The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (2 page)

But the children’s mother, as if Granny’s remark had for her an entirely different meaning, not nearly so generous, said, “I shall give you the writing desk from my bedroom, Ursula. It has a key.”

“Where will you keep your things?” said Granny, protesting. She could not very well say that the desk was her own, not to be moved: Like everything else – the dark cathedrals, the shaky painted tables – it had come with the flat.

“I don’t need a key,” said the children’s mother, lacing her
fingers tightly around her knees. “I’m not writing a play, or anything else I want kept secret. Not any more.”

“They used to take Colin for walks,” said Ursula, yawning, only vaguely taking in the importance of the desk. “That was when I started to write this thing. Once they stayed out the whole afternoon. They never said where they’d been.”

“I wonder,” said her mother, thoughtful. She started to say something to Ursula, something not quite a question, but the child was too preoccupied with herself. Everything about the trip, in the end, would crystallize around Tatiana and the Grand Duke. Already, Ursula was Tatiana. The children’s mother looked at Ursula’s long bare legs, her heavy shoes, her pleated skirt, and she thought, I must do something about her clothes, something to make her pretty.

“Colin, dear,” said Granny in her special inner-meaning voice, “do you remember your walks?”

“No.”

“I wonder why they wanted to take him alone,” said Colin’s mother. “It seems odd, all the same.”

“Under seven,” said Granny, cryptic. “Couldn’t influence girl. Too old. Boy different. Give me first seven years, you can have rest.”

“But it wasn’t seven years. He hasn’t been alive that long. It was only two weeks.”

“Two very impressionable weeks,” Granny said.

“I understand everything you’re saying,” Ursula said, “even when you talk that way. They spoke French when they didn’t want us to hear, but we understood that, too.”

“I fed the swans,” Colin suddenly shouted.

There, he had told about Geneva. He sat up and kicked his heels on the carpet as if the noise would drown out the consequence of what he had revealed. As he said it, the image became static: a gray sky, a gray lake, and a swan wonderfully turning upside down with the black rubber feet showing
above the water. His father was not in the picture at all; neither was
she
. But Geneva was fixed for the rest of his life: gray, lake, swan.

Having delivered his secret he had nothing more to tell. He began to invent. “I was sick on the plane,” he said, but Ursula at once said that this was a lie, and he lay down again, humiliated. At last, feeling sleepy, he began to cry.

“He never once cried in Geneva,” Ursula said. But by the one simple act of creating Tatiana and the Grand Duke, she had removed herself from the ranks of reliable witnesses.

“How would you know?” said Granny bitterly. “You weren’t always with him. If you had paid more attention, if you had taken care of your little brother, he wouldn’t have come back to us with his hair cut.”

“Never mind,” said the children’s mother. Rising, she helped Colin to his feet and led him away to bed.

She stood behind him as he cleaned his teeth. He looked male and self-assured with his newly cropped head, and she thought of her husband, and how odd it was that only a few hours before Colin had been with him. She touched the tender back of his neck. “Don’t,” he said. Frowning, concentrating, he hung up his toothbrush. “I told about Geneva.”

“Yes, you did.” He had fed swans. She saw sunshine, a blue lake, and the boats Granny had described, heaped with colored cushions. She saw her husband and someone else (probably in white, she thought, ridiculously bouffant, the origin of Tatiana) and Colin with his curls shorn, revealing ears surprisingly large. There was nothing to be had from Ursula – not, at least, until the Grand Duke had died down. But Colin seemed to carry the story of the visit with him, and she felt the faintest stirrings of envy, the resentfulness of the spectator, the loved one left behind.

“Were you really sick on the plane?” she said.

“Yes,” said Colin.

“Were they lovely, the swans?”

But the question bore no relation to anything he had seen. He said nothing. He played with toothpaste, dawdling.

“Isn’t that child in bed yet?” called Granny. “Does he want his supper?”

“No,” said Colin.

“No,” said his mother. “He was sick on the plane.”

“I thought so,” Granny said. “That, at least, is a fact.”

They heard the voice of Ursula, protesting.

