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

“Cloti, cover your mouth, please.”

So-and-so’s sleeping, someone else is just falling asleep, you’ve woken him up, or you will wake him up, why do you have to shout so, you’ll get the children into bad habits, is that how they taught you to speak at school, what a way to educate children, like savages, when I have the baby, God and St Raymond permitting, you’ll either have to change your ways or I’ll have to let you go…

Cloti was very confused and couldn’t understand why they found her way of speaking so irritating and why, on the other hand, they didn’t get annoyed with the television or the ambulances, when the latter sounded as if the patient they were carrying was yelling at the top of his voice, and she began to think that perhaps she lacked some refinement or native cunning common to those city folk, and so she tried to make it clear that she was aware of this by interrupting a sentence with her hand over her mouth in order to speak more softly, giggling and shrugging and repeating her favourite excuse: “That’s how I always speak.”

Her fatal taste for free speech and for rending the air with her cawing became a source of fear and horror one afternoon when Señorita Palmira sent her to the Church of the Holy Orders with a message for Father Román, the parish priest. Father Román wasn’t to be found at home or in the sacristy, so Cloti went to see if he was at church, where she found him praying. Sitting with him in the gloom were a few women whispering prayers, and Cloti went over to the priest’s pew and stood there, saying nothing. Father Ramón looked at her, opened a book and sat reading for a good while before, with some difficulty, getting to his feet; then he drew very close to her as if he couldn’t quite see her and, in a soft, mellow voice, asked:

“What do you want, child? What do you want?”

“Señorita Palmira sent me to tell you that…”

The priest shrank back, raised his right hand, placed one silencing finger to his lips to stop her, and let out a very long “shhhhh”, like a balloon deflating or like an owl in the bell tower.

Cloti had covered her mouth, convinced she had committed some terrible sin. Then she removed her hand from her mouth and said as quietly as she could:

“I’ll come back when God is awake.”

Then she fled on tiptoe and didn’t look back.

LORENZO IS SUCH A WORRIER! He worries intensely about nothing at all; he’s in a constant state about the silliest of things! He began to suspect that the questions people were always asking him and to which he always had to answer No, and the number of occasions on which people mistook him for someone else must all have some basis in reality, in some mysterious truth; perhaps those people were right in a way.

If, for example, a gentleman came over to him and said: “Excuse me, is your name Francisco?”, Lorenzo would frown and say anxiously: “No, no, of course not. My name’s Lorenzo.”

And it wasn’t that he thought that this complete stranger Francisco might be a bad person or some rogue wanted by the police. No, Francisco could be anyone. What worried him, what he found so mysterious, was that he could just as easily have been called Francisco as Lorenzo, that he had a certain percentage of Francisco in him, in his gestures, his face, his eyes, his clothes.

He had been worrying about this for almost two years. It began when he was doing his national service and had time on his hands. He was pondering the lives of his commanding officers and thinking how every village has a different way of expressing the same thing. He was teetering on the verge of dialectology. But one Sunday afternoon he was caught unawares by a question. Up until then, he hadn’t even really noticed that he was often mistaken for someone else.

“Young man, are you in the cavalry?”

“No, no, I’m not.”

“I see. Because in the cavalry, of course, they give you instruction in hand-to-hand combat, swords and other weapons.”

The person who asked him this question was an old man. But what of it? In the first place, the gentleman should have been able to see that he was in the infantry. In the second place, what did he mean by all that stuff about “instruction” in various matters? “Wow! Even dressed the way I am, I could still pass for a cavalryman!”

He began to compare himself with the men in the fourth squadron. He studied their coarse, blackened features, their stocky, thickset bodies, their baggy breeches, their nasal voices and their awful jokes. He concluded that he really could have belonged to the cavalry.

He thought: “We are never what we should be. We are impregnated with things that are not ours and never have been.” Couldn’t the questions people asked him be directed at anyone? Was there anyone so completely himself that he could not be mistaken for someone else? Was he the only one who could be both Francisco and Lorenzo, a cavalryman and an infantryman, an engineer and a bookkeeper for a rather dodgy loan company? One day, you see, he was travelling on the train to Villalba to see his cousin Isabel who had just had an operation. He got off the train. Other passengers got off too. On the platform stood a group of workmen wearing scarves covering their mouths and, as soon as they saw him, they talked briefly among themselves, then two of them came over to him and asked:

“Are you the engineer?”

“The engineer? What engineer? No, no, of course I’m not.”

“Oh, sorry. So he’s not on this train either. We’re waiting for the mines engineer, you see.”

They were from Hoyo de Manzanares. They must have been guards or miners. They were waiting for the train so as to receive their weekly wages perhaps or in the hope of finding work. They were waiting for an engineer. Apart from that brief exchange of remarks, they had approached Lorenzo as soon as they saw him. How odd. Out of all the other passengers who had arrived, those men had identified Lorenzo as the engineer. His cousin Isabel found the mistake most amusing. She smiled as if there were nothing else to do in the world but smile, because she was pleased that her cousin had come to see her and because she was ill.

Mistaken identities! What mysterious veil covers the eyes of the person who makes the mistake? What are they trying to tell us with that mistake? What path are they opening up for us? What mysterious essence in us encourages those erroneous questions?

People had been mistaking Lorenzo for someone else long before he even noticed.

“Do you own a hotel in Los Negrales?”

“You’ll have had your lunch, I suppose.”

“Hi, are you the jeweller from the shop on the corner?”

“Are you related to Señor Requena?”

“Heavens, is that you, Andresito!”

“You probably know Julia already.”

“Is your father called Antonio?”

“Did you do your degree in History or in Politics?”

“You look to me like you’re from Extremadura.”

Good grief! What a world of possibilities people offered him! He was capable of being called Lorenzo, of having his own life and relationships and, at the same time, filling other worlds, too, indeed overflowing them, and having a father called Antonio, being related to Requena, having a university degree, meeting and even marrying Julia and being a native of Extremadura like Hernán Cortés…

But he was just plain Lorenzo. The son of Pedro and Aurora. Born in León. Inhabitant of Madrid. A bookkeeper in Calle de Carretas. Resident in an obscure boarding house in Corredera Baja. He was Lorenzo. The kind of man who comes over all romantic when he sees a clean shirt folded neatly on a wardrobe shelf.

He was Lorenzo, who, on that particular morning, could not decide whether or not to buy a ticket for the football match and was strolling indecisively to and fro in the midday sun in Plaza de Canalejas. Some other men were hanging about, too. And walking slowly along next to him was a pale, very pretty young woman, her hands in her overcoat pockets and her spine slightly arched; she was wrapped up warmly, with a kind of feline grace, looking cold and delicate despite the sun. Lorenzo, strolling idly back and forth between two streets, glanced at her for a moment, then continued his pacing. Suddenly, at his back, he heard an indecipherable hubbub, a slight commotion, and noticed people hurrying to a spot immediately behind him. He turned. The young woman, looking even paler, almost waxen, was lying on the ground in a pose of deathly abandon, as if — or so it seemed — she had been laid low by the thunderbolt of being stood up. He stepped into the circle of six or seven people.