By ANTÒNIA VICENS
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN
Palma, 1978
One day he came, handed me a little box, and said look, look inside. Oh God, what a husband, I was afraid maybe he was losing it, another day it had been look, open this package, and there were more than half a dozen bras with ruffles. I opened the little box and was practically blinded by a stone brighter than the sun. No explanation, nothing, business is coming along, he said. And at night, here we go, trying for an heir, but that wasn’t coming along at all.
If I was in love with my husband, it isn’t something I would dare say too loud. When we were kids he was already after me, pulling on my braids, tripping me, laughing when I cried, but the one I was in love with, like all the other girls my age who were starting to feel the tickling of forbidden things, like all the other women, married or widowed, barren or mothers of many children, was the town vicar. A bit sickly, slight, almost transparent, he had us all under a spell. His gentle way of speaking, his graceful gestures, his dark, piercing gaze, so close to that soft smile, his lips like two slices of apple, pear, quince, any fleshy fruit… and better not to mention the ten fingers of his hands. The men knew, of course they knew, and the worst thing was that he also knew. No woman drew near him without stretching out her hands for him to kiss them, and we, still tender little buds, ran over to rub our noses in his hands, and our cheeks, and then he would give us a blessing. The boys, jealous, and a little shy, would say sure, I’m not as attractive as the vicar, and the husbands, pissed off, shit, I’m not as polite as the vicar. In the end, more or less everyone dined out on the vicar. Even my mother would say what a blossom of a man the vicar is, and my father, an anticlerical Republican from way back, would come back with a ton of unrelenting shits and fucks. You should all burn in hell.
Another day my husband came and stretched out both hands with his fists closed, guess, come on, which hand do you want. A little hesitant, a little scared, I said this one, pointing to the right, and he burst out laughing and opened the left, a set of keys clinking before my eyes, a new house in the city, in a fine neighborhood, as it happened, on a fourth floor overlooking the bay. At first I got lost, with all the intersecting hallways separating bedrooms and little rooms, everything decorated in the latest style. And a maid who served me lunch at the table, turned down the bed, cleaned the house, what can I say, I had the whole day to do nothing, get lost in thought, now look out one window, now another, and at night here he was wanting to make a baby, an heir, because he said it must be very gratifying for a man to come home and find his wife and children waiting for him. Truth be told, I was hoping for a child too, but what was eating away at me was not knowing where that pit of money came from, and he said well, don’t bother about that, it’s all legal, housing developments, hotels, tourists. Occasionally it would be I can’t come home tonight, I won’t be home for lunch, and I wandered up and down the hallways, bedecked in outlandish, expensive clothes meant for lounging at home, and even at home they looked ridiculous, but this is what he wanted, for me to look gorgeous for him if he found a minute to come home.
I soon tired of this looking gorgeous for him, and dissatisfaction began to spread through my body like a kind of hemorrhage, leaving me listless, pale. Some friends he had introduced me to, satisfied wives and grateful daughters of friends of his in the business, suggested I see a psychologist, since, besides giving you pills that turn your sorrows into joys, it had cachet, it made you look rich, but I decided to go back to wearing my old clothes and to thinking about the vicar, and wondering if he still went around stilling ladies’ hearts and making bodies like mine go faint, in the absence of a sensitive, reliable husband….
As I said, I was fed up with him, and I also made fun of him. At first he would go you aren’t adapting, you’re used to working and the good life is too much for you, you need a child, two, three, four, or five children, a house full of children, and, colder than a block of ice, I would think, go on, fool, you’re the thing that’s too much for me, you and your pompous, inflated pronouncements full of shit. And while he applied body and soul to making a baby, I would fantasize about how one of his numerous secretaries would call me: Mrs. …? Is this you? I have been told to inform you that your husband has had a heart attack, he’s all yellow and quite dead.
I bundled up the fancy clothes and gave them to Rosario, señora, what an honor, she said in her Andalusian accent, and more than once my husband, on one of his hurried visits, either to change his clothes or to look for the pills for stress he had forgotten to take with him, gave Rosario a kiss, and apologized, I made a mistake, it’s your fault for making her wear your clothes. And I would shrug, and he would practically kneel before me, he didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand my indifference, you could see he still hoped to have a son, an heir, because what am I working for, if not?
