FROM: SPANISH
Translated by : Frances Riddle
The autumn felt more like summer
than the summer had. I was wearing my blue silk dress, and I had the little
Pekinese they’d given me for my birthday when I arrived at my boyfriend’s house.
I remember that day clearly.
“Jealousy rules the world,” said
Mrs. Yapura, thinking I didn’t want to marry Romirio out of jealousy. “My son
sleeps only with the cat.”
I didn’t want to marry Romirio,
or hadn’t decided whether I wanted to marry him, for other reasons. Sometimes
the words people say are changed by the intonation of the voice with which they
say them. It seems like I’m getting off topic, but there’s an explanation. The
voice of Romirio, my boyfriend, was repulsive to me. Every word he uttered,
even if said with the utmost respect for me, although he hadn’t touched so much
as a toe of my foot, sounded obscene. I couldn’t love him. I felt bad about
this, not so much for him as for his mother, who was generous and kind. The only
negative trait she was known for was jealousy, but she was old now and had even
lost that. And should we believe the rumors? People said that she had got
married very young to a man who soon betrayed her with another woman. Once she
began to suspect, she spent a month without sleep trying to uncover the
adultery. When she did, it was like a knife wound to the heart. She didn’t say
anything, but that very night, as her husband slept beside her, she threw
herself at his throat and tried to strangle him. The mother of the victim came
to save him; if it hadn’t been for her he would have died.
My courtship with Romirio had
gone on too long. “What’s a voice,” I thought. “It’s not an insolent, groping
hand, it’s not a repulsive mouth trying to kiss me, it’s not that obscene and
protuberant sex I so fear, it’s nothing physical like buttocks or hot like a
belly.” Nevertheless, Romirio’s voice was much more disagreeable to me than any
of those things. How could I bear living alongside a man who broadcasted that
voice to whoever would listen? That visceral, lewd, scatological voice. But who
would dare say to their boyfriend, “Your voice displeases me, it repulses me,
it scandalizes me. It’s like the word lust in the catechism of my childhood”?
Our wedding was put off indefinitely
without any obvious reason.
Romirio visited me every afternoon.
Rarely did I go to his dark house, because his mother, who was sick, went to
bed early. But I very much liked their little garden, full of shadows, and
Lamberti, Romirio’s reddish-gray cat. There was not a more timid couple in the
neighborhood. We might have kissed at most once during the summer of that year.
Did we hold hands? Not a chance. Embrace? Slow dancing was out of fashion. This
unusual behavior sparked a suspicion that we’d never marry.
That day I took the Pekinese
they’d given me to Romirio’s house. Romirio picked him up to pet him. Poor
Romirio, he loved animals so much. We were sitting in the living-room as usual,
when Lamberti’s fur stood on end, and with a spitting sound he ran away
knocking over a flowerpot. Mrs. Yapura called me the next day crying. That
night, as always, Romirio had slept with Lamberti in his bed, but in the middle
of the night the cat went into a frenzy and clawed Romirio’s throat. The mother
went running in when she heard his screams. She managed to pull the cat from her
son’s throat and she strangled it with a belt. They say nothing is more
terrible than a frenzied cat. It isn’t hard to believe. I hate them. The
incident left Romirio without a voice, and the doctors that looked after him
said he wouldn’t ever recover it.
“You won’t marry Romirio,” his
mother said crying. “I had good reason for telling my son not to sleep with
that cat!”
“I will marry him,” I responded.
From that day forward I loved Romirio.