A Strange Visit

Before, she ate her lunch at a small table in the room adjoining the dining room, and now she was allowed to have lunch at the big table. During the conversations Leonor’s eyes wandered to the windows, searching for a patch of clear blue in a sky that had been covered entirely by clouds. It was going to rain, and she’d been waiting for this day for some time, because they had promised to take her on a visit to a house in the outskirts, where they had taken her only once before. A very tall man lived there, as if isolated from the world by his height. He was a friend of Leonor’s father and lived with his daughter, two housemaids, and a gardener in a little house that had a spiral staircase. In the garden was a miniature fountain with two entwined tritons that spewed water from a spout, a palm tree flattened against the house next door, and four rosebushes in double rows on either side of the path. Elena had jet-black hair, but her face was so pale it looked almost erased; all that remained was the white bow in her hair and a dress with five pleats that caught Leonor’s eye.

They explored the house with all its nooks and crannies. They went up to the roof, where you could see the lives of the neighboring houses in the clothing hung out to dry. They hid under the staircase and grew bored, since no one came looking for them. They peered in the window of the downstairs study where two men were talking, two men with the severe faces of their fathers, two gentlemen stifling in their serious stiff collars and the smell of cigars. Leonor, holding back her laughter, pressed her nose against the cold window. Her eyes moved across the landscape through a white curtain and past a statue of Diana the Huntress, to see as far as her father, who sat on a brown leather sofa. Leonor watched as he removed from his pocket the wide handkerchief he used to pat his forehead dry on very hot days, but it was cold in that room. Her father had not taken off his overcoat, but with the same gesture of drying his forehead on hot days, he wiped his face with the handkerchief up to the level of his eyes, where he kept it like someone crying. The sound of a sewing machine took over the house, making it a circle of silence, and one could barely hear the whimper that tears must make in order to burst through closed eyes. Elena’s father stood up and closed the blinds. After a while the voices grew as loud as before. Elena took the hand of Leonor, who was afraid, and they walked as far as the playroom as if they had been ordered to play—but they didn’t play. Elena gave her a little medallion that she dropped on the floor three times while taking it out of its box. They said goodbye without looking at each other, with a kiss that sought cheeks next to cheeks, a kiss in the air.

On the car ride home her father scolded her twice, and Leonor no longer believed that he had been crying. She saw his rough wrinkled forehead out of the corner of her eye, and she couldn’t reconcile the two images, one seen through the distant landscape of the curtain, the other so close, in a remote region where his bad mood took him, sitting in the driver’s seat.

Leonor thought of Elena. The table was filled with laughter during dessert. The sky grew darker and darker, and a thin rain like powdered sugar was falling. Leonor saw her father shake his head, and, knowing that they would not go to Elena’s house that evening, she felt a vast ocean like the one they taught her about on maps separating her from the face she wanted to reach, as it faded away before her: Elena’s.