Learning to Talk to Plants E-Book

Marta Orriols

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 316

Beschreibung

An immersive, moving novel about complex griefPaula's partner has died in a car accident – but no one knows her true grief. Only hours before his death, Mauro revealed that he was leaving her for another woman.Paula guards this secret and ploughs on with her job as a paediatrician in Barcelona, trying to maintain the outline of their old life. But all of Mauro's plants are dying, the fridge only contains expired yoghurt and her mind feverishly obsesses over this other, unknown woman.As the weeks pass, vitality returns to Paula in unexpected ways. She remembers, slowly, how to live. By turns devastating and darkly funny, Learning to Talk to Plants is a piercingly honest portrayal of grief – and of the many ways to lose someone.

Leseprobe

3

LEARNING TO TALK TO PLANTS

MARTA ORRIOLS

Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem

pushkin press

5

For you, Miquel.

Days and nights and those hours that can’t be measured on a clock.

We’ll never forget you.

I miss you and I love you. Still and forever.

6

7

“You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”

JULIAN BARNES,Levels of Life8

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationEpigraphBefore123456789101112131415161718AfterAcknowledgementsCopyright

9

BEFORE

We were alive.

Terrorist attacks, accidents, wars and epidemics weren’t our concern. We could watch movies that made light of dying, others that turned the act of dying into an act of love, but we remained outside that zone where the true meaning of death resided.

Some nights, protected by the arrogance of our late youth, we would lie in bed, surrounded by huge, soft pillows, and we would watch the news in the dim light, our feet intertwined, and that was when death, without us knowing, settled, all bluish, into the lenses of Mauro’s glasses. One hundred and thirty-seven people died in Paris in attacks claimed by the Islamic State, six deaths in less than twenty-four hours on the roads in three different head-on collisions, an overflowing river caused four deaths in a small town in southern Spain, at least seventy dead in a chain of attacks in Syria. And, scared for a moment, we might have said things like “What a world” or “Poor guy, in the wrong place at the wrong time” and the news, if it wasn’t too harsh, would dwindle that very night in the confines of the bedroom of a couple, a couple that was also fizzling out.

We would change the channel and watch the end of a movie, and meanwhile I’d confirm his arrival time the next day or 10remind him to go past the dry cleaner’s to pick up his black coat; if we’d had a good day, in those last months, we might make love, but matter-of-factly. If the news was momentous, its effects would last a little longer, be part of the conversation on a coffee break at work or in line at the fishmonger’s.

But we were alive, death was for others.

We used expressions like I’m dead to convey our exhaustion after a long day at work, and the word didn’t affect our mood. When we were first together, we were capable of floating out in the middle of the sea at our favourite cove, and joking, with our lips drenched in salt and sun, about a hypothetical drowning that ended with a scandalous mouth-to-mouth scenario and cackles of laughter. Death was something distant, as if it didn’t belong to us.

What I’d lived through as a girl—my mother became ill and died just a few months later—had become a hazy memory that no longer stung. My father came to pick me up at school just an hour after we’d come back from lunch. Hundreds of us, girls and boys, were climbing the spiral staircase to return to the classrooms from the cafeteria, with the high jinks typical of life, which keeps on moving despite the silence of those who are no longer among us. My father came to the classroom with the headmistress, who knocked on the door just as the science teacher was explaining that there were invertebrate animals and vertebrates. My memory of my mother’s death will always be linked to white writing on the green chalkboard that divided the animal kingdom in two. My classmates, who up until then had always been 11my equals, now looked at me with new eyes. I remained very still, overcome by the feeling that I was retreating to a third kingdom, the kingdom of wounded, motherless animals.

Even though it didn’t make it any less terrible, that death was forewarned, and the warning had given us some time for goodbyes and well wishes, her decline gave us the chance to express all our love. Most of all, there was the naivety of believing she was going to the heaven that had been drawn for me, and the innocence of being seven years old, which saved me from comprehending the finality of her departure.

Mauro and I were a couple for many years. Then, and just for a few hours, we stopped being one. He died suddenly some months ago, without warning. The car that struck him carried him off, along with many other things.

