1
I’ve always envied the ease with which some people are able to forget – people for whom the past is only a set of last season’s clothes or a pair of old shoes that can simply be condemned to the back of a cupboard to ensure they’re unable to retrace lost footsteps. I had the misfortune of remembering everything, and that everything in turn, remembered me. I recall my early childhood days of cold and loneliness, of dead moments spent gazing at greyness; and the dark mirror that haunted my father’s eyes. Yet I can barely bring back the memory of a single friend. I can conjure up the faces of children in the Ribera neighbourhood with whom I sometimes played or quarrelled in the street, but none I would wish to rescue from that land of indifference. None except Blanca’s.
Blanca was about two years older than me. I met her one day in April outside my front door. She was walking hand in hand with a maid who had come to collect some books from a small antiquarian bookshop, opposite the building site for the concert hall. By a quirk of fate the bookshop didn’t open until twelve o’clock that day and the maid had arrived at eleven thirty, leaving a half-hour gap during which, unbeknown to me, my fate was about to be sealed. Had it been up to me, I would never have dared exchange a single word with her. Her clothes, her smell and her elegant bearing spoke of a wealthy girl cosseted by silks and velvet; she clearly didn’t belong to my world, and even less did I belong to hers. We were separated by only a few metres of street and miles of invisible laws. I merely gazed at her, the way one admires objects that have been consigned to a glass cabinet or to the display window of one of those shops that may look open, but you know you’ll never enter. I’ve often thought that, were it not for my father’s firm strictures regarding my personal cleanliness, Blanca would never have noticed me. My father was of the opinion that he’d seen enough filth during the war to fill nine lives and although we were as poor as church mice, he had taught me, from a very early age, to become used to the freezing water that ran – when it felt like it – from the tap above the sink, and to those soap bars that smelled of bleach and scraped everything off you, even your regrets. That is how, when I’d just turned eight, yours truly, David Martín, a clean nonentity and a future candidate for third-rate author, managed to gather enough composure not to look away when that well-to-do doll set her eyes on me and smiled timidly. My father had always told me that in life one should pay people back in kind. He was referring to slaps in the face and other such offences, but I decided to follow his teachings and return that smile – and while I was at it, throw in a small nod. She was the one who walked over, slowly and, looking me up and down, held out her hand, a gesture nobody had ever made to me, and said:
‘My name is Blanca.’
Blanca held out her hand the way young ladies do in drawing-room comedy, palm down and with the detachment of a Parisian damsel. I didn’t realise that what was expected of me was to lean forward and brush her hand with my lips, and after a while Blanca removed her hand and raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m David.’
‘Are you always so bad-mannered?’
I was working on a rhetorical way out that would compensate for my uncouth plebeian background, rescuing my image with a display of ingenuity and wit, when the maid walked over, a look of alarm on her face, and stared at me the way one stares at a rabid dog let loose on the street. She was a young, severe-looking woman with deep, dark eyes that held no sympathy for me. Grabbing Blanca by the arm, she pulled her out of reach.
‘Who are you speaking to, Miss Blanca? You know your father doesn’t like you to talk to strangers.’
‘He’s not a stranger, Antonia. This is my friend David. My father knows him.’
I froze while the maid studied me out of the corner of her eye.
‘David what?’
‘David Martín, madam. At your service.’
‘Nobody is at Antonia’s service, David. She’s the one who serves us. Isn’t that right, Antonia?’
It was just an instant, an expression nobody would have noticed but me – for I was watching her closely. Antonia darted a brief, dark glance at Blanca, a look that was poisoned with hatred and turned my blood to ice, before she concealed it with a smile of resignation and a shake of the head, playing down the matter.
‘Kids,’ she muttered under her breath as she turned to walk back to the bookshop, which was now opening its doors.
Blanca then made as if to sit down on the front doorstep. Even a yokel like me knew that the dress she wore could not come into contact with the base materials covered in soot with which my home was built. I took off my patched-up jacket and spread it over the step like a doormat. Blanca sat on my best garment, gazing at the street and the people walking by. From the bookshop door, Antonia didn’t take her eyes off us, and I pretended not to notice.
‘Do you live here?’ Blanca asked.
I nodded, pointing at the adjacent building.
‘Do you?’
Blanca looked at me as if that were the stupidest question she’d heard in her short life.
‘Of course not.’
‘Don’t you like the neighbourhood?’
‘It smells bad, it’s dark and cold and the people are ugly and noisy.’
It had never occurred to me to size up the world I knew in such a way, but I found no solid arguments with which to contradict her.
‘So why do you come here?’
‘My father has a house near the Born Market. Antonia brings me here to visit him almost every day.’
‘And where do you live?’
‘In Sarriá, with my mother.’
Even a poor wretch like me had heard of Sarriá, but I’d never actually been there. I imagined it as a sort of citadel made up of large mansions and lime-tree avenues, luxurious carriages and leafy gardens, a world inhabited by people like that girl, only taller. Hers was a perfumed, luminous world, no doubt, a world of fresh breezes and good-looking, quiet citizens.
‘So how come your father lives here and not with you and your mother?’
Blanca shrugged and looked away. The subject seemed to make her uncomfortable so I decided not to insist.
‘It’s just for a while,’ she added. ‘He’ll come back home soon.’
‘Of course,’ I said, without quite knowing what we were talking about, but adopting that commiserating tone of those already born defeated, experts at recommending resignation.
‘The Ribera isn’t that bad, you’ll see. You’ll get used to it.’
‘I don’t want to get used to it. I don’t like this neighbourhood, nor the house my father has bought. I don’t have any friends here.’
I gulped.
‘I can be your friend, if you like.’
‘And who are you?’
‘David Martín.’
‘You’ve already said that.’
‘I suppose I’m also someone who doesn’t have any friends.’
Blanca turned her head to look at me with a mixture of curiosity and hesitation.
‘I don’t like playing hide-and-seek, or ball games,’ she warned me.
‘Neither do I.’
Blanca smiled and held out her hand again. This time I did my utmost to brush it with my lips.
‘Do you like stories?’ she asked.
‘That’s what I like best in the whole world.’
‘I know a few stories that very few people have heard,’ she said. ‘My father writes them for me.’
‘I also write stories. Well, I invent them and learn them by heart.’
Blanca frowned.
‘Let’s see. Tell me one.’
‘Now?’
She nodded, defiantly.
‘I hope it’s not about little princesses,’ she threatened. ‘I hate little princesses.’
‘Well, it does have one princess . . . but she’s a very bad one.’
Blanca’s face lit up.
‘How bad?
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