Barcelona Dreaming Read online

  When I reached him, he greeted me in Spanish.

  “I didn’t know you spoke castellano,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Only a little.”

  I smiled. “I’m sure it’s better than my French.”

  “No,” he said, remaining serious. “Your French is okay.”

  Your French is okay. He hadn’t said my French was good, as most people would have done. That would have been a lie. I admired his candor. With someone like him, you might have a chance of knowing where you stood.

  I asked him how he was feeling. Better, he said. He had been to a doctor, in the Raval.

  “A doctor?” I said.

  He looked past me, towards Major de Sarrià. Dusk was falling, the deep blue of the sky edging into black. I hadn’t been exaggerating about his looks—if anything, he was more beautiful than I remembered—and I felt something open or unfold inside me, like the speeded-up footage of a flower blooming. I hadn’t dared to hope I would have this feeling again in my life, and for a few moments I was fearful.

  “Is he bothering you?”

  I looked round. My neighbor, Senyor Artes, was standing in the entrance to the building. Next to him was the maroon two-wheeled Rolser he always took to the shops with him. Eulogio Faus Artes was in his late sixties, with a drinker’s swollen eyelids and gray hair that lay flat against his skull, and he lived on the ground floor, as I did, though his apartment was at the front, facing the street. He was a widower, and rarely had a good word to say about anything. In an attempt to stay on the right side of him, I spoke in Catalan whenever I saw him, Catalan he instantly corrected, even if there was nothing wrong with it, but in the eighteen months that I’d lived in the building he had already taken me to task on several occasions—for putting my rubbish out too early, for letting the door to my apartment slam, and also for playing music in the evenings. Eulogio, I thought. Never had a man been less aptly named.

  “He’s not bothering me at all,” I said. “He’s a friend.”

  “Friend.” Artes’s lips twisted, then he pushed past me and moved off along the pavement.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said, turning back to the young man. “My neighbor isn’t very pleasant.”

  He gave a little shrug. “It’s normal.”

  “It doesn’t make you angry?”

  “Sometimes.” Then, all of a sudden, he looked me full in the face. “But you’re not like that.”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  He showed me the plastic bag he was holding. “I have come to cook for you.”

  “You’ve come to cook for me?”

  “Yes. To say thank you.”

  “How lovely.” I took out the keys to my apartment. “Please,” I said. “Come in.”

  * * *

  —

  HIS NAME was Abdel ben Tajah, he told me, and he was from Tangier. He had been living in Barcelona for about six months. Before that, he was in Almería. He had learned to cook when his mother was knocked down in the street and broke her arm. He was fourteen then. As the eldest of three children, he had to take over in the kitchen. His mother would issue instructions from a nearby chair. No, not like that, he said, imitating her. Cut into smaller pieces. Stir more slowly. You forgot the salt. He was smiling. He hadn’t seen her in almost three years. She was still back home, in Morocco.

  That evening Abdel cooked a lamb tajine. He had arrived with everything that he would need—not just the meat, but tomatoes and onions, dried apricots, fresh coriander, and his own herbs and spices wrapped in twists of rough brown paper. He even brought a terra-cotta cooking pot with a lid. We ate at the small table on my terrace. I lit candles and opened a bottle of Rioja. As a Muslim, Abdel was content with fruit juice. His Spanish was no more sophisticated than my French, and he didn’t have any English at all, but we had no trouble communicating. I asked him about Morocco, a country I had never visited. His father’s family were Bedouin, he said. They lived in the mountains to the south of Marrakesh. He was open and talkative, nothing like the tense, wary person I had come across in the small hours of Thursday morning. He didn’t seem to find it awkward to be alone with a woman from a different culture—a woman he barely knew—and I caught myself hoping it wasn’t on account of my age. At least once that evening, while in the bathroom, I leaned close to the mirror, examining my face. People were always telling me how young I looked, how me and my daughter, Mar, could easily be sisters. But that was just something people said, wasn’t it. On my way back to the terrace, I paused in the shadows at the far end of the living room. I could see Abdel through the sliding glass door. Gazing out into the night, with his chin propped on one hand, he looked at home, at ease. The fact that I had met him when he was at his lowest had given him, paradoxically, a kind of strength. After all, in his own eyes, he would never be less of a man than he had been on that first night.

  It grew late, but the idea that he should leave didn’t occur to him. His complacency made me smile, and I had to turn away so he didn’t notice. I didn’t want him thinking I was mocking him. Busying myself at the sink, I told him I had to be up early in the morning, and that it was probably time he went home. With anyone else, this would have been rude. Not with him, somehow. He stretched lazily, as if he had also drunk a little too much Rioja, then he gathered up his cooking pot, which I had washed, and his remaining herbs and spices, and packed them into the carrier bag he had brought with him. Once I had showed him out of my apartment, we stood on the thin strip of pavement at the front of the building. Aware that my neighbor’s living room window was open, I stepped closer to Abdel and spoke in a low voice. I thanked him for cooking for me. He nodded, then studied his feet. For the first time that evening he seemed on edge, as if he was waiting for something, and I remembered how, on Thursday night, I had given him cab fare. He was too embarrassed to bring it up, perhaps.

