The Bad Girl (46 page)

"No, I don't think it was him."

"Yes, yes," she said, stamping her foot, angry and upset. "It's him,

tell me it's him, Ricardo."

"Yes, yes, it was him, you're right."

"Give me all the money in your wallet," she ordered. "Bills and

change both."

I did as she asked. Then, holding the money in her hand, she

approached the two clochards. They looked at her as if she were an

exotic animal, I imagine, since it was too dark to see their faces. She

bent forward, and I saw her speak to him, hand him the money, and

finally, what a surprise, kiss the clochard on both cheeks. Then she

came toward me, smiling like a little girl who has just done a good

deed. She took my arm and we began to walk along Boulevard

Montparnasse. It was a good half hour to Ecole Militaire. But it

wasn't cold and it wasn't going to rain.

"That clochard must think he's had a dream, that his fairy

godmother fell from the sky and appeared to him. What did you say

to him?"

"Thank you, Monsieur Clochard, for saving the life of my

happiness."

"You're becoming sentimental too, bad girl." I kissed her on the

lips. "Tell me another, another cheap, sentimental thing, please." 

7

Fifty years ago the Madrid neighborhood of Lavapies, an old enclave

of Jews and Moriscos, was still considered one of the most

traditional neighborhoods in Madrid, where, like archaeological

curiosities, the swaggering lower-class characters from the operettas

called zarzuelas were preserved: flashy young men in waistcoats and

caps, wearing handkerchiefs around their necks and tight trousers,

and sassy young women in close-fitting polka-dotted dresses, with

large earrings and parasols and handkerchiefs tied around hair

gathered into sculptural chignons.

When I came to live in Lavapies, the neighborhood had changed

so much I sometimes wondered if in that Babel there was still some

authentic Madrilenian left, or if all the residents were, like Marcella

and me, imported. The Spaniards from the neighborhood came from

every corner of the country, and with their accents and variety of

physical types, they helped to give the admixture of races, languages,

inflections, customs, attire, and nostalgia in Lavapies the appearance

of a microcosm. The human geography of the planet seemed to be

represented in its few blocks.

When you left Calle Ave Maria, where we lived on the third floor

of a faded, ramshackle building, you found yourself in a Babylon of

Chinese and Pakistani merchants, Indian laundries and stores, tiny

Moroccan tea shops, bars filled with South Americans, Colombian

drug traffickers, and Africans, and wherever you looked, forming

groups in doorways and on street corners, a number of Romanians,

Yugoslavs, Moldavians, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Russians, and

Asians. The Spanish families in the neighborhood resisted the

changes with old habits like having get-togethers between balconies,

hanging out clothes to dry on lines hung from eaves and windows,

and, on Sundays, going in couples, the men wearing ties and the

women dressed in black, to hear Mass at the Church of San Lorenzo,

on the corner of Calle Doctor Piga and Calle Salitre.

Our apartment was smaller than the one I'd had on Rue Joseph

Granier, or it seemed that way to me because of how crowded it was

with the cardboard, paper, and balsa-wood models of Marcella's set

designs, which, like Salomon Toledano's little toy soldiers, invaded

the apartment's two small rooms, and even the kitchen and tiny

bathroom. In spite of being so small and so full of books and

records, it wasn't claustrophobic, thanks to the windows onto the

street, through which the vivid white light of Castile, so different

from Parisian light, streamed in, and because it had a small balcony

where we could put a table at night and eat supper under the stars,

which do exist in Madrid, though diffused by the reflection of the

city's lights.

Marcella managed to work in the apartment, lying on the bed if

she was drawing, or sitting on the Afghan rug in the living room if

she was constructing her models with pieces of cardboard, bits of

wood, glue, paste, coated cardboard, and colored pencils. I preferred

to do the translations that the editor Mario Muchnik assigned to me

in a nearby cafe, the Cafe Barbieri, where I would spend several

hours a day translating, reading, and observing the fauna that

frequented the cafe and never bored me, because it incarnated all

the many colors of this nascent Noah's ark in the heart of old

Madrid.

The Cafe Barbieri was right on Calle Ave Maria and seemed—this

is what Marcella said the first time she took me there, and she knew

about those things—like an expressionist set from 1920s Berlin or

an engraving by Grosz or Otto Dix, with its cracked walls, dark

corners, medallions of Roman ladies on the ceiling, and mysterious

cubicles where it looked as if crimes could be committed without the

patrons finding out, or demented sums wagered in poker games in

which knives flashed, or Black Masses celebrated. It was enormous,

angled, full of uneven floors, silvery cobwebs hanging from gloomy

corners of the ceiling, feeble tables and crippled chairs, benches and

ledges about to collapse from sheer exhaustion; it was dark, smoky,

always filled with people who seemed to be in costume, a crowd of

extras from a farcical play waiting in the wings to go onstage. I

always tried to sit at a table in the back where a little more light

filtered in, and, instead of hard chairs, there was a fairly comfortable

armchair covered in velvet that once had been red but was

disintegrating from the holes burned into it by cigarettes and the

friction of so many rumps. One of my distractions, each time I

entered the Cafe Barbieri, consisted of identifying the languages I

heard between the door and the table in the rear, and sometimes I

counted half a dozen in that brief passage of some thirty meters.

