The Secret Life of Shakespeareans

Soledad Puértolas

translated by Rosalind Harvey

I’m a man surrounded by Shakespeareans. My sister Julia, who is a couple of years older than me, studied English language and literature. She was in love with the language of Shakespeare and, not surprisingly, she then fell in love with Shakespeare, which, together with her obvious natural attributes, prompted the group of Shakespeareans – which wasn’t small – to fall en masse in love with her. As a result, a tightly bunched rosary of boyfriends passed through her hands, and an endless string of suitors filed through our house, some with more flair than others.

I never got along with my sister’s boyfriends, not so much for being Shakespeareans, but because of their qualities as boyfriends. The least clumsy of them was far too shifty; the quiet one, whom you never knew how to speak to, was as irritating as the chatterbox, whom you could never get rid of.

Once she finished university, Julia didn’t marry any of them. Her eyes had fallen upon an economist, a young man who read only in moderation. Essays, if anything. Never novels, let alone plays. But Shakespeare’s presence in our family life did not cease, due not just to Julia’s constant mentioning of him, marking out her conversation with lines from his plays – particularly his lesser-known ones, just to intimidate us – but also to the simple tendency my sister had to turn her life into a stage play. She had of course been born with this trait, but no one doubted that Shakespeare had contributed enormously to its development.

Julia and Marco got married, had two children, and seem like a well-matched couple. We all get on well with Marco. He’s a consultant for a large firm and his task, as far as I can tell, consists of improving product sales. Something to do with efficiency and the company’s image, I think. Anyway, the thing is, he travels a lot, he’s been to almost every country in the world.

When we talk to Marco about news from wars that seem a long way off, he gives us new facts. He knows this city, that region, he tells us something about them, the food, the smells, anything. Not just wars and catastrophes: his comments might also allude to happy events. But we all know what the news is like – it doesn’t relay a huge amount of happiness.

Sometimes, Julia and I both show up at our parents’ house for dinner. The time when it was just the two of us with them around the dining-room table, and our bedrooms, mine and Julia’s, were each on one side of the hall, is long gone, but we are the same: the same parents, the same son and daughter. Just like always, but after a period of time. The two of us speaking much more than they do, now. The two of them looking at us much more than they ever have done. With curiosity, with an awareness of a certain distance, conscious they will never fully know us. Accepting it, perhaps eagerly, as if shrugging off a weight.

One of these nights, after eating, we settled down in the living room to slowly drink our coffee. Our parents had both put their heads back and closed their eyes. They dozed. On the TV, we’d just watched images of houses destroyed by bombs, columns of smoke, men crawling through the dust, among the wreckage, gunshots.

‘Aleppo,’ Julia murmured. ‘We were there five years ago. That was when I used to go with Marco on quite a few of his trips. I used to enjoy it. The firms Marco did business with sorted everything out for us. They put us up in five-star hotels and there was always a car with a driver for me to use, and a guide to show me around the monuments and other interesting places in the cities. I had lots of spare time but I never got bored. I liked the hotel restaurants. I liked watching the other travellers. A strange thing happened to me in Aleppo.’

I made a mental note of everything Julia told me. Like the excellent amateur actress she is, she has a real knack for telling stories. She knows I like listening to her and that I often use the anecdotes she tells me in my novels, transformed, put into someone else’s mouth. Before she begins, she usually says to me: ‘This might interest you, you’ll figure out the best way to use it.’

Later that evening, I wrote down what Julia had told me (and dramatised, too) at our parents’ house. I hardly changed a thing. I liked it just as it had happened. This is her story.

The driver left me in front of one of the gates to the bazaar in Aleppo and, while I waited for him (I don’t know if he had gone to park the four-by-four somewhere else or whether he had to do something, get money from the bank or an ATM or buy tobacco, I can’t remember), I went into a shop whose little window display was full of fine scarves in all the colours of the rainbow. Up above, and to both sides of the door, hung more scarves like the others. Scarves of every size, made from silk, from very fine wool, from cotton. The breeze filled them up and blew them to and fro. It was impossible to resist the temptation to go into the shop. I rang the driver – he was guide and driver in one – and he agreed to come and meet me in the shop right away.

I lost myself among all those scarves. When the guide turned up, the owner of the shop, a charming man with a white beard, a djellaba and a crimson-coloured fez, was still making up the parcels.

Since we planned to take a good long look around the bazaar, the guide asked the shopkeeper to look after the bag with the scarves for me so I could walk round with my hands free, essential in a bazaar where there’s so much to see, to poke about in, to touch. He agreed happily, as far as we could tell from the great big smile he gave us. He stood in the doorway to the shop, looking around with satisfaction.

When I emerged from the bazaar, one or two hours later – an indeterminate amount of time, as labyrinthine and repetitive as the hours spent on a stage – I felt so exhausted I almost forgot about the scarves being held for me in the shop. My guide didn’t, though. To him, my confusion made sense.

‘It’s true, bazaars make you dizzy,’ he said. ‘Your thoughts go all over the place, some go and others come in their place. It’s a healthy movement,’ he said. ‘It’s life.’

I felt something very special, as if I were in a play, something I had sensed a few hours earlier, in the same shop at the entrance to the bazaar, as I got lost among the colours, sizes and textures of the scarves. Absorbed in a reality that made me desire everything and doubt everything at once, and which emptied me out of my previous life, of the connections in it, of the trip itself and my role in it. I existed there like I had never existed anywhere else. I was touching something unique, transcendent. Something that went beyond life.

And so we went back to the shop with the scarves. The man with the crimson fez and the leathery skin handed us the bag and said goodbye again from the entrance to the shop, leaning against the doorway, encircled by a crown of scarves swollen in the wind like sails, happy and full.

Back at the hotel, I left the packages in my room, freshened up a little and went down to eat in the restaurant. Then I fell asleep. Later that evening, I took the packages out of the bag and opened them. In one of the bundles, instead of one silk scarf, there were two. Exactly the same. Clinging to each other. Duplicated. A mistake. Or was it?

That night, over dinner, I mentioned it to Marco. How could it be that an old Syrian shopkeeper whose premises backed on to one of the most ancient bazaars in the world had made a mistake?

‘It’s because he wants you to go back. It’s a sort of test,’ Marco said, jokingly, knowing full well that this was exactly what I wanted to hear.

I decided that it wasn’t my place to teach anyone a lesson, still less an old shopkeeper from Aleppo. I would go back to the shop, buy another silk scarf, show him I knew when to keep my mouth shut, that I’d come back to set something right, if he wanted to do so, that is.

I gave no explanation to the guide. All I said was that I wanted to return to the shop, which didn’t surprise him. He smiled, and nodded his head, as if saying to himself, ‘Yes, I knew it, I knew we’d go back.’

Once again I was in the shop. A sunny morning. The wind was blowing; the scarves fluttered.

The old man wasn’t surprised to see me. Once again he showed me some scarves, opening drawers, sliding display trays out, unfolding pieces of cloth.

‘This is the finest shawl of them all,’ he said, placing his wrinkled, bony hand on a piece of cashmere fabric in pinkish hues.

Then, he moved his hand to his neck, just below his chin.

‘This is where the wool is at its finest. There’s nothing softer.’

I asked him the price, which seemed to me exorbitant.

‘You won’t find a shawl like this anywhere else,’ he said, or at least I thought I understood.

I bought it – how could I not? Why had I gone back to the shop, otherwise?

It was the last purchase I made on that trip.

Nevertheless, this incomparable shawl got ruined. Someone (maybe one of the maids who came to clean the house and who generally, more than any other job, used to like doing the laundry) put it in the washing machine. The shawl shrunk, the fabric grew tight and became matted, the edges curled slightly, the pink tones lost something of their delicate contrast.

The best shawl that the old shopkeeper from Aleppo could offer me, bought on my second visit to his shop, after having found among my purchases one handkerchief too many.

A question arose, of course: was the shawl that exceptional? It shouldn’t have been put in the washing machine, naturally, but was it really extraordinary, unique? Was it worth the high price I had paid for it?

It was a real anecdote, and I tried to respect it just as it was. I carried it inside me; I’d find out soon enough what I might do with it. It was too closely linked to my sister to attribute it, unaltered, to another character.

One day, I run into Ignacio Gil, one of those Shakespearean boyfriends of Julia’s who had trooped unsuccessfully through our house. Of them all, he had perhaps been the best. Very modest, profoundly shy, somewhat evasive. He had become a renowned specialist on Shakespeare.

We have a coffee in a nearby bar and, without letting me get a word in edgeways (not that I would have known what to say), he launches into a long and tedious speech on the question of Shakespeare’s identity. He does not put the man’s identity into question, what interests him is why so many doubts have arisen, why people have tried so hard to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare but someone else, a Bacon, an Earl of Oxford, a Lady So-and-So.

Later on, after countless theories about one or another aspect of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, he asks me about my sister. Wanting to make the most of it being my turn, and because I enjoyed the anecdote and felt like telling it, I slowly string out the story of Julia and the scarves of Aleppo, the cashmere shawl, the shopkeeper with his crimson-coloured fez.

Ignacio Gil listens very closely, fervently, I would say, as if he doesn’t want to miss a single detail, which makes me drag my tale out, making it longer, although I do try to stick to the story. When I finish, Ignacio Gil looks at me with a strange expression, as if he’d had a vision, a vision of the very same bazaar in Aleppo or the shop with the silk scarves. Then he asks me for my phone number, which he stores in his mobile phone. He gives me his and watches, silently, as I type it in.

It’s very hot out in the street and we move away from each other with scarcely another word. I can’t stop wondering why he suddenly went so quiet, why he made not a single comment about Julia’s anecdote.

Two days later, he calls me. In truth, I’m not surprised.

We’ve arranged to meet on the terrace outside a bar. It’s nine o’clock at night. The heat persists, but there is a gentle breeze, not exactly cool, but not boiling hot, either.

I arrive punctually. I don’t mind waiting. This is when my mind is at its busiest. I take my Moleskine from my pocket and assume the exact appearance of a writer with no time to waste. I see Ignacio Gil approaching between the tables. He’s very pale. We all are, those of us who don’t have swimming pools, who spend this first month of the summer partly shut up in our houses and offices. But Ignacio Gil’s paleness is something else. He has a panicked expression on his face.

‘It’s a disaster!’ he says, almost before sitting down, without even saying hello. ‘Look at my hair.’

I look at his head, the dark brown hair. Artificial, obviously dyed.

‘I just don’t know how I let myself be talked into it,’ he says. ‘It was my daughter Ana’s idea. It was a stupid thing to do. A man like me with his hair dyed… how could I let something like this happen? But Ana insisted. According to her, the colour will fade with time, the more I wash it, and it’ll end up perfect, although I don’t know when. I’ve washed my hair about ten times and it’s still black, as you can see. It’s totally ridiculous, it’s inappropriate. I’m so embarrassed.’

‘Plenty of men dye their hair,’ I tell him. ‘No one’s shocked by that nowadays. And anyway, the colour will fade, sooner or later. It’s a matter of time.’

‘I have to accept it, I know – I’ve got old,’ Ignacio says. ‘I suppose that’s what the problem is.’

The waiter comes over. Ignacio Gil orders a beer. He sighs. In the slightly hushed tone used for secrets, he says:

‘What you told me the other day about your sister, that thing that happened to her in that city, Aleppo, I’ve been thinking about it – do you believe in symbols? I don’t know, it seemed like a really symbolic story to me. What do they represent, the two silk scarves? And the ruined shawl that cost an exorbitant amount? And the old man with the maroon fez? What role does he play in the story? Was he the one who pulled the strings or was it controlled from higher up, from who knows where?’

‘It’s something that happened,’ I say, ‘something real. It sounds poetic, magical, even, when it’s told as a story.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, not very convinced. ‘Does Julia tell you lots of things? That’s a stroke of luck, isn’t it? Being a writer and having people tell you things you then go on to tell. What about Julia? How is she? The two of you are pretty close, aren’t you? Anyway, I don’t know, the story about the silk scarves really affected me. Time suddenly closed in on me, I don’t know why. I felt very old, like I was already on life’s edge. It was like a pang of nostalgia, who knows, nostalgia for my lost youth. You can’t go back, you just can’t. Your sister feeling doubtful as she looked at those two scarves, I liked that, I really did. I’m like that too, I never know what to do. I don’t know what I would have done in her place; maybe I would have gone back too, like she did, gone back to the shop and bought something else, just to pretend nothing had happened, so as not to feel guilty. I understand her, I do, I understand why she did what she did. That’s what moved me, as if that ability, to understand someone, was something that suddenly revealed itself to me, something being resurrected. It had left me and it came back. That’s why I was moved, but moved with a really sad emotion, a kind of anguish. That was when Ana appeared, and started talking to me about dying my hair. She’d been telling me to do it for ages. “You can’t put it off any longer, Dad,” she said. I couldn’t say no. I had to do something, I felt awful.’

‘You can’t really tell,’ I said, lying. ‘You just look a bit paler. When I saw you, I thought something had happened to you. It’s done now, don’t take it so seriously.’

‘I can’t fix it, I’m too ashamed,’ he says. ‘As soon as I see someone I tell them, I want to get in there before they say anything, I want them to know I’m aware of the mistake, that I’m embarrassed.’

‘You could always shave your head,’ I say, thinking that this, in his place, is what I would do, although I can’t imagine myself in his place at all.

The fact is that Ignacio Gil’s remorse touched me. I could see him walking down the corridors of the Faculty of Philosophy, where he teaches, giving explanations for his hair left, right and centre. He would rather get in there first, make a statement, than have to make an embarrassing confession; like the child who, after committing some small crime, fears being discovered and announces his innocence prematurely, suspiciously. I understood him, just as he understood Julia when, after seeing the two silk scarves in her hotel room, she went back to the shop.

Beneath all this is what matters. It was the anecdote about the scarves in Aleppo that led Ignacio Gil to dye his hair.

‘There’s nothing interesting in my life,’ he says, in a tiny little voice. ‘I have a friend, Gerardo, who’s had lots of adventures, some very odd things have happened to him, incredible things. The next time you and I meet up, if you’ve got time, I’ll tell you some of these stories, you could write a novel with them, several novels even.’

‘I’m not an epic writer, Ignacio,’ I say. ‘I’m more interested in the subject of your hair.’

He looked at me, his eyes very wide in the middle of his white face, probably convinced I was teasing him.

I told my sister about my encounters with her old Shakespearean boyfriend. One of them. The best, without a doubt.

‘Why do you think he rang me?’ I asked her.

‘He probably wants to be your friend. Maybe he feels lonely.’

‘It’s because of you,’ I said. ‘All that stuff about dying his hair after I talked to him about you, well – it’s pretty obvious, his memory of you stirred something up, he wanted to be young again. You’d better watch out, any day now you’ll run into him and he’ll try and ask you out again.’

‘He always was quite an elusive guy,’ Julia said. ‘But not totally elusive, not totally… I might have been more elusive than he was. I never thought he’d end up becoming a scholar. He’s an authority on Shakespeare. I didn’t see that coming.’

The thing is, Ignacio Gil doesn’t call me again. It’s not that I miss him, but in a way, his story, the one about the dyed hair, had interested me and probably his relationship with my sister had, too.

In the middle of summer, sitting out on the terrace of a bar, my Moleskine on the table and my head empty, or too full, but of heavy, useless things, I slide my finger over the screen of my mobile phone. Ignacio Gil.

‘How’s the hair?’ I ask.

‘Oh, the hair, yeah, much better! I’ll call you back, I’m driving.’

He hangs up and calls me back a minute later.

‘Where are you?’ he asks. ‘I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

It’s curious, but as I wait for Ignacio Gil – slightly longer than ten minutes – I have the impression I’m waiting for a great friend, someone I really trust.

He’s not so pale any more. His hair isn’t completely black, it has a more muted tone, more matt. Ignacio Gil is looking good. He looks younger. If I told him this, he’d be pleased, but I don’t. I don’t really know why, but I keep quiet. In any case, he already seems pretty pleased.

‘You haven’t left either,’ he says. ‘This city is great in the summer. I’m so happy I stayed. Laura and the kids are at the beach, but I have to finish off a translation.’

‘Shakespeare?’

‘Of course. It’s never-ending, you can always improve it.’

‘Have you been thinking about the Aleppo scarves, about everything that happened to Julia and that you thought was so symbolic?’

He smiles with forced indifference, and shakes his head.

‘Occupational hazard,’ he says. ‘We students of literature are always looking for symbols in everything.’

‘The most interesting thing about that anecdote,’ I say, ‘is Julia herself. Her doubts, her suspicions, the decisions she makes, perhaps the wrong ones.’

He looks vague. He might agree with me, he might not. It doesn’t matter. It’s ancient history now. He’s tied up in other matters. Shakespeare again, those kings out of context, those improbable scenarios, those exaggerated passions, those manipulators, so evil, or the professional scroungers, the cynics, the egotists, that capacity of Shakespeare’s to go from one to the other, casting a net of captivating lines that is hoisted higher and higher. Ignacio Gil is, without a doubt, at his peak as an orator, as an academic lecturer. Occasionally, there is a phrase in English that he intones slowly, accompanied by gestures. He raises his arms up a little, separating his hands, and traces a circle in the air, a magnificent sphere that encompasses everything.

He has cast a net out towards me, his own net of words, interlaced on top of Shakespeare’s words, but I am an experienced observer. Ignacio Gil is euphoric, that’s what matters.

I say goodbye, but he stays where he is. He’s not in a hurry, he says. He’s on his own in Madrid. He’ll have a drink somewhere and then go home and work some more. A long night of intense work awaits him.

I could have told him that I’m on my own in Madrid too, suggest we have a drink together, but I know that Ignacio Gil would carry on talking about Shakespeare, would hardly let me speak, that the night would be for him, for his monologue.

