Surreptitiously, Ana eyed the plate that had just been served. Paris was worth a Mass, it turned out.
‘How many bedrooms does the house have?’
‘What?’ The woman seemed first to brighten and then subside. ‘Ah, five. Five bedrooms.’
Ana glanced into the courtyard: it didn’t seem like a big place. Oh well. In the box she wrote ‘five.’ She looked at the woman.
‘Very well’—in the tone of a teacher at the end of a lesson.
‘Is that it?’
Ana put down her pencil and shuffled the forms together.
‘That’s it,’ she said.
She considered the woman’s fascinated expression for a moment before deciding to reach for the plate herself. Unexpectedly the woman sang softly to herself. She seemed younger now: she was glowing.
‘So that was it,’ she murmured thoughtfully.
Ana ate. The food was really delicious. And the woman could talk all she liked now. About her model husband and her three talented daughters and her cheeky blond boy, the family’s pride and joy. Why not? Everyone has a little treasure. Eating made her magnanimous.
‘It wasn’t that bad, was it?’ she asked playfully.
The woman shook her head. She seemed not entirely to have taken in all the extraordinary things that had just happened. Timidly, she pointed to the forms.
‘And this, where does it go?’ she asked.
‘This?’ Ana glanced charily at the papers. ‘I don’t know, I suppose they’ll use them for statistics, that sort of thing.’
‘Statistics,’ the woman repeated, dreamily.
On second thought, it might be better to finish eating quickly and get going, before the woman started talking again. ‘Get down from there immediately!’ she heard someone shout. ‘I’m not going to!’ The next-door neighbours: a rowdy bunch, as the woman had said. ‘Get down!’
‘I said I’m not coming down!’ louder now, or closer. ‘I want my skateboard!’
Ana looked towards where the voice was coming from. She saw a boy’s blond head appear over the partition wall. ‘I said get down. You’ll fall.’
‘Eat up quickly, or it will get cold.’
‘I want my skateboard,’ the boy repeated. ‘Amelia!’
‘Señorita Amelia,’ the neighbour corrected.
‘Señorita Amelia!’ the boy shouted. ‘Are you there?’
Ana looked at the woman; she was eating with her eyes fixed on the plate.
‘Señorita Amelia!’ The boy spotted Ana in the kitchen. ‘Hey, you!’ he shouted, ‘is Señorita Amelia there?’
Ana looked at the woman, who was still focussing on her plate.
‘Listen,’ she said with exasperation. ‘They’re asking for Señorita Amelia — can’t you hear them?’
‘And what’s that to do with me?’ said the woman. ‘Am I expected to know everyone in the neighbourhood?’
‘Can you do me a favour?’ the boy asked Ana. ‘I lent it to her because she said it was for a nephew but now my mother says that she doesn’t have nephews or anything. You’re not her nephew, by any chance?’ he laughed, delighted by his joke, and the neighbour murmured something inaudible. ‘I have to get down now or she’ll kill me, but if you see Señorita Amelia, please tell her.’
And like an actor concluding his part, the boy and his blond mop disappeared back behind the wall.
‘Have you finished?’
Ana looked up, startled. The woman was standing right beside her. That overflowing quality that had earlier surrounded her like an aura seemed entirely to have disappeared.
She took away the plates and the tureen. Meticulously, determinedly, she threw all the food that was left into the rubbish bin. All that work wasted, Ana thought. She remembered the six dirty cups, the half-eaten toast, and wanted to get away from the flat as quickly as possible.
‘Dessert?’
The face turned to her without expression. As if the woman felt herself mercilessly compelled to play out her role until the last.
‘No thank you, I have to go.’
She stood up and collected her things together. The woman very slightly raised her arm.
‘So this doesn’t…?’
She stopped short. Ana’s gaze fell on her hand, fearfully pointing at the forms.
‘This stays as it is,’ Ana said, very quietly.
For an instant the woman recovered the quality that had previously made her glow.
‘Thank you,’ she said, barely audible.
