The Street of the Three Beds (24 page)

Her eyes brimmed with tears that couldn't find their way down. Her voice also trembled. “Maybe it is my fault. I won't deny it. It's true I wanted those things, but not at such a high price. Your silence through all these years is very hard to take, Roderic. You've pushed me into a corner of your life as if you had sent me into exile. I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive you.”

For a few seconds no more words were spoken. They had told each other everything there was to tell, and the office seemed too small to hold the three of them. For the first time in the conversation, Maurici referred to the future.

“I won't judge you, Father. But from now on I don't want any part in your business or to depend on you in any way.”

“Is that so?” his father quipped. “And what will you do? How do you plan to make a living? You're not fit for any kind of work!”

“I'm a lawyer. I'll open a practice.”

“A lawyer! Ha! A lawyer! Don't make me laugh! You passed the examinations thanks to my connections, otherwise you'd never have graduated. Some lawyer! You better forget it.”

Maurici gave him a serious, distant look—too distant for him to be touched by the scorn or by the truth he recognized in those words. When Roderic's hilarity subsided, he simply said, “Farewell, Father.”

* * *

Maurici intended to finish up the tasks still pending at the factory and to leave in a week. With Caterina, he'd rented an apartment with a long balcony in the old city, where she planned to run a preschool. One afternoon, when his days at the family home in Passeig de Sant Joan were nearing the end, his mother went to the weekly card game at her friend Adela's. On her return, she was taken ill with nausea and a fever and had to go to bed. Doro, the maid, helped her undress and tried to reassure her with brandy, hot towels, and a running monologue.

When Maurici came back from the factory, he found her as pale as a ghost. Her forehead was burning. Influenza or a summer cold, he assumed. Doro had sent for the family doctor, who would arrive any minute.

As he was leaving the bedroom, Lídia called him. “Don't go! Stay with me for a while.”

He took off his coat and tie and sat by the bed, which smelled of cologne. Then he realized it had been years since he'd set foot in his parents' bedroom. Casting a circular glance, he thought that if Lídia's taste had prevailed in the rest of the apartment, that room—imposing and bleak—was Roderic's haven and bore his mark. The wallpaper was a plain, dark blue; the rugs, minimal, leaving most of the cold tiles exposed; the oak bed, brought from his parents' home, heavy. Above the headboard hung a cross made to the measurements of the Aldabòs's faith, a timid reminder of a possible afterlife. He couldn't help but wonder if his mother had been happy in that room, in that bed inherited from the father-in-law to whom she'd never warmed. The dressing room, on the other hand, with its Louis XV furniture; the armoire with the full-length mirror and gold tassels hanging from the door keys; the carefully selected, graceful crystal and porcelain knickknacks; all the sensuous comforts civilization could conceive of, was clearly Lídia's territory.

Roderic Aldabò returned from work at the usual time: well past nine. As Maurici heard the key turn in the lock, he went to meet him.

“Mother's not feeling well.”

They exchanged no more words than those that were necessary. Roderic, with a scowl engraved on his face, avoided his son's eyes. Without taking off his hat, he walked straight to the bedroom.

From the hall, Maurici watched him bend over the pillow, place his hand on his wife's forehead, and ask in a tone reserved just for her, “Lídia, what's wrong?”

Five minutes later the doorbell rang. It was Dr. García, a small, plump, bespectacled man in his fifties. The birth of Maurici in that very room had been one of the earliest challenges of his career. Needless to say he'd been the doctor of the Palau family, who deemed him not presentable but highly competent.

With the preoccupied expression characteristic of the medical class, whether the case was serious or not, he listened to the patient's heart and lungs before examining her tongue, eyeballs, and the skin of her face, neck, hands, arms, and legs. Lídia's eyes, fixed on him, glowed like torches.

“Mrs. Aldabò, have you drunk from a public fountain lately?”

She looked up at the ceiling, pondering her answer, which came out in a weak voice, “A few days ago I went shopping downtown with Doro. Instead of getting a cab, we walked to see the construction around the old bridge. It was very hot and in one of those narrow streets there was a fountain.”

“Did Doro drink too?”

