1

THE MOVIES

by

José A. Zorrilla

(Translated by Asa Zatz)

Tuesday, January 7 (1)

This is page one of my diary. I am María del Carmen García González, married, about to have a baby, the doctor doesn’t know if it´s a boy or girl, and the Old Man says you still can´t find out that kind of things so fast these days, the Old Man is my husband, okay, and that´s what I call him, I´m twenty-three and am going to write the story of my life on account of it is very interesting and things have happened to me like in a novel.

I was born in Madrid on October 25, 1950. My father worked on the railroad and when he died they were going to make him a foreman at the warehouse. He was always bringing home presents for me and was very special about them as he carved them himself out of wood, little dolls, baskets, boats, and my mother would say to him, So long as you are spending your time on that and not other things!-mom used to say. My mother was the one who woke me up every morning for school and got me on my way no matter how hot or cold it was. If I made believe I was sick she would put her hand to my forehead and if I didn’t have fever, a couple of good whacks would get me out of bed. Poor mama, so loving with me now and how we laugh when she tells about the things I would do in school! I was a tomboy. I jumped walls, caught tadpoles, had stone fights in empty lots...Imagine! I came home one time with a big bump on the forehead from getting hit with one, but what I told was that I fell down and hit my head on the sidewalk and they believed me and so it was okay. Grandpa says I´m a dummy, more like a hick, let alone a lady from Madrid but mama tells him the stuff now is nothing compared to how I used to drive her wild when I was a kid. She still remembers the time we swiped a slingshot that belonged to Ramón, the leader of the boys. I tried to hit a lamp post with a

stone but didn’t know how to aim and broke a window in the egg store! Wow, did I get a licking when I got home!

Not long after, I entered a parochial school. the Saint Teresa Academy for Girls, because I got my Primary Studies Certificate real soon and loved math, I always got good marks, and so I continued school on my scholarship till fourth year but kept on being just as rambunctious. Then, mama said I had to go to work so they put me in secretarial school. I learned stenography and typing and made lots of friends there. I went dancing, always at places where it was free for the girls and had a great time. We had fun getting the boys peeved and sometimes we would let them treat us and then we´d dump them. Once I met a boy by the name of Julian who worked in a Savings Bank. What stuff he would tell me! And he was very serious. We went out often and he talked to me a lot, he wanted something different out of life, had a yen to rise in the world, to better himself, to be somebody, was never satisfied with just anything. Mama said he had a future but I was just a kid and only wanted to have fun, and so we went out for a little while and it was very nice, well, but it wasn’t like with the Old Man who made me fall in love with him like a fool, but the Old Man is different, I married him, wasn’t that something!, with that genius face of his... Who would have foretold it! Now, it seems like he knows everything, and he´s so different and so sure of himself… My best girlfriend, Pilar, the one who came the day before yesterday and we went to the movies, said that it was because he was a student and students learn a lot of things we don´t know about. For instance, lawyers study in the Code, that love doesn’t exist, but the Old Man says that no, of course, he didn’t study law but being a professor in the University he will know that. Well, I call him a know-it-all, he looks like one of those old owls in the films that live in a tree and all the animals come to ask them things and they growl at them but are really very kindhearted and end up telling everything and giving advice.

I met the Old Man in a coffee shop. We were Merche, Paloma, Marta, Pilar, the one who came the day before yesterday and who sells Avon, and me; well, the whole gang. What a ball: all of us laughing, carrying on, me, especially, of course, I was like the team captain and in comes José Luis with Roberto, that friend of his who is such a drip, and they later broke off, and after flirting around a while, they invite us to dance, and we say all or none and, okay, we girls all enter without paying, they too, what nerve! They sneaked in without the doorman noticing, and he stuck with me all afternoon, dancing, telling me stuff that was all Greek to me, I thought he was making fun of me, and when we left he wanted to kiss me. Naturally, I told him to hold off, of course, what did he think I was, Swedish? (2) Because he had been working there, which was what he had told me, and so we began going out and mama got hold of me and told me to watch out, that students only wanted to have fun and the only thing they thought about was A that, and we got along fine. He had a car he named Robustiano and we would go out practically every day, and what stuff happened to us...one time the police stopped us and gave us a ticket because he put his hand on my shoulder and it is against the law to drive like that; another time we ran out of gas and it was ten o´clock at night. I hitched a ride and he stayed, I got home late and caught hell.

I guess mama didn’t like me having a boyfriend. As a matter of fact, she confessed afterwards that she had been keeping check on the calendar to make sure I wasn´t getting late(3). Poor mama, always so worried. And then one day he said to me: How would you like for us to get engaged? For real, eh? For me, out of this world. So, that´s when I got closer to Pilar because he went off to finish his ROTC(4) in Cadiz and me, I stayed at the station crying like a fool. Poor Pilar! She was a lot prettier than me but it seems like she was having very hard luck, because all the fellows didn’t last very long with her. Then, I practically didn’t see her

until the other day and then the Old Man finished up his service and came back and when he was hired by the university we got married, because as always he got such high grades that he was hired and started to teach. The wedding was a simple one because the Old Man said that it was no time for..., what word did he use?, pomp, I think it was, well, that getting married with music and candles was a thing of the past and that it wasn’t a question of saving money, what a disappointment for his folks, but to him who always gets his way it didn’t mean a thing. Me, I couldn’t care less. Even if it was a civil wedding,(5) it would be all the same to me, what I cared about was him. Going aboard on our honeymoon was out of the question for it would have meant borrowing even more from his folks. So, we went to Panticosa, a lovely place, because he said that everybody goes to Mallorca and that it wasn’t anything special after all.(6) The owners of the hotel were very nice and we still write to each other. We live in an apartment that´s a doll and that we decorated ourselves but the Old Man who is a stickler says that it´s very small and he doesn’t like the neighborhood much because it´s very new and the people take too much notice of him, but to me it´s wonderful compared to where I used to live. Of course for him it´s different because of his parents´ apartment in Gijón, I was there only one time, but the thing is you get lost, and what carpets and pictures!; I tell him, don´t worry, when you win the Nobel we´ll buy a house like your parents´ but he says it´s a museum and who needs that either but when he gets a professorship, which he will, we will have servants and an apartment that´s bigger and with a swimming pool. It doesn’t matter to me, to tell you the truth, I´d settle for this one. Of course, picking out the curtains was the only thing he left up to me. And that´s how we were living for a year until I was expecting. Sure, this first year, he would say, we had to live like we were courting, and then we would be taking on more responsibilities because it isn’t that he didn’t want children,

he has always said that us women were built for it, that we need it to feel complete and that if not we get hysterical, but that it was necessary to wait a little and so we waited and then after the first days passed that were really bad I feel terrific. My mother says that you can never tell about that. That you have to wait and that I have to take care of myself because a pregnancy is a pregnancy. It´s a drag when she calls me but it makes me feel very good. I understand my mother better now and I like to feel that she´s close by. Naturally she couldn’t come to live with us, nor would she want to, well, maybe the last month, of course, I don´t know, we’ll see what the know-it-all thinks. He doesn’t like her much. And that´s the story. I have told everything that has happened to me up to now and I haven´t done anything for a long, long time but write. That´s what´s happening with me for having listened to Pilar. Well, I’ve forgotten the most important part: about the movies and that I went out with Pilar (which is why I am writing this Diary) and about the Christmas present but I’ll put it in tomorrow because it´s very late for me today and at this rate José won´t be getting his supper.

Wednesday, January 9

Now that I look over what I wrote a few days ago, I realize how much I forgot and how short it all came out on me. It is hard to believe that I had so many things to say! And all out of order besides. For instance, I left out that my father died when I was 15 and that on being left alone in the house I had to go to work. Papa was very big and very strong, with a voice that scared you and a thick mustache, but really bushy. The Old Man says it´s normal that I should have loved him and be reminded of him because women love their fathers and men their mothers according to the psychiatrists and he liked reading that kind of books very much. Well my father in spite of his looking tough and

the way he banged on the table with his fists he never laid a hand on me. My mother was the one who spanked me but, for the mischief I did it was normal. Sometimes, I think that since he is so much older and so serious that the Old Man looks something like papa and he always talks to me like I was a little girl, I don´t like it of course, as he says, I´m just spoiled.

After papa died I began working as a secretary because before that mama wanted me to be a salesgirl at El Corte Inglés with a very good salary and I wouldn’t need to go to school but papa wanted me to be a secretary. The mother superior said it was a shame for me to be dropping out, we said a very sad goodbye and I entered secretarial school.

The director´s name was Don Luis and we called him The Dude because he was such a sloppy dresser. Absolutely wrinkled trousers and always the same corduroy jacket with horrible stains. The kids would be throwing pebbles from the window but he acted like he didn’t see anything. All in all, I didn’t do so bad there. I learned shorthand and typing very well and got a job right away in the bank as secretary to Don Miguel who was a very fine person and not like the bosses in the comics who keep trying to get the secretary to sit on their lap. I learned a lot at the bank and everybody was nice to me, and besides, as I had money and gave it all to my mother, it wasn’t as though she didn’t have enough with her pension but I gave it to her and right away, yes, she would buy me whatever I wanted, that´s a very pleasant time in my life. I used to go out with my girlfriends until met José Luis. Then, when I fell in love it was wonderful. It was like living inside another person because it seemed so incredible that I could be the same person as the one I was before knowing the Old Man. More than anything he taught me the kind of person I was. Very often he would say to me: you are like this and do this because of that. I realized it was true but how did he learn so much? Nobody ever worried about me until then, I didn’t matter to them, that is, of course, mama loved me but it was different, hey, to figure out why I did things seems to me unbelievable, that there should be so much interest! As if I had something special! And then that he always hit the nail on the head.

I didn’t know what to say, I felt foolish. One time he and his friends were talking about me while I walked ahead of them and they were saying that it was better I didn’t know, that they preferred it that way, but I didn’t like playing dumb all the time in the middle of strange words because acting like a fool is not a very nice thing. And it wasn’t that I´m an idiot. My girlfriends understand me and so does my mama. But him, being such a star, he says he´s just a bookworm and that I´m better off not

being one, that one scholar in the family is plenty and bad enough that he was it. That´s for sure, what circles under the poor guy´s eyes because he wanted to get top grades in everything! And the nights without sleep! The same now. Like I say: all that studying, just so he can study more now. Because he hasn’t missed reading a book even for one single day. And all of them full of numbers and letters nobody can understand. José says I should understand because they are in a universal language. Universal I don´t know, but if people like me don´t understand, how universal could it be, I say. But that never comes up. What else could you expect, that´s his job. Of course we never argued about anything either. The only quarrel we had was one day when we agreed to meet at a certain time and I got there pretty early and so I waited quite a while and then left a hair´s breadth (according to him) before the time. He got there on the dot, I wasn’t there anymore, and it was your fault, or was it my fault, a big fuss. My mother told me not to stand my ground, that us women are always the losers, but I put my foot down, insisting he was in the wrong, but we made up right away.

The truth is that the other day we also had a quarrel because he said I don´t know what about my mother, that she was messing up everything or I don´t know what but that now it didn’t matter so much. But one thing yes, he didn’t like me working because just to see other men around me made him feel sick. Me, I am not jealous of him, even though mom keeps telling me that men are all alike, but Grandpa with that solemn face of his, pooh! Of course, when he puts on his specks, he looks real cute.

At last, I´m going to tell about Pilar who is at the bottom of the whole thing. We weren’t seeing each other for a bunch of years; I couldn’t even find her to invite her to my wedding, she had run away from home, she was always very wild, the kind that´ll be going with one today and another tomorrow; how bad mama

took it when José left and I began going out with her! So, well, the bell rings, I was home alone, four o´clock or so, because it was all the same to José if it was vacation time or not, he was always at the Faculty, anyway, so I open the door and it´s an Avon salesgirl and before I could say boo, what do you know, Mari Carmen, what are you doing here? Pilar, what a surprise, what´s with you, tell me all, come in. Okay, so I tell her the works, that I got married, what I was doing, that I was having a baby, what José was like... She told me a bunch of stuff. Holy smoke! She´d been to Barcelona, to Valencia, to Costa del Sol, to San Sebastian. ..! Just like that, reeling it off like it was nothing. And for me who´s practically never been even out of Madrid it was like made up, and more stuff that she told me is not fit for print. What a life she had! Poor Pilar! For me, in spite of all that she knows and has lived through, I feel very sorry for her. Let her not tell me she is happy doing what she does! And living alone the way she lives! She reminded me a little of the girl on the third floor, Ana, the one that lives alone. Anyway, to celebrate she said we should go to a movie, that it was her treat, and that she went a lot. For me to be going out without José didn’t look right but she insisted and I began going out with her! So, I did a quick change, we went out, and what a surprise. She had a Fiat 600, my dear, who would have imagined it, and I would like to have a driver´s license, too, but José says that it is bad when expecting and being a mother comes first.

I was having a very strange feeling inside, like I was going to have to pee, just like when I was a little girl and about to do some mischief or other. Hey, what about if José found out? I said to her and she came back, Women once they get hitched, they´re out of this world, aren’t they? The minute they step out of the church there´s no getting them out of the house. What difference does it make what the husband says? The thing is I didn’t like that she said that but, let´s face it, I hardly go out at all and what

can happen for one time, I´m getting too serious and besides there´s nothing wrong with having fun once in a while.

I had no idea what was showing at the movies in the neighborhood but she said we should go to one that was opening, a very nice one downtown with Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra´s wife, and that it was her treat. So we went and it was full of people, like they had nothing else to do, and these here, don´t they have husbands? I said to myself. The kind of money girls have nowadays! The place was bulging, as they say. Pilar managed to squeeze into the line, I don´t know how, and got tickets while I bought candy because I can´t go to a movie without candies, and we went in. Good God! what a picture. The things they did! Pilar already told me that it was about a woman who had a child with the devil, Rosemary´s Baby (7) was the name of it and I, of course, ready not to believe it but, hey, as soon as the picture started, naturally, I don´ t know how many years since I went to movie, how wonderful, how everything ran, New York from up above, the music, what an impression! Just from the music alone you knew something strange was going to happen, real sensational. Of course, some of the things didn’t seem real to me. For instance, I would never drink that swill they gave the people or eat raw liver, nothing like that. But all the rest was wonderful. The costumes, the colors, her acting, I didn’t know him but he was also very good, and all. Then we took a walk and window-shopped. There were lovely things and I would have liked to buy them all, but we don´t have much money.... Hopefully, José will be doing better soon. Then, we went to a coffee shop for a bite and were discussing. Pilar was saying that, of course, it was all make-believe, that they don´t know what to do anymore, but I don´t know, after seeing the picture, I thought that why not, these days anything is possible. And like that, Pilar that no and me that yes and so we passed the time. Then, we talked of when we were kids, and then about how as kids we had to squeeze our

centimos to get the two reales(8) together that the movies cost then and when you think what it costs now and how much we enjoyed it, it was practically the only thing we thought about, then we grew up, we became more responsible, and finally..well, finally it got very late and all I could do was think of what was going to happen if the Old Man got home and found nobody at home. He likes for me to be waiting when he gets there, he says the most important thing for a real home is the woman, I think he is right, but anyways I got back in time. I was feeling strange, uncomfortable, and that´s because I always like getting back, it´s like a refuge, a place of your own, I don´t know… to be just there talking idly to my pal... Then, it was on the way that Pilar told me about the Diary. That I had to keep a Diary of the things that happen to me, especially everything now that I am expecting and that she is also keeping one since some years ago in which she tells everything that happens to her. And so, there may be anything else in this house, but there´s no lack of paper I have begun my Diary that Pilar told me is the way of giving the mind a rest. Well, then, at last, I was able to make supper for José, and then I asked him, being one who knows, if he thought that a woman could have a child with the devil, but of course, I already knew beforehand what he was going to answer, that it was nonsense, he´s got quite a head on his shoulders. Then, for Epiphany on January 6th (9) he gave me a great big bear, a yen I’ve had since I was little, it was what I wanted, and a surprise because we had given our presents for Christmas, because José Luis says Epiphany is old-fashioned, so we didn’t go out, we spent the at home together, and all I could think of was poor Mia Farrow so thin and he what a scoundrel, what a terrible thing to sell her to the Devil, if José did anything like that I´d kill him, and I told him so, you really wouldn’t do a thing like that to me, would you José? and he answered me: AHow silly you are, Maricarmen. He´s right. The things I get into my head, poor Old Man.

Thursday, January 10

I didn’t write yesterday not because I didn’t have anything to tell or because I was tired, but because I had a guilty conscience about how forgetful I´m getting. All I do is write and go to the movies, I’ve already gone yesterday and the day before. So, I have served meat balls and liver to keep the budget down. What with all the stuff I have to do! Wash handkerchiefs, José´s cream shirt, the blue tablecloth that looks a mess, check the socks, buy softener. What not! And that´s it, I´m sitting all day or going to the movies. Yesterday I was feeling so good that I went for a walk. It was very cold but sunny, so I bundled up and went out. I didn’t have a definite place in mind to go to and began wandering around. How strange! It was such a long time since I hadn’t gone out of the house!. It seemed to me that people were looking at me, how foolish, as though everybody knew I was going to have a baby, sure, there still wasn’t any obvious sign yet, but I don´t know, as if I was different than the rest. That must be because I didn’t go out for a walk in I don´t know how long and everything looked new and very bright. And what most attracts my attention is the women with children. To think that very soon I´m going to go around outside like that myself! And so, while I was wandering I found myself in front of a movie where they were showing Seven Women(10) and Agent Number I don´t know what in Bangkok or I don´t where. As I saw that the first one they were showing was the one about women I figured it would be a love story, I had time to see it and besides it didn’t cost so much.

Actually, it wasn’t what I expected. It took place in China, and all the women were missionaries. One of them is the Mother Superior, who reminded me of Mother Bernardine, but they are lay sisters because they are Protestants and one of the ones there, the Doctor, is like Pilar who smokes and drinks and is a

fast woman but who is the heroine and the one who sacrifices herself for them at the end and saves them all, poor girl, not like those others who are devout churchgoers except for the one going to have a baby, poor thing what a bad time she has, what fear, and a bunch of liars because down deep, I am sure, they the would like to be like the doctor. I had a bad time, to tell the truth, it´s a bit disgusting but I liked it. It was a picture that was, how can I describe it? full, different, I don´t really know, it was so well done, and those poor children, what brutes the Chinese, what a terrible thing, how can we Europeans allow such things? Oh, well! Then I stayed a little for the other one but how awful! what a mess. Just to begin with, I realized. That wasn’t a movie, it was a piece of s----. I got very nervous and began eating candies (as a matter of fact, I hadn’t eaten even a single one during the other it was so interesting) and I don´t like leaving the theater because now that you paid you stay till the end, but the thing is that with that one I couldn’t. There´s a scene where the boy beats six bad guys to death. Who is going to swallow that? And it seems like the women have nothing better to do than to lie down so as to get stepped on by him. The old song about the bullfighter and the lady except the other way around.(11)

When I got home and it was already dark I was thinking how it was possible to know before seeing a picture whether it is going to be good or not. Because the difference between the first and the second was not to believe. I came home, fixed supper and when the know-it-all owl arrived I asked him. But José doesn’t like movies so he told me that he didn’t know but that there are Art films and Experimental Films that are the good ones, which have a message but are very boring, the others that are for everybody are very bad(12). I got angry because that was calling me stupid. It seems to me that there are ones that are not Art and Experimental pictures (and I haven´t seen any of those) which are very good. Those same two (and the other two I saw

right after: The Seven Year Itch (13)and Nothing but the Best(14). But José says that the movies are for everyone, a show and not an art, and that besides they do them to make money and that people go because the brain waves when we watch movies are easier to have than the ones from reading. I didn’t understand that so well but it meant something like we can see that movies are for idiots. Since he´d given me the bear and I had him on my mind all afternoon, I didn’t want to argue but he didn’t convince me a bit. What a way to explain that movies are for everyone! And I can´t say anything to mama because she´s crazy about him. Put the blame on the men, that yes, is what she keeps harping on with me day in and day out. That if men this and men that, watch your step with José or he´s going to get away from you, as if this were a jail, it seems like to keep a man happy is harder than to be an engineer, but when it comes to saying who´s in the right, she always lets it be José. So, I’ve ended up not telling her anything and amen, amen. As she calls me every day to see how I´m doing... Oh, mama, mama, why do you worry so much about me? The thing is she’´s so lonely... Although I don´t know anymore if she does it for me or for herself.

Day 11 January - Saturday.

This being Saturday morning I am going to take advantage of having José home in the afternoon to try to get him to the movies and so I won´t be able to write. How funny, it´s the first thing I don´t tell him, but he doesn’t guess either. What struck me the most, okay, and strikes me, is how he knows things I don´t tell him. He always ends up finding out everything, as if someone had given him a crystal ball, even things I myself don´t know why I´m doing, bingo, he knows right off, well, because of such and such, but about the Diary no, let´s see if he´s gotten on to it or not or. If he ends up knowing I’ll be embarrassed to death with

the things I’ve said, like going to the movies and that they are growing on me more and more each time without my knowing perhaps maybe all I wanted was to be a lazybones...

Now I´m writing again and have talked with mama for half an hour. I can´t tell her what´s going on because she hasn’t said anything: okay, the same stuff. What I´m going to serve for dinner today, how about my feeling dizzy, if I have any appetite, if he seems satisfied, how the spaghetti turned out yesterday, that the grocery raised rice to 30 pesetas, and I was reminded of those women in China and the sad face on Shirley McLaine in Some Came Running (15) and I was thinking that what my mother was telling me was a bunch of nonsense and I was waiting for her to finish so I could get back to writing. If mama knew that I go to the movies every day she´d kill me. Mama says the same as José, that the most important in a house is the woman and more so now that I´m expecting but to tell the truth, I´m only a month and a half along and don´t notice anything, well, I did have some vomiting but after they made the last tests I´m like new. Besides, I have to walk and be careful about eating but as I don´t drink or smoke and don´t like eating greasy, except for chorizo, which is painful, but it´s all for the good of the little one. What was I saying? Oh, yes, about my mother putting down the movies. Not anymore because I´m married, it´s that she doesn’t understand how a person can like such things. And as they cost money besides, forget it. The most my mother went to the movies was once a week. The neighbors would spend the whole day at the continuous features for which mama backbited them,...Well, it´s not for nothing that mama comes from Zamora and is very much a homebody (16). When I was a little kid, I had to steal centimos from her to make up two reales and later I would go with Pilar. Well, also when I got good marks, but as I was always first in my class, I went every Thursday to the movies. I remember I loved Four Feathers and Little Women and Walt Disney´s. Now, of the

ones I have seen since I started writing the Diary I liked all except the secret agent one and a comedy with an American whose name I don´t know but he wears glasses and has a foolish face that´s just too much and tries to be a holdup man. I think it was Take the Money and Go (17) or Rob and Run, or something like that, and especially with him being so shy with the girl he likes, poor thing, reminding me of the Old Man, such a dear and so charming. When I see a good picture or enjoy myself a lot I realize I love him more. If it is a happy picture, I get into a good mood and then if it´s sad I feel very affectionate towards him. I remember that in the pre-marriage introductory short course I had to take they told me that everything I did that helped me to love him was good and the other way around. Of course, I don´t need anything to help me love him, but even so. Today, I’ll make him a paella for the record books and let´s see if I can convince him we should go to the movies but I don´t know, he hardly ever goes out, he gets bored, well, I oughtn’t say that, surely his work must tire him out. So, I’ll go buy some seafood and a chicken and get busy.

8 p.m.

Am I burned up! I make him the paella, my rice came out terrific, for the record books, and not only that, I found cheap lobster and the red peppers he loves, and gorgeous clams, and he wolf´s it down real fast, scrubs the plate clean and says to me, “Marvelous”, and I wait a little until he´s picked up his drink and I say to him sweet as honey, “José, you´re taking me to the movies this afternoon, aren’t you?” And he, “Let me have my nap, okay?”

So, he gets up from his nap and sees that I´m bugged and to butter me up he says, “Today in the university, they told me I had the best polished shoes in the whole department” and I answer him on the snippy side: “On account of the Kanfor(18),

don´t you think?” Because he insists that with Kanfor you get a better shine and so as not to get into an argument I say that yes as though I shine with Kanfor, but without him knowing that I use ordinary shoe polish. I wouldn’t know any different, but that...despite him having learned it in the Army. And then he says: “No, woman, it´s because you are the best wife in the world”. And he gets up, gives me a kiss smelling of wine from nearly the whole bottle he polished off and to sleep. Me, I´m plenty angry. I haven´t done anything the whole afternoon but sit waiting for him to get up. And sure, just as I expected we don´t get to the movies. And since I don´t want to wake him from his siesta...

9 p.m.

The first thing he did after getting up was sit down and listen to music. Oh yes, with him music is a craze. Good music, as he says: Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mussorsky or however you´re supposed to say. The only ones he likes. It seems to me that there is prettier music, quieter, because his makes a terrible noise. So, in the end, as far as going to the movies goes, no soap. Between that and the noise the record player is putting out full blast, I got very nervous. So I went over to the couch and laid it on the line. “I want custard”, I said to him. He made a very funny face, stretched out there on the furniture. “I have a craving - do you get me? I want custard”. “Now?”. “That´s right, now”. So, a good thing he got up and went for it, otherwise, I don´t know what I would have done, I was that mad. After us having to stay home! I don´t know where he went for the custard but he´d better find it because if not B I wouldn’t let him in the house. You wanted to stay home didn’t you? So, there. But I don´t feel good about it even though I had my way.

- Monday January 12 -

Finally we went to the movies on Sunday, but I don´ know if it was for better or worse. When he brought the custard home I had a terrible feeling I was about to cry and not wanting to, I really didn’t want him to see me crying, anything but that, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. When I saw him come in with a package he was holding by the ribbon between two fingers, big fat tears of I´m here waiting for you started rolling out. He got very loving and we made up. But, I won´t tell about that. And so on Sunday for me to forgive him he said we would go to the movies. I asked him again how you can tell if a picture is good or bad, because all I do is look first to see if it is black and white or in color and if I know the actors. Since he was being so nice he didn’t tell me the same thing as the other time about the brain waves and the Art and Experimental (which, I haven´t forgotten, believe me) but he told me about the script and the director. What happens, he said, is that there are very few Good Ones. I only know Hitchcock who is the one of the terror pictures but he said some other names I don´t remember anymore and so we looked in the paper and went to the one closest to the house which had Natalie Wood and it seems like the director was very famous, a Turk or something like that, Splendor on the Grass (19) was the name of it.

To me it was a wonderful picture and so that was the problem because he thought it was a disaster. I, of course, cry at goodness because it is something to be cried about, the things that happened to poor Natalie Wood when the teacher makes her say those marvelous verses, and her father, that brute, eating like a pig while she suffers because he has left her, how well I understood that part, peeking out of the corner of my eye at José Luis to see if he was getting the message, but nothing doing, and especially the end when he is a farmer and married to a common

girl and she appears, so radiant and marvelous, what a feeling of sadness, so much beauty wasted! Without my knowing why I felt a kind of chill go through me, after all she had suffered and for nothing. And on leaving the theater, he goes and says to me: “You must have like it a lot, didn’t you? Being a tear-jerker...” I wasn’t up to arguing except that he said it with such a sense of superiority that it drove me wild. And as I couldn’t control myself I said to him: “The thing is you are a brute”. And I was as though frightened by the force I said it with; besides which I wasn’t thinking just of him but of all men and I felt something strange in my belly, foolishness, I know it isn’t anything special but I felt like it was. I don´t know what it is they´re so proud of, to tell you the truth, but going back to where we were, on getting home we had the gloves off for at least two hours on whether the picture was good or bad. He was saying that it was a tear-jerker and I that it wasn’t and that my liking it wasn’t because it made me cry but because it was so well made that it seems real and one cried only at some special moment not at others, and her acting was simply phenomenal, the way she goes crazy, and all the men trying to take advantage of her, and so he goes and says: “To be expected”. By then we´re heaving dishes at each other´s head, the first fight of our married life, but I believe it´s something more than movies, I don´t know, but arguing so much over a picture is ridiculous.

What I don´t understand is how José Luis, with that good taste of his, could think like that about the film, I don´t know. He was the one who decorated the apartment. He didn’t let me say anything. Mama considers it too modern but I think it´s lovely and so do my friends. We have a glass table and some tubular chairs, a very futuristic screen, a designer lamp made of aluminum, also a ship´s chest of drawers that he brought from his home and a red very good thick carpet, also a three-piece suite with a chesterfield. So far, I have always thought José did things

right, except only for the pictures. The Guernica we have in the dining room mama says could frighten anybody and I don´t like the other picture either, an enormous photograph covered all over with CO2 which is the formula for who knows what that they gave the Nobel Prize for to a very strange man. José insists it is the symbol of our time, my opinion is that this does not justify bringing it into the house, because the airplane is also a symbol of our time but we don´t have it under our noses. I resign myself because it´s what gives us our bread and butter which otherwise... The truth is that it is possible to live with a person and not know him very well. At any rate I have now decided not to go to the movies for at least all this week. Let´s see if get over this strange feeling I´m having as after all what´s most important is my marriage.

- Friday, January 16 -

My goodness! I haven´t been able not to go to the movies for this whole week. I don´t know how I forgot to buy the fruit in the morning when I went shopping and Luisa closes Thursdays in the afternoon because she takes the children to see her mother-in-law who is in the hospital and Thursday is visiting day, so I had to go to the fruit store up above. Well, to save steps I went up Esperanza Street instead of taking Comandante Ruiz and before getting to the grocery I looked to my left and what did I see? the movie house, how foolish, and I didn’t even remember that it was there, listen here, I could have taken another street, but nothing doing, I had to take that one, and they were showing one with Audrey Hepburn, that face of hers with those fine features, Breakfast at Tiffany´s (20) that they told me was very good but that I wasn’t able to see. So I couldn’t resist the temptation and went in. I spent a delicious hour and a half nibbling candies because it´s neither sad enough to cry over nor funny enough to

split your sides all the way through, you might laugh but it´s true. What I liked best of all, apart from the wild parties, is the end, she´s looking for the cat and not realizing that she herself is the cat, it starts raining, and she finds it and realizes that she is mistaken, and we knew from the beginning that she belongs to the nice guy, the writer, who is writing all day long or making believe that he is, and she sends the millionaire packing, and he gets the girl. I enjoyed it very much because it is like the story of José and me. Neither of the two has money, they want it, and how true all that is, what a pity we need to have money. If not for that we would be a lot happier, I´m sure. On seeing the picture I realized that money is not as important to me as it is to others. For example, to mama. Mama always has money on her mind. Each time she calls me, and she calls every day, she tells me something that has to do with money. Whether such and such has gone up, the cost of living, sure, I worry about it, too, everything going up like murder, but there´s other things. I wouldn’t have hesitated. Having a choice, I would have chosen the young writer. Not that the millionaire was so bad but that´s another matter. Money isn’t everything. In any case, I had a heavenly time and besides I was in a good mood and so I opened the can of asparagus to make some appetizers and a fruit salad with condensed milk for dessert that the Old Man loves. He smacked his lips and let´s go! Off to sleep...together!

- Sunday January 18-

The Old Man is having a nap so I´m taking advantage to write for a while. He´s caught a nasty case of the grippe, poor fellow. On Thursday when I heard him sneezing I already told him he should take care but of course he went to the Faculty without a sweater and as it seems that the heat there turns on when it feels like he came home with his eyes all red and you could tell

with fever. So I tucked him in bed, put the thermometer under his tongue and he had 100. He wouldn’t hear about lying down but when I showed him the thermometer he gave up. I fixed him a punch with a pair of aspirins and got him to sweat. He passed the night fine and yesterday he wanted to get up but to keep him quiet I gave him a Cela (21) book and picked upon another one of his for myself. Wow that Cela! (the thing is that one of José´s friends gave us a wedding present of a set of his complete works). More people die in La familia de Pascual Duarte than in a western. I didn’t want him talking because he was pretty rocky but he insisted and was telling me stuff about literature and authors and like that. I’ve read precious little so it served for me to find out something. Cela of course is a very good writer but it seems to me that things don´t happen like that in Spain these days.

While José was sick, I was thinking that it seems like I love him more and that I enjoy taking care of him. What nonsense, it´s not as if I was a nurse! But just seeing him ailing, now without that know-it-all attitude of his, makes me feel tender and think only of his getting well. Besides while he is in bed I have him in the house and we talk, it seems like we are together, because he is always out, busy with his affairs and there´s no place for me in them. Sure, I don´t know anything... but when he is nearby he seems more boyish, even though he gets cross when he´s being taken care of, he resists, is a bad patient, really, always restless. Mama offered to come, but no way. I’ve told her I can handle it alone, the least I can do, like when José says we need to get help. I can manage a house on my own. Mama has been telling me there is a lot of grippe going around the neighborhood. It must be because of this nice weather we’ve had lately with the changes in temperature causing problems. The Old Man says that it is not known what brings on the grippe and that it is caused by very small viruses that run off the slides for microscopes. When he gets down to explaining things it´s like you are at a

movie; you learn a whole lot, of course there´s no way of knowing if it is true or not, but I believe everything he tells me. Considering the years he spent studying, what else could you expect.

Well today I´m going to let him stand up and sit on the sofa, poor Old Man, sick ,like that he gets bored as an oyster, see? I say, so you can get the idea what it means to be in the house all the time, and he says that we women are different than them, what else, but that has to be cleared up some, now that he´s under the weather we’ll let it pass but as soon as he gets on his feet we’ll talk it over and see what he means by that. It seems like what I am going to get is a TV which until now he hasn’t wanted to even hear mentioned. He has already told me that television isn’t a bad thing in itself but that it´s the programs and that the whole thing depends on discipline when the time comes to pick out what to see. Sure thing, if José were always sick I would not go to the movies. And I could have taken the opportunity to ask him for my driver´s license but, alright, I suppose he´ll give in eventually. Now that it´s five o´clock I´m going to wake him otherwise he´ll be up the whole night. And, meantime I´m going to fix myself some custard. I don´t know what´s with me but I get so hungry...I´m very happy. Sure thing, if José were always sick I wouldn’t get to the movies.

- Thursday, January22 -

The truth is I may not know other things but I sure know José to perfection. The TV just arrived. It isn’t very big, I knew for starters that he wasn’t going to buy a 21-inch but it is okay for watching. They installed the antenna already and all. The first thing I did was buy the program guide, to see what they were showing this week and it is full of movies. On Channel 2 there´s a very old one, a comedy, with a star by the name of Buster Keaton and on 1 there´s a repeat at four and another at night that

seems good: The Great War (22) an Italian comical one. Perfect, I’ll put it on and have a ball.

- Thursday January 29 -

I se movies, movies, movies. A directors’ cycle has started on TV: Hawks and René Clair. I have three good pictures on deck besides. Mutiny on the Bounty (23) , Witness for the Prosecution (24) and Robin Hood (25). The movies are wonderful. I don´t think there´s anybody as good as the Americans. And the critic who introduces the pictures is phenomenal. So many things that he knows! To tell you the truth, the more I see movies the more I realize I´m an ignoramus and I lose all urge to write.

- February 2 -

Today I´m in the dumps. Am not with it, for real! Imagine, I sprinkled sugar on the potatoes instead of salt! Wow, how José Luis got! He says television is to blame. I don´t know. It may be because I´m pregnant. The truth is that he was very nasty and I haven´t tried to apologize or anything. I recalled the expressions on the faces of the men in Splendor on the Grass and I said to myself “Because he gets annoyed one time, I have to be in the kitchen a whole day”. No lovey-dovey or anything of the sort!

- April 10 -

More than two months since I wrote anything. I hardly have time. Besides, with all the things I see, writing seems to me like foolishness. However, today is different. I’ve started talking to mama again, I always talk to her and she tells me everyday things. The water is running cloudy, her pension payment was a week late, Señora Matilde on the third floor doesn’t get along with her daughter-in-law and she started to knit sweaters that she gets good money for, Marian is going to Benidorm for her vacation, and a cousin of the Marins has arrived from Canada. I can´t say there´s any big news. I don´t care a rap about Marian, the Marín´s cousin, the water, or the pension. But the usual is that I say yes to everything and goodbye but today I got very nervous with so much useless chatter and I’ve had to control myself and not hang up while she´s talking. Lately, I seem to be angry at the whole world. I´m furious, that´s it, and don´t know why, although today I have my reasons. This is the first time I am going to the movies in almost three months. I have spent all this time watching television. I have seen a lot of movies, it´s true. I’ve learned an unbelievable amount...

I have stopped writing after two hours and have been thinking about what I ought to be putting into the Diary. After so much time it was worth the trouble to wait a little more and say sensible things because what I have said up to now is nothing but rubbish, of course, but after I’ve seen the picture I saw yesterday everything seems like nonsense to one.

I had gone out shopping I don´t remember for what, I think to pick up some stockings when I found myself in front of the theater again. A lot of coincidences already, but it is true, and I remember the other time when the same thing happened to me, and so I went in to whatever they were showing. The director, Ingmar Bergman, was the only one I knew, and since I hadn’t seen any movies and had the time, so I went in to see what it was like. The name is Brink of Life (26) and it´s about three women who are

going to have a baby; so each one feels something else, the three are very different from one another but the important thing is that they are expecting and how that affects them. It was like in dreams and it seems to me that I have a little of each of the three. Of the one who wants to have the baby, of the one who isn’t sure of anything and of the one who would rather have an abortion or die. And suddenly I began feeling very much that I wanted to write. To tell the truth, it has been a long time that I haven´t written but it didn’t bother me because I was watching movies all day. I’ve gotten addicted, I see all the feature lengths on Television and even manage to get away to openings of top directors. But to be honest it>s a big screen, darkness and the machine behind. Television is a trick for staying put in the house. They haven´t trapped me yet. Even though I keep seeing openings I don´t know on television, I intend to go the movies like before José Luis bought the TV set. How far off that is! I see everything as in shadows but on rereading what I wrote in the Diary I see that I am not the same. I have learned so many things! The documentary of the Jewish children in Warsaw, for example, gave me a chill. Not until then did I understand that the savagery had been very big, now I also believe that, too, and that apparently nobody cared. Or, for instance, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse when the Germans entered Paris and occupied everything, those things hadn’t mattered to me, I was living just for myself and that didn’t exist, but not for José Luis either, it seems to me that it is the first thing I catch him not knowing besides movies that he doesn’t have any idea about; talking one time, I said to him, “Doesn’t anything matter to you?”; and he answered me,”If I let myself get worried about everything that goes on...” and he kept on reading his paper. Then, there’s things that aren’t so bad. Also, there are people who worried about the rest and want to do good. For instance, my father was a guy very much like Marlon Brando in The Young Lions, (28) the kind of person who wouldn’t harm a

fly. Then there was the business that the poor man must have had a bad time after the war, they didn’t say anything to me, but as a kid I heard something, he had to go to jail or something like that and they soon got him out, seems like he hadn’t done anything, one time I heard him say “Me, an atheist, eh? but may God forgive them”. I don´t know who ought to be forgiven because my mother didn’t open her mouth but my dad was eating cabbage without salt in those days, because he was left from that (29) with a nephritis which flared up once in a while, as papa liked to eat well! When we were sent things from his little country home town you could see that he was in a good mood, especially when he was sharpening the ham knife, worn thin by the slicing, almost about to snap. It was during Christmas, when they butchered, they sent us sacks filled with things and some wicker cases that were closed with little black clasps. Then we would go to the kitchen, the warmest place in the house, and opened everything. There was ham, ribs, bacon, chops, black sausage...sometimes they put in a pig´s head and if they´d had luck a brace of partridges on a wire. Then papa would say: “This one is old. Look at the spurs”. Or feeling the feathers of the other: “This one feels like old mattress stuffing; it must have been cold on the mountain” And then “How I loved to hunt...” Imagine that! One time I asked him why he didn’t go hunting and he told because he didn’t have a shotgun anymore. “Did you sell it?” I asked and then he put his hand on my head and looked at me very sad. Then he said something to me like no, bad people with bad politics, but he didn’t say it with anger but as though it made him very sad, that´s why he reminded me of Marlon Brando playing the good German officer. How strange! That I remembered all that so well. And how nervous mama got “Don´t say such things”-- always like that, as if afraid, I believe that now too, nothing has changed. All in all: I never did find out the story of the shotgun.

High Noon (30) was a picture that impressed me a lot. It was fun watching that adventure while I was peeling the potatoes or shelling the peas. While Gary Cooper is left in the lurch by all because the people in that town are a bunch of cowards, and he has to fight against the bad guys, me there cool as can be with the peelings and the knife. Of course, I quit doing that pretty soon, my goodness, I remember when I had to take candies to the movies because if I didn’t I wouldn’t know how to keep watching anything and would got bored. It´s just beautiful to see how the one who wins is the one in the right but surely that´s not the way it happens all the time, in reality, that is; a movie always has the advantage that it can be made knowing beforehand how it is going to come out while life is something else again more complicated. What a shame life isn’t more like the movies! That way the good guys would always win out and there would be justice for all. And nice things. You could dance in the rain, find cats at six in the morning, go barefooted in the park, sing on the docks, propose in the subway, get away from the police, laugh at firemen, help out your friends, who knows what all! It´s that anything can happen in a movie! For instance, the Romans talk in Spanish not Latin. The same with pictures that take place in China. Nobody talks Chinese and you believe it. Or take the pirate ones. Imagine having to worry about what the Governor is to do to Errol Flynn When it´s all a bunch of hokum! But apparently there´s something special that makes us worry about it. I don´t understand it anymore and just enjoy it. For instance in Huston´s The Misfits or in Dassin´s Naked City or Hathaway´s Niagara. And I don´t say that a picture isn’t the actors but the Director, who is the most important. I learned this from listening to the critic who introduces the pictures on television. The Directors are the ones who make a picture good or bad, boring or entertaining. (31) The one I saw yesterday was by a genius, without question. In black and white, three women in a hospital room, and you spend a

marvelous hour and a half. If any other director was to do it, for sure, you´d be bored to death. Any of those who do stuff for television would have ruined it. Sure, it´s the scripts they get to see. Well, that´s another matter...

