Skylight Page 20

Lídia had not the slightest desire to know what those problems were. She sensed that it would only hurt her to hear about them, and at that precise moment she longed for the phone to ring, for example, or for some other interruption that would bring the conversation to a close. The phone, however, did not ring, and Paulino was clearly in no mood now to be silenced.

  “You women don’t understand men. Just because we really like a woman doesn’t mean we never think of anyone else.”

  “Of course. It’s the same with us women.”

  Some mischievous demon had prompted Lídia to say these words. The same demon was whispering still more daring things to her, and she had to bite her tongue so as not to say them out loud. Her sharp eyes were now trained on Paulino’s ugly features. And he, slightly piqued by what she had said, answered:

  “Naturally. It wouldn’t do to be thinking about the same person all the time.”

  There was a hint of spite in his voice. They eyed each other mistrustfully, almost like enemies. Paulino was trying to find out just how much Lídia knew. She, for her part, was turning his words this way and that in her effort to discover what lay behind them. Suddenly an intuitive flash lit up her brain:

  “Changing the subject entirely, I forgot to mention that my upstairs neighbor, the young girl’s mother, asked me to thank you for your interest . . .”

  The change that came over Paulino’s face proved to her that she had been right. She knew now whom she was up against. At the same time, she felt a shiver of fear run through her. The little demon had hidden himself away somewhere, and she was alone and helpless.

  Paulino knocked the ash off the end of his cigarillo and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He looked like a boy who has been caught eating jam while his mother wasn’t looking.

  “Yes, she’s a bright young thing.”

  “Are you thinking of increasing her wages?”

  “Yes, possibly. I said I’d do so after three months, but her family’s pretty badly off, or so you told me. And Claudinha gets on really well with the other staff . . .”

  “So it’s Claudinha, is it?”

  “Yes, Maria Cláudia.”

  Paulino was absorbed in watching the ash dulling the glow of his cigarillo. With an ironic smile, Lídia asked:

  “And how’s her shorthand coming along?”

  “Oh, really well. She’s a quick learner.”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  The demon had returned. Lídia was now confident that as long as she kept her cool, she would win in the end. She must, above all, avoid offending Paulino, but without revealing to him her own secret fears. She would be lost if he so much as suspected how insecure she was feeling.

  “Her mother talks to me a lot, you know, and from what she’s told me, it seems that Claudinha has been a naughty girl recently.”

  “A naughty girl?”

  Paulino’s evident curiosity would have been enough to convince Lídia, if she hadn’t been convinced already.

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” she said insinuatingly. Then, as if the idea had only just occurred to her, she exclaimed: “Oh, good heavens, it’s nothing like that. If it were, do you think her mother would have told me? Don’t be so silly, sweetheart!”

  Perhaps Paulino was being silly, but the fact is he seemed disappointed. He managed to splutter out:

  “I wasn’t thinking anything . . .”

  “It’s quite simple, really. Her father was getting concerned because she started arriving home late each evening. Her excuse was that you had kept her at the office, finishing some urgent work . . .”

  Paulino realized that he should fill in the pause:

  “Well, it wasn’t quite like that. It happened a few times, but—”

  “Oh, no, that’s all perfectly understandable, no, that wasn’t the problem. Her father followed her one evening and caught her with her boyfriend!”

  The little demon was so overjoyed now that he was performing somersaults and rolling around laughing. Paulino had grown somber. He gritted his teeth and muttered:

  “You can’t trust these modern girls . . .”

  “Now you’re being unfair, sweetheart. What’s she supposed to do? You’re forgetting that she’s only nineteen, and what’s a girl of nineteen supposed to do? Her Prince Charming is bound to be some handsome, elegant boy her own age who tells her the sweetest things. Don’t forget, you were nineteen once.”

  “When I was nineteen . . .”

  But he said no more and sat there chewing on his cigarillo, muttering incomprehensibly. He was greatly put out, not to say furious. He had spent valuable time courting the young typist only to learn that she had been stringing him along all the while. He had never gone beyond smiling and being attentive and talking to her—when they were alone in his office, of course, after six o’clock—but nothing more than that. She was very young and there were her parents to consider . . . In time, perhaps . . . but his intentions were, of course, entirely honorable. He simply wanted to help the young woman and her struggling family . . . Then he said:

  “And do you think it’s true?”

  “You see how silly and naive you are? People don’t invent things like that. When they happen, one’s first instinct is usually to cover them up. And the fact that I know about it means that Claudinha’s mother trusts me—” She broke off and added anxiously: “I hope you’re not too upset. It would be a shame if you were to turn against the girl. I know how scrupulous you are about such matters, but please don’t take it out on her!”

  “I won’t, don’t worry.”

  Lídia got up. It was best to drop the subject now. She had sown the seed of doubt in Paulino’s pleasant little flirtation, and this, she believed, would be quite enough to put a stop to his fantasy. She prepared his coffee, taking care to make her every gesture elegant. She then served Paulino herself. She sat on his lap, put her arm about him and gave him the coffee to sip as if he were a baby. The subject of Maria Cláudia had been safely dealt with. Paulino drank his coffee, smiling at the way Lídia was stroking the back of his neck. Suddenly Lídia expressed unusual interest in his hair:

  “What are you using on your hair these days?”

