“I understand there are five of you, four sisters and a brother.”
“Yes, my other sister, Micaela, is in Linares…”
Señorita Palmira stepped back a little.
“Don’t shout, girl. And what does she do?”
“We don’t know.”
“Please, don’t shout, I’ve told you already. I’m not deaf, you know. People in town don’t talk the way you folk up in the mountains do.”
Señorita Palmira’s words buzzed like motherly, loving bees about her mouth, while Cloti seemed to have clambered up onto some high crag, from which she heaped loathing on the earth and sky like a rook.
“That isn’t speaking, that’s shouting. You see, Cloti, there’s always someone sleeping in this house. There’s María de las Mercedes, who’s not yet one year old; Almudena and Toñito who, like all small children need their sleep and so tend to get up late; then there’s my husband, who always takes a nap in his armchair before going back to work; and my father-in-law, who has a lie-down as soon as he returns from his daily game of cards at the local bar; and even the neighbours may take a nap, too, for all I know; you never hear anyone shouting in the courtyard. Imagine if someone were to ask you something about us, however trivial, well, everyone would hear what you said in reply…”
Señorita Palmira spoke in gentle waves and smelt of warm flesh and breast milk.
Cloti got into the habit of clapping her hand over her mouth whenever her loud croak soared up to the heavens, which was all the time, but she simply could not understand this household, because in the big houses in the mountains where she had been brought up, the children and the elderly who slept during the day, regardless of whether they were sleeping in a bed, in a cradle or on the floor, always seemed dead to the world and oblivious to the fact that everyone around them was shouting at the top of their voice and, besides, people there tended to sleep at night and, summer or winter, got up at six or seven o’clock in the morning, if not earlier. It seemed to her that in the city everyone slept very lightly, and the only explanation she could come up with was the one people at home gave for everything: they obviously didn’t work hard enough, because a good night’s sleep had to be earned, like your daily bread or the trust of your master.
“Cloti, please, Señor Toño is sleeping.”
“For Heaven’s sake, Cloti, the little one’s fast asleep.”
“Cloti, cover your mouth, please.”
So-and-so’s sleeping, someone else is just falling asleep, you’ve woken him up, or you will wake him up, why do you have to shout so, you’ll get the children into bad habits, is that how they taught you to speak at school, what a way to educate children, like savages, when I have the baby, God and St Raymond permitting, you’ll either have to change your ways or I’ll have to let you go…
Cloti was very confused and couldn’t understand why they found her way of speaking so irritating and why, on the other hand, they didn’t get annoyed with the television or the ambulances, when the latter sounded as if the patient they were carrying was yelling at the top of his voice, and she began to think that perhaps she lacked some refinement or native cunning common to those city folk, and so she tried to make it clear that she was aware of this by interrupting a sentence with her hand over her mouth in order to speak more softly, giggling and shrugging and repeating her favourite excuse: “That’s how I always speak.”
Her fatal taste for free speech and for rending the air with her cawing became a source of fear and horror one afternoon when Señorita Palmira sent her to the Church of the Holy Orders with a message for Father Román, the parish priest. Father Román wasn’t to be found at home or in the sacristy, so Cloti went to see if he was at church, where she found him praying. Sitting with him in the gloom were a few women whispering prayers, and Cloti went over to the priest’s pew and stood there, saying nothing. Father Ramón looked at her, opened a book and sat reading for a good while before, with some difficulty, getting to his feet; then he drew very close to her as if he couldn’t quite see her and, in a soft, mellow voice, asked:
“What do you want, child? What do you want?”
“Señorita Palmira sent me to tell you that…”
The priest shrank back, raised his right hand, placed one silencing finger to his lips to stop her, and let out a very long “shhhhh”, like a balloon deflating or like an owl in the bell tower.
Cloti had covered her mouth, convinced she had committed some terrible sin. Then she removed her hand from her mouth and said as quietly as she could:
“I’ll come back when God is awake.”
Then she fled on tiptoe and didn’t look back.
MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
LORENZO IS SUCH A WORRIER! He worries intensely about nothing at all; he’s in a constant state about the silliest of things! He began to suspect that the questions people were always asking him and to which he always had to answer No, and the number of occasions on which people mistook him for someone else must all have some basis in reality, in some mysterious truth; perhaps those people were right in a way.
If, for example, a gentleman came over to him and said: “Excuse me, is your name Francisco?”, Lorenzo would frown and say anxiously: “No, no, of course not. My name’s Lorenzo.”
And it wasn’t that he thought that this complete stranger Francisco might be a bad person or some rogue wanted by the police. No, Francisco could be anyone. What worried him, what he found so mysterious, was that he could just as easily have been called Francisco as Lorenzo, that he had a certain percentage of Francisco in him, in his gestures, his face, his eyes, his clothes.
He had been worrying about this for almost two years. It began when he was doing his national service and had time on his hands. He was pondering the lives of his commanding officers and thinking how every village has a different way of expressing the same thing. He was teetering on the verge of dialectology. But one Sunday afternoon he was caught unawares by a question. Up until then, he hadn’t even really noticed that he was often mistaken for someone else.
“Young man, are you in the cavalry?”
“No, no, I’m not.”
“I see. Because in the cavalry, of course, they give you instruction in hand-to-hand combat, swords and other weapons.”
The person who asked him this question was an old man. But what of it? In the first place, the gentleman should have been able to see that he was in the infantry. In the second place, what did he mean by all that stuff about “instruction” in various matters? “Wow! Even dressed the way I am, I could still pass for a cavalryman!”
He began to compare himself with the men in the fourth squadron. He studied their coarse, blackened features, their stocky, thickset bodies, their baggy breeches, their nasal voices and their awful jokes. He concluded that he really could have belonged to the cavalry.
He thought: “We are never what we should be. We are impregnated with things that are not ours and never have been.” Couldn’t the questions people asked him be directed at anyone? Was there anyone so completely himself that he could not be mistaken for someone else? Was he the only one who could be both Francisco and Lorenzo, a cavalryman and an infantryman, an engineer and a bookkeeper for a rather dodgy loan company? One day, you see, he was travelling on the train to Villalba to see his cousin Isabel who had just had an operation. He got off the train. Other passengers got off too. On the platform stood a group of workmen wearing scarves covering their mouths and, as soon as they saw him, they talked briefly among themselves, then two of them came over to him and asked: