The Living Infinite, page 9
“Well, at least you won’t worry about my ill-formed imagination ever again,” I said, sourness in my mouth like a lemon.
“Come now. I have just the thing in mind for you.” I followed the professor through a tight alleyway bridged overhead by a medieval arch. The wooden figure of San Judas Tadeo loomed over us. I stole a glance at its bare toes and whispered a little prayer to the saint of impossible requests.
Soon we were on Calle Pozo Seco. There, a small store, the trim painted dark red, the window with a sign that read Libreria Flores, stood between a bakery and a hat shop. “It is my father’s old bookshop, Aragón. I’ve managed it since he died—”
“My father died two weeks ago,” I offered, then said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“And yours. But mine was long ago. This seems more like fate by the minute. The store needs minding. We’ve had one bad manager after another. You seem the man with just the right interests to do it. Popular fiction of the sort you enjoy sells fairly well,” he said, his mouth a smirk.
I knew it. What he said was true. My collection of Verne books had come from this store, which was always well stocked. I searched my memory for the countenances of the people who worked there and could not locate the professor among those faces.
“It was never a place I loved,” the professor said. “An irony, I suppose. I prefer libraries to bookstores.” He slid an iron key, a relic from some bygone era it seemed, out of his pocket. “Do with it what you will. Only send me a check of the profits, minus the bills and whatever salary you find appropriate, at the end of each month.”
“Profesor, I don’t know if—”
“Would you go back to the farm, Tomás?” he asked, and his mouth turned down a little. “There’s an apartment upstairs. It’s small, but functional.”
I thought of my bedroom back at my mother’s house. I saw myself surrounded by books, perhaps taking up my pen again on slow days.
Profesor Flores, his hand shaking a little, held out the key, and I took it.
Eulalia
Shortly after my second birthday, my mother, Su Majestad, La Reina Isabel II, was dethroned in a coup. A group of generals and politicians, opponents of my mother’s regime calling themselves “Spain with Honor,” sent us into exile. They were embarrassed by my mother’s many lovers, by her superstitious ways, perhaps, even, by the look of her. She was not a great beauty. They selected a minor Italian prince to serve as king, while my brother Alfonso, the rightful heir, was sent to England, to learn about politics, Shakespeare, and how to cultivate roses in that wet, fertile climate. My mother, two sisters—María Isabel had just gotten married and was on her honeymoon when the news reached her—and I left Madrid by train. As the story was recounted to me later, I was covered in spots from a wretched case of measles, and my fever was high. Perhaps the heat in my body acted as a crucible for my first memories, which date from the start of our exile when I was only two.
We were on vacation in the north of Spain, at San Sebastian, when news of the revolt came. We didn’t know we were leaving. Nobody had warned us that we would not return to the palace nursery again as children, or that when we next spent time in those quiet rooms, we’d be mothers ourselves.
My first memory is of my mother on that train. She sat like a mountain as Spain rushed by our windows. We had some nobles with us, and a few cousins who had remained loyal to the queen. Sor Patrocinio was with us, too, her hands freshly bleeding. None of the other servants were allowed to come. I remember my sisters crying about some of their larger toys that could not be sent for from the palace, like the dollhouse that was taller than Pilár, with working lights and running water inside. Pilár’s tears soon became a tantrum and to shock her into silence, my mother told the story of the son of a Liberal and how he had been murdered by the Carlists in front of his father. The child, only four, had been placed before a firing squad. One of the Carlists threw an orange a few feet from him, and when he toddled towards it, the shots rang out and the tiny body crumpled. This was the story my mother chose to tell us as we began our exile into France.
In our exile, Spain was renamed a Republic. For my mother, it may have felt like a prison, being stuck in Paris as Madrid went through its seasons without her. But I would come to think of Madrid as a different kind of prison. A gilded one. A beautiful one. But a cage nevertheless.