And I knew very well what he was working for, for whatever whim blew out of his ass, as I was on the verge of telling him a thousand times, I swear it on my health. For a whole string of debauched partners and employees, retired military men, cross-eyed civil guards, he worked for the rancid ass of them all, a bunch of cranks who would just as soon hire the most expensive floozies of the city as cry before the portrait of General Franco, because now, without the general, they were nobodies, and goodies that used to be only for them now trickled down to the people, and when it came to voting, they said no, they had all the freedom they wanted, and my husband, madder than I’ve ever seen him, saying I will go from town to town, from district to district, present a million fake names, what is going on, people just like to complain, everyone’s out for themselves….
In some moment of euphoria, I told him just like this that things would not end well, that a business born of a lucky moment couldn’t last a lifetime, that it would be like a sand castle, and a bad gust of wind would bring it all down, but he didn’t so much as listen, he paced up and down in his shiny silk dressing gown, Rosario running behind him with the ashtray, impressed by my husband’s long, wide stride, poor thing, always sighing, ay, señora, I’m just dazzled by shiny things.
One day, tired of doing nothing, my fantasies exhausted, remembering the vicar no longer made my heart beat, unable to come up with a single type of man who might come to save my femininity, I said to Rosario, lie down on the sofa, or look out the windows, enjoy the delights of the bay views, war vessels and merchant vessels, motorboats and fishing boats, the sea all blue and the sky all green, see how the clouds thin out and melt, turning into snowflakes, see how the wind buffets the atmosphere, leaving it bruised, how the mountains tremble, how the cars on the highway are getting flats, four accidents in five days, ten deaths in a week, watch closely, Rosario, leave no page of the newspaper unread, sports and politics and culture to understand the ways of men, and I’ll make lunch, Rosario, and wash the dishes, and do the housekeeping. And Rosario said, what an honor, señora.
More than a few times I confronted my husband, I wanted a divorce, or a separation, or whatever, far from you I’ll be a different woman, healthy, happy, but he, if he was in a good mood, he would laugh till his sides shook, my little lady is so funny, and if he was angry, he wouldn’t listen, he would empty the bottle of Chivas Regal and quickly down a kilo of green almonds, almost without chewing. If I sat down next to him, trying to clarify the situation a bit, his face would go red and puff up so much that I would feel uncomfortable and go up to the roof terrace and leave him to do as he pleased with Rosario, since the only thing that gave him pleasure was sexual release, and for quite some time now I had decided that that was not for me by any means, and he would say why are you rejecting me?
I sensed that the business wasn’t going as well as before, when, in moments of depression, instead of hitting the Scotch whiskey, he would soak up national brands that he wouldn’t even have sniffed before. He also stayed home more, wanting to tell me something. Despite it all, he never managed to say anything, but I understood, of course I understood, as much as I hated him. One Sunday afternoon, as he leaned over the railing on the roof terrace, moving his fingers, moving his hands, moving his whole body, as if his bones were decomposing, it wasn’t hard at all, no, and it wasn’t even much of a physical effort. I couldn’t quite get what he shouted as he fell, the lights had just gone on in the bay, the setting sun had left a sort of ditch just above the horizon, the moon was like a gob of spit, and Rosario was saying señora, what a terrible tragedy.
Antònia Vicens’s first novel, 39º in the Shade, won the Sant Jordi Award and introduced themes of mass tourism, identity loss, womanhood, and solitude. Since then, she has published numerous collections of short stories and novels, among them Kilometers of Tulle for a Small Corpse, which won the Llorenç Villalonga Prize. In 2022, she won the 54th Prize of Honor of the Catalan Letters.
Mary Ann Newman is the executive director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the US and co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee. She translates from Catalan and Spanish and has published works by Quim Monzó, Josep Carner, and Josep Maria de Sagarra. She was awarded the 2017 North American Catalan Society Award for her translation of de Sagarra’s novel Private Life.
