The Dream of the City (27 page)

Laura and Dimas couldn't stop smiling at the people's slavery to social convention and the attention sought out by the majority of those present. When they were finally alone, they still stood close together, their faces close to each other after being shoved together by the mob. Laura, her body pressed against Dimas's, looked up at him, while he tensed his muscles beneath his suit to avoid any movement that might be interpreted wrongly; he didn't want Laura to think he had tried to come close to her against her wishes. But now—in fact, he hadn't even realized it—he too was refusing to pull away, and in his head there was a fierce struggle between the demands of decorum and good behavior and what his body, struggling against his own thoughts, longed desperately to do.

They stayed that way awhile, frozen, as though chained together, without feeling the wind or the cold or the dust that rose up with the others' footsteps—until suddenly what their bodies understood on the edge of their thoughts rose up between them like an insurmountable barrier that made them aware of where they stood, of what others would think if they saw them like that, if they gave in to those instincts that seemed suddenly and incomprehensibly to be taking over both of them, that they seemed incapable of reining in. Then they imagined the looks of the people—a crowd, not anyone in particular—who would look at them and reprimand their attitude. And they separated. Laura patted down her hair and Dimas, just to do something with his hands, adjusted his tie and straightened his detachable celluloid collar.

They walked slowly and in silence, like automatons, carried by the inertia of the masses, and when they had calmed down, they were almost at the edge of the lot. Laura pointed to her family's car.

“There are my parents and Núria. I have to go.”

“Of course. I'm sorry …”

Laura moved to place two fingers over Dimas's lips, then thought better of it, afraid she would be seen or he would reject that spontaneous gesture.

“Don't say anything. I'll see you tomorrow.” And she turned around. That phrase, so normal, so habitual, seemed to him like a promise concealed in normality.

Her step was light as she walked away. Dimas stayed there looking a few moments and then returned to the temple. After he had walked a few yards, he found his father, who was there waiting for him. When he reached him, they started walking together.

“That girl …” his father began.

“Yes?”

“She's the sister of your boss, no?”

“She is,” Dimas said.

They went on walking in silence. Guillermo saw them and ran up to them. His hands were stained, and his pants were filthy from sitting on the ground.

“Can you not have anything nice?” Juan reproached him. “If you had said something, you could have gone home and changed. I can't leave you by yourself. Have you seen what you look like?”

Guillermo hung his head the rest of the walk, kicking the occasional stone, looking back sometimes at Dimas, while his brother resisted looking back. The young man had a strange feeling in his stomach, and though it was different, it made him feel very good.

CHAPTER 27

Laura arrived at the jewelry workshop before Ferran, who was surprised to see her so early in their father's office.

“They don't need you at the cathedral today?” he asked with a certain sarcasm.

“No,” she responded drily. “I want to finish a drawing, something Papa assigned me.”

Ferran lifted an eyebrow in response. He didn't like to be told how to run the business, but he did have a high regard for Laura's work, although he didn't tell her to avoid swelling her expectations. He was racking his brains trying to come up with a more economical and efficient way of doing things. He thought that what would work was automating the processes, eliminating costs and reducing production time, and focusing on the quality of the materials—a perspective that would bring together the old and the new with the traditional idea of jewelry, or what Laura dismissively called “the price of fancy rocks.” His sister, unlike him, worked in the uncertain terrain of art, a world where the idea, the form, was what mattered. But what did she know about invoices, purveyors, fluctuations in the precious metals market … Ferran headed to his office. He remarked to an apprentice that he should tell Dimas Ferran was waiting for him when he arrived.

When she heard Dimas's name, Laura trembled. Luckily, nobody noticed. Since the morning of the day before, she had been incapable of getting his image, his voice, his gestures out of her mind. She pulled back her hair from her face and tried to tuck it behind her ear. Then she bent over the table and traced for the thousandth time the line of a curve that still did not seem right to her. It was impossible to concentrate. Every time she heard a noise, she thought it was the door. And every time someone came in, she raised her head timidly. She spent a long time in that state of continuous excitement without sketching a single worthwhile drawing.

Then suddenly, she heard someone say: “Dimas, the boss wants to see you; he's waiting for you.”

Laura heard that phrase, and though she hadn't planned on doing so, she couldn't stop herself—she burst from her father's office. It was as if her legs had a life of their own and dragged her on regardless of her will, as if they heard an unmistakable call, the call of her blood, of her passion, beyond her own perception. She made it in time to see him step into Ferran's office. Since she was up, she went to Àngel's table to consult him about a question. With her back to Ferran's office, she tried not to give the impression that she was occupied with anything except her work.

Slightly perplexed, Àngel answered Laura's questions about the malleability of white gold. She seemed distracted. Then Ferran came out with Dimas, who had a tube of cardboard under his arm, and accompanied him to the exit. They passed by her side without noticing her. Ferran wished Dimas luck and said to make sure to keep him informed.

