“It’s because of that girl you’ve been buzzing about with since after the Christmas holidays, right? The long, skinny blonde with a blue coat who I finally saw you with last week on Calle Altamirano?” she asked as she sprinkled a few drops of water on one of his shirts.
“Do you think she’ll come with me to America when it’s time for me to leave?” he asked point-blank.
No, son, was what she was about to tell him: not even an idiot would think so. But before opening her mouth, she put down the iron and looked at him closely.
He had taken a tangerine from the earthenware fruit bowl that dominated the dining room’s brazier table and was slowly peeling it, his eyes on the ground and his hair falling over his face, concentrating on stripping the rough skin as if beneath it he’d find relief for his suffering. Such a good handsome young man, a foreigner but yet close to her heart, the widow thought. With a stature that made everything in the place look too small for him. With that accent and that outlook on life that she found both strange and tender.
“Head over heels,” the widow said, sitting in front of him.
“What?”
“You’ve fallen in love head over heels, child.”
“I guess so.”
“And you’re busy calculating the time left for you to return to your country and the numbers don’t add up.”
“Less than three months, that is the time left.”
The faded portrait of Antonia’s wedding with the deceased Marcelino and the reproduction of a Julio Romero de Torres painting on the calendar month of March stared down at him from the wall as usual.
“Because I’m wondering, even if you’d wish, you couldn’t just stick around for her,” the widow said, measuring her words.
“And do what? How could I earn a living in this country? What kind of future would I have? At the most I could teach English, but no one here is interested in a foreign language unless it’s French,” he said without lifting his eyes from another tangerine. He’d already peeled four and hadn’t eaten a single one. “But if she consented to come with me, then, perhaps . . .”
She shook her head slowly in a gesture of resignation, sighed, and then clutched his hand above the crocheted tablecloth.
“You haven’t understood, Daniel. Son, you still don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“That it doesn’t matter if the girl wants to go with you or stay here,” the widow said, pressing his wrist tightly. “Here she has no say about what she wants or doesn’t want.”
“But—”
“Either you get to the altar before you go, kid, or there’s nothing to be done.”
Chapter 24
* * *
Holy Tuesday, noon. Time to return home for the midday meal. Three bodies advanced toward the Paseo de la Muralla in Cartagena after having an aperitif in the Mastia Bar, talking among themselves about trifles with all the natural excitement of a family gathered for the holidays. Until she saw him. Leaning on the balustrade with his back to the sea, waiting for her. Confused, bewildered almost, she excused herself from her parents.
He was again moved to see her face and mane, watching her approach with her elastic gait, once again having her mouth close to his for which he would have sold his soul to the devil without hesitation. With great difficulty he fought his urge to kiss her.
“What are you doing here?” was all she was able to mutter. The tone of her voice gave away a mixture of nervousness and misgiving.
“I’ve come to ask you to marry me,” he said, bringing his hand up to her face.
She stopped him. The caress and the marriage proposal were both left unfinished.
“Not here, Daniel, not like this . . .” she mumbled.
“I cannot return to my country without you: you must come with me.”
His explanations could have dragged on forever, but there was no time. At her back, on the other side of the street, they heard a voice. Her mother’s, specifically, calling her daughter with the sharpness of a combat knife.
“Don’t even think of it, you nut . . .” Aurora whispered.
Too late. He’d already grabbed her by the hand and was dragging her with him to the opposite sidewalk.
“My name is Daniel Carter. I’m an American and want to ask for your daughter’s hand.”
He’d practiced it. Dozens of times. While the concierge was washing the dishes or hanging the clothes in the inside patio or checking the salt in the lentils by the stove; he, waiting to be corrected, had repeated his proposition over and over again to her like a litany. This was why the sentence came out perfectly, worthy of the highest mark: ten. What he wasn’t ready for, however, was their reaction.
Carranza the pharmacist was left speechless, unable to utter anything coherent as he gazed incredulously at the accomplices in this absurdity. The mother, irate and with a frown, pure class and dignity behind the pearl brooch on her lapel, finally spoke up.
“I believe you are very confused, young man.”
Afterwards she sized him up arrogantly from head to toe.
“Please leave us alone,” she added.
“Señora Carranza, I—”
She didn’t even deign to look at him again.
“Let’s go home, Aurora,” she commanded.
“No,” Aurora answered stubbornly, clutching Daniel’s arm with both hands.
“Let’s go home right this minute, I said,” the mother repeated with greater vigor.
“Señora, just one moment . . .”
She ignored him again haughtily. Some pedestrians approached, observing the scene with curiosity. She gave them a brief greeting and a fake smile. Then, as they moved away, she once more focused on the two.
“Don’t make a scene in the middle of the street, Aurora,” she snarled, trying to contain her ire. “Have we all gone crazy or what? Where on earth has this smart aleck come from? And what are you doing with him? Let’s go home immediately; I’m not going to repeat myself.”
“I will not leave until you listen to him.”
“Aurora, I’m running out of patience . . .”
“Señora, I beg you . . .” Daniel insisted for a third time.