Without the comfort of a heaven, and with all the unwieldy pain of adulthood, I often think and speak of Mauro using the adverbs before and after, to avoid the past tense. Life split down the middle. He was alive that afternoon with me, he drank wine and asked if they could cook his steak a bit more, he took a couple of calls from the publishing house while he played with his napkin ring, he jotted down, on the back of a business card from the restaurant, the title of a book by a French author he was enthusiastically recommending to me, he scratched his left earlobe, uncomfortable and ashamed, perhaps, and then he told me. He was almost stuttering. A few hours later he was dead. 12

The restaurant had a piece of coral in its logo. I look at it often, on that little card where Mauro, in his flawless handwriting, had written out that book title. Perhaps because we are all free to embellish our misfortune with as many fuchsias, yellows, blues and greens as our little hearts desire, since the day of the accident I imagine the before and after in my life like the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world. Every time I think about whether something happened before or after Mauro’s death I make an effort to envisage the barrier reef, fill it with colourful fish and sea urchins, and turn it into an equator of life.

When death ceases to belong to others, you have to carefully make a place for it on the other side of the reef, because, otherwise, it feels completely within its rights to take up any and all available space.

Dying isn’t mystical. Dying is physical, it’s logical, it’s real.

13

1

“Pili, check the equipment, fast! Is she breathing?”

“No.”

“Let’s start positive-pressure ventilation.”

I repeat the baby’s vitals in a whisper, like a litany. I know, little one. This is no way to greet you on your arrival into this world, but we have to get you breathing, you hear me?

“Thirty seconds.” One, two, three… there’s a woman lying over there, your mum, and she needs you, you see her? Come on, you can do it, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen… come on, breathe, you got this, I promise that if you can do this, things’ll change, this world is a good place to be. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Living is worth the effort, you know? Twenty-three, twenty-four… sometimes it’s hard, I won’t lie, twenty-six, twenty-seven, come on, sweetie, don’t do this to me. I promise it’s worth it. Thirty.

Silence. The baby girl doesn’t move.

“Pili, heart rate?”

My eyes meet the nurse’s vigilant gaze. This is the second time this has happened recently and I know that warning look. She’s right, I shouldn’t raise my voice so much, I shouldn’t raise it at all, in fact. I’m not comfortable. I’m hot and my right clog is rubbing against a little blister I got from my sandals in the last few days of my summer holiday. In these crucial moments, right after birth, the blister and 14this heat are the last thing I need. Our absolute priority for the baby is to keep her from losing body warmth. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to travel at the crack of dawn and go straight to work without stopping by the house to unpack and shake off the strange sensation of having spent almost two weeks away, far from work, from my babies’ medical records, from the blood work, from the lab, far from everything that makes me tick.

New decision. With short, quick movements, I stimulate the soles of the baby’s feet and, as always happens when I do that, I curb my desire to press harder, with more urgency. You can’t do this to me, little one, I can’t start September off like this, come on, breathe, pretty girl. Reassessment.

I try to concentrate on the information on the monitor and on the girl, but I need to close my eyes for a second since I can’t cover my ears, and the questions launched at me by her mother, which sound like a disconsolate moan in the delivery room, throw me off worse than ever. Other people’s suffering now feels like an overloaded plate after I’ve eaten my fill. I can’t take in any more and it sends me running in the opposite direction. Every pained cry and whimper becomes Mauro’s mother’s sobbing on the day of his burial. It ripped at the soul.

Breathe, pretty girl, come on, for the love of God, breathe!

I furrow my brow and shake my head to remind myself that I shouldn’t stir up all that. Not here. Here you shouldn’t make waves. Here you shouldn’t remember. Not here, Paula. Focus. Reality hits me like a pitcher of cold water and 15instantly puts me in my place: I have a body weighing only eight hundred and fifty grams that hasn’t taken a breath, laid out here on the resuscitation table, and its life is in my hands. My sixth sense kicks in, guiding me more and more. That sense somehow maintains a balance between the most extreme objectivity, where I retain protocols and reasoning, and my shrewd ability to harness my intuition, without which, I’m convinced, I couldn’t aid these tiny creatures with their arrival into the world.

