did, who García Hernández and Fermín Galán were) understood a thing.

Antón Mateo, who worked with Casal, was the one who secretly brought us the bottle, as if the present had been picked up on the black market. Apparently Casal had bought it for Lucía, using the fact he was on his own, the Sunday he went to vote, because he knew something momentous was about to happen. In effect, Ánxel Casal would later become famous for his proverbial optimism – but who could ever have predicted during those days of euphoria what this would all turn into, in spite of all the optimism and golden bubbles?

It was the first time I drank champagne, toasting with Lucía and Isaura, who kept on smiling and making me smile, as at a party, since it was only at parties that Isaura stayed for dinner. From the gulps of champagne, all I can remember is the freshness in my throat and the sense of swallowing golden nuggets. I can never forget it. Ever since that night, champagne has tasted to me of the Republic on a day in April and of tiny little balls that slide down into your stomach, as into a raffle drum. That was when I set myself the goal of eating and dining with champagne one day.

That night, it also smelled of the sea in a way I never remember it smelling in Coruña. The scent of the sea entered our house through the wide-open windows, spreading happiness in the street and over the horizon. What with the different scents and warm taste of champagne, Lucía decided to teach me a libertarian version of Riego’s anthem: ‘If the King and Queen of Spain only knew how little they were going to last, they’d go out into the street, shouting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom!”’ We laughed nervously, while Lucía raised my right fist into the air. ‘If the priests and friars only knew what a beating was coming their way, they’d climb into the choir, singing…’ – at which point we nodded, raised our voices and shouted into the street, ‘“Freedom, freedom, freedom!”’

We sang like this, with full voices, the three of us leaning over the balcony and watching a priest scuttle past, raising his cassock so he wouldn’t trip and glancing up at this balcony of heretics, no doubt transfixed by fear and transfixed by indignation, which in some cases amount to more or less the same thing. I learned that day, when I saw him running with his cassock in the air, that priests wear trousers under their skirts, and this came as a real surprise to me.

People thought the Republic would alter their lives, but the truth is, the following day in Coruña, nothing seemed all that different, except for a few hung-over expressions and the broad smile on Don Avelino’s face when he came to school, though I couldn’t be sure whether this was down to the Republic or the kisses of an elated anarchist who thought compulsory free love had arrived in Spain along with the Republic. For this, we would have to wait another forty years, a civil war, a world one, a short man with delusions of grandeur and the final cuplé, but there was no way they could have known this. The woman who kissed Don Avelino on the night the Republic arrived was no doubt ahead of her time, and the truth is that time for Don Avelino was never the same again. Her name was Merceditas and, when I think about her, I realize that Don Avelino was just a normal, sympathetic guy who wanted to give and receive love, like everybody else. Even though, back then, both Samuel and I would have sworn it was impossible for our teacher, or any other teacher in the world, to have anything in common with love.

Samuel’s father was in an elated state as well, but he belonged to the National Confederation of Labour, and I’ve probably never met anyone so damned idealistic. The sharp tongues of the Cantón bourgeoisie (the only one, they claimed, that mattered) put it about that, on the night of 14 April, while the three of us were singing Riego’s anthem at the befuddled priest from our balcony, Samuel’s father took Samuel by the hand and marched off to the military barracks, trusting blindly in a spontaneous revolt that, making the most of the Republican fervour, would give rise to an anarchist counterstate. It seems the child got away, but he was arrested and his knuckles whipped with a riding crop, or at least that was the story the Cantón’s bourgeois women put about, who seemed to have perfected a method of inventing systems of torture, as they would demonstrate later on. When I asked Samuel about it, he denied everything: his father had slept off his drinking spree like everybody else, at home, and his knuckles the following morning showed no signs of having been tortured. Even so, I was always left with the doubt: who could trust him after all that business about coming for tea at my house?

And yet, in my house, the arrival of the Republic did make itself felt. Casal would turn up every afternoon, full of conjectures and projects for the summer’s election campaign he wanted to consult with Lucía. The two of them would sit down and discuss things, and then Lucía would spend hours writing those letters that didn’t interest me at all, but must have been fairly decisive when it came to what Galicianists in Coruña were doing those days. Every time an answer arrived, Casal would sit down at the kitchen table with Lucía and start to fantasize: ‘I never imagined his handwriting would be like that,’ he would say, or, ‘Don’t they teach philosophers how to write properly?’ They would spend hours poring over the letters, coming out with criticism and all sorts of things, he would take notes and get into lengthy discourses with Lucía I thought I would never be able to decipher. Had I not forgotten them, I’d probably appreciate I was right. The truth is I have no idea exactly what kind of politics Lucía and Casal were discussing on those post-Republican days when they kissed little and talked much.

