Rain Over Madrid by Andrés Barba

Author:Andrés Barba [Andrés Barba]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9788494228483
Publisher: Hispabooks
Published: 2014-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

She was never entirely sure whether the encounter had really taken place or not. This was more than two years later. She hadn’t thought about Anita in at least a year. Her life had resumed, her mysterious, unmanageable, wan, cavernous, and sometimes breathtaking life, her everyday life. The memory of Mamá had mellowed, and her relationship with Raquel had adopted a routine—a monthly phone call and a Christmas visit. Once, she and Pablo had even made a trip to London and Raquel had spent three days taking them around the city. She and Donovan had divorced, and she had a new Spanish boyfriend three years younger than her who worked in the hotel industry and with whom, she privately confessed, she wanted to have a child. Like the spring in a jack-in-the-box, Mamá’s death had triggered in Raquel the desire for a child. She herself found the idea ludicrous and selfish, but also carefree and timeless, like the adolescent urge to get a tattoo. She pictured the child Raquel would have as some small, powerful creature, just as egocentric, waggish, and overwhelming as her sister; she thought the train wreck they were sure to produce would be a sight to see, but that despite Raquel’s character, the two of them would most likely be good for each other. Mamá’s death had had a surprising effect on Raquel; the legendary status she had conferred upon Mamá was so absurd that she became something akin to the kindly old grandmother out of a bad children’s story. She’d clung to that fiction with the tenacity of a survivor, needing constantly to believe—despite a lack of rational support for her belief—that she lived a life very different from the life she in fact lived. Sometimes she would grab hold of her arm and speak of Mamá in languorous, sentimental tones. She knew, the very first time it happened, that she couldn’t go against her narrative, that Raquel needed it to be that way, perhaps needed her complicity, as well, so she simply listened to those anecdotes about events she actually remembered, and remembered quite differently, like someone playing telephone. It wouldn’t have done any good to explain that, for her, Mamá had, over the past few years, gradually turned into a person about whom it was increasingly difficult to make any assumptions at all, something like her own body, perhaps—at times intimate and comprehensible, and other times distant and dark and full of warm tunnels.

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.