Listen, little girl, one of the things worth living for is the sea.

“Pili, I’m turning off the ventilation. I’m going to try tactile stimulation of her back.”

I take a deep breath and let it out like someone preparing to leap into the void. My mask acts as a wall and holds in my exhalation, a mix of the fluoride toothpaste I found this morning in my father’s bathroom and the quick, bitter coffee I drank in a motorway service station. I miss my things, my normal life. I miss my coffee and my coffeemaker. The smell of home, my rhythm, not owing anyone any explanations, just being able to do my own thing.

I rub the baby’s tiny back as gently as I can.

The sea has a rhythm, you feel it? Like this: it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes. You feel my hands? The waves come and go, like this. Come on, beauty, the sea is worth living for, there are other things too, but for now focus on the sea, like this, gentle, you feel it?

“She’s breathing.”

The first cry was like a miaow, but we received it with the joyful relief that greets a summer storm. 16

“Welcome…” I’m not sure if I’m saying it to the baby or to myself, but I have to struggle to hold back my emotion.

I wash her with quick movements I’ve made hundreds of times before. It calms me to see her colour improving, that transparent skin taking on a reassuring pink tone.

“Heart rate?”

“One hundred and fifty.”

“Pili, let’s put on a CPAP and put her in the incubator, please.”

I look over my mask into her eyes to make her understand that I’m sorry about my earlier tone. It’s best to keep Pili happy, otherwise she acts all offended and pays me back by making me wait for the blood work. At least she gets cross with me, which is something in and of itself. For the last few months everyone’s been incredibly forgiving when I lose my patience and their indulgence actually makes me more angry and irritable.

As I wait for the incubator, I rub the baby’s tiny back sweetly, this time to thank her for making that immense effort to cling to life. But I can’t help thinking that, deep down, I’m touching her for some other, more elusive reason too, something to do with the fact that she’s still here when Mauro isn’t. Because he’s not here, Paula. He’s gone and, yet he comes to me even here as I’m handling these few grams of gelatinous life.

“Here you go, Mama. Give your daughter a kiss.” I bring the baby over to her mother for just a few seconds so they can meet. “She had some trouble breathing but now she’s 17fine. We’re going to bring her up to the ICU like we talked about, OK? I’ll be back in a little while to explain everything in detail. Don’t worry, everything’ll be fine.”

But I don’t promise her anything. Even though the mother’s eyes are begging me to give them hope, after Mauro I don’t make any promises.

18

2

Lídia will be here soon, her office hours end at one. I feel a wave of relief, knowing I’ll see her. In mere minutes I’ll hear her chattering away, plunging me back into normality, just what my body is demanding from me. After the summer holidays, that’s the key: getting back into my routine.

I wait for her amid the bustle of the hospital canteen as I move my salad around on the plate. The smell of a huge communal pot of broth is stuck in my nose, sending me back to the school cafeteria, where I hid things I didn’t like in the pockets of my uniform or traded in chicken thighs with the hungrier students. The paediatrician ordered my father to make me toast with honey to keep up the battle against my low percentile, which he pointed to with a pencil on that odious growth chart. Honey became a regular part of my diet and of our grey days without Mum, not to sweeten things, but to fatten me up. I read somewhere that an eighty-three-year-old Hindu ascetic had survived without eating or drinking for more than seventy years. A team from the Research and Development branch of India’s Ministry of Defence studied him for a couple of weeks. The only contact he had with water was when washing or gargling. The doctor who was conducting the experiment came to the conclusion that if he wasn’t obtaining energy from food or water, then it had to 19be coming from some other source in his environment, such as the sun. When the experiment ended, the yogi returned to his hometown to resume his meditation. It seems he had been blessed by a goddess when he was eight and that allowed him to live without food.

Four days after Mauro’s death, and by that I mean literally four days, I had ingested only lime blossom tea; luckily, I’d let my father add some honey from his local beekeeper. Unable to put up a fight, I’d allowed it. I don’t know what graph curve he was trying to increase at that point. Once again, my sadness was dripping out in amber tones.

