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

“Whose is that?”

My mother said:

“I just bought it.”

My father looked at her in disbelief and exclaimed:

“You’re mad!”

That’s how my father always began the story of the armchair, and he told it to me I don’t know how many times, because I was only five when my mother bought it, and, besides, he told it to me so that I would take his side.

My mother had been saying for ages that they should smarten the place up just in case Doña Micaela should ever come and see us.

“Doña Micaela is what she is and we’re what we are; she has money and we don’t…”

“We can pay for it in instalments…”

And so it was that, one morning, she stopped by the cabinetmaker’s next to the market, saw the armchair in the window and immediately felt that it would be a good way to start improving the apartment.

This is what the cabinetmaker told her:

The armchair was made of mahogany in the Isabelline style, albeit late Isabelline, because it had springs in the back and the seat. It had belonged to the big house in Calle de Ministriles and had been brought in to be reupholstered, but, unable to find any Nanking silk, he had used artificial Chardonnet silk instead, and, in the end, the Marchioness had told him to keep it, because they had decided to refurnish the whole room…

My mother’s eyes were like saucers, and in a tiny thread of a voice she said:

“Unfortunately, I can’t afford to buy it…”

“There’s no hurry. Pay me in instalments,” said the man.

My mother agreed to pay in six monthly instalments, and the cabinetmaker loaded the chair onto his van and drove my mother and the chair home.

All our other furniture was old and second-hand, and if it didn’t wobble, it creaked; everything either had a mediocre look about it or appeared to have been born malformed. When my parents got married, they just bought the few bits and pieces they needed and moved straight into the apartment, which was cheap to rent and not so much antique as old. My mother went all out in her efforts to improve our furnishings.

My father never accepted the armchair, not even in the expectation that Doña Micaela might visit us, and, over the years, albeit less frequently as time passed, he would come up with arguments against it:

“That armchair’s not for people like us. I’m not going to sit on it.”

“A man’s posterior doesn’t need all that padding.”

“The only true revolutionary is the man who sits on the floor.”

“Think of all the ham we could have eaten with the money you spent on that chair!”

And if he happened to be in a good mood, he would refer to it as “the sibyl’s chair”.

“There’s no reason why the poor shouldn’t have fine things in their homes, too. A fine piece of furniture never looks out of place,” argued my mother.

Because of the animosity that had grown up around the armchair and our strained finances, my mother abandoned the idea of improving the apartment, but, whenever she went to pay her monthly instalment, she returned more convinced than ever that it had been a good buy, because the cabinetmaker always told her stories about the chair.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Pepe Botella hadn’t sat on that chair.”

“Pepe who?”

“King José I, Napoleon’s brother, the one who liked his drink. And I’m sure Isabel II would have sat on it, because she often stayed with aristocratic friends, and so did her husband, and General Espartero. I’m not just saying this, I know it for a fact.”

“Do you mean the man on the statue, the one riding a horse?”

“The very same.”

I sided with my mother, and once, when we went to the Retiro Park, she pointed out Espartero’s statue to me as we were leaving and said: “Your father may not believe it, but that very important general once sat on our armchair.”

I stood stock still, unable to take my eyes off him, as if I had always known him and he were a close relative of ours.

One day, my father returned from work in a bad mood and it occurred to him to say that he wasn’t sure whether to sell that reactionary chair or to adopt a cat so that it would piss on the seat the Queen had sat on and sharpen its claws on the mahogany legs like a true gentleman; without a word, my mother flounced off into the bedroom to cry, and I didn’t move a muscle, because my father knew very well that I wanted to go and console her and he didn’t take his eyes off me.

When I was alone with my mother, she would let me play at being king, and if Vidal and Goyo were there — two friends of mine living in the same block — I would sit in the armchair and issue orders, for example, to go to the kitchen and bring me a glass of water and a spoon — because I thought kings drank water as if it were soup — to crawl about the room a few times or to come and ask my formal permission to go forth and discover a new land full of fierce Indians. If they rose up against me, I had to win, although we made sure to engage in any battles well away from the “throne” so as not to damage it, because my mother was always telling me to be careful, and that kings, unlike me, weren’t always kicking and fidgeting when they sat on the throne.

I knew Doña Micaela from a photo in which she was holding me in her arms when I was still a baby, and to my surprise and to my mother’s delight — because we were alone at home at the time — she finally made an appearance early one afternoon.

As soon as she came in, she cast a rather inquisitive eye about the apartment and immediately noticed the armchair:

“Goodness, have you won the lottery or did you steal it?”

And to play down what she had said, she burst out laughing. My mother lied to her:

“I must have told you the story a hundred times! Don’t you remember? It belonged to my great grandmother, who was given it by a very grand lady in the village whose house she’d worked in for many years. Then my grandmother Bonifacia inherited it and, when she died, it came to my mother.”

“How amazing, because it looks like new.”

“Well, I have had it reupholstered.”

Doña Micaela sat down on the chair, and my mother made her coffee and gave her a serviette and a plate and two cakes.

Doña Micaela stroked my hair and said how much I’d grown.

They talked for a long time about people I didn’t know, and my father, fortunately, arrived home late, as if he had sensed her presence, and said how pleased he was not to have been there.

“Well, now that she’s sat on that piece of junk, we can sell it,” he said.

When I heard this, a lump came into my throat and, as soon as I had the opportunity, I asked my mother tearfully:

“Are you really going to sell it?”

“Do you want us to?”

“No.”

“Well, neither do I.”

And she kissed me.

Now I realize that the “piece of junk” had allowed me to dream of being General Espartero or of being king and having armies at my command. Sitting on it was like passing through the door of hopes and treasures, seeing princesses, living in a palace, oblivious to the smell of sardines or fried peppers. Thanks to my mother, the chair was our one adventure, my one toy, which, even though we were poor, meant that we weren’t poor at all and instilled in me a secret dignity that I still, inexplicably, carry within me.

In the end, they did have to sell it, but, by then, I had stopped playing at being king.

THE DOORBELL only rings when there’s a new moon, as if the person calling wanted to melt away into the shadows. Not that I’m expecting anyone at three or four o’clock in the morning, because no one rings the doorbell at that hour. At that hour, I’m either sleeping or grappling with the pillows in an attempt to reconcile them with the elusive sleep I seek, or else, when the dawn breeze makes the blinds click and bang or lifts the curtain like a soft out-breath, I’m feeling my chest just to make sure I’m still alive. At night, I toss and turn between the sheets, and the slightest click or echo in the house makes me open my eyes, cock my ears and wait helplessly for something to happen. Sometimes I do plumb the somniferous depths and then, occasionally, an intense, loud, urgent ringing pierces the normally cautious silence of the night, penetrating every corner and demanding an immediate response. “Oh, no,” I mumble and, still half asleep, get out of bed and, from the balcony, peer down through the slats of the blind at the front door and see no one, only the night, which lays itself before me in all its indifference or its pretended candour and silence. I go back to bed and speculate about that invisible night owl demanding my attention and inexplicably perpetuating my disquiet, who resents my rest, who takes advantage of moonless nights to make his very invisibility more obvious and more frightening; the wakeful visitor who both wants and doesn’t want to come in, and whom I cannot describe as a thief or a murderer, because he’s neither of those things and because he has no name.