  “Do you need money to get home?” I asked.

  “I will take the metro,” he said, “or a bus.” He turned away, but then turned back. “Did you think about me?”

  “I’m sorry?” I wasn’t sure I’d understood.

  “Did you think about me on Thursday night, after I had gone?” His eyes were earnest and sober, as if the matter troubled him. But I still couldn’t work out what he was asking. Before I had time to answer, he spoke again. “I thought about you.”

  A car came up the narrow street with its headlights on full beam, and as I half-closed my eyes against the glare, one of its wing mirrors clipped my thigh. I let out a faint cry, but the car was already past me and turning onto Avinguda Foix.

  Abdel put a hand on my upper arm, near the shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It was a shock, that’s all.”

  His hand remained where it was, his gaze intent, unfathomable. He seemed older just then, and I thought I could imagine how he might age, threads of white in those dark curls and fine lines at the edges of his eyes and mouth, but still something extraordinary to look at.

  “Really,” I said. “It was nothing.”

  I looked away from him, but felt his gaze rest on me for a moment longer, then he took his hand from my arm and walked off down the street, in the direction of the metro station. I stood and watched him go, his head poised, almost afloat in the air. After what he had said, I could feel my heart beating—it had slowed down, and seemed, at the same time, to have become more powerful, more urgent—and I thought he might look over his shoulder, just a glance, but he didn’t, not even once.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS AFTER Abdel cooked the tajine, my ex-husband Pol appeared at my shop. He often dropped in on Saturdays, and he never called beforehand. He knew where I would be, of course—when you run a shop you have to be there all the time, especially if, like me, you can’t afford to hire staff—but I always had the feeling there was more to it than that. It was as i
f he wanted to surprise me, catch me out. As if he was trying to gather evidence for some theory he had about me.

  “How much?” He had picked up a Moroccan lantern made of metal and stained glass. Though he knew nothing about Abdel—how could he?—somehow this didn’t feel coincidental.

  I named a price. “But since it’s you,” I said, “I could probably go lower.”

  He smiled, then put it back. “You’ll never get rich that way.”

  Pol owned and ran a management consultancy in Terrassa, an industrial town about half an hour’s drive inland, and he lived in a glass-and-concrete house on the west-facing slopes of the Collserola, in an area called La Floresta. After we broke up, he hadn’t married again, though he’d had several long-term relationships, usually with women who were much younger. He was as fit as he had been in his twenties—when I was with him, he had been passionate about windsurfing, and he still played tennis three times a week—but as he had aged his face had become leaner, and now that he wore his hair swept back from his forehead and longer at the back, he had a distinctly predatory air. It was as if he had decided to reveal something about himself that had always been true. We had been separated for so long that, had it not been for Mar, it would have been hard for us to believe that we had ever been together, and perhaps for that reason we tended to behave like siblings when we were in each other’s company. We joked and bickered and sulked, and in some indefinable way we also still loved each other, though entirely without desire, it seemed, on either part.

  I noticed he was wearing jogging bottoms with iridescent stripes down the sides. “Are you seeing someone new?”

  He gave me a look that was wary, but also smug.

  “Thought so,” I said.

  “How did you guess?”

  I shook my head and looked off into the shop with a remote smile that I knew would annoy him. “I suppose she’s—what?—twenty-six?”

  Pol laughed. “What about you, Amy? Have you got anyone at the moment?”

  “No.”

  “What happened to the architect?”

  “Felip? That ended months ago.” I adjusted the position of some notebooks on the counter. “To be honest, it never really began.”

  “Really? I thought you two were quite well suited.”

  Pol was being provocative. I had met Felip at a dinner at Montse’s house. Felip was divorced and in his early fifties. He talked about buildings the way other people talked about films or books. And he was curious—attentive. We went to bed a couple of times, but it felt slightly awkward, or unequal, as if the act of making love was a pair of scales, and one of us weighed more than the other. He kept giving me things. I wished he would go slower. When I told him I didn’t think the relationship was working, about six weeks after the dinner, he said I was acting in haste, and that I hadn’t given him a chance. He said I was frightened. It didn’t seem to me that any of that was true. Though we no longer saw each other, he would sometimes call me, his voice still hopeful but also forlorn. How are you? And how is that beautiful shop of yours?

  Pol was checking his phone. “I have to go. Is Mar still arriving on Tuesday?”

  I said she was.

  “Would it be all right if she stays with me for the first few days, then comes to you on Friday?”

  I imagined Pol and his new girlfriend had plans for the weekend, but I wasn’t about to hold that against him, or make things difficult.

  “No problem,” I said.

  That evening, I met Montse in a bar in the Barri Gòtic. After Pol’s surprise visit, I suppose ex-husbands were on my mind, and as we ordered drinks I remembered that Montse had been married in her twenties, before I knew her, and that her husband, Nacho, had been unfaithful. When I asked her about him, she let out a sigh.

