By IMMA MONSÓ
Translated by MARLENA GITTLEMAN
Lisa
Morning after morning, Lisa would wake up with an easily achievable aspiration: to eat breakfast while contemplating the house at the bottom of the valley, which stood in the distance amidst the fog. When the fog started to fade, she could make out frost-covered shingles and smoke rising from the chimney. She could glimpse the narrow ribbon of water that divided the field behind the house, until it disappeared into the darkness of the impenetrable forest. And she could, above all, train her gaze on a hypnotizing point: the only lit window, the window of an attic room, a room Lisa guessed was a study. Very infrequently—because she preferred a wide and mysterious view—she would pick up the binoculars, and she could make out the shape of a woman whose face never came into view. It was someone seated far away with her back toward the window, which she never approached; someone leaning forward slightly, who moved her arm as if writing without a desk. For this reason, and because the window would be lit starting at around seven o’clock in the morning, Lisa had deduced that it was a woman who wrote in her study, a deduction that Lisa, for as long as she lived, never succeeded in confirming. When all was said and done, the house was too far away for her to be able to assess the details. Too far—and yet the right distance—away.
When it snowed, the sight became a vision, unreal in its magnificence, like those fictional landscapes accompanying Christmas tidings. If the sky was gray, the intense yellow of the little lit square stood out against the whiteness that thickened over everything. On clear spring nights, the tiled roof and the fields glimmered under a magical brightness. It was even better if there was no moon: the squared dot stood out so intensely that Lisa could spend hours watching it. Then, it felt like she could hear the crickets, or the ribbon of water that splashed as it descended. But in reality, she could only ever hear the elevator of her apartment block going up and down at all hours of the day and night, the engines of the cars driving on the highway that ran beneath the building, and the screams of children playing on the patio between apartment blocks.
The morning and evening sight from her dining room in apartment block F, which was set at the top of a hill in the sinister industrial city of Nagí, fed in Lisa an obsessive, persistent image: sliding down the grass and rolling like an avalanche until coming to a stop, forever, at the little house at the bottom of the valley, a place where the city’s name no longer applied. That’s how industrial cities are: they seem like cities, but then, before you know it, you’re suddenly in the middle of the forest. But Lisa never achieved her dream. In part out of fear of learning more about the house, in part because she didn’t have a car and would have had to walk for hours through the brush to get to the bottom of the valley—and in part because she didn’t want to lose that perspective, distant and plummeting.
Adrissa
Morning after morning, Adrissa knew that through the window of her study, a visual horror, tinged smoky ochre, would muddle the horizon and threaten her delicate state. The study was sunny, certainly—that’s why they’d put it there instead of in one of the other rooms, which were all damp, dark, and uninhabitable. But the study did have a serious problem: a view so awful that only a blind optimist could avoid the most horrifying depression when contemplating the horizon plagued by those artificial protuberances in the shape of apartment blocks, all painted a grim, crusty ochre. Years before, there had been a strawberry field at the horizon line. Now, though, there were three ill-fitting apartment blocks. It’s hard to say exactly why those blocks brought on suicidal tendencies. Adrissa couldn’t stop thinking about suicide, not her own, but of the people who lived in those horrible apartment blocks. She would see all those little squares crammed together, the ochre of the façade and the clothes drying in the sun, and that swarm of potential suicides encapsulated in those depressing, ancient rooms. She would see and feel the dense sadness of the huge beehive’s inhabitants; she knew it was stupid, but without fail, as soon as she saw the crusty ochre, she half-expected to witness some desperate, disgusted person throw themself to the void from any one of those filthy windows.
But if the problem Adrissa assumed those trapped strangers were experiencing was serious, her problem was serious, too; and what’s more, it was hers. Only someone who was as insensitive as a sweet potato could avoid the unsettling feeling of witnessing that inhumane horror and the overwhelming thought of those potential suicides. In order to avoid it, Adrissa, condemned to the view from her study, had taken up the habit of ignoring the window. She dedicated herself to an activity she could do with her eyes closed. In this way, the study window led to her passion for the cello. Leaning toward the instrument, she would imagine herself at the bottom of a huge hollow, the vast fields that led slowly down to her house, and above, a field of strawberries like there had been before, like there was now behind the creek. Even if she were to open her eyes, Adrissa wouldn’t be forced to contemplate the horror, because she always played—as we’ve already mentioned—with her back to the damn window, facing the door to the room.
Lisa and Adrissa
There were three generations of Lisas and Adrissas, all genetically pessimists, sensitive to architectural horrors, and allergic to the presence of concrete on sunny Sunday afternoons.
