“The truth is, I’m bored,” she said quietly, even though her neighbor couldn’t hear her or absolve her for all her suspicions. “That’s all it is . . .”
In October 1963, Sara Gómez Morales began to attend classes far removed from the prestigious schooling of her recent past. She remembered the torments of algebra and compared that to learning shorthand, which she viewed as a pastime, a simple technique to be mastered through hours of practice. She felt similarly about typing, although the typewriter seemed alien to someone accustomed to using only a pen and paper. That summer she had learned many other strange things: working out how much bleach was needed to wash white clothes without damaging the fabric or turning it yellow, for instance. Ironing a jacket through a wet cloth. Knowing exactly when a sauce made from tomatoes was ready, the moment when the flesh had given up its juices but the oil hadn’t yet risen to the surface. Cleaning anchovies, removing the head and backbone without damaging the flesh. Beating the doormat with that giant wicker carpet beater. Cleaning the grouting between the old, dull tiles, applying a foul-smelling liquid with a little brush, and later, once it was dry, spreading it over the tiles with a cloth in an attempt to restore some of the shine stolen by the years, rubbing until her arms ached.
Sara learned how to do all of this with the same determination, the same sharp stubbornness with which she had sweated over math problems, muttering under her breath that those two bloody trains that left Madrid and Barcelona at the same time and passed through Calatayud thirty-five minutes apart wouldn’t get the better of her. This sense of pride, this unconditional self-belief, was the only thing she had, the only aspect of her life that wasn’t given to her by other people. It defined her and was both a flaw and a virtue, changing the course of her life one fine morning in July. Sara had returned from the walk she took every day on the pretext of buying bread, to find her room tidied, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe and her bed made.
Until then, she’d lived with her parents like a guest, a visitor, the natural successor to the little girl from another home who came only for Sunday lunch. For a fortnight they had all played their part in this fiction. She emerged from her room only at mealtimes and nobody else went in there. Dirty clothes piled up on the bed with open books, biscuit wrappers and half-eaten bags of chips.That morning, her mother had broken the unspoken rule by tidying her room, and Sara didn’t even have to wonder why she flushed with shame at the thought of it. But the room, with its sloping floor, now seemed bigger, more comfortable and more welcoming than before. At that moment, Sara Gómez Morales finally confronted her destiny. Everyone had treated her gently but she had only managed to survive the confusion of her precarious existence by learning to be hard on herself.When her godmother had said goodbye to her at the door to the house in the CalleVelázquez, there had been no mercy, and there would be none now either. Sara thought of the room in her dolls’ house that was a mirror image of the one she used to inhabit, a world created for a little girl whose only sin had been to grow up. And once again she felt the anger she’d felt on a night a lifetime ago, the night she turned sixteen, when she suddenly understood not only why she could no longer fit her legs under her desk, but also why she would never have another desk made for her. Doña Sara had grown tired of playing mother and didn’t deserve to see her shed so much as a tear.What Sara could not allow now was that her own mother, who never even had the chance to teach her to play, should treat her like the young lady she no longer was.
Her mother was in the kitchen, chopping onions, garlic and parsley on a wooden chopping board. Sara went and stood beside her, not knowing what to say, where to start.The seconds passed slowly.The garlic was chopped so finely it was almost a paste.The knife reduced the onion to tiny pieces, and Sara silently envied the happy unconcern of the blade. She couldn’t bring herself to risk either humiliating her mother by thanking her, or offending her by asking her never to clean her room again. Then, Sebastiana turned and scraped the contents of the chopping board into a frying pan, wiped her hands on her apron, and smiled.
“Hello, dear,” she greeted her daughter in a bright voice. “How are things going?”
“Fine,” answered Sara.“What are you making?”
“Beef stew, for lunch.”
“Lovely! Are you adding potatoes?”
“Yes, but not till later,” said her mother, looking away, glancing at the pan, as if confused by this sudden curiosity and her daughter’s exaggerated enthusiasm.“Potatoes are softer than meat, so they cook quickly. If I put them in now, they’ll go mushy. So that’s why you have to wait until almost the end. Half an hour is plenty.”
“Oh,” murmured Sara,“I didn’t know that.”
Neither of them could find anything more to say. Sebastiana washed her hands, and once she’d dried them thoroughly, she washed the chopping board and dried it with the same excessive care she had applied to her fingers, cuticles and nails. Sara realized how ill at ease her mother was, but her own hands were empty and she wouldn’t find a knife in any drawer that could cut through the tough, invisible membrane that separated them, keeping them at a polite, cautious distance from each other. They had never learned to talk to each other and both could feel the weight of the air above their heads, pressing down on them like a plunger.Then Sebastiana put her hand to her forehead and smiled.
“The washing!” she exclaimed, relieved to have found something to say at last.“I’ve got to hang out the washing, I forgot.”
“No, Mama,” Sara said quickly, looking round for the washing basket, which was on a chair. She grabbed it before her mother could get to it. “I’ll do it.”
She opened the window and found a little basket of pegs on the ledge. She struggled with the pulleys until she realized that clothes were only hung beyond the knot. She was determined not to make any more mistakes after that.“It’s easy,” she told herself every time she pegged an item of clothing to the line. Easy.” She worked slowly, taking care over every movement, thinking she mustn’t let anything drop down into the courtyard. She took a shirt from the washing basket and turned it upside down, then the right way up, then upside down again.
“Mama,” she said at last, “how do you hang shirts—by the shoulders or by the hem?”
