Published in Issue 63.4: Fall 2024
Who wouldn’t want to marry a minor character? said Marcos.
And he thought that someone should have written first about Raúl’s rust-colored eyes, or at least have had the urge.
They were on the small terrace behind the restaurant, a cement square between three buildings where the coworkers who’d been outside earlier had set out a few metal chairs, a huge wooden bench, and a few glasses of various shapes and sizes that always ended up as ashtrays.
The last light of the afternoon gave an orange glow to the metallic nametag pinned to Raúl’s chest. It read Henrique. New people always inherited the nametag of whoever had worked there before. It took some time before they would make you one of your own. First, you had to survive the company’s trial period, the customers’ trial period, and finally, convince the manager that your name wasn’t Henrique. But most important of all, you had to build up the willpower to request a new nametag that didn’t say someone else’s name. Raúl had been working there for three weeks, Marcos for two years.
In there, we’re not even minor characters, Raúl said.
That’s a bit dramatic, Marcos replied with a laugh. And he watched, again, as Raúl fitted his visor back over his head, careful not to leave out any of his glossy ringlets.
Then Raúl walked back inside and Marcos went home. The apartment they shared had a view of Alameda Park. The building was built in the sixties, and Marcos thought it would make an ideal setting for a polyphonic novel about the Franco regime and the transition to democracy.
He, Elisa, and Raúl had lived together since they were twenty-two. Now, they were twenty-five. Elisa was a nurse at the university hospital; Raúl, before he got hired at the burger joint, had spent a poorly remunerated year learning to write invoices and send packages via courier for an art gallery, completely disconnected from the art they showed; and Marcos, since well before they graduated, had been working on his novel, a book that he himself had once defined as “nonfiction” and “European.”
It was cold out, and before he went up, Marcos noticed Elisa’s silhouette in the foggy windows of the living room, hanging her laundry. She had a strange way of doing it. A system. At the back, closest to the window, she would hang her scrubs. She said they shielded the rest of her clothes from prying eyes. What she really meant was that she was proud of her job.
A couple floors above, three strands of unlit Christmas lights were still strung around the bars of a balcony. When they were still lit up in February, someone must have realized they’d been on for too long. Marcos imagined a little boy asking his mother: Why is it still Christmas in that house?
And the mother paying him no mind.
It’s an old building primarily inhabited by university students, shared apartments where no one stays for more than a year or two. Except for them. It was in this same apartment, about two years ago, that they’d stopped being students. Now they don’t quite know what they are.
Of course they didn’t know the man who lived on the fourth floor, weren’t even home the day the door was bashed in to remove his body. For a couple weeks, the stench lingered in the stairwell, mingling with the artificial lavender smell of the detergent used by the girl the cleaning company had sent.
He’d died alone. His name was still on the mail slot.
Marcos brought his eyes back to the second floor. He liked that the windows were foggy, as if it wasn’t just the clothes that were drying but the walls too. Elisa had turned on the heat, he guessed. He hoped Raúl would get home late that night, totally exhausted. That he would come in and find them asleep. They would be sure to argue about it in the morning.
After the heat came the incident with the flowers.
Do you think it’s good to talk to yourself? Marcos asked.
Elisa had brought flowers that morning. A bouquet of yellow lilies that looked like they’d been plucked from the flowerbeds of some park but had surely cost her something like ten or twelve euros. When she came into the apartment with the bouquet wrapped in a brown paper cone, the flowers had a joy to them. Now, in a vase on the center of the table where the three of them were eating lunch, it was like the flowers were shouting. They had something to say.
Do you mean out loud or in your head? Raúl said.
Does it matter?
No, I guess all that matters is what you say, said Elisa, as she served herself a bowl of soup. Marcos had boiled six eggs and added them to the
noodles and flavor-packet broth.
When you talk to yourself, do you laugh? she asked.
Marcos thought for a moment. There was some broth left at the bottom of his bowl and he tilted it to better pool the liquid in his spoon.
Yeah, I think so. I smile like when I’m happy. I mean, if I have something to be happy about, I smile when I talk to myself.
Then there’s something seriously wrong with you, said Raúl. Seriously, seriously wrong.
Marcos looked at Elisa and she laughed. They all did.
He didn’t want to say anything about the flowers, their yellow: that joy verging on madness.
Yellow in the lilies, the yolk, the broth.
After lunch Elisa left for the hospital and Marcos and Raúl fell asleep, each on his respective couch. When Marcos woke, the flowers were gone and the dirty bowls were still on the table.
Translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers
Purchase our Fall 2024 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Ismael Ramos is a Galician-language poet, author of the collections Os fillos da fame (2016), Lumes (2017), and Lixeiro (2021), for which he won the Miguel Hernández National Poetry Prize. His debut story collection, A parte fácil (2023), was released with editions in Galician, Spanish, and Catalan. His work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish, French, Hungarian, and Portuguese, and included in various anthologies and magazines.
Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. His translation of Manuel Rivas’s The Last Days of Terranova was published by Archipelago Books in 2022, and the translation of Berta Dávila’s The Dear Ones published by 3TimesRebel Press in 2023. His translation of Xavier Queipo’s Orange Dream and Other Stories is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions.