Dimas put on his hat and walked pensively out of the workshop. Ferran's assignment would require him to act again. He needed to think clearly before taking any steps, so the first thing he did when he reached his destination was to find a place to sit down and have a coffee.

Ferran Jufresa was interested in getting into the real estate business; the new times were doing away with the traditionally secure values. Speculation was an evil that had burdened the country's economy for centuries, but it worked well for making the already rich even richer. Barcelona was living through years of unrestrained growth and land was doubling in price in the blink of an eye. What had formerly been fields for crops became apartment blocks in a matter of months. “Cheap housing,” as it was called, invaded the suburbs; it was ludicrously priced and built in enormous quantities, tens or hundreds of buildings jammed into lots that had previously belonged to a single mansion or country home. Innumerable families were packed into the most minimal spaces. The huge number of people determined to struggle for a simple job in the city meant that, because of sheer volume, even humble dwellings were big business. “I want my piece of the pie, Dimas,” Ferran had insisted moments before with the look of a hungry animal.

The plan consisted of acquiring tracts in the region known as Campo del Arpa, a place belonging to San Martin de Provensals. When that had been a town independent of Barcelona, it was known as
La Muntanya
, and they didn't begin to build houses there until the second half of the nineteenth century. For a long time it was agricultural land providing food for the neighboring city of Barcelona. But with industrialization, the factories took over the district, and Campo del Arpa filled up with workers as well. Cerdà had included it in his plan, with the idea of respecting the region's peculiar terrain. Nonetheless, the owners resisted it, and as a consequence, there were numerous streets in the Ensanche, like the Calle Rosellón, that stopped dead when they reached Campo del Arpa.

Ferran's idea was to buy there, little by little, until he had managed to obtain enough properties to organize them into an island in the style of the Ensanche. That would certainly involve buying up agricultural land as well as neighboring buildings. The latter would be more difficult, because the property owners were heavily divided and some would be willing to sell while others would be against it. Once everyone was convinced and Ferran had the land, he wouldn't have any problems finding a builder.

Dimas's job was to make that consensus happen. He knew the operation was important for other reasons: Ferran was not only trying to show himself to be an able businessman in the eyes of Barcelona's bourgeoisie, but also trying to win positions of power by flushing the radical workers out of the area. Campo del Arpa was becoming a nucleus for anarchist, Catalanist, and anticlerical organizations. If he acquired the buildings and bourgeois residents took them over, little by little the ideology of the neighborhood would change. The workers would eventually sell, and they would spread out through the city and lose some of their strength, which after all lay in their unity. But for now, Dimas was trying to get the lay of the neighborhood, contemplating the possibility of making the initial buys and getting to know who was who.

He took a sip of coffee and set the cup down softly on the marble tabletop. He stretched his neck to relieve a bit of tension and looked lazily around the bar, trying to distract himself for a moment. His eyes fell on the back of a girl who was just getting up from her seat: her hair, the same color as Laura's, was cut in the
garcon
style. Forcing his mind back to business, Dimas paid for his drink and began chatting with the owner, a thin bald man. With just a few questions he managed to find out that one of the major property owners in the area was Bartolomeu Raventós, who had built a number of apartment buildings for rent. His good reputation indicated he wasn't someone excessively ambitious, so Dimas didn't imagine it would be too hard to convince him. He went home ready to think up a plan.

When he arrived, he unfolded the map of the Ensanche Ferran had given him with the construction plan for Campo del Arpa. Bartolomeu's buildings were exactly what Dimas was looking for. He took his time tracing out a strategy, and he had to leave to buy notebooks and carbon paper. He made as many copies as were necessary until he came up with a credible image in which Bartolomeu's buildings were not the future enclave, but rather a hypothetical arterial that would need to be demolished. If he argued it was a matter of eminent domain, he could surely convince the owner, and at a low price as well.

When he was satisfied, Dimas thought of taking a copy of the map to his boss's office so that Ferran would be up to date. But he wanted to bathe first. He heated the water on the stove in the kitchen and emptied it into the metal tub until it was half full. Then he added cold water until the temperature was ideal and the tub full. He stripped and knelt down inside with a tremble. The hot water turned his flesh bright red. The memory of Laura emerged with force from amid the hot vapors. That morning he had only seen her a few moments in the workshop, while Ferran was explaining his plans and Dimas was acting as if he was listening. In reality he was looking through the windows of the office. Laura had her back turned, bent slightly over the desk of Àngel Vila. She was beautiful when she got lost in her thoughts like that, far from everyone and everything. She looked fragile, defenseless.