  “It’s a new lotion I bought.”

  “Yes, it smells different. Hang on, though . . .”

  She looked hard at his bald pate and said, beaming:

  “Sweetie, you’ve got more hair!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I mean it.”

  “Let me look in the mirror.”

  Lídia slid off his lap and ran to the dressing table to get the mirror.

  “Here you are!”

  Squinting around in order to see his own image, Paulino said softly:

  “Yes, you’re right . . .”

  “Look, here and here! See those little hairs. That’s new hair growing!”

  Paulino handed the mirror back to her, smiling:

  “It’s good stuff. I was told it was. It contains vitamins, you know.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Paulino then went into elaborate detail as to the precise composition of the lotion he was using and the mode of application. In this way, the evening, having begun badly, ended very well. It did not go on for as long as usual. It was Lídia’s “time of the month,” and so Paulino left before midnight. Although not in so many words, they both expressed their regret at this imposed abstinence, but made up for it with kisses and tender words.

  When he had left, Lídia went back into the bedroom. She was just starting to tidy up when she heard the sharp click of heels crossing the floor above her. The sound came and went, disappeared, then returned. While she listened, Lídia stood perfectly still, fists clenched, head slightly raised. Then came two louder thumps (the shoes being taken off) and silence.

  28

  Carmen added yet another letter to a long correspondence that consisted largely of complaints and lamentations. In her faraway hometown of Vigo, her parents would be left terrified and tearful whe
n they read the ever-growing catalog of woes sent by their daughter, who continued to live in bondage to that foreigner.

  Condemned in her everyday life to speak a foreign tongue, she could only fully express herself in her letters. She told her parents everything that had happened since her previous letter, lingering over her son’s illness and describing the terrible scene in the kitchen—although she took pains to show herself in a more dignified light. For, once she had calmed down, she had to admit that her behavior had been most undignified. Kneeling in the presence of her husband was, she felt, the worst of ignominies. As for her son, well, he was still only a child and would doubtless forget, but her husband would not, and that was what pained her most.

  After some hesitation, she also wrote to her cousin Manolo. In doing so, she felt a vague sense of betrayal and had to acknowledge that writing to him was hardly appropriate. She had received no correspondence from him apart from a brief note each year on her birthday and at Christmas and Easter. However, she knew all about his life. Her parents kept her up to date on happenings in the family clan, and her cousin Manolo, along with his brush factory, always provided plenty to write about. Business had boomed, but he was, alas, still a bachelor, which meant that, when he died, there would be so many heirs to his wealth that each of them would inherit very little. Unless, of course, he were to favor one of those heirs over all the others. He was free to dispose of his goods and chattels as he wished, and so anything could happen. These concerns were set out at great length in the letters she received from Vigo. Manolo was still young, only six years older than Carmen, but he needed to be reminded of Henriquinho’s existence. Carmen had never given much importance to these suggestions, nor was there any easy way to make him more aware of her son. Manolo barely knew him. The only time he had seen him was when Henriquinho was a baby, on a trip Manolo had made to Lisbon with Carmen’s parents. Carmen knew (from her mother) that Manolo had declared his dislike of Emílio. At the time, being only recently married, she had ignored this comment, but now she could see that Manolo had been right. The Portuguese say, “From Spain expect only cold winds and cold wives,” but some similar saying could equally be applied to Portugal regarding husbands, except that, although she knew all there was to know about the evils that proliferated this side of the Spanish–Portuguese frontier, she lacked the necessary poetic imagination to come up with a nice alliterative pairing for “husbands.”

  Once she had written the letters, she felt relieved. Replies to them would not be long in coming, bringing with them consolation and sympathy, which was all Carmen wanted. Manolo’s sadness regarding her situation would make up for this minor act of disloyalty toward her husband. She could imagine her cousin in his office at the factory, which she could still vaguely remember. A pile of letters, orders and invoices stood on the desk, and her letter was on the very top of the pile. Manolo would open it, then read and reread it intently. Then he would put it down on the desk before him and, once he had sat for a few moments, with the look of someone recalling pleasant past events, he would push all the other documents to one side, take a clean sheet of paper (with the name of the factory at the top in block capitals) and begin to write.

  As she pondered this scene, homesickness and nostalgia began to gnaw away at Carmen’s heart. Nostalgia for everything she had left behind: her town, her parents’ house, the factory gates, the soft Galician way of speaking that the Portuguese could never imitate. Remembering all these things, she began to cry. True, she had long been troubled by such feelings, but they vanished as quickly as they came, crushed beneath the ever-growing weight of time. Everything was disappearing, she could barely dredge up the faded images from her past, but now she could see it all there before her, as clear as day. That’s why she was crying. She was crying for all that she had lost and would never see again. In Vigo, she would be among her own people, a friend among friends. No one would snigger behind her back at the way she spoke, no one would call her galega—or Galician—in the scornful way they did here; she would be a galega in the land of the galegos, where galego was not a synonym for “errand boy” or “coalman.”

