The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories by Margaret Jull Costa

Author:Margaret Jull Costa [Costa, Margaret Jull]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Juan José Millás*

She’s Everywhere

When my second marriage collapsed, I knew that it marked the end of my romantic biography. In future, I might have a few semi-passionate affairs, but there was bound to be something artificial, something false about all of them, completely at odds with the degree of commitment that, in my view, was necessary to sustain any long-term relationship. I hate to generalize, but men are very strange, by which I mean that they lack emotions or are more or less incapable of communicating them. They relate best to objects – a car, a gold watch, a leatherbound diary, a credit card – and it may be that, through them, they’re trying to say things too profound for us women to understand; we, on the other hand, have a much closer relationship with the abyss, with the void, with absence. You can’t have a conversation about life with a man or, if you do, there’s always something rather coarse or vulgar about his words, and that fills me with a kind of atavistic revulsion of which I’ve tried in vain to cure myself. It’s funny, because when you see fathers with their daughters, they do seem to develop genuinely tender feelings for them, as if they were their ideal girlfriends or something. As I say, all this is a massive generalization; there are men capable of peering into the abyss on the edge of which we women sit permanently perched, although I’ve yet to meet such a man, and am unlikely to do so at this stage in my life. Anyway, I’m not prepared to hang around waiting for such a rare event to happen.

Not that my relationships with other women have been easy either. I seem to arouse feelings of intense rivalry in them, and, while I found this rather flattering when I was younger, I absolutely loathe it now. So I don’t have any close women friends either, and, of course, none with whom I could consider sharing my life. That’s why, when my second husband left me, I began to embrace solitude in the belief that, in future, this would be the norm. I quickly acquired the habits of a singleton, little routines with which I gradually fortified my existence, until I had come to a proper understanding with the walls of my apartment and with my sheets, and, generally speaking, this worked very well until, that is, I met Julia.

I met her in a café where we both used to have lunch. The first time I saw her and our eyes met, I knew there was something about her that touched me deeply. We only had to exchange a few words for that disquieting feeling to be confirmed, a feeling that continued to grow apace in the weeks that followed. It was the beginning of autumn and I was beset by a vague but persistent melancholy, which found meaning and direction in Julia’s company. I began to depend on her, but without having to pay the high price that comes with depending on a man.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.