Stendhal Syndrome

I didn’t buy flowers for Valentino. I spent part of the fifty thousand quid going to the Caribbean, but before that, and as always, I said the same thing: “Hello... I’m calling you from Vodafone. Fibre optic broadband is now available in your building. We have some great deals that might interest you...” and so on. The same pitch a hundred times a day. Apart from a few friendly responses, and thus an opportunity for my company, people didn’t pick up. That Tuesday I decided to bend the rules and not begin where the list started. I am called Pilar. In Spain it’s a common name, so there are always a few on the list. Since I am friendly, I assume the same of others named Pilar. I looked for the two Pilars on the sheet Jorge Luis de la Luz had given me that day and called them first before anyone else.  It’s worth mentioning that after those two calls I didn’t do anything more because of how strange and accurate the responses were. I went home without sparing another thought as to what could happen.

“Hello, I’m looking for Pilar González. I’m calling from Vodafone because fibre optic is now….”

“I’m sorry, dear. Pilar has gone to the Himalayas, to bring her ex-boyfriend’s remains.”

It has happened me quite a few times. There are some people who cannot avail of Vodafone services because, right now, they are a few kilometres South of the North Pole, or going down, down into the depths of the Mariana Trench. Only that this brief exchange struck a chord deep within me. I am also called Pilar, just like that lady, and my ex-boyfriend Valentino Schmidt had made me sign a contract in which we agreed I would take his remains to the Himalayas. What’s more, the money required for this procedure was accounted for in his will.

 

On calling the second Pilar on the list, I got an almost identical response and it’s not worth transcribing. The sole difference wasn’t of much importance…. one could say. The now deceased ex-boyfriend of this girl was called Valentino Schmidt. Or be more exact, the voice of the old, tearful lady told me that Mr. Schmidt, whose first name she couldn’t recall at this time, but that he had an affinity for 1920s cinema, had fallen from the churches bell tower while trying to photograph a stork’s hatchlings. She went on to say she was very sorry, because the truth is that Valentino was a friendly young man. That was my Valentino, who otherwise photographed wildlife. About him being friendly, well sure, but nobody would believe friendliness to be a major attribute of his. This blonde man of German descent could carry himself with the most absurd disdain.

When I got home, I knew I was going to find a letter from the lawyer in my mailbox asking not only that I claim the money and the ashes, but to make the trip to the Himalayas. The letter had arrived days before, but since I usually went up to the house from the parking lot and the mailbox is on the first floor, I almost never check it. Obviously Valentino wasn’t actually expecting his remains to be scattered on Mount Everest – since it’s almost impossible for a Vodafone call-centre employee, who got no exercise apart from rolling from one end of her desk to the other on a swivel chair…For her to simply put the ashes in some isolated place would suffice. Furthermore, for those who don’t know, climbing the Himalayas from a small hamlet at its base all the way up to the summit, will cost you more or less 15,000 euro. This goes towards paying all the people helping to carry your things, the equipment, and necessary guides. No one calculates how many candies you could buy with that money. To be specific, Valentino had left me with fifty-thousand euro. After such an unremarkable relationship, and the fact that there were other Pilars with ashes, it was a good amount of money just for dumping his remains in the most sacred of public washrooms in Madrid.

Everything went by quickly with the lawyer. He made sure not to mention the other girls and I didn’t say a thing. I feared that any turn of events might endanger the money written out to me. That same evening, I got rid of the ashes inside the washrooms in the Corte Inglés shopping mall by the corner of Calle Serrano and Calle Ayala. The had been handed over to me in a human-shaped urn, pretty cool, so cool that I considered holding on to it, but then didn’t out of superstition. While lifting the lid of the trashcan to throw them away, I saw that someone else was already there…. another Pilar doing same thing. A fit of laughter rose from within me as I saw how we women could act so alike, and despite that, men would never understand. The Pilar that went before me, I do confess, seemed more resolute, not to say I wasn’t given a small advantage by being a Vodafone call-centre employee and knowing in advance that there would be others involved. I imagined the Himalayas, covered by women called Pilar carrying polished mother of pearl urns filled with the remains of men called Valentino Schmidt. Like a vanilla ice cream with chocolate shavings. I then regretted throwing away his ashes and the urn. I wanted to see what would come of all this, whether it was a prank or something. Later I bought myself a box of coconut chocolates, lost in my curious speculation.

