The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda. Mercè Rodoreda
and waiters carrying trays of food. It was so crowded I couldn’t take a step. I pushed my way into the dining room where I discovered Roser seated at a table—she’s the friend I told you about who worked with me sometimes—and I asked her, ‘Have you seen my father?’ Just then my husband passed by, quick as lightning. ‘No, I haven’t seen him, he was tired, I don’t know where he’s gone.’ I heard a loud voice urgently calling out my father’s name, repeatedly, and suddenly saw a cripple—a stout man with a cardboard nose—tottering toward me. As he approached, I could see his tiny hands, like a child’s, all purple with little swollen fingers. I don’t know how, but as I gazed at the hands, I realized the cripple was my father. Somehow I managed to remove the cardboard nose. I held him against me, like a baby. He didn’t seem heavy at all as I carried him along the corridors of the hotel. Then I woke up. No one knew how to interpret the dream, but it troubled me terribly.
“The garden looked dreadful when we returned from our holiday. Roser had watered it occasionally, but the sun had scorched the more delicate plants that needed water every day. My husband and I set about redoing the garden, fixing it all up. We had them bring compost, planted dahlias—not the right time to do that, if you ask me—and a couple of weeks later it looked like a garden in some fine house. That year, the last, the dahlias bloomed so large that each flower looked like a child’s head. Lots of different colors. Blood red, yellow, white, also rose-colored, with a pink so delicate that each petal was like a silk ribbon. The day the first dahlia bloomed—the bud had been hard as a rock—I learned from the baker that the girl down the street was getting married. By chance I caught a glimpse of the wedding because I happened to be sweeping the sidewalk in front of the house. She was wearing a navy blue suit, white gloves and shoes, and carrying a bouquet of lilies tied with lots of ribbons that dangled down. Don’t laugh at me now, but I ran into the garden, singing, filled with joy, running my hand over each dahlia, caressing them like they were my children. I was happy all day, a happiness no words can describe. I couldn’t sew, just moved from room to room tidying up. I changed the sheets, put on the silk bedspread, fixed a late snack for when my husband got in, put the embroidered tablecloth on the little table near the window, made some pudding.
“When my husband came in, all the lights in the house were on and I was exhausted. As soon as I saw him, my heart sank. He entered and closed the door with such weariness that I thought he was ill. He headed straight to the bedroom; I followed him like a shadow without saying a word. He took off his jacket, laid it on the bed, walked over to the window, and stood there without moving, like he was made of wood. I didn’t dare speak. I picked up his jacket—I remember tiptoeing as if I’d entered a church when the Host of Our Lord was raised—and hung it on the clothes rack behind the door. My husband stood there without moving, facing the garden, his back to me. I went over to him, and before I had time to ask him what was the matter, he turned and hugged me, and you know what? He was weeping. Weeping uncontrollably, like I had during my saddest nights. He didn’t say a word, not one. I asked him why he was crying, but he didn’t want to tell me. He finally calmed down and said, ‘Let’s go to sleep.’ He was like a little boy, it made me so sad.
“The truth didn’t hit me for a long time. When I asked him why he cried that night, he would frown and turn angry. Every now and then during the following days and weeks, I couldn’t help but ask him why he cried. It was driving me crazy that he didn’t want to tell me. Then I started to want to weep. It was like the world had blackened. We hardly spoke to each other. It was all, ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ ‘No.’ Nothing else. I felt like I was drowning. But then I saw it clear as day: my husband had fallen in love with the girl and was sorry he married me. I was driven to distraction thinking that he started falling in love all that time when I was afraid he would fall in love. ‘Are you sad because now you have to come home alone?’ I couldn’t help but ask. ‘Do you want me to come and meet you at work?’ He looked like he’d been stung by a wasp. ‘All I need now is for you to make me look ridiculous.’ Then we started arguing; I told him there was nothing ridiculous about a woman meeting her husband after work, he said there was, I said there wasn’t. This went on till morning.
