As Sara Gómez Morales slid down to the bottom of the slope, the tragedy of her unborn child came to join her memories, bitterness, anger, rifles and love in a reality that was absolutely flat, grey, featureless, with no emotion and no surprises. Of all the lives she’d coveted in the warm dreams of her future, this was the only one she’d never wanted. But she hadn’t shied away from it; Sara Gómez Morales kept going, always kept going, no turning aside, no looking back, without stopping to rest because resting can sometimes be worse than keeping going. She kept going, in her love of brandy and in the oblivion of that love. She didn’t know what else to do, and she was now too old to learn.
The loss of the child that she had not sought, had not planned, hadn’t even wanted until she gave in to the unforgivable weakness of making it a refuge, hurt her more deeply than she would ever have thought possible, because this selfish project had involved much more than the accidental promise of motherhood. It had been her chance to break the siege, the vicious circle of her life, and yet it had gone wrong all by itself, as if her cards had been marked since birth.The script of her life had never been so succinct, so obvious, so accurate. Sara Gómez Morales—borrowed life, superfluous daughter, mother of no one. She was nothing at all, and would never be anything; she’d be nothing for the rest of her life.
She missed Vicente. Very much. His arms and his words, the trips abroad, breaking up and getting back together. She’d always had so few things that she’d never learned to let any of them go. She’d even come to miss the taste of disappointment, the company of her own tears, the intermittent shudder of all those truncated dreams. Behind the patient, inscrutable smiles with which she’d tried to calm her father’s bewilderment, her mother’s anxiety over the fate of the child, the mistake who had refused to keep growing till the end, there was less pride and more hope than it seemed. Sara hadn’t been counting on Vicente, but she was still in love with him at the time, and the child was his, and with those three simple elements, the variations in the equation were endless. And yet, when Vicente came for her, she couldn’t go with him because this defeat had devastated her inside. It had stolen her faith and changed her forever. She missed Vicente terribly. She regretted having thrown him out of her life, but she knew it was the only way forward, the only thing she could do. She didn’t have the strength to get hooked on disappointment again as a way of life. She knew by now that nothing would rise from the sterile ashes of hope, nothing except more ashes.
When her savings began to run out, Sara convinced herself that she’d recovered enough to start looking for a job. She didn’t find much. She was thirty-five, had a pile of humble diplomas gained on obsolete correspondence courses and no higher qualifications, all of which made her prospects surprisingly worse than the last time she’d looked for a new job. It was as if universities had exploded like popcorn makers in the nine years since then, filling the streets and houses, businesses and factories, with graduates. Sara settled for the best job she could find, even though it was the most inconvenient—an accountant in the offices of a large supermarket where she had no lunch break, changed shifts every week, and was constantly forced to undergo training, sacrificing one Saturday after another to an endless succession of computer courses.This was the only noteworthy novelty in her life until the health of her father—a man who had always seemed relatively healthy despite his chronic lung disease—deteriorated definitively.
Arcadio Gómez Gómez died on the first dawn of 1984. Sara thought that death had chosen a good date for him, because he was conscious almost until the end and was able to say goodbye to his children and almost all of his grandchildren, a privilege he would not have enjoyed had his final hours not arrived during the Christmas holidays. Sebastiana was so bereft, however, that she wouldn’t even let her family comfort her. She shut herself up in her room and told them all, one by one, that she wouldn’t see another New Year’s Eve.