But how can they be trusted, the children’s mother thought Which of them can one believe? “Perhaps,” she said to Colin, “one day, you can tell me more about Geneva?”

“Yes,” he said perplexed.

But, really, she doubted it; nothing had come back from the trip but her own feelings of longing and envy, the longing and envy she felt at night, seeing, at a crossroad or over a bridge, the lighted windows of a train sweep by. Her children had nothing to tell her. Perhaps, as she had said, one day Colin would say something, produce the image of Geneva, tell her about the lake, the boats, the swans, and why her husband had left her. Perhaps he could tell her, but, really, she doubted it. And, already, so did he.

1955

I
N MADRID
, nine years ago, we lived on the thought of money. Our friendships were nourished with talk of money we expected to have, and what we intended to do when it came. There were four of us – two men and two girls. The men, Pablo and Carlos, were cousins. Pilar was a relation of theirs. I was not Spanish and not a relation, and a friend almost by mistake. The thing we had in common was that we were all waiting for money.

Every day I went to the Central Post Office, and I made the rounds of the banks and the travel agencies, where letters and money could come. I was not certain how much it might be, or where it was going to arrive, but I saw it riding down a long arc like a rainbow. In those days I was always looking for signs. I saw signs in cigarette smoke, in the way ash fell and in the cards. I laid the cards out three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday were no good, because the cards were mute or evasive; and on Sundays they lied. I thought these signs – the ash, the smoke and so on – would tell me what direction my life was going to take and what might happen from now on. I had unbounded belief in free will, which most of the people I knew despised, but I was superstitious, too. I saw inside my eyelids at night the nine of clubs, which is an excellent card, and the ten of
hearts, which is better, morally speaking, since it implies gain through effort. I saw the aces of clubs and diamonds, and the jack of diamonds, who is the postman. Although Pablo and Pilar and Carlos were not waiting for anything in particular – indeed, had nothing to wait for, except a fortune – they were anxious about the postman, and relieved when he turned up. They never supposed that the postman would not arrive, or that his coming might have no significance.

Carlos and Pablo came from a town outside Madrid. They had no near relatives in the city, and they shared a room in a flat on Calle Hortaleza. I lived in a room along the hall; that was how we came to know each other. Pilar, who was twenty-two, the youngest of the four of us, lived in a small flat of her own. She had been married to Carlos’s stepbrother at seventeen, and had been a widow three years. She was eager to marry again but feared she was already too old. Carlos was twenty-nine, the oldest. Pablo and I came in between.

Carlos worked in a bank. His salary was so small that he could barely subsist on it, and he was everywhere in debt. Pablo studied law at the University of Madrid. When he had nothing to do, he went with me on my rounds. These rounds took up most of the day, and had become important, for, after a time, the fact of waiting became more valid than the thing I was waiting for. I knew that I would feel let down when the waiting was over. I went to the post office, to three or four banks, to Cook’s and American Express. At each place, I stood and waited in a queue. I have never seen so many queues, or so many patient people. I also gave time and thought to selling my clothes. I sold them to the gypsies in the flea market. Once I got a dollar-fifty for a coat and a skirt, but it was stolen from my pocket when I stopped to buy a newspaper. I thought I had jostled the thief, and when I said “Sorry” he nodded his head and walked quickly away. He was a man of about thirty. I can still see his turned-up collar and the back of his head. When I put my hand in my pocket to pay for the paper, the money was
gone. When I was not standing in queues or getting rid of clothes, I went to see Pilar. We sat out on her balcony when it was fine, and next to her kitchen stove when it was cold. We were not ashamed to go to the confectioner’s across the street and bargain in fractions of pennies for fifty grams of chocolate, which we scrupulously shared. Pilar was idle, but restful. Pablo was idle, but heavy about it. He was the most heavily idle person I have ever known. He was also the only one of us who had any money. His father sent him money for his room and his meals, and he had an extra allowance from his godfather, who owned a hotel on one of the coasts. Pablo was dark, curly-haired and stocky, with the large head and opaque eyes you saw on the streets of Madrid. He was one of the New Spaniards – part of the first generation grown to maturity under Franco. He was the generation they were so proud of in the newspapers. But he must be – he
is
– well over thirty now, and no longer New. He had already calculated, with paper and pencil, what the future held, and decided it was worth only half a try.

