could tell, the only person who wasn’t concerned about my relationship with the Catalan salesman was him, Sabas, who kept coming to Berango every Sunday (although, now, he had to wait for us to walk down the road, when that man and I used to walk the same route all the couples in town did, all the same places: the church portico, the rudimentary sidewalks, and down the road a kilometer outside of town; when he saw us he’d stand there staring at us, staring at me, rather, since there was no indication he even saw the salesman, and he even waved at me slightly, serious, inscrutable, infuriatingly tenacious, until we walked away, and I wouldn’t see him again until the following Sunday). I was counting on another source of strength, the certainty that a girl’s first kiss sealed something eternal, or at least lasting until it became apparent that the man would refuse marriage or that he was already married; and that, in any case, I could count on a period of precious time, a pause, in which I could find whatever there was to find, that I would make the most of it somehow, that at least Sabas couldn’t enjoy it, and it would be time that would go by uselessly, that would escape his immovable plan of waiting, in which time was fundamental.
Then came July, and on the night of the 30th, when I was on my way home with the donkey carrying grass for the only cow we had, I saw him on the road, waiting for me. He moved only when I reached him, after the donkey had passed him.
“Wait,” he said, pulling a piece of straw from some brambles and starting to crush it with his fingers. He’d positioned himself in the middle of the road, so I was forced to stop. “I’m not upset. Listen. I need to talk to you. Everything is already decided and we haven’t even talked. I’ll come get you tomorrow and we’ll go to the San Ignacio festival together.”
When he finished speaking, he stuck the broken piece of straw in his mouth and turned around, walking away silently in the dark.
I had made up my mind and I felt strong for the first time, bolstered by a single, unpleasant kiss from the Catalan salesman. But when I saw Sabas the next morning, coming down the road from Benito’s farm, with the cow on a leash following behind him, walking slowly, without any hint of triumph on his face, stiff and serious, I understood that everything had been useless; all there was left to do was look at the sky where it touched the sea to know whether I should take an umbrella to the festival that afternoon.
I wanted to see the salesman and I went looking for him, but they told me he wouldn’t be back until evening. Therefore, I couldn’t tell him I was breaking up with him. And I waited for Sabas and he took me to Algorta, to the San Ignacio festival. I didn’t know what was happening to me; I couldn’t think, as if he’d already taken possession of me, even my inner self.
There he had me, not listening to him but just hearing him, forced to do so because I had two healthy ears and I was next to him (I still couldn’t believe it), and not even the bedlam of the carousel, the stands selling churros, French fries, beer, and soda, the municipal band in their blue uniforms or, on their breaks, the shrill loudspeakers, managed to get between us, to interrupt his clipped sentences, through which I found out that the bed and the oak wardrobe were finished (he even described the carved decorations they had), and that the wedding date had been set—August 31st—so I wouldn’t even get to have the engagement that every woman dreams of, with enough time and all the necessary formalities. He would yank me out of single life and, with no transition, I would be sharing a bed with him, captured, kidnapped, and, in a way, enslaved, since he also said it was a good date because then we could harvest the corn together in September. He would also be denying me a honeymoon, transplanting me in a single day from a single woman’s house to a married woman’s house, from the convent to the brothel, without the purification that the honeymoon trip means to every woman (the first night and the following nights, up to seven or fifteen—or even just the first—under a different sky, in a new room in a new city, far from our hometowns, with our nice new white clothing debuting that first night, so that we can more easily believe that we’ve entered a fantasy world, where not only everything is possible, but even logical and forgivable, including the obsession that has dominated us since we were thirteen or fifteen—sex); wanting to purify what needs purifying, since we were born pure in the moment the man and the woman, upon admiring one another, admired their unborn children, and the rest is superfluous. I wouldn’t even get that.
We were sitting in the field near the fair, and it was getting dark. I stood up and said: “He hugged me and he kissed me. Are you upset?”
“It’s alright,” he said. “I was counting on that. But no more than that.”
He was so confident about what he said, so sure of himself, foreseeing everything, domineering, with nearly enough power to pull the strings of everyone else’s lives.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
But I was already running away from him, desperate, elbowing my way through the crowds, and probably sobbing. The whole way back to Berango, to the house where the Catalan salesman was staying—nearly an hour—I didn’t once look behind me to see if he was following me. I climbed the stairs and knocked softly on his door (he lived in the loft, alone) and he opened the door and looked at me strangely, but then he smiled and his face suddenly turned repugnant. He moved to one side, inviting me to come in. But I didn’t move. And then I looked behind me, though that wasn’t exactly it: I looked at the stairs, then down, trying, at the same time, to hear something. He looked at me, looked at the stairs, looked at me again, and smiled, moving back to the center of the doorway.
“It’s a shame he didn’t follow you,” he said, his little eyes smiling. “At the very least, you would have stepped inside the door and I would have closed it behind you. Even though that wouldn’t change anything, since whatever you told him afterward couldn’t be taken into consideration; he simply wouldn’t have believed you; and whatever I told him—if you chose this approach—wouldn’t matter either, because whatever a man says about such things, and certainly if he’s a tramp, is just taken as bragging. He would have had to see it and then be sure he hadn’t dreamed it. He needed to have followed you and seen it with his own eyes. Because a man who was capable of getting that cow from Benito, even if it cost all that money, is capable of disbelieving any sort of logic pertaining to men . . .”
So that was it. The cow. The reason I couldn’t plan a honeymoon, not even a brief stay in San Sebastián. He had spent all his savings, figuring that in order to have a wife he could cut out a lot of things, including money, but if he wanted a cow, especially if it was like that cow, he had to pay for it.
And I stood there, in front of the open door, rigid, bewildered, once I’d understood that even if I took one step across that threshold and gained a power much stronger than a simple kiss to be able to resist him and—I imagined—defeat him, I wouldn’t accomplish anything, since he was invincible. Not even by resorting to all that a woman is capable of giving up in order to get something, would I liberate myself from his stubbornness.
The traveler was still looking at me, and I lifted my head and, no longer using a casual tone with him, asked, “Do you happen to have a pattern for embroidering sheets with an interlocking J and S?”
Translated by Emily Davis
WORK
1944, El misterio de la pensión Florrie, Moderna (published under the pseudonym Romo P. Girca) (novel).
1957, El ídolo, El Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús (novel).
1961, Las ciegas hormigas, Destino (novel, new edition published by Tusquets, 2010).
1961, El héroe del Tonkin, Comisión Ejecutiva Proceso Canonización Beato Valentín de Berrio Ochoa (biography).
1969, En el tiempo de los tallos
