10
The following morning, before Isabella woke up, I walked over to her family’s grocery shop on Calle Mirallers. It was just getting light and the security grille over the shop door was only half open. I slipped inside and found a couple of young boys piling up boxes of tea and other goods on the counter.
‘We’re closed,’ one of them said.
‘Well, you don’t look closed. Go and fetch the owner.’
While I waited, I kept myself busy by examining the family emporium of the ungrateful heiress Isabella, who in her infinite innocence had turned her back on the ambrosia of commerce to prostrate herself before the miseries of literature. The shop was a small bazaar full of marvels brought from every corner of the world. Jams, sweets and teas. Coffees, spices and tinned food. Fruit and cured meats. Chocolates and smoked ham. A Pantagruelian paradise for well-lined pockets. Don Odón, the girl’s father and manager of the establishment, appeared shortly afterwards wearing a blue overall, a marshal’s moustache and an expression of alarm that seemed to herald a heart attack at any moment. I decided to skip the pleasantries.
‘Your daughter says you have a double-barrelled shotgun with which you have sworn to kill me,’ I said, stretching my arms out to the sides. ‘Well, here I am.’
‘Who are you, you scoundrel?’
‘I’m the scoundrel who’s had to take in a young girl because her pathetic father was unable to keep her under control.’
The shopkeeper’s angry expression disappeared and was replaced with a faint-hearted smile.
‘Se?or Martín? I didn’t recognise you . . . How is my child?’
I sighed.
‘Your child is safe and sound in my house, snoring like a mastiff, but with her honour and virtue intact.’
The shopkeeper crossed himself twice, much relieved.
‘God bless you.’
‘Thank you very much, but in the meantime I’m going to ask you to come and collect her today without fail, otherwise I’ll smash your face in, shotgun or no shotgun.’
‘Shotgun?’ the shopkeeper mumbled in confusion.
His wife, a small nervous-looking woman, was spying on us from behind the curtain that concealed the back room. Something told me there would be no shots fired here. Don Odón huffed and puffed and looked as if he was on the point of collapse.
‘Nothing would please me more, Se?or Martín. But the girl doesn’t want to be here,’ he argued, devastated.
When I realised the shopkeeper was not the rogue Isabella had painted him as, I was sorry for the way I’d spoken.
‘You haven’t thrown her out of your house?’
Don Odón opened his eyes wide and looked hurt. His wife stepped forward and took her husband’s hand.
‘We had an argument,’ he said. ‘Things were said that shouldn’t have been said, on both sides. But that girl has such a temper, you wouldn’t believe it . . . She threatened to leave us and said she’d never come back. Her saintly mother nearly passed away from the palpitations. I shouted at her and said I’d stick her in a convent.’
‘An infallible argument when reasoning with a seventeen-year-old girl,’ I pointed out.
‘It was the first thing that came to mind,’ the shopkeeper argued. ‘As if I would put her in a convent!’
‘From what I’ve seen, you’d need the help of a whole regiment of infantry.’
‘I don’t know what that girl has told you, Se?or Martín, but you mustn’t believe her. We might not be very refined, but we’re not monsters either. I don’t know how to deal with her any more. I’m not the type of man who would pull out a belt and give her forty lashes. And my missus here daren’t even shout at the cat. I don’t know where the girl gets it from. I think it’s all that reading. Mind you, the nuns did warn us. And my father, God rest his soul, used to say it too: the day women are allowed to learn to read and write, the world will become ungovernable.’
‘A deep thinker, your father, but that doesn’t solve your problem or mine.’
‘What can we do? Isabella doesn’t want to be with us, Se?or Martín. She says we’re dim and we don’t understand her; she says we want to bury her in this shop . . . There’s nothing I’d like more than to understand her. I’ve worked in this shop since I was seven years old, from dawn to dusk, and the only thing I understand is that the world is a nasty place with no consideration for a young girl who has her head in the clouds,’ the shopkeeper explained, leaning on a barrel. ‘My greatest fear is that, if I force her to return, she might really run away and fall into the hands of any old . . . I don’t even want to think about it.’
‘It’s true,’ his wife said, with a slight Italian accent. ‘Believe me, the girl has broken our hearts, but this is not the first time she’s gone away. She’s turned out just like my mother, who had a Neapolitan temperament . . .’
‘Oh, la mamma,’ said Don Odón, shuddering even at the memory of his mother-in-law.
‘When she told us she was going to stay at your house for a few days while she helped you with your work, well, we felt reassured,’ Isabella’s mother went on, ‘because we know you’re a good person and basically the girl is nearby, only two streets away. We’re sure you’ll be able to convince her to return.’
I wondered what Isabella had told them about me to persuade them that yours truly could walk on water.
‘Only last night, just round the corner from here, two labourers on their way home were given a terrible beating. Imagine! It seems they were battered with an iron pole, smashed to bits like dogs. One of them might not survive, and it looks like the other one will be crippled for life,’ said the mother. ‘What sort of world are we living in?’
Don Odón gave me a worried look.
‘If I go and fetch her, she’ll leave again. And this time I don’t know whether she’ll end up with someone like you. It’s not right for a young girl to live in a bachelor’s house, but at least you’re honest and will know how to take care of her.’
The shopkeeper looked as if he was about to cry. I would have preferred it if he’d rushed off to fetch the gun. There was still the chance that some Neapolitan cousin might turn up, armed with a blunderbuss, to save the girl’s honour. Porca miseria.
‘Do I have your word that you’ll look after her for me until she comes to her senses?’
I grunted. ‘You have my word.’
I returned home laden with superb delicacies which Don Odón and his wife had insisted on foisting on me. I promised them I’d take care of Isabella for a few days, until she agreed to reason things out and understand that her place was with her family. The shopkeepers wanted to pay me for her keep, but I refused. My plan was that, before the week was up, Isabella would be back sleeping in her own home, even if, to achieve that, I had to keep up the pretence that she was my assistant. Taller towers had toppled.
When I got home I found her sitting at the kitchen table. She had washed all the dishes from the night before, had made coffee and had dressed and styled her hair so that she resembled a saint in a religious picture. Isabella, who was no fool, knew perfectly well where I’d been and looked at me like an abandoned dog, smiling meekly. I left the bags with the delicacies from Don Odón by the sink.
‘Didn’t my father shoot you with his gun?’
‘He’d run out of bullets and decided to throw all these pots of jam and Manchego cheese at me instead.’
Isabella pressed her lips together, trying to look serious.
‘So the name Isabella comes from your grandmother?’
‘La mamma,’ she confirmed. ‘In the area they called her Vesuvia.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘They say I’m a bit like her. When it comes to persistence.’
There was no need for a judge to pronounce on that, I thought.
‘Your parents are good folk, Isabella. They don’t misunderstand you any more than you misunderstand them.’
The girl didn’t say anything. She poured me a cup of coffee and waited for the verdict. I had two options: throw her out and give the two shopkeepers a fit; or be bold and patient for two or three more days. I imagined that forty-eight hours of my most cynical and cutting performance would be enough to break the iron determination of the young girl and send her, on her knees, back to her mother’s apron strings, begging for forgiveness and full board.
‘You can stay here for the time being—’
‘Thank you!’
‘Not so fast. You can stay here under the following conditions: one, that you go and spend some time in the shop every day, to say hello to your parents and tell them you’re well; and two, that you obey me and follow the rules of this house.’
It sounded patriarchal but excessively faint-hearted. I maintained my austere expression and decided to make my tone more severe.
‘What are the rules of this house?’ Isabella enquired.
‘Basically, whatever I damn well please.’
‘Sounds fair.’
‘It’s a deal, then.’
Isabella came round the table and hugged me gratefully. I felt the warmth and the firm shape of her seventeen-year-old body against mine. I pushed her away delicately, keeping my distance.
‘The first rule is that this is not Little Women and we don’t hug one another or burst into tears at the slightest thing.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘That will be the motto on which we’ll build our coexistence: whatever I say.’
Isabella laughed and rushed off into the corridor.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘To tidy up your study. You don’t mean to leave it like that, do you?’