She was wrong, but only just. She outlived her husband by sixteen months. Sara found her dead in her bed one morning in April, the sheets lying tidily over her body and a placid expression on her face, eyes closed, lips parted, as if she were snoring at death. In the middle of the night, her heart had stopped beating without waking her.Although this was a clean and pleasant end, compassionate, in fact the best end that Sara could have wished for her mother, it seemed cruel at first, and somehow more harsh than the long, dry agony that had slowly, mercilessly crumbled away the final weeks of her father’s life. Before the peaceful corpse of the woman who had felt she was not cut out to be a widow, and had had her own way, Sara began to tremble, her fingers shaking, her knees weak. She felt suddenly hot, then cold, and realized that she was about to faint. She sat down quickly on the edge of the bed, on the side her father had left empty when he died.The dizziness threw her senses into disarray, making her feel nauseated for what seemed like an eternity. Later, much later, she was able to cry. By then she’d called work, called her brothers and sisters, and the undertakers were on their way, but she was still alone in the flat.Then she went to the kitchen, sat on a chair, leaned her elbows on the table, covered her face with her hands, and wept; for her mother and her father, for herself, for the suffering that had parted them and the suffering that had brought them back together again, for the stories they’d never managed to tell her and for those she’d heard from other lips, for the stations in the metro every Sunday, and for the green and black lines of an apron, for the traps and tunnels of a duplicitous, lying memory, for the arcades of the Plaza Mayor in black and white, for the pavements of the CalleVelázquez in resplendent color, Sara wept. For her parents’ fate, which had been so dark, so unfair, and for her own, Sara Gómez Morales wept for a long time.
In the bewildering frenzy of the first few days, the constant visitors and sleepless nights, she asked herself many times why this second death had affected her so deeply, so much more profoundly than the first. She’d always been more like her father. She had the same personality, the same useless, obstinate pride, the same anger fermenting deep inside her. She’d inherited Arcadio’s words and silences, his will, his determination, his way of suffering and telling no one.Things would have gone better for her had she been more like her mother, she thought sometimes, more flexible and yielding. Sebastiana adjusted better to the blows of fortune, as well as the caresses. In her, hatred was a requirement of love. In her husband, love had always been a manifestation of hatred. But they had loved each other equally, and had loved each other until the end. Sara, who had only ever loved another woman’s husband, was amazed when she compared her own history of borrowed beds and guilty secrets with the astounding simplicity of her parents’ love. In their whole lives they had fought only one war, and it was a war they had lost. But they’d survived defeat together, unaware that this was a way of beating history at its own game. She loved them both, each in their own way, but perhaps she had always loved her father, the one who was like her, a little more. She’d often felt guilty for this slight preference, although she never betrayed it in either words or gestures. Nevertheless she had mourned Arcadio more briefly, more fleetingly; her grief for him had been ample, private, acute and wide, but it had never paralyzed her as her mother’s death did.
Later, when all the visitors had left and sleep returned, Sara Gómez Morales realized she was alone. She was thirty-eight years old, and she was more alone than ever before. Her hands were empty and she had no home to return to. But then, as if she’d read Sara’s thoughts from afar, the woman chose that moment to come back into her life.
The doorbell rang at exactly five o’clock one afternoon in June, the week after her birthday. Sara almost didn’t open the door, because she wasn’t expecting anyone. “It’ll be some awful traveling salesman,” she thought, but the doorbell continued to ring so insistently that in the end she gave in out of curiosity, and found the last person she was ever expecting to see standing in her doorway.
“Hello, darling,” said her godmother, with a smile that belonged to another time, as if the life they had shared had never come to its abrupt end.“Won’t you ask me in?”
Stunned and unable to move, Sara eventually stepped aside to let her in.
“Of course. I wasn’t expecting you.”
Doña Sara Villamarín Ruiz slowly entered the tiny hallway of her god-daughter’s flat. Before, Sara had always been able to guess which direction she was walking in from the sound of her heels clicking energetically, almost furiously, across the floor, but now she realized that her godmother was shuffling her feet. It had been over ten years since she’d last seen her.
“Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?”
“Of course,” she repeated, as if she were unable to say anything else. She leaned towards her godmother, who’d grown smaller since the last time she’d kissed her.“Of course.”
Doña Sara walked on into the flat, slowly and laboriously, without asking where the living room was. She didn’t need to—the flat was so small it would be impossible to get lost. Sara, who had been dozing on the sofa in the darkened room when the doorbell rang, went ahead to open the blinds.