They were apathetic, unreal days, the shock filled everything, there was no space for hunger. I remember my father’s firm hand turning the wooden spoon and honey rolling slowly through the slits without dripping. My father is a perfectionist and found it inconceivable that I didn’t have a wooden honey spoon. He bought me one. He also organized my cutlery drawer and fixed the door to the pantry where I kept my pots. For a week my father and Lídia took turns, maintaining a constant presence in my home, and I just let them. They filled my fridge with nice things that slowly rotted. Lídia would come at lunchtime or dinnertime to make sure that I ate something and keep me company.

Everyone assumed, during those weeks following the accident, that my stunned gaze, neglected appearance and lowered blinds were due to my sadness over losing the person who’d been my partner for so many years; no one realized that, clinging to the pain of his death, there was another 20grief, slippery but slow, like a slug able to cover everything—including the other pain—with its viscous trail that gradually saturated everything, ugly, so ugly that all I knew how to do was hide it, I was dying too with the shock of this new shame, even more shocking than the death itself.

I wonder if the two things are somehow linked, if her arrival into my consciousness made him disappear, physically, from my life.

“Come on, Paula, please, at least have the banana. You haven’t eaten a thing.”

I looked at Lídia, my head tilted to one side, smiling. I had remembered the story of the yogi and was about to make a joke, explaining that a goddess had blessed me and I didn’t need food, but seeing the worry on her face I decided to keep it to myself.

“Come on, just a little.”

I was sitting in a chair in the kitchen and she stood beside me. We could have been two friends on any old day at lunch-time, in some randomly chosen place where there’d been no deaths of friends or lovers. But the scene’s composition was completely deformed. If I bandaged up everything that was hurting inside me, I would have embodied the anachronistic image of a soldier returning from war, mutilated.

Lídia meticulously peeled the banana. I watched her, distracted, and when she offered it to me, stripped and held up in her fingers, we looked into each other’s eyes and felt an urge to laugh, without knowing what had brought it on.

“Please, eat. Come on.” 21

“I’m not hungry, Lídia, really. It’ll make me feel sick.”

“Come on, just the tip…”

We both burst out laughing and I felt my cheeks burning with shame. My laughter calmed her and allowed her to laugh. I needed to calm her first so that she could calm me. The onus of Mauro’s sudden death—with bonus cheating—had taught me things others will never know, for instance, that calmness isn’t truly possible. And I laughed. I laughed but still wasn’t able to eat, I laughed but couldn’t sleep, I laughed clammy with cold sweat. I knew that if I stopped abruptly, if I stopped laughing and just told Lídia the truth, that he’d left me, she’d be appalled and the shock of his infidelity would overshadow his death. Crass, clichéd infidelity would take centre stage. But, for now, we were still laughing. Lídia was laughing and I was laughing with her while I sought out her gaze hidden in the folds of her eyelids, wanting to convey it all without having to put it into words; but no, she didn’t catch my drift. That you’ve been dumped, compared to the death of the guy who left you, isn’t the sort of news that’s easily transmitted in a look.

“Eat, Paula.”

I took a bite of the banana just so I wouldn’t have to hear her anymore.

“You know that humans have about twenty thousand, five hundred genes and bananas around thirty-six thousand?”

“What are you going on about?”

“That a banana has about fifteen thousand more genes than a human being,” I explained to Lídia. 22

“Great, fantastic.” She tried on a compassionate expression as she pushed my hair out of my face and put it behind my ear. I’d never felt pity from her before. “Everything’s going to be fine, sweetie. You’ll get past this.”

Deep inside, in silence, I thought, no, I won’t.

Soon the sweet, pasty texture of the banana that I was struggling to swallow took on the salty taste of my tears.

“Guess who?” Hands cover my eyes, from behind. I didn’t see her coming. I turn and we hug. Lídia is a whirlwind of wild, blonde curls, and a rain of freckles decorates her whole face.

