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

Anyway, we were talking about her this afternoon. Rosarito, the secretary in my department, couldn’t stop laughing when she heard us, a cruel little laugh, as if she couldn’t understand our purely altruistic interest in the girl. Women, as we know, are not always very nice to each other. The girl knew this, too, and she had a bit of a rough time of it with some of her female colleagues, as well as with the wife of a male colleague. When she was with the other women, they would put on a good front and pat her smooth cheeks, but when she wasn’t there, they would say she was frivolous, arrogant, mad and — and this was what really irritated me — that she really wasn’t anything so very special.

That wasn’t true at all, and she certainly wasn’t mad. Because I — and many of us men — occasionally went to the cinema with her, and we know that she wasn’t the slightest bit mad. We were colleagues, in and out of the office, but nothing more. You might be in the cinema, say, and you’d get it into your head that she was the girl for you. Then she would give you a look, and you knew at once that you were being a fool, and at precisely that moment, she would say:

“Come on, don’t spoil things. You’re a colleague, nothing more, which is why I agreed to come to the cinema with you in the first place. Don’t be silly, and keep your hands to yourself.”

And because of that, some of the men said she was cold, but when you looked into her eyes, you could see there was a fire burning there, no, more than that, a bright blaze. She was a most unusual girl. She was the only typist who didn’t want to marry any of us, and she could have if she’d wanted, just ask Manolo and Morán, not to mention Moro.

Bernardo Moro works in the Technical Office and his wife died four years ago. He’s a good colleague and a serious fellow, but he’s very vain and doesn’t like to be told No. He’s also a bit of a hothead and he spent about three years barely eating or sleeping, barely living. He really fell for her in a big way and had a very bad time of it.

What I liked best was when Carmencita would peer round the door and say “Hi!”, then turn away without coming in, as if she’d forgotten something or had gone off to look at who knows what. She was just gorgeous then, because she had her own little world, you see, her own private world. The fact is that, during the three years she spent with us, she turned the office into an aquarium, in which we dull grey fishes prided ourselves on having among us a beautiful gold fish, who deigned to spend eight hours a day working to earn a wage, just like the rest of us. She was a lovely fish, long and golden, with succulent flesh, and if she’d been cut up on the slab, she’d have fetched a very good price, but that would have been a great shame. She dressed simply and elegantly, and, next to her, we felt like complete nonentities, because her presence made you think of cruise ships, tennis games and big cities: New York and Paris. As bald Dimas used to say:

“Some girls are real gems.”

When they moved her from Materials and Construction to the Technical Office, where she worked more as a secretary than a typist, she again wrong-footed everyone. Including me. I got it wrong too. The Technical Office, if you like, is home to the bosses, and we immediately thought that Carmencita, as was only logical, would end up in the hands of Don Tomás, who is a fat, impulsive fellow, but he has money and position, and we all knew what he was like. He’s a man of the world and knows how to give a girl a good time; well, a girl who suddenly finds herself being picked up from work by a car can get all kinds of ideas in her head. But with Carmencita nothing happened, and we know that Don Tomás plied her with endless offers and attentions. Some say — and we know who — that, one day, Carmencita slapped him. But we’re not sure she would ever have gone that far. The truth is that the girl wasn’t, as we had often thought, interested only in money, even though Don Tomás, being married, always went out of his way to avoid scandal. As I said before, women have a will of their own, and Carmencita knew what she wanted and, quite rightly, was prepared to wait patiently.

Today, Dimas spent a good hour and a half talking to me about her. We all took a bit of a break actually, and I even phoned down to Joaquín in the café to ask him to bring me up a coffee, which I never normally do. On some afternoons in the office we have a really good time. We talk and talk, and before you know it, it’s half past seven. Anyway, today Dimas had met Carmencita in the street and, according to him, they stopped to chat. She sent her regards to everyone apparently, and Dimas said she was really friendly. Inevitably, we all ended up talking about Gaspar. I tried to take a cool, objective view. Life, I think, is full of surprises, and sometimes you just have to leave passion to one side. Gaspar was one of life’s surprises. For a month or two, I remember, he was the centre of attention here. How he got the job we still don’t know, but he would turn up late every morning and, now and then, he would shout at the boss like nobody’s business. At first, we rather admired him; everyone talked about him and it was said that he’d saved the boss’s life at the front in Teruel, that he’d been an officer and goodness knows what else. No one much liked him, though. He was arrogant, he seemed to have played even more golf than the Prince of Wales and he was a bit of a dandy. I tend to think he was a decent enough fellow, but, then again, he was one of those ill-disciplined people who spend more than they earn.

I have no idea what Carmencita could have seen in him, but that was it — end of story. They got married, had a big, expensive wedding — that was when Alberto and María Luísa from the Commercial Section first started going out together — and shortly afterwards, Gaspar got into some kind of “bother” at work, was given the sack, and Carmencita immediately asked to be transferred to the branch in Calle Méndez Núñez, where she still works now.

Rosarito, the secretary in our department, finally took an interest in the conversation and asked Dimas if Carmencita had had children after she married or if she was expecting. Dimas didn’t know. He hadn’t noticed and didn’t like to ask.

I haven’t seen Carmencita since she left and hadn’t really given her a thought in ages. Dimas said she’s not a shadow of her former self, not in the way she dresses or anything.

It occurs to me now that the time Carmencita spent with us was like the reign of a queen. We were better men then, because her presence required us to be. It’s a reign much missed by all those who lived through it. It somehow raised us up and, every day, our heads were filled with dreams. What do these new boys, these youngsters, know about what happened to us in the past! They will never experience the reign of such a queen.

AS THE YEARS PASS, the winters seem darker and colder, the spring unsettling and fickle, and the rays of the summer sun seem wrapped in a distant, leaden cloud that drains them of energy. As the years pass, the flowers are only flowers by name. Their colours and perfumes largely fade. “Here are some flowers for you,” we say one day to please our aged grandmother. She cautiously holds out her hand, for she can barely see the colours or smell their perfume, but, because we used the word “flowers”, she looks at them as if we had presented her with a bunch of fresh memories and bestows on them a faint smile, slightly sad and distant. Old people notice how the world is growing gradually dimmer and, at the moment of death, what they really think is that someone has turned out the light, what little light they still received. In their long journey through illnesses and ailments, old people often find that they have developed cataracts, and their youngest relatives quite forget how bright those eyes were years ago. It is at this point — at least in the provinces — that older people get on a train and come to the city to walk through its streets and noises, wearing, over one eye, a white bandage that flattens the old ladies’ coquettish coiffures of soft, shiny, white hair. They come to the city to visit a good doctor, a doctor with a fine reputation who offers hope, and they pay as they leave, retrieving bank notes from complicated interiors, from hidden pockets or thick wallets and belts wide enough to contain seeds and tools.