  “I made a mistake, love. I was young.”

  “How long were you together?”

  “Getting on for ten years.”

  At the beginning, she had fallen under his spell completely, she told me. He was a jazz musician, older than her, very cool. He looked at her as if he couldn’t quite believe his luck. It was all in his eyes. She felt like the only person in the room. When he played live, he took her with him—to Girona, to Marseille, to Cannes. His drinking didn’t bother her back then, maybe because she was drinking too, but later, when she was pregnant with Beatriz, she found she couldn’t handle it. He’d come home drunk and start blaming her for things. He never faced up to anything. There was always an excuse. His charm wore thin, like a T-shirt washed too many times. And then there was the cheating…She couldn’t go on living with someone like that, children or no children.

  The whole time Montse was talking, our waiter had been sending glances in our direction, at both of us, and I was reminded of a phenomenon that I had noticed recently. All of a sudden, around the time of my fortieth birthday, young men began to look at me. Not that they hadn’t looked before—they had, when I was young—but this felt like a different kind of gaze. Obviously, I no longer had the body of a seventeen year-old, but neither did I have the neediness I had back then, or the self-regard, and they seemed to pick up on that. It was as if I had grown into a version of myself——or a version of womanhood, perhaps—that they could both desire and appreciate.

  I looked at Montse over the rim of my glass. “When you turned forty,” I said, “did young men start hitting on you?”

  “Are you talking about our waiter?”

  I hesitated.

  “You are, aren’t you.” Her penciled eyebrows lifted as she reached for her drink. “Darling, he’s just thinking about the expensive trainers you would buy for him.”

  I stared at her for a moment—this was an angle that would never have occurred to me—then I burst out laughing.

  Montse was something else. She really was.

  * * *

  —

  THE FOLLOWING Tuesday I closed early and drove out to the airport. Pol had been planning to pick Mar up, but he’d had a crisis at work, and he had called and asked if I would go instead. Mar was still expecting her father, and when she walked out of Arrivals I thought she looked more grown-up—more of a woman—than she would have done if she’d known I was meeting her.

  After we had hugged, she asked where Pol was, but she wasn’t put out by the change of plan. The fact that her parents rarely appeared at the same time, and often replaced each other at a moment’s notice, was entirely normal. Since she couldn’t remember us ever having lived together, our separation hadn’t had the slightest effect on her. We talked over each other all the way back to the car. It had been nearly three months.

  Once I had negotiated the speed bumps outside the terminal, I accelerated into the left-hand curve that would take us to the city. We passed a giant silver hand holding a mobile phone and a billboard of the Brazilian footballer, Ronaldinho, advertising gum.

  “I’ve always loved the way you drive,” Mar said.

  “Your father used to give me a hard time about it when you were young. He’d tell me to slow down. Be more responsible.”

  Mar smiled.

  There was a brief silence, then she said, “You look different.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “Have I aged?”

  She laughed. “The opposite, if anything. You look weirdly relaxed.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not in love, are you?”

  I was careful to conceal my surprise. “I wish.”

  Despite being in my early twenties when Pol and I split up, I had devoted myself to Mar. I’d had a few relationships—there was the Irish sports journalist, and a sculptor from Valencia—but nothing had lasted. You’re still young, Mar told me once, when she was a teenager. You should have a boyfriend. I like things the way they are, I told her. She rolled her eyes. Mum. The truth was, I hadn’t wanted to disrupt the life I had invented for myself. Infatuations came and went, their white heat hard to sustain. Love was
a lower flame, and burned for longer. I knew that. I didn’t have the patience for it, though.

  I took one hand off the steering wheel and put it against her cheek, not removing it until I had to change gear. “It’s so good to have you back. How’s England?”

  * * *

  —

  WE STOPPED outside the house in La Floresta, with its facade of smooth gray concrete and its lap pool in the yard. Pol had bought the house in the mid-nineties, not long after he floated his business on the stock market. At that time, property prices had been relatively low. I couldn’t imagine what the house must now be worth. His Filipina maid, Ligaya, answered the door, telling Mar her father was on his way, and that he wanted to take her out to dinner. Mar kissed me, then ran upstairs for a shower. I decided not to wait.

  I drove back through the Valvidrera tunnels and turned off Via Augusta into Sarrià, calling at my local Caprabo to buy groceries. Half an hour later, when I came round the corner into my street, I saw Abdel standing opposite my building in a white shirt. There was a stirring in me like a glass of water on a café table when a truck goes past. The way the surface of the liquid shudders.

  You’re not in love, are you?

  I pulled up alongside and smiled at him through the open window. ‘Have you come to cook for me again?’

  He looked uncertain, almost alarmed. “No.”

  In my nervousness, I had said the first thing that occurred to me. I backtracked quickly. “It was just a joke. Perhaps, this time, I can cook for you.”

  A car behind me honked, and I told him I needed to find a place to park. I would be back soon.