Mercè Rodoreda - The Selected Stories

The next day I was calmer. I raised the blinds all the way and sat down, placing a cushion on the chair to make myself more visible. “Maybe that will restrain them,” I thought with loathing.

The girl seemed surprised when she saw me. The fact that the blinds had been shut for several days must have made them think I was away on holiday. She was wearing the red blouse that made her look so beautiful. I was filled with a profound sadness, more intense than ever, for her and for me. It was an uncontrollable, noxious pity.

But it didn’t last long. Soon the man appeared. He didn’t see me. They began to quarrel violently, as if they were taking up an argument that had started long ago. They disappeared from sight, but I could still hear the bitter tone of their voices, though I couldn’t make out any of the words. An hour or so passed. The girl returned to the window; soon he joined her and seemed affable. They were leaning on the window ledge; when I looked again they were kissing. It was a hazy afternoon, with a storm threatening. The air was still. I pretended to read. From time to time I glanced at the couple kissing, making an effort not to raise my head too high. Suddenly, my eyes met the girl’s. Her gaze was fascinating, impossible to ignore. We looked fixedly at each other. Her eyes seemed to be smiling at me in a complicated way, full of refusal and promise. As if her kisses were for me. The girl seemed to be offering herself diabolically to me. Had it not been for the distance, I could have taken her by the arm and she would have followed me. The torture continued for a moment. I was ablaze, as if enveloped by flames. I felt grotesque, sitting high on the cushion, paralyzed before the creature that absorbed me. She was all kisses, but it was easy to forgive her. The air was unbreathable. The girl kept looking at me as, almost literally, I died.

My father fell gravely ill that summer. In September I was scheduled to retake the exams I had failed, but he died before then. It was a sad summer. I loved my father, and his sudden death made me grow up, grow old. I was overcome by a deep melancholy that the years have not been able to expel. That summer marked a turning point in my life. It altered me forever. I returned to my room, to my desk by the window, to the landscape of my student years where I was now a stranger after an absence of only a few months. The weather was gentle, the afternoons pleasant, less blue, the green of the trees more nuanced. All of it gave the impression of becoming more beautiful so that I might sleep better.

The window of my anguish stood before me with the blinds down. The girl with the red blouse seemed to belong to a remote past. All of it was a dream dispelled by the light, disrobing everything that had been made mysterious by the night. How absurd my anxious ravings now seemed to me. I needed to apply myself to my studies. Why all those fine intentions, if the future seemed inaccessible, life difficult, everything useless? But I had to work hard, make my way, beat a path if necessary, do as others did, offer my mother support (my sister too, until she married), and start a family. Then later I would live in my children, die like my father — quickly, one radiant summer — and be mourned by my family.

Despite all my reasoning, despite the mental discipline I attempted to impose, I have to confess that when the accustomed hour approached, I was again obsessed by the window opposite me. The greater the effort to remain indifferent, the more anxious I grew. Everything that had seemed to vanish the night before my arrival returned in all its intensity. But no one opened the window. Nor the following day. Nor any other day. I felt liberated. I would sit at my desk, calmly, without thinking of anything, my spirit at rest. I remembered what I studied and was slowly but surely making progress, following a straight path. I felt solid and began to feel sure of myself. The sense of inferiority at having failed my June exams began to fade. I was exultant.

When the memory had almost vanished, and I no longer looked up from my desk — as if the window opposite now belonged to another world — I realized one day that the blinds were up. I could see into the room that for so long had been like an extension of mine. But the girl wasn’t there. Another girl had appeared, with the same young man, but she didn’t awake in me any sense of curiosity. Whether they raised or lowered the blinds, kissed in front of me or not, didn’t matter.

One day, toward evening, I heard someone climbing the stairs. I could recognize the footsteps of everyone who came to visit me; I needed to hear them only once to know who was coming to see me. But I had never heard that kind of step. “Somebody must have the wrong address,” I thought, since I lived on the top floor. But then I immediately told myself: “No, they’re coming here, the steps of someone who has never been here before.”

They stopped on the landing outside my door. A few seconds passed. The person was hesitating before knocking. Then I heard him going down. I was intrigued. The steps stopped for a long time on the floor beneath mine. Then they started up again, giving the impression of being tired. The strange visitor had decided to come up again. There was a soft knock on the door, as if they didn’t wish to be heard. If it hadn’t been for the steps, I might not have even realized someone was knocking.

I opened the door. It was the girl with the red blouse. She was paler, almost ashen. She had lost a lot of weight. Without a word she strode across the room directly to the window, as if we had known each other for years, as if I knew that she would come. And why. From my desk she gazed at the window opposite. She stood there with a sad, eager look. Speechless, motionless. She remained for an instant, as if alone in the world. I felt I should do something, move her away from the window, not let her look. I could feel she was suffering, but I was paralyzed, out of respect, and because I sensed the situation was unreal. What stood before her must have represented a happiness she would never find again.

It was almost dark. I went toward her. I have never again felt such tenderness as on that evening beside the sad girl who did not know to what degree she had taken possession of my heart. Why I decided to approach her, what words I uttered: these things have been erased from my memory. I recall, with terrible precision, only her heartrending sobs. She burst into tears in my arms, which must have seemed impersonal to her, as if she were crying against a wall. She cried with greater pain than I did when my father died. Never again have I heard a person weep like that. I felt I needed to protect her, as if destiny had brought her to me, as if in some way her future belonged to me, and mysteriously she had become my responsibility. Everything I had learned from literature (which at that time was considerable) was evoked. I carried her in my arms, like a child, shaking as she wept uncontrollably, and laid her on the bed, as if she were something that belonged to me, something not seized, but offered, found. I knelt on the floor with my face by hers, her tears dampening my cheek.

Hours and hours passed. She never said a word. The fits of sobbing became less frequent, and she fell asleep, like a flame that slowly fades. I watched over her. It was a chaste night, but I still recall her soft hair, the salty taste of her tears. How can one let the hand of a sleeping body drop! How lips parch when the heart suffers. I felt as if I held a dead bird in my hand. I must have fallen asleep in the early morning. When I awoke it was day, the room full of sun. I never saw her again. Never again have I lived hours of such passion, a night of love so pure.