"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