In Paris, we lived in the Palais de Castille. Napoleon III reigned, and his son came over often for playdates. We took walks in the Bois de Boulogne, and in the Tuilleries, I skinned my knees and once I punched a little French girl for stealing a candy from me. My Spanish nannies scolded me, but I had no patience for them, or their tales meant to frighten me into submission.
“There are no such things as witches,” I would say to them when they tried to convince me that a witch would come and take me away for being naughty. I didn’t dare say such things to my mother, though. She not only believed in witches, but in even more frightening elements of the supernatural. Sor Patrocinio haunted the Palais, her bloody bandages needing changing, which she did not do often enough, so that all would see her “miracle” and be stunned into reverence.
My sisters and I were day-scholars at Sacré Cœur, and we wore dark blue uniforms every day. Gone were the taffeta gowns, the elaborate costumes my mother had seamstresses design for the many royal balls, gone were the high-heeled shoes, gone were the diadems.
We were not wholly free of the royal life, though. Sor Patrocinio, who did not like the French brand of Catholicism, insisted that our uniforms be equipped with multiple hidden pockets. Inside, she would hide medals, from which dangled small, golden lockets. Within the lockets were relics—the tooth of Santa Barbara rested in one, the thumbnail of Santa Marta was in another. San Damian’s small toe bone was in Pilár’s pocket, while Paz had the dubious distinction of carrying around a withered chunk of San Judas Tadeo’s left earlobe. We clinked and jangled along with our unsuspecting Parisian playmates at school, and removed our uniforms in the evenings, careful not to touch the relics, which always felt cold, even in the summer.
At school, I gathered around me, year after year, an ever-larger group of girls who depended on me to lighten the mood. At age seven, I was horrified to realize that there wasn’t a single mirror at Sacré Coeur. They were forbidden by the nuns, in an effort to curb our vanity.
What a shame, I thought. These French girls were so pretty, with their tiny, upturned noses, and their wide-set eyes, their little waists and feline legs. My sisters and I stood out among them, stocky and Bourbon through and through.
So, I devised a plan. I took one of Sor Patrocinio’s habits, which was black as night, and tore it in half. This, I brought to school. The classroom doors had small, clear windows in them, and when I put the black cloth behind them, the effect was that I created a mirror on the other side. Whenever one of the girls wished to check her hair, or just look at herself and admire what she saw, they would call out, “Lali, Lali,” and I would come with Sor Patrocinio’s torn habit and make a mirror at once.
“You are so beautiful,” I would tell my friends, and they would embrace me and kiss my cheeks.
“Merci, Lali. Vous êtes très mignonne!” they would say, and I would float on air afterwards.
Those nine years in exile were the only time in my life in which anyone thought to shorten “Eulalia” to something else, something tender. I am still Lali in my heart, you see, though I haven’t heard that name in many years, and to say it to myself would be beyond silly.
When my mother found out about Sor Patrocinio’s habit, she yelled at me for an hour, and made me mend the cloth with needle and thread. I did a poor job of it, though not on purpose. My mother, examining the habit, sighed and said, “You are only fit for America,” as if that was the worst insult she could muster.
Her dismissive utterance sparked in me an intense desire to visit that place. If only I could take a ship to America, I thought, then I should be really happy.
She also said this: “I have two sons. Alfonso and Eulalia,” which was meant to insult me, but which I delighted in. If only I had been the second boy she had so wanted! What freedoms I would have had!
In short, my years in Paris were the happiest of my life. But it was in Normandy, on that cold, serrated shore, that I made my first real stand against the destiny set for me. As I think of it, I realize that perhaps the events at Normandy so affected me, so branded my way of thinking, that now, whenever I am near the sea, on a coast that looks alien in its jagged beauty, with my skin prickling into bumps, chilly toes going numb, I am happiest, and feel most free.
