On the afternoon that Guillermo found the thing he needed in order to be happy, water was streaming from the canvas roof onto Juacho’s stall. It was raining hard. The loutish owner of the stall was sheltering in a garage on the pavement opposite, rubbing his hands together and calling out to the maids who came running past. The drenched books were reduced to a paste; the men of the Wild West were turning the same colour as their hats; on the covers of old magazines, the ink had run onto the white teeth, costly furs and swan necks of the famous stars. And there was Juacho, standing on the pavement opposite, as happy as a sandboy. The stream of water sounded just like water filling a bottle. Something was certainly being filled there; yes, something was gradually filling up.
The following day, in the sun, Guillermo went to look at the books. As they dried, they gave off a lovely, peaceful, bluish steam. Among the steam stood Juacho, like a bookselling saint. The books and their plots were easing back to life with elastic, feminine grace, making delicate crackling noises. Guillermo picked one up and became quite mad with joy. He had to dig in his nails in order to unstick it from the planks. It had become moss like the moss that carpets woods, moss you could buy for a peseta.
Every day at the boarding house, Guillermo would give that wise old novel a squeeze. He would press his nose to the pages in order to smell the earth and the air, the rain and the sun. Were there books anywhere in the world that contained the same deep wisdom as Juacho’s books? Was there anything purer and more ancient in the whole city? Those books contained the tunes he played on the harmonica, the ox carts, human time, the joy of walking the earth. Guillermo bought more and more of those battered old novels. He never read them. In one he was surprised and delighted to find a toad. It was a small, dead toad, but it seemed to him very beautiful. Guillermo lived in hope that one day a novel would simply crumble to dust in his hands.
THE ARMCHAIR
ONE MORNING, my mother went shopping and returned in a van belonging to a cabinetmaker, who carried an armchair up to our apartment. When my father got back from work and saw the chair by the window in the living room, he asked:
“Whose is that?”
My mother said:
“I just bought it.”
My father looked at her in disbelief and exclaimed:
“You’re mad!”
That’s how my father always began the story of the armchair, and he told it to me I don’t know how many times, because I was only five when my mother bought it, and, besides, he told it to me so that I would take his side.
My mother had been saying for ages that they should smarten the place up just in case Doña Micaela should ever come and see us.
“Doña Micaela is what she is and we’re what we are; she has money and we don’t…”
“We can pay for it in instalments…”
And so it was that, one morning, she stopped by the cabinetmaker’s next to the market, saw the armchair in the window and immediately felt that it would be a good way to start improving the apartment.
This is what the cabinetmaker told her:
The armchair was made of mahogany in the Isabelline style, albeit late Isabelline, because it had springs in the back and the seat. It had belonged to the big house in Calle de Ministriles and had been brought in to be reupholstered, but, unable to find any Nanking silk, he had used artificial Chardonnet silk instead, and, in the end, the Marchioness had told him to keep it, because they had decided to refurnish the whole room…
My mother’s eyes were like saucers, and in a tiny thread of a voice she said:
“Unfortunately, I can’t afford to buy it…”
“There’s no hurry. Pay me in instalments,” said the man.
My mother agreed to pay in six monthly instalments, and the cabinetmaker loaded the chair onto his van and drove my mother and the chair home.
All our other furniture was old and second-hand, and if it didn’t wobble, it creaked; everything either had a mediocre look about it or appeared to have been born malformed. When my parents got married, they just bought the few bits and pieces they needed and moved straight into the apartment, which was cheap to rent and not so much antique as old. My mother went all out in her efforts to improve our furnishings.
My father never accepted the armchair, not even in the expectation that Doña Micaela might visit us, and, over the years, albeit less frequently as time passed, he would come up with arguments against it:
“That armchair’s not for people like us. I’m not going to sit on it.”
“A man’s posterior doesn’t need all that padding.”
“The only true revolutionary is the man who sits on the floor.”
“Think of all the ham we could have eaten with the money you spent on that chair!”
And if he happened to be in a good mood, he would refer to it as “the sibyl’s chair”.
“There’s no reason why the poor shouldn’t have fine things in their homes, too. A fine piece of furniture never looks out of place,” argued my mother.
Because of the animosity that had grown up around the armchair and our strained finances, my mother abandoned the idea of improving the apartment, but, whenever she went to pay her monthly instalment, she returned more convinced than ever that it had been a good buy, because the cabinetmaker always told her stories about the chair.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Pepe Botella hadn’t sat on that chair.”
“Pepe who?”
“King José I, Napoleon’s brother, the one who liked his drink. And I’m sure Isabel II would have sat on it, because she often stayed with aristocratic friends, and so did her husband, and General Espartero. I’m not just saying this, I know it for a fact.”
“Do you mean the man on the statue, the one riding a horse?”
“The very same.”
I sided with my mother, and once, when we went to the Retiro Park, she pointed out Espartero’s statue to me as we were leaving and said: “Your father may not believe it, but that very important general once sat on our armchair.”
I stood stock still, unable to take my eyes off him, as if I had always known him and he were a close relative of ours.
One day, my father returned from work in a bad mood and it occurred to him to say that he wasn’t sure whether to sell that reactionary chair or to adopt a cat so that it would piss on the seat the Queen had sat on and sharpen its claws on the mahogany legs like a true gentleman; without a word, my mother flounced off into the bedroom to cry, and I didn’t move a muscle, because my father knew very well that I wanted to go and console her and he didn’t take his eyes off me.