Mama called up again. That she had forgotten to ask me what the doctor said. I reported the same thing as always: that he finds me in good shape. That I can eat whatever I want except spicy and sausage and me with practically no big belly yet, and the usual pills and regular test. She asked me how about us going shopping but I told her no. That I don´t need clothes yet and that the less money I spend the better. All in all it´s no longer like before when I was earning. I didn’t say that to my mother but I was thinking it. Of course thinking doesn’t do anything; it´s like seeing the way they give Monty Clift a beating and having to stand by watching and bearing it.

The truth is that now I realize that apart from seeing movies I don´t do much of anything. I mean to say that the only thing I do is see what happens in movies. But it´s not my fault. Nothing happens to me. I have no drunken friends who know Shakespeare by heart, I´m not kidnapped in a room and threatened, nor who knows what. Nothing ever happens to me. It´s agonizing. With all my wanting to see the world and having to be shut in! And with the baby it will be worse. As for my going out on the street to the movies it´s something else again. I have a feeling of being free and wanting to do crazy stuff. There´s people, cars, I don´t know what. And it ´s the only difference every day, and that not either when mama calls who always repeats the time before, as though the most important thing in the world was the price of sugar, the health of the people on the fourth floor or how much the security people make (after having seen one of John Ford´s films!). And to top it off, the house is a bore. I get up, put on the coffee, we have a quick breakfast, I make the bed, straighten up the house a little, go to the store,

keep an eye on the door as there´s always someone ringing who wants something, make dinner in a jiffy, set the table, we eat, practically always without conversation now, no idea what´s going on, wash the dishes, take a little rest, do something around the house, and watch TV. Sometimes I take off to the movies and it´s wonderful. Those two hours make up for all the hours I do nothing. Imagine that! In a wink you go from Paris to Hong-Kong, from Stockholm to Kenya or from New Delhi to London. And then, the people are so interesting: drug dealers, generals, spies, explorers...the kind of men you don´t bump into everyday. And more things happen in one picture than in half a lifetime at home. And the best part is you don´t even notice, it seems like something ordinary, like any old day. What a difference from my husband! People who know things get to be the most unbearable. They think that because they know more than we do they have a right to everything. Whenever they have taught me something I’ve had to put on a stupid look, especially with José Luis. I think that if I like the movies it´s because it teaches me something without putting on airs.

I don´t know if that´s why I’ve been so angry recently. I´m not happy that´s the truth. And I don´t get things right. That business with the sugar and salt keeps happening. Then the pepper and the paprika; I forget to buy things that are needed, I have mixups in my head that I don´t understand. And the fusses with my husband keep getting angrier. Every time I do something wrong, a fuss. He says that as long as I don´t have anything else to do I could be more careful. I say “okay”, so I think that´s just why I do everything wrong. I´m fed up even though I don´t know with what. When I got back home yesterday something strange happened to me. Ana, the girl on the third floor, was coming home at the same time as me. I always felt sorry for her because she is a girl who lives alone but then what a difference!. I said to myself “I can´t stay for the night screening because I have to get

home but she gets back because she wants to”. And I smiled at her. I didn’t feel sorry for her anymore. On the contrary. I was the one who was fed up with having to fix supper even though I didn’t feel like eating supper. Ana hardly even looked at me but I took a good look at her. The movies had taught me that too. Everything is important: a drop of water, a belt not buckled right, an involuntary smile...That´s how I got to understand that up to now I’d been living wrong. There was nothing unhappy about Ana. I was the unhappy one.

-12 April-

I was ironing a shirt and all of a sudden I stopped short and began thinking. If my child is a girl, is the same going to happen to her as to me? And all I could do was turn the Bergman picture of the other day over and over in mind. Why do things have to be like that?

-14 April, 24:00 -

I was eagerly waiting for today because this is the day the theater down here would be showing From Here to Eternity (32) which is very famous and which I have been wanting to see for a long time. And so I went to the quarter to five show, there was hardly anybody there, so I went in to see it. Me, I’ve sat in the back rows since always, I mean, since I was a little kid when the usher would put me in the front seats so as to leave the others for the older people. It seems you see everything sharper and better from the back, or at least that´s what my mother said and then always in the back with my husband, that is, when we were courting. But something very strange happened today which is that a young couple sat right in front cuddling and smooching, so as to keep me from seeing anything, finally after ten minutes I

was so annoyed that I went down front as far as I could go. Almost without paying attention to what I was doing because there were now many people in the theater and I had to take a seat right under the screen, which was Cinemascope. And all of sudden I realized that the viewing was not at all bad. On the contrary, it is like being part of what is going on, I was right next to Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Monty Clift...and I am thinking of not going to the rear again. To really enjoy the movies you have to be alone in the middle of the goings on, being right there with them, hearing them talk and recognizing each time the shot is changed (I think that each frame is called a shot). And so when it is most marveling at hearing Frank Sinatra play taps because his friend Monty died I realize that the whole theater is crying just like the trumpet. It is true that two big round tears were rolling down his face but I don´t understand why everybody else is crying so much. The sobbing, to tell the truth, seemed a little exaggerated to me and could be heard all over the theater. All at once, I noticed that I was not crying, it was in the middle of the picture and, not crying myself, I could take notice of everything, the people around me and the picture in front. Two different things. The picture was make-believe but the people were really crying. I hadn’t thought of that ever. And the best part was that I very much liked the way the whole thing was done: the camera up above taking the picture, then it passed on to be closer, Sinatra´s face with the tears and the music of taps. But the others were not seeing what I was; they were feeling the boy´s death as if it were real. Not me. That made me very happy, made me feel important, I myself, I don´t know, it was like when I came home with my first salary. I was not a little girl anymore. It was very strange. When I fixed supper I didn’t feel bad at all. I understood that there are many ways of doing things. I don´t do them like I used to anymore. Not even supper.

- 15 April -

Even though I don´t make a habit of arguing with my husband, and prefer to let him say whatever he pleases, there are times when I can´t take it any longer and we tangle. Well, today that´s how it was. What a brawl! I admit that even though I try to do things just like always, they don´t come out as good. Not the meals, not the ironing, not the sewing, not the shoe polishing, not the hundred and one details you have to take care of to make everything run smooth. And he, accustomed to just snapping his fingers, it gets my back up. Sure, that doesn’t bother me very much, let him say whatever he wants and so be it, but today he touched on something I didn’t like one bit and besides which I won´t allow him to say. He came out with that I ought to be grateful to him for my having married him. Okay, he didn’t say it just like that but like that. I would never have believed it. Grateful! Grateful for what? In what is he better than me? What fault of mine is it that I didn’t have a rich family like his? Alright, so I didn’t speak English as good as him, or French, idiot! snob! nor did I have his ways. So, why did he marry me and not somebody of his own class, one who could cook him miracles and knew how to handle servants? He never said boo about that. I know I am poor. But why does he bring that up. Is he ashamed or what? I would never have believed that of him. He has disappointed me. I knew he had no imagination and wasn’t a cheerful person but I never took him for being mean. Or maybe it´s that he is very insecure and that´s why he has studied so much, like those American characters who want to be successful at all costs because their father was a very important person.

In any case, after that scrap I was left like dazed. I don´t know what´s happened to us. It seems like we have both changed, maybe it´s my fault and I never loved him. I don´t know.

I just got up and am still a little groggy from the siesta. My goodness! I slept all afternoon.

- 20 April -

I’ve been like a zombie these last few days. I don´t feel right, not right at all ever since I had such a serious fight with José Luis. But going back to a clean slate is impossible. I can forgive him, but what was said was said. I hope this isn’t going to affect the baby. I’ll have to ask the gynecologist.

- 22 April -

I’ve gone back to the movies again to see if I can pull myself together once and for all and saw a picture, well, a half, terrible. It´s my own fault. The old business of going just to go. The director and actors must have been still in film school, so I have gotten very mad at myself and at the movies. All that is happening is because of the damn movies. As I was watching the picture I would keep asking myself over and over: And is this what´s causing you so much misery? It doesn’t seem possible that anything that bad could be the culprit. And I was thinking that all in all José Luis was right. I don´t have anything else to do, even though it´s not of any importance and boring, I should do it properly, after all it´s my life, we are married and I don´t have the slightest interest in anything, everything is neglected, well then, I decided to get off my high horse; I left the picture in the middle and hurried home. It´s been such a long time since I gave the place a thorough cleaning! I’ve begun with the dining room windows, especially the ones higher up which were a disgrace to see. They were so dirty they looked back at you. Then, I pulled back the table and rolled up the rug and did a preliminary going over with the vacuum cleaner. After that, I did a polishing with a

special wax that I saw advertised in the paper. Then I went at the chandelier and wiped it off bulb by bulb. So as to leave everything like a new day, I tackled the living room suite and changed the arrangement. Instead of having it in front of the windows, I moved them further away for which I had to pull the table aside a little. The rest was only a matter of going through drawers, seeing what could be thrown out, and attending to a few details. For instance, I changed the bedspreads and put on the ones mama gave me for my trousseau and took some porcelain plates out of the china closet and put them on the chest in the living room. I prepared an extra dish for supper. A shrimp omelet and lamb chops. I also fixed a scrumptious salad: cucumbers, capers, stuffed olives, tomatoes and endives. And it came back to me that they always had after-dinner cheese at his house, so I bought a chunk of domestic manchego, the aged, because they don´t carry the French kind here which I know he likes the best. The only detail lacking was to get out the silverware, polish it, and set the table. I freshen up and wait for him. Finally, he arrives, hangs up his overcoat, hello girl, goes to the dining room, I trail in after him, let´s hear what he comments, he opens the newspaper, looks around for the living room suite, I say to myself here we go, let´s see what happens, and then he notices, seems to notice, but no, he says nothing, sits down, opens the paper, begins to read and says to me: “When supper is ready, let me know, ok?” Just as if nothing… Okay, what could I do? I had the shrimps ready in the batter and the salad prepared so that everything would be ready before he finished reading. “Oh, how delicious!”- he says. He sits down and gobbles it down, fast like always. I ask him, “Don´t you notice anything?” “Actually I don´t”, he answers me. “What about the armchairs?” “What armchairs?” “What armchairs could they be? As if this was a furniture store”. “Ah, don´t get sore”. “No”. “Then, I don´t get what´s going on”. And I: “But don´t you see they aren’t where they were before?”

“Oh, and so what?” “What do you mean, and so what? Look!” He says to me “I don´t get you. It seems to me a very good thing that you changed the furniture around, right? It does not matter to me”. And that was that. I ´m so furious I can´t even talk about it because besides, after supper, he says to me “I see you´re getting civilized. Is the cheese deal something new?” “What do you mean civilized?”, I say. “Yes, my dear, a meal without cheese is like a woman without an eye”. “Well, you could have said so before. Is that how much you miss your home?” And the idiot comes up with this answer: “There are things that are known and not to be taught.” “Listen to yourself Mr. Professor... “ I begin... All in all; another king-size squabble. I don´t know what the neighbors are going to be thinking but I console myself imagining that the ones Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart worked up must have been a lot worse. At least that´s what this week´s Program Guide said.

The worst struck after he´d gone to bed and I was cleaning up. While I was clearing the table I was in my usual bad temper after a fight with José Luis, but on entering the kitchen all I had before my eyes was an image of Giulietta Massina in La Strada (33) and I fell into such a sad mood that I started to cry without knowing why; all I could remember was the words she says to him in the wagon: “And do you do with other women what you do with me at night?” But I can´t explain what La Strada has to do with my fight, don´t understand anything, but feeling so miserable that all I could do was cry my heart out all the while I was scrubbing until I calmed down and went off to bed.

- 23 April -

Mama calling again a short time before I leave for the movies. She tells me the same story all over again and repeats about the woman on the third floor who had to start making

sweaters to survive. Once more the same story of ingratitude, how badly we children behave and the problems we cause. I very nearly got late to the movie.

- 24 April -

I was late taking the bus downtown to do a little shopping and some guys with beards and looking really weird got on the bus. They give you the idea they hadn’t washed in three weeks. But, how strange! they were talking about movies. To tell you the truth I didn’t understand even half of what they were saying but every once in a while they mentioned a name I had heard. Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, etc. They were going to a Cine-Club (34) around there and were discussing the program that included old pictures; one of them was explaining that the films in their collection could be shown for five years and after that had to be destroyed except for some that are saved for TV and the Film Library.(35) I didn’t miss a word but they got off leaving me in the dark. Apart from finding out that a good history of the movies by a Spaniard was just published, I learned to look for the Film Library in the newspaper from now on and check what programs are showing. And so, taking advantage of going to the Corte Inglés I stopped off at the book section and, sure enough, they had it, the history in two volumes. As it wasn’t expensive, I figured: rice and mussels instead of paella, hake well thawed out, and imported meat this week. I’ve bought it and in passing I glanced at a movie encyclopedia that had everything. Black and white photos, complete descriptions of films, scripts, biographies...but, at the price they were asking, forget it. I´d already spent enough. I settled on the history of movies. On the way home I got the paper, not my husband´s, so as to have two, and had a look at it. At first I couldn’t find it but the thing is that only the regular movies are listed. The Film Library comes under

Art and Experimental Theaters offers four or five films daily and changes the program every day so you have go there to find out. A nuisance, but anyway, it will be the first thing I do as soon as I’ve read the history of the movies.