We were playing on the sand, my sisters and I, when a tall boy about my age came by with a pail. Inside the pail was a brown crab, clawing the smooth sides of the pail, trying to get out. My sisters squealed and ran from the sight of the boy and the crab, but I found that I could not move. The look of him—his scabby knees, his feet good and solid on the sand, held me steady. I hear him say, “Regardez ici, belle fille.”
“Do not call me ‘girl.’” I told him. “I am Su Alteza Real la Serenísima Infanta Eulalia,” I said, giving him the full title I would later use. When he laughed, I laughed too, and he moved closer with his pail and his skittish crab. The magic of the moment was interrupted by one of the Spanish nannies, who came running toward us, her skirts fisted in her hands, struggling over the sand and rocks. I knew she was coming to shoo him away, and so I met her halfway and kicked her hard in the shin.
The nanny, whose name I no longer remember, cried out, and fell, clutching her leg. She told me that if I weren’t an infanta, I would have been spanked long ago, and I told her that I wished someone would hit me, because I longed for a good fight.
“By my life, no one will ever harm a single, blond eyelash of yours,” the nanny said as she lay on the ground. I ran away, following the boy into a stand of trees not too far away, while the nanny screamed and hobbled in our direction.
I was gone for several hours with the boy named Alain. He took me to his parents’ orchard, and we ate apples that were not ripe, and gave ourselves a stomachache. There, in Normandy, a small fire grew in my belly, and Alain, gallant boy, kissed my knuckles with his sticky mouth.
Later, Alain’s parents would drag me across the sands, apologizing to me the whole time, “Nous sommes désolés, princesse,” again and again, before returning me to the Spanish nanny, who came toward us with outstretched hands, relief plain on her face.
The memory of Alain’s little round face, of his mouth on my hand, served to perplex me for years. How is that I could not choose to stay in that orchard? My grandmother had abdicated the throne, leaving Madrid and settling in Normandy with her lover. She paid the price with exile, with the loss of her daughters and her crown. But she had chosen her own path. Why couldn’t I?
This is what I learned: I may wear a crown, but I am powerless as an ant, as a fox dead on the side of the road, as a mote of dust, whipped by the wind. Crown or no, I have one life. Just the one. I wish I might have spent it munching on French apples near the shore, saying to anyone who passes by, “I have no plans for tomorrow, or the day after that. Come back if you desire. I may or may not be here.”
Tomás
It was strange, at first, to have a set path, to have plans that unfolded. I took that uneasiness with me to the bookshop when I first went to see what it was I had signed on to do. Waiting outside, leaning against the door, was a young woman. Her hair was hidden under a brown felt hat, and her dress, a burnt orange, had a high collar, with tarnished gold buttons trailing down her throat, between her breasts, and all the way past her waist to the hem of her skirt. She was staring at me as if I had done her some wrong. In her hands was a parasol that she was gripping tightly.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’d like to enter my shop.”
“Your shop,” the woman said. Her voice was quivering.
I dangled the key, and she leapt into motion, trying to snatch it away. I sprang backwards, then held up a hand. “Hang on a moment,” I began to say.
“Your shop? Did the esteemed Profesor Flores simply hand you the keys because of your potential? Scholar maybe? Writer? The son he never had? Is that it?” The blood had rushed to her cheeks, and she squinted at me as if trying to peer into my heart.
“I don’t know who you are, or what—”
“Juana Flores,” she said. “The profesor’s daughter. His only child.” She was breathing hard, and her eyes were wet.
“Listen, you don’t have to get upset. You don’t have to cry.”
“I’m not crying,” she said through gritted teeth.
I noticed that, though her arms were crossed, she was pinching her elbows. I held up the key again, and gestured to the door. Juana moved aside, and watched as I inserted the key.
“Teeth up,” she corrected, and I turned the key over and managed to get the door open.
Once inside, Juana walked purposefully through the store, and returned with a kerosene lamp. Then, she went behind the counter, opened a drawer, and drew a match, with which she lit the lamp, lighting the dark corners of the shop. I put the keys and my red notebook, still in my pocket and now soft and worn, onto the counter. The shelves were half-empty, and a rustling sound could be heard overhead.
“Bats,” we both said at once, and she turned to me and smiled, reluctantly.
“You know the place well,” I said.
Juana turned slowly in the center of the shop, her eyes casting about, taking it all in.
“I do,” she breathed. Her deep breath filled her dress, her exhale loosened the fabric, and I watched it fill again, mesmerized by her. “Papá wouldn’t let me manage the shop. No matter how I begged, even though I grew up here. Do you even know anything about the book business?”
I shook my head. “I like to read.”
Juana laughed, but it was a bitter sort of laugh. “You like to read?”
“Verne, mostly.”
She laughed again. “Wonderful. Just wonderful.” She stalked over to the cash register, and popped open a secret door in the back. Inside was a folded piece of paper. This she gave me. “Here,” she said. “It’s the names and addresses of the people you need to know. The publishers and the accountant, the tax collector and the university librarian, and also . . . “ On and on she went, retrieving other slips of paper with more and more names and addresses on them. Juana spent the rest of the afternoon in the shop, lecturing one moment, then setting up mouse traps the next, pausing to wipe her small face with a handkerchief, polishing the counter, then taking stock of the books still in boxes at the back of the shop. Every once in a while, she would take my hand and lead me down an aisle. Then, she would let go, and I would feel deflated, as if her very touch was a source of energy.
Opening up a new box, we found new editions of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I ran my fingers over the covers and sighed deeply. “I’ve never read him,” she admitted.
I picked up a copy and handed it to her. “Start tonight,” I said.
“Look around. There is so much work to do. Top to bottom, the store needs—”
“I’ll help. We will work until Libreria Flories is in good shape again. I’ll go get some food, and in the meantime, Verne,” I said, tapping the book in her hand.
I left her in the store in search of food to bring. A little box of olives, some jamón serrano, and a bottle of wine were easily procured at a shop around the corner. When I returned, she was flipping through my notebook.
“That’s mine,” I said.
“It’s empty.” Juana was right. I had never used the notebook my mother had given me. It seemed to me that I hadn’t quite found the right story to put into it, and the small book had become precious to me in a way I couldn’t explain.
“Even so,” I said. Juana shrugged and left my notebook alone. Then, she picked up a pair of scissors to cut open more boxes, careful not to tear into the books themselves.
“More atlases,” she sighed after attacking the first box, and gave the big books a slap, as if chastising them.
I motioned to the food. We ate with small plates on our laps. There were no napkins in the store, and it seemed we’d both forgotten our handkerchiefs that day, so we licked our fingers clean. I watched her cheeks turn red as she did so, which perhaps made me flush, too, I can’t be sure.
“Well,” Juana said, after finishing her last bite of food. “I should go.”
“Wait,” I said, but didn’t know what else to say. For the first time since the debacle with my stories, followed immediately by my father’s death, I felt light, happy even. I didn’t think it was the bookstore itself that caused the change, but the creature before me, who seemed as if she were in her element among the stacks. “Why won’t your father turn over the store to you?”
“A woman has no place in business,” she said in a booming voice, impersonating her father. She shook her skirt a little and pointed her toe.
“Other women manage stores,” I said, but Juana shrugged. I couldn’t simply hand her the key. What would be the point? Professor Flores would only take it from her. “The truth is, I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said.
“I know.”
“If you’d like, you can—”
Juana smiled and clasped her hands under her chin. “Yes. I would very much like to help. I have so many ideas,” she went on. “Little signs designating local authors. There are three of which I know. No more atlases, of course. How many different kinds does a store need? A section on Shakespeare, don’t you think? Children’s books, too . . . “ I followed her back to the store, listening long into the night to her flurry of words, watching her hands as they punctuated her speech. I didn’t take a single note, but I learned the patterns her gestures made, like birds in flight.
