‘I’d like to stay in bed with you, to fall asleep together … We never have, have we? But I don’t like them travelling in taxis on their own. There are all sorts … Are you going home? Ah, right, you haven’t got one. Want to stay? You can sleep for a while, while I go and get them.’
She stopped talking when she saw me crying. Without bothering to ask me she got on the bed and made room for my head between her breasts, running one hand — merely a woman’s hand by now — over my face and hair, repeating in a whisper ‘It won’t be all right, it won’t be all right,’ her heartbeat calming me till I could breathe again with my mouth closed.
‘Don’t go,’ I begged her. I was pierced by a sudden glacial cold, as if my bones were vibrating inside me. She touched my forehead with the back of her fingers.
‘You’re burning up, you poor thing. Don’t be scared, it’s the hangover, worse in your state. You’ll be all right after a few hours’ sleep.’
‘Then what do I do?’
‘Well, if you feel ok, you can come to the cinema with us.’
‘With my life. You should give me an e every six hours, like antibiotics.’
‘That’s not a bad idea. A mite expensive, that’s all. And then you donate your liver to science. I dunno. Listen, darling, you and me … I’m afraid we’ve been seriously screwed. Happy we’ll never be. It’d be a real downer though to be happy in these conditions. So let’s think of an alternative.’
‘It’s just that it’s all so … fragile. First I fall into hell, then I emerge in paradise, and suddenly … here.’
‘Know what I think? Want me to tell you what I do when …? It’s like this. Heaven and hell … are just drugs. Understand? Drugs. Nothing else. They stay for a while, then they go away. Know what we’re going to do? I’ll go and get the girls, and meanwhile you can stay here in bed and sleep. I’ll only be a little while, ok? When we get back, I’ll make you something to eat.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep.’
‘I’ll tell you a bedtime story. It’s a fairy tale to help you get to sleep. I’ve got some great ones. The girls love them. They’re fairy tales in reverse. In my stories the glass slipper fits the stepsister and the ugly duckling grows into an ugly duck. Ha! And Sleeping Beauty carries on sleeping covered in dust, unhappily ever after. Let’s see … I’ll tell you the one about the Toad King. Once upon a time … there was a very powerful king, who wisely ruled over a very rich kingdom that stretched from the mountains to the sea and had in it all climates and all landscapes, and the land bore fruit by the handful, almost without need for cultivation. This king had an only daughter, whom he loved with all his heart, and he would shower her with gifts and attention. Several rooms in the palace, where all ugliness was banned, were for the princess’s sole use: one full of sweets, another of dresses, another of pets, another of toys. Of these her favourite was a gleaming, perfect ball of gold, brighter than the sun. The little princess’s life was spent peacefully in the palace’s beautiful gardens, without a care other than playing with her golden ball. Until one day war was declared at the gates of the kingdom. The king called his beloved daughter to him and said to her: “Duty calls. I must fight the enemy that threatens our borders. In my absence you may play in all the rooms in the palace, including my chambers; all except the one that contains the book in which the fate of the kingdom is written, for what is written in it, once read, can never be undone. This is the key to that door,” he concluded and handed it to her. “I give it to you so that you will not use it.” The days passed and the girl enjoyed her new freedom so much that she was soon consoled about her father’s absence. One day, while playing in the corridors, the beautiful golden ball rolled up against the door of the forbidden room, as if it had a life of its own. Her curiosity making her forget the warnings, she took the little golden key, which she always kept at hand in the pocket of her apron, and pushed: inside was nothing but a heavy table, on which, lay a great, closed book with orange covers. As she approached, the girl discovered with astonishment that printed on it in gold letters was her own name. That was why he didn’t want me to read it, she thought to herself and, feeling offended by her father’s deceit, she opened it without hesitation at the first page. It was covered in tiny letters, but to her surprise the little princess discovered that they turned to bloodstains as she tried to read them. Page after page the same thing happened: seemingly ordinary letters became bloodstains no sooner had she fixed her eyes upon them. She closed the book, recalling her father’s warnings and sorry she hadn’t obeyed them, although no sooner had she done this than through the window she heard the sound of trumpets and cries of victory. Jumping for joy, she tried to reach it to look out, but it was too high, so she had to climb on the table; she still couldn’t reach the window; only by climbing on the forbidden book was she able to peek over the edge. What she saw through it struck her dumb with fright, and the golden ball fell from her open hand to the floor, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. Her father had returned, yes, but not resplendent as he had left on his spirited white charger, but weighed down by chains on a sad grey donkey and surrounded by an escort of ugly toads from the northern marshes, his allies in the war against the neighbouring kingdom; they it was who were croaking out the songs of victory. Leading the procession, mounted on the white horse, which advanced with white mane hanging and head bowed, now rode the Toad King. “Your father has something to say to you,” he roared in a voice of thunder. Without looking at her, the king spoke, his voice broken and glum: “You have disobeyed me and as a consequence the commander of the toads has deposed me and is the new king. He has asked me for your hand in marriage and I am in no position to refuse him. But do not despair: if you marry him and obey him in everything, the day you accept him and learn to love him he will turn into a handsome prince who will whisk you away to his kingdom, where you will live happily ever after, and I shall regain my throne and forgive you.”
