7 Out of All the Books, One
Out of All the Books, One
“I’ll go with you.”
“To Paris?”
“To the airport.”
For a second, Paulina had gotten scared.
She would have loved for her husband to accompany her to her cousin’s wedding, but in that brief moment of misunderstanding, which didn’t last long, her whole world had fallen apart.
It was very strange for a stubborn man like him to suddenly change his mind.
And she had spent a couple of weeks, perhaps even a couple of months since they had received the formal invitation, telling Julie that she was deeply sorry, but Manuel would not be able to attend.
There was a lot of work these days. He had to prepare for the annual Düsseldorf fair, and in four days the year’s revenue for the sale of windshield wipers was at stake.
People drive their car, and turn on the windshield wipers when it rains, never even considering how someone manufactured the two wipers and how inside there’s a rod that sustains the rhythmic dance of the brushes.
And the more cars that are sold, the more windshield wipers are manufactured, and automatically, Manuel’s machines have to start generating stainless steel rods in three eight-hour shifts.
Sure, the workers will change, but the machines don’t stop.
She had told Júlia all these tales over the phone to excuse her husband, and now, twenty-four hours before the wedding, she couldn’t just call her and say, “Sorry, love, but Manuel is also coming. He was able to pull it off. And the guys at Seat and Renault, who have assembly-line workers twiddling their thumbs because they’re waiting on the delivery of the rods, can go fuck themselves.
” She couldn’t change the nuptials plans on such short notice, because she knew that her cousin—a devoted and long-suffering girlfriend—had racked her brains arranging the tables, performing all sorts of balancing acts, isolating unknowns, and taking into account so many variables that she would have needed a mathematical formula to make everything fit together: This is for one side of the family, these people can’t stand these other people, these people are business competitors to these other people, this is a bitch that no one can tolerate but the monsieur hasn’t had the balls to cross her off the invitation list. And to further complicate operational matters, given that the groom was French and that she was not native to Paris, there was a basic linguistic constraint she had to take into account when putting together the tables of ten.
Paulina knew that if she had showed up to church with her husband, Júlia would have been delighted to see him, and in a blink of an eye, would have figured out how to find him a spot at a table.
But, since he had opened the envelope with the invitation and learned that Júlia and Alain would be married on June 12, 1981, and that the wedding feast would take place at the Bois de Vincennes, Manuel had no intention of running off to Paris for a couple of days like his wife suggested.
Paulina, in the negligee that was capable of achieving the impossible, affectionately sat on one of the arms of the armchair where he always napped.
“Four days for a wedding?”
“It’s my cousin. I can’t just go, say hi, and then come back. Especially to Paris.”
“Three days of window shopping, if you’re asking me . . .”
“I know how to go shopping by myself. I’m used to that, but come on, for the wedding.”
“Do whatever you want, but don’t get me involved.”
“Júlia is like a sister to me.”
“Then go by yourself.” He put Alain and Julie’s invitation back into the envelope. “But don’t pout.”
She hoped Manuel would accompany her. She wanted Júlia’s French friends and new family to meet him and say, “Whoa, what an interesting guy your husband is. And so tall! Such a handsome nose! And what a personality.” But he had shut down completely, and Paulina didn’t want to get upset with him.
She knew that her husband found weddings exasperating.
He’d complain about having to put on stiff shoes.
He’d get angry, because after polishing them, they’d get all dusty before the damned photo with the couple.
He worried about arriving without anyone noticing the sweat on his shirt, about parking near the church, about standing up through the eternal cocktail hour, about the doofus waiters who served wine and let it drip all over the tablecloths, about the temperature of the steak that was burnt on the outside but cold inside, about .
. . He wasn’t like that about his life. Manuel tended to be easy to please.
He had his quirks, like everyone, but he kept these hang-ups in check.
Paulina generally had nothing to complain about.