We stood in endless queues together in banks, avoiding the bank where Carlos worked, because we were afraid of giggling and embarrassing him. We shelled peanuts and gossiped and held hands in the blank, amiable waiting state that had become the essence of life. When we had heard the ritual “No” everywhere, we went home.

Home was a dark, long flat filled with the sound of clocks and dripping faucets. It was a pension, of a sort, but secret. In order to escape paying taxes, the owners had never declared it to the police, and lived in perpetual dread. A girl had given me the address on a train, warning me to say nothing about it to anyone. There was one other foreign person – a crazy old Englishwoman. She never spoke a word to me and, I think, hated me on sight. But she did not like Spaniards any better; one could hear her saying so when she talked to herself. At first we were given meals, but after a time, because the proprietors were afraid about the licensing and the police, that stopped,
and so we bought food and took it to Pilar’s, or cooked in my room on an alcohol stove. We ate rationed bread with lumps of flour under the crust, and horrible ersatz jam. We were always vaguely hungry. Our craving for sweet things was limitless; we bought cardboard pastries that seemed exquisite because of the lingering sugary taste they left in the mouth. Sometimes we went to a restaurant we called “the ten-peseta place” because you could get a three-course meal with wine and bread for ten pesetas – about twenty-three cents then. There was also the twelve-peseta place, where the smell was less nauseating, although the food was nearly as rank. The décor in both restaurants was distinctly unEuropean. The cheaper the restaurant, the more cheaply Oriental it became. I remember being served calves’ brains in an open skull.

One of the customers in the ten-peseta restaurant was a true madman, with claw hands, sparse hair and dying skin. He looked like a monkey, and behaved like one I had known, who would accept grapes and bananas with pleasure, and then, shrieking with hate at some shadowy insult, would dance and gibber and try to bite. This man would not eat from his plate. He was beyond even saying the plate was poisoned; that had been settled long ago. He shovelled his food onto the table, or onto pieces of bread, and scratched his head with his fork, turning and muttering with smiles and scowls. Everyone sat still when he had his seizures – not in horror, even less with compassion, but still, suspended. I remember a coarse-faced sergeant slowly lowering his knife and fork and parting his heavy lips as he stared; and I remember the blankness in the room – the waiting. What will happen next? What does it mean? The atmosphere was full of cold, secret marvelling. But nobody moved or spoke.

We often came away depressed, saying that it was cheaper and pleasanter to eat at home; but the stove was slow, and we were often too hungry to linger, watching water come to the boil. But food was cheap enough; once, by returning three
empty Valdepeñas wine bottles, I bought enough food for three. We ate a lot of onions and potatoes – things like that. Pilar lived on sweet things. I have seen her cook macaroni and sprinkle sugar on it and eat it up. She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl, and you felt that in a few years something might go wrong; she might get swollen ankles or grow a moustache.

Her flat had two rooms, one of which was rented to a young couple. The other room she divided with a curtain. Behind the curtain was the bed she had brought as part of her dowry for the marriage with Carlos’s stepbrother. There was a picture of María Felix, the Mexican actress, on the wall. I would like to tell a story about Pilar, but nobody will believe it. It is how she thought, or pretended to think, that the Museo Romantico was her home. This was an extraordinary museum – a set of rooms furnished with all the trappings of the romantic period. Someone had planned it with love and care, but hardly any visitors came. If any did wander in when we were around, we stared them out. The cousins played the game with Pilar because they had no money and nothing better to do. I see Pilar sitting in an armchair, being elegant, and the boys standing or lounging against a mantelpiece; I say “boys” because I never thought of them as men. I am by the window, with my back turned. I disapprove, and it shows. I feel like a prig. I tip the painted blind, just to see the street and be reassured by a tram going by. It
is
the twentieth century. And Pilar cries, in unaffected anguish, “Oh, make her stop. She is spoiling everything.”