This Too Shall Pass (8 page)

I wake up the next morning to the sound of a dog barking. I linger curled up in bed thinking it's coming from the street downstairs; maybe it's Rey, I muse, coming to find me. Once, we had as many as five dogs in the house at the same time, three of our own, the one kept by the housecleaner, which was one of the dogs you picked up and saved and then bankrolled for the rest of his life—I remember how you'd carry a collar and leash in your purse, just in case you came across some stray dog—and the fifth belonged to a friend who was staying with us for a bit. You so enjoyed that pack of untouchables; they were like a court parallel to the one of your friends. If any visitor dared to complain or turn away from the dogs' rambunctious charges, or worse, said they were afraid of them, he or she would be reckoned la-di-da, a total pinhead, and never invited back. Unless, that is, their skill as a poker player earned back your respect. I remember a very dapper lady who used to come to play poker. You always placed an immaculate and perfectly folded towel on the back of her chair so she could cover her legs and protect them from the rubbing, licking, and dubious hygiene of your dogs.

I hear Guillem's booming voice. He's just arrived with Patum. I can already tell it's going to be a beautiful day before opening the curtains, just from the way the light is filtering through the fabric. I'll go to the cemetery to visit you today. I put on one of the crumpled silk dresses that are tangled together with the rest of my clothes in a precarious bunch on the only chair in the room. I don't even enjoy buying clothes anymore, which used to be my main hobby. Despite the heat, the only clothes I buy now are the kind that cover me up or that hug me. In any case, clothes are nothing more than a substitute for sex, or at least a means for getting it. Maybe everything is a substitute for sex: food, money, the sea, power, even sex itself. I open the curtain and let the summer sunshine in, so young and brazen, so exactly as it was in my childhood, and it spills across the room.

Guillem shows up loaded with boxes of vegetables.

—Quick, Úrsula, hide them before Blanca has the chance to throw them in the trash! I know her too well, he says when he sees me.

—How great that you've come! I say, giving him a hug.

—Yeah, now you have another person to torture, eh?

I'm glad to see him. He's definitely a person who would not send me to a nursing home. I used to measure how much I could trust a person by asking myself whether they would have been a collaborator in occupied France, but now my trial by fire is whether they would send me to a nursing home. Or to the stake for being a witch. You always said in that peculiar way of yours, as if insulting me and praising me all at the same time, that I wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the Middle Ages.

The children are upstairs, having breakfast in front of the television.

—You mean to tell me they're watching television at this time of the morning, and on a day like this? Guillem cries.

Úrsula is freshly showered, her hair and skin aglow, and she's wearing one of her very skinny tops with a tropical motif. She laughs and sips her coffee quietly. The good thing about Úrsula for people like me who don't like having help is that, with her, it's almost the same as not having any. Elisa appears through the kitchen door with cups, saucers, and toast, followed by Damián. I haven't seen her alone once since we arrived in Cadaqués.

—Morning, lovely, how are you feeling? she says by way of a greeting.

Her stunning shock of hair is loose and she has a white sundress on, very red toenails, and her silver sandals have been accessorized with an ankle bracelet made of tiny bells. I see we're still in Cuban mode, I think facetiously. Elisa likes clothes and every time she changes her boyfriend, she changes her style.

—There are days, though, when what I really want to do is go out completely nude, she told me once with the trademark candor of a gorgeous, uninhibited woman who knows that beauty is its own dress, so she's never truly naked.

Damián is wearing gray jeans cut off at the knee, an old shirt, navy-blue sneakers with matching socks, and a fabulous bangle he always wears at his wrist, made of bronze and turquoise. I tried to take it from him several times, but he says he can't get it off. He put it on when he was a teenager, before leaving Cuba. And when he tried to take it off later on—when he broke up with the girlfriend who had given it to him—he'd grown so much that he could no longer slip the bracelet over his hand. I met Damián years before I met Elisa, through a mutual friend at the launch of an anthology of young Cuban poets. He's restrained, kind, affectionate, and fun-loving; he likes women, alcohol, and drugs, but I've never seen him flaunting any one of the three. I think he's a good man, although it's hard to tell with people until you need a favor, or when it comes to taking sides, which always happens sooner or later. At least he looks you in the eye, he's always the same person no matter who he's with, and I've never heard him say a bad word about anyone. He likes to laugh more than talk, and when he does talk it's to divulge some complicated socio-political theory that nobody really understands anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if he were one of those people who think the first moonwalking mission was a hoax. He's tall and thin, but fluffy and rounded at the same time, his features are lazy like hills, there's nothing sharp to them like the style of men I prefer, nothing perverse, aquiline, or defeated in him, no hidden storms on the horizon, and the sky one touches by his side probably doesn't reach beyond the ceiling, the bedroom ceiling that is. But of course Elisa sees him as a sort of Greek god type, a dangerous predator, a Don Juan who has had affairs with half the city. When you fall in love—she insists she's not, that he's just a lover and nothing more, a strong sign that she probably is—the way you think about your object of desire never corresponds with reality, especially with regards to physical allure. How good it would be if we could only preserve this truth for the next time around, but love always returns the settings back to zero, and if we're lucky, the next man who comes along will once again be the most handsome, sexy, smart, fun, and amazing man in the world, even though he's really a halfwit hunchback.