One day, Lisa III was displaced by a steel company that had bought apartment block F in order to convert it into a modern office block. They gave residents the choice between moving out with a small compensation or moving into—renting, as before—the identical apartment block right next to it, where there were a few open units. Lisa III, a lover of tradition, opted to move into apartment block G and maintain the same view her ancestors had enjoyed.
Since apartment block F was to become an office block, they had to make it very cubic and geometric and shiny; offices are usually geometric, to give off a sense of a business’s sterility and integrity. So they added a lot of glass and metal—a lot of glass and metal. All sides of the building were covered in stainless steel and mirrored glass, including the side of the building that faced the valley.
Adrissa III noticed the shift. “Just what we needed. Construction,” she thought. As if the visual contamination weren’t enough, now she’d have to put up with the distant sounds of jackhammers and cement mixers and clanging shovels, which echoed at the bottom of the valley. For some time, the ochre buildings, already horrible and browning, were covered in scaffolding, pulleys, and safety netting. They became even uglier and more horrifying, but at least they didn’t house potential suicides, even if the apartment blocks next to them did. Now there weren’t just three, as in her grandmother’s time, but five. Plus, they were building another one, so there was absolutely no trace of the old horizon. Finally, they took away the formwork and the rags, and apartment block F’s new look came into view: they’d covered it in slightly concave mirrors that reflected the sunlight. Adrissa found this to be even more horrible—it should be noted that she was very delicate—but, all things considered, she was really only asking for things that had been normal during the Stone Age, like an unobstructed view of the horizon and not being artificially blinded by an immense, absurd mirror. Now, the contrast between the urban, geometric shine of what used to be apartment block F and the browning, decadent ochre of the apartment blocks next to it made things even worse.
One day, she felt curious to check out the nearby area. She went to the city and made her way toward the neighborhood in question. It was much worse than what she’d imagined. On one side, the familiar buildings; in front of them, the squat highway and some rusted, dilapidated fencing, behind which was dirty pavement filled with trash, behind which, but much farther down, the slope of her family’s plot began until it became a field and led, even farther down, to her house. She looked up at the side of the building covered in mirrors, and she could see the whole valley and her house, small and far away, reflected in the concave surface that served as a wide-angle lens. Behold the view from the upper floors of the building: her dream house at the bottom of the valley! She felt cheated: the view that she and her house provided belonged to them. She and her dark, sunken house existed to make their lives happier, while she got screwed at the bottom of the valley. Adrissa III knew just what to do: she would go live in one of those offices and give up her house. It didn’t take her long to realize that if the offices weren’t habitable, she could get one of the units in the adjoining apartment block with the view she desired. There were open units there. She rented one and put her house up for sale.
Lisa III had the habit of doing something that the preceding generations had never done: going down to walk in the valley forest—now it was easier to get there than before—and contemplating, up close, the magnificent landscape that she could see from her hovel. She would go with her seven-year-old daughter, who didn’t share her predecessors’ passion for the country. “Isn’t it lovely?” her mother would ask her thousands of times during their walks through the valley. But Mini Lisa was that typical kid who was bored by the country. “I don’t like coming here. It’s boring.” Lisa III would get impatient: “Start collecting something. Leaves, rocks, butterflies—anything.” But Mini Lisa wasn’t interested in collecting anything that came from that hostile environment known as the country. “I like going to Dad’s place better and staying home. Can we go now?” On one of those days, Lisa III saw a sign announcing that the house was for sale and got closer to note down the real estate agency. “I think we’ll be coming here more often from now on,” the mother announced, dreamy. “Can we go now?” the daughter repeated, tugging at her arm. “Wait a minute, wait,” said the mother, seemingly inspired. “This whole green expanse, its scent… living here, what a joy! Look at all of this shiny, dewy green.” “Grass,” said the girl. “Yes, grass! Grass!” repeated the mother, ecstatic. “Not a speck of concrete, not a centimeter of asphalt, not a paving stone, not an artificially lit streetlamp in sight!” Mini Lisa looked critically at the grassy surface, skeptical about the unlikely possibility of skating on that irregular pavement.
The next day, Lisa III went to the real estate agency from the sign to find out the price. She learned that she hadn’t been even remotely able to imagine the amount they were asking for. It wasn’t so out of hand, but Lisa had a good deal on a rental contract that was transferable from parents to children, so she’d never had to worry too much about the cost of living. Impossible. Once again condemned to dream, she went back to her ancient block F room. Condemned—she’d say—to dream.
It had been four months since Adrissa III had moved onto the same floor. Ecstatic, she told everyone that she’d finally found what she’d been looking for. She called her husband, from whom she’d just separated and who always accused her of not caring about things the minute she’d gotten them. She wanted to tell him that his accusations had been wrong, even though she herself had come to believe them. “I’m no longer eternally unsatisfied,” she said proudly. “Finally, I’m satisfied, and you wouldn’t believe how. And I think it’s permanent.” Indeed, her satisfaction didn’t lessen as the months passed. Nor did the frequency with which she looked out the window, the source of an optimism she’d never experienced before.