“Leave us alone, I said!” she screamed at the top of her voice, on the verge of hysteria. The heads of the passersby turned back in the distance and she, self-conscious, lowered her voice without tempering her acrimony one iota. “What the hell has come into you, for God’s sake?”
Just then Aurora, unable to stand the strain any further, broke down in sobs. Unrestrained, grief-stricken, pouring out her tears in a mixture of frustration, anger, and sadness. Daniel attempted to hug her, to protect and shelter her, but now it was the father who finally stopped him.
“Do us a favor and please leave,” he said with authority while he pulled Aurora toward him. “Come on, honey, let’s go too.”
Realizing that his boldness had cost him something that he hadn’t quite foreseen, Daniel finally came around to reason.
“We’ll talk . . .” he said to Aurora by way of a good-bye.
The mother’s stern voice once again made itself heard.
“Everything has been said in this matter! By no means are we going to permit our daughter to have a relationship with some foreigner, do you hear me? Don’t come near her again. Ever!”
“But you must listen to me even if it’s at some other moment, please. I only want to . . .”
His words fell on deaf ears. Before he’d finished the sentence, all three of them had started walking the short distance to their house, the mother still furious, the father silent and thoughtful, and Aurora, his Aurora, awash in a desperate flood of tears.
Disconcerted, he watched them move away while above his head a few seagulls screeched. And for the first time he began to doubt.
In the six months that he’d been i
n Spain, he had always made an effort to find an explanation when faced with countless instances of irrational behavior. The servility of the people before everything that was imposed on them by the authorities, the lack of reaction and critical thinking, the stubborn pride. That recalcitrant stagnation before progress and that prudish and proverbial logic, incompatible with modernization. Faithful to Cabeza de Vaca’s advice, however, he’d always tried to find a justification for everything, a reason that would support the untenable or would make the complex palatable. Daniel had often responded with more-than-gracious acceptance when the levels of absurdity were impossible to assume. “Respect these people; don’t judge us simplistically,” the old monarchist soldier had asked him on their first meeting in Madrid. And this was what Daniel Carter did—until that way of seeing the world through a special lens not only affected how he saw others but turned against him personally, going straight for the jugular. Then it hurt. And although he struggled not to, he had no choice but to admit that the soul of his adopted country could also be ungrateful and unfair.
There was no way of seeing Aurora again that afternoon. From an early hour he waited outside her place, but she did not come out. Neither did she poke her head out of any of the windows, nor could he make out her silhouette at any of the balconies. He phoned her from a noisy café with a telephone token that he’d gotten from a waiter behind the bar. A surly voice told him she was not in, but he knew it was a lie. He also went to look for her at the pharmacy without luck, anticipating that he would find only Gregorio and his clientele with all their ailments. He wandered around disoriented, not fully aware of where he was or where he was going. He came across men dressed in long tunics and pointed hats under their arms and ladies in black wearing mantillas, and he was reminded of the happy days in Madrid when Aurora had spoken to him with tenderness of her city’s Holy Week celebration, which he expected to be captivating but now began to appear increasingly sinister. Typical of people stuck in the Stone Age, he thought, with the mind-set of an American coming from a large, industrialized city.
While he struggled to sleep at two in the morning, little did he suspect that Cartagena’s upper crust already knew that a foreigner of an uncertain reputation had asked for the Carranzas’ daughter’s hand in marriage in the middle of the street. The buzz of conversation never reached his pension’s inner room, but ever since the encounter with the parents on the Paseo de la Muralla, it flowed throughout the city: I’m telling you, in the middle of the street, yes, yes, Marichu almost passed out and Enrique was left speechless, how could it be otherwise, a vagrant or God knows what, it’s said the fellow doesn’t have a penny to his name, what gall, the thing is he’s not at all bad-looking, but you tell me, no one knows where he’s come from, what nerve, a hustler, what are we coming to, he might even be a communist, I bet you he’s even a Protestant, or an atheist, I don’t know which is worse, and the girl has locked herself up in her room and refuses to come out, what insolence, what shamelessness, this is what happens when you send girls to the university, so what actor do you think he looks like?
It wasn’t yet nine o’clock on the following day when he was again at the Paseo de la Muralla, half-hidden in the distance behind a palm tree, alternating his gaze between the luminous sea and Aurora’s doorway. At a quarter to ten he saw the pharmacist, Carranza, emerge alone. Half an hour later the mother did so with one of her small children, the kid enduring a severe reprimand.
The stage was beginning to clear, but he decided to wait a bit longer. After the previous day’s wait he knew the windows and balconies of the Carranza home by heart, the peculiarities of its architecture and the bad-tempered face of the concierge, a puny-looking man who answered to the name of Abelardo and who, knowing the tension that boiled in the building and instructed by the pharmacist’s wife, guarded the entryway with the zeal of a Cerberus.
Daniel stood for a long time hoping for a break in his luck, accompanied solely by his thoughts and the seagulls that flew over the port. A tense hour-and-a-half wait, until the simultaneous arrival of the mailman, a grocery store deliveryman, and a couple of sailors loaded down with a large package briefly blocked the section of street in front of the entrance as they spoke to Abelardo:
“We have to deliver this to the home of Colonel Del Castillo.”