Then, in silence, she led Ana to the door. When Ana said goodbye she didn’t answer or even look at her. She waited for her to leave, then firmly shut the door, turning the key twice.
NOW
Perhaps it would be best if I go away for a while, if I stay here I’ll end up getting agitated. Mama and Adelaida do nothing but cry in the room where Juan Luis sleeps (as if that’s going to help my brother in any way) and it’s terrible to see Papa: just now I looked into the living room and he’s still standing at the window, watching the entrance into our road. We’ll know from his face when the ambulance turns in.
It’s odd that I wrote ambulance because, even as I was writing it, I was imagining them arriving by car. A car would be worse, I don’t know why. Actually, I do know. I can’t stop thinking that Juan Luis is going to scream like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. And they came for Blanche in a car.
. . .
Just now I told Papa that I was thinking of going out for a stroll but he didn’t seem to like the idea. It’s not surprising: Juan Luis could wake up at any moment and if he’s anything like he was last night, Papa won’t be able to manage him alone (and it’s clear that we can’t count on Mama and Adelaida). I wonder how long this nightmare can go on. But we must not give in to despair. Now that they’re taking Juan Luis away, we have to try to forge a new life; we were on the verge of becoming demented ourselves. It seems like centuries since I last felt the sun on my skin.
The first thing we should do is move house. I mooted the idea to Adelaida just now, but she looked at me with a kind of horror. I do understand: our childhood was here. It’s not easy detaching yourself from a place. We used to play in this room, when it was the family room, while the adults took a siesta on Sundays. She would be Aleta and Queen Guinevere; I was the wizard Merlin; Juan Luis, Prince Valiant. That crack over there served for tempering the Singing Sword. And in the summer we used to run around in the sun until our heads hurt. But this is precisely what we need to avoid: sentimentality. It’s as if everything here is somehow tainted by Juan Luis. Full of his memory, I mean. If we stay in this house, we’ll never be able to make a fresh start. Every morning, when Mama waters the azaleas, she’ll say the same thing: ‘To think this is the flower bed Juan Luis made for me after he sold his first painting, my poor son.’ And if anyone points out the cobwebs in the birdbath in the courtyard, Adelaida will say: ‘This is where Sebastian tried to give Juan Luis a bath, when Juan Luis was three years old.’ And she’ll look at her mother and they’ll both cry. Only yesterday afternoon, Mama was searching for an X-ray or something and she found that photograph from when Juan Luis won the drawing competition. ‘Do you remember how handsome he was?’ she said. ‘When he came out on the stage everybody cheered. Do you remember how proud I was?’ She held the photograph against her heart. ‘How old was he?’ she asked. ‘Ten?’ ‘No, eleven,’ said Adelaida. ‘Don’t you remember that Sebastian wore long trousers for the first time that day?’ Mama sighed deeply and I realised that she was crying. ‘How happy we might have been,’ she said. Then, hearing a noise, she glanced up. When she saw me watching from the door she quickly dried her eyes with the back of her hand; she doesn’t like anyone to see her crying. I sat down beside her to comfort her, but she started stroking my head like a ninny and murmuring my darling boy. She’s very nervy, poor Mama, and she ended up making me nervous too. Or, I don’t know, perhaps it’s the result of living with this tension for so long. The touch of her hand must have acted as a catalyst, taking me back to another time — I can’t have been more than four years old because Juan Luis was still sleeping in a cot in Mama and Papa’s room — and I had been dreaming of dogs (or imagining them). That’s all it was. A terrifying number of black and hairy dogs, ugly dogs, in a pile, tearing at each other’s ears with their teeth. I didn’t want to shout for fear of waking my little brother in the room next door. That was the first night, I remember, that I ever heard my heart beating. I was about to cover my ears with my hands and then I felt her come in. Is something wrong, darling boy? I heard her say, above my head. She was stroking my forehead and then she sat down on the bed. And it was as if all the peace in the world settled on my bed, with her.