One day, however, he arrived with a despondent air. He looked different, more lonely, ill at ease. He was extremely sensitive and, at the slightest provocation, would accuse Lucía of thinking he was stupid, or couldn’t read, and ask himself why on earth he had allowed himself to be governed by a woman… This last comment finally exhausted Lucía’s patience, and she threatened to throw him out of the house and fling his clothes out of the window if he didn’t tell her what was wrong.

‘Everybody knows the things I say at party meetings are not my own.’

Suddenly, he turned to look at me. This is something I can remember. He looked at me the way Paris looked at Achilles on the day of battle, and I couldn’t understand it. All I know is that Casal stared at me as if I were older and had been present at party meetings or discussions. I glimpsed a trace of shame in his look, which made me feel sorry for him, though at the time I tried to convince myself that, if I wanted to be like him when I grew up, I couldn’t permit myself to feel sorry for Casal.

Lucía had to ask him if he’d gone mad, an eight-year-old child had no idea about originality in political ideas. I couldn’t quite understand what made Lucía say this but, most of all, I was flummoxed by the role I had to play in this story that had suddenly diverted their attention away from politics, philosophers and freedom, and made them start talking about me. This scene is etched on my memory because it was the first time I heard the word ‘originality’. What a long word – originality! It sounded natural on Lucía’s lips, as if only she were capable of pronouncing it in all its glorious length. Originality.

At this point, Casal paced slowly towards the sofa, rubbing his eyes and temples with tiredness, as if his limbs weighed heavily; he sat down, gave me another doleful look (I was right in front of him, sitting on the floor, uncertain how to react, since I still wasn’t sure why the focus had turned to me) and pulled me over. He grabbed my hand and, in all the time that followed, didn’t let go, but carried on squeezing until it hurt, though I would never have dared admit it was hurting, I somehow knew it was better to let him carry on squeezing, it wouldn’t do me any lasting damage, and it seemed that what perhaps Casal needed was a silent hand in which to deposit all his shame, anger, rage and two-headed love of living at a crossroads between two families.

That was when Casal broke down. Lucía and I were stunned, this was the last thing we’d been expecting.

I realize now, or at least I imagine, that other sharp tongues than the bourgeois ones in the Cantón – that is to say, the members of the Sisterhood – had started weaving a new suit for Lucía in the light of what they called the stark evidence of Casal’s speeches and barefaced cheek. Barefaced cheek above all else. He was suddenly assailed by a wave of doubts and problems, the difficulty of choosing not between two women, but between two ways of life: the publishing wizard Ánxel Casal’s public persona and that handsome man who arrived at our house, gave me books, kissed Lucía and fiddled with her enormous ring, laughed and gave you such a transparent look it left you reeling.

She approached him, took my hand out of his (finally, the blood could circulate!), moved me out of the way, sat down beside him, placed a hand on his nape, another on his leg, and asked in a tremulous voice, ‘Since when did you care what others have to say about us? When did you stop laughing at them?’ And he replied, ‘When I realized they were looking at us as if we were the killers of children.’

Every time I recall this, I feel the terrible shiver that ran down my spine when I heard this.

Casal’s weakness that day was what started to make Lucía feel afraid. She did her best to put a brave face on it, like it was water off a duck’s back, and it was still just as easy to be absolutely free when you loved somebody as much as she loved Casal. But the campaign and build-up to the campaign for the elections of June 1931 were not the hope-filled period for Lucía it says in the history books, they were a private torment she endured with dignity and a touch of superiority, something she was helped in a lot by Isaura, who, with her staggering sense of discretion, protected her in the market and at the fishmonger’s, helping to crush the rumours that almost finished them off. Perhaps Isaura also comprehended this kind of love.

Even so, at night, I would hear Lucía weeping with rage, and yet I never told anybody, not even Samuel or Casal. Lucía must have died with the conviction her nocturnal laments were her own unconfessable secret.

