In the years before his stroke, just how many times had her father told a woman he loved her after dating for two or three weeks? He said it to her cat the moment he set eyes on it, when she took it out of the carrier on one of her visits. ‘I love you, cat’. The word that most surprised her, when he first used it, shortly after becoming a widower, was ‘sweetheart’. He’d never called his wife that; their romantic language had matured with time, and he never employed any of their usual terms of endearment with anyone else. The women he began to date were ‘sweethearts’ from the start and he even used it to refer to Adriana on the phone. ‘How are you doing, sweetheart?’ ‘Hugs and kisses, sweetheart!’ She felt like one of his online partners and wondered how many hours he spent on his cell phone for it to become a habit to call even his daughter ‘sweetheart’.
During those years, her father had interminable conversations with women. Whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, and sometimes even nights were spent offloading the story of his life into the ears of these women, some of whom appeared on Meetic profiles with their heads cropped so they wouldn’t be recognized. In addition to ‘sweetheart’, there was the ‘This time I think I’ve found the one for me’. ‘What’s-her-name is a darling, I think she’s the one for me,’ he’d told Adriana on ten, twenty, thirty occasions, with the phone or computer at hand, ready to start a new conversation with the next headless woman. ‘Just in case,’ he always replied when she objected to the contradiction involved in saying he’d found the one for him and then immediately linking up with someone else.
What does ‘I love you’ mean? What did he mean by it? Soon those words, uttered as casually as you might say, ‘Take care of yourself’ or pinch the chubby cheeks of the neighbor’s baby, began to litter more intimate conversations. None of those online attachments had lasted: when he didn’t break things off with them, the women broke off with him. ‘Have you split up with Menganita?’ Adriana would ask. ‘Oh, don’t mention her! What a pain she was!’ he’d answer, or ‘What a busybody!’ or ‘That one? I’m better off without her’ or ‘We have almost nothing in common’ or even ‘She’s a simple-minded woman with little experience of life.’ And then there were the ‘We have nothing to talk about’ and the ‘I found her really boring’. But not long before, in a kind of shallow expression of devotion, he’d told those women he loved them. It wasn’t that he was intentionally lying; those I-love-yous expressed a hope, the possibility of loving that person in the future. The majority of them had played along, taking things just as lightly, as if by a certain age they’d become immune, or were harking back to old-fashioned ways of hooking up, when words of love functioned as common euphemisms for sexual encounters.
He’d started dating the middle-aged women he met on Meetic as a slightly befuddled way of ensuring old age wouldn’t find him alone, particularly when he was experiencing a sudden, happy, second youth. He had nineteen partners in four years; his ‘partners’ were anyone he’d been with for more than a month. That was part of his happiness. The story wasn’t that he was desperately seeking someone to be with and had tried nineteen times, but that he’d dated all those ‘girls’. He called them girls, a word that was totally juvenile, just like his own soul.
He waited a whole summer before cutting loose, the exact amount of time that Adriana spent with him in Valencia after her mother’s death. Her funeral had been held on July 9, under a scorching sun, and seeing him so vulnerable for the first time, she’d decided to stay until the end of September. Three depressing months of cloying Mediterranean humidity that they spent looking at photos and arranging for family members and her mother’s friends to come choose items of clothing. Well, in fact, she was the one dividing up belongings while her father was driving around the city on a Vespa at sunset, whenever there was a bit of a breeze. The only area he took charge of was organizing the paperwork during interminable mornings of bureaucracy. They each made a will to avoid problems if the other died. At night they went to some small beachfront chiringuito, although Adriana was irritated by the number of people the cruise ships had been disgorging in recent years into a city that, during her childhood and adolescence, hadn’t been on the tourism map. Back then, Malvarrosa had had a scruffy, dilapidated air she’d loved. But it had been a long time since the former spa hotel of Las Arenas, with all its simple elegance, was converted into a flashy beachside complex and the whole esplanade had become a succession of packed terrace bars serving mediocre food for guiris, as the foreign tourists were known, with sangria and loud, cheesy music.
