The Dinner Guest Read online

  *

  My family received a number of threats during the eighties, nineties, and the years after 2000. Until I was an adolescent, my parents managed to more or less shield me from it all, though I was aware that some of the things that happened to us were unusual. One morning, for example, someone tagged our house with a message that was hard to decipher or identify: a circle and a P, or maybe a half-R or half-B. Whoever was responsible for the graffiti had left it unfinished. Another day someone came in the dining room window. He threw a stone to break the glass and wandered around the room until the alarm went off, and then he was gone. In the summer of 1992 a man spent the whole night sitting in a white Ford Fiesta in front of our house. The engine was off, and every so often we could see a lit cigarette moving in the dark. My mother and I watched him through a window. We called the police. The man who spoke to us told us that the car was stolen and he said that some officers would be sent to arrest him, but by the time they arrived, the man with the cigarette had gone.

  I found out about my grandfather’s killing from a neighbour. I was seven. That day I came home crying and I told my parents what I’d heard. ‘We didn’t tell you before because you never asked us how he died,’ my mother said. The two of them avoided giving me details about the kidnapping. Not long before, in ’87 or ’89, my father’s little brother, my Uncle Cosme, committed suicide. Years later I learned that he had done it by pouring a can of gasoline over his head and setting fire to himself. Today I can’t remember his face. Nor can I remember anyone looking sad, or any mention of his funeral or burial. There are just two stories I remember hearing about my uncle: that before he killed himself he spent weeks insisting that my mother go with him to the supermarket at El Corte Inglés, and that he was once caught shooting up heroin in our bathroom. I’ve never seen photographs of him, but in our living room there was a bronze figurine of a little girl in a walker, pleading to be lifted out. The piece had belonged to my uncle. It was a strange object, not pretty. The girl had a look of distress on her face.

  *

  A spring day in 1989

  The Renault 4 stalled again on the hill between the train station and the church of San Ignacio. It was too steep a slope for such an old car. My mother and I got out, and, with the help of a man on the pavement, we tried to get it to start. She got back behind the wheel to turn the key while the man and I pushed from behind. The sound of the engine at first was like water coming to the boil in a pot, and then, a few minutes later, like the hum of a pressure cooker. I leaned my arms on the car, but I doubt the efforts of a five-and-a-half-year-old made any difference. The man dug the tips of his shoes into the road and pushed with his hands and the whole weight of his body. On the back of the car, on the hatch, there was a giant sticker of Mickey Mouse’s face. I think one of my uncles gave it to my mother and she stuck it there because she thought I might like it. The car itself was a sight, yellow and beat-up; the Mickey Mouse face didn’t look out of place. Normally the sticker was an object of pride for me, but that day my sweaty hands slipped on it. The wheels began to turn on their own, and the man and I celebrated our accomplishment by letting go of the car. My mother stopped the Renault and got out to thank the man, offering him a bottle of water from her bag. The man drank it. At the top of the hill were the grounds of San Ignacio, a park crossed by palm-lined paths that lay in front of the church. On the other side of the lawn, almost straight across from the beach overlook, was the nursery school. Some parents were waiting with their children on the benches for the doors to open. My mother waved to everybody and I imitated her. In English, I said ‘Bye bye’, and my mother replied, ‘Bye bye Gabriela.’

  Leaving Las Arenas, the landscape was leached of colour: the parks, beaches and freshly painted houses disappeared. This was the start of an industrial zone where concrete buildings sprouted, their balconies grimy from the smoke of the factories. Around Erandio, the water of the estuary was a yellowish grey, and each time that a ship went by it left a wake of soapy foam. In this neighbourhood the air was thick with the emissions from a number of chemical factories and the tall chimneys on the far side of the estuary. Every so often, some of the factories released fumes, and for fifteen minutes or half an hour their chimneys belched clouds of smoke. If you were driving, you had to roll up the windows as quickly as possible, and if you were out walking you had to cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief and try to find shelter. Grass didn’t grow in Erandio, and on the balconies of the buildings closest to the factories, the laundry got holey and dirty. As a girl I had no idea about any of this, but I remember that passing by in the car I worried that the white things hanging from the balconies would be soiled.

  I imagine my mother driving into the centre of Bilbao, parking the car in the garage at El Corte Inglés and going into the supermarket there. She must have done a big shop. Then she must have had a sandwich at a bar on General Concha with a friend and got back in the car to return to Neguri.