Time was running out. One day, Casal told us he was moving the publishing house to Santiago and left. I have no idea why he did this. There must have been a very good reason for him to choose to distance himself from Lucía, and it can’t have been the political situation, Miramontes or the business. Unless, after the weakness of the other day, it was one of those three reasons that had suddenly acquired a different weight in Casal’s soul. All I know is that it seemed to me the world had suddenly invaded us from back to front, and Casal was hell-bent on retracing our steps and leaving us behind, as if we had done something. So, first Lucía came running after him, with me on her back, to Coruña, and then he departed for Santiago, the city they said was mine, but seemed so distant in my memory…

I couldn’t understand, but there was one thing that was clear to me: not for Casal or the devil in person would I allow anyone to take me back to Santiago. All I wanted was to live in the lights of Coruña, on the sand of the beach that was Troy, among the squid of Saturday afternoons and the book of Don Avelino. We were happy there, or at least I thought so. Happy in appearance, like everything in Coruña.

This made me wonder whether Casal had left on my account. I confessed this to Samuel one day when I could bear it no longer. I thought perhaps I’d got on Casal’s nerves because of something I’d done, something I hadn’t realized. ‘Did you ever give him an evil look?’ Samuel asked. Nothing. ‘If I did, it wasn’t deliberate,’ I replied while pursuing a crab in a rock pool with a stick. Then perhaps the one I’d annoyed or given a bad look to was Miramontes, in her shop of remnants… ‘That’s impossible,’ I cut in. How could I have given Miramontes the evil eye when she was always handing out sweets? And if she didn’t like me, then why did she call me over, ruffle my hair and stuff sweets in my pocket?

‘Tactics,’ said Samuel, and he fell to thinking, staring out to sea, pulling the sock from under his shirt and then putting it back, perhaps because he realized there would be no fighting in Troy on that gloomy day.

It’s possible Samuel wasn’t so wide of the mark with what he said about tactics. I don’t know how, at the age of eight, we could come up with such a contorted explanation for the simple fact that Casal felt remorse. I started to believe that Miramontes pretended to like me so Casal would feel guilty. This meant I wasn’t as irresistible as I thought, nor was Casal so good, just and transparent, since he was capable of inflicting suffering on a woman who, setting aside the humiliation, turned the other cheek (as dictated by the norm) and so dignified her suffering in front of the Coruña world of appearances (again, as dictated by the norm). In reality, it was probably just that María loved him above everything else in the world and, like us, didn’t want to lose him.

It took me many years to see this. Given that I was going to be left without any sweets, since they were leaving Coruña, and in the knowledge that I wouldn’t come across her any more in front of the doorway of the remnants shop, I decided from this day onwards to hate Miramontes with all my soul. At that moment, she represented the sole cause of all my and Lucía’s suffering. This was unforgivable.

Samuel and I continued to think like this until one morning in October, when Casal turned up on the doorstep, smiling broadly, as if nothing had happened, happily reminding me of that first day when we had come to a gentlemen’s agreement to hide from the world the fact he came visiting Lucía’s house and to suspend the punishment in progress of having to count the dots on the wall, that day I started wanting to be like Casal when I was older. ‘You’ve really grown,’ he said, and carefully held my head to give me a frank kiss on my right cheek. At this point, I forgot the fact I couldn’t see him any more and he’d left after squeezing my hand and crying one day. Or, rather, all of that no longer bothered me because Casal had come back and, when Casal was there, for some strange reason, I wasn’t afraid that my family’s murderers might come back, or that a general might rise up in Seville, making Lucía nervous, as had happened during the summer, or that a revolutionary outburst might come over her every time the miners in Asturias rebelled.

Casal came back that day, and suddenly they were in a marvellous mood, Lucía and he, as if all those weeks without Casal had never existed, eating and sharing affection, as if they’d seen each other without my realizing. He brought me more books, and the two of them kept smiling, perhaps because they wanted to make up for lost time or sensed there wouldn’t be so many meetings in the future, not just because of the distance between the two cities. I didn’t understand anything at the time and swore to myself I would never again try to comprehend the relationship between Lucía and Casal. That said, I realized, if they both wanted to be happy in Coruña, Santiago or anywhere else, they would probably have to invent a different life in which only they entered and emerged from a story that would surely be fascinating, precisely because nobody else would be able to interpret it.

Time passed imperceptibly and slowly, as it always does for children. Samuel and I continued to grow in a succession of days during which Troy, chocolate and the beach gave way to swapping picture cards, escaping to the theatre and spending long afternoons fishing. We no longer spoke about Helen and Paris or the stories from Don Avelino’s book, or even about the adventures and misadventures of Lucía and Casal, but about Mae West’s large eyes, Gary Cooper’s way of walking and Charlie Chaplin’s soft smile, which made us burst out laughing.

