When I was alone with my mother, she would let me play at being king, and if Vidal and Goyo were there — two friends of mine living in the same block — I would sit in the armchair and issue orders, for example, to go to the kitchen and bring me a glass of water and a spoon — because I thought kings drank water as if it were soup — to crawl about the room a few times or to come and ask my formal permission to go forth and discover a new land full of fierce Indians. If they rose up against me, I had to win, although we made sure to engage in any battles well away from the “throne” so as not to damage it, because my mother was always telling me to be careful, and that kings, unlike me, weren’t always kicking and fidgeting when they sat on the throne.
I knew Doña Micaela from a photo in which she was holding me in her arms when I was still a baby, and to my surprise and to my mother’s delight — because we were alone at home at the time — she finally made an appearance early one afternoon.
As soon as she came in, she cast a rather inquisitive eye about the apartment and immediately noticed the armchair:
“Goodness, have you won the lottery or did you steal it?”
And to play down what she had said, she burst out laughing. My mother lied to her:
“I must have told you the story a hundred times! Don’t you remember? It belonged to my great grandmother, who was given it by a very grand lady in the village whose house she’d worked in for many years. Then my grandmother Bonifacia inherited it and, when she died, it came to my mother.”
“How amazing, because it looks like new.”
“Well, I have had it reupholstered.”
Doña Micaela sat down on the chair, and my mother made her coffee and gave her a serviette and a plate and two cakes.
Doña Micaela stroked my hair and said how much I’d grown.
They talked for a long time about people I didn’t know, and my father, fortunately, arrived home late, as if he had sensed her presence, and said how pleased he was not to have been there.
“Well, now that she’s sat on that piece of junk, we can sell it,” he said.
When I heard this, a lump came into my throat and, as soon as I had the opportunity, I asked my mother tearfully:
“Are you really going to sell it?”
“Do you want us to?”
“No.”
“Well, neither do I.”
And she kissed me.
Now I realize that the “piece of junk” had allowed me to dream of being General Espartero or of being king and having armies at my command. Sitting on it was like passing through the door of hopes and treasures, seeing princesses, living in a palace, oblivious to the smell of sardines or fried peppers. Thanks to my mother, the chair was our one adventure, my one toy, which, even though we were poor, meant that we weren’t poor at all and instilled in me a secret dignity that I still, inexplicably, carry within me.
In the end, they did have to sell it, but, by then, I had stopped playing at being king.
OLD MAN DRIVE
THE DOORBELL only rings when there’s a new moon, as if the person calling wanted to melt away into the shadows. Not that I’m expecting anyone at three or four o’clock in the morning, because no one rings the doorbell at that hour. At that hour, I’m either sleeping or grappling with the pillows in an attempt to reconcile them with the elusive sleep I seek, or else, when the dawn breeze makes the blinds click and bang or lifts the curtain like a soft out-breath, I’m feeling my chest just to make sure I’m still alive. At night, I toss and turn between the sheets, and the slightest click or echo in the house makes me open my eyes, cock my ears and wait helplessly for something to happen. Sometimes I do plumb the somniferous depths and then, occasionally, an intense, loud, urgent ringing pierces the normally cautious silence of the night, penetrating every corner and demanding an immediate response. “Oh, no,” I mumble and, still half asleep, get out of bed and, from the balcony, peer down through the slats of the blind at the front door and see no one, only the night, which lays itself before me in all its indifference or its pretended candour and silence. I go back to bed and speculate about that invisible night owl demanding my attention and inexplicably perpetuating my disquiet, who resents my rest, who takes advantage of moonless nights to make his very invisibility more obvious and more frightening; the wakeful visitor who both wants and doesn’t want to come in, and whom I cannot describe as a thief or a murderer, because he’s neither of those things and because he has no name.
I ponder the gratuitous wickedness of someone who wanders the streets at night or perhaps works at night and returns to his lair or walks down my street either filled with resentment or rolling drunk. Someone who doesn’t know me, but who, for no reason, rings my doorbell and perhaps other people’s doorbells, too, just to make his crime more heinous. I’ve considered, too, that maybe the low winter temperatures, capable of making the world’s ears buzz, could seal up a door with ice and cause a doorbell to shrink back into the precarious warmth of the house. But why does it always happen when the moon is on the turn, the streets deserted and the dawn at its sharpest and darkest, lit only by the street lamp on a distant corner, penned in by shadows?
The night is a universal truce during which we wait for the new day. The absence of light strikes fear into all of us, animals and men; it’s a time to lock the doors, speak softly, turn out the lights so that our house will go unnoticed and blend in with all the others in the dark, silent street; a time to feel the hammer of sleep and tiredness, to withdraw into the cave of the bed and surrender to the mysterious realm of dreams, to wake perhaps in the early hours, screaming and fearful or, for some unfathomable reason, smiling, eyes closed, as if beneficent wings had brushed our lips. A time to revisit forgotten remnants of our life, a time for births and silent machine guns that will deliver to the new day millions of newborns and corpses. A time to be spent in the other world, whatever that is, a world expressed in sighs and apparently inexplicable groans, in chafings and sudden buffeting winds and quiet disembodied voices conspiring outside, where you can barely hear or understand them.
Trying to make it seem as if I were talking about something perfectly ordinary, I’ve asked various neighbours if they ever hear anything unusual in the small hours, and they always say No and, in turn, ask me why, telling me that the owners of No. 52 have installed an alarm that sometimes goes off for no reason and howls away for hours if they happen to be out for the evening, and perhaps that’s what I’ve heard. I shrug and say, yes, they’re probably right: “Perhaps it is the neighbours’ burglar alarm,” I say. But it isn’t.
My house has two doors, the street door and the one in the living room that opens onto the garden. The garden is fenced and has its own flimsy, apparently lockable gate. The only bell is on the front door, but I suspect that the person who rings the bell at night is trying to tempt me downstairs to open the front door while he sneaks in through the living room and grabs me from behind, and so now, when I hear the bell, I listen for a moment, then go to a window at the back of the house and scrutinize the shadows in the garden, where the bushes and the trees flourish placidly in the darkness or sway obediently in the night breeze. No one. No one? I try to penetrate the shadows, where I can make out odd shapes and figures that appear to be moving and signalling to each other, but I hear nothing, absolutely nothing, and so return to my cold bed, looking right and left, watching every uncertain, somnambular step I take.
The doorbell ringing at night is an illness no doctors can cure. I used to wake before I even heard it, but now, whenever the moon is on the turn, or, rather, always, I lie waiting for it, unable to sleep, and spend long, sleepless nights wishing the wretched bell would ring, because I can’t get to sleep, and if it does suddenly, raucously irrupt into the silence, like a treacherous knife-thrust, like a baleful laugh, I jump out of my skin, then wait a few minutes before creeping out of bed to ascertain whose finger it is pressing the bell, and, after traipsing back and forth in the house, I flop into bed again like a twisted, abandoned, broken body that someone has discarded there.