I went to Cuba. Without the ashes, staying in Madrid didn’t seem like such a good idea. I don’t know, I suspected that the lawyer might discover my misdemeanour. In Barajas Airport, while I waited for my plane to Havana, I wondered if I could see if there was a flight to Nepal or someplace nearby at that time, to see if a Pilar had been silly enough to go. There was no airline going to Nepal, but there was one headed for China. And of course, there stood a Pilar as worried as any woman would be, burdened with a task of such magnitude. I knew she was my namesake because at that moment she took the mother of pearl urn from her handbag, switching it into a larger one, where I imagined she carried all sorts of equipment, purchased in some specialist mountaineering store. I didn’t want to talk to her. I had never liked that type of conversation between two women who had dated the same man. Much less in such a delicate moment as this. But a while after, while I smoked a cigarette in the exit of the terminal, it was she who approached me.

“I believe it’s just us two missing” she said. “At least I’m not the only one leaving two days after.”

“Excuse me?” I responded and then I was the one who was worried. I wasn’t carrying an urn or any other tell-tale clue as to my situation or name.

“What do you know about the weather in Nepal? Between me being in such a hurry and going to Valentino’s funeral, I couldn’t look for information. Do you have a light?”

“In Nepal it’s always cold, I suppose.” I said for the sake of it.

“Of course, Pilar, it’s fine if you don’t tell me anything else, but in your case, you don’t need to know. I just asked you out of curiosity. You’re headed for the Caribbean, right?

“Pardon me?” The woman looked at me, confused. She had a nervous tick. It almost went unnoticed, but in a second, she seemed to twitch her nose, like those white mice they sell in pet shops.

“To the Caribbean. Sun, beaches, gosh. A lot of people would be jealous of you going to the Caribbean while others are going to places as harsh as Nepal or Siberia.”

‘How’d you know I’m going to Cuba?” I don’t know why I told her about Cuba then, but it doesn’t really matter.

“You got on well with Valentino, and every Pilar in the group knows that.”

“What group?” I didn’t know what she was saying to me…. “How many Pilars are there?” I had smoked the cigarette down to a stub between my fingers, so I took another, but the woman didn’t do the same. I remember almost laughing and telling her that there was only one Valentino and I doubted the existence of so many lovers. I had never watched one of that man’s films, on purpose…I always had the feeling that Valentino was giving me something that I didn’t understand at all. But the woman glanced around her as if she had been called to someplace. I suppose that was another of her nervous ticks. Besides, it wasn’t the time for messing around. It was cold in the parking lot of Barajas airport. It was almost deserted. Apart from us, there was no one except for a caretaker, the taxi drivers and an old-timer with a neglected look in his face.

“I have to go” said the Pilar that wasn’t me while she stubbed out her cigarette on the grill of the ashtray. She was smoking Davidoff, one of those strong cigarettes with the white filter. Just like Valentino used to. They are hard to find in Spain and I supposed that, like him, they were sent to her from Germany or another North European country. It wasn’t strange that a man such as Valentino Schmidt passed on his refined tastes to women. He was one of those men who defended his habits defiantly, as if he feared the outside world, and then appeared sure of it…nothing could be more wrong.

It was then, thanks to that Davidoff cigarette, that I got what I needed for my trip to Cuba. What until that moment had seemed to be my dream, was nothing more than a yearning rooted in my subconsciousness by the ex-boyfriend of the women called Pilar. It was like a spy film and I had to figure out where all this was going. A taxi driver came over, more out of a desire to flirt than to offer his services. I didn’t let him speak and crossed to the other side. We both had professions too cacophonous for my liking. The security guard and the taxi driver laughed as if the guy coming up to me were a circus clown. I didn’t want to lose sight of my mortuary travel companion. My only hope of getting closer to the truth was that woman, who appeared to know more I did. Or else I could just let life slip by, which apparently no longer mattered anymore, perhaps never did, whether by my own doing or by chance.

The woman joined one of the queues, suddenly was lost among a group of Chinese returning to their country. They were loaded down with colourful suitcases and conversing in that musical but incomprehensible way of theirs. I remembered how many times Valentino had bemoaned the fact that, after his studies and so many years in Spain, he hadn’t quite achieved an optimum inflection in Spanish, compared to the way in which the Chinese people at the market spoke. Would he have made the same comment to the other Pilars? That detail, taking into account the place, was as good a reason as any to talk to her again. After a few more minutes waiting in the queue, the woman would reach a waiting room, where she would be out of my reach. I lugged my suitcase towards her, which at that moment had a wheel jammed and was screeching obnoxiously. The Chinese protested at first, but eventually conceded me some space.

“Pilar” I said. “Could you explain to me how you know I’m going to Cuba, and what all of this is?”

“Pilar, we can’t talk here. Just carry on with your trip and things will become clear to you as if suddenly it were daylight. You won’t regret it.”

“But, Pilar.”

“No ‘buts’, Pilar. Go to Cuba and fulfil your boyfriend’s last wish.”

“Just like you’re fulfilling yours?” I said to her, a little pissed off.

“Yeah, but Valentino wasn’t my boyfriend, darling. We were married long before however many others came into his life. In fact, this whole idea is more mine than his.

“Your idea?”

“Yes, darling. I was smoking Davidoff long before him. And, one thing is for sure, I’m not called Pilar.”

The Chinese didn’t give me anymore time. As per their culture they were changing the direction in which they spoke, like a game of ping pong. I could feel their relief when the woman said she wasn’t called Pilar. That very word was at risk of becoming a catch phrase. One of those words one always had to watch out for as a Vodafone call-centre employee. It was then that it struck me how fifty thousand euro wouldn’t last forever, and that I wanted to return to my job before my stay in Havana, scheduled for seven days, was followed by my dismissal. But with all what was going on with the lawyer and the will, I had already spent two days absent from my post, now there would probably be someone else saying “Hello…” It’s funny how, since yesterday I was denying the idea that the money would last forever. It already seemed very little to me, although I do acknowledge that I have no idea where Valentino could have gotten it from to dole out to so many Pilars. So, I decide to carry on with my ex’s plan, if only for in some version of reality there existed a way for me to, after all of this, to steer my own path. I had been doing so from that moment, but I didn’t trust myself to keep going. As soon as I got to Cuba, I would look for a mixed-race guy - then we would see what the dead Valentino thought about that, or what he would do to stop it.

On the plane I did what I should really have done all along but didn’t feel up to. I thought about Valentino. Not about his last wishes, but about everything we went through together these last three years. We had ended our relationship without too many problems. He had gone. To Cuba, to be precise. We he returned, all that remained between us was a platonic friendship, and perhaps, my excitement to hear all about his trip. I never go to.

On the plane I searched through my memories, in an effort, I suppose, to discover some hint as to what the woman who wasn’t called Pilar told me. To discover whether Schmidt, the wildlife photographer, had really hidden his marriage all this time. But there was nothing, even though we had lived together for the last year. He never struck me as a ladies’ man, except for the times I caught him eyeing other girls’ butts on the street. But that’s normal, I would say, and doesn’t mean anything. Even the teenager right there next to me on the plane didn’t miss the opportunity to have peek at my legs. It was a gesture, I understood, more bearable than listening to him chew the same piece of gum for ten hours. They are just things, the peeking and the chewing gum, that we forgive in a young person, but not in a grownup. Besides, when Valentino used to look at other girls, how old were we? We were both twenty or twenty-one.

Save for one pretty cool shot of a goat mid-leap over two boys playing in the park, my boyfriend didn’t have any other photos in his wallet, not even of me. I didn’t have one of him either. He never took a photo of me because he had that type of professional bias. At first, I thought the goat was a merry excuse to cover up the paternity of the two boys. I don’t know. Valentino didn’t take pictures of creatures that didn’t have wings or at least four legs. If I didn’t really care during those three years, when I could see all of his gestures clearly, what was I going to find out now? That thought saddened me slightly, made me a bit sentimental, because well, the man was dead now and I just wanted his blonde ashes in the Himalayas.

The most tender moment between Valentino and I was on my twenty-first birthday. We didn’t have money, but he had organized that, during the next twenty-four hours, I would get a surprise present every sixty minutes. A candy, a letter, whatever. Apart from that, our boredom went from bad to worse and, one day, without realizing it, we went from being lovers to roommates. Now I didn’t remember it as anything but a waste of time. This had me looking back over my whole life, all the time I had wasted, like what I had experienced because of him. At least I had my youth and some money to sort things out. A mixed-race man from Havana didn’t seem like a permanent solution, but a good first step toward a new life. Never had I risked so much so far from my parents’ house.

 

The plane arrived at night-time in Havana. It appeared to have rained a bit, and when I got out onto the street, I had to drag the suitcase and its jammed wheel with all my strength to avoid a passing car soaking me with water from a puddle. On one of the benches in the parking lot I yanked the wheel from the suitcase, then covered the hole I had made at the edge by forcing it. The airport’s surroundings seemed to outlive whatever hour of the day it was. What a change from Barajas airport!  There were more taxis than passengers and even a horse-drawn cart. A man discreetly handed out cards with the address of some house for rent. Those on the package-holiday for elderly tourists by which I came obediently boarded the bus for the hotel. They all appeared quite happy, except for the young guy who was to be my companion for the bus ride. We waved goodbye from a distance. Those recently arrived on other flights were hugging their families with such affection. Watching them from there on my bench sullied with oil stains, I felt so alone that I felt like getting married, even in that airport, and being surrounded by little kids on all sides.

 

 

 

Cuba is a country of people who haven’t seen snow. It doesn’t matter what part of Spain you’re from, to them I was a foreigner. I discovered this in the taxi, and also that they call these vintage cars almendrones. There are so many of them that one feels as if they are in a 50s film, but everyone knows this. The taxi driver, called Aurelio the Freckled, was more red than white because of the number of freckles he had. He was the owner of the green Mercury in which he first drove me to see the Capitolio and the Malecón, which at that hour was bustling with groups of youngsters and musicians and illicit vendors. I was going along with no destination in mind in my rented almendron and Aurelio was talking incessantly. While it would be impossible for me to forget his name, he took the courtesy of introducing himself to me three times. I can assure you; I didn’t meet another soul in Havana that spoke as much.

 

In the airport in Havana it was recommended we take only official taxis and not these almendrones. They can have defects and you never know who the driver is, even less so at this time of night. But there were so many old vintage cars. I didn’t think they were all thieves and that the notices had more to do with publicity. Even Aurelio was puzzled by my decision. To him I appeared to be an adventurous girl and so we got on well. He gained my trust early on, by the informal way he was treated by security guards. It was obvious everyone knew him. A girl so young in a strange city, with no accommodation and no plans. He told me I didn’t have to worry about anything.

Neither were there technical defects. The vintage car was false. The only part of it from the 50s was the chassis. As I said, he showed me the Capitolio, and a large part of the malecón before driving me to Casa de Mercedes, where I stayed. We arrived there at ten thirty. Mercedes already had my room prepared. If you take into account that Aurelio had called her from the airport, it seemed to me pretty quick service. That same night I wanted to go out dancing and I asked Aurelio if he would drive me. He, however, didn’t want to. While we were approaching Casa de Mercedes, on Calle Infanta, I noticed that this man was distancing himself from me. When I paid him he said;

“Watch out for yourself, seriously. And I’m not saying this just because I always do.” He already knew the sort of thing I would be getting up to in Havana and of my plans to find a mixed-race guy. I thought he was referring to this.

“I’m not going to do anything silly but thank you. And especially for that tour. It changed the image I had of Havana.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet.”

“I was thinking the people would be sad, that was all I thought.” Aurelio laughed at my description. His phone started to ring. He looked at the number, muttered something under his breath, but didn’t pick up.

“Call me if you need anything, Spaniard.”

“But I don’t have your number. Or a phone.” I said.

“Well then buy one…” His words, and the tone in which he spoke, made me finally understand what he was saying before. And also, what he had said the time the engine of the almendron rumbled. There was something aloof about him. It seemed like he suddenly started to mistrust me and was avoiding any commitment. “I have it on good authority”, Valentino had once told me, “that people in Cuba, especially the taxi drivers and the owners of rental accommodation, take great pains to give good service and sometimes they’re so friendly that they’re a little cheeky.” Aurelio, on the contrary, was trying to escape by using that same friendliness. Anyway, he didn’t leave until the door opened behind me and Mercedes appeared. I saw it as a protective gesture more so than a courtesy, and I said goodbye without him hearing.

With Mercedes it was the same thing. Initially she was very friendly and in two hours she knew quite a lot about me -without even mentioning Valentino, we were joking about and she let me lend her a hand in the kitchen. We talked a lot about Madrid, and she sang me part of that song that talks about the Cibeles Square. Later on she got a call, and everything started to change, although she didn’t become all aloof like Aurelio the Freckled did. Mercedes was of about the same age as my mother and she began to treat me with compassion and a biting curtness at the same time. She didn’t want to hear anymore about my life and after that phone call she became withdrawn. It was as if the kitchen had become larger all of a sudden and she didn’t hear my comments about how, in a place like this, an automatic washing machine would be useful.

“I think you need to rest a while.” She told me. “Your room is ready.”

“Let me help you mop the floor, Mercedes. I didn’t sleep much on the plane, but I’m not sleepy either.”

“Where have you been, love? If you don’t feel like sleeping, go walk around the streets. There are lots of places you can go dancing.” She was nervous, I noticed it by the way she dried her hands on a towel. She didn’t look at me as she spoke.

“This part of Havana is quiet and at the same time, dangerous for a young girl.” She told me. “I’m going to talk to a friend of mine from Miramar. She has a place for rent near Tropicana and there you’ll have more fun things to do, if that’s what you’d like.”

“I could always get a taxi, I suppose.”

“This isn’t a neighbourhood for young people, love. Over there you’ll be better off. For now, go off to sleep.”