‘The wedding bed was prepared in the darkest, dampest room of the palace’s cellars, which was the one the toad had chosen, and the wedding was celebrated. At the banquet, held with great pomp and accompanied by music from a choir of frogs and toads, when they uncovered the dishes brimming with flies, the princess realised she was better off dead. But she knew she couldn’t let her father down a second time and so, under her husband’s vigilant gaze, she ate every last little leg of the flies on her plate. That night, in bed, recalling her father’s commandment and full of hope that one night would be enough, she tried to warm the toad’s cold, viscous skin by pressing it to her body, but it was her blood that turned to ice.
‘Little by little she grew accustomed to her new life: to not entering her private rooms, now full of toad children that broke her toys and pulled her dresses out of shape, to never seeing the sunlight any more. She even adapted to the diet of flies, sharpening her wits to make it more varied: in the mornings she would put milk on them as if they were cornflakes, at lunchtime she would make a pie, for tea she would spread them on toast and at night-time she would make purée. After dinner she only had to put up with the half-hour in which the pale greywhite belly huffed and puffed and croaked over her prostrate body, then turned its green wart-covered back on her, and the princess would delay her sleep imagining in a thousand different ways the features her husband would have the next morning, for she kept thinking that this time she had grown to love him and that tomorrow she would awaken at the side of the most handsome prince on earth. And every morning the first thing she saw on opening her hopeful eyes was a mouth stretched wider than the pillow on which it rested. The princess had never been outside the palace, which in a way was lucky, because the toads had turned the fertile lands of the kingdom into an open-air slaughterhouse, piling the corpses of the animals together with the crops to rot in the sun and so attract the millions of flies they needed to feed themselves, the entire population devoted to the job of catching them and carrying them to the palace in big baskets for the toads to eat. So she started sleeping, sleeping longer and longer. Every night in secret she would eat some crimson berries that brought her a deep sleep so that even when her husband climbed on top of her, she would go on sleeping, his slobbering kisses unable to awaken her. Through the lengthening night she dreamed of her handsome prince, sincerely believing she had come to love her husband and worrying about the inexplicable delay in the promised transformation; in her naivety she thought that if she slept as long as possible her dreams would eventually triumph. Her doubts began the morning she awoke to find the first wart on her finger. Affected by her long enclosure, her skin had begun to turn pale and green as if she were ill, and every morning on awakening she looked at herself naked in the mirror and found a fresh wart on another part of her body. It was around that time that she began to be afraid of, rather than wish for, the promised transformation; she would awaken screaming in the night from a nightmare in which the disgusted Prince Charming kicked the toad in women’s clothes out of his bed. Several months passed, during which the princess resigned herself to her new life so completely that she quite forgot her old one; when one morning, instead of finding new warts, she discovered that one on her belly had grown more than the others and began to get bigger and bigger from that day on. They called the doctor, an old toad with a briefcase who, after checking her, instead of frowning with concern, he stood up and smiled. “We must congratulate the father,” he said. “The kingdom will now have its heirs.”