A Woman and a Chair

It was written in my diary for the seventh of July, the day I’d be thirty-five: change chair.
So that the group of chairs sheltering the dining-table didn’t clash, that brown chair had to be red. But it had been brown for a long time, four or five months, ever since I’d bought it in a rush. I’d agreed with the shop assistant, again in a rush, to change it as soon as the red one arrived, without allowing for the sluggishness that overcomes those of us who go from birthday to birthday without furniture ever settling down in our houses. Yes, I wanted a red one, but they didn’t have a red one just then, only brown. Coming up to thirty-five without ever having owned a dining-table, I couldn’t wait even a couple of days for another chair to arrive.

[private]‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘I’ll take this one for now. When the other one comes, I’ll collect it.’
And I spent four, five months gazing at the brown chair, incapable of picking it up and taking it to be changed even when they began to phone almost daily from the shop.

‘The red one is here for you. You can come for it now.’
‘I can’t today. I’ll come tomorrow.’
I wrote down the job to be done on several pages covering several weeks, I went to bed many nights thinking about the chair, I often got up fretting that a polite voice on the phone would say good morning and remind me:
‘Would you like us to deliver it? We can deliver it, too.’
‘No, no, I’ll come.’
‘If you prefer the brown one, you can keep it.’
‘No, really I prefer the red one.’

And the day came to return the chair. A seventh of July like any other, except that on that day I was thirty-five. I swore I wouldn’t let the morning go by without getting the job done. I got up, resolute. I took the brown chair in my arms, I walked downstairs with it and put it into the car, in the front passenger seat, legs in the air. I sat behind the steering-wheel and set off.

I’ve always liked driving. I remembered this wasn’t the way to the shop, but I headed down the road that crossed the river, certain I’d end up in the same place. In this respect Santiago isn’t like other cities. The urban layout is an ancient one, established long ago, and from the surrounding villages you reach the centre along narrow tarmac lanes that go straight from the front doors of the houses to the covered market, and nowhere much else. The radial roads that run from the centre to the surrounding areas aren’t linked by those circular flyovers which weave the spider’s web of a great city. I drove through those patches of green country in the hope of sometime finding the short cut that would take me to the shopping centre, but a little after crossing the river I realized there wasn’t going to be any such short cut. Even so, the beauty of the road that was now taking me into wooded country made it worth going a few extra kilometres to get to nowhere in particular without looking at the clock. The brown chair was by my side, sitting with its legs in the air like a silent, sceptical companion.

I thought for a moment that this was one of the most absurd scenes of my life, a woman who on her thirty-fifth birthday runs away from home, with only a chair for her luggage, towards an unpredictable and unknown destiny. Who’d miss me if I never went back? Would the shop owner really take the trouble to find me? I drove on as I fantasized about reaching a wonderful place, a moist, green meadow where I would get out, set up my chair – the chair I should never have bought – and sit there to look at the view, the city in the distance with the outline of the cathedral, and maybe, around me, as around the oldest city centres, there would be a gradual accumulation of sundry and necessary objects that I still didn’t own and that it was high time I took into my care; in the end that soon-to-be-rejected chair would become the first stone upon which my church would be built, and beside it a man who’d greet me at the door with a kiss, the children I’d have with that man, the walls we’d build to protect them from the cold, the beds we’d sleep in, and finally the table and the chairs we’d buy to sit down and eat on festa days with our guests. The brown chair would be the first stone of my new life, a chair chanced upon, not chosen. I glanced at it by my side in the car, and began to feel sorry to be getting rid of that piece of furniture.

Suddenly, just when I was thinking about turning back, a little tired from driving for kilometres doing nothing but my imagination any good, I looked at the dashboard clock: it was gone half past one. The time when I was born, according to my mother – half past one in the afternoon, the time when all the shops close. I calculated that I was further from the shopping centre than it had at first seemed. I thought I must either rush back to change the chair before they closed or forget all about the matter. But I did the former, of course. I turned back and put my foot down. I didn’t waste time looking for short cuts, I drove like greased lightning back along the tarmac road I’d come down, and in five minutes covered the distance that separated me from the centre and that had taken me half an hour in my impromptu flight. I saw the frightened faces of the people, stepping back on to the verges, the trees I was leaving behind, the moist, green meadows with which I’d had my moment of intimacy and which were now becoming forever alien. Soon I crossed the river and returned to the city. The roads, cluttered with cars and traffic lights, led me straight to the shopping centre. They were hanging up the ‘closed’ sign when I arrived. The shop assistant looked at me, in the relaxed manner of small-town shopkeepers. I took the brown chair in my arms as if it were a sick child.
‘I’m here to change the chair,’ I said, like someone coming into casualty from a long way off, from one of those villages where there aren’t any hospitals, or any shopping centres.
The man looked at the chair and recognised it. He let us in.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘We were just about to shut.’
The red chair was in an unsorted collection of furniture in a corner of the shop. It seemed faded.
‘Yes, that’s the one,’ I said, and handed my chair over.

It was past lunchtime when I got home. The door in front of me opened by itself, as if in a hurricane, as if someone had sensed me climbing the stairs. Behind the door, young blond children welcomed me expectantly.
‘Happy birthday, Mama.’
I walked with the chair through their shouts and their turmoil to the dining-room, where the brown chair had left its empty space. A man sitting on the sofa folded the newspaper he was reading and came to kiss me.
‘Happy birthday, my dear,’ he said.
I tried to act normally. I put the chair in its place. I went to my diary to cross out the job I’d just done. I asked those people what they wanted for lunch.[/private]

Luisa Castro is a poet and novelist. Her career began as a poet in the1980s. Her volume of poetry in Galician, Baleas e baleas (Esquío Prize, 1988), is considered a seminal work. Since then she has written exclusively in Spanish, apart from some short stories, such as this one. Castro has published several novels and one collection of short stories, Podría hacerte daño (Ediciones del Viento, 2005), which was awarded the Torrente Ballester prize. She contributes to El País, El Mundo and ABC, the three most important Spanish newspapers, and to La Voz de Galicia, the most important Galician one.

This story is included in From the Beginning of the Sea (Anthology of Contemporary Galician Short Stories). www.foreigndemand.net