DISEQUILIBRIUMS. The Individuals. Chapter 11
CHAPTER 11
Thursday 15 December 2016
Time: 18:30
“It was good, wasn’t it?”
Erik’s voice whispers in my ear, bringing me back to reality.
I’m lost in my thoughts again, thinking about what happened in the ice cream shop. I don’t know what surprised me most – the behaviour of the hysterical man, the frightened assistant, the silly hysterical girls, David and Erik standing up to the man, Samuel dealing with the problem, or the child with the pendant. I can’t stop thinking about that symbol. If only I knew what it meant, and why the child was wearing it.
And the mother, how she looked at me when I touched the pendant to look at it more closely! Was it curiosity or fear I saw etched on her face? I have not yet told the others about that.
And here he is asking me about the ice cream.
“I don’t know,” I reply looking at the people around as the five of us make our way down Alfonso Street towards the Basilica del Pilar. “I don’t want any ice cream. I want to talk to the mother to ask her where she got the child’s pendant from.”
He does not realise that I’ve noticed his shrug of indifference. Shadows often give us away.
“I would like to know myself.” David said, to support me.
At least someone else in the group isn’t thinking only of ice cream in this commotion. Suddenly, Erik grabs me and pulls me towards him.
“Careful!” he shouts.
I don’t try to pull away. Samuel, walking on my left, jumps to the opposite side, allowing the corpulent man walking in front of us to fall backwards. The woman with him is shouting. The crash is very loud because he’s fallen straight down like a tree trunk and has hit his head. Dear me, there’s blood on the ground! A trickle is coming out of his ear, but even worse, it’s forming a small pool of blood under his head.
“Move away! Quickly!”
A couple of policemen on patrol push us aside to make room to attend to the man. People start gathering around. The woman has stopped screaming and is now crying while being comforted by two women who’ve been walking along the street. As people push forward to see what is happening, we are forced to move away and withdraw to the wall of the cafe on the left.
Samuel takes out his tablet from one of his pockets and starts taking photos of the people. The rest of us, like petrified bodies, are leaning against the glass frontage of the café as we look on. No one says anything.
Suddenly, there’s shouting and pounding on the glass. Erik releases me and points behind us. David turns around to look and, with disgust, walks up the street towards the corner where the bank is. Elsa turns and shows her annoyance. It’s incredible! People in the café start insulting and shouting at us from inside to move away and not block their view of the spectacle happening in the street. Such elegant, well-dressed couples are shouting at us. How disgusting!
We all move away, not before Elsa start making a couple of rude signs with her finger, which could have caused us problems if someone had come out.
As we are just at the corner of Torre Nueva Street, to get away from all this confusion, I make signs for us to turn around and continue walking towards Plaza San Felipe.
“Look!” David shouts, looking back towards Alfonso Street.
Samuel turns around, takes his tablet out again to take photos and walks two steps back. The rest of us only turn around. What we see leaves us dumbstruck.
There are three people on the ground holding their ears. We are some 20 metres away, but I can see that the hands of the three people are covered in blood and that they are just staring at it. They try to stand, but collapse again. They can’t stay on their feet.
Suddenly, one of the policemen who went to the aid of the corpulent man is falling backwards in a daze. He has his hands up against his ears. Then, his legs buckle under him. Fortunately, he manages to put his left hand down on the ground to break his fall. Otherwise, he would have collapsed like the man who had fallen earlier.
“We can’t do anything here.” Samuel surprises us in his matter-of-fact tone, as he puts his tablet away again into his pocket, turns and walks in the direction of Plaza San Felipe.
“Why not?” Elsa asks. “We could call the police.”
Then, she falls quiet. As if speaking for the others, I point towards Alfonso Street and say:
“But if the police are there…”
I go towards Samuel and start walking to the Plaza.
“Come, I want to see something,” I declare.
Everything is beginning to get intense – the guide at the museum, the conflict in the ice cream shop, the commotion on the street just now. I need a little peace and quiet, and the place we are going towards have always been a haven of peace for me…
There are several people walking in the opposite direction to where we are going. I think that they have probably heard about what’s happening behind us. I glance at my friends. They seem very serious with expressionless faces, as if waiting for something else to happen. We’re some metres away from the corner of Plaza San Felipe. Walking along the street and occupying its whole width, we look like a band of cowboys from those American Westerns entering a street to confront the crooks. Samuel’s broad coat, which he wears unbuttoned, and Elsa’s, although a little narrow, also unfastened, helps to conjure up the image of the five of us coming in from the Wild West.
Caught up in our thoughts, we at last reach my haven of peace. I like this plaza. The Casa Montal restaurant on the right, with its old but well-kept building, invites you to travel back in time. Opposite in the background, stand the Pablo Gargallo Museum and the Church of San Felipe on the left. Whenever I look at it, I’m constantly looking for a second tower to give symmetry to the entrance. Of course I can never find it. Neither do I ever stop admiring the door at the entrance into the church which, according to my mother, was originally the door to the Basilica del Pilar in the city, but was brought here to this church.
I again look at the two statues at the entrance of the museum. Each has a rider mounted on a horse which, on many a Sunday morning, has a bottle or a piece of clothing forgotten by some absent-minded person from a party the night before. That sometimes occurs to works of art.
I head for the place I want to go to. Behind, the others stop to look at me.
I reach the statue of the little boy sitting on the ground and looking up, with his legs bent at the knees and his arms resting on them, and I sit down next to it.
“Is this why you wanted us to come here?” Erik asks as he reaches me.
The others laugh. David and Elsa also sit down next to me.
“I love this place,” I say, looking at the place where the statue is. “I don’t know why they put it here, but I like coming here. It is so peaceful here.”
“You really don’t know why they put it there?”
Elsa’s question sounds more like a reproach than a don’t worry friend, I’ll tell you why. Looking at the faces of the others, she realises that her comment is not appropriate.
“Sorry!” She begins, as she looks down on the ground in apology. “The child is looking up at the Torre Nueva.”
I remember someone telling me something about that, but I can’t remember what it is.
“The Torre Nueva (the New Tower) was the first great building built in Zaragoza in the 16th century. It was one of the most beautiful Mudéjar towers. It had a great clock and, with its big bells, it alerted people of danger and it was used for normal everyday things.”
Elsa stands up and motions us to follow her. I don’t mind following her because I can’t remember what she was saying.
She stops and, with her finger on the ground, draws a circle around it.
“Do you see these shapes on the ground?”
“Which one?” asks David.
It’s true. There are several shapes all within each other.
If anyone was looking at us, they would be laughing at the five of us standing, looking down at the ground, each one in our own corner, following the various shapes.
“They are octagonal,” Elsa continues. “They represent the base of the tower and its various levels which all had the same shape.”
I had no idea.
“But they had to knock it down,” Elsa continues “Several years after its construction it had begun to lean, and by the end of the 19th century, the Council decided that they had to prevent risk to the surrounding buildings.”
Elsa stops midway as the rest of us look at the shapes.
“To commemorate the tower, which was very popular with the people in the city, they drew an octagon here where the tower was originally located, and put the statue of the boy you see here,” she pointed to the place where we were sitting earlier, “looking up to the top of it.”
“Wow!” David exclaims. “The number of times I have been here. I didn’t have the faintest idea.”
Elsa must have been feeling proud of herself because we are all looking at her. With the light grey long coat she’s wearing today and the woollen cap with an equally grey visor, she has the romantic air of a poet. The only thing left for her to do is to recite a poem aloud for people to applaud.
“You haven’t told the whole story.” Samuel interrupts the almost magical moment.
Elsa looks at him a little seriously and the rest of us looks at each other inquiringly.
“This is one of the examples that went against the balance of the city.”
Samuel’s last words are like a splash of cold water. For several days we’ve been talking about the balance in the city, even from Roman times, and now it looks as if there is something that’s not right.
“You will say that!” Elsa exclaims a little rudely.
“The only thing I know,” Samuel continues, “is that it is all shrouded in mystery. How could a 81-metre tower be built and be a ruin seven years later? If it was leaning during its construction, shouldn’t they have had to stop works and rebuild it from the foundations up, or change the site if the subsoil did not support the right foundation? These were some of the questions I had heard.”
Samuel moves towards the corner of El Temple Street. We follow him and, as we reach him, he invites us to look up.
There is a great painting on the facade of a wall, as high as the four-storey building on which it was painted. It is a representation of what the tower was like before it was thrown down. It’s pretty.
An icy wind suddenly picks up and I have to gather my coat about me.
“It’s getting late,” David interrupts the moment. “With all that has happened in the ice cream shop and the commotion on Alfonso Street, the time has gone and we haven’t done what we’ve planned. I told my mother that I would be home within a half an hour.”
“OK,” I respond. “We will return tomorrow afternoon if that’s alright.”
“Yes,” Elsa and Erik agree simultaneously.
Samuel nods and, with that, he understood that he had said all that he needed to say.
Suddenly, David surprises us when he whispers:
“Have you seen who is outside that newspaper shop?”
“The man in the ice cream shop!” Erik responds, a little unsettled.
He’s looking at the shop window with the little girl standing next to him and the pram with the baby. The mother must have been inside.
“Do you see the mother?” David surprises me with his question.
“She must be buying something inside,” I answer, as if it’s obvious.
“No,” David turns around, looking at me as if I had said something he had not expected me to say. “I would not have asked if I had seen her inside.”
I don’t know who’s less diplomatic, I for implying that it should be obvious or he for his comment on implied stupidity.
Suddenly, I feel someone touch me from behind.
I turn around and my heart almost stops. Standing in front of me is the woman; the same woman who tried in vain to soothe the baby at the ice cream shop; the same woman who followed her husband in silence and glanced at me as she was leaving. She is no more than a metre and a half tall, with long black hair, very dark eyes, aquiline nose and very pronounced cheekbones. She is pretty, but she looks very tired, almost worn out. I look directly into her eyes. For some reason that I can’t understand, I feel sure of myself at her side.
“Get away from here.” She takes me by the arm and draws me a couple of metres away from where we were standing.
“Why?” I ask, although I don’t put up any resistance to moving.
“It no longer matters,” was the only answer I receive.
I don’t understand what’s happening. We’ve only moved a little. I look down at the ground and the only thing we’ve done is to move away from the lines of the octagon that were drawn on the ground. I look at her again and frown. I hope she will understand that I think that what she’s just done is absurd.
“I saw how you watched my daughter’s pendant before,” She tells me, with her eyes staring into mine, without taking notice of my alarm.
I don’t know what to say. The others realise what’s happening and are observing us in silence. I can’t break my gaze.
A gust of wind makes her lift her left hand to flick her dark hair, blocking her view, from her face.
“I don’t know what you know,” she continues very seriously, “but I advise you to forget it and do not even try to find out more.”
“Why are you saying this?” I ask her, now unsettled and unable to control my reaction.
She remains silent. She looks at my friends behind me and, aware that I’m following all her gestures, she takes out something from under her blouse with her right hand. Boldly, I look down and recognise that it is the same pendant with the same symbol the guide at the museum had given me. I can feel my eyebrows raising, my eyes opening wide and my jaw dropping.
“It’s very dangerous. Leave now while you can.”
Then, she walks away heading to the shop where her husband and children are standing, and points out our position to him. They look at us and the four of them hurry away along Torre Nueva Street towards the Central Market.
As we gaze after them, we can see two women collapsed on the ground, holding their ears.
Writer: Glen Lapson © 2016
English translator: Rose Cartledge
Publisher: Fundacion ECUUP
Project: Disequilibriums
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