“Wait. It’s just that it was so hot.There you are. Sit here, in this armchair, it’s very comfortable.Would you like something to drink?”
“A coffee? But only if there’s some already made.”
“It’s all right, I can make some. It won’t take a minute.”
Sara escaped to the kitchen and focused on the simple, methodical task of brewing the coffee as a way of calming herself, but she only half succeeded. By the time the steel lid of the coffee pot began to tremble, she still hadn’t been able to guess what might have prompted her godmother’s visit that afternoon. Many years had passed since their regular contact—first weekly, then fortnightly, then monthly visits that maintained the sham of a relationship between them—had disintegrated into an irregular routine of phone calls, always from her godmother to her, and ending with a promise to visit that Sara had never kept.Their final phone conversation had ended abruptly, and Sara believed it would be their last. In the autumn of 1982, her godmother had offered to speak to Vicente on her behalf, to force him to acknowledge paternity of the child Sara was expecting, hinting that this exchange between social equals would be more successful than any Sara herself might undertake. Sara had told her to go to hell, then hung up. End of story.Yet here she was, almost three years later, sitting in Sara’s living room.
“What lovely coffee, darling,” said Doña Sara after her first sip, with her accustomed, fixed smile, so imperturbable it might have been painted on.
“All coffee’s good nowadays,” thought Sara. But she said nothing, because her godmother’s anachronistic comment, endlessly repeated by an older generation who were used to coffee made with chicory, reminded her that she had before her not the great lady of the past, but a bewildered old woman, overcome by age like any other. Her godmother had always had a rather bird-like face, her nose curved like a beak, with a pointed chin and bulging eyes, but she was no longer the majestic eagle with a predatory stare and backcombed hair who used to receive her in silence, pointing to her watch with her right index finger, but an old owl, the skin on her face wrinkled, soft and trembling, like a curtain flapping in the wind. She was seventy years old, had sunken eyes, and even her willing smile could not mask her weariness.
“I came to see you last week but you weren’t in.Your neighbor said you were probably at work. I thought of leaving a note with the concierge, but as you don’t have . . .” She paused, but Sara didn’t fill the silence. “I was very sorry to hear about your mother, Sara. I was very fond of her, as you know.You should have called me. In the end I found out from the mother of one of the girls who works for me who knew her. Anyway, there’s nothing to be done now. My husband died too, did you know that? Eighteen months ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes. But he was in a very bad way. He was in a lot of pain and the left side of his body was completely paralyzed. He’d been bedridden for years, and he couldn’t speak any more, he could only grunt. Sometimes we understood him straight away, sometimes we didn’t, and then the poor man would become exasperated. Because he was all there, you know.That was the worst part—he was aware of everything. I think he wanted to die. He’d been wanting to for years. He just wished it was all over, but it wasn’t, he didn’t die, and nobody could do anything for him.”
“I’m very sorry, Mami,” said Sara. Unexpectedly moved by the suffering of the bitter, disagreeable old man, she’d unconsciously called her by the name she had used when she was a little girl who hardly ever saw her mother but who, without ever quite knowing why, never called her godmother “Mama.”“It must have been very difficult for you.”
“It’s always been very difficult for me.”And for a moment her eyes filled with tears. “You don’t know how difficult.” She recovered quickly and started searching for something in her handbag.“Well, let’s not dwell on such unhappy matters.We’ve had quite enough of that lately, the two of us, haven’t we? Look, I’ve brought you a birthday present. It isn’t new, but I hope you’ll like it. I would have liked to buy you something, but I’m rather reluctant to go out these days. I often feel dizzy when I go to the department stores.And I’ve spent so many years at home, not going anywhere, always at Antonio’s beck and call, that I wouldn’t know which shops to go to. I’ve grown old. But what can you do?”