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

“Are you the boyfriend?” asked an older fellow with moustaches, who revealed himself to be a man of action and took charge of the situation.

“No…no…”

“You’re probably still in shock. Come on, help me! If she’s just fainted, that’s no problem, but if it’s her heart, which it might be… Take that arm. That’s it. You over there. Come on. Easy does it. Right, now what we want is a taxi. There’s one! She needs to be taken to the nearest first-aid post. Come on, man, in you get and don’t worry. Come on, lad!”

He felt someone giving him encouraging, affectionate pats on the back. Then someone else grabbed his arms and propelled him into the taxi. When the taxi moved off, the crowd of onlookers on the pavement discussing the incident suddenly increased in number.

He was alone in a taxi with a woman he didn’t even know. The taxi driver turned and asked drily:

“So what happened, then? Did she faint? Are you the boyfriend?”

He spoke slowly, with great aplomb, sarcastically savouring every word, as if he were accompanying his questions with a slow handclap. Lorenzo was troubled. People just wouldn’t listen. “Are you the boyfriend? Are you the boyfriend?” they kept asking. The boyfriend of this young woman! He stared at her. She had fine features, long, white, manicured hands. She might be in love or she might just be hungry. Her handbag was simple and in good taste, her overcoat thick, warm, elegant…

He had often thought about how other people’s mistakes offered him a new life. He had more chances than most of acquiring an alternative identity, of being mistaken for someone else. He could be any one of those mistakes. He demonstrated this by confirming both the question asked by that older man with the moustache and by that impertinent taxi driver: “Are you the boyfriend?”

Yes, he was Laura’s boyfriend, Laura being the young woman who had suffered that fainting fit, as transient and spectacular as rain in May. No one was in the least surprised when they got engaged, but he thought privately that some mistakes are like prophecies, mysterious and very troubling…

THE STREETS OF THE CITY are like airways, wide-open doors that seek out our vitamin deficiencies and render us prone to catching colds. The streets of the city are good for nothing but wearing away the soles of our shoes, freezing our noses off, finding us a seamstress girlfriend to whom we can boast that our village has a telegraph office and provoking endless, tear-filled yawns and a kind of aggressive sadness that turns our teeth the colour of the winter sun. The boarding house filled Guillermo with a kind of neurotic wisdom. Guillermo was slowly going crazy and, if he hadn’t been a strong, serious-minded young man, many would have said that he was already stark staring mad. He played the harmonica and had a good ear for music. He made ox carts out of toothpicks and corks and gave them to Marianín, the landlady’s little boy. Every day, after lunch, Marianín would say:

“Go on, make me an ox cart, go on!”

And if Guillermo refused, Marianín would punch him with his hard, strong little fist. Guillermo didn’t always make him a cart. Sometimes it just wasn’t the right moment to do so, to recall those distant roads. Sometimes it was the moment to chew on a bit of wood, to bat at the light bulb with your hand or to fall asleep. Time was cyclical and various in the streets and rectilinear and monotonous in his room. Guillermo was under the illusion that he wasn’t using up time at all. He felt that he was being prepared for death in some other establishment, that he was heading for death in a different ox cart. Time didn’t touch or trouble him. He was hoping to beat time and gain eternity through sheer indifference or perhaps through sympathy. When June came around, he would read a few books and pass a few exams. Then, teeth gritted, he would wait to get the results before setting off by train for his village, where he would tramp the fields, drink the local wine and be happy. He had pale eyes, into which the world slipped very easily. He suffered from melancholia, the same kind of enduring melancholia as that suffered by the cricket or the old duck on the pond. He lacked only one thing in order to be happy, which is all anyone lacks. But Guillermo had the advantage that his one thing was very simple.

He found it one rainy afternoon at Juacho’s bookstall, as he was walking down the same street he walked down every day. The stall was propped against a convent wall and sold dog-eared old novels and sad magazines. It was made of four planks of wood and two battered crates covered by a small, dark piece of filthy canvas. The stall stank, was home to hundreds of small, wingless insects and resembled a boat wrecked on a cliff — the remains of Juacho’s shipwreck, because Juacho, that seller of detective novels, was a shipwreck victim, the shipwreck having occurred when he was thrown out of his house, but that’s another story. Juacho had the black bushy moustache of a stage villain or one of life’s tyrants. Leaning on his stall, he resembled a swarthy, hairy whore, a whore from the south. He had the body of a navvy, and his laughter was loud, wry and brazen. He laughed like a young picador. He had a harsh voice that gave off visible waves and filled the whole street, a voice that emerged from among the accumulated dust of all the imaginary police stations that appeared in those novels and from the occasional real police station too. However, he never talked about Scotland Yard, Sherlock Holmes, Maigret, Dog Savage, the Coyote, the FBI or about the suicidal Max Linder, the old star of stage and screen. When he spoke, what he said was pure Madrid.

On the afternoon that Guillermo found the thing he needed in order to be happy, water was streaming from the canvas roof onto Juacho’s stall. It was raining hard. The loutish owner of the stall was sheltering in a garage on the pavement opposite, rubbing his hands together and calling out to the maids who came running past. The drenched books were reduced to a paste; the men of the Wild West were turning the same colour as their hats; on the covers of old magazines, the ink had run onto the white teeth, costly furs and swan necks of the famous stars. And there was Juacho, standing on the pavement opposite, as happy as a sandboy. The stream of water sounded just like water filling a bottle. Something was certainly being filled there; yes, something was gradually filling up.

The following day, in the sun, Guillermo went to look at the books. As they dried, they gave off a lovely, peaceful, bluish steam. Among the steam stood Juacho, like a bookselling saint. The books and their plots were easing back to life with elastic, feminine grace, making delicate crackling noises. Guillermo picked one up and became quite mad with joy. He had to dig in his nails in order to unstick it from the planks. It had become moss like the moss that carpets woods, moss you could buy for a peseta.

Every day at the boarding house, Guillermo would give that wise old novel a squeeze. He would press his nose to the pages in order to smell the earth and the air, the rain and the sun. Were there books anywhere in the world that contained the same deep wisdom as Juacho’s books? Was there anything purer and more ancient in the whole city? Those books contained the tunes he played on the harmonica, the ox carts, human time, the joy of walking the earth. Guillermo bought more and more of those battered old novels. He never read them. In one he was surprised and delighted to find a toad. It was a small, dead toad, but it seemed to him very beautiful. Guillermo lived in hope that one day a novel would simply crumble to dust in his hands.

ONE MORNING, my mother went shopping and returned in a van belonging to a cabinetmaker, who carried an armchair up to our apartment. When my father got back from work and saw the chair by the window in the living room, he asked: