““The girl said nothing, but after a moment she opened her eyes and he could see that they were still and very dark, and by the way she looked at him he knew she would be leaving very soon.” ”
There is a time in each man’s life, perhaps only a moment, when looking back he recognises that he was master of his small world, having found himself in the perfect position amongst those who loved and admired him. Don Carlos was reflecting upon his own moment of fleeting perfection, almost twenty years ago on the day in July he was due to be married and when all the various elements of his life had seemed engineered to direct him to a small church in the village of his future wife surrounded by her family and friends, when he was broken from his reminiscences by a commotion in the yard behind his house.
A girl had fallen from the sky and was lying amongst the artichoke plants, quite unconscious. It must have been a heavy fall as there was a broken branch from Don Carlos’s fig tree by her left arm and, looking up, he could see that there were other branches split or bent. The figs, which would not be ripe for many weeks, were lying with the girl amongst the artichokes, and he reminded himself to collect them later so the wasps wouldn’t break into them or flies infest the fruit with their eggs.
He carried the girl up in his arms, wary of any injuries she might have suffered on her fall from the sky. She weighed very little and he had no problem walking with her into the house where he placed her down to recover in the window seat that looked out to his neighbour’s garden. Then he closed the curtains so the sun wouldn’t be in her face, and he went back to his papers. There was a short article he had to write for his editor in Pamplona, but he struggled to regain his train of thought for his mind kept returning to that summer of his wedding. His wife had been a scientist and when he had first shown interest in her, explained how beautiful he found her and asked whether she would consider joining him for dinner one evening, she in turn had explained to him that if it was love he was after then he was barking up the wrong tree, for such things did not appeal to her. She admitted to him, almost with pride, that she did not know what love was. Without knowing it, in that simple phrase she had provoked a man like Don Carlos into loving her forever, for there was nothing he desired more than a challenge, especially one set by a beautiful woman. He could never have realised that, having decided to devote a lifetime in demonstrating to this woman what love could be, in the end it would be she who taught him that such romantic love did not exist but for in the souls of simple men like Don Carlos. Though of a good family and well educated, in many ways he was a peasant, and unsophisticated when it came to matters of the world and its practicalities. His mind was consumed with stories and images. Heroics taken from books were realities to him and ones he did his best to repeat in the daily events of his life, even if it was in such insignificant matters as saving a chick from drowning or helping an old woman with her chores. These small acts of generosity in his mind took on legendary importance for he had the idea that if everyone acted in such a way the world would be close to the heavens each child before he grows cynical imagines. But he had many fanciful ideas and this was just one.
The morning continued, and after an hour he had managed to write nearly a thousand words for the article. He looked up from his typewriter every so often to check on the girl, but she didn’t move. In the afternoon, as he waited for the water to boil in order to make his tea, which had become a habit now that he was older, he sat by her and examined her arms and legs for any blood or bruising. They were lean and elegant, these limbs, but as far as he could tell they were unscathed. To fall that far and not sustain even a bruise, he thought, she must be made of steel, and it astonished him that women in many ways were made so much stronger than men. To him it seemed that women such as his wife could bear a lifetime of insults and injuries and show not even the slightest hurt whereas a man like Don Carlos could be broken with a single word, if that word was said by the woman he loved. He recalled the words his wife had said to him during their marriage that had hurt him the deepest and found he could recall each one, but compliments he could think of only a single example. Very early in their courtship she had looked at him and told him he was beautiful, and it had stayed with him because no other woman had ever called him beautiful before. A man remembers a thing like that.
At eight the sun was sinking below the line of trees and so he opened the curtains and let in some air. It stirred the girl’s hair, and he saw how long her eyelashes were and how soft and delicate the skin around her mouth. He fetched a bowl of water and a cloth and began to dampen her face, hoping it might revive her. He cleaned each of her fingers carefully and dried them, before kneeling on the floor to wash her feet. The toes were narrow and short and perfectly white. When he was finished he peeled two oranges and began to feed the segments to her, chewing the fruit first and then placing the crushed pulp between her lips, as he had seen seabirds do on the beach when feeding fish to their young. Once it was dark, he made a bed for himself below the window seat and slept that night with his hand enclosing hers, so he would notice any sign of movement when she woke. But by morning she was still asleep and there had been no change in her condition.
As he watched her while he drank his morning coffee, Don Carlos recalled his wife. He had slept poorly on the improvised bed on the floor and he was still half asleep, he supposed, because before he could resist it he had pictured his wife dying in her bed and the memory was so painful he decided he could not spend another hour in the house where so many ghosts competed for his attentions. He had wasted enough years in the dark writing, he told himself. He must be out in the sunshine. A day outside would refresh his blood. A man can only spend so much time alone with his stories before he forgets how to be a man at all, and despite the appearance he sometimes projected of a solitary man, Don Carlos loved people and their habits. There was nothing more he enjoyed than a day amongst them, hearing their complaints and observations. Knowing he did not have to live with them helped, of course, according him a patience the wives and husbands, brothers, uncles and mothers of these strangers could never own, for they had heard the same complaints too many times to care. He went to his neighbour, Torres, who had once been a famous magistrate in Madrid but was now happy cultivating a peach orchard he said would one day be the pride of Navarra, and asked him to look in on the girl every two hours to see that she was unchanged, while he drove to the city to deliver the article by hand to his publisher.
‘Si se despierta, llama por favor a mi editor. Estaré con él toda la tarde,’ he said, and he wrote down his publisher’s number on a piece of paper on his desk.
Torres said that he would be sure to call if there was any change in the girl.
‘Pero…¿quién es ella?’ the old magistrate asked. ‘¿De dónde vino?’
She came from the sky, was all Don Carlos replied, pointing to his broken fig tree. Seeing it, Torres nodded and said nothing more, for he was an old man who had lived and experienced many things and he could see for himself what had happened.
Don Carlos was glad when he was finally on the road to Pamplona, glad of the air and of the warmth of the sunshine on his bare neck. The day in the city proved to be short and full of incident and when Don Carlos arrived home he had almost forgotten about his guest until he walked in through the door and an abundant sweet aroma struck him, as thick as a dew. He was used to such smells. The orchards of his neighbour were indeed as rich and productive as Torres claimed, and their scents often filled Don Carlos’s house; peaches and nectarines from May to June, figs and plums in August. In summer the almonds would ripen and the bitter smell would seep into Don Carlos’s rooms like an intoxicating fever, until he could sense the same bitterness on his own skin as he lay sweating in the night.
This present smell was unfamiliar to him. He wondered if Torres was such a magician that he had made raspberries grow in Mélida. When he arrived in his study the girl was sitting upright in the window. Her eyes were closed but he could see that she was awake and quite alert. Don Carlos moved to the desk and put down his hat, placed the slim leather satchel that his wife had bought him on his thirtieth birthday in the bottom drawer. All of this he did with quiet, deft movements so as not to alarm the girl. Then he went to the kitchen and took two of the peaches Torres had left out for him and carried them to the window, placing one next to the girl. The other he cut open with a small knife and he began to eat the flesh, which was very moist and very sweet.
The girl said nothing, but after a moment she opened her eyes and he could see that they were still and very dark, and by the way she looked at him he knew she would be leaving very soon. He got to his feet and collected the satchel from the desk and took it to the kitchen where he began to fill it with fresh fruit from Torres’s orchard. When he returned, the girl was biting into the peach he had given her. He saw that her teeth were as small and perfect as her toes, her fingers. He wondered if this girl could see that he had once been a man with his own perfect kingdom and a woman who had desired him or whether she saw only an ageing writer whose face was red with the sun. As she climbed to her feet he wanted to tell her that he knew his stories were only that: stories. He wanted to explain that he had known and loved a woman in the true sense, that he had adored her for what she was and not some romantic notion of a woman, but a woman of flesh and bone with flaws and cruel thoughts and anger and jealousies like any other women, feelings that sometimes overwhelmed her. But that he had chosen her to love because hers were flaws he could understand and had even found beautiful, no matter whether she had believed him or not.
The girl finished the peach and once she was at the door he felt a sudden panic overtake him, as though soon he would never again have the chance to explain himself. He rushed outside with the thought that if she could just stay another minute he might find a way to prove to her the fine feelings he had, to show how noble even a fool’s heart could be. But the girl was already above the fig tree, her slim pale feet grazing the topmost leaves. She had forgotten to take the satchel of fruit he had packed for her, and he held it in his hand aimlessly as she moved steadily away from him, growing smaller in the sky until he could not identify her from the specks of pollen in the air above his neighbour’s orchards.
He could easily have imagined she had never existed were it not for the sweet aroma that lingered in the study when he returned out of the sun. And there was a fresh leaf of paper in the typewriter that he knew he had left empty before his trip to the city. Taking it out he read it and he was not ashamed to tell Torres later, when they were drinking in the other man’s garden, admiring the sunlight in the peach branches, that he cried like a boy at the words she had left him. They were the words his wife had told him those years ago in Badostáin, the night before they were married:
‘Una vez dije que no sabía lo que era el amor, pero supe que me había enamorado de tí incluso antes de haberte conocido. Eso es lo bonito del amor: no tiene sentido, y algo que no tiene sentido, no puede tener fin. Es tan imposible como el tiempo. ’
‘I once said I did not know what love was, but I knew that I had fallen in love with you before I had even met you. And that is the beauty of love. For it has no sense, and a thing that has no sense can have no end. It is as impossible as time.’
Torres nodded and smiled. He did not ask to see the paper the girl had typed, for he knew that old men often have a need to believe in things that are not true, especially artists like Don Carlos. He did not mention that Don Carlos’s fig tree had been ailing for some time so it was not unexpected that its branches should begin to snap, nor that when he had entered the house earlier there was no sign of the girl his neighbour described. He merely listened to his friend as he spoke of his visitor, and occasionally he would lean over and pour more wine and smile, because sometime that was all expected from a friend, he reasoned. After all, who was to say that tomorrow it would not be his house that smelled of orange blossom, and that a girl might happen to fall from the sky and remind him that he, Torres, was once loved and admired. And if he were lucky enough for it to happen, he asked himself, then what reason would another man have to shatter a dream when the world was in dire need of such rare magic?