“We didn’t speak to each other for two weeks. When we finally did, things had gotten too far out of hand. I looked at my husband and saw him as he was. It made me want to laugh. He was missing three molars and could only chew on one side of his mouth; and when he chewed, he had one sunken cheek, one swollen, distorting his face in a comical way. He ate fast, like an animal, his elbows up in the air, and he walked with a stoop, as if he still had a towel over his arm like in the café. He had a red streak in his eye, and after so many years of being forced to smile at clients, his mouth twisted strangely when he smiled.
“That winter he got sick. Caught a really bad case of the flu that almost turned into pneumonia. That’s when he cuddled up to me, all frightened, like a child. Even then I felt a tenderness for him. But the real story began when he got well. He started humiliating me, I mean doing things to humiliate me. I can’t explain what kind of things; I’d never finish telling you. You know? Little things, all in bad faith. It was torture.
“The summer ended with a lot of rain. All the dahlias looked at the ground; I had to prop them up with sticks to keep them straight. Little by little, the autumn settled in, the days got shorter, the air cooler. I served my husband as he ate and amused myself by watching him eat with that fury of his. Sometimes I’d have to struggle to keep from laughing. He finally realized, and the following day he came home with a roll of electrical wire. I didn’t ask him what he planned to do. He spent the next Sunday installing a switch in the bedroom, ‘so I can turn on the light in the garden without having to walk all the way to the front door.’ When he finished, he said, ‘Try it out. You see? How’s that? So, if I’m ever late coming home and you think I’m coming back with some girl, you can turn the light on us, without bothering to go to the door. How’s that?’ ‘Great,’ I said.
“When the time came, I pulled up the dahlias, like I did every year, and stored the bulbs on a shelf in the junk room on the rooftop. On October 28—I remember like it was yesterday—he calmly got into bed, turned out the light, and went to sleep. Me too. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when I felt—here, in the middle of my chest—a terrible weight, like a real weight, a kind of oppression, and I started waking up, but it was like I was still asleep and was coming from far away. Then I clearly heard my husband’s voice, but as if approaching through the fog, ‘Get up, hurry, get up.’ I jumped out of bed, and my husband pushed me over to the window. ‘Don’t you see something?’ ‘No’ ‘Nothing at all?’ ‘Wait a moment.’ Then he switched on the light in the garden and I saw . . . first I saw a shadow leaning against the orange tree, and when my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw that it was a girl. ‘What is it?’ ‘A girl. Don’t you always think I’m running around with young women? Well, take a look, now I even have them in the garden.’ ‘It’s like a dream,’ I said. Then he rapped on the window, and the girl began to move slowly, as if she wasn’t of this world, moving toward the gate. If I hadn’t heard the sound of the hinges, I’d have thought the whole thing had been a hallucination. My husband held his belly and laughed, you can’t imagine how he laughed. The next day he asked me what had happened; I’d started crying out in my sleep that there was a girl in the garden. It made my head spin. “No, I didn’t dream it; you’d been planning this little joke for some time, ever since you installed that switch in the bedroom.’ When he left for work, I raced out to the garden to see if I could find anything by the orange tree, I don’t know what, anything that could be touched, like a feather that a bird had lost. I found nothing. No footprints—the ground was too hard. All day I stormed around like crazy, trying to decide if what I’d seen was real or a dream. The dream I described about my father was different; it was truly a dream, but what happened that night was a joke my husband played, wanting to muddle my brain. When it was dark, I locked the house, barred it, trembling all over with fright. I started rummaging through drawers to conquer my fear, not sure what I was looking for. When I found it, I knew what it was: my father’s picture. You see, I’m not one of those women who cover the walls with family photos. It was printed on heavy cardboard, discolored from age and humidity. I took it out of the drawer and knelt down, holding it with both hands like a relic. The lower part of his face was rubbed out, but his eyes were clear, so