It’s then that I realise Ignacio Gil hasn’t asked me about Julia.

Maybe I’ll leave Madrid. I’m tired of this heat. The advantages of the empty city aren’t enough for me – not exactly empty, just with fewer people and less traffic – but I don’t know what I could do, with whom or where to go. I make a few phone calls. When I go to sleep – or try to – at around two in the morning, the blanket of heat seems to have dissolved and an almost-magical, soft breeze is blowing, incredibly fragile and destined, without a doubt, for a very fleeting life. I now have some kind of prospect, a journey to the north in the company of another solitary traveller.

My parents are still in Madrid. A few years ago they installed air conditioning in their seventh-floor apartment, at the very top of the building. They don’t mind, they say, staying in the city for all of August. You can’t go anywhere in August. The hotels are full, the beaches overflowing. They wait until September. They spend a fortnight in a hotel. They always choose the south, Almería or Cádiz. Portugal, occasionally. They go with another married couple, my mother’s younger brother and his wife. They have a lovely time. They argue a little about the quality of the wine they order with their meals. My mother’s younger brother and his wife have become very demanding and order expensive wines, which upsets my parents’ budget. They try to negotiate, to reach an agreement. OK, we’ll spend a little more on the wine for you guys. In return, let’s visit some churches today. My father’s passion: little shrines in secluded mountain gullies, ancient, enigmatic constructions of brick, who knows what they hold or what was made there, ruins in the middle of the countryside. Visiting churches includes all this.

I call my mother and tell her to expect me at dinner.

‘I think I’ll leave tomorrow,’ I say. ‘I’ll come and say goodbye first.’

I spend the morning writing. That is, having breakfast, reading the paper, showering, drinking coffee, walking around the house, sitting in front of my computer, getting up, checking my emails, checking something on the internet.

I decide to walk to my parents’ house. I take the shady side of the street. The breeze from last night, the fleeting one, is still fluttering, its life happily prolonged. I feel like leaving, losing sight of this city for a few days, leaving aside my grand literary projects, my wandering around the house waiting for important calls, proposals, plaudits, prizes (oh God, sometimes I dream of prizes, too!). Swimming in the sea, in the freezing water of the north, where my friend has a house, gazing at the trees, the orchards, the vineyards, the parks, the gardens.

My mother opens the door. She looks very pleased to see me, as if rather than the five or six days that have passed since we saw each other, a whole year had gone by.

‘Where are you off to, then?’ she asks.

‘Galicia,’ I say. ‘I’m going with Adrian, to the house he has there. He couldn’t really be bothered to go, but it’s different when someone goes with you, we both warmed to the idea.’

The phone rings.

‘How nice, darling! What a lovely surprise!’ I hear my mother say. ‘Of course we’ll wait for you. Your brother’s here too, he’s just arrived, he’s off tomorrow. This is such a coincidence, now you two can see each other.’

My mother, evidently, is speaking to Julia. She puts down the phone and looks at us.

‘Julia is in Madrid. She got here this morning. She had to do something at the boys’ school, something about the curriculum there, I didn’t fully understand; anyway, the thing is she’s on her way, she’ll be here any minute. Now you two can see each other,’ she says again, the same phrase she ended her phone call with.

Julia has come to Madrid for a few hours and I’m still in Madrid, this is the only thing that matters to my mother. The rest is unimportant. My mother’s great joy comes from Julia and I seeing each other, sitting together around the dining room table under her satisfied gaze, as if the two of us being there, by her side, were a guarantee of something, of some sort of continuity, beyond plans and personal wishes, something transcendent that will last forever.

‘Now you two can see each other,’ she repeats. A simple phrase, a kind of mantra.

I had my own mantra, made up of images: Ignacio Gil listening in fervent silence and with pensive, melancholy gaze to the story of the scarves of Aleppo; his pale face a few days later, in unnerving contrast to his dyed black hair, his shame and the nostalgia for his youth; the euphoria of yesterday, as he spoke about Shakespeare, not an atom of nostalgia by then, alone in the city abandoned for the summer, far from his wife and from his children. This, as a logical continuation of the story, was where Julia’s unexpected arrival slotted in.

Unexpected and fleeting. Julia turned up late, just as we were about to sit down at the table, and left immediately, not staying for coffee. She said she had lots of things to do. Errands, things that Marco and the kids had asked her to do, she had very little time. I felt like she was lying, that the voice she said all this in was not her own. Her voice, her eyes, her gestures, her smile, everything was different.