At first we talk a blue streak, competing to get a word in edgewise. We catch up on the details of getting back to work after the summer, then I complain indignantly about the state of the renovations, which are very far along in the newer wing where she works as a paediatrician. I’m forced to work between constricting walls, in spaces that are too compartmentalized, with insufficient light and twisting passageways. All the facilities that the public doesn’t see have been left on the back burner, despite their need for an overhaul. Lídia sticks out her tongue at me, to stop my complaining. Our friendship has never been equal. She always imposes herself subtly, but I’ve accepted it since the very first day, just like I’ve always accepted that circumstances have moulded me inwards, into myself. Then she tells me about her disappointment with the hotels she stayed in during her trip to Scotland—that the carpets were gross and the food revolting, that they made a mistake with one of the reservations and 23ended up in a room that was so dirty they decided to sleep in the car, all four of them—and, as if we were still on her parents’ roof terrace studying for finals, we put our arms together to compare our tans.

“You look great,” she announces with a smile. “These days have done you good.”

And I let her believe her own conclusion because I don’t feel like talking about me or about the two weeks I spent in Selva de Mar, at my father’s house. The supposed tranquillity of life far from the rat race, the pleasure of simple things, the famous inner peace that everyone insisted would do me such good, none of it had worked.

I hadn’t been back there since the accident, and with the opaque filter of time, my father’s town seemed different, the church bigger and the streets narrower, the church bells had never chimed so loudly nor the laughter of the summer people in the square been so brazen. I’d had it up to here with the calmness, my father’s melancholy piano playing, the birds that woke me up at dawn just when I’d managed to fall asleep; I was sick of the internet connection failing, of having to hang off a cliff just to get third-rate phone coverage, and of the games of chess after meals. No, the tranquillity had only set off all my alarms and amplified the questions I was supposedly avoiding during my first vacation without Mauro. So, to keep my conversation with Lídia from turning doleful, I make sure to keep lobbing out questions so she can’t question me. After all, a mother just back from a family trip around Europe is always going to have more 24stories to tell than a single woman whose brilliant summer plan was spending fifteen days in a tiny town whipped by the north wind, surrounded by her father’s friends, who are all pushing seventy.

“And how are the girls?”

“Oh man, the girls… you’ll see them soon enough. Daniela’s unbearable, a textbook teenager, and Martina’s following close on her heels: now, when one of them wants a pool day the other wants to go to the beach, and it’s like that with everything.” She sighs hard before continuing. “I swear, travelling with kids is a real trial. You can’t even imagine how many times I wanted to leave them with Toni, sneak off and join you in that small town, sunbathe in the buff all day long, and smoke and drink every night without having to hide.”

Why didn’t you, I think. Why did you leave me alone for so many days? The adult inside me knows that Lídia is married, that she has daughters, responsibilities, a family to spend her holidays with. The adult bites her tongue and smiles, tells her it wasn’t all that, that she’s anxious to see the girls, that she bought them some T-shirts, that everything went well in her father’s town, same as ever, that her dad is strong as an ox, cooking all day long, and she must have gained at least three kilos.

“And? You must have been popular…?” And then she fixes those blue eyes of hers on me, those eyes that always find you out when you’re trying to dodge something. I don’t think she was referring to men in particular with that question, just trying to suss out how I was doing. 25

“With dozens of French tourists.” I wave a hand over my body from top to bottom, then extend my arms as if to say, have you seen me lately, do I look like I’m in a state where I could possibly get involved with another human being?

“Well, that’s probably better. It’s all very recent. Let things settle, so you can think more clearly. Mauro’s… it’s too soon. I don’t know that it’s the right moment, Paula.”

The right moment for what, I think. Is there some set period of time? In the instruction manual for those left behind does it say anything about how soon you can go out and play without being considered tawdry? But the adult in me just nods her head slightly, while lining up all the cherry tomatoes in the salad on one side of the plate. 

26

* * * * * *

I’ve read that over the long term our brains employ reconstructions and abstractions to store memories, which is why we can even go to the extreme of producing false ones. I wonder how I can hold on to your memory, intact and in a fair way.

It would be much easier if I could experience those memories in chronological order, but that’s not the case. They appear randomly, coming and going in miscellaneous bursts that don’t help to give shape to the collection of contrasts that was your life, or your life with me.

