Medardo Fraile - Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories

One day, Don José, the odontologist, looked at Rosita. It was the look she had been waiting for, and Rosita began to look at Don José too. He was wearing a wedding ring, but this fact provoked in Rosita only relative unease. And it was this perhaps — so that there could be no possible room for doubt — that prompted Don José to turn up one afternoon at the Café El Buen Suceso with his lady wife and his three offspring in tow, plus one baby not yet weaned and still in the pram. The children clearly adored their papa. His lady wife ordered hot chocolate, cake, milk and anything else she fancied. Don José was clearly not alone. He had probably only looked at Rosita that once in order to appraise her teeth. As far as Rosita was concerned, Don José could look where he liked, although, truth be told, married men really had no right to look anywhere.

She was still sighing over these sad thoughts when she noticed, standing at one end of the bar, Isabel’s boyfriend, who worked as a waiter at El Guayacán and who, as usual, was waiting for Isabel as he silently drank a coffee. Isabel was lucky. Isabel went over and spoke to him, said goodbye to Rosita and her other colleagues, and then she and her boyfriend went off together arm in arm.

It seems that another customer, Señor Quintana, was also in the habit of looking at her. She only looked at him on alternate days in order to make him jealous, but on the days when she did look at him, she positively besieged him with looks that were sometimes clear and impetuous and sometimes soft and insinuating. Señor Quintana, we should say, was a clerk of the court and when he first noticed Rosita looking at him, he immediately considered the moral consequences, but, on one occasion, was so far tempted that he found himself doing sums in his head to work out how much he could, at a pinch, afford per month. Señor Quintana, however, far from being an impulsive man, was the very soul of caution and didn’t want to give up the café, or miss out on his cigar on Thursdays and Sundays, or delay work on the modest house he was having built in Pozuelo. Besides, Señor Quintana already had someone at home: his wife.

Rosita wasn’t lucky like Isabel. Nor was she like Ketty, whom Don Ángel picked up each night at around one o’clock. Don Ángel was not her boyfriend, because boyfriends are never called Don anything. All that awaited Rosita, when the bar closed, were the shadows of the trees on moonlit nights, the last tram, the occasional drunken passer-by and the nightwatchman’s sideways glances. Until one day, the magnet of the cash register attracted the gaze of Don Andrés Llorente, a rentier and a gentleman, with a bad cough and a certain macho arrogance, who was getting on in years, perhaps too much so.

Don Andrés was a regular customer at El Buen Suceso. He talked about the law, because he had studied to be a lawyer, but he talked about medicine too, because he had a nephew who was an eminent doctor, and about architecture, politics and business, because he had relatives involved in those areas too. He spoke in such virile tones that the veins on his forehead stood out. He was a proper man. He used to visit the bar before lunch for an aperitif and in the evening, at eight o’clock, he would wait in a corner of the café for the arrival of a modest young girl, with whom he would talk very quietly, opening and closing his eyes a great deal and making large gestures. The young woman would sometimes laugh as if she were at the circus. And sometimes she would be heard to cry in a shrill, rather vulgar voice:

“Ooh, Andrés, the things you say!”

Then, one evening, she did not come.

“I say, Manolín, has my niece been in?”

And Rosita seized the opportunity to ask:

“Oh, is she a relative of yours, the young woman you meet here?”

Very gravely, carefully composing his features and modulating his voice, Don Andrés spoke rather loftily about that common misfortune, common at least in the upper classes: divorce. A brother of his had frittered away a fortune, married badly, and now his poor children were paying for his mistakes. The girl who met him in the café was one of his brother’s daughters, the eldest; he sometimes gave her money and was trying to find her a job. “Well, it’s hardly the poor little angel’s fault,” said Don Andrés wisely and with unusual restraint.

“Ah, the things that life throws at us!” sighed Rosita. “It’s lucky for them that they have such a kind uncle who can help them out a little.”

“Who did you think she was, then? No, I like mature women like yourself, the kind of woman who, when you get up close, gives off the sound of the sea, just like pressing your ear to a seashell.”

When he wasn’t coughing, Don Andrés was quite silver-tongued and made remarkably eloquent use of his hat in conversation. To Rosita — even though she had no idea whether he was a bachelor or not — he seemed like a man idealized by bachelordom and capable of being as obedient as a schoolboy, a man who would meekly allow someone to tend his various coughs and colds. Gradually, the niece — the supposed niece, thought Rosita to herself — began to visit the café less often and, in the end, stopped coming altogether; indeed, on the last few occasions, she had argued with Don Andrés and been rude to him. Day by day, Don Andrés and Rosita exchanged more and more comments and confidences, and Rosa frequently left the cash register to go over to the bar, like a young girl going to the street window to trade sweet nothings with her lover. He was in no hurry to sin; his body now had little to do with his words and remained slightly aloof, waiting its turn, always alleging aches and pains and other pretexts. They had spent many days now embroiled in sad, delicate family histories, which embellish and lend a sheen of unhappiness to both eyes and skin. Rosita was not happy. Don Andrés — ah, what a falling-off had there been — now lacked the very dearest of affections. The world, he said, was full of ungrateful people.

“I just can’t believe they would do that to you, Don Andrés!”

And he, tactfully, said no more, so as not to pour more poison into what he imagined to be Rosita’s innocent soul.

“Oh, the tales I could tell you… Then you’d know what it is to be a man.”

And they agreed that she would reduce her working day to just one shift so that they could meet somewhere else at a decent hour, because being able to talk as freely as they did was really something very special.

And so that is what they agreed, and it was then that the newspapers starting trumpeting forth in banner headlines the arrival of a fast-moving cold front accompanied by strong winds. And the cold front duly arrived, setting the geography shivering, sending goose pimples throughout all Iberia and carrying off with it Don Andrés, that very proper husk of a man, full of impure hopes and terrible memories. It happened rather suddenly. As if death had finally taken seriously his many lamentations, not realizing that they were only the measure of the affection he was asking of Rosita. And so off Don Andrés went. Along with four cows in Lugo, an old lady in Ávila, a truck carrying flour in Soria, a nightwatchman in La Felguera, a little boy in Peñarroya and another in Sama de Langreo.

Rosita, now the grieving widow of a plan, exalted their story and filled the memory of their friendship with sudden, gentle floods of tears, with melancholy and respect. She continued to work all day in the café. At night, when it closed, and the figures of Morterito and Rodrigo Vázquez were left alone to stick their tongues out at each other, what awaited Rosita now were not only the shadows of the trees on moonlit nights, but also another friendlier, less noticeable shadow, one that smelt of cigarettes and coffee, had the sparkle of a diamond ring and walked with the small, delicate steps of a gentleman: the shadow of Don Andrés Llorente, ill-fated lover and the broken handle through which Rosita Pascual had once, God willing, hoped to slip her quiet, plump, anodyne arm.