“This certificate is for Señora Conesa. Please sign here. Good afternoon.”
“Abelardo, Osasuna lost three-to-nothing. Boy, your forecasts are really off—so much so that never in our fucking lives is the sports lottery ticket going to lift us out of our poverty.”
“Come on, help me with this sack of potatoes, then I’ll tell you who is going to win the Betis-Celta game.”
“Let’s see if you get it right for once . . .”
The lively exchange of soccer commentaries and other talk created the opportunity.
“Gento? Are saying Gento? Come on, man! Where is Kubala—”
It all happened in a flash. Before Abelardo was able to give his opinion regarding the Hungarian’s soccer passes, the American, in four stealthy strides, was inside.
The building was fitted with an elevator but he chose not to use it. Impetuous, with urgency beating in his temples, he climbed the steps three at a time to the second floor. Once there, however, he was assailed by confusion. All morning long he’d been yearning for this moment and, once there, he hesitated. Two doors awaited him, identically bolted and barred while he deliberated. Would it be best to ring immediately? Wait for someone to come out and inquire with discretion, perhaps? Time was running against him; the sports-chatting voices could no longer be heard on the street. The elevator started up: someone was coming.
Fortunately for him, his bewilderment lasted only the time it took for the left door to open. A voice was then heard coming from inside the apartment, preceding its owner.
“Yes, yes, I won’t forget, but boy, all of you are a pain in the neck . . . Okay, see you later. Good-bye . . .”
That bony and magnificent old lady with gleaming hair was going to add something else when she saw him. Daniel, in turn, didn’t know what to do. It was too late to vanish into thin air, and he was too surprised to think clearly. He finally decided not to move and wait. Quickly combing his hair with his fingers, pulling the cuffs of his shirt beneath the sleeves of his jacket, adjusting the knot of the tie he’d worn to make himself presentable, he waited expectantly.
Surprised by the presence of the stranger on the landing, the lady gave a brief start and, with quick reflexes, brought her finger to her mouth and whispered a sonorous “Shhhhhhhhhh.” Daniel recognized the woman wearing a sable stole and double-strand pearl necklace as Aurora’s grandmother, the one he had fleetingly seen at the station. Basque by birth, somewhat peculiar, as Aurora had told him. Known to everyone as Nana.
“You are the American who has got my granddaughter all worked up, right?” she mumbled in rapture.
“Yes, Señora. I’m afraid I am.”
There was no time for formal introductions or to correct misunderstandings.
“Well, you should know that the girl is a complete mess, my daughter is livid, and no Christian soul can live in this house another minute,” she continued matter-of-factly. “I’ve told them I’m going for a little walk, that I have a lot of errands—though in truth I only wanted to get away from here. But I’d like to speak with you, young man, so if you want, you can meet me in half an hour at the Gran Bar.”
And with an energetic and perfectly manicured aged hand, she showed him the stairs. The jangling gold coins on her bracelets added emphasis to her order to leave without delay.
• • •
“My daughter is old-fashioned and my son-in-law is a dunce” was the first thing she said after exhaling a long puff of smoke.
Daniel had seen her come in and stood up to receive her, pulling out the chair so that she could sit down and holding a lighter up close as she p
laced in an ivory holder the cigarette he’d offered her.
“They’re stubborn as can be. It won’t be easy to make them change their minds, so you’re going to have to earn it if you want to take the girl to America.”
The amazing coolness with which she related intimacies to an unknown foreigner, one who was supposedly a threat to the family’s honor, confused him.
“You know, dear, I too had the opportunity to go overseas when I was young,” she went on after a sip of vermouth. “I had a suitor who went to Argentina; what was his name? . . . Ay, ay, ay, what was his name? . . . Ro . . . Ro . . . Romualdo—that’s it—and don’t for a minute think he left because things were not looking up here; no, no, no, by no means. He was from a wonderful, fantastic, magnificent family, but he left because he was an adventurer, enterprising, a go-getter who created a fabulous business of . . . of . . .” The short lapse of memory seemed to annoy her for a split second, but she proceeded with her conversation. “Well, of whatever. What difference does it make? The thing is that he got rich, real rich. I was told that he had buildings in Calle Corrientes and a hacienda in La Pampa and I can’t recall how many other things, but do you know what?” she asked impetuously.
“No, I don’t know,” Daniel answered truthfully.
“Well, many years later I found out that he’d never married, so I sometimes think that maybe he did not do so because he spent his life thinking of me. The truth is that I didn’t miss him much when he left, because it didn’t even cross my mind to go with him; where was I to go, living as comfortably as I did in Neguri at the time? So I said to him, See you later, and I was much relieved. But afterwards, as the years went by and I turned it over and over in my head, I sometimes thought to myself: What would my life have been like had I accepted that suitor and run away to Argentina with him? Of course I’d dance the tango wonderfully and speak the way they do, with that accent of theirs . . .”