But they had lived together for years, and she knew that, when it came to weddings, Manuel grumbled about everything before they even left the house until, in the elevator, he took off his stiff shoes.
Maybe it was better if she went on her own and left Gina, now that she was five years old and felt a little older, with Manuel at home.
Or maybe even with Isabel, who could sleep over those days if it was easier for her.
The apartment on the Eixample, old with high, decorated ceilings, had a view to the front and back.
The dining room faced the intersection between the Rambla de Catalunya and Carrer de Còrsega, next to the biggest lamp store in the city.
In the back, with views of the interior patio, were the primary bedroom and Gina’s room.
Isabel, who had been asked to vacuum every day because the child still played on the floor a lot, was convinced that as long as the apartment was, it must have at least forty rooms. And one of them, one of the only three that didn’t get natural light, was hers.
They had fixed it up with a bed, a wardrobe with a mirror, and a poster of the olive trees in Jaén, the landscape of her childhood, so that the nanny could sleep over in situations like this.
“Take her to school and eat dinner at home. That’s all I’m asking. That way Gina sees you for a little while and you can be there for her. She’s never been away from me for five days. Since I’m gonna miss her, at least she . . .”
“It’s five days, for Christ’s ache! It’s not like it’s five months . . .”
“It’s ‘Christ’s sake.’ It’s ‘sake,’ not ‘ache.’ I’ve told you several times . . .”
“What do you know? You’re a philologist now?”
“It’s not a matter of language, Manu. It’s philosophy. How do you want Christ to ache, if he doesn’t exist?”
Manuel hung his head, not in the mood to throw any more stones.
He knew that if he kept splashing in the deep waters of his marriage, he might surface a conversation with no predictable end in sight.
And at home, anyway, they were polite in their actions and words.
They passed the “keyhole test” with flying colors.
They loved each other. They respected each other, and they made love twice a month.
Three times, in the best of cases. And they were satisfied with that.
Sometimes he initiated it. Sometimes it was Pau who would climb into bed without pajamas, waiting to surprise him under the blankets.
They were also not keeping track. But they both agreed once, when they discussed the matter, that since Georgina’s birth, their habits, their appetites, with how tired they were and everything . . .
“How do you think people would see us through the keyhole of the door?” Paulina asked Manuel, not long after, before she started to leave.
“I’m not sure . . .”
“You’ve never thought about what people you know, your parents’ couple friends, are like behind closed doors when you peek through the keyhole?
Everyone puts on a front on the street, at the stores, but what are people like when no one sees them?
What surprises would we discover if we peeped at them through the keyhole of a door? ”
Manuel had never played at imagining what other people’s lives were like the way Paulina did.
From that moment forward, he played with his whole heart.
Paulina became his wife, and the “keyhole game” became a family tradition like Parcheesi or checkers.
“If we could watch Romero,” Paulina would say, referring to the neighbor from the first apartment on the second floor, “through the keyhole, I’m sure he wouldn’t be as nice as he acts.
If we watched Aparicio through the keyhole, the longtime boss at the factory, I think we’d discover a dark side of him.
I’m not sure if he likes men, women, or what.
And what about us? What do you think they’d think about us through the keyhole?
” Paulina would always be the one to ask the question.
“Fine. Normal.” Manuel always gave the same answer.
“A peaceful family.” News at the Castro–Homs household never needed big headlines.
The morning that Manuel walked out of the bathroom without a mustache, it was a whole event, and it was the topic of conversation at dinner for weeks.
Whether it was deciding whether to vacation at Morros de Torredembarra or put the car on a ferry and stay in Menorca at a seafront hotel in Cala Galdana, they mulled things over without rushing.
The same thing happened with Gina’s room.
Now that they were switching out the baby furniture for decor fit for a five-year-old girl, Paulina decided, and Manu, automatically, gave his approval after looking at the plans and reviewing the budget.
Nevertheless, if it looked good to Paulina, he couldn’t add much else.