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

Sudeva knew perfectly well that Damayanti was working as a hat-check girl in a club. The first time he saw her, he watched her until late at night. At ten o’clock, a man appeared — young, slim, tall, dark and wearing a blue overcoat — and took her dancing. At dawn, the couple disappeared into a hotel.

This is what Damayanti was thinking about that dark young man called Maisure: “Sometimes he does things that Nala might have done.”

A year and a half later, Sudeva saw her again. This time she was with an equally young man, although this time he was pink-skinned and fair and muscular. Standing on a street corner, they were exchanging a very long, awkward kiss.

Damayanti was thinking about the fair-haired man: “He often reminds me of Nala and also, a little, of Maisure.”

Sudeva also knew that Nala was currently working for an advertising agency. Just as he was despairing of ever finding him, he spotted him drinking a dry Martini with a kind of young Damayanti. She was dark, slender, and with a smile that Sudeva took great pains to study. The inspector deduced or, rather, intuited that there was more to this affair than mere words.

Nala was thinking about Shimoga, the dark young woman: “Sometimes she does what Damayanti used to do.”

A while later, Sudeva saw him again walking by a river, under an umbrella, arm in arm with a svelte, red-haired woman with nice legs. The couple sat down beneath the arch of the bridge, while Sudeva, up above, was thinking his own thoughts as he gazed down at the river.

It seemed to Nala that the woman was sometimes like Damayanti and sometimes like Shimoga.

Sudeva was old now. His job allowed him to live very comfortably. He looked for Nala and Damayanti, but always took special care never to find them. He had thought deeply about this. He would not allow the story to end well, because he didn’t want it to end badly. Things are as they are, and not even a father can change them. Besides, it was so pleasant to be eternally employed by a gentleman: a fine, rich, kind-hearted gentleman like the magnanimous Bhima!

For José Luis Castillo Puche, with thanks for the loan of these two characters

THEY TOOK JUANA to the cemetery. The funeral was attended by a number of old people of Frasquito’s age, by Juana’s brother-in-law, their nephews and three or four women. Juana and Frasquito were well-known figures locally. Originally because, though poor themselves, they were distant relatives of Don Roque, the richest man in the village. Later, they became famous because four years earlier they had been the victims of a robbery. When Don Roque died, he left them a vineyard in the neighbouring village. Since they had no children, they sold the vineyard. And afterwards, on the train back, all the money from the sale was stolen from them, and with it the prospect of a comfortable old age and a trip to Valencia to get Juana’s teeth fixed. The civil guard never found out who was responsible. Originally, Juana and Frasquito were referred to as “Don Roque’s relatives”. Later, they were known as “the couple who got robbed”.

Juana’s death — which was hastened by the distress caused by the robbery and by the civil war — had prompted people to start gossiping again about that famous incident. And as Frasquito walked behind the coffin, he caught the odd word, snatches of conversation, comments and even the occasional muffled laugh, doubtless alluding to the robbery on the train. Not even three years of civil war had erased the memory of that event. A feeling of helpless rage began to take hold of Frasquito, and as he threw the first handful of earth onto the coffin, he muttered darkly, his words muffled by sobs: “They’re going to give it all back, Juana. You’ll see. All of it.” None of those present knew what he meant, and they listened, eyes fixed coldly and respectfully on the ground, believing that they had heard a promise, an oath or the announcement of something that time would take it upon itself to crumple and cast to the winds.

The people attending the funeral lined up to shake the hand of the widower, Juana’s brother-in-law and the nephews, and then they formed into groups or couples as they strolled back to the village, rolling cigarettes, chatting about the state of the fields and turning their backs on that alien death.

That night, Frasquito chose not to stay with any of his nephews. He managed to endure until quite late in the day the company of his family and those three or four women who had arranged for them all to pray the rosary. Then he went back alone to the house where he had always lived with Juana. He bolted the door, placed a straw mattress and a blanket behind it, and there, with his feet almost touching the door of their bedroom, he lay very still in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about what death must be like and wondering whether his Juana would be feeling terribly alone and cold and perhaps filled with dumb, inexpressible grief to find he was no longer at her side, as he always had been, with the sudden realization that he had left her there, far beneath the earth, as if she, poor, innocent, childlike Juana, would be capable of understanding a death as serious, irreparable and permanent as that. “Juana, my love, you must get used to not being with me, just for a while at first, and then awhile longer, and then a bit more. The earth is dry and hard and blind, but the Lord God understands, my dear, and, gradually, with a slow, firm hand, He will change you so that you no longer turn to look at me, so that you can bear to spend whole days without me”—here his eyes filled with tears—“and it may even be better for you, you might even be happier, and one day, Juana, you will learn how the people who robbed us are suffering down in hell.”

No. He was sure that the very obliging man from the train was still alive. Had he been the thief? Or was it the photographer with the horse, who had taken their picture in the village square? He didn’t know. He had never known. It had been all of them. The brusque, starchy notary who had rushed them through the sale; the Gómez brothers, who, when they bought the vineyard, had rolled their eyes and laughed, all the while insisting that they had given them a good price; the mediator Carrasco; the men standing in the square in their long, dark smocks, eyeing them insolently, mischievously, mockingly; the sacristan in the church, which Juana had insisted on entering in order to pay for a mass for Don Roque; the packed train itself, full of people, loud voices, smoke, sun and wind, full of inexplicable, lurching stops and starts, of comings and goings and vehement pushings and shovings. It had all been a rascally plot to relegate them once more to the miserly wage they could earn from working the land, to their previous state of desolate, domestic poverty. But he didn’t care any more. Raising his eyebrows and looking back at the cemetery, he murmured: “I may not be here to tend the dead, Juana, but just remember: they’re going to pay back all the money they stole from us, right down to the last peseta. Perhaps God will arrange for the wind to send you the occasional flower.” Then, when the light seeping in through the cracks in the yard door took on a bluish tinge, he got up in silence and stood hesitating for a while outside their bedroom. In the end, he pushed the door open and went in, determined that he would look at nothing, that he would barely breathe. On a chair, he saw his corduroy suit. He put it on hurriedly, clumsily. He opened the bottom drawer of the potbellied dresser, and a pair of dark, bright, peasant eyes looked up at him from a piece of card. There they were in their wedding photo, stiff and as if rooted to the spot, but she was the person you immediately noticed, not him. He put the photo away in his inside jacket pocket. He picked up a grey sweater, a blanket, his black scarf and his black cap. Then he stumbled, almost choking, from the room and stood leaning against the wall in the corridor, two tears running down his cheeks, because, despite himself, he had felt Juana’s presence, smelt her; her human warmth was still there in the bedroom. She smelt as he knew Juana always did on a Sunday. And the dresser was full of her. As the darkness outside was beginning to swell with light, he opened the door, as alone now as he had been on the cruelly bright, fateful day when he had last stepped out of the house with Juana and walked slowly to the station, where he sat down and waited. The train hove into view like a vast, grubby shadow, like a great black panting beast forced by its driver to slice a path through the dawn light. He got out his ticket. He climbed into the carriage. When the train drew out of the station, the fields looked numb with cold, the wind was whistling and there were still stars in the sky. “Such a bitter night! How hard it must be for the newly dead! Poor Juana, abandoned to the darkness! What a horrible thing it is to shovel earth onto a life, as if to do so were a mere ritual, almost a game, and never to raise that life up again. Never!” Frasquito was staring, wide-eyed, out of the window and moving cracked, trembling lips: “Goodbye, Juana! Goodbye, Juana, my love!” The platform was empty. He waved at the flagstones, waving goodbye to his dead wife, who had also been like an inseparable sister to him. He looked at the village roofs, the school, Don Roque’s house, the church, the town-hall tower, and, at the first bend, he caught sight of the west wall of the cemetery and a cypress tree. There she was, with no alternative now but to accustom herself to death, slowly letting go of Frasquito’s warm kisses, of the female, physical web of household chores, the chatter and laughter with the next-door neighbour, the long, warm, delicious evenings sitting by the front door — all cold now, all gone. There she was, sadly, opaquely, entering a world so large, so formal, so landless that in it she would be nothing. And yet poor Juana, who had been made for this lowly, humble world, was now incredibly important, for she was entering the unstoppable, meandering river of eternity.