-25- April

Today finally, I don´t go to the Film Library. I finished reading in the history of the movies very late and on television they are showing one of Hawks´s: Only Angels Have Wings (36). So I´m staying home. As a matter of fact, today I’ve been on the point of not answering the telephone knowing for sure that it was mama who was calling. Finally, I’ve regretted. But it makes me so angry to be interrupted! I was exactly in the middle of the 50's which covers most of the pictures I’ve seen. After reading the book I realize there are people who know a slew about everything and I don´t know anything. The only thing I think of is that many pictures are left for me to see. Where did that Román Gubern find time to see so many and where had he seen them! Compare that to what it´s like here with the kind of programs we have...

- 26 April -

Today I’ve gone to the Film Library for the first time. I took the 42 bus, then the crosstown and then I walked to the theater which is quite filthy but cosy (37). They are showing four different pictures in a day.... hardly any! But I mustn’t miss the first and the fourth. One was Chaplin shorts which I love and the other was Fritz Lang´s Ministry of Fear. I didn’t know who that director was until yesterday that I read the history of movies. And there was a Spanish one in between by a Forqué: Amanacer en Puerta Oscura (38) which didn’t interest me at all and I didn’t know what to do with that free hour and a half. So, after the shorts I went

over to an open bookshop they had in the lobby and chatted with the girl who was attending. And so she says to me “Aren’t you seeing the picture?” and I “No, after all it´s Spanish “ “What are you saying, girl?” And she laughed (she´s very nice, her name is Concha and she wears glasses) “It´s a terrific work!. Don´t miss it!” So, I go back in again and it´s true, she was right I liked it very much and besides the color was marvelous. And I didn’t know that they had made pictures that good in Spain. That´s a director I´m not going to forget now, for sure. What a great afternoon! I haven´t had such a good time in a long while. That´s why I´d been in the theater four hours. But of course it made me very late and I rushed out of there. “Where are you going?” Concha asked me and I . “I wont have time to make supper”. Terrible. And as I am saying this to her I noticed a book that looks like anything but a book, a small thing with a few pages about The Witch Hunt. And what´s that? I ask her because I am very curious and it made me wonder very much, imagine, hunting witches! And she says to me, “About what they did to directors and actors in McCarthy´s time”. “And who´s the author?” “Oh, don´t you know?” “Look, girl, so I don´t know!” “And how much is it?” And she let me have it for 40 pesetas. So, for that price... And I left on the run. I caught all the buses, ok but no way. I got home late and even though it means less to me now than before having to fight is always disagreeable. No sooner do I set foot in the house than my husband comes out with “Where are you hailing from at this hour?” And I answer “From the Film Library”. So he comes out with

“Turning into a lefty, are you?” And since never in my life did hear I that term before, I look at him at him all worried and say “What’s that?” And he comes up with a very snooty answer, “The kind of people who go to the Film Library. Goons, with long hair and short on ideas, like the women.” It´s was terrible and we were on the verge of a nasty quarrel but I held off (but, believe me, I´m

not forgetting it) because we were going to watch a picture on television, a Huston, The Treasure of Sierra Madre.(39) And so, I fixed a quick potato omelet and let´s cool it. What a letdown! When Bogey gets to Mexico without a penny and suddenly hits it rich I hear a strange sound alongside of me and what do I see? José Luis snoring away. Unbelievable! Going to sleep in he middle of such a picture! Me taking advantage of him being out cold to get even with him I lit a cigarette. He keeps telling me that being pregnant I mustn’t smoke, let him put up with it, and just lighting up, the first puff, disgusting, my goodness how awful tobacco tastes, I can´t imagine how there are people who enjoy smoking, besides it got in my eyes and stings like pepper, then it fell on the rug and almost set it on fire, a disaster. Then I saw it clear as daylight. Why was I smoking? I did it to annoy and at the same disliking it, to boot. It´s in style! The saddest part is that by doing it all I get out of it is to do myself harm. And at the same time I was thinking this I was hearing mama´s conversation the other day: the ungratefulness, how bad us children are, but it was something else that interested me, something that she had said and didn’t remember at the moment, for the shooting between the Mexican bandits and Bogey began José Luis woke and I forgot everything. José Luis swore by his sainted mother that he hadn’t been asleep (ha!, ha!) And at the last minute when the bandits are shot with their hats on and the money is lost I realized that what I wanted to remember was about the sweaters. The woman who makes sweaters. That´s what was lacking. I didn’t have to break my head to get together money enough here and there for the movies but to earn it myself, like I used to. I used to write on the typewriter before I could knit. I sure could. Tomorrow right off I’ll see Doña Matilde.

I got into such a good mood that I couldn’t fall asleep. Even though I’d been writing what I just did for over an hour.

- 27 April -

The saying that between the word and the deed a streetcar can come by is God´s truth. After deciding to go to Doña Matilde´s house I fell into a tremendous spell of laziness and between that and my curiosity at finding out what a witch hunt meant I stayed in the house reading the book I bought yesterday. I finished in no time because it is very small and you can read it straight off. But besides its not having many pages it doesn’t waste space. For a while I sat there imagining what the witch-hunt was. And that McCarthy? He must have been a nut, the poor fellow. Imagine accusing somebody of being a communist because they said that in Russia the children play in the parks! My father was right in saying that misfortune shows up the decent person as well as the scoundrel. The business with Elia Kazan was shocking. I had no idea that he squealed on his friends in the movies so as to keep out of trouble himself. That seems cowardly and a shameful thing. But I like Splendor in the Grass in spite of everything. I must read the play by Arthur Miller, The Witches of Salem and I would like to see something by the two guys who stood up without accusing anybody, Abraham Polonsky and Dalton Trumbo. But here in Spain probably nobody knows their name, I, at least I never heard them mentioned. Arthur Miller yes, I already saw the ad of After the Fall but as I wasn’t interested in those things, I didn’t go.

I got a moral out of the book that some of the USA aren’t what I thought they were or, in the 50's, at least, they weren’t. Of course, in the movies they don´t mention that. If you watch the pictures of those years it looks as though everybody was happy as pie: they had cars, they made lots of money, they gave parties...you can´t be sure of anything. And, of course, what the movies tell you is even less. Enjoy it yes, believe it no. And that´s because of my now knowing more and having found out about the

basics of shooting and all that. That the pictures are not filmed in the same order that they are seen, the continuity and I don´t know what all. I got a book by a certain Lumet for college students and another from the UNESCO. Sensational. Poor Concha! The minute she turns her back, swiped. That is what not having money does! Tomorrow right off without fail to see Doña Matilde about the sweaters.

- 28 April -

Just to get out of the house I took a walk to the butcher´s and the grocery and did the shopping. The same old story. I get on line with the usual ladies: Woe is me. Poor thing that I am. Are you getting stuck! Oh, so young, a cousin of my dead aunt who knows what? And all the questions... This even though you can hardly tell by looking at me. An eagle would be glad to have their eye. Disgusting! Then into the Metro and off home. As it was a long time since I´d gone that way, I forgot some of the stations. After Moncloa at which I changed lines, I took the one I used for many years to go to work, and there it was the same as I remembered. Then, on going into the station, it was not exactly like in my head. It seemed sadder and poorer than I had left it last. And on going out to the street also. My God, what a neighborhood! To think that I was living in here without realizing it! Our house was real plain but compared to this it was a palace. And the block, all the same, black with nothing but dirt, and children running around, bars with sawdust on the floor, and soft drink stands... I stopped on a corner to buy roasted peanuts and realized that there weren’t any empty lots there like before that we played in. Since the last time I´d been home, there wasn’t one without a building. As I walked around I was remembering all that I had there: when we were let out of school in our white dress and mama would give me bread with olive oil, the sidewalk where we

played hopscotch, the bakery where I broke the window, the empty lot where we played...so many things! I was remembering everything so clearly. I even went in to say hello to Yosi who had the shop across from the house where she sold hard candies, chocolates, comics, exploding chickpeas, little dresses and dolls, sugared almonds, pine nuts… of the times we went there as little kids to buy a few centimos worth of sweets! They had dispensers filled with candy balls and you put in the coin and they rolled out of an opening. After eating them we would wipe our filthy hands all sticky on our clothes and go home to get spanked with mama yelling all over the house. Yosi was as nice as she could be, congratulating me for the baby which at that point the whole neighborhood would be knowing, and she was telling me about how much my mother loves me who does nothing but talk about me at all hours and how she is going to be a grandmother, evidently she´s very proud and hopes to have a grandson weighing at least ten pounds. Then we talked, like always, of how naughty I was when I was seven or eight, also she mentioned the first boy I went out with. Julián left the Savings Bank and is now director of a Bank in Marbella. I can hardly remember his face, it was such a short while, but I will never forget what a good time we had. I thought of him a few times in these last few weeks. It´s strange because he didn’t even cross my imagination until today. He was a serious, gloomy boy who was always thinking about getting up in the world. He told me that I was like a spring that was pushing him. But, I don´t know, I liked him, but really. He always complained about what he was and that he didn’t want to work there as a pen-pusher, as he put it. I glad he is doing well. I hope he´s happier than me.

After being with Yosi, I went home. How dark the dim entrance looked to me! And it smelled bad, strange, like something that reminded of when I was a little girl. I began going up the stairs and on getting home it seemed to me as though it

was wrong to pass by without first knocking to tell mom I was there but if I did knock and she was there she would have kept me all morning talking. When I got to the third floor I was trembling all over; and so I was on the point of turning around and going on my way, but I finally controlled my self and knocked. Poor Doña Matilde how wrinkled she was! It upset me so much to see her so old! My wedding day was the last time I saw her and she was so lively, wearing a light blue dress and a white scarf. Lots of times as a little girl I would go up to her house and because nobody in her house liked the skin she would bring the milk to a boil, take it from the stove, and skim off the skin to give to Pilar and me on a slice of bread with sugar. She was so good to us! I think she had the warmest heart of all the people I ever knew. The boys who were very stupid would throw chickpeas at her legs but she didn’t get scared and if she got hold of one of them she would give him a good hiding with a little cane that she carried. Poor Doña Matilde! Am I going to look just like her too one of these days? She is all wrinkled up and her eyes are watery and not bright anymore. Now, besides, even though she wants to smile the same expression comes out as on mama, a kind of peculiar grin, as if her mouth got twisted. It must be because of worries. When she saw me at first she didn’t recognize me. It´s so dark on the stairs! Then when she put on her glasses she said “But you are María Carmen”. And she gave me a hug that nearly hurt. “My dear, what a pleasure”, she said almost crying. “What made you think of me?”. And she squeezed my arm. I told her “Well I came to see my mother and she wasn’t home so I went up to see you”. “You did a very good thing , my dear daughter!; remember when you used to come here and I would give you bread with skin? What about Pilar? Do you have any news of her?” We got to talking and she went on and on. I saw that she had her work laid out on the table but she didn’t touch it. She offered me a cup of coffee without skin and was

filling me in with all the neighborhood gossip. After a while she stopped talking for a bit and then said, “I just don´t understand how come there are daughters like you and yet my son is so horrible…” And she stayed quiet. Of course, as she has no idea how I get on with mama, she assumes that okay, but still waters run deep. So, I encouraged her to tell me what gives with her and as she was anxious for somebody to listen she told me that since her son got married, she doesn’t get on so well with him anymore because the daughter-in-law insists on stirring up bad feelings and tells her husband that it´s either his mother or her, that what´s this about his mother being the one who irons his Sunday shirts for him and tells her how he likes his food fixed, which is what he married her for, and that it´s enough already about his mother remaining the head of the house and who does she think she is that because the apartment belongs to her she can push her aside, and besides it is her son who puts the food in her mouth and she should be kissing the ground her daughter-in-law walks on and not be putting on airs as though she was the mistress of the house and an important lady and that if she didn’t like it she knew where the old folks home was. All in all: poor Doña Matilde, so as not to be beholden and not to fall out with her son (who, between parentheses, is a henpecked husband for giving in to all this) she makes her own dinner apart and pays for it making sweaters. I now felt ashamed to say that I wanted to make sweaters too so as to have money for the movies, as though I was a pauper. Well, finally I wormed out of her where she gets the orders from. It´s a shop on Relatores Street and they pay a thousand pesetas a piece and supply the yarn besides. The stitch is called Algerian. It is very pretty and the work is very fast because the wool is so heavy it doesn’t take very long to finish a sweater. It won´t be hard, the only thing is putting the collar in but I’ll manage. If not on the first one, on the second. Poor Doña Matilde! After our being together for more than two hours she

didn’t want me to go. Every time I made a move to get up she asked me something and offered me cookies. How lonely she must be! And she goes and asks me “Do you think they would put me in an old people´s home?” And at one point she started to cry like a soul in torment and hug me tight and call me daughter. I tried to console her as much as I could, telling her that if she didn’t want to she didn’t have to go, that the apartment is in her name and they can´t take it away from her but the truth is that she was so sad that I didn’t know what to tell her. And I remembered when papa died of a kidney attack and mama crying in the kitchen and me starting to also without knowing why. Then we said goodbye and when I got downstairs I knocked on the door of the house but mama wasn’t there. Just as well because I only wanted to get home, mine that is, and see if I couldn’t get a little of all that out of mind because My Lord, such sadness! There are always people who are suffering more than one is. Compared to her I am a lucky woman. Now, I believe I complain for the sake of complaining and that it´s wrong of me.

- April 29 -

Today I took it into my head that what I liked about my husband from the beginning was that he was very sure of himself, that he asked for things as though they were coming to him which is precisely because he comes from a rich family and was older than me. Yesterday, I realized how ugly being poor was. I didn’t understand it, actually, but there are things that can´t be helped happening, that are done unconsciously. After I got home, I am, I don´t know, I have everything jumbled. It seems like. That I had fallen love with José for personal advantage and that worries me. That can´t be so. Besides he has no money. A rich man´s education, that he does have, and his parents are wealthy but he didn’t want anything from them other then the key money for the

apartment and he wants to take care of the rest on his own. Poor Doña Matilde! To think that she might possibly have to go to a home! Although I don´t know José Luis´s family very well, such things don´t happen to them. That happens only when there is no money to buy an apartment apart and have all the necessary services.

