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

“And what did your friend Paco el Largo do?” asked my uncle.

“He got a job in that new hotel on the Gran Vía. And this summer he’s going to work on La Toja.”

“Does he speak any languages?”

“Sort of.”

“I see.”

“You know, just what he learnt at school.”

“And where does he work? In reception?”

“No, he’s a waiter.”

I proved easy enough to persuade. I was still pretty naive at the time. My uncle said the most amazing things about me and seasoned the dish with tales of fishing. He gave a nod to Socrates with one of his jokes about Pliny and fishing for trout with hemlock. He said that hemlock resembled parsley. The result was that when I left his office, I started turning the idea over in my mind.

“I could be a gentleman and not like Paco el Largo. After all, a university degree is a university degree. My uncle’s quite right. Not everyone is as intelligent as me! And yet I…”

These thoughts carried me to the University. It was a curious world full of very pompous people, whom one gradually got used to. The girls weren’t like that. They were ordinary and pretty and often burst into tears. Generally speaking, the girls led a life of leisure in the afternoons, quite different from ours. We gave ourselves over to scepticism, getting chilled to the bone and talking. Many of us spent the afternoons recovering from colds. Everyone hated the textbooks. As an antidote, they looked up the catalogue numbers of French novels to collect from the same pharmacy, namely, the library. Some people were studying English and they would gaze out of the windows in the direction of the Atlantic. The big windows were splendid, providing excellent views of the Guadarrama Mountains and of El Pardo, and the mornings were the colour of rabbits or wild boar. Some students did nothing but study; others devoted themselves to art. I particularly noticed the sculptors and sculptresses. They were never splattered with clay nor did they have the hands of stonecutters. I found that odd. But then they were only beginners.

My uncle asked me how things were going and, as I was telling him, he offered me a cigarette, and I noticed that his hand was trembling. He didn’t look well, and yet he wasn’t ill: it was those wild nights on the town. Suddenly, he raised his eyebrows and said:

“My dear nephew, I may not be much older than you, but I’m old enough to tell you that, at your age, one must be very careful. Now is the time to study. Even if your eyes are drawn to a shapely pair of calves, forget them and apply yourself to your studies. No, don’t laugh.”

I, of course, was laughing from sheer lack of imagination.

“Don’t laugh. I’m not saying you should become a saint, but don’t fall in love.”

“Uncle, please!”

“If you are ever foolish enough to fall in love, you’ll begin by selling the book you need least and end up selling the one you need most and spending the money put by for your fees…”

I learnt nothing of note during that first year. I read — off my own bat— Don Quixote and the Bible, more out of a sense of pride than anything else. It’s odd, but the Bible is a book I’d really like to talk about one day. As for Don Quixote, my reading left me only with a few choice quotes, the most popular of which was what poor Dorotea said about how the eyes of the lynx cannot rival loving or idle eyes. I even tried to learn a bit of Greek to humour a lanky, shabby fellow, who said to me one day:

“Study Greek! That way you will discover the tepid dawn delights of pornai .”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes, and Aristophanes will season your mind with a little Attic salt.”

Despite this, Greek did not agree with me.

But I haven’t yet told you the funniest part. To me it seems like the third act of all that went before.

In some classes, we always had to sit in our allotted places. The teacher’s register was like the fate that, day after day, placed us next to the same person. The girl who used to sit on my right was tall and had brown hair. She wore a grey coat, buttoned right up: she was a broom in skirts. She spent each morning freezing; she even smiled coldly and had no talent at all for asking questions. Sometimes she would ask something, but it was impossible to understand what it was she wanted to know. Her name was Obdulia Ramos García, and my uncle Alberto had no reason to fear her. She studied quite hard. In that respect, she was like the other girls, who were always swapping lecture notes. I led a rather more irregular life. Sometimes I read in the library or attended classes. At others, I would go down to the bar, stroll about in the corridors or the garden. The garden was nice, but a bit cold at that time of year. The lines of rose bushes, with their greyish, woody stems, looked to me like adolescent orphans from the School for Rosoideae. They had no leaves and were just twigs adorned with a lot of reddish thorns. I couldn’t believe that this bare scaffolding could represent something as exquisite as a rose. But then that was the world for you: a trick and a swindle. It turned out that the girl sitting on my right was exactly like one of those grey-brown twigs. She represented something equally exquisite, Woman, and she, too, wore a grey coat.

When the fine weather came, the university girls got out a long piece of rope, like the serpent from Paradise, and started skipping in the garden. One morning, I joined them, and my wintry thoughts thawed considerably. On the parterre, the first rose bush I saw had two huge roses on it. And Obdulia had taken off her grey covering, her grey coat, and bore not the slightest resemblance to those winter rose bushes. She was far more like that springtime bush, with its two roses in full bloom. She looked radiant, really lovely, as if she were waiting to be discovered by some film director. It really was most odd!

I finished the year and they gave me the slips bearing my exam results; like lilies they were, like daisies, to be floated down the river on a summer’s afternoon. Wild horses couldn’t drag me to Uncle Alberto’s house now, and I haven’t been back to the University. Some of the other girls used to ask Obdulia about her boyfriend. She told me they thought I was a bit of a dreamer. And yet for a year and a half, my head was filled with some very real plans. First, I wanted to be a merchant seaman, and then I thought I would drop the navy and study for three years to become a lawyer.

My uncle Alberto passed me in the street one day.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” he said.

At home, this was a common enough statement, as common as “Turn the radio on”, “Don’t be late” and “Close the door properly.” A few days later, Obdulia asked the same question:

“What’s going on in that head of yours?”

It was as if the world were sitting around watching, making me the centrepiece of some spectacle. Perhaps it’s some kind of ancient custom, wanting to know what other people are thinking.

Lázaro — a friend of mine — used to pass me in the street every day, when Obdulia and I were out for a walk or looking for a café where we could sit. I saw him today and he stirred my memories.

“So, what happened to the girl?”

“Oh, it ended.”

You see, my relationship with Obdulia ended six months ago, on my birthday, when my aunt Cristina gave me the pearl-grey hat.

Now that I have nothing to do, I enjoy remembering these things…

FERMÍN ULÍA, although poor — and from a poor neighbourhood — had already sailed, if not the seven seas, at least two or three. He lived at the top of a steep hill, where, between the windows of the houses, the women hung the clothes out to dry on thin halyards that had long since exchanged sails for shirts and nappies. The early hours were always full of comings and goings, and dawn broke with the light of lanterns. Fermín, you see, was a fisherman. He went every day to that great cod-liver oil factory — the sea — to that great factory of phosphorus.