“By the hem. And it’s better if you peg it at the seams, because that way the peg marks don’t show quite as much and it’s easier to iron.”
Sara hung out the shirts correctly but almost everything else was wrong, though she did manage to pair up all the socks and hang out the entire basket without anything falling into the courtyard. When she’d finished she felt quite pleased with herself, not realizing that taking twenty-five minutes over this simple task was ridiculous.
“Right,” she said as she closed the window and turned around, holding the washing basket, not really knowing what to do with it. “That’s done.”
And then she fell silent. Her mother was standing very near, looking at Sara with moist eyes, wringing her apron. Sara couldn’t bear the tremble in her mother’s eyes, the veiled tears dancing in her pupils.
“Don’t cry, Mama.” Sara threw down the washing basket and went to her, choking back violent sobs.“I’m so sorry.”
“Why should you be sorry, dear?”
“I don’t know, Mama, I don’t know.”
Sebastiana opened her short, thick arms, and Sara, who was much taller, shrank into them.They stayed like that for a long time, belatedly learning to communicate without words. Meanwhile, the stew caught on the bottom of the pan.That day they had to have fried eggs and potatoes for lunch. When Arcadio arrived home at two that afternoon he didn’t ask any questions, but realized that something had changed.
If Sara Gómez Morales was ever cruel and merciless, it was then, when she decided to tear off her old skin with her own fingernails.This was the moment when she actively chose—or thought she was choosing—the only life left to her, and fed her anger until she had suppressed any temptation to look back. Sometimes, at night, she found herself thinking of Juan Mari, Maruchi, and the Beatles, amiable inhabitants of a distant shore, but she quickly tried to forget them, to bury them beneath other memories. Even in her worst moments, when she felt utterly miserable, Sara remained cool-headed enough to understand that anything—hate, bitterness, revenge—would do her less harm than the soft, rosy nostalgia of a string of broken dreams.
And, for a time, she succeeded, especially during the day. Sara threw herself into a frenzied schedule of activities that kept her busier than she’d ever been before. She made sure to keep herself occupied inwardly too, rigorously controlling the flow and nature of her thoughts as she concentrated on the new tasks she tackled each morning. Sometimes she ended up with a headache as she forced herself to be perpetually cheerful. At others, she resorted to the same childish fantasizing that she had indulged in only a few months earlier, when she daydreamed about married life with Juan Mari—their honeymoon in Venice, a spacious, elegant home, summers by a quiet beach in the north, a couple of beautiful blond children in due course—but now she planned a very different future, limited to the confines of a poky, old third-floor flat. She imagined doing up the bathroom and kitchen, enlarging the windows, laying wooden floors, knocking down half the walls and erecting others—mad schemes that would have seemed less so if she had ever learned to plane floorboards or mix cement herself.
Her parents listened to her, their shoulders hunched, exchanging alarmed looks as they watched her going about the house, never stopping, moving furniture and then moving it back again, tying back the curtains and then letting them go, tidying things that were already tidy, battling against dust that wasn’t there.
“I don’t know, Arcadio, she’s behaving very oddly,” whispered Sebastiana occasionally.“She’s like a nun.”
He nodded without a word, playing the part his daughter had assigned him in a belated, painful and unlikely rebirth.
“Well . . .”
Sometimes, after supper, Sara would take out a cardboard box from the chest of drawers where her mother kept the linen. She sat on the sofa beside Arcadio, and made him look at the dog-eared, yellowed old photographs it contained. He would have preferred never to set eyes on them again, but he gathered his patience and answered the questions of this willful, confused girl whose curiosity seemed never to be satisfied.
“This is you, isn’t it?”
Arcadio in his militiaman’s uniform, holding a rifle, with a cartridge belt slung across his body, standing beside a large granite rock.
“Where was it taken?”
“In the
sierra
, near Guadarrama.”
“When was that?”
“I’m not sure, dear, I don’t remember. It must have been at the start of the war.”
“And who took the photo?”
“A German photographer who was a friend of Don Mario.”
“Who was Don Mario?”
“Somebody I knew.”
But Sara wouldn’t accept this, wouldn’t accept only scraps of information from a remote past that was beginning to seem desperately important to her. She forced her father to talk, to search his memory for names, dates, details as trivial as breadcrumbs that she ground down with her teeth until she had absorbed them completely.
“And here?”
A group of trade unionists photographed outside the headquarters of the Workers’ Party in Madrid, dressed in their Sunday best and holding their hats, the younger ones smiling. Some had raised their fists—Arcadio among them—and they were gathered round a man dressed in black, who wore a tie and a hat, and had pale eyes and an aquiline nose. He was smiling at the camera confidently, seductively.
“And this gentleman?”
“Largo Caballero.”
“Was he on your side?”
“Yes, of course. He was a leader. One of most important ones.”
“He looks very elegant.”
“Does he? There were much more elegant men than him, believe me. But he was my leader.”
“And what was he doing there?”
“Well, I don’t know. He must have come for a meeting, or a conference. I don’t remember, it was a long time ago.”
“And this person here is Don Mario, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” said Arcadio, smiling despite himself. “This is Don Mario.”
Sara knew all the features of the rough, sunburned faces by heart, the names, and the stories hidden behind each picture. But still she went on looking at each photograph over and over again, pointing to it, interpreting its edges and curves, presences and absences, shadows and symbols, as if the images were some new kind of alphabet.