So possibly what I was thinking was that falling in love meant that I was interested in the money. How awful! What ideas I would get since that time until to now in these last few weeks. What about him? What would he think if he saw where I used to live? It is also true that my girl friends were saying, AIf you´re going with a student after a while you won´t even be talking to us, eh? And I was very proud that a fellow in his position would take notice of me. Sometimes, I would ask myself AWhat is it about me that he likes? I didn’t know.

- April 30 -

Finally yesterday I went to the shop that Doña Matilde told me about, and as I was going in I could feel myself getting awfully nervous. Besides I loathed having to go ask for money, it was my money but, anyway, being married... of course if my mother or my husband knew it, there would be one huge fuss. The man in the shop thought at first that I wanted to buy something until I told him about knitting, and so he called a lady and left me with her but from the way they looked at me I could see that they couldn’t make me out. And as now that my condition was obvious! They must be thinking that I was up to something, although I had on a wedding ring, because that´s pretty normal by now (40). And stranger still because of my being a young woman and since I assume they have steady ones working for them who are older women like Doña Matilde. It seemed like I didn’t make a very good impression on the lady, but

fortunately they may not have enough workers...they didn’t even ask who told me: they give the yarn and pay a thousand pesetas and I have to give them at least two sweaters a week. The thing is that they have lots of work because they are preparing to stock up or ship out whatever, since with the hot weather starting I don´t know to whom they are going to be able to sell in Spain.

I´m thinking that if I have to work in the house, to make two sweaters and go to the movies it is going to be a little hard. Anyway, I‘ll get up early and go to sleep late or we’ll see what I can manage to do.

To celebrate I’ve gone to the Film Library to pick up a program since I left the old one I don´t know where. Concha was there, as usual, with those volumes of hers. I asked her to see if what they are showing of Rosellini was any good. She told me that sure as always and I went in. What picture! It left me scared. In Roman Gubern´s book I read that it was very important but after seeing it, it´s something else again. More than a movie it was a documentary, well done, which it was, not like the official government newsreels, but without that touch of fantasy of the Americans or other Italians (41). The phone was ringing as I got into the house and it was my mother. That she had been trying to reach me all morning , what´s up, where had I been, I hadn’t let her know anything, she got very annoyed, as usual, how are you, you have to be careful, they told her in the butcher shop that those of us who are expecting should not eat brains. Imagine such a thing! The headaches daughters give a person, but me I´m in the dark I could not care less about the whole thing. Even José Luis has caught on, I think this is what started the whole business. “What are you thinking about?” he says to me. Eating my soup and gazing at the ceiling, I didn’t hear him “Hey, what´s with you?”- and once again. “Oh, nothing, I tell him, just thinking”. “Thinking,you?” he answers me, “Ha! “Stuff just to bug me. I know that I don´t know as many things as he

does, that he is more intelligent, richer, better looking, taller, stronger and more mature than anybody and, of course, more than me; that he is from an upper class family and I´m not, that he speaks English and I don´t, that he kisses the hand of married women, eats cheese before dessert and even though he never puts on a necktie, he knows more rules about etiquette than a master of ceremonies. I wasn’t able to hold back. “Yes, thinking. You don´t believe it? Well, yes, thinking”. And then I let him have it. “Of a picture. The movies. Do you get me?” You´d think he was going to keel over. “Don´t tell me you´re interested in the movies” he comes out with- “ like the lefties in the Faculty”. And he gets red in the face. “Yes, those lefties, once more Mister Band, listen, they´re just as normal as can be. And I don´t know what you mean when you say lefty, but if it´s the people who go to the movies they don´t bother anybody or insult, and the stuff about long hair and short on ideas of the other time you can shut up about!” I go on. “And what do you know about movies?” – he asks. “Ah, a lot, of course” I say. “The one who doesn’t know anything about movies is you”. “Oh, no? “No!” And I ask him: “Do you know who Einsestein is?” And he busts out laughing. “What are you talking about! That´s a physicist. Come on, Carmen, Don´t bother me and pay attention to your own business which is the kitchen. And more than ever now that you´re about to have the baby.” “You never mind about the baby, I´m carrying it,” I tell him. “To teach you a lesson, Einsestein is not a physicist, he is a movie director. And the most famous. One of the first. He has over three pictures: Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible...”and he didn’t let me finish, “What do you bet?”, he says with that smart aleck air of his. “that you are wrong and don´t know how to pronounce it and it´s Einstein?.” “What are we betting?” I say to him: “Whatever you want “ Well, here I see the chance to buy myself a few books: what I want is some books on movies. The encyclopedia at El Corte Inglés.- for instance. “Done”. So I get up all set, go to the

bookcase and take down the history of the movies, turn to the page and show it to him. He has a look on his face like somebody who just saw a ghost. There was a photo on the first page, the famous one of the sailor with the mustache that caught the eye. He reads it and says, “Well, it´s true. Say, when did you buy this? Who told you to buy it?” “Oh, nobody”, I say. “What´s the big deal? On my own”. “A person has to see what they can waste their time on”. - Actually, he was real burned that I´d caught him off base. “Now I get it why my blue shirt has a button missing for so long.” “Listen, good-looking,” I say, “One thing doesn’t cancel out another. I will like or I won´t like what I do, but you can´t complain. You aren’t going around like a tramp, dear”. “I don´t know”, he says. “Since some time ago you are spending less time at home, you pay less attention to everything, for example, meals, you miss one thing today, tomorrow another thing... I don´t know how long it´s been we haven´t enjoyed tripe or squid...” “Sure,” I jump in, “considering what it takes to clean them, forget it,” and he, “Listen here, that´s what you married me for, didn’t you? You have nothing else to do, we already decided you weren’t going to work”. “Oh, no”,I say, “we decided nothing. You forbade me, which is different. The thing is I worked before and used to go out a lot. What happens is that you don´t want me to leave the house”. That drove him up the wall. “No, absolutely not, I´m an Arab in that respect, I support my wife with no need for her working on the outside as if she didn’t have sufficient at home and then, if that´s how it us with us, what about the children, can they do without a mother, maybe?” “Look here, handsome”, I cut him short, “this is beginning to look like a four o´clock soap opera. Just listen to what the angel comes out with!. Look here, that you support me can pass but if you believe that´s all there´s to it, you´re mistaken. I know more and better than just being your pushover.” And he goes and says, and I quote: “With that street vocabulary of yours the only place they´d give you a job is in a

bar. And not just any bar”. That´s where I wanted him. “So why did you marry me, eh?” I ask him. “Why didn’t you get yourself a Señorita of your class instead of picking a girl from Vallecas like me? Well, not that far down either”. And he, the sly fox, says nothing. “Answer, darling, a blonde little angel like Pia Dagemark, and with blue eyes and a manner like Garbo. Something like the girl in Sweet Bird of Youth. Did you see it? Yvette Mimieux: rich and foolish. And I´m sure she would pick out cheeses for you and fix you salads and etc..., but not by herself, eh? with servants, that yes, a real Señora not this one here who is the Señor´s servant girl and bustles around the whole day.” And he puts on a pious face and answers me with: “It´s that I fell in love with you”. “Oh”, I say to him. “And why?” Because I was ready to go along with whatever. “Now, listen here: because you got a kick out of that dumb look I would have on face every time you talked to me about Sweden, England, the Faculty, about your parents, about everything. Yes, yes, that´s why. Because what you like is to dominate, that´s why, and because with me it was easy. And it´s not that I´m a dummy. I was always first in my class, and with a scholarship, not like you, and in English, too, the thing was that I had no money to go to England and had to go to work, the rest we know about. Go ahead, man, say something, seems the cat´s got your tongue.” And him still with that bellyache expression on his face. “I’ve never seen you like this before”. “Sure. Because we never discussed this before. Now, it´s not like before, you know. I learned a lot these months thanks to my going to the movies.” Then he loses his temper and says, “Well, if this is what the movies taught you, have a look at what I´m going to do with your lousy movies.” And slam, bang! He tears up the book right in my face. “It was with my money that you bought it, wasn’t it?. Well, with my money I do whatever I please. To teach you a lesson...” I, very, very slowly, let him have this: “Look here, José Luis, I´m okay as the dunce in the house and the slavey. I´m good enough

for washing your clothes, darning your socks, serving your meals, cleaning the house, making the bed for you and getting up to fix your coffee for breakfast. I´m good enough for shining your shoes, for which let it be said in passing I use shoe polish and not Kanfor as you say because although it means less work it doesn’t do as good a job in my opinion, and so you wear them as polished as you have them, but I´m not for this. By the memory of my father, remember something. It´s your money, ok. There´s no need for you to be throwing it up to me that I am poor. Very well, then: starting tomorrow I go to work at whatever. Do you get me? At whatever. And if you tear something of mine I bought with my money I’ll tear you apart because I have a temper you know about. Tomorrow without fail I go to work and intend to buy all the movie books I feel like besides records, real music; have you seen The Chronicle of Ana Magdalena Bach and Elvira Madigan, ? Well there´s another one who is a Mozart, and not your Wagners and your Russians that nobody can stomach and novels by Dashiel Hammet and not that trash of Simenon that you’ve got stashed around. And Hamlet and Macbeth and whatever else. I´m fed up with having to bow down to you in everything. Period. As for meals, we’ll eat plain food. If it´s wonders you are looking for, get a chef. Life like in the time of the Pharaohs is only on the screen, right?” And he answers me: “Listen, Mari Carmen, stop dreaming and do your thing which is the house. It makes no difference to me that you are into movies; since you are pregnant it´s probably nothing but a whim and when the baby comes you’ll see everything in a different light. But I´m the one who gives the orders here. There´s no two ways about that. Equality in everything but the male is the male. I’ve said you don´t work and that´s all there is to it. All we need is for you with your big belly going around begging. As if what I earn isn’t enough. I´m strict about that and the law is on my side. If I have to prohibit you from working I will prohibit you, period. Don´t be going too far. Equality

in everything, we´re in the twentieth century, so everybody in their place. Don´t try to be putting on the pants in this house.(43)

Today is the first day since we were married that we didn’t sleep together.

- April 31-

After yesterday´s hassle I didn’t feel at all like getting down to work on my knitting which is real hard work, but I pushed myself and got on with it. At first, since it was a long time since I had done that, it didn’t seem like I was making much progress, and I got into a terrible mood but then, as I managed to be making headway, I fell into a better mood and ended up pleased with myself. As a matter of fact, I practically didn’t leave off even to eat and by the time I said enough already, I wouldn’t have changed for anybody. I stopped going to the movies, which has gotten to be a habit. I wanted to see Abraham Polonsky´s “Tell Them Willie Boyd Is Here”.(44) It was by chance that right after I read about him, they opened a picture of his. He deserves credit, it must have been real hard for a writer to get a picture of his produced after thirty years of not making movies. With sixty some years behind you, you must have to like movies. As much as I do, at least!

How fabulous! Today my son moved for the first time. I´m sitting at the movies and can hardly believe it´s true. The picture begins and already I know I was going to like it. The minute I saw the girl dressed in white I realized it was something special. Not that he, Robert Redford, is not at all bad, but she, Catherine Ross, is something else again, you’ve known since the beginning that she´s going to die, from the time the sheriff begins to follow the Indian couple in love, we all knew that the boy had to kill her and would end up killing himself. Lets stay focused. When he has to kill her and he covers the revolver shot in the chest with the same

yellow kerchief he had given her as a present the first day they were together, I began feeling something strange inside myself, everything began moving, and I get scared, I practically lose my breath with surprise, there it goes, like when I heard the little baby´s heartbeats in the stethoscope, but for real, pum, pum, he´s turning around, oh my God, it was little Willie kicking his feet, and changing his position, Willie, so alone and in such darkness. So that he should feel better, I put my hands over my belly, and began explaining the picture to him, thinking, so that nobody should hear, that I was telling him: now the sheriff is following the Indian, but it´s not that he wants to kill him, nor does he enjoy his job but it can´t be helped, his father was very important and he wants to rise to his level and now he finds himself at the top of a mountain, the final duel, and the sheriff thinks he is very brave and that he has given Willie a chance to defend himself but the former has emptied the chamber and is letting himself be killed. Which is the worst harm the sheriff can do. Willie, do you understand? At the end, Willie has moved another little bit, as though he also liked it. I got home on a cloud and when José arrived we made up. It seems he wasn’t very convinced about Willie having moved; I didn’t tell him either that I call him Willie because being what he is it might give him a shock that would kill him. When he told me, sweet as honey: “You won´t be going to work, right?” I didn’t answer. “And he knew very well that when I keep quiet there´s nothing to be done about it”.

Since this first week ends on Wednesday and I have to have a sweater finished, if I don´t hurry up they’ll cut me off or at least consider me unreliable. But if I want to go to the movies and do something like I am doing at home, I can´t because I have very little time at night. Before my husband finds out and I throw myself out of the window. He, who knows everything, let him figure out where I get the money to buy what I am thinking of buying: a little

underwear, a Bach record, another of Mozart, and books Concha has on display that nobody seems to want.

The thing about working at home is that it gets to be the hardest because it´s not possible to go out or do anything else, except listen to the radio; before I would probably be watching television but now if the picture is not good I don´t enjoy anything, they all look alike to me and besides the movies have to be really watched. No candies, no job, no nothing. To think that before I couldn’t watch a picture without chewing on something! The only advantage of working is that it keeps one calm. And how! But I think I’ll come out okay.

...

In order to celebrate finishing the front part of the sweater. I went to the movies with Willie to see Truffaut´s L´enfant sauvage (45) which opened a short while ago. It reminded me of the music of Ana Magdalena Bach(46). What an exact similarity! It looked like a jig saw puzzle assembled. Wonderful cutting. And the original idea, too. I told Willie: “Now, don´t you worry. That won´t happen to you. You’ve got your mama and your papa as God ordains - you mama, at least. I swear to you”. And what I liked best was when they put the wolf boy to the test and in order to see if he knows the difference between good and bad, they hit him when he does something good and the boy fights back. Without being able to prevent it, wham! a tear rolls down my cheek and I tell the little fellow “See, Willie? That´s movies”.