You knew how to sew. You would sew on buttons, darn the occasional hole in a sock.

When you couldn’t find something and you called out for me to come and help you look, you’d call me Pauli, and I didn’t like that but you never stopped doing it.

You would sneeze three times in a row when you got out of bed in the morning. When you called your mother on the phone your tone of voice would change. When you said “Mama” with that childlike ring, I would grab my keys and go out for a walk because I knew you’d give in to whatever she demanded of you. You smelt clean. You didn’t wear any cologne, it was a pure scent of warm water and soap.

When you were deep into reading the newspaper you would break biscuits with your tongue against the roof of 27your mouth. One after the other. At first I found it amusing, but over the years I would nag you about eating so much sugar.

When we made love, just as we were getting started, if I touched you, an ever so slight shiver would run through you, like a tiny shock, like a bittersweet reaction of desire and aversion. It must not have always been that way, but I can’t remember how it was at the beginning.

You liked to buy me shoes. I never told you but I usually wasn’t crazy about the ones you chose for me. I felt bad about it and would wear them to make you happy. They were shoes for a woman who didn’t have my feet, or my style that wasn’t really a style. They were shoes for a woman who wasn’t me.

Before leaving the house you would kiss me on the fore-head, a sincere kiss, filled with tenderness. That’s how it always was. Always.

* * * * * *

28

3

A jar of mayonnaise. Two beers. A vegetable reduced to a wilted stump covered in velvety mould. Two yogurts a week past their use-by date. I grab one. An almost empty jar of bitter orange marmalade, and the electric hum of the refrigerator. That’s all. Welcome home.

The red light on the answering machine is blinking. Just one message. For a moment, my heart leaps, but no, it can’t be Pep. I don’t think I ever gave him my home number. I want to think that he staunchly follows my battle orders, and when someone tells you “Get away from me because we’ll hurt each other” there isn’t much room for confusion. I’ll confess that sometimes I invoke him. Some nights I call out to him silently and beg him to phone me, show some sign of life. A message, an image, any proof he’s out there would be fine. Some nights I fall asleep with my phone in my hand, after hours of weighing whether I should tell him things or not, whether it’s true that we would be so bad for each other. There are certain moments when I curse his resolve, and others when I can scarcely believe that, at forty-two years old, I’ve emerged from the ashes looking so childish, so hesitant, so unruly. It’s like stumbling around all day long, and often I think that Pep probably doesn’t even remember my name anymore. 29

So if there’s only one message, it’s definitely not from him. In fact, I can only imagine it’s from my father—he’s the sole reason I keep that dusty, anachronistic device in the house, sitting there impassive beside the television. My father not only leaves me voice messages; he even plays his piano compositions into it. I still have relics on there, several minutes long, and I could never bear to part with them in the technological shift. No matter what time I get home, it’s always blinking, letting me know there’s some music to listen to, or his voice curious to hear my take. It’s sometimes better to ring him back right away, otherwise he has a tendency to insist. There are some restless, insatiable personality types who should never be allowed to retire.

I press the button and, as expected, his voice fills the room. As I listen between spoonfuls of yogurt, I raise the blinds on the back balcony to let in the light and air the place out a little.

“You must have just arrived… I hope you didn’t hit a lot of traffic. I ran into Pepi and she says hi. She says if she’d known you were in town she would have loved to see you, give you a hug… Oh, Paula! You left that piece of cake that Maria brought you yesterday, here on the counter in the kitchen… I just wanted to wish you a good return to work. That’s all… And eat, you hear me? Love you.”

I stop with my mouth half open, immediately repulsed. I throw out the yogurt. The image of the cake in the tupperware from Maria at Can Rubiés makes me retch. I saw it in the kitchen this morning before I left my father’s house. 30I had it in my hands, in fact, but I put it down on the marble counter because the container had the same musty smell as Maria’s breath.

“We have to be strong, sweetie. You’re very young. You have to remake your life.”

