B0040702LQ EBOK (46 page)

And she held me over the dead woman's face. I almost
touched those still eyelids and I started screaming and struggling in Basilisa's arms. Antonia suddenly appeared on the
other side of the bed, her hair wild. She snatched me from the
old servant's arms and held me to her, sobbing and choking.
Confronted by my sister's desperate kisses, by the gaze of her
reddened eyes, I had a sense of great desolation ... Antonia's
body felt oddly rigid and there was a strange, stubborn look of
pain on her face. Later, in another room, sitting in a low chair,
she held me on her knee, stroked me, kissed me again, still
sobbing, and then, squeezing my hand, she laughed and
laughed and laughed ... A lady fanned her with her handkerchief; another, with frightened eyes, opened a bottle of
perfume; another entered carrying a glass of water trembling
on a metal tray.

XX - I was sitting in a corner, plunged in a state of confused
sadness that made my head ache as if I were about to be sick.
Sometimes I cried and sometimes I distracted myself listening
to others crying. It must have been nearly midnight when the
door was flung open and there, at the far end of the room,
flickered the flames of four candles. My mother lay in her
shroud in a black coffin. I went noiselessly into the bedroom
and sat down on the window seat. Three women and Basilisa's
brother were keeping vigil round the coffin. From time to
time, the tailor would get up and spit on his fingers to trim the
wick on the candles. There was a kind of clownish skill in the
way that dwarfish, elegant tailor in this scarlet waistcoat
nipped the wick and puffed out his cheeks to blow on his
fingers.

I listened to the women's stories and gradually my crying
stopped. They were telling tales of ghosts and people who had
been buried alive.

XXI - As day was breaking, a very tall woman, with dark eyes
and white hair, came into the bedroom. She kissed my
mother's barely closed lids, unafraid of the cold of death
and hardly shedding a tear. Then she knelt down between
two candles and dipped an olive branch in holy water and
sprinkled it over the corpse. Basilisa came in looking for me
and beckoned me to her:

`Look, it's your grandmother!'

My grandmother! She had come by mule from her house
in the hills, seven leagues from Santiago. At that moment, I
heard the sound of hooves striking the stones in the courtyard
where the mule had been tethered. The sound seemed to
resonate in the emptiness of that house full of weeping. My
sister Antonia called to me from the door.

`Come here, child!ff

Basilisa released me and very slowly I left the room. Antonia took me by the hand and drew me into a corner.

'That lady is your grandmother. From now on, we're going
to live with her.'

I sighed:

Why doesn't she give me a kiss?'

Antonia thought for a moment, while she dried her eyes.

`Don't be silly. First, she has to pray for Mama.'

She prayed for a long time. At last, she got up and asked for
us, and Antonia led me over to her. My grandmother was now
wearing a black shawl over her curly, silver hair that seemed to
emphasise the dark fire of her eyes. Her fingers lightly
brushed my cheek and I still remember the impression it
made on me, that rough, peasant hand, entirely bereft of
tenderness. She spoke to us in dialect:

`Your mother is dead and now I will be your mother. You
have nowhere else in the world to go ... I will take you
with me because this house is to be shut up. We will set off
tomorrow, after mass has been said.'

XXII - The following day, my grandmother closed up the
house, and we set off to San Clemente de Brandeso. I was
already outside, mounted on a mule belonging to a peasant
who had sat me in front of him on the saddle, when we heard
the sound of slamming doors and people calling for my sister
Antonia. They did not find her and, their faces contorted with
fear, they came out onto the balconies, then went back in
again and ran, calling for my sister, through the empty rooms,
where the wind rattled the doors. From the cathedral door, a
woman spotted her on the roof, lying in a faint. We called to
her and she opened her eyes to the morning sun, as frightened
as if she had just woken from a bad dream. A sacristan in
cassock and shirtsleeves had to use a long ladder to get her
down. And as we were leaving, the student from Bretal
appeared in the atrium, his cloak buffeted by the wind. He
had a black bandage round his head and, beneath it, I thought
I could see the bloody wounds left by two lopped-off ears.

XXIII - In Santiago in Galicia, which has long been one of
the world's shrines, people still watch intently for a miracle.

© Dr Carlos del Valle-Inclan

Translated by Margaret full Costa

Ramon del Valle-Inclan (Villanueva de Arosa [Pontevedra],
1866-Santiago de Compostela, 1936) was a novelist, playwright and poet and one of the great literary figures of his day.
Apart from brief excursions to Mexico and Argentina, he
spent most of his adult life in Madrid writing newspaper articles, short stories, novels and plays and participating vociferously in the literary circles that met in many of the cafes. He
wrote novels on a variety of subjects - the Carlist wars, an
imaginary Latin American dictator, the corrupt court of
Isabel II - but is perhaps best known for the Sonatas (19021905; Spring and Summer Sonatas and Autumn and Winter
Sonatas, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus, 1997 and 1998) and
for his remarkable plays, particularly, Divinas Palabras and Luces
de Bohemia (both 1920; Lights of Bohemia, tr. John Lyon, Aris
& Phillips, 1993; Divine Words/Bohemian Lights/Silver Face, tr.
M. Delgado, Methuen, 1993). This story is taken from Jardin
umbrio (1903), a collection of ghostly tales set in Galicia.

I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go
to it laughing.