- May 3 -

I’ve been waiting for the opening of Cera Virgen (47) because I saw that it was by the same director as that Spanish picture I liked so much. “Amanecer en Puerta Oscura”. What a

disappointment! I didn’t like it at all. Sure, there´s almost twenty years between the two pictures, but even so.

- May 6 -

I brought in the now finished sweater and they accepted it but with a sour face. The stitches are loose, sure, but that heavy yarn makes it difficult . You should have seen how the boss acted: “You’ve got to press harder or else they come out loose and they don´t accept them from us” (because then they are resold). I kept my mouth shut, what could I say? Satisfied they gave me more yarn. “And remember, next week, two”. Being your first pull it gets by, afterwards not a chance. And they don´t pay until I’ve made six. It´s the rule. Me, with the idea I was going to collect the same day, nothing doing. This is what happens to us, Willie, for being poor, which is a bad thing, and can´t be fixed. Remember Wilder´s pictures? Something like that. And so we went to see Vertigo at the Film Library. I´d never seen it that full. Not an empty seat. The air so hot you could smother. I, who was beginning feel tired, was thinking it was maybe a little on the bad side but worth the trouble. Just as I was going in I heard somebody saying: “I came because I only saw it four times...” I hurried to where Concha was sweating it out trying to keep her eye on her books because when she´s not looking we swipe them. The ones who come here, us, don´t have a centimo to our name. She seems to know everybody and has been pointing them out to me: the owner of the theater, a director between pictures, scriptwriters, critics, cameramen, students from the Film School, lefties like my husband says, older people with notebooks under their arm, an actor or two and the regulars, the fans who´ve gotten to know one another as if they were family. There´s one strange couple, he has a hairdo like an Indian in the westerns, she´s like a little doll,

style Yvette Minieux, in a gypsy skirt and missing only the brood of kids. If the cops take notice of them they could end caged up. (48) Of course, nothing is out of place at the Film Library. As a matter of fact I´m thinking of making a dress for myself out of an old curtain to go to the Film Library in. This is no Palace Theater, by a long shot. What´s lacking is joyfulness. Everybody complains of the same thing: it´s impossible to make films, there´s no funding, the Fund doesn’t pay, censorship doesn’t pass anything; it must be because of this Forqué doesn’t make anymore pictures as good as Amanecer en Puerta Oscura. Others say it´s the public, I don´t know, that they don´t like the good pictures. That seems to me like a joke. I´d like to see anybody who doesn’t like The Diary of a Chambermaid or The Gold Rush So there! Then I thought the thing about Cera Virgen was maybe that like what happened to Edward Dmytryk who began making good movies before McCarthy and then went downhill. What I really would like to see is the cycle of Spanish films, Bardem and Berlanga about whom I know nothing. Let´s see if it comes around soon. Meanwhile, Willie and I have had a great time with Vertigo. When the projection cut off in the change of reels, yelling and stamping broke out like crazy. I, who have been a peaceful person up to now, put my fingers in my mouth and let out a blast enough to split a cow´s ears. What nerve! That´s no way to treat Hitchcock, dammit!

- May 4 -

A few days ago while I was on my way to the University in the bus I saw hanging from the trees very flashy red and black posters with the ad of the Cine-Club and which must be from one of the University halls around there. I´d always told myself I ought to go but with one thing and another I was never able to. All I needed, of course, was for José Luis to say that there´s nothing

but lefties in the University Hall for me to go against him and take advantage that there´s nothing to see ( the movies in a bad way here: what a country!) As they put the number of the bus on the programs I didn’t have much trouble finding it: otherwise I don´t know how what I would have done. The picture was Ophuls´ Lola Montes. Wow!

Okay, the building is all black and looking like a coffin outside but very nice inside, like a courtyard with a lot of windows. Boys all over the place, gawking. You´d think they´d never seen a woman before. I was charged only fifteen pesetas but a good thing that I paid when I did because no sooner did the place open than it was packed and stuffed, which I hate. The movie, great. Everybody´s garbage compared to Ophuls. I hung around waiting afterwards because at the Cine-Club in the neighborhood there was a discussion after the show but I saw nobody was staying so I left. As I was going out the door the boy who sells the tickets said to me; “You’re going to have a movie-buff”. (49) “A what?” I answered a little annoyed because I don´t consider Willie a topic for discussion. A movie fan, woman, what did you think I meant? Well, in that case, I am also a buff. What a word, very funny. The things a person learns! - May 6 -

I´d been at it quite a while hacking away at my task when mama phoned. That she had seen some very cute something or others that she is going to buy for me. That it´s time to be thinking about baby clothes, that I´m almost forgetting about Willie´s needs, and how about us going shopping. I was putting it off for later because otherwise I ´m not going to be able to get on with it. I´m really in a bind. If I want to finish my knitting and not miss a single good picture I barely have time for the house. And the little night table there with a coat of dust on it an inch thick. My father

would keep teasing my mother about cleaning. “Francisca, let´s wipe the plates off on the floor. It´s so clean…” And mother would get all puffed up. Sometimes he got her furious teasing about dropping the ashes. “Where can I get rid of this butt?” and he would pretend he was about to throw it to the floor. Mama would get upset. “Look here, now, aren’t there enough ashtrays for you in this house? Other things maybe lacking, but not that!” And he´d keep on. “No idea, no idea. What about this butt, eh, bunny rabbit?” and he´d look at me, as he called me bunny rabbit. My goodness, how sad to be talking about papa. It makes me miss him so much!

Yet, my mother gets me more and more steamed up. The business of cleaning is a mania, almost, of crackpots, or people who have nothing else to do. Oh! And then the same routine: “and with a child, you’ll see what’s what” But it´s not only my mother. I get the same litany from very woman I meet: this business of being a woman is no joke. And you’ve still got a long way to go. Shit!

- May 9 -

The Film Library begins its Spanish film cycle today, so it´s a holiday. At least 3 pictures a day. Then if they get shown on television we don´t turn our noses up either and see them again. There is no much to choose and Willie and I get bored as oysters.

I´m dead sleepy but before I retire I’ll take advantage of a while now that José Luis has gone to bed. It´s been a wonderful afternoon. I saw Welcome, Mr. Marshall(50), Main Street,(51) and The Revenge (52). But the best part was that they were there, the directors, and they talked to some of us regulars, the “Mohican”, the “Weak Sister”, The “Vietnamese”, the “Polish Refugee” (those are the nicknames I gave them) me, of course, all ears. They were talking about the heroic times, when there was no film, no

sound, no money, no nothing. But if with that and not having what with, they produced what they produced we ought better go back to have a look at what went on. There´s no denying that those pictures are worth more than the latest Spanish ones I’ve seen. Some asked them loaded questions. The truth is that it´s hard to explain. Knowing how to make movies now that they have the experience, why they come out worse than before? There´s something in the air, I don´t know, but it seems as though people dry up, like plants without water or something of the kind. I don´t know what. To sum up it was a crazy scene. We packed ourselves in, sweating and suffocating. We clapped, whistled, stamped, whatever! But how marvelous. What a great time we had. Concha sold a lot of books. The only thing was the beating my poor backside took. Those seats aren’t hard, oh no, not much! And José Luis doesn’t know why I am happy. He thinks, apparently, that I have gotten over my crazinesses and that I am delighted with whatever I´m getting. He’s like one of those H. Hawks´ husbands.

- May 15 -

Great day. Pilar suddenly came over, and how! With her Avon sample case. Like in the days of Rosemary´s Baby. She was bending my ear with stories about her adventures: Malaga, Valencia, Zaragoza, Valladolid, and El Ferrol. Like the Wandering Jew. Me, I’ve asked her what about boy friends, but it seems like no man in her life. You today someone else tomorrow, as a friend of mine put it when backbiting. That running around of hers from one place to another made me jealous... Me always locked up like a slave. With all the places there are that I´d like to know! Sure, she with her car has only to get behind the wheel and off in a flash to light anywhere. That´s the reason I wanted a driver´s license. But I´d have to knit a bunch of sweaters to be able to

afford one! For what I need now, that could wait, because to ask José Luis, forget it. No, I did it before, now it´s all in the past. He won´t be throwing it up to me again that I bought things with his money. I’ve told her that one of these weekends we should go somewhere by ourselves and she just looked at me with her mouth open. “Hey, how you’ve changed. A couple of months ago nobody could get you out of the house even to go to a movie”. “Well, that´s how it is, my girl. One has to keep up with the times”. And then she´s gotten on to asking me a bunch of questions about my pregnancy even though, like so many others, she doesn’t have as much of an idea as you might think, and so, okay, I repeat the same old line as always and answer the kind of questions they ask, which are very annoying: “Is it going to hurt very much, and don´t you lose a lot of blood? Do they have to open you up? Do you eat raw meat? You shouldn’t do this or that; it´s bad for you to eat this or that , and an aunt of mine lost her baby because she ate I don´t know what and you can forget about any married life for six months after, watch out with the spices, by the way, do you get very hungry?” And I’ve had it up to the teeth with my mother constantly repeating herself, so I say yes to everything , and keep knitting, until finally I say to her, “Come on, let´s go to a movie”. Because with all the placenta and ovary talk I was developing a headache. Besides, she was telling me about a cousin who died in childbirth! Good old Pilar was surprised. “But to get you to the movies the other time, I had to drag you out!” Well, we went, not to the Film Library because Pilar has something against it but I took her to see The Wild Bunch(53) . Very amusing! She says “Who did it?” And I tell her, “Peckinpah, know him? He made High Sierra and Major Dundee”. And she: “What are you talking about? Major Dundee is Charlton Heston´s. Ta, ta! I hadn’t realized everybody thinks that it´s the actors who make the picture. I’ve explained to Pilar that it´s the directors who make the picture. They cast the actors in their parts, decide the

filming, put in the music, make changes in the script, actually, everything. Pilar looks at me like in awe. “My dear girl, amazing how much you’ve learned since the last time I saw you! Remember? “ “I get you. Seems to me like we saw Polansky´s “Rosemary´s Baby” “What a memory! I couldn’t have told you”. Her eyes were big as saucers.

Finally we saw The Wild Bunch. It started an argument, I admit, because Pilar considers a rerun house is for poor people. One has to go to openings on the main drag in a fancy theater on the Gran Via. She wanted us to go to a real strange Italian one that Miguel Rubio in Nuevo Diario called real bad. But I put my foot down. At this stage for me to miss a Peckinpah is unthinkable. Fortunately, she liked it even though she thought it was a horror. Sure, it was a horror alright, but typical Peckinpah, full of kids and animals. Willie certainly got fascinated. The way Buñuel always puts in his special touches, the wooden leg, the dead donkey, Peckinpah the same: children and animals. I kept it to myself so as not to appear corny. But I explained a little about movies to Pilar and she was delighted. “My girl, the last thing I expected to hear. That there are people who take movies seriously.” And when we were saying goodbye I couldn’thold back and said to her: “I´m sure if you had seen Lilith´ you would understand why I take movies seriously.” She didn’t know anything about R. Rossen nor ALilith, but she had heard of Jean Seberg, and of Warren Beatty. I told her the story. A poor guy comes to a lunatic asylum and they hire him as an attendant. There is a wonderful girl there, you don´t know whether she is crazy or not, that she lives a rich life in herself, and is happy among her things. He however is empty and when he wants to fill himself with her, naturally, in bed, the only thing he gets to do is kill her: Lilith commits suicide among her dolls. And besides it is the last by Rossen, another of the McCarthy victims. He was dying of cancer while he was making it. That was what I think

gives it a special kind of mystery. But either you understand or don´t understand. And I think Pilar is one of those who doesn’t understand. What a pity! Anyway, even though she isn’t the same as she used to be anymore, I´m grateful to her for being the one who took me to the movies for the first time in a long while. My goodness, how I’ve changed! And how bold Pilar seemed to me and how little of it is left in her! On seeing me knitting the only thing she could say was that I´m in love with my husband! And keept repeating that I should get every bit out of him I can. Poor Pilar! Down deep she wants to get married. And she is the one who would be happy that way.

- May 17-

I´m going to the Cine-Club again. A picture that´s almost more verité than Rosellini: Milos Forman´s Loves of a Blonde. The boys, delightful. I´m getting to know them all. “Moby Dick” (how Willie laughed when I told him) who weighs at least two hundred kilos, the “Greek”: because he has an eagle´s profile, Fatso because he’s so skinny...the regulars, selling tickets at the door. Since they know me by now they smile when they hand me the program. Sometimes they write in some unusual presentations that even they don´t understand but all together it is very good because they give the entire history of films and that helps a lot. The movies from the East are good; Polansky, Wadja, Forman, Kawalerowicz, Haas, Zanussi, Gaal, Jancsó, Antonov, Chitilova...I, however, have a special weakness for Menzec and his The Closely Watched Trains. I said so to one of the fellows at the door who had a face like an owl; Forman isn’t bad but believe me, compared to Menzec... And he told me that today he doesn’t have time to discuss it but that we could the following day. The next day there was a screening for friends. And since they call me The Pet I was invited. Eisenstein´s Potemkin (54) and

Bresson´s Mouchette. I had to hold myself back from jumping up and down with joy.

- May 18 -

What a disaster! Willie is finally making trouble. I’ve been throwing up all morning. And my kidneys are feeling very bad. Like during the early weeks. I’ve already told him to stop trying to get in my good graces because like this there´s no way to be knitting and if there´s no needlework there´s no movies or anything but apparently the poor fellow doesn’t feel at all happy there by himself.

- May 20 -

Today a perfect day: I have five sweaters knitted and Potemkin and Mouchette waiting for me. So I’ve been humming to myself all morning. Too bad there´s only two pictures. It seems like not much to me, but so be it. It´s been such a long time since I’ve had money of my own that I can hardly believe it. Actually, with all that I have to buy it is also true that it is not going to stretch very far. Nobody is going to get rich on this knitting business, no, but what with one thing another it´s a terrific day.

