It was a Monday and there was almost no one there; in fact, one of the young women serving behind the bar spent most of the time scratching her head and yawning, and so when there were still twenty minutes to go before the film began, I slowly got up, went to the toilet — just in case — then proceeded upstairs to the cinema. The usher, the one I like best, was standing at the door and he said very politely that I would have to wait five minutes because people were still coming out from the first showing, which had begun at one o’clock.
When five minutes had passed, he apologized and waved me in, and I went to my usual seat in the second row. Two rows behind me there were only two coffins, but not the same two I had seen in the café; they were the sort — and there are many — of whom it’s very hard to say quite what they are. When I went to take my seat, the seat said “Hello”, and I looked around just to make sure no one else had noticed and then sat down as if I had heard nothing.
The music started, and I saw thirteen or fourteen coffins filing in, some in couples and others alone, as well as other cinema-goers — albeit not many — of the unclassifiable variety, who looked rather out of place and about whom I never know quite what to think, as if they were going to attack me. Well, you never can tell. One thing is certain: they were not coffins.
The lights went down and, despite the noise, I managed to sleep through the adverts, until, at last, Casablanca started, a film I’ve seen at least seven times before and which I only see again in order to hear what Ingrid Bergman says to the pianist: “Play it, Sam.” Then I feel something very deep and very remote stirring inside me and I think of Luisa, which is odd because Luisa and I never got on particularly well. Nevertheless — although quite why I’ve no idea — I always think of her and the evening we went dancing at the Pasapoga Music Hall. Anyway, that’s the only reason I go to see Casablanca, and I’ll be back at the Cosmo next week, too, because they’re showing Some Like It Hot, by that amusing director Billy Wilder, and I only watch that in order to hear the final line, when the rich, slightly effeminate little squirt of a suitor says to Jack Lemmon, “Nobody’s perfect!” I don’t even know how often I’ve seen it, certainly more often than Casablanca; the first time was with my little niece, Emilia, when she was thirteen and had ambitions to be another Marilyn Monroe, but the poor thing never even managed to become another Bette Davis.
When the lights went up and I left the cinema, the usher helped me down the stairs to the ground floor. Ahead of me, swaying slowly, was the long female coffin, the one I’d seen in the bar. There was no sign of the male coffin. The usher took me almost to the front door and said: “Take care of yourself! See you next week!” It’s a real pleasure knowing people like him.
THE BENCH
MY SCHOOL WAS NEARBY, but to get there I had to cross the tramlines, and crossing them twice in a day made for a hazardous journey. At first, this meant holding fast to the frantic hand of my godmother, who would say: “Wait!”, “Let’s go!”, “No, not now!”, “Quick, run!” Later, I had to cross it alone, looking anxiously this way and that, first left, then right. On our side of the pavement there was a double bench with a back rest in the middle section, and immediately next to it, on the corner, was the local bar; beyond that were three doorways — the last of which was mine — and opposite we could see the ancient trees of La Moncloa.
My godmother would sometimes disappear among those trees and up the slopes of the Parque del Oeste, hand in hand with an army corporal who had been or was about to go to Africa, and to whom his rank and that posting to Africa lent an aura of bravery and manliness. As well, of course, as the added glamour of being here today and gone tomorrow. I accompanied them on a couple of occasions; once, on a short walk among the trees in the square, and once while they were standing chatting on the corner. I didn’t know who he was, whether a distant cousin or a friend of someone she knew, but he had a very slow, wheedling way of saying things, full of implied meanings and obscure expressions, as if he were trying to persuade her to do something, although quite what I didn’t know. My godmother, a young widow, was diminutive, but quite broad in the beam.
My school was on the mezzanine floor. In the mornings, there was no light on the stairs and very little in the classrooms. I don’t remember if I had a male or female teacher, although she was probably female, because, had I gone straight from being with my overly solicitous godmother to being with a man, I would have been sure to notice the change. The teachers at school rewarded those students who could sit for as long as possible with arms folded and in silence, and I can see myself now looking very disciplined and keen, very alert. However, my eagerness to learn at that school proved ill-placed. My shirtsleeves grew crumpled with all those hours of stultifying inertia.
When I left our apartment in the morning, my godmother would wait on the landing, looking down the stairwell, until I reached the hallway and the street door; then she would run out onto the balcony and watch me until I disappeared around the corner. She stayed at home, where I expected to find her when I came back.
A year earlier, the apartment had been a hive of activity, and I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that this was how all apartments were. No, my mother was dying, and a daily procession of relatives and friends came to visit her and my father; they would give me a kiss or gently pinch or pat my cheek. I didn’t understand about death, not even when she died. Then came the great void, the silence, my godmother’s cheerfully chaotic approach to running a household, the black pinafore they gave me to play in and my dear father, also in black, who worked nights and went to bed in the early afternoon in the now dark, inaccessible bedroom — without my mother.
One sunny day, when there were lots of people out in the street — for ever after, crowds became associated in my mind with loss — two things happened: I had gone out without a handkerchief and when I came back to our apartment from school, I rang the doorbell again and again, but no one answered. I went back down into the street, and, I suppose, looked around, without crossing the road again, at the trees of La Moncloa and at my immediate surroundings. Seeing no one I knew, I set off towards the bar on the corner, where I went over to the bench and sat down with my back to the trams. And what loomed largest for me was not that I had been left alone, but the terrible thoughtlessness that lay behind my not having a handkerchief — which I’m sure I didn’t need that urgently — and my whole being softened and crumpled at the thought of the lack of consideration implied by their going out like that without any warning and leaving a small boy without a handkerchief with which to blow his nose or dry his tears, which seemed to me the very height of neglect and carelessness.
A boy I didn’t know sat down beside me and, on that sunny noonday street, with the dizzying crowds of people coming and going, I remember telling him that I was sitting on that bench because there was no one at home and I had nowhere to go, that I didn’t even have a handkerchief nor was I likely to have one, because my godmother would be in Africa by now with her boyfriend, a corporal in the army, whom she loved more than she did me, and that my situation was grave in the extreme because I didn’t know how long I would have to sit on that bench. I think I may even have asked about his parents, and he doubtless gave some foolish reply that I have since forgotten.