I don’t know how we got to this point, but we suddenly started talking about Troy as if it were a film and we had never played such a game on the beach, but all our lives had been spent playing the roles of Achilles and Penthesilea on a large, white sheet. In our fantasies, I was Rudolph Valentino, Carlos Gardel or sometimes Buster Keaton, Johnny Weissmuller even. Samuel stuttered out the names of Lillian Gish, Pola Negri, Mary Pickford and, above all, Gloria Swanson or Imperio Argentina, but there was no doubt that for him Penthesilea would be Greta Garbo. Had we carried on playing Troy as when we were younger, I’m quite sure Samuel would have gone out of his way to resemble Garbo, to move his eyes in the same way, to walk with the same strides and to wash his face in seawater, just as she washed her face with snow in Queen Christina. But we didn’t play this game any more, so we had to give our characters the names of actors and invent films for them to appear in.

For my part, I had my own cinematographic secrets. At night, before falling asleep, I would fall to wondering what real lovers’ kisses were like, how Lucía and Casal joined lips, since, until I saw Tarzan, I’d never been able to imagine anyone I knew expressing passionate, unbridled love. As a result of this film, it became clear to me that I was completely unaware of the world of sentiment, and this was unforgivable. If a good savage from Africa (why on earth was he white?), lacking all the traits of civilization, could kiss like that, then it must be a natural and integral part of being human, I surmised, like talking, eating or sleeping. I came to the conclusion that the whole of Coruña had been hiding something from me, they were all in love behind my back and trying to stop me seeing on a daily basis what I witnessed on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in the Savoy cinema, where we watched American movies, the ones I liked best, or on ‘Atlas Fridays’ in the Cantón cinema. This was where Samuel preferred to go. He had gone straight from Penthesilea to quasi-intellectual and greatly admired the avant-garde films proceeding from Germany, France and, most of all, Russia, which had been banned for such a long time, as his father said. He didn’t mind paying the 2.50 pesetas it cost, just as I would happily dole out the 2 or 3 pesetas I had saved for weeks in order to be able to go to the Savoy, the Kiosko Alfonso, the París, the Rosalía or the Ideal in Gaiteira to see Chaplin’s films, Tarzan, King Kong or that Frankenstein by James Whale that moved me greatly when the monster, Boris Karloff, engaged tenderly with the girl and made you forget you were watching a horror movie, a reflection of life, in which no one in their right mind would deliberately go about killing a child.

The Savoy turned into the most fantastical place in the whole of Coruña, replacing Riazor Beach and causing me to dream of unimaginable lives, forbidden loves, unusual smells of wood and curtain velvet and tastes that always ended with the memory of champagne on the day of the Republic. This is where I discovered that it wasn’t Coruña hiding its way of loving from me, but rather that, because of all the Hollywood films we watched on Savoy afternoons, we’d all learned to love differently.

For this reason, I must be from one of the first generations that can say how they gave their first kiss in tender childhood. Though I have to admit my childhood was no longer quite so tender, judging by the depths plunged by that kiss inside María’s mouth. This is something I shall never forget.

María was a girl about my age, perhaps a little older, who, at the time I’m talking about, no longer seemed like such a child as Samuel and I did. She was at least a head taller, she was slim and, when she walked, she resembled a music box. I sometimes still dream of her as she was on the day I met her, aged about twelve or thirteen, dancing with a tutu inside a box and blowing me a kiss as I gaze in her direction, in an image taken straight from Lolita that still drives me crazy.

María had black hair and the largest eyes I’d ever seen, dark, with long lashes, and a small mouth that always seemed on the verge of saying ‘oui’. When María smiled, I felt a sense of tranquillity. I suppose it was this affirmative gesture, this peace I’d always needed so badly, that made me fall head over heels in love with her – at the time I could only ever fall head in heels in love, as in the films at the Savoy cinema, where I scrutinized her in the distance on weekend afternoons.

I only told Samuel my secret:

‘That girl is so pretty!’

‘Vitola?’

‘What?’

‘Vitola, Vitoliña, María Victoria, I think. Don’t you know her then?’

‘No, why should I?’

‘Because she used to live near your house and Miramontes’.’

‘Well, I hadn’t realized… you say her name is María?’

‘No. Well… yes, but that’s not what they call her.’

‘How do you know?’