The waitresses and waiters also represented the diversity of the

neighborhood: Swedes, Belgians, North Americans, Moroccans,

Ecuadorians, Peruvians, and so forth. They changed all the time,

because they must have been badly paid, and for the eight straight

hours they worked, in two shifts, the patrons had them carrying and

fetching beer, coffee, tea, hot chocolate, glasses of wine, and

sandwiches. As soon as I was settled at my usual table, with my

notebooks and pens and the book I was translating, they quickly

brought me an espresso with a little milk and a bottle of still mineral

water.

At the table I would look through the morning papers, and in the

afternoon, when I was tired of translating, I would read, not for

work now but for pleasure. The three books I had translated, by

Doris Lessing, Paul Auster, and Michel Tournier, hadn't been too

difficult, but I didn't have a very good time bringing them over into

Spanish. Their authors were in fashion, but the novels I was given to

translate weren't the best they had written. As I always suspected,

literary translations were very poorly paid, the fees much lower than

for commercial ones. But I was no longer in any condition to do

them, because the mental fatigue that came over me when my effort

at concentration was prolonged meant my progress was very slow.

In any event, this meager income allowed me to help Marcella with

household expenses and not feel like a kept man. My friend

Muchnik tried to help me find some translation work from

Russian—it was what I wanted most—and we almost convinced an

editor to publish Turgenev's Fathers and Sons or the staggering

Requiem by Anna Akhmatova, but it didn't work out because

Russian fiction still didn't arouse much interest in Spanish and

Latin American readers, and Russian poetry even less.

I couldn't tell if I liked Madrid or not. I didn't know the other

neighborhoods of the city, where I barely had ventured on the

occasions I went to a museum or accompanied Marcella to a show.

But I felt comfortable in Lavapies, even though I'd been mugged on

its streets for the first time in my life by a couple of Arabs who stole

my watch, a wallet with some change, and my Mont Blanc pen, my

last luxury. The truth is I felt at home here, immersed in its

ebullient life. Sometimes, in the afternoon, Marcella stopped by for

me at the Barbieri and we would walk through the neighborhood,

which I got to know like the back of my hand. I always discovered

something curious or odd. For example, the shop and radio studio of

the Bolivian Alcerreca, who learned Swahili to better serve his

African customers. If they were showing something interesting, we'd

go to the Filmoteca to see a classic film.

On these walks, Marcella talked without stopping and I listened.

I intervened very occasionally to let her catch her breath, and, by

means of a question or observation, encouraged her to go on telling

me about the project she wanted to be involved in. Sometimes I

didn't pay much attention to what she was saying because I focused

so much on how she said it: with passion, conviction, hope, and joy.

I never knew anyone who gave herself so totally—so fanatically, I'd

say, if the word didn't have gloomy memories—to her vocation, who

knew in so exclusionary a way what she wanted to do in life.

We had met years earlier in Paris, at a clinic in Passy where I was

having some tests done and she was visiting a friend who had

recently had surgery. During the half hour we shared the waiting

room, she spoke with so much enthusiasm about a play of Moliere's,

The Bourgeois Gentleman, being shown at a small theater in

Nanterre where she had done the set designs, that I went to see it. I

ran into Marcella at the theater, and when the play was over I

suggested having a drink at a bistrot near the Metro station.

We had lived together for two and a half years, the first year in

Paris and after that, in Madrid. Marcella was Italian, twenty years

younger than me. She had studied architecture in Rome to please

her parents, both of whom were architects, and while still a student

began to work as a theatrical set designer. Her never having

practiced architecture offended her parents, and for some years they

were estranged. They reconciled when her parents understood that

what their daughter did was not a whim but a true vocation.

Occasionally she would spend some time with her parents in Rome,

and since she didn't have much money—she was the hardestworking

person in the world, but the designs she was hired to do

were of small account, in marginal theaters, and she was paid very

little, and sometimes nothing at all—her parents, who were fairly

well-off, sent her occasional money orders that allowed her to

dedicate her time and energy to the theater. She hadn't triumphed,

and it wasn't something she cared about very much, because

she—and I as well—were absolutely certain that sooner or later

theater people in Spain, in Italy, in all of Europe, would come to

recognize her talent. Though she spoke a great deal, gesticulating

like the caricature of an Italian, she never bored me. I was fascinated

to hear her describe the ideas that whirled inside her head about

revolutionizing the sets of The Cherry Orchard, Waiting for Godot,

Harlequin, Servant of Two Masters, or La Celestina. She had been

hired for the movies as an assistant decorator and could have made

her way in that medium, but she liked the theater and was not

prepared to sacrifice her vocation, even if it was more difficult to

move ahead designing for the theater than for films or television.

Thanks to Marcella, I learned to see shows with different eyes, to

pay careful attention not only to plots and characters but also to

places, the light in which they moved, the things that surrounded

them.

She was small, with light hair, green eyes, extremely white

smooth skin, and a joyful smile. She exuded energy. She dressed

very carelessly, most of the time in sandals, jeans, and a worn

sheepskin jacket, and she used glasses for reading and the movies, a

pair of tiny rimless glasses that made her expression somewhat

clownish. She was unselfish, uncalculating, generous, capable of

devoting a good amount time to insignificant jobs, like the single

performance of a play by Lope de Vega put on by the students at an

academy, with a set consisting of a few odds and ends and a couple

of painted canvases to which she devoted herself with the

perseverance of a designer working at the Paris Opera for the first

time. The satisfaction she felt more than compensated for the small

or nonexistent monetary reward she brought home from that

adventure. If anyone was described by the phrase "working for love

of the art," it was Marcella.

Less than a tenth of the models that smothered our apartment

had appeared onstage. Most had been frustrated by a lack of

financing; they were ideas she'd had after reading a work she liked