They’d never had any children because she couldn’t imagine herself as a mother. And because most of the things attached to childhood seemed to her both foolish and silly. She had never believed for a moment that the three Kings came from the East bearing gifts. She had only ever cared to watch the feet of the Gegants[37], and from a very early age she had wondered how much they paid someone to wear them and how heavy they were. When she was asked to write things at school she found it an impossible task. Reading stories with even the slightest dose of fantasy was like torture for her.
“I’ll tell stories to the children myself,” her husband would say, since he had wanted to become a father. “But I just can’t imagine what a child of ours would be like,” she’d respond. He was a silver importer; every two years he travelled to Zacatecas, Mexico, and came back overwhelmed by the poverty and the orphaned children there. A friend of his had taken a few of them in so they wouldn’t die of hunger. It was 1980, during the time when Cervantes Corona couldn’t finish his gubernatorial acceptance speech because his voice had broken with emotion at the state of desolation in which his predecessor had left the region. His friend’s wife told him the children needed a family. They were able to provide food and shelter, as if the kids were abandoned kittens, but that wasn’t enough. And so one day, when they were already well into their forties, he said to Onia: “If you can’t imagine a child of our own, then you no longer need to. She already exists.” He told her about the children of Zacatecas, the mining orphans: “Any one of them, or more than one.” Each time he came back from one of his trips to Mexico he told her about the starving children. She had a hard time getting her head around the idea, but since she had no real imagination, she couldn’t find a pretext to oppose it. So she acquiesced. Living with her was easy, everything was so overwhelmingly logical.
They lived in L’Eixample and so they thought they should look for a quieter neighborhood for a child — or even better, a house in the country near Lleida, where Onia was born. But the task of finding the house of their dreams fell to her husband, as she didn’t do such a thing as have dreams. In Sitges: “It has an enormous rooftop terrace with views of both the sea and a pine forest.” When they went to see it together, the art nouveau details weren’t much to her liking. But the views were very nice and it was basically fine with her. They put their apartment in L’Eixample up for sale.
The week they were supposed to sign the mortgage contract, she found a job that allowed her to put her accounting studies to good use. It was a well-paid job near their home, for a pest control company. It put a stop to their plans: they couldn’t go live in Sitges if her job was in Barcelona. At that time it was still a long commute. So they put off their plans to move indefinitely. As time went by, they also dropped the subject of adopting. So they stayed in L’Eixample and didn’t act on the one and only big decision that could have changed the course of their lives.
It took him a long time to give up the dreams he had built around the house and child. For the first time, he was seriously bothered by the fact that she didn’t have any dreams of her own, that her feet were so firmly planted on the ground. But when he would reflect on the horrible life he had shared with his ex-wife, he would go back to admiring Onia. What incredible common sense she has, he often thought. One time he asked her: “I already know that you never daydream, but what about when you sleep?” She told him that she rarely remembered a dream. And when she remembered anything, it was entirely uninteresting; fumigating fleas, adding up invoices, retying her scarf. To her, not dreaming at all and dreaming such things were one and the same.
Thirty years went by after the decision that was never made. This year Onia would turn seventy-nine. She had no regrets and thought very little about the past. She had just remodeled her dining room, which opened out on the corner of Passeig de Gràcia and Passatge de la Concepció. It had previously remained closed. Now she spent her days there, as she could no longer walk around without help and so tended to go out very little. Despite the fact that she’d just bought herself a brand-new wheelchair. “The Ferrari of wheelchairs!” the salesman exclaimed. “Just imagine all the things you can do now!” She shot him a stern look and replied, “Why, imagine it yourself, young man.”
One afternoon, and quite unexpectedly, Onia felt as though there was something missing inside of her, like there was a great big hole in her life. She had never really noticed this empty space before, and if she hadn’t lived for so many years, she would have died without ever feeling it. But that afternoon, all of a sudden, perhaps because she now had unlimited free time (she couldn’t imagine that she’d actually die one day), she decided for the first time ever to follow her teacher’s advice, the one who had made her write about trees with secret doorways and daisies that zoomed away from their flowerpots on rollerskates. She was never able to just come up with these sorts of things, and so the teacher used to tell her: “Start with reality and then go beyond it. Change it, distort it, don’t write things as they are, but as they could be, or as they could have been.”
So she started that very afternoon. She sat down in front of the window that looked out over Passatge de la Concepció, not over Passeig de Gràcia, which she loathed because it was so lit up and conspicuous. Luxury stores, tourists, colors, everything en masse and uncontrolled. In the Passatge, however, things were less hectic. There were only a few stores. From her window she saw the corner façade of Santa Eulalia; customers went in through the doors that open onto Passeig de Gràcia, so there wasn’t much of interest to observe there. She could also see the restaurant Tragaluz, where celebrities often showed up with their court of paparazzi. But Onia didn’t think this would do much to stimulate her thoughts and set them wandering. In any case, the restaurant was closed in the afternoon, which was when Onia spent time looking out her window. There was a small store between Tragaluz and Santa Eulalia which sold sweaters. It had belonged to her husband until he passed away six years earlier and she had decided to sell it. Shortly afterward they opened Tot Cashmere, which is still there today.
She sat down at three o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t move from her spot. The method consisted in watching any person who entered the Passatge and trying to imagine their name, their job, their family, their origin, and their future. She tried with more than twenty people but nothing occurred to her. It’s supposed to be quite easy, something a five-year-old can do. But no, not for her. She just couldn’t see herself doing these asinine things. At five-thirty she decided to give herself one last shot. A tall woman with a long black braid and sunglasses turned the corner from Passeig de Gràcia and entered the Passatge. Onia tried to imagine which one of the stores the braided woman would enter. She had stopped in front of the show window of Santa Eulalia: Onia had a few extra moments to call up her fantasy, but the woman walked into the sweater shop. Onia didn’t give up hope. Since the woman would be in the shop for a bit, she had some time to make up her story: Who is she? Where does she live? When will she come out? What will she buy? Why? Where will she go when she comes out?
Twenty minutes went by and Onia still couldn’t find any answers to these questions... She searched for a way to open her mind with visions of this unknown woman’s immediate future, but she couldn’t do it... When over an hour had passed, the woman with the braid had still not come back out. This fact alone would have given anyone else plenty to imagine. But Onia simply felt surprised. She had stopped trying to stimulate her imagination twenty minutes earlier. She didn’t feel like fantasizing: now all she wanted was for the woman to come out.
37
Large wooden carnival figures brought out during festivals and important occasions to dance with and impress children.