4 A Third-Floor Apartment Without an Elevator
A Third-Floor Apartment Without an Elevator
Two hard-case suitcases. A Samsonite with small wheels, for a weekend trip.
Three duffel bags stuffed with shoes. And a cardboard box with kitchen utensils and some olive oil and vinegar cruets, some oven mitts, and various odds and ends Isabel had prepared so that she wouldn’t lack anything in her escape to the student apartment.
When you’re eighteen years old, the inventory of your life is still portable.
No doubt, she was leaving behind a ton of things at her dad’s house, Gina thought.
If she needed them, she’d come back for them.
Nothing was stopping her. Even in the most contentious moment, her father had never told her not to step foot in that house.
In fact, his last words before that curt and sluggish goodbye were to tell her that she could come over whenever she wanted to.
On one condition: that she was in a good mood.
He didn’t want any bad attitudes in his house.
As soon as Gina had all her belongings on the street, she noticed a confused-looking man approaching her slowly on the sidewalk.
He walked with the gait of someone who was uncertain.
He seemed to be carried by the wind. He was looking up as if he were searching for something hidden among the buildings at half mast, and was about to crash into the black suitcase with little wheels.
“Oh, sorry—”
The man, with a head of black hair that seemed to fall with its own weight, moved his hands like he wanted to say something but couldn’t quite grasp the words.
And he seemed frustrated, not knowing how to express himself in the language of the country.
At first glance, Gina found him attractive.
He looked rough around the edges, with sharp cheekbones, and a small round nose that didn’t quite suit him.
By the redness in his cheeks, she immediately guessed where he was from.
She had seen many younger versions of him in pubs in Kent County.
The man struggled to say something but couldn’t find the words.
No matter how hard he tried, it was useless.
Finally, just as he was about to babble like an idiot, the British man with green eyes and an intriguing air asked the girl with boxes for forgiveness with his look.
“Do you speak English?”
“More or less?”
“I’m looking for . . .” He took a crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket, looked at it, and read it with some difficulty. “Polina Joms.”
“Paulina Homs, maybe?”
“Miss Polina, yes.”
The guy had done a good job to come to the Sants neighborhood. He was just a decade too late. Maybe he had taken a Spanish train. The Englishman returned his gaze to the piece of paper.
“Rambla de Catalunya, 127.”
He looked at the number in the doorway to verify that he was right.
“Yes, the address is right. Are you delivering a package?”
“No, no. A package? Not me.”
“Then . . .”
“I came looking for her.”
At that moment on July 21 on a hot summer, just as the hourly radio announcements were reporting that the Catalan magical realist writer Pere Calders had died at eighty-one, Gina surprised herself.
Maybe it was because she liked what she saw, maybe it because he found her at a chaotic moment, maybe it was because she was still mad at the most important man in her life, maybe it was because that morning had suddenly become a mystery, maybe it was because she still liked to gamble in life, maybe it was because she was ovulating and feeling strange—she looked the Englishman in front of her up and down, and she flashed him a smile she hoped seemed frank and said persuasively: “That’s me. I’m Paulina Homs.”
They shook hands.
“How do you do?”
“How do you do?”
“Mark. Mark Granger.”
“Paulina Homs,” she repeated to him even more slowly, looking at the piece of paper. “Paulina Oms, the ‘h’ is silent. Oms, just like that. And what do you need from my . . . what do you need from me?”
“Honestly, nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I don’t really know. It was a sudden impulse. I didn’t expect to find you like this, so quickly, and that you’d be so . . .”
“You came all the way from England, and you don’t know what you want?”
“Well, I do work in London, and I live in the East End. But I’m Welsh. I can’t say I’m English.”
“Look, Mark, you found me in the middle of . . . I’m in a rush. What can I help you with?”
“Help?” The Welshman smiled crookedly. “I should be the one asking you that.”
Gina, stepping into her mother’s skin, had started a game that, scarcely a minute in, she wasn’t sure where it would end.
She also wasn’t sure how she’d put a stop to it once the moment came to be honest with Mark Granger, who was missing a finger on his left hand, even though she hadn’t gotten a good enough glimpse to see if it was his ring or index finger.