  I imagine that it was in Deusto, somewhere near the university, where my mother ran into a police checkpoint. Her Renault, yellow with a Mickey Mouse sticker on the hatch, must have stood out in the stream of traffic. There must have been lots of policemen, the sirens on their cars rotating silently and tinting the road orange. The officers, two by two, must have asked drivers for their papers, ordering them to pull off onto the hard shoulder by the estuary. One officer must have looked at the documents while the other, standing guard, kept his machine gun pointed at the driver. I imagine that when my mother passed through the checkpoint, a man gestured for her to pull over. She must have turned onto the shoulder, rolled down the window and greeted the officers. It wouldn’t have been the first time that she had been stopped. What was unusual this time was that the policeman’s gun was shaking. I imagine one of the officers saying slowly: ‘Get out of the car now and put your hands on the bonnet.’ My mother must have opened the door and stepped out, standing there for a second, smelling the sulphur of the factories and resting her palms on the bonnet. More officers must have arrived. One must have patted her down, two must have searched the car, and another two must have stood there with their rifles aimed at her. They must have pried up the seats, opened the glove compartment, slid their hands into every crevice. In the boot they must have found the grocery bags. They must have taken the things out one by one, leaving fruit, jam, cleaning products on the tarmac. I imagine one of the policemen with a mop in his hand saying: ‘There’s nothing here.’ My mother, her hands still on the bonnet, must have sensed that the machine gun pointed at her ear wasn’t shaking anymore. She must have relaxed too. The officer who’d had a hand on her back must have helped her straighten up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he must have said. I imagine my mother taking a deep breath and smelling the acidity in the air again. ‘One of our fellow officers was just killed near here. We know that the shooter is in a yellow Renault 4 heading down the highway along the estuary … There aren’t many cars like yours. And we know that the crime was committed by a woman.’

  I imagine my mother getting back in the car, crossing the smoke cloud of Erandio again and heading to Neguri. Upon reaching our neighbourhood, the grass must have seemed too green and the houses too immaculate. My father was in India covering a conflict. She must have thought of him and missed him. I imagine my mother taking the groceries out of the boot, asking our long-time housekeeper María Jesús for help, and the two of them putting everything away in the refrigerator, the freezer and the pantry. My mother chose not to say anything to anybody about the incident, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She must have felt watched. She must have passed the window and scanned the street, seeing no one but Raúl, the doorman of the building across the street, watering some plants. I imagine my mother going up to her room to call my grandfather. It always calmed her to talk to her father. ‘Something just happened to me,’ she must have said, and she must have told him the whole story, beginning with the car stalling on the hill and ending with the groceries that she had just
unloaded in the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry,’ my grandfather must have said, ‘the police are aware of your situation.’ I imagine my mother glancing at the clock. My father wouldn’t call until night-time. Then she must have reread the postcard that he had just sent from Calcutta. ‘I miss you and Gabriela so very very much.’ My mother must have gone down the stairs and out to pick me up at the nursery school. Calle Marqués de Arriluce must have been empty. The abandoned house and the deserted mansion across the street must have looked more ominous to her than ever.

  X

  ‘She came into the house, took off her sun hat, opened the kitchen door and started to cry,’ my sister Inés told me over the phone. The first cycle of chemotherapy ended in mid July, and it was common practice for the patient to spend six weeks without treatment to see how the disease progressed. The doctors advised my mother to go back to Spain and take a holiday, protecting herself from the sun but making sure to walk on the beach when it wasn’t too hot. She was happy; the doctors were optimistic and everyone was sure that the tests scheduled for the end of the summer would show no trace of the disease. Before leaving for the coast she spent a week in Madrid. She felt strong, though every so often she needed to sleep at odd hours. It was four weeks before I could join her. I had to stay behind in New York to move into the new apartment in the tower block by the river.

  The work on the kitchen of the apartment in Madrid began the same week that my mother discovered the lump and ended just before she got off the plane at Barajas, left her suitcases in her room, took off her hat and burst into tears at the sight of the renovated kitchen.

  The job had taken longer than it was supposed to; no one had been keeping an eye on the workers. I remember that my sister Inés, when she got back to Madrid after visiting my mother in New York, called me to say that she had found the workmen asleep on a sack of tiles.

  Days after the renovation was finished, my sister realised that the door of the dish cupboard collided with the kitchen door, the water heater was too high, and the fuse box was hard to find, buried in the pantry. ‘But if all the cupboards stay closed and we never blow a fuse, it’s great,’ she told me over the phone.

  My mother didn’t mention any flaws. She was satisfied with the new island, the new stove, the new countertop. In the kitchen, I think, she felt cured of the disease.

  *

  During the week she spent in Madrid, she had lots of energy. One afternoon she even went to IKEA to buy some stools for the kitchen counter. Things started to go downhill soon afterwards, the day she flew from Madrid to Cádiz.

  When she boarded the plane at Barajas in the morning she was healthy, but forty-five minutes later, upon landing in Jerez, she hurried to the airport bathroom to vomit and she didn’t feel well again after that. What surprised me most when I saw her three weeks later was her skin, damp and soft as gelatin. Her appearance in general was disconcerting. Sometimes she seemed very old and other times very young, her apparent age changing according to the angle or the time of day. She was as thin as she had been when she took me to school in the Renault 4, but her back was hunched and her skin was waxy. ‘It’s muscle pains’, ‘it’s the side effects of the chemo’ or ‘everyone says you sweat a lot in menopause’: this is what we told ourselves to keep believing that what was happening was normal. ‘I’m fine, just fine,’ my mother kept saying. For a month and a half we were adrift, hatching our own theories without seeing any doctor. Of the six weeks that my mother spent on vacation in Spain, I was in New York for four, moving and seeking reasons for her discomfort. I often thought about her father, my grandfather. He had died after his cancer metastasised to the bone. One day he sat down in a wheelchair and never got up again. According to what my family was telling me, it seemed that my mother had got worse. Still, she was walking. The day that she sat down and didn’t get up was the day I would have to worry. Today, more than a year later, it occurs to me that maybe my mother had the same thought. Maybe that was why she refused to let us buy her a wheelchair and why she got angry whenever anyone mentioned metastasis. I think that was why she pretended it was her muscles that hurt, not her bones.

