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

“So, Berta, what are you doing here? What happened?”

And while Berta was explaining that she was spending a few days in Madrid before leaving again for Seville, where she had been sent by her company, Lupita was momentarily ignored and she remembered that, before Berta had arrived, someone else had been about to speak to her. And she turned her head, looking at everyone there, one by one, until she found him: Jacobo. Eyes wide, gaze fixed on him, she urged him to say his sentence. Jacobo noticed and grew still more inhibited. For her part, Lupita’s mother, smiling sweetly, was following the direction of her little girl’s eyes. Lupita even uttered the usual password: “Baaa!” But Jacobo, who, when he arrived, had managed some quite acceptable phrases, now nervously crossed his legs, stared into his glass of wine or grimly studied a painting on the wall, or else shot a fleeting glance, which he intended to appear casual, at a newspaper or some other object. Lupita felt suspicious, and her gaze grew more searching and persistent. What a strange man. It was so hard to know what he was thinking.

Jacobo refused, after much hesitation, to compete with Berta. As everyone there could see, her presence only increased his sense of his own absurdity, and so he tried hard to make a good impression. Not that he made much of an impression with his familiar long silences, his all-consuming shyness that showed itself in the form of an affected seriousness and slightly tactless, brusque remarks. He could never, with any naturalness, manage those strange verbal deviations of Berta’s, those clean leaps from one word to another. “How’s my little babbler, my baboon, my bouncing bean!” And it worked perfectly. Lupita — like all babies — did babble and could certainly shriek like a baboon and, at certain moments, she actually did resemble one of those neat little butter beans, all creamy and soft.

“What’s so fascinating about Jacobo, sweetie? Why do you keep looking at him like that?” said Lupita’s mother.

“Yes, she won’t take her eyes off him,” said the others.

And Jacobo gave Lupita a faint smile, accompanied by a determined, almost aggressive look that asked the usual nonsense one asks of children. But his shyness, crouching in his eyes like two dark dots, censured the words it occurred to him to say, pursued and erased them, leaving only a charmless, bitter void. There was a dense silence. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, for Jacobo to speak to Lupita. Half hidden in a corner, Berta was watching and smiling imperceptibly, curious and silent.

“It’s awfully hot, don’t you think?” he said.

And he said this as a warning to the others. He meant to say: “Yes, it’s true, children do sometimes stare insistently at some grown-up, it’s a habit they have, but we shouldn’t pay them too much attention, we should simply talk about our own affairs. And it is awfully hot today. Unusual for the time of year. That’s what we should be talking about.”

“Baaa!” cried Lupita defiantly.

“It’s usually getting cooler by now.”

“Say something to the child! Can’t you see she’s looking at you?”

Yes, the moment had arrived. The silence and the expectation thickened. Eyes flicked from Jacobo to Lupita and back again. Slowly and terribly shyly, almost regretfully, Jacobo finally managed to say:

“Hello! How are you? Why are you looking at me like that? What’s up? What do you want? What did I do?”

As if he were talking to a moneylender.

“What do you think she wants? Say something funny, man. Pay her some attention. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Lupita?”

Lupita burst into tears. She had seen the scowling black cloud advancing towards her across the room. And she hadn’t wanted things to go that far. The words had left a dramatic aftertaste in the air, threatening and exciting. Lupita was crying because she had ventured innocently into unknown territory, where the somewhat stiff words exuded a certain bitterness, and where situations crystallized into impossible shapes. The daylight blinked, and the room filled with loud, laborious, rhythmical words of consolation. Lupita pouted and sobbed and wept bitterly. It lasted a long time.

The evening succumbed meekly. The clock struck the hour. Jacobo made his excuses, saying that he was expected elsewhere, then got up and left. He was walking slowly down the street, not sure where he was going. It felt slightly chilly. He was thinking about Berta, to whom he still felt attracted, about Lupita, so friendly and funny and lovely, and about his friends, his old friends. How nice it would have been to have stayed with them to the end.

PACO EL LARGO was my best friend at the time. The one I saw most often. I had another friend, too, who was a coal-man. But I never really knew what his face was like, still less what he thought. We used to chat in the coal-yard where he worked, and my impression was that he was rather fair-skinned. I must have seen him dozens of times outside of work, but I never knew it was him; and he never said hello either. Through such friends, however, I acquired some very picturesque acquaintances, people I don’t even give the time of day to now. We had fun, even when we didn’t have a penny to our names. Paco, especially, knew a lot of people and, now and then, thanks to him, we’d organize a really good shindig, sometimes even with a few Gypsy musicians laid on.

Family life and the family house — always dimly lit, with the shutters half closed — bored me rigid, and when it came to choosing between spending the evening with my family or going out on a spree with a friend, it was hardly a difficult choice to make. It was my mother, I think, who first started nagging me — when I was alone with her and my father and at mealtimes — about my friends and, even more, about my future.

As I understood it, my life was deemed to have taken a displeasing and, needless to say, suspect turn. It was summer — which we were spending at home — and I realized that they were all determined to put a stop to my propensity for idleness. My father, it seems, had never been like that — like me that is — and this, it seems, was accepted by everyone as an irrefutable argument. My father was also shorter than me, despite being older, and yet it would never have occurred to me to reproach him for his lack of height. But it would have occurred to them. They disapproved of any aspect of myself that did not resemble him. They wanted me to be a sort of second edition of my father.

All this happened in the year when my uncle Alberto decided that I should apply myself to my studies. Frankly, I had absolutely no desire to pick up a book, but my uncle had got it into his head that the phrenological characteristics of my frontal bone indicated a studious turn of mind. My uncle Alberto was — and still is — a young man; he had three university degrees, was keen on trout-fishing and going out on the town at night, plus he was my father’s favourite brother, and all these factors weighed so heavily in his favour that they proved very hard to resist, given that everything was now focused on making an honest man of me.

One day, he called me into his office.

“My dear nephew, you are probably thinking, ‘What on earth does my uncle Alberto want with me?’”

I looked at him. I didn’t think him capable of setting a trap. He talked a great deal, and what impressed me — and this was doubtless done for dramatic effect — was that he stood right next to the portrait of my grandfather. He put his case to me almost casually, as if it were as simple a matter as putting stamps on a letter. My grandfather — long since dead — agreed with everything he said. I don’t recall ever in my life having seen a portrait take such an active role in a perfectly ordinary conversation as that portrait of my grandfather, moving his eyes and lips and generally demonstrating his agreement in such a variety of ways. At the time, such things made a great impression on me. Nevertheless, I said what I thought, I didn’t hold back. I told him that I would much prefer, for example, to do what my friend Paco el Largo had done.