I went to the shop and they paid me. It was a lot of money, I had to sweat to earn it and I wasn’t feeling all that sure of myself and safe; I was uneasy about carrying it around on me. So, before doing anything I went home to put it away.

What I least expected was to find my mama and José Luis there in the dining room looking very grim. “Where have you been?” José Luis opened with and my mother, “let me handle it.” And she walks over and slaps in the face twice. “There, to teach you a lesson. What do you mean working without your husband´s knowledge!” And he “Let her be. I’ll take care of it,” And my

mother. “Lacking for anything, are you? Answer me! A woman expecting. You should be ashamed! What are people going to think now? That the woman has habits the husband can´t afford? That´s where we could end up”. Then to my husband. “And you who give into her”. “Me?”- says José Luis. “I forbade her to do anything and if she did it that´s her problem”. “What do you mean her problem? On the loose all day as if she had no home of her own and off to the movies, as if she had nothing better to do, rubbing shoulders with men. Who knows what will be going on there in the dark! Thanks God you found out, else who knows what could have happened” “Found out?” - I say-“Found out what?” “What do mean?”-says my husband “Everything. Do you think you can do something without my finding out? I know that you are knitting, that you spend your life at the movies and don´t set foot in the house. And it doesn’t seem to me proper for a woman in your condition”. And my mother. “After what we taught you at home and that you go about like a bitch on the loose without any responsibility, leaving the house abandoned and your husband to take care of things. Do you consider that proper? Eh? Answer!” And she´s up again to come over and hit me but dazed as I was I couldn’t even imagine any of this and, wham, she hits me again, a slap in the face, and José Luis uninvolved and I, automatically, grab her by the arm and give her push that lands her on the couch, but without my intending it, and I turn to José Luis.”What about mama? What is mama doing here? How come you called her?” “Oh,” he says, “because that´s what your mother is for. If she didn’t know how to bring you up let her teach you now because I’ve got enough to do as a professor at the University”. “And so you get her to hit me?” “Sure”, he tells me, “if not with a carrot, with a stick. What is out of the question is for you to be doing whatever you please and even more so because being a woman and everybody may know you. But can you imagine what people would think if they knew that the wife of a Riera was

going around knitting sweaters like the poor women at a wake?.” “Well” I say, “It´s only natural. All my father got to be was a foreman”. “Exactly” - my mother bursting into tears – “you should be kissing the ground your husband walks on. What were we? You a secretary who any day is abused by her boss and I the widow of a railroad worker may he rest in peace. And you dare to disobey your husband who has given you a name you don´t deserve. Do you understand?” And I turn to José Luis and ask him. “And you, what have you got to say? What does the lord of the manor have to say? Is it that you believe you have done a charitable act and that I am an ungrateful creature? Am I so in debt to you?” And he, as usual, mum. “Say something, man speak, go ahead, tell how you fell in love with a girl from the gutter and liberated her from going to work every day. And now how happy he feels for he has the power to teach her things and to see that dumb look on her face! Well, let me tell you something, handsome: if you married me so you could feel richer, smarter, and on top of it, the bonus that you were doing a good deed, you can go look for another dunce because with María del Carmen García is through. Got it? You can keep your name, rich man, my own is more than enough for me; well, mine and my father´s. How proud of him I am. That was a man, you aren’t. You´re a wimp. Not even. You needed my mother. Couldn’t we have taken care of this between you and me? Speak, you coward!”

José Luis then comes over and hits me so hard I´m knocked to the floor. “Repeat that, go ahead, repeat it and I’ll kill you”. And I, my God, I think of Willie, poor little thing, who can´t defend himself, and I get up and no longer knowing what I ´m doing I jump on him and grab him by the hair, scratch and bite him, begin kicking him, what a rage against the foul coward, imagine hitting me now that I´m carrying Willie, wham! I push him, stamp on him, take that, ugh, my mother grabs me from behind, “Let go, what are you doing?” I attack, we fall against the table, splat! The three

of us on the floor, the flower vase gets smashed, we continue fighting and then, like in the movies, I grab the glass vase by the neck, and hold the sharp points an inch from their faces, saying, “I’ll kill whoever comes near me!” My mother: “My God, how disgusting!” And José Luis: “This is what I get for marrying one of your class that was very good to begin with but then the wild animal reverts to type. No, there´s no denying where you come from...” “You too” I answer. “For all that Guernica on the wall the one they didn’t let have a shotgun was my father who knew nothing about politics or Picasso”. “What a mess!” he answers. “What about my son?” “What?” I say “Your son? Here we go. And now you´re remembering him? Now? You can go to hell, you son of a bitch!”

I wish I could be watching Potemkin one day after another. First because it is so beautiful that you feel sorry it ended and second because I knew that when it was over I could no longer go home and fix supper again. I had still to see Mouchette´s suicide, the little girl who puts on her mother´s shroud to throw herself into the river. But it wasn´t enough. Then I saw the sailors mutiny because they were giving them wormy meat, and shortly afterwards the Czar´s soldiers going down the steps and killing children. Then I knew that, yes, I would go home to prepare my farewell. Actually, it was going to be a pie in the face; something that would do him no harm (it would also be hard because to know how to suffer you must be generous), but would make him very furious. So, all I had to do was buy a poster of Chaplin with the Kid and paste it over the photo of the C02 in the dining room. What will he say when he sees Jackie Coogan laughing at him and covering his infernal formulas nobody can understand!. And then the final touch: with the tube of Kanfor that he gave me to shine his shoes the modern way, I wrote The End on the floor. I hope he gets the joke. In any case, I will be very far away, I don´t know where, trying to find something worth the trouble for Willie,

something as beautiful and as grand as the movies, and so important that even though at the same time that it´s make-believe it can teach you to realize things. And because I want to do it alone without anybody´s help, I will throw the Diary into the fire right now.

It is not as beautiful an ending as the one for Casablanca: the two of them on the runway, in the fog, the plane taking off...but neither is my husband Bogey nor am I Ingrid Bergman. The truth is that it is enough for me, once and for all, to destroy this feeling of emptiness, of living only because I am foolish and he likes to take me to bed.

The EndFootnotes

(1)The story takes place in the last years of francoist rule. (Franco passed away in 1975). I wrote the story in Helsinki (Capital of Finland) in 1974.

(2)Sweden was the sexual liberation country of reference in those days and Jose Luis worked there for some time.

(3)Standard procedure in peasant or very humble social environments.

(4)ROTC. Reserve Officer Training Corps. In those days of conscription college students had a special program to serve in the Armed Forces only in summer time. After two summers they received a commission and a command- just a quarter. The common lot toiled daily for about one year or fifteen months as privates.

(5)Even though she is very shy on sexual matters Mamen is liberated in religious affairs. A civil wedding in those days in Spain was a no no for any self respecting family.

(6)Panticosa is a mountain resort in the Pyrenees. Mallorca was the typical middle class destination. Very much like Niagara Falls in the US. Jose is a leftie after all. He goes to Church to wed, otherwise no loan from the old folks, yet he does not go abroad to let things within the limits of the affordable. Yet he allows himself to be a cut above the commoners by leaving out the Mallorca beaches to grace instead the summits and the slopes of Huesca. The thing to do according to the non written rules of the progressive minded youth of the seventies.

(7)Rosemary´s Baby (1968). Mia Farrow, John Casavettes. Director Roman Polanski.

(8)Fifty cents, that is half peseta. Around 10 cents in the US.

(9)Christmas presents in Spain are exchanged January 6th, Magi Kings day. Christmas is a relatively new thing imported from the English speaking countries.

(10) Seven Women (1966). Anne Bancroft, Sue Lyon. Director, John Ford.

(11) According to legend Spanish men threw their cloaks or capes for the belles to step over. The story of a bullfighter who does it to his beloved only to be killed later on the sands of the ring is particularly popular and became a song.

(12) Arte y Ensayo- Art and Essay- was the title of movies outside big commercial rings considered a bore by the majority of the population. Leftie or not Jose shares the usual contempt of the intellectuals for movies. And of course considers Arte y Ensayo a pain in the ass.

(13) The Seven Year Itch. (1955) Marylin Monroe, Tom Ewell. Director Billy Wilder.

(14) Nothing but the Best. (1964)- Alan Bates. Director Clive Donner.

(15) Some came running. (1958) Frank Sinatra, Shirley Mc Laine. Director. Vincent Minelli.

(16) Zamora. Supposed to be one of the most staunch conservative strongholds of Castille. Zamora dwells in what some call “The Spanish Siberia”, in reference to its big country plains.

(17) Take the money and run. (1971) Woody Allen comedy starring Janet Margolin.

(18) Jose, being a progressive leftie, considers shoe polish a thing of the past and insists on having his shoes polished with Kanfor (by his wife, of course) which is as simple as rubbing the product over the leather- a trick he owes to the Army. Mamen knows best and sticks to the good old shoe polish of yore, which is the way to go if you like leather and shoes, btw.

(19) Splendor on the Grass. (1961) Natalie Wood. Warren Beatty. Director Elia Kazan. American of Armenian ancestry.

(20) Breakfast at Tiffany´s. (1961) Audrey Hepburn. George Peppard. Director Blake Edwards.

(21) Camilo José Cela (1916-2002). Nobel Prize of Literature (1989).

(22) The Great War. (1959) Alberto Sordi. Vittorio Gassman. Director. Mario Monicelli.

(23) Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) Marlon Brando. Trevor Howard. Director Lewis Milestone.

(24) Witness for the Prosecution (1957). Marlene Dietrich. Director. Billy Wilder.

(25) Robin Hood (1938). Errol Flynn. Olivia de Havilland. Director. Michael Curtiz.

(26) Brink of Life (1958). Bibi Andersson. Ingrid Thulin. Eva Dahlbeck. Director. Ingmar Bergman

(27) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Glenn Ford. Ingrid Thulin. Director Vincent Minelli.

(28) The Young Lions. (1958) Marlon Brando. Director. Edward Dmitryk.

(29) That. The Civil War. Unmentionable in those days. The loyal side, that is.

(30) High Noon. (1952). Gary Cooper. Grace Kelly. Director. Fred Zinemann.

(31) The critical thought emanating from Cahiers du Cinema blinded a whole generation of film lovers. The evil it caused is still there.

(32) From Here to Eternity. (1953) Burt Lancaster. Deborah Kerr. Director Fred Zinemann.

(33) La Strada. (1954). Giulietta Massina. Director Federico Fellini.

(34) Cine Club. A rare institution in francoist Spain. In exchange for showing the movies only to members they were allowed to distribute classics or otherwise memorable movies outside the usual rules of censorship. They were non profit, of course, and membership was reserved for persons above the age of 21.

(35) Distribution contracts in Spain (from US majors, that is) lasted five years. That explains why many of us had to see the classics in TV and not in theaters. TV in those days was a cluster of enlightment and cinematic erudition and many of us simply cannot forget how much we owe to that bunch of poorly paid enthusiasts.

(36) Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Gary Grant. Jean Arthur. Director Howard Hawks.

(37) At the time the Film Library did not have a permanent see and squatted in an old Madrid cinema, long gone, the California at Gaztambide Street.

(38) Amanecer en Puerta Oscura. (1957) Silver Bear, Berlin Film Festival. Paco Rabal. Isabel de Pomés. Director. Jose

María Forqué. (39) The Treasure of Sierra Madre. (1948). Humphrey Bogart.

Walter Huston. Director. John Huston. (40) An unwed mother in the seventies was not a very proper

thing to be. Ring or not, married women usually of Mamen´s age did not need to knit to make a living. Widowers of advanced age, unwed mothers and the like were more likely agents.

(41) Mamen is referring to Roberto Rosellini´s masterpiece “Rome Open City”. (1945)

(42) Vallecas is a popular quarter in Madrid. Not the urban chic at all.

(43) Jose Luis is right. Married women needed the husband´s consent to open a Bank account, to get a passport, to travel abroad and of course to work. Some hardliners even advocated that husbands enjoyed towards their spouses the same correction rights they enjoyed towards their children. All this changed only with the advent of democracy in 1978. Yet Spain was one of the first countries in the world to allow universal suffrage (1931). Women lost the Civil War too.

(44) Tell Them Willie Boyd Is Here”. (1969). Robert Redford. Katherine Ross. Director Abraham Polonski.

(45) L´enfant sauvage. (The wild Child) (1970) Jean Pierre Cargol. Director. Francois Truffaut.

(46) Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach. (1968). Gustav Leonhart. Christiane Lang.Directors. Jean Marie Straub- Danielle Huillet.

(47) Cera Virgen. (1972) Manuel Alexandre. Francisco Algora. Director. Jose M. Forque, of “Amanecer en Puerta Oscura” fame. Long gone the days of Spanish neorrealism, Forque indulged in the daily bread industry of the Spanish films of the seventies with the usual -and expected- result.

(48) What today would be acceptable gear was definitely not welcome in the last moments of Franco´s rule.

(49) The word in Spanish is high brow “cinéfilo”. “Cinephile”. No wonder Mamen suspects an insult or a joke.

(50) Welcome Mr. Marshall. (1953). José Isbert. Lolita Sevilla. Director. Luis García Berlanga.

(51) Main Street. (1956) Betsy Blair. José Suarez. Director. Juan Antonio Bardem.

(52) The Revenge. (1958) Carmen Sevilla. Raf Vallone. Director. Juan Antonio Bardem. First Spanish movie to be Oscar nominated.

(53) The Wild Bunch. (1969). William Holden. Ernest Borgnine. Director. Sam Peckinpah.

(54) Sergei Einsestein´s Potemkin was forbidden in Franco´s days whether in Cine Clubs or anywhere. Therefore Mamen is invited to a clandestine screening, something reserved to the initiated and the trustworthy. To attend the screening was a criminal offence. As to Mouchette it is a Robert Bresson´s masterpiece (vintage 1967) starring Nadine Nortier.