Sofía bursts through the door, dragging Dani with her. She's just back from town and has a bottle of champagne in hand. She's wearing a truly bizarre straw hat with a black bow that looks like an upside-down ice-cream cone with the tip cut off, huge bug-eye sunglasses, and a black dress tied at the neck, which showcases her delicate collarbone and shoulders.

—Look what I found in town!

She stares at Guillem for a few seconds and I watch as surprise, curiosity, interest, and glee all pass hurriedly across her countenance one by one.

—Oh, champagne, he says sarcastically. —Wouldn't a bottle of whiskey have been more appropriate? Champagne is for those silly chichi types. What do you think, Úrsula?

—I don't know, Mr. Guillem, I don't drink.

—Yeah, right, he responds. In this house you have to mark the level of liquid in the bottles before going to bed.

—I had to buy it. I just received terrible news. My gynecologist died.

—Oh, I'm so sorry, I say. —That's terrible.

She sits at the table looking downcast and quiet, lost in thought. I had no idea she was so fond of her gynecologist. I wonder briefly if she's going to steal the wind from my grief.

—Don't you get it? she exclaims abruptly, raising her head. —He's the first man to die who's had his hands in my cunt.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

—We're getting so old, Elisa sighs philosophically.

—I'm fabulous, Sofía says. Better than ever.

—Come on, Posh, pass the bottle over and I'll put it in the fridge to chill, Guillem says. —We can see how upset you are.

—What did he call me? Sofía asks, opening her eyes widely.

—Posh, you know, the Spice Girl who's a little chichi, I say.

Sofía snorts daintily. —That's odd. I'm not the least bit chichi.

—What's odd is the hat you're wearing, Guillem says.

—Well. Who wants to go boating? Boys! Get ready. We leave in twenty minutes. Posh, go and put your swimsuit on.

There was nothing in the world you liked more than to go out on the boat. I'll look for one of the photos of you at the helm of
Tururut
as soon as I gather the courage to open the photo albums you gave me on my last birthday, a few months before you died—I told you I wasn't interested in your precious figurines or valuable books and paintings, the only thing I wanted was the family photo albums my grandfather had started and you continued, and then you showed up with a huge purple suitcase full of them, dragging it along with great difficulty and the help of a nurse. They're an irrefutable testament that we had been happy. A photo where you're smiling; your hair is windblown and salty, and I'll place it with the rest of the photos on the shelf, next to Papa's. I haven't done it so far, because you aren't a memory yet. I imagine that time, the bastard, the all-merciful, will see to that.

Guillem is wearing an old captain's hat he dug out of a box in the garage and leads the small force down the cobblestone streets and onward to the pier, passing muster before the unflappable gaze of the church, gleaming in the sunlight. Houses are assembled around it like an army of obedient soldiers, forming a compact and harmonious mass only broken here and there by the vibrant fuchsia of a bougainvillea or the weathered green of a random tree. The mountains rise up behind the town, once covered in olive trees, isolating it from the rest of the region and practically turning it into an island. The sea, tame or angry, gloomy or euphoric, wicked or coy, is speckled with tired, empty boats, and seems to be paying homage to a place that neither time nor the hordes of tourists have been able to ruin.

The children wait dutifully on the pier next to Guillem and Patum for the boatman to come and transport us out to our wharf, dressed in orange life jackets that echo the color of the buoys bobbing on the water's surface. Hugo and Pep talk softly between themselves, Carolina tries to stop little Nina from jumping into the water, and we go for a beer run.

Guillem immediately befriends the boatman, who gives his phone number for when we're ready to come back in.

—Posh, remind me to buy him a bottle of rum when we're in town this afternoon, would you?

The sea is like a silver plate; its surface sparkles as if all the stars of the night before had fallen in. I reach into the water and let my hand drag against the movement, feel the current between my fingers, the three foamy columns that leave a wake behind and disappear almost instantly. At the bottom I glimpse tiny gray fish stirring like little ghosts. Then the beach and its human rainbow, the sounds of laughter, the shouting and splashing all dissipate into the distance as we move full speed ahead. When we get to our boat, Guillem asks us to board in an orderly fashion and tells us where to sit. Afterward, and with Edgar's help, he pulls the tiller and rudder blade out and plants himself smack in the middle. He adjusts his captain's hat and starts to imitate you.

—All right then, children, don't anyone move from their spot, a boat can be a very dangerous place. Edgar, Edgar, put the tiller in its place. Careful now! Careful there, don't fall in! Wait, where's that anchor? Oh, it's in the water! Let's just hope we haven't snagged it in the rocks. Who's going to jump in to unsnag the anchor? No, it's not? Oh, thank goodness. The keys! Where are the keys? Whose job was it to bring the keys? My bag! My bag! Where is it? The glasses! The glasses! Don't anyone move!

It's such a perfect imitation that we roar with laughter.

Then he sucks the tip of his index finger, raises it high, and frowns with his eyebrows knitted, looking out over the horizon, and turns into Paco, one of your best friends.

—Let's see if today the Garbi doesn't just kick up. Ohhh, yes. The situation is tricky, could get critical at some point. Might be better to stay close, a quick swim and back home in a jiffy.