“If you’re at the ball, might as well dance,” she’d heard Grandma Lourdes say on more than one occasion, and she decided to go all in.
What did she have to lose? And what the hell, carrying on a conversation in her mother’s voice was a new and unlikely source of fun.
“Honestly, you can’t really help me too much, but if you took a plane from London and came all the way to Rambla de Catalunya 127 to find me . . . As you can see, by the way, you caught me off guard, because I’m in the middle of a move.”
“For a trip.”
“Not exactly.” She also didn’t feel like telling him the whole story. I don’t let my dad control me, so why should I let an Englishman or Welshman or whatever the hell he is pry into my life? “What are you laughing about now?”
“The thing is I didn’t come by plane. I drove here.”
“From London?”
“Yeah . . .”
“That’s crazy. Without stopping?”
“I love driving, but I slept in one of those accommodations on the side of the highway, just past Lyon. A Novotel. When sleep takes hold . . .”
“Of course, of course . . .” Idioms change from language to language, but clichés are all the same.
“It hasn’t even been thirty hours since I left home.
Once upon a time my grandpa did fall asleep at the wheel.
It’s a good story. Grandpa Granger owned one of the first Fords in Wales after the war.
And one day, many years ago before I was even born, he took a nap at the wheel, but unfortunately, tired as he was, his foot stayed on the accelerator without his realizing it.
The car lurched directly forward a couple of meters, and just as he was about to crash into the barrier at a level crossing, he suddenly woke up and had enough of his wits about him to duck his head.
And by some miracle, the car passed through just an instant, just a second, before a train passed. ”
“Lucky man, your grandpa.”
“A miracle, I’m telling you. We’re lucky folks, us Grangers. We always save ourselves by the skin of our teeth. But after that scare, Grandpa never drove again. He never wanted to hear about that car again.”
For Gina, with her boxes spread across the street, desperate to abandon a secure life and jump into a new adventure, and seeing that skies were turning gray, this story about Grandpa Granger meant nothing.
“So, I’m working on getting my license.”
“You don’t know how to drive?”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Don’t know . . .”
“I’ll be nineteen soon. What about you?”
He was forty, and he was missing his middle finger. He had a big hand and strong fingers. At least the ones he had left. His nails were too long for Gina’s taste. On a man, long nails make him look old.
“And can I know why, Mark, now that I know about your grandfather, you came looking for me if we don’t know each other at all?”
“I didn’t come here deliberately. Or not exactly. I had fifteen days off. I rented a room in Salu—Salou,” he corrected himself, “but since I was passing through Barcelona and since I haven’t been able to reach you by telephone, I thought it might be fun to take a detour, find you, and meet you.”
“Where did you call me?”
“Where did I . . . Did I screw it up?” Mark’s four-fingered hand grasped from pocket to pocket, but he didn’t find anything. “Here it is.”
In the inside jacket pocket, he found the paper he had checked earlier for the address. He gave it to Paulina. It was actually her business card. It contained her name, the Catalunya 127 address, a phone number, and something written, that on her first glance, Gina had not been able to read.
“This is an old phone number. No wonder you couldn’t . . . Where’d you get this from?”
“From a book about two or three years ago. I found it inside of a book. At first I didn’t pay it any attention.
I saw that ‘Appelle-moi’ was written there, and I kept it for a long time, maybe more than a year.
One day I thought, ‘Call, Mark, you have nothing to lose.’ And I called.
One day. Then another. But no one ever answered.
It seemed like there wasn’t even a ring tone.
I made sure that the Barcelona area code was right, but nothing. ”
“Let’s see. Oh man, it’s been years since we changed our number, I have to say.”
The more Gina looked at it, the less she understood.
What was that business card, belonging to her mother, who had been dead for ten years, doing in the hands of that Welsh man with four fingers who had come to find her on the other end of Europe without really knowing anything about her?
Because if he did, he wouldn’t have mistaken Gina for Paulina.
And she didn’t understand that “Appelle-moi.” That handwriting, written in blue ink, might have looked like Paulina Homs’, but now that she thought about it, she had seen so few things written by her own mother that she couldn’t verify whether it was or wasn’t hers.
The game had gotten complicated. She didn’t know what to say or do.