After the water grew cold, he decided to soap himself before getting out. While he dressed, he looked at the still-full tub: the water didn't look dirty. He wanted to see it clouded, filled with the ambition, the vanity, the pride, the love for business and for money that he had scrubbed away, but in fact, the soap had hardly whitened it. He picked up the cardboard tube where he had rolled up the plans and went to look for Ferran at his office.

When he arrived at the workshop, he realized it was later than he'd thought when he left. Absorbed in his work, and later in the relaxation of the bath, he had let time slip away. Everyone seemed to have left already. He knocked at the door with little hope of an answer; maybe it would have been better to leave the bath for later.

The door creaked softly and opened slowly.

“I saw you through the window, otherwise I wouldn't have opened up.”

Laura was there, enveloped in the shadow, looking at him with her enormous eyes. Those lips … Dimas swallowed.

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” she said in a whisper that Dimas didn't know how to interpret. It seemed like a reproach, but also like a sarcastic joke of the kind he had heard her say to her brother or the artisans in the shop.

He looked at her closely, still there on the threshold, not sure if it would be proper to stay there or come in. Maybe it wasn't prudent to do so. He still couldn't tell whether she enjoyed his presence or not, whether she found him agreeable, bothersome, or simply inevitable. How was it possible, he thought, indecisive, that after all the jobs and errands he had performed for Ferran, all of them accomplished without a hitch, he was still incapable of understanding the demeanor of that young woman who sometimes struck him like a little girl, other times like the very essence of a woman?

As if she could divine his thoughts, she stood aside to open the way in for him. He entered and immediately knew that it had been a bad idea; he wasn't sure he'd be able to control himself; she was the wife of his boss, a society girl, and he, he …

“I came to drop this off for your brother,” was all he managed to say, with his customary seriousness.

“I'm at the table in the back,” she said, pointing with one hand. They walked together toward the offices. The noise of their steps broke the silence of the workshop.

Dimas left the cylinder on Ferran's desk and closed the door to the office behind him. He had nothing else to do there. He understood that he should leave, but he resisted. Laura was standing beside her worktable, illuminated by the pale yellow light of a small lamp, as if waiting for him. Dimas approached her with his heart beating fast. She moved to one side to show him what she was working on. He bent over to see better and heard the rustling of her clothes when she stepped slightly back to avoid blocking his light. After a few moments looking at the piece she had been fashioning, he finally dared to pick it up. Holding the jewel between two fingers, he stood up straight. He looked her in the eyes and said, “I like it.”

She had been holding her breath waiting for his verdict. When she heard it, she breathed a sigh of relief, softly, calming herself down. Suddenly, for Dimas, the whole day had a reason for being: Laura and her cheerful face. All those hours, the sins and virtues, the hunger and gluttony, the satisfaction and sorrow vanished, as when someone pulls away a cloth and leaves the clean table underneath. The day was ending, but it had finally found its meaning.

The sound of Dimas's voice made Laura shiver. Everything had been silence before then and the shadows emphasized that feeling of defenselessness, of solitude. All day she'd been working, and all at once, she found herself far happier at his compliment than she would have liked to admit.

“Really?” she murmured.

Dimas could not stop looking at Laura's face: her eyes, her half-open lips, her neck …

“Really,” he repeated in his deep voice.

Laura went on looking at him and a desire pounded away at her:
kiss him, kiss him, kiss him
…

Dimas approached her slowly. First he pressed his forehead against hers to see whether the touch was invited. Both closed their eyes as if to preserve that moment, to sharpen the rest of their senses. And they kissed. He pulled her close to him by the waist and she wrapped him in her arms. They could feel the warmth of each other's bodies. And their movements, until then sinuous and slow, became more daring, more rapid. Dimas sat her on the table. Laura pushed away all that was on it and some of her tools fell to the floor. They went on kissing, frantically, as if afraid time would stop; and then more slowly, savoring each other, eyes open, perfectly conscious. Laura gave a moan when Dimas ran his lips down her neck and stopped on her ear.

“Laura …” he whispered.

She wanted to cry, to laugh, to shout. She brought her small hands up to Dimas's face and pushed him a few inches away. She looked at him like that for an instant, as if trying to catch her breath. Then the caresses and the kisses returned. Dimas slid his hands down her back and unfastened the closures of her dress. She took off his jacket and nervously unbuttoned his shirt. His chest rose and fell in time with his frenzied breathing. Both were now naked to the waist.

Dimas continued kissing her. He traveled over her neck, her breasts. Laura moaned a bit and that only stoked his desire. Then she pushed him softly with her hands and he stood before her, perplexed, until she removed what remained of her clothes and stood before him unclothed. She felt neither embarrassment nor shame, despite all that she'd been told or had imagined. Then she came close to him while he stood there unsure and took off his pants. Both were naked and staring at each other. She took his hand and walked him into a corner.