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

Geny interrupted him because there was a programme about the Normandy landings on Channel 2.

“When?”

“Any minute now.”

They watched it together, while she busied herself with some knitting for the Hospital for Children with Spina Bifida. He fell asleep towards the end, before the Führer took personal command. When he woke, they ate some cheese and biscuits and some fruit and, after watching the nine o’clock news, slowly got ready for bed.

“Did you write the letter?”

“No. When did I have time?”

He lay down on his side, thinking about what he had written and noticed that Geny had got into bed wearing her floral-print nightdress. And, still looking at those flowers, he gradually drifted off to sleep.

NALA LIVED on his country estate, and the cat, the dog, the horse, the housemaid, the scullery maid, the old cook, the estate manager, the day labourer and anyone else who happened to pass by all gazed at him. Nala was like a god.

Damayanti lived on her country estate, neither very near nor very far from Nala, and when she passed, the flowers opened, the stream leapt, the birds sang, the clouds vanished, the oak tree bowed low, the old ash tree clamoured murmurously and the ilex simpered coyly like a procuress from long, long ago. Damayanti was like a goddess.

One day, beside the battered old car abandoned by the hen house, Nala found a brightly coloured football. It could have belonged to his younger brother Puskara, except that he had never played football. Nala kicked the ball as hard as he could and sent it soaring up into the sky, where it disappeared from sight.

Damayanti was splashing and jumping about in the pool with her girlfriends when she heard a dull plop. A coloured ball spun and glittered on the surface of the water. Damayanti swam gaily over to pick it up, but the ball slipped majestically away along one of the overflow channels. She climbed out of the water and ran after the ball. She picked it up and studied it carefully. The ball showed evident signs of fatigue; it was breathing wearily through its one lung. After a while, Damayanti heard a voice telling her: “The one who sent me has flexible muscles, is tireless, powerful and young.”

That evening, Damayanti consulted the oldest people on the estate about wind direction and distances, and found out where the ball had come from.

Shortly afterwards, her father, Bhima, threw a lavish party.

People came from all over, even the three famous and incalculably wealthy landowners called Indra, Agni and Kali. Then, from outside the iron gates, came a long, victorious blast from Nala’s car horn, and when he entered, there issued forth from the mouths of all the women an irrepressible murmur of pleasure. Music was playing. Couples were dancing. Nala and Damayanti slowly surrendered their red hearts, which — now partnered, now alone — were galloping ever faster and rapidly ripening and swaying on the warm branch of the dance.

Indra, Agni and Kali were outraged. They stared insolently at Damayanti. They took it in turns to speak to her. They brandished the glittering gold of their words, looks, teeth, pockets, jewels, buttons, fingers, ears, noses, buttonholes. Damayanti hesitated. What would her kind father say when he learnt that she had rejected the landowners’ fortunes? But it seemed to her that these gentlemen, like gods laden with ex-votos, lacked substance; they flitted back and forth, their feet not even touching the ground, and their handsome, well-bred eyes, apparently made to gaze upon great things, were hard and inexpressive and still, like plump little glasses filled with liqueur. Damayanti’s heart settled on the young man who was tossing a ball over the warm heads of the other girls, a ball presaging vigour and strength. She settled on Nala.

And so they married. And they lived on his country estate. And they were happy. And they had a son and a daughter.

But Nala was mad about playing poker dice. He never just bought a Martini. He either lost it or won it.

And so the landowner Kali, who could not forgive the happy couple, made a pact with Puskara, who was never gazed at by the cat, the dog, the horse, the bull, the housemaid, the scullery maid, the old cook, the day labourer or the estate manager. Who was never gazed at by anyone.

He said to Puskara: “Play dice with your brother day and night. All the gold I have glitters at your back. We will ruin him. His good luck will never be such as to reach the very bottom of our purses. Our luck, on the other hand, will sweep away his entire fortune.”

And day by day, Nala, bent over the card table and blind to the consequences, lost his wedding ring, his watch, his tiepin, his diamond cufflinks, his Alfa Romeo, his Mercedes 180, his Ferrari — with its wild, fast engine — his clothes, his lands, his house and even the gaze of those who never tired of gazing at him.

Damayanti wept. What else could she do? And one evening, when the first lights were being lit, she secretly took her two children and left them at her father’s house.

“Now all you have left is Damayanti,” Puskara said to Nala. Meanwhile, Kali, intoxicated, overjoyed and fully avenged, was watching in triumph, with one piercing eye pressed to the keyhole.

When Nala heard his wife’s name, he stood up. Fearfully, like the child who steals the milk intended for an invalid, like the blind man in a world ablaze with light, and filled with the bitter solitude of all great libertines and all great sages, he made his way to Damayanti’s bedroom.

He said nothing. He entered the room in silence, his face as white as the sheets that covered him as he slipped into bed; with a strange light in his eyes, he stroked his wife’s soft hair, her hands and shoulders.

At midnight, when Damayanti was sleeping, he got up and left the house for ever.

He wrote her only a few parting words: “Now that I am about to lose you, my love grows ever stronger. I cannot taint your life with my misfortune. The bed that, tonight, gave shelter to our uneasy sleep is no longer ours. Nothing in this house belongs to us. But one day, I will be worthy of you. I promise. I will remake the fortune I have lost and seek you out day and night in order to pay you in kisses for each tear you have shed.”

Given that the forests of the world lie too far off, Damayanti did not plunge into them to weep over his misfortune. We men may have travelled to the moon, but we never know anything about what happens in the Earth’s forests, and had this story not occurred near the city and affected two respectable families, no one would ever have known anything about it.

Damayanti did not want to move back into her father’s house, and so she set off into the world in search of Nala. She worked as a lady’s companion, a research assistant, an English teacher, an interpreter in a fashion house, the manageress of a hotel, a window dresser.

Nala sought his fortune by every available route. He was a docker, a car salesman, a barman, a chauffeur, a taxi driver, an opening act for big-name stars.

Damayanti’s father, Bhima, immediately summoned Sudeva — a shrewd, veteran police inspector, working now as a private detective — and engaged him on a full-time basis, his mission being to find both Nala and Damayanti.

Inspector Sudeva fell asleep in his seat, legs crossed, on innumerable trains; he arrived in strange cities; he spent whole mornings and afternoons in districts full of market stalls; he ate hundreds of sandwiches in cinemas with continuous showings; he had his eyes tested and bought new glasses; from the windows of old cafés, he watched people of all classes and at all hours of the day; in every park, he threw children their ball and he waited, yawning, in every doorway, for the rain to ease.