  “¡Ah, desgraciada, desgraciada!”

  Her son was staring at her in amazement. With instinctive obstinacy, he had resisted all his mother’s attempts to win him back, just as he had resisted the beatings and the witchcraft. Every beating and every prayer had driven him closer to his father. His father was calm and serene, while his mother was excessive in everything she did, whether in love or in hate. Now, though, she was crying, and Henrique, like all children, could not bear to see another person cry, much less his mother. He went over to her and consoled her as best he could, wordlessly. He kissed her, pressed his face to her face wet with tears, and soon they were both crying. Then Carmen told him long stories about Galicia, speaking, without realizing it, in Galician rather than in Portuguese.

  “I don’t understand, Mama!”

  She realized then what she was doing and translated the stories into that other hateful language, Portuguese, and the stories, once stripped of their native tongue, lost all their beauty and savor. Then she showed him photographs of Grandpa Filipe and Grandma Mercedes, and another in which cousin Manolo appeared, along with other relatives. Henrique had seen all these pictures before, but his mother insisted on making him look at them again. Showing him a picture of part of her parents’ garden, she said:

  “I often used to play here with cousin Manolo . . .”

  The memory of Manolo had become an obsession. Her thoughts always led her to him along hidden paths, and Carmen felt quite troubled when she realized that she had been thinking about him for a long time now. After all these years, it was mere folly. She was old, though she was only thirty-three. And she was married. She had a home, a husband, a son. No one in her situation had the right to harbor such thoughts.

  She put the photos away and immersed herself in housework, but however hard she tried to drown out those thoughts, they refused to go away: memories of her hometown, her parents and, only belatedly, of Manolo, as if his face and voice, grown too remote, took a long while to arrive.

  At night, lying in bed beside her husband, she was unable to sleep. Her longing for her past life had become suddenly urgent, as if demanding immediate action from her. Immersed in these distant memories, she grew calmer. Her fiery temperament softened, a sweet serenity filled her heart. Emílio was bewildered by this transformation, but made no comment. He suspected that it was simply a change of tactic intended to recapture her son’s love, and when he noticed that Henrique now divided his favors equally between him and his mother, he assumed he must be right. It was almost as if Henrique were trying to bring them back together. Ingenuously and possibly unwittingly, he did his best to interest both of them in his needs and interests. The results were not encouraging. His father and mother, so ready to speak to him when he addressed them individually, pretended not to notice when he tried to include them both in the conversation. Henrique could not understand this. He had not been fond of his father before, but had discovered that he was capable of loving him unreservedly; for a while, he had felt afraid of his mother, but seeing her crying had made him realize that he had, in fact, never stopped loving her. He loved them both and yet he could see them growing ever more distant one from the other. Why did they not speak? Why did they look at each other sometimes as if they didn’t know each other or knew each other all too well? Why those silent evenings in which his childish voice seemed to wander, lost, as if in a vast, dark forest that muffled all sounds and from which all the birds had vanished? Yes, all the lovebirds had flown far away, and without the life that only love can engender, the forest had turned to stone.

  The days passed slowly. The postal service had dispatched Carmen’s letters across the country and across the border. The replies were perhaps setting off along the same route on their return journey (perhaps, who knows, carried by the same hands). Each hour and each day brought them closer. Carmen did not even know
what she was hoping for. Compassion? Kind words? Yes, that was what she needed. She would feel less alone when she read those words, as if she were once again surrounded by her own family. She could see their compassionate faces bent over her, instilling her with courage. That was all she could hope for, but perhaps because she had also written to Manolo, she was hoping for something more. The days passed. Her own intense need made her forget that her mother was never quick to answer letters, and that often weeks went by without her receiving a response. She feared she had been forgotten.

  Tied to his routine as a salesman and seeing the day of his liberation moving ever further off, Emílio allowed the time to pass. He had announced that he would be leaving, but had taken not one step in that direction. His courage was failing him. As he stood poised on the threshold ready to leave and never come back, something held him there. Love had vanished from his home. He did not hate his wife, but he was weary of being unhappy. Everyone has his limits: he could bear a certain degree of unhappiness, but no more than that. And yet still he did not leave. His wife had stopped making those terrible scenes and had grown meek and quiet. She never raised her voice or complained about her wretched life. When he considered this, Emílio felt afraid that she might perhaps be trying to rebuild their home life. He already felt too trapped to want such a thing. On the other hand, he realized, Carmen spoke to him only when absolutely necessary, so there were little grounds for thinking she wanted a reconciliation. It was clear that she had managed to regain her son’s trust, but that was a very long way from wanting to win back her husband as well; no, that was a distance she seemed unwilling to travel. The transformation intrigued him, though. Henrique had resumed his close relationship with her, so why no more of those stormy scenes? When he asked himself this question and received no answer, Emílio would shrug his shoulders and surrender himself to time, as if time would give him the courage he lacked.

  Then a letter arrived. Emílio was out, and Henrique had gone off on an errand. When she received the letter from the postman and recognized her mother’s handwriting, Carmen felt a kind of shudder run through her and asked: