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

“Perfect,” he replied rather too enthusiastically, as if that is what he had been intending to eat ever since he arrived.

“You’ll enjoy it. It’s really delicious!”

He nodded brusquely, and his chin stopped halfway, rather as a flamingo pauses, head down, before spearing some bothersome parasite on its wing.

She withdrew, and he again heard the nasal creak of the swing door; he opened the newspaper, then closed it again and put it down on the table. He looked over at the kitchen. He looked out of the window. He read the sign on the corner of the street: “Nelson Street. Cul-de-sac”. Nelson Street led into the avenue where the restaurant had its entrance; it was made up of detached houses with one or two garages, long back gardens and various run-down tenement buildings. The cars driving down the one-way street passed with youthful impetuosity, sending out pulses of sound.

On the corner of Nelson Street a middle-aged man appeared with bristling hair, baggy, drooping trousers, large eyes and a wrinkled face. He turned on his feet like an automaton in order to place himself on the edge of the pavement. Suddenly, standing very erect and keeping his elbows close to his body, he began to conduct an imaginary orchestra of percussion and wind instruments. He appeared to be urging the percussionist to keep banging the cymbals.

The man in the restaurant looked across at the kitchen door, his now bright eyes adding to his stiff smile; then, with renewed interest, he immediately turned back to the man in the street.

The man had crossed the road and was walking calmly along the opposite pavement towards, it seems, a newspaper kiosk. He disappeared behind the kiosk.

He soon reappeared, striding rapidly in the other direction, with a folded newspaper under each arm and another vast newspaper open in his hands. When he reached Nelson Street, he stepped off the kerb with extreme care, slowed his pace and stopped in the middle of the street, reading intently. “What if a car comes along…”, “A car might come along and…”, “A car could come round that corner at any moment…” The man rapidly folded up the newspaper he was reading, added it to the other one he was carrying under his left arm and walked over to the opposite pavement taking two hops each on either leg. When he reached the kerb, he climbed onto the pavement by raising his right leg ridiculously high, then set off again, but instead of coming down Nelson Street, he continued along the avenue. Ahead of him, going in the same direction, were two ladies wearing hats and walking along arm in arm. He tiptoed up to them and, keeping one step behind them, began to imitate their swaying, rhythmic walk, like barges bobbing about on the water…

It was difficult for the man in the restaurant to see now, and so he slightly shifted the table, with its bottle of tomato sauce, plates and cutlery, so that he could lean right over and peer out of the other side of the window, his forehead resting on the glass. One of the ladies turned round, spotted the man following them and stopped abruptly. The man immediately averted his gaze, stared haughtily down at the pavement and brusquely, awkwardly — perhaps fearfully, too — marched straight past them, feigning a complete lack of interest. He was walking along very briskly now, when…

The man heard beside him a sound like someone sniffing. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder. The waitress was there with a plate in her hand. He straightened up and sat down, while she pushed the table against the window, restored the sauce bottle and the cutlery to their proper places and set before him the plate of spaghetti.

“Seen something interesting?” she asked.

“Yes, very. Very interesting indeed! Thank you.”

The waitress lumbered off, and he began greedily coiling the spaghetti round his fork, using the spoon as bowl. He glanced over at the door to the kitchen and saw that it was not quite closed and that the waitress was peering at him through the crack.

“OK, SEND HER OVER.”

And Señorita Palmira, who had three small children and another on the way, put the phone down and said to Toño, who was falling asleep in his armchair:

“She’ll never be as good as Rosa.”

And she sat down, wondering how things would turn out for Rosa, who had worked for her as a nursemaid for four years and, instead of becoming a nun, as she had always told everyone was her intention, had married a man from the same village as her and with whom she had been in regular correspondence.

“She’s going to have a very different life in the village from the one she’s had here with us in town,” she said, as Toño uttered his first loud snore.

And two days later, the new nursemaid arrived, Cloti, who had the dark pallor of the poor, and was skinny and slightly hunched, having carried children in her arms long before she was really strong enough to do so, and who wore women’s clothes that hung loosely about her thirteen-year-old body. She came from the mountains — whether from the Sierra de Saceruela or the Sierra de Almadén, Señorita Palmira couldn’t remember — and she had two sisters who were also in service, one with a family in Córdoba and another in Almagro, and a brother who had found a position as a cook or a kitchen hand at the spa at Fuensanta.

“I understand there are five of you, four sisters and a brother.”

“Yes, my other sister, Micaela, is in Linares…”

Señorita Palmira stepped back a little.

“Don’t shout, girl. And what does she do?”

“We don’t know.”

“Please, don’t shout, I’ve told you already. I’m not deaf, you know. People in town don’t talk the way you folk up in the mountains do.”

Señorita Palmira’s words buzzed like motherly, loving bees about her mouth, while Cloti seemed to have clambered up onto some high crag, from which she heaped loathing on the earth and sky like a rook.

“That isn’t speaking, that’s shouting. You see, Cloti, there’s always someone sleeping in this house. There’s María de las Mercedes, who’s not yet one year old; Almudena and Toñito who, like all small children need their sleep and so tend to get up late; then there’s my husband, who always takes a nap in his armchair before going back to work; and my father-in-law, who has a lie-down as soon as he returns from his daily game of cards at the local bar; and even the neighbours may take a nap, too, for all I know; you never hear anyone shouting in the courtyard. Imagine if someone were to ask you something about us, however trivial, well, everyone would hear what you said in reply…”

Señorita Palmira spoke in gentle waves and smelt of warm flesh and breast milk.

Cloti got into the habit of clapping her hand over her mouth whenever her loud croak soared up to the heavens, which was all the time, but she simply could not understand this household, because in the big houses in the mountains where she had been brought up, the children and the elderly who slept during the day, regardless of whether they were sleeping in a bed, in a cradle or on the floor, always seemed dead to the world and oblivious to the fact that everyone around them was shouting at the top of their voice and, besides, people there tended to sleep at night and, summer or winter, got up at six or seven o’clock in the morning, if not earlier. It seemed to her that in the city everyone slept very lightly, and the only explanation she could come up with was the one people at home gave for everything: they obviously didn’t work hard enough, because a good night’s sleep had to be earned, like your daily bread or the trust of your master.

“Cloti, please, Señor Toño is sleeping.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Cloti, the little one’s fast asleep.”