  During her illness, time passed capriciously. I know it was six months because I can count the weeks from the time her treatment began until she died. When I got to Cádiz it scared me badly to see her, but I wasn’t able to take in what was happening. Four weeks earlier, the doctors had told us that she would get better. I never considered the possibility that she was dying. In an email to a friend dated 10 August, 2011, I wrote: ‘My mother is very weak, I think she’s anaemic.’

  *

  The bird tree was in the middle of the golf course, by a pond. I was never there, but whenever I heard it mentioned I imagined a pine tree with lush branches and a bare trunk. My sister Inés told me that in the days before I got to Cádiz, she, Leticia and my mother had taken a stroll to the tree every evening. My mother could hardly walk, but she leaned on my sisters’ arms until she reached the pond. The branches were full of all kinds of birds and the three of them watched their fluttering from below as the sun went down. My mother said that the walk did her good, but Inés remembers that she would get upset when her ankles gave way. One day she almost fell. Another day she needed to go to the bathroom halfway there, and my sisters had to help her hide behind a bush. My mother wanted to let go of them so they wouldn’t have to see her crouch on the ground with her bottom in the air, but she wasn’t able to support herself. When she rose, her hands were dirty and she tried to lean on my sisters without touching them. Inés said it was hard to hold her up, that she was nervous and her legs shook.

  Every evening, after walking to the tree, my mother took off her shoes, lay down in bed and asked someone to draw the curtains. When I got to Cádiz that’s where she was, lying on the bed barefoot in the dark.

  *

  My father took a hand towel and soaked it in the basin that he had put next to the bedside table. He sank his arm into the basin up to the elbow and swished the towel a few times before wringing it out and draping it over his wife’s forehead. On the mattress, my mother sweated and arched her back. She said that putting weight on the crown of her head helped her bear the ache in her muscles. Sometimes, when the stretches worked and she was able to relax, she would open and close her lips, breathing in. ‘If I take deep breaths, maybe my body will cool down faster.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my father said as he stroked her face, ‘this must be a side effect of the chemo.’ Then he rubbed her arms, her lower thighs, and her legs from knee to ankle. Her skin was shiny and wet, so that his hand slid easily, smoothing the hairs to her body.

  Every day she looked more like a narrow-hipped adolescent. Her hair had grown, and now it fell eight inches below her shoulders. He was sitting on the bed beside her, stroking her head. Every so often he tangled his index finger in a lock of hair, straightening the wavy strands. I imagine he must have thought how long it had been since he saw her hair like this.

  XI

  On the morning of 21 August, 2011, we left Cádiz, and on the night of the 22nd we landed in New York. My mother’s whole body hurt. The next day we had an appointment with the oncologist, but we didn’t want to wait and we went straight to the hospital. It was raining. From the window of the plane all you could see were blurs of light. My mother said that she wanted an ambulance for the ride into Manhattan, but I managed to convince her that we should take a taxi. The idea of waiting filled me with dread, and anyway, I didn’t know what you had to do to get an ambulance. The taxi moved along the highway and the blurs of light grew. So much rain was coming down that it seemed like winter. She didn’t complain. When we got to the hospital, the taxi driver helped me unfold the wheelchair while holding an umbrella over my head. I lifted my mother and sat her in the chair, and the driver walked us to the reception desk. I went back for the luggage and left it at the desk. We went up to the emergency room. I was soaked; my mother was dry. They put us in an examination room. I told her that I had bough
t a blender and I was going to make her lots of juices. ‘Has the cancer metastasised?’ a nurse asked. I said that it hadn’t. The nurse left and I started to talk about smoothies. A young doctor came in. After he had introduced himself, he took a wooden tongue depressor out of a box and stepped over to put it in her mouth. Two hours of tests. They couldn’t say what she might have in addition to cancer. Maybe some sort of virus? When they saw the sores in her mouth they thought it might be AIDS. ‘But how is that possible?’ my mother kept saying. It was past midnight when they sent us to a room on the fifteenth floor. The results wouldn’t be in until the next day. I went with my mother to her new room, we talked for a while, and after yawning a few times I took a taxi home with the suitcases.

  *

  Room 1539 had light-coloured walls and a window. In the upper-right corner hung a TV that we hardly ever turned on. Besides the television, there were four pieces of furniture: a bed, a bedside table, a recliner, and the wooden trolley on which meals were served.

  On the right-hand wall there were various machines and some IV bags hanging from a metal pole. You had to duck between them to get into the bathroom, a tiny cubicle with a chair standing on the shower tray.

  The hospital rules required visitors to protect themselves from patients who might be contagious, and since it wasn’t yet clear whether my mother had a virus or not, before coming into the room you had to put on a gown, a cap and a mask, and scrub your hands with gel from a dispenser on the wall.