The only thing her father did that summer was sign up on Meetic at the advice of a friend. He’d log on at night to chat for a while, but nothing more. No dates. He was still feeling too dazed by his widowhood and was seeking consolation in friends and his two older sisters, Asela and Piluca. They were retired, living in Santa Pola, near Alicante, and invited him to visit on weekends. Took him to lunch or dinner, or spent the day with him on the beach. Her father hated getting sand in his clothes and would stay in the chiringuito, watching the others take dips in the sea, roast in the sun, and apply high-protection sunscreen that left their skin as white as corpses. Adriana declined most of her aunts’ invitations. She’d figured one thing out: however much they wanted to, they were incapable of consoling one other, first because they each needed to grieve alone and then, more importantly, because the journey through mourning necessitated a common horizon, was a shared project, and that was impossible; she had her boring life as a PhD student with a scholarship at a Madrid university, and her father was throwing himself into, as they say, remaking his life, which implied meeting someone in a similar situation with the desire to confront the final stretch with company, as he definitely didn’t want to face that stage alone. The only way he could find meaning in things, in himself, was through sharing his days with a woman. He used to talk to her at great length about it, perhaps believing that doing so would ensure a positive outcome. His task now, he insisted, was to meet a sensible person, capable of commitment. The repetition left room for skepticism since what is taken as a given doesn’t need to be alluded to so frequently. And, in fact, her father didn’t take anything for granted; there was an underlying sense of doubt. She didn’t know if his misgivings stemmed from fear of not complying with his own plans, from not trusting them or himself, or from the fact that he simply hadn’t yet come to terms with the death of his wife.
The fun and games started in October. She was back in Madrid and her father began emailing her photos of the women he was flirting with or dating. ‘What do you think to this one?’ he’d ask. Then they both bought smartphones and downloaded WhatsApp so it was her cell phone rather than her Gmail inbox that was filled with images of women in their late fifties and early sixties. It was important to him that she give the thumbs-up to the person’s physique, not so much in terms of a slender figure, beautiful eyes, or gym-sculpted muscles, but something more subtle in the whole look, as if an infallible capacity for commitment – his obsession – could be inferred from an impeccable appearance.
The first woman he dated was Quela, a widow from Massanassa who owned orange orchards and gave Adriana a bracelet; in her free time, the woman made jewelry from pieces of wood, shells and zircon. She never saw her again because her father broke off the relationship after a few weeks, arguing that she had a jealous streak. Then came the slightly younger Araceli, who lived in Sagunto and was the spitting image of Jacqueline Kennedy. Her father broke off that too, this time because it was impossible to go out to restaurants with her – she hated all the dishes and hardly spoke a word. She was followed by Mari Carmen, Amparo, Roser and Delfina, all from Valencia, all blonde and standoffish, and none of whom lasted more than a month. They left him before he tired of them. For his next date, he went farther afield, to the home of a certain Nines in Castellón, where he planned to spend five days. Nines was a head taller than her father and twice his weight. In her photo, she looked on the large side, had dyed red hair and was wearing purple lipstick and eyeshadow. Nines, who was also widowed, introduced him to her children, made plans for his vacations, loaned him an SUV, and firmly believed that she’d found the man she wanted to end her days with. Somewhat overwhelmed, he soon set her straight on that point. And then she stalked him. When her father blocked her calls and emails, Nines found Adriana’s Facebook page and left messages for her: ‘Your father is the man for me’; ‘No woman could ever love him more than I do.’
Adriana was surprised that people in their sixties still had romantic illusions, that women with children and marriages behind them could believe it possible to be in love with someone after knowing them for five days. Or was it a kind of regression? Maybe desperation led them to unlearn, to deny everything experience had taught them. Was it possible not to learn anything? Maybe there was absolutely nothing to learn. That idea was spine-chilling. Or maybe it was just Nines; all the others had a more realistic sense of what love was. Usually, there was practicality on both sides: they were looking for company, friendship, but there was no form of passion or sentimentality involved, just a mutual checking out. Moreover, he tended to avoid what he called the ‘unbalanced’ ones: women who were over-the-top in some way, excessively bad-humored, excessively sporty, excessively sensitive. He had no regrets about dropping Nines, nor Lourdes, her successor, who said she was separated from her husband but still lived in the same house as him, and who then moved into her father’s apartment without ever being invited. One night, she cooked croquettes for him and her father got a bad stomachache. Adriana’s aunt Piluca called her immediately:
‘The woman is trying to poison him!’
That episode made him more cautious. He continued meeting all the Nurias, Cristinas, Ángeles, Lauras and Consuelos who were happy to have a beer with him, but if it went beyond that, he’d wait weeks before inviting them home. If he particularly liked the woman, he’d suggest a weekend in some nearby hotel.
