Mercè Rodoreda - The Selected Stories

He couldn’t have told you how he had gotten the ink stain. As he waited for the tram, he glanced down at his trousers in despair. They were his only reasonably decent ones. There were three spots of blue-black ink on the right knee, two small ones and one the size of a cherry. No, much larger than a cherry. As large as what? An apple, he thought anxiously. The trousers were the color of café amb llet , and as the ink dried, the spot turned darker and seemed to spread.

“So, I see you stained your trousers?”

Senyor Comes was an old acquaintance. They rode the tram together in the morning and afternoon.

“You should have put water on it right away. There’s nothing that stains quite like ink. I had to have some trousers dyed once. Maybe they weren’t as light as the ones you’re wearing, but even so, there was no other solution.”

He wasn’t listening. All he could still see were Senyoreta Freixes’s eyes. She was the typist. He had been so irritated when she lost the files, seven files, that he had snapped at her: “Nothing depresses me as much as having to work with imbeciles.” She had looked at him in surprise, her eyes welling up. “Oh!” was the only thing she had mustered the courage to stammer.

“Here it comes.”

The obese and cordial Senyor Comes had gestured at the tram with his head. It was crowded, and people were huddled on the running board. As always, Senyor Comes was the first on. It was a specialty of his, elbowing his way through, using his belly, his childlike smile. No one protested.

The tram started with a jerk. Houses, windows, balconies drifted past. The Garatge Internacional, the Cooperative, the Tennis Club. Everything passed in the same order as each day, fated, draining. The tram emptied out slightly, and they sat down.

“I’ve already bought the ticket,” Senyor Comes said with a mysterious air, giving his friend a little slap on the thigh.

Once a month, for close to five years, they had bought and shared a lottery ticket. They had never won anything, but every month Senyor Comes would say to him with a smile, “We’re getting closer.”

When Senyor Comes noticed his friend reaching for his pocket, he stopped him. “Don’t bother. We’ll work it out at the first of the month. How’s the boy doing?”

“The boy? Better, thanks.”

When he reached home he headed straight to the dining room. The sun streaming in from the gallery made the furniture look older, the corners more dusty, the curtains grayer. Everything looked aged, had lost its freshness.

He wife moved back and forth to the kitchen. She had just set the table. She had gained weight. He kissed her perfunctorily on the forehead, sat down, and opened the newspaper.

“What did you do to your trousers? What’s that!”

“I know. . Senyor Comes said the only solution was to have them dyed.”

“Everything always happens at the same time. Why this month, when we have the boy’s medicine and the doctor?”

“How’s he doing? Anything new?”

“No. Doctor Martí says tomorrow we can let him get up. But, what is it with you?”

Here we go. She’s realized something’s troubling me. His wife’s knack for grasping his moods had seemed like a blessing when they were courting. It had been reassuring to feel himself understood, to know she could read his state of mind, anticipate it, and he could say, “I’m feeling down, though I don’t really know why. Maybe I’m just worried about the exams.” But more and more that infallible intuition of hers caused him anguish. He felt naked, defenseless. He would have wished to have a bit of a secret life. The thing that most irritated him was that he would begin explaining everything he didn’t want to disclose at her slightest allusion. Occasionally he would decide to keep quiet, his silence an act of discipline, but his will always faltered. He was incapable of keeping anything from her.

“Something upset me this morning. That’s how I got the ink stains. I got nervous and knocked over the ink pot.”

He explained to her about the seven lost files.

“I said every disagreeable thing one can say to a person.”

He saw her face light up. Her large eyes, usually expressionless, shone, and her tallowy, rather sunken cheeks turned rosy. His wife had the thin lips of a blunt, worried person.

A drama occurred every time a new typist joined the office. She had never met any of the girls. She always said, “My place is at home. I’m not one of those women who follow their husbands around.” But she always managed, subtly, to extract descriptions of the typists from him, and she would agonize as she imagined them.

“Serves her right, losing seven files! All these girls who work with men, it’s because they’re looking for something. She had it coming. Now she’s seen that you’re a man of character.”

She placed the steaming soup on the table and served it.

“What’s her name?

He raised his head, his mouth full, the spoon motionless in midair.

“Who?”

“The typist.”

“Ah, Freixes.”

“No, I mean her first name.”

“Eulàlia or Elvira. I don’t know.”

“Is she very young?”

He swallowed the mouthful of soup.

“I think so.”

“What do you mean, ‘I think so?’ It must be obvious that either she’s young or she isn’t.”

“Oh, you know me, I don’t pay much attention.”

“Is she engaged?”

“I don’t know.”

She had only joined the office the week before, a little shy but candid. She had sat down in front of the typewriter and waited to be given work. The next day she took one of the drinking glasses, filled it with water, and placed some violets in it. By the third day she was laughing.

While he was drinking his coffee, his wife entered the boy’s room and came out immediately.

“He’s sleeping like an angel. Better not to disturb him. You’ll see him this evening. Come home early, you hear me?”

What a beast I was. Such a young girl, probably not yet twenty, I shouldn’t have said. . her hair’s like silk and when she laughs. . I shouldn’t have said anything .

He decided to walk back to work; he didn’t feel like talking to Senyor Comes.

It’s curious. I’ve walked along this street for years, yet today it all seems new. He noticed a shop window with crisp curtains, a budding rosebush by the gate to a house, some blades of fresh grass springing up between two slabs of pavement. Beyond the hedge of boxwood shrubs at the Tennis Club he could hear two girls chattering; they must have been standing right there. He stopped for a moment in front of the Garatge Internacional: “Important things are taking place in Barcelona now, no doubt about it.” A wave of youthfulness surged through him.

There was a flower shop near the office. He deliberated for a moment, then with an effort to overcome his embarrassment he strode in with resolve. He bought a bouquet of tiny roses surrounded by green, russet-tipped leaves.

“They look like porcelain,” the florist said kindly.

Standing on the stairs to his office, he wrapped the bouquet in a newspaper. When no one was looking, he would throw away the violets, change the water, and place the roses in the vase. Perhaps. . Perhaps in the afternoon he would say: “Elvira, would you like for the two of us to go out this evening?” He could already imagine the color of the sky, the evening’s perfume.

A plaintive moan filled the room. It continued for a while before suddenly dying, as if it had passed through the walls. It sounded like a whimper from a wounded animal that had not yet lost any blood or energy. The dense silence again invaded everything. A moment later a body moved beneath the sheets as if, rather than a moan, the mysterious echo of a moan had awoken him from a deep sleep. The meowing of a cat on the stairs rose in tone and volume, becoming sharp and urgent. Another moan silenced the cat. A shadow jumped out of the bed, followed by an arpeggio of springs. The sound of bare feet on the floor, two or three coughs, a switch being flipped, and the room was flooded with light.