Love and Gaby

Gaby y el amor

Salvadora Medina Onrubia

In the twenty-five years of Gaby’s life, only one minute had had the profundity of all the hours that form a destiny. In Gaby’s twenty-five years of life, only one minute …

And to be able to arrive at that minute, I have to tell her whole story.
Her story?... It’s really an unimportant story; there’s nothing in it that could act as a cliché for some tormented modern psychologist.
The heroines in all the magazine novellas are just like Gaby. Or we find them in the theatre, as the cheesy, mediocre heroines of earnest and weepy dramas.
In her life, she simply exists. She walks down Florida Avenue, goes to the stores, to the flower stands. She was educated by nuns; she knows how to embroider and play the piano. Just now she’s cut her long hair.
Among all of the Gabys out there, the one in my story is without a doubt the most beautiful. Golden blonde hair, blonde, so blonde, warm and soft, fluffed up like tangled silk.



 Her skin is milky white and blushing pink; her eyes are almost gray, almost blue, and there is a miraculous harmony between her long dark eyelashes and the perfect arc of her plucked eyebrows.
Already twenty-five years. But it doesn’t matter. If the refined, modern, artificial women of the city don’t have the triumphant freshness of youth, neither do they have the premature anguish of growing old. They’re eternally little girls. When they finally hand over their weapons, it’s because they are, or could be, grandmothers.
Gaby is one of them. Her gray-blue eyes widened with eye shadow; her perfect lips red, too red; a touch of crimson in her quivering nostrils; and stunning white teeth. Gaby is through and through a woman made for love … Nice and tall, very fragile, very delicate, and within her fragility and her delicateness an undulant woman with powerful hips and the ankles of a greyhound. And the complete harmony in her walking and in her moving, and in her laughing, and her white hands, perfect, whose miraculous softness and delicateness were necessary for many generations of idleness … and her fingernails, painted a red as violent as the one on her lips.
Gaby, Gaby … How beautiful she is! All of her sisters pale and are erased in the light of her luminous light hair.
Gaby had a mother, a father and six siblings, two of them brothers. Her father had a high post in the government.
Her family enjoyed an enviable social position; they knew how to seem important, and who knows how flashy they might have been if they’d actually had wealth. But their only support was the salary of her severe father, a stomach-diseased, myopic, methodical man who was a fanatic reactionary and highly convinced of his social importance.
Poor man. His glasses didn’t help him, thick as they were, to see that in life, he, reactionary par excellence, had children by his side, a wife, a high social position, a house and lofty friendships; he was the great proletarian, the sad beast of burden, the victim of the great social scheme, which he, between stabbing stomach pains and walloping hiccups, defended ardently.
Laura, Gaby’s mother, was like the mothers of all the Gabys. She had only two outstanding features: her chest and the pretensions of her imagined social standing. She was another victim; her life was a heroic life – it was the type of heroism that never had a José Santos Chocano to sing about it.
Sometimes her nerves failed her and her husband paid for it. But it was only fair: she couldn’t make miracles with that ridiculous salary, which had to sustain so much. The house and housekeeping and clothes … and arranging suitable marriages for four daughters – lazy ones, who lived as though they were princesses – and seeking the proper schooling for her miscreant sons, schooling they would never actually go on to finish. And the grocer, and the butcher …
How the poor woman bellowed!... One might have thought she was one of those miserable tenement women who have so many children that they have to be cared for by the dirty handymen who come begging for bread.
These things … with these things Gaby’s mother played at having a career. What do any of them know of poverty? What dire needs do they have? None; apart from those of bread and shelter, which God provided to them, along with the thousand other things that Gaby’s family had. And four young women to marry off.
The first to get married was Gaby, and when she got married she was twenty years old.
The extraordinary beauty had in her mother – her creator and proprietress – a shrewd administrator.
On her own, Gaby never would have made such a smart match, marrying an obese multimillionaire who owned grand ships that traveled to the south.
She’d thrown away the treasure of her bright eyes and her juicy lips; she’d given them to the first thirsty traveler who’d wanted to drink from them.
Love?... Love? … Her mother never permitted any of her daughters such luxuries. The girls would have to wait and marry well and earn extravagances like love.
Their mother was an honest dealer. She was looking for four high bidders, for her noble merchandise was four pure, beautiful virgins who would one day become four perfect housewives.
How difficult that trip to Mar del Plata was for their mother! But the four girls were a sensation… Gaby, with her light, calm eyes and her voluptuous red mouth, outfitted with piles of white pants and straw hats, hardly had time to take notice of anyone before she found herself engaged. Their mother almost fainted that morning – eight days after the arrival – when the obese multimillionaire spoke to her about his love for Gaby. She concealed her shock and sent a telegraph to her husband with a cryptic triumphant shout.
Finally, Gaby’s father understood the reasonableness, the magnificence, of his wife’s orchestrations in his life, and the foolishness of his timid protestations.
The joy that seized her mother when Gaby became engaged, which lasted until the end of her days, prevented her from throwing the manner in her husband’s face too bitterly.
Financial needs were a far-off nightmare; the other three daughters were assured splendid matches, the sons could study lazily and resist dating wealthy heiresses. Their father could finally let his stomach and his hiccups and all of his grand bureaucratic grumbling kill him like a horse tied to a treadmill… Their mother could finally breathe, with sighs so deep they made her abundant chest tremble and quiver like gelatin.
Fifteen days of vacation. Poor daddy, he could hardly stand to be alone so long.
Gaby posed this way and that for all of the magazines. The new couple exhausted every possible and impossible resource to furnish the house ostentatiously, and finally Gaby was married.
She was happy. She had everything that a woman could buy. Everything … she desired nothing more.
Something like a childish vanity arose from feeling like she was part of some great drama, along with a loyal and honest affection for the man who gave her so many things, and who kissed her beautiful mouth with his thick lips bristling with sharp whiskers, who bit her red lips with his gold-encased teeth.
Love? Tito, the stupid man, besieged her once. But she knew how to say sharp and brutal things with her painted mouth.
Five years of marriage … Her cold flesh was sterile.
Now, awhile back, he’d given her romance novels to read … mindless things. Sometimes, while she was reading them, a longing, an anguish… a vague anxiety. She began to take interest in conversations that at one time had bothered her. But everything was vague… only that feeling while she read … those anguished thougts about love.
Gaby knew very well that love only existed in books. If passion really existed in life, how beautiful it would be to live!
Speaking over tea with a friend, Gaby summarized it like this:
Love is only a great anxiety, an endless longing, an eternal anguish that every woman has inside of her …
The unbalanced, the hysterical ones, they let it lead them down crooked paths. The good ones, the sensible ones, they lock it with two turns of the bolt inside their chests.
Sometimes, the riskiest ones let themselves be kissed on the fingers by a gallant young man, or they smile in response to some daring line.
And, Gaby finished laconically, passing her teacup:
Well, enough of the childish talk. Give me more tea.
Five years of marriage.
When she woke up on the morning of that fateful day, laughing and fresh as spring, Gaby was thinking of nothing but of love.
It was cold. She called the private car and wrapped herself in her splendid blonde fur overcoat, of a blonde that was slightly darker than her own hair.
She went to a boutique, wanting to buy herself a hat with flowers. She left at nearly eleven.
She came upon a detour. Next to the boutique, a house was being demolished. Several men were working in the middle of a cloud of dust.
Her car couldn’t get close, and as she was getting out of the car to pass through the pile of rubble on foot, a horse pulling a cart rushed by, frightening her. A gallant cart driver took him by the bridle and pulled him back to let her pass. Gaby lifted her gray-blue eyes to thank him. She saw a strong and solid, tall and dark brute of a man. He was hatless and had black, curly, uncombed hair, which was full of soil. His gaze was audacious and his eyes were black, intense, insolent … he smiled at her, flashing his strong white teeth.
Beneath his tattered shirt she could make out a robust, steely musculature, around his neck a black handkerchief, and on his waist a thick belt that held up his loose gaucho trousers. Flat shoes made of cotton and jute; enormous, dirty, calloused hands. It was a single glance. It was how Gaby would always see him.
She stopped, flustered. She saw that the eyes of the man were surprised, full of admiration. And in her indecision, the man said:
-Wait. Go this way –and he threw a plank over the debris.
They smiled at one another. Gaby accepted the favor and walked over the plank, agile, with her light step and her greyhound ankles.
When she walked away, he waited for her, replaced the plank for her and they smiled at one another once more.
Gaby left the car there and crossed the street to another shop.
While she tried on hats, bold eyes from the street followed her through the shop window with longing. They disturbed her. She left without buying anything.