In contrast, ever since Lisa III had found out that the price of her dream was unattainable, she hadn’t wanted to go back down to the valley again, or even open the dining room curtain that faced it. She spent her days in bed, sleeping in the room that faced the shaft.
Lisa and Adrissa could have met, because their units shared a landing. If they had, Lisa would have known that, from the second floor of the house in the valley, the only habitable one, you could only see the horrifying landscape made up by apartment blocks C, D, F, G, and H. But Lisa and Adrissa never met. They would only have crossed paths waiting for the elevator or at tenant meetings. But Lisa was too depressed to take the elevator, and she felt too down to see anyone at all, let alone the neighbors. Buying the house in the valley had been a dream neatly relegated to the intimate diaries of three generations of Lisas. When the opportunity had presented itself—and it surely wouldn’t present itself again for many generations—she, a poor, miserable wage earner, hadn’t been able to buy the house, because she’d never had a cent to her name. She regretted not having taken the moving compensation when she hadn’t known she’d need it; she regretted having spent her life looking out the window instead of, for example, knitting sweaters and saving up for the opportunity that she now couldn’t make hers—she regretted everything. As such, she spent her life in the room, a place where you could only see the gray interior patio.
Sometimes the girls from the fourth generation, Adrissa, who was around five, and Lisa, who was seven, would meet on the playground—that is, the interior patio between the buildings, a mass of concrete dotted with different-colored swings. Lisa III never went down with her daughter, because she was perpetually miserable, and she often just wanted to lie down and watch the grayish light that came through the translucent window facing the shaft.
That’s why the two girls usually played with Adrissa’s mom. Yet even she wouldn’t come down often, because she needed to contemplate the magnificent view from the apartment as if it were an addiction. Every few minutes, she would leave them, saying, “Be right back—I’m going up to look.”
One day when she said this, Mini Lisa asked, “What’s your mom doing?”
“She’s going up to look,” said Adrissa IV. “She needs to look a lot—always, actually.”
“And she can’t look from here?”
“She needs a window. She likes to look out the window—that’s why she goes upstairs.”
“Oh,” said Mini Lisa, remembering. “My mom also looks. She looks at the shaft window a lot, but she never opens it.”
“No, dummy, my mom looks at the view from the front room.”
“Over there, where you can see the house in the middle of the field?” asked Mini Lisa, excited. “My mom wanted to go live there! She wanted to buy it.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“I don’t know. She’s poor.” Mini Lisa stopped swinging and wiped the booger hanging from her nose. “Is your dad rich?”
“I don’t know. He left a long time ago, when we still lived in the other house. We lived in a different house. My dad didn’t want to sell it, so they fought. My mom said: The house has been mine for generations, and if I want to sell it, I’ll sell it.”
“Which house?”
“The house we lived in. I don’t remember it. I don’t know where it was, and she doesn’t want to take me there. She says it was a shitty house. She likes it here. She’s crazy about the view here—she looks out the window all day.”
“My mom looks at the shaft window. But she doesn’t open it.”
“Why?”
“Who knows…” Lisa reflected, and after a few seconds she said, “She’s sad because she’s poor and she couldn’t buy the house, but when I grow up, I’ll buy it for her.”
“You’re stupid,” Adrissa responded. “If your mom is poor, you’ll be poor too.”
Mini Lisa started to cry.
“What’s going on with her?” said Adrissa’s mom, who had just come back down.
“She’s stupid and she’s sad,” said Adrissa IV.
“I’ll make you both a snack, and we’ll look out the window.” Adrissa III thought that would fix everything.
“I don’t wanna look out the window,” said Mini Lisa, angry all of a sudden. “I can’t stand windows, especially if they’re for looking,” she added, irritated. And she left with her pointed nose turned up toward the sky, very dignified, and she went over to the blue seesaw in the middle of the concrete patio. But since there was no one to sit on the other side and balance her weight, she changed her mind and went upstairs to get her skates.
Imma Monsó is the author of nine novels and three collections of stories. In 2013, she won the National Prize for Culture, awarded by the Government of Catalonia. Her works have been published in Spanish, French, English, and Italian, among other languages.
Marlena Gittleman (she/they) recently completed a PhD in comparative literature with a designated emphasis in women, gender, and sexuality at the University of California, Berkeley. Marlena is a translator from Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese whose translations have appeared in Critical Times, Anomaly, and Asymptote.
Translation of “La finestra” from MARXEM, PAPA, AQUÍ NO ENS VOLEN. © Imma Monsó, 2004.