I was sometimes astonished by Samuel’s capacity to know everything. Had it not been that he’d been saying for years he wanted to be a fashion designer, I would have said his real vocation was to be a janitor. He knew the name of this muse! Of course, the reason Samuel knew her name was because he couldn’t bear her. ‘She’s stuck-up and dumb. And she’s always wearing the most ridiculous shoes.’ The truth is, to be fair, the shoes she was wearing were pretty ugly, but I didn’t care, on her feet they struck me as the most wonderful pair of shoes in the world, Cinderella’s own glass slippers, if need be. As to her being stuck-up and dumb, I didn’t pay much attention to what Samuel had to say. How could such a woman be stuck-up and dumb? Samuel must have made a mistake, though I had to admit he wasn’t entirely wrong in his reasoning: according to him, how could she not be stuck-up and dumb if she never went to the Savoy with her girl friends? It must be because none of them could bear her, he said. And yet I preferred to think she didn’t go with her friends because she was above human and divine concerns, and had no time for conventional friendships – she would have had to be friends with Athena at least, or the Virgin Mary, or Eleanor Roosevelt. I liked to believe this girl was something like Lucía as a teenager, someone with deep friendships she cultivated by letter or in secret, who went to the cinema purely for pleasure, like me. But the signals Samuel had emitted didn’t help me much, so I was forced to insist:

‘How come you know so much about her?’

‘I don’t know. When she’s here on holiday, she walks straight past my house with her parents, and my mother always says, “Look how pretty Vitoliña is becoming!” My father then replies, “You’re out of your mind. Can’t you see she’s stuck-up and dumb, just like her parents?” That’s how I know her name is Vitola, or Vitoliña, from María Victoria, and has been all her life, and she’s stuck-up and dumb, just like her parents. The fact she’s pretty is plain to see. But the bit about the shoes is mine.’

Samuel obviously knew nothing at all. Though, to tell the truth, I wasn’t really fazed by these details about María Victoria’s life and clearly assigned less importance to her footwear than my friend did. It was enough for me to see her, to inhale her vanilla cologne when she passed nearby or when I went out of my way to sit beside her. It was enough for me that the Savoy had somehow turned into that girl and her Hollywood aura. For me, she had to be María, I got to the conclusion this name, the story evoked by this name, was the one that best suited the girl in the Savoy. But soon this wasn’t enough, and I started longing for María to realize there was a boy out there who was crazy about her. She who was always so distant…

Since Samuel only served for personal descriptions, I took the decision to consult further afield. Having pondered long and hard how to conceal my embarrassment, I plucked up all my courage and, one Saturday morning, asked Lucía to buy me the same cologne that Casal used. I made the tactical error of not shielding myself from Isaura, who burst out laughing as soon as the question I’d spent days formulating came tumbling out of my mouth, ‘Lucía, will you buy me Casal’s cologne?’

The problem was Lucía didn’t know what cologne Casal used. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know what your own boyfriend smells of?’ I blurted out. Suppressing her sense of mirth, she suggested I talk to him directly, he would no doubt be able to guide me on the question of prices and retail establishments as well. Isaura marched off to the kitchen, shaking with laughter. At that moment, when we were alone, Lucía gave me that intelligent look she always had, raising her plucked right eyebrow, and posed the question I had been dreading, ‘So you like some girl?’

Some girl! I was more offended than I had been in years! ‘What do you mean, some girl!’ I retorted, and felt the blood rising to my face. On top of the sitting-room table, there was a jug with white and yellow roses, quite large, full of greenery. I grabbed a book and sat as far behind the flowers as I could, with the intention of remaining there for the rest of eternity, until Lucía came over, sat down beside me (also smelling of vanilla) and said Casal was coming for lunch that day, better to discuss the topic of colognes with him. She also said she was the one who knew about women’s perfumes, and perhaps what I needed to know was the fragrance emitted by women – not how I had to smell.

I didn’t care. I wanted to smell like Casal. If Casal had managed to make Lucía fall in love with him, then his cologne must have had something to do with it, and María, like Lucía, would inevitably fall at my feet. She would indeed have fallen at my feet, having fainted, because, once I got hold of a cologne and tried it on for the first time so I could seek her out one Saturday in the Savoy, I didn’t pay much attention to Coco Chanel’s advice to sprinkle a few drops of perfume in the places you wish to be kissed. I must have wanted María to lick me all over because I used up half the bottle at the first attempt, including my slicked-back hair, which looked as if it had gone under the tongue of a cow, and of course not only did she not come anywhere near me, but nobody wanted or was able to sit in my vicinity. Only Samuel, needless to say, loyal to the core, endured what friends are capable of enduring and opened my eyes with his astonishing sincerity, ‘If Casal smells like this, I don’t know how Lucía puts up with him, my friend.’ I reached the conclusion that, to be like Casal, what I had to do was glower like him, turn my head like him, and not use any cologne at all.

Text © Inma López Silva

Translation © Jonathan Dunne