Stubb, in Moby Dick

One April afternoon a few years ago, when my name was
still Mempo Lesmes and I was very young and a starving,
unknown actor, I got lost in the labyrinthine outskirts of San
Anfiero de Granzara and I came across a large mansion surrounded by an overgrown garden, the Villa Nemo. I had no
problem getting into the house, there was no lock, no knocker
on the door, it was an abandoned house, abandoned, it seemed
to me, in the fullest sense of the word, for I found signs that, as
well as being abandoned by its owners, it was a house that had
also somehow abandoned itself. I was fascinated by the whole
idea and I walked in the garden for a long time imagining the
house abandoning itself to its own fate in the darkness of the
night. In a state of great excitement, walking along one of the
galleries open to the winds, I told myself that if, one day, I
succeeded as an actor, the first thing I would do would be to
buy that house and make of it my residence of choice.

Some years passed and I became a successful movie actor.
A minor (but very meaty) role in The Trunk of Fools shot me
straight to stardom. People found the way I gnawed on a
toothpick a revelation. My agent was thoughtful and astute
enough to change my name to Brandy Mostaza and from
then on it was plain sailing. I was signed to star in The Loves
of Mustafa, the comedy which, by opening to me all the
doors of popularity, wrought a spectacular overnight change
in my life. I achieved my greatest success with The Many
Moods of Young Brandy, the television series that shone so
brightly in the sixties and which now, like everything else I did, has been relegated to the most complete and humiliating
oblivion.

What contributed to my irresistible rise was the extreme,
comic thinness of my body (people laughed because when I
walked, I looked like a leaf being blown along by the wind),
but that same physical quirk was soon to tell tragically against
me. I bought Villa Nemo, put the garden in order and restored
the house, I built a large swimming pool, I began throwing
extravagant parties every Friday night, and the labyrinthine
outskirts of San Anfiero de Granzara filled with men and girls
who came and went like moths among the whisperings and
the champagne and the stars. Every Friday, crates of oranges
and lemons for the cocktails arrived from a fruiterer in San
Anfiero, and every Saturday these same lemons and oranges
left Villa Nemo by the back door in a pyramid of pulpless
halves. I had lots of girlfriends, I danced boleros, I began many
beguines, I sang songs to love. But misfortune was lurking in
the most brightly lit corner of my festive garden, and, without
realising it, I began to let myself go, to abandon myself. As if
there were some secret link between the house and obesity, I
gradually began to put on weight, and when I realised what
was happening, no diet could stop the irreversible process, the
tragic transformation. And so I reached the last Friday of the
seventies, all dressed up and with not a girlfriend in sight,
transformed into a Brandy Mostaza who was unrecognisable,
a monstrous fatso who had lost his comic spark.

`For some time now, you haven't been able to see the wood
for the fat,' my agent warned me that day.

`What wood?'I asked, pretending that I didn't know what
he was talking about.

`Oh, come on! Just tell me one thing: how long is it since
anyone offered you a contract?'

Since I had earned a lot of money, the fact that people had
stopped giving me contracts didn't particularly bother me. I
was much more worried, for example, by the sudden, alarming absence of girlfriends and the steadily declining numbers
of guests at my parties. I was incapable of seeing that everything, absolutely everything, was indissolubly linked.

`And tell me,' said my agent, `why do you think no one
offers you movies any more, or, if they do, why they only want
you for awful minor roles?'

`Well,' I said, `I suppose it must have something to do with
my putting on a few pounds.'

`You suppose!P

Baron Mulder, who was quite blatantly and openly
eavesdropping on us, joined in the conversation.

'My friend Brandy's fatness,' he said, toying with his
monocle, `is a splendid monument to the flesh, to excess and
to human kindness.'

You might think that he was saying all this because he was
even fatter than I was, but I had an inkling too that, for some
hidden reason which I could not pin down, he was trying to
flatter me in order to gain my sympathy as a preliminary to
getting something out of me.

My suspicions were soon confirmed when, an hour later, I
bumped into him again in the garden and he started talking to
me about his ancestors, the Mulders and the Roigers, revealing to me that both branches of the family had lived in Villa
Nemo at one time and that they had suffered all kinds of
misfortunes there. He was a bit drunk and very garrulous, and
a shameless doom merchant. From all that he told me (he even
had the impertinence to ask if his ancestors' ghosts were quite
happy haunting my house) I drew one clear conclusion: Villa
Nemo had a baleful influence on all its owners. That was why
I was surprised when, as he said goodbye to me that night, he
asked how much I wanted for the house.

`My friend,' he said, `I'll be honest with you. As a fat man,
your future in show business looks pretty bleak. Let's not fool
ourselves. The public preferred you thin. I know that before
too long you'll be having money troubles and I'd like to help
you out. Sell me Villa Nemo, submarine included, and then
go off on a trip, a trip round the world.'

I was just about to ask him about the submarine when his
monocle fell out. I stooped to pick it up for him, but he
ground it angrily into the earth. Then, he did a few eccentric
tap dance steps and fell flat on his face on the grass. Something strange happened to me then, for when I saw him fall onto the
grass, I felt an enigmatic impulse rise up inside me, an unstoppable desire to turn a somersault in the air and to perform a
circus number with the baron at the end of a party which, it
must be said, had turned out to be positively soporific.