“I never would have if she hadn't encouraged me. I'm not used to drinking from fountains as maids do, . . . but she drank so eagerly . . . and she kept saying, ‘Aren't you thirsty, Madam?' And it was so hot under the afternoon sun, and the water was so cool . . .”

Dr. García also examined Doro, who showed no symptoms so far. Then he stepped into the office where father and son waited in a state of high tension.

“I'm afraid it's typhus.”

“What?” Roderic Aldabò's face was distorted with shock.

“You mean there is a typhus epidemic?” asked Maurici, also stunned by the blow.

“We have one every time there's hunger and hardship.”

“Hunger and hardship?” Roderic repeated. “Barcelona's more prosperous than ever. How can hunger and hardship affect my wife?”

“Hardship affects everyone, Mr. Aldabò. Who knows what lives in the sewers of this city besides thousands of rats.”

Maurici's memory replayed like a phonograph the last conversation with Rita. He could hear the echo of his own voice repeating what he'd read in the papers: that in Barcelona rats outnumbered people. At the time, it was just a meaningless statement—a figure, an abstraction. Since that day, he'd plunged into sewers and smelled them from inside. He'd seen a few rats, big and small. Up close, they looked worse than from a distance.

“This time there are infected waters coming down from the mountains,” Dr. García went on, wiping the sweat off his forehead with a wrinkled handkerchief. “I must be frank with you, it's a severe case. When the symptoms are so virulent . . . you'd better watch out. It's highly contagious.”

Roderic moved to the guest room. Maurici, with an air of defeat he'd never shown before, explained to Caterina that his mother was seriously ill and he'd have to postpone the move for a few days, perhaps a few weeks . . . Dr. García had given her less than a month. Father and son took turns going to the factory, so that one of them could stay home monitoring the course of the disease.

The doctor, on his frequent visits, instructed Doro to scrub the bedroom with bleach and change the sheets daily. All the windows remained open. A nurse wearing a mask bathed the patient, rubbed her body with alcohol, and stayed with her at night. Even so, father and son—both alert to her every whisper and breathing—rarely slept. Lídia lost weight—and hair in handfuls, while a smattering of red flowers bloomed on her skin. She refused to eat, but the thirst she'd attempted to quench that hot afternoon constantly revived, like an inexhaustible longing. The water she'd drunk from the fountain had exacerbated rather than extinguished it.

Sometimes her temperature would subside and a wave of euphoria would ripple through the Aldabò home. It was a hallucination. A few hours later the fever climbed with
renewed vigor, reclaiming that body contaminated by a rare moment in her life when she'd blended with the people.

The second week inaugurated the phase of mental confusion Dr. García had foretold. In the wee hours she called “Maurici! Maurici!” It was useless for the nurse to try to calm her down. When he went to her, her vacant gaze wandered over his face, “You're not Maurici.” If Roderic sought to reassure her, she replied in a tone of strange desolation, “Roderic, where's my son? I want Maurici. I've lost my child.” On those few occasions when she recognized him she whispered secretively and in feverish excitement, “Let's run away to the country!” Or she begged him to play the piano at four in the morning. One night when the nurse dozed off, Lídia drew strength from some deep recess of her being and left her bed. Trailing the sheet like a bridal train, she wandered into her son's bedroom. In those days it didn't take much to wake him up. He jumped to his feet in time to catch her before she fell to the floor. As he took her back to her room, she repeated like a naughty child, “Let's go, Maurici, now that no one can hear us! You are the real Maurici, aren't you? Not the other one, are you?”

One early morning, while night and day fought the battle of dawn, her breathing became irregular. The two men, alerted by the nurse, rushed to the sickroom. For an instant, she stared at them with the expression of someone who has glimpsed an extra dimension. She turned her head slightly to the oil lamp on the nightstand and said, “Blow it out.” It was the definitive good night.

After mass at Santa Anna's church and the funeral at the new cemetery in Poble Nou, Roderic and Maurici Aldabò shook hands like automata with the endless line of mourners. Maurici felt as if in a state of weightless levitation, his legs flabby at the knees. Maybe it was he who had died. Despite his ashen complexion, the circles of fatigue under
his eyes, and the trails of tears on his cheeks, his face had the vulnerability that makes men beautiful.