He was standing next to the door. He was no longer smiling. He looked at her with a drawn mouth and hard eyes. Gaby was frightened; but it was a sweet, flesh-gripping fear. She lifted her eyes and for a moment held the gaze of the man.
She passed, she wasn’t sure how … and the car finally started, slowly …
And Gaby, fully turned around and stone-faced, watched him for a long time as he stood in the middle of the street, arms crossed, absorbed, staring after her, surrounded by a screech of tram bells and car horns and an entire block of traffic detained in homage to her gray-blue eyes.
Once she was far away, she raised her hand and said, “Goodbye.”
Gaby’s white hand, with its sparkling red fingernails, repeated the gesture: Goodbye … Goodbye…
She arrived home sullen and cranky. Her head hurt. It was time for lunch. She had no appetite.
At her side her husband slurped his soup, obese and smiling.
Gaby started at her full plate, with her doll face between her white hands, watching it as though she’d never seen it.
Her mother, who was eating with them, was chattering about something, which elicited responses, between spoonfuls, from her owner and husband.
Gaby looked at him. His mouth full of gold, his short, bristly whiskers, his white, wide face, his nearly invisible eyes beneath the sacks of his eyelids, his plump bald patch, his short, thick fingers, his soft, flabby hands …
Fat; fat and flabby, with a wide chain crossing his bright vest.
Gaby looked at him … and behind him rose another figure. … it was life, youth, the strong brute who could have shattered all of her fair fragility with one hand.
He was there, with his black hair, curly and full of dust, with his red, firm mouth and teeth so white against his brown face, his black, ardent eyes… She saw his enormous hands, calloused and marked, which had helped her. she felt the stare of his admiration and desire enveloping her completely.
And that feeling almost like fear, that sweet fear that alighted in her flesh an unfamiliar pain… Fear, Gaby? And she thought about what might have happened if instead of finding him there, in the street, she had found him on the mountain one morning when she was riding alone through the Chaco countryside.
What fear!... Him… What had he done?... Love and Gaby… In none of the romance novels that she read had something so absurd happened.
Love and Gaby… Her gray-blue eyes looked hard at the fat bourgeois man slurping his soup.
He noticed it, and pushing the empty bowl away from him, he said:
-Why are you looking at me, darling?
Everything that had happened that morning had been so out of the ordinary. Sweet, serene Gaby exploded in hysterical, convulsive sobs.
Mother and husband tried to help her. They asked what was wrong. She rigidly shook them off, and when her husband tried to kiss her she called him a brute, an imbecile, stupid.
She locked herself in her room, threw herself on the bed and cried and moaned.
Gaby, the sweet and sensible Gaby, created in her house an unheard-of scandal. She – she! – had an anxiety attack. Gaby, the very reflection of well brought-up daughters and sensible and calm women.
How distressed her husband was! Her mother calmed him down with talk of babies. Gaby simply needed a child.
He tried to talk with Gaby, but it was useless. He left. Later, nearing nightfall, her mother returned and Gaby, awaiting guests, was already dressed in a pale suit and had eyes as bright as the sky after a storm.
-Nothing, mother… Don’t I have the right to have nerves myself once in awhile?
Her mother sensed something; but Gaby’s husband and his guests had already arrived. And Gaby, sweeter and more gentile than ever, lifted her pale face to her husband for a kiss, greeted everyone, smiled… And her long lashes veiled gray-blue eyes that seemed to her mother to be brimming with mystery.
And Gaby smiled …
And the man who felt through his entire being the fervent desire for the untouchable doll who he’d seen pass, dazzling, before his eyes?
He sat on the pile of rubble of his cart, with the reins in his dirty, languid hands, strong and beautiful and sad, sunken in the mystery of the great city.
A woman, some otherly woman, had passed by him and he had given her the homage of his spirited desire.
Her… her. He would never know that those gray-blue eyes sparkled just for him, that they never looked at anyone the way they looked at him. That that smile never was so sweet, that the hand that said goodbye was saying goodbye to the first shock its flesh had known. That nobody would ever possess Gaby as he possessed her in that instant, in which he, alone, isolated from life, eyes only on her, stood with crossed arms in the middle of the street, hearing neither the whistles of the trams, nor the honking of the cars – his detainees, the chorus of his desire.
If only he’d been able to squeeze that doll with his calloused hands. How soft she would be, how beautiful… How he would look lovingly in the bright eyes that surrendered themselves to his.
But she one was of “the others” …
What passed through the soul of that man?
That which made Gaby cry and moan and clench was, in the chest of the man, a flash of rebellion and a longing to kill.
They were two seeds sown in fertile soil.
-… seeds? Of what?
“The furrow, the seed, and the harvest …”
Love and Gaby. Love and Gaby …