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

He picked up his things and went over to the control booth.

“Right, job done.”

“Everything OK?”

“Yes.”

“All finished?”

“Take a look.”

Señor Ramiro did not move. He was immovable, confident, powerful.

“All finished?”

“Yes, all done.”

“I’ll take a look afterwards.”

Lucio walked back across the plank to the other platform. He was tired of the noise, the dim, round, yellow lights and the dusty air. He was hungry too; well, it was three o’clock. He was not so much weary of the work as of Señor Ramiro. But at least he had done a good job. He’d like to see someone do it better. This thought cheered him, that and being able to go out into the clean air and the sunlight again, away from that great, stinking, cramped mousehole. Things look different in the light, he thought; you see everything more clearly, the birds sing, there are no mistakes, no doubts. In the light, everything is what it is and as it was. There’s nothing else. You need to drag death and life out into the light, along with the stingy wages, your anger, as well as what happened now and what happened in the past. You have to take the risk of either evaporating like a drop of water or growing like a plant in the sun. You have to be like bits of cloth hung out to dry.

Lucio was dazzled by the light as he went up the first brightly lit stairs. Up above, he could see the leaves of a tree stirring. When he reached the square, he closed his eyes, then slowly opened them again. The large, docile sun hung dozing above the Earth. Lucio took a deep breath with his head up. His eyes fell on a blue plaque. “Plaza del General Pedro Navarro”. Pedro, not Juan. Pedro. Pedro Navarro. He had put Juan. He stood stock still, not knowing what to do. Señor Ramiro had said: “I’ll take a look afterwards.” Did that mean now or later or tomorrow? When? Not that it made much difference. He smiled a slightly mischievous smile. “Oh, what the hell,” he muttered.

There was a bar opposite and he went in.

“Give me a glass of wine, will you, Boni?”

WHEN SHE STARTED working at the bar, she was already past the first flush of youth. She had traipsed about her local neighbourhood, Legazpi, until her hips had grown spinsterish and sour, or, rather, soporific and slightly broad in the beam. Her boyfriend was also from the barrio, which had been witness both to her tears and her tear-smudged make-up. And when the relationship ended and she heard him say for the last time: “Look, sweetheart, let’s call it a day, shall we?”, she, in order to forget and make the time pass more easily, got a job in Argüelles, in a bar, which involved a long daily commute by tram or Metro; in short, she took up travelling.

Don Arcadio, the owner of the Café El Buen Suceso, gave the new cashier her instructions: Wear a black uniform with a nice clean white collar. Go to the bank on the corner every morning to get change for a thousand-peseta note. No fiddling the accounts and no chat. And if the till’s a bit short, it’ll be taken off your wages at the end of the month. Rosita Pascual said: Yes, sir, and then went and sat down at the till, which was in a kind of recess set into the counter, facing the customers.

Initially, Rosita’s large, dark, prominent eyes rolled and shifted about above the till, with the intention of looking cheerful and attractive. And when Manolín, the waiter, said, for example, “Four pesetas” and handed her a five-peseta piece, Rosita would give him the change, saying: “There you are.” And later to the departing customer: “Goodbye, sir! Have a good day!” or “Goodbye, sir! Have a good evening!”

During the day, time after time, everyone, Manolín, Fabián the manager, Pepe and Antonio, Isabel and Ketty, would approach that recess in the counter to deposit the customers’ money on the marble pedestal beneath the till or in Rosita Pascual’s hard but ladylike hand. And Rosita, who had a keen eye for certain things, came to consider herself the very heart of the café and began to assert her authority. One morning, she said to the waiter: “Manolín, sweetheart, would you mind going to the bank to get some change?” And Manolín went. And over time, that phrase slowly mutated into: “Manolín didn’t go to the bank this morning, the laggard.” One day, she neglected to put on her regulation black uniform, and when Don Arcadio asked her about this, she said: “It’s being washed, Don Arcadio, but this dark dress is just as discreet and just as nice, don’t you agree?” And gradually, imperceptibly, the dark dress replaced the black uniform with the white collar and, in the end, the owner of the bar came round to the idea and said, Yes, it was fine. Then, on one occasion, she went to her boss’s desk and said: “Look, Don Arcadio, I know you’re not happy with Julita, the girl who does the other shift. I don’t trust her either, to be honest; she’s no good at adding up and the slightest thing confuses her. If you like, I could do both shifts. After all, there are always quiet times when I can take a rest.” And so it was that Rosita Pascual became the sole cashier at the Café El Buen Suceso: weddings, christenings, coffees and spirits. Cashier and very nearly queen, for her head was crowned by two bottles of anis that stood on a little shelf behind her, Anís Morterito and Anís Rodrigo Vázquez, whose labels bore the pictures of two famous toreadors, facing each other like rivals in the ring.

The good thing about the till was that it reigned supreme over everything. Not only did all the money handled in the bar come there, but, at quiet times, all the employees’ stories and financial worries came too, and sometimes the way in which these were relayed to her had a distinct whiff of the consulting room about them. The till was also a splendid observation post, from which, for example, one could watch the love of an old man for a young girl and another very different kind of love, over-ripe and insipid and past its best, and which only tends to be resolved once the man involved has belatedly passed the long-awaited exams required to get a better job; or one could observe the ideas and the worlds that some poor writer was tirelessly pursuing from his table, or the looks and gestures of the solitary woman and the solitary man, and from there, too, one could hear the grotesque, foul-mouthed voices of post-menopausal get-togethers and the fresh, fiery words of students.

For Rosita, the bar was a place where anything could happen, a music box full of surprises, with the advantage that she was inside that great music box and could subtly change the melody with just a glance or a word. In the mornings, the customers, drenched in light, seemed to Rosita to have a golden glow about them, they talked loudly and there hung in the air the aroma of those autumnal brown cigars that make one think of strong, swarthy men with money and expensive cars. In the afternoons, in the long hours until the lights were turned on, the customers changed in appearance, allowing themselves to be filled right down to the bottoms of their pockets with a glittering, greenish light, an aquarium light, like a sauce that eases the digestion and gently dissolves ideas. Then came the vulgar, ecstatic, dizzying hour of the young couples. And at night, the shrill yellow light, the yellow of funerals, liquorice root and brass cymbals, clung to the flesh of the various night owls and suspect couples, who emerged from the tunnel of night looking new and elastic, confident and free, and filled with a somewhat malign spirit.

The till recorded the sales and then, at the appropriate moment, automatically added them up, while Rosita tirelessly recorded the hidden depths and ways of the regular customers, dissecting their souls with a look and drawing conclusions and results whose truth she would put to the test by using the catalyst of a comment or a conversation.