As he stood alone in the Palau pantheon, he realized that his father was not only crushed with grief but deprived of the emotional resources to release it. Roderic's eyes appeared glazed over, his body limp, his pain unable to flow. Maurici felt an impulse to embrace him for the last time, but his father's gaze froze it. Maurici understood that he blamed him for everything. His mother's death, instead of bringing them together, had pulled them apart.

* * *

The next Monday when Maurici left the factory, where unattended business had piled up throughout Lídia's illness, he went to La Mina. It was unlikely he'd find Dr. Miralpeix there, but he wanted to inspect the place and see if somebody could give him information.

When, a long time ago, Proverbs had mentioned La Mina, Maurici hadn't imagined it as it was: a ramshackle tavern with a front entrance and a side door that opened to a courtyard, where two women picked minuscule fauna from each other's hair. Inside there was a metallic bar, and ill-assorted tables and benches were scattered everywhere. Beyond the tavern, Maurici saw a larger room under a dome held by columns. The dark, humid stones of the floor were unevenly covered with sawdust. One of the walls was lined with wine casks; the others featured built-in benches with ropes hanging from hooks at either end. The purpose of the ropes eluded him. The architecture of the building betrayed its past as a medieval convent, which had survived as an anachronistic witness to the period when the neighborhood had been the sacred ground of the city.
Even though some sunlight squeezed into the narrow street, the inside atmosphere was a murky brew of smoke, sweat, alcoholic breath, and germs.

One man stood up every time a pedestrian tossed a cigarette butt in the street. He picked it up eagerly and buried it in his pocket. When he'd collected a few, he rolled a cigarette and tried to sell it to one of his mates.

The stench and squalor made a strong impact on Maurici's state of mind, already devastated by his mother's recent death. He felt faint and it took him a few seconds to stop the objects from spinning around him. When he gathered the strength to face the cave dwellers he identified tubercular men, tattooed sailors with protruding jaws who seemed stuck in a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder, hustlers and rogues flashing knives under their belts, and over-the-hill women clinging to their necks, . . . the debris of the harbor, jail, or syphilis—faces that didn't know if they were inside or outside and whether it was night or day.

When he asked the bartender for Dr. Miralpeix, he met with a hostile look.

“Nobody's got a name in here.”

Uneasy about the concentration of jackknives mounting around him, he took a couple of bills from his wallet. Instantly men, women, and specimens of other sexes—not enough among all of them to compile a full set of teeth—swarmed to the summons.

“Tell me who you're lookin' for, I'll find him.”

“What did you lose, honey?”

He gave a description of the abortionist. As he fought off an army of hands prying at his clothes an old woman broke through the crowd, palm held out. Her speech was so slurred Maurici had to cock his ear to make it out.

“Come back six in the mornin', when they wake ‘em up. They—us—see, we mostly sleep here. Come six, they kick us out. Then you'll find ‘im . . . some day or other.”

Mumbling his thanks, Maurici tossed out a handful of coins to buy his escape.

* * *

It took him almost a year to find Dr. Miralpeix. He'd lost track of how many days he'd risen at five o'clock; of the winter nights when, fending off desperate hookers and fearing criminal assaults, he'd landed at La Mina around midnight, when drunken fights peaked at the stage of pandemonium. Sooner or later, amidst the parade of nameless ghosts, he'd identify the light frame, the waxy skin, the wilted moustache, the narcotized eyes. Come that moment, he didn't know what he'd do.

At last he saw him. He saw him one day long after he'd deserted the family home and the factory and had lost all contact with his father. It was a rainy morning. At ten minutes before six, La Mina looked darker than ever. His memory brought back the corridor at La Perla d'Orient and a shiver ran through his body—hard to tell if it was the recollection or the morning frost.

The benches along the walls were packed full. Men and women slumbered sitting up, pressed against each other. Some snored noisily, others muttered fragments of dreams dictated by alcohol. The taut ropes, tied at the hooks, held the torsos up at a forty-five degree angle, while the heads dangled like those of the hanged. The stench of communal sleep was nauseating.