She just blurted it out last Tuesday afternoon, when my father and I went to see her and she offered us some coffee. I know my father has good intentions, visiting neighbours when they’re sick or have lost a family member. I think it has to do with his obsession with wanting to feel that he belongs in that town where he’s been spending more and more time; I’ve never seen him do it in Barcelona, except with close friends or family members, and despite everything his city ways show through in the details: he writes down the visits in a calendar and he even gets dressed up for them. On Tuesday morning, while we were having breakfast in the courtyard, an alarm went off on his phone. He wiped his lips with a napkin and, still chewing, informed me:

“Maria, at noon. We have to hurry if we want to take a dip at Port de la Selva before we stop by to give her our condolences.”

I stared at him, sceptical, and said there was no way I was going with him to Maria’s house, that paying my condolences to people I don’t know wasn’t in my summer plans.

“But she knows you. If you come with me, I’ll make angler fish with clams tonight for dinner.”

—

31No one in that town knows that Mauro left me a few hours before he died. Not even my father, although he was aware we were going through a really rough patch. It was autumn, but we were still in short sleeves. Mauro and I had had a big argument; I’d bought plane tickets for the long weekend in November and the dates weren’t good for him because of some work conflict. I’d told him that he couldn’t complain I never surprised him, and that led to shouting and slammed doors. He told me to go screw myself and I snapped that, with him, that was probably my best option. Half an hour later I met my father to go with him to the dermatologist. They had to remove some moles from his back and, being a wimp, he’d asked me to go home with him after the procedure, which was a very simple one. While we waited for the nurse to call him in, even though I knew he wouldn’t help me because he’d never known how to, I got carried away in the weakness of the moment and I let him know that Mauro and I weren’t getting along well, without going into details. My voice trembled and then he said that bit about the bad season. That was what he called it. A bad season, Paula, you’ll see how things will be good again in the springtime. It happens to all couples. And with that facile view of time’s healing powers and two pats on the shoulder he considered the problem solved. Inside my head I laughed at my own naivety and told them both to take a long walk off a short pier. Problems removed as easily as moles. The springtime.

My father would have been terribly sorry to hear that we’d separated after all those years, so much so that I imagine he 32would’ve struggled to come up with an explanation to give his friends that would soften the blow of having an old maid for a daughter. He liked to say things like “My son-in-law is an editor” or “There’s an interview with my son-in-law in La Vanguardia today” or “My son-in-law got the Noisette rose bush on my eastern wall to flower”. They truly appreciated each other, and created their own communion around the legal family we never were, that I always stood in the way of. Calling him his “son-in-law” gave him slightly more possession. “Paula’s staying with me for a few days. My son-in-law had an accident. He’s dead.”

The fact that Mrs Maria knew who I was when I didn’t know her could only mean that my father hadn’t hesitated to introduce me in his circle as Paula, poor thing, who lost her spouse in an accident. In a way, it’s easier to explain your daughter’s change in relationship status when there’s a death involved, rather than opening the door to discussions about couples today, with so much freedom and so little energy for fixing things when they aren’t perfect. Death fixes the irreparable; it’s unalterable and distorts everything. It changed Mauro and placed him in the realm of the saints and the innocent. Death is like springtime.

My father and Maria spoke in phrases that trailed off, almost like something out of a phrasebook. There is a specific language for talking about the dead, an inventory of aphorisms using sounds that waver between respect and fear. I watched them from the doorway, avoiding a scent that floated in the 33air, a mix of bitter quince and freshly sliced, cured sausage, anxious for the coffee to be ready, hoping that the coffeepot would explode and we could run away and not have to sit down around that table covered in sticky oilcloth, where there must still have been prints from Mrs Maria’s dead husband’s plump fingers.

It was 26 August and she was wearing a long-sleeved black cardigan, a skirt to her ankles and some winter house slippers, with no back and a slight heel. I wore flat sandals made of two scant strips of leather, clearly marking our differences. We aren’t the same woman and as such we don’t share the same pain, despite which we’ve both been recruited by grief, like an infectious agent with the ability to reproduce and be transmitted irrespective of the wishes of those left behind. My pain is mine and I don’t want her coming anywhere near it.