Although he still kept her regularly updated on his connections, Adriana lost track. During her visits, she’d sit behind him at the computer to look at all those ‘beheadeds’, as she called them, although, in fact, as he explained, they were in the minority: he knew from experience that only the ones who were married or shy hid their faces, and he’d stopped dating them, which didn’t stop her from continuing to call them all ‘beheadeds’ just to bug him.
She wasn’t concerned about his juvenile lifestyle. He’d spent the last years diligently caring for his beloved, ailing wife, and before that, over thirty years taking orders from that same sergeant-major of a wife, with equal parts diligence and unconditional love. It had never occurred to him that he’d survive her. A constant source of irritation for Adriana, though, was the amount of money he was spending. In just a few months, he’d gone through his modest savings; sometimes he didn’t have enough to see him through the month and would have to ask one of his sisters for a loan. ‘What if something happens to you? You’ve got nothing to fall back on,’ Adriana began to say. ‘What if the air conditioning breaks down, or the television, or your car, or all of them give up the ghost at the same time?’ she’d protest at each visit. ‘When I win my case against Social Security and they pay my full pension, I’ll be more comfortable,’ he’d reply. ‘And I’ve cut down on a lot of expenses, but I need to find a partner.’ ‘And can’t these women pay their share? They have their own money. Fuck it, this is the twentieth century. Why do you have to come off all manly?’ Her father would shrug his shoulders, which for him was equivalent to an absolute refusal, even if he did know he was in the wrong. He was about to turn seventy and came from a generation where men had to pay to seduce, particularly on the first date. And that was the problem: he rarely got past the first date. When she reminded him of that, he’d be despondent because not only was he leaking money like water, but it was also confirmation of his advancing years.
The apartment had gradually become a labyrinth.
It was large, very old-fashioned, and cluttered with things inherited from her mother’s side of the family: tapestries, rugs, revolving bookcases, ceramicware from all around the peninsula, several boxes of antique silver cutlery, porcelain dinner services, huge crystal chandeliers, paintings, prints, African carvings, Lladró figurines, wall clocks, chairs, armchairs, occasional tables, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in three rooms containing the complete library of the only ancestor with intellectual pretensions, who died celibate, having accumulated enough culture for several generations. The whole place was an expression of horror vacui; it needed constant attention, which had formerly been provided by Teresa, who came to clean. Now, whenever Adriana happened to be there on one of her days, Teresa would take her aside to say, ‘Can’t you persuade your father to throw out some of the papers in his study? It’s impossible to tidy in there!’ Or, ‘Can’t you persuade him to clear out the attic, take the rugs to be cleaned, dust the chandeliers, to at least throw something out?’ Her father was having none of it. Adriana knew Teresa was wondering why she didn’t do it, why his daughter didn’t use her visits to bring a little order to the chaos. But she’d already thrown out enough stuff when her mother died, had spent whole months clearing the junk rooms, donating books to libraries, listing white elephants on Wallapop, until she’d had more than enough, and her aunts advised her that she shouldn’t go around cheerfully offloading things that, according to them, were very valuable. ‘Why don’t you have them auctioned?’ they said. ‘You’ll need the money,’ a distant cousin warned one day. There was a hint of vengeance in her words. They could no longer count on her mother’s generous salary as a pediatrician. What’s more, although Adriana doubted the value of all those possessions, something was holding her back. She was done with breaking her back. She resolved to do as little as possible, but then the embolism came along, multiplying the number of things she had to take charge of, leaving even less time for all the paintings, tapestries, fabrics, dinner services, silverware, books and counterpanes belonging to great-grandmothers and their mothers, and the mountain of papers, and the cluttered junk rooms. Her father’s health became her main, and at times only, concern. Lady Death and Lady Manipulator – two deities of the darkness that had begun to surround her during her mother’s illness – took all her energy, and then she felt like those devices that control people’s activities, giving a warning whenever they stray from a healthy lifestyle: ‘You haven’t worked out for two weeks’; ‘Your blood pressure is higher’; ‘Your pulse is faster today’; ‘Have you taken your medication?’; ‘Have you stopped smoking?’ Yet, not even after his stroke did her father think about death, or the possibility that he might not fully recover. But he did, on the other hand, think about how hard it was going to be to find a partner now that he had one useless hand, a walker, and a pace not much faster than a snail’s.
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This is an excerpt from The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro and translated by Christina MacSweeney, which is published in the UK by Two Lines Press.
Image © Masha Rostovskaya
