The Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda by Mercè Rodoreda

Author:Mercè Rodoreda [Rodoreda, Mercè]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Catalonian Literature, Anthologies, Short Stories
ISBN: 1934824313
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The

Bath

She was wearing a muslin dress, in carmine, with a white insert. The broad pleat on the bodice had a bouquet of forget-me-nots. She was wearing white socks, black patent-leather shoes, and a bow in her hair that was the same color as her dress, tied like a butterfly. Her mouth and nose were swollen, and she spoke with difficulty. The day before she had fallen from her grandfather’s bed—it was a meter high. She was doing somersaults and had split her upper lip. It had bled profusely.

Her parents and grandfather were closing doors and windows: the gate by the kitchen, the balcony off the dining room, the double doors on the roof terrace. Her mother had brought in the clothes from the line, still damp. That was the prudent thing to do. In this quiet, isolated area of Sant Gervasi, leaving a house closed for too long gave a sense that a surprise was in the air.

They ran into silly little Felipet on the street, his nose full of snot, his glance sad.

“You’re leaving now?”

What would he do the whole afternoon without Mercè? He felt a little intimidated—this was a different Mercè, a flaming-red Mercè who was going to participate in a comedy. In the last act she was pulled, half smothered, from a strongbox. “Your arms and legs, limp, you hear? You’ve got to pretend you’re dead,” the director told her at every rehearsal, because without realizing, her whole body would stiffen when the man picked her up.

Felipet watched them walking away, up Carrer de Paris. Mercè, her parents and grandfather growing tiny against the backdrop of Tibidabo.

The house was closed, deserted, its well-tended garden with jasmine, camellias, and gardenias, the old olive tree they used on sunny winter days for a pirate ship, or a lighthouse to guide lost ships—all of it, house and garden, seemed alien to him, as if he had never been inside.

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