The Four Corners of my Past Read online

  I knew Quim had recognized me way before I remembered who he was and when I did, I imitated his silence. There was nothing to say, time had not healed everything but aging had taught me to ignore the pains of the past.

  Before we went our separate ways again, in the eternal second in which I recognized him, while his stare was still part of mine, I smiled at him. I didn’t have anything to say to him but he was part of the Elena I was, of the Elena I am. Quim was not my enemy, he was only my past. One more chapter, a memory, a travel mate.

  The second lasted only that, one second and after him, my path continued just as it was. It was my birthday, it was a Tuesday in the month of May. My life was that which was in front of me, the past, like Quim, was already behind my back.

  Barcelona has always been my city. My anchor, the place to return to. A most faithful and pacient friend that has known how to understand my quirks, respect my spaces. i have lost myself in the natural order of its geography, in the colors of a city that bathes itself in the dawn of a peaceful mediterraneum, like the architecture of its forms.

  Trips have always been a part of my life and Barcelona the smell of my childhood, of memories, the place to feel safe. When airports were the elevator of my routine, my city was my anchor. I’ve always lived in the same neighborhood, trying to measure distances, to know every footprint of my day to day, protect myself from time passing, the advances, the works and the tourists. My neighborhood has been my kingdom and I have defended it staying true to my bakery, to the florist who decorates the balconies of the neighborhood, the kiosk that informs itself of the literally novelties to share them with me and offer me warm novels like bread that just came out of the oven. My movie theatre, my school, the thousand colors market, the corner bar with the homemade pastries and the fresh coffee. In my neighborhood have resided all my smells and no matter how far I traveled, a wind, a perfume, the instinct of something known, were my return home. To my city, to a Barcelona that has taken care of me even when I didn’t deserve it.

  How nice it is to feel we belong some place, even when the streets may confuse us sometimes and the signs change when the wind blows. Being a part of something, it’s easier not to feel alone when you go inside a restaurant and the chair in front of you is empty, when someone in a hotel lobby pities the empty side of your double bed or whenever you exit a movie theatre you don’t have anyone to comment the movie with. We are not used to loneliness and this is what condemn us to repeat fears, mistakes, because deep down we usually think that it is better to be in bad company than to be alone. Even when the saying states the contrary. I belong to Barcelona and that, a lot of times, has given me a sense. It has been the other half of my orange, my lemon and all the fruit juices in the supermarket. The love of my life. The I will always love you, the only one that guarantees me to eat partridges and be happy. My city, my home.

  No... it couldn’t be him... that man that was walking towards me, with his jacket opened and the first button of his white shirt untied, it could not be him.

  I narrowed my eyes trying to disguise my myopia, waiting for my pupils to be able to comfort me, to tell me I was making a mistake, that my past was not just crossing the corner to be placed in front of me.

  That way of walking, with the legs slightly arched, feets pointing in almost opposite directions, the light arms, one hand in his pocket, the other hand enjoying the ride, the wind, the movement.

  We were only fifteen meters away when he looked at me and my mouth responded to his look with a smile. I felt the desire again of years ago. It had been more than a decade since we last saw each other and he was still just as handsome as I remembered.

  He recognized me instantly too, he tried to pronounce my name, to greet me in the most impersonal way, but a past history united us forever, the memory of who we were. The tears, the passion...

  He hugged me. In silence, I breathed deeply, I felt again the power of his hugs, the smell of a perfume that transported me back to London, to the Barcelona of my youth, to the hotel nights, the office hours text messages, the forbidden love and the passion. A lot of passion.

  - Hello Edward – I said without leaving yet his arms.

  - Elena...

  Edward

  There was a time in my life, before I turned thirty years old and way before my daughter was born, in which I thought that my professional success would guarantee my realization as a person, as if the eight hours a day that I spent at the office, could assure the happiness of the other sixteen. Everything revolved around my work, from my personal relationships to my way of dressing. It had to represent the young business woman I pretended to be and for that, every detail had to be measured, controlled and validated. That’s what Mr. Cuevas, my boss, told me the day I went to his office to present him with a contract proposal with some English clients.

  - Elena, every time you face a negotiation or simply a business meeting, you need to be clear that you are playing, from the start, with a disadvantage. First of all, because you’re a woman and second of all, because you’re young. – he said that looking at me over his metallic glasses, sitting on a leather chair that was disproportionately large, with the pen between his hands and the window blinds of his office, closed. The picture window behind him, in front of a four star hotel, did not offered the privacy he wanted. –in the ninety-nine percent of the cases – he continued – in front of you, you will have men that are older than you, sirs that when they look at you they’ll think <> and the will despise you because of your age and your gender. Unfourtanately you will always have to demonstrate twice as much as your men coworkers, although I know very well that you are a thousand times better than any of them – that flattery did not made me feel any better – Take care of your appearance, your gestures, your words... and punch the table whenever its necessary.

  I had been working for him for two years. Mr. Cuevas had been the star signing of our company. We both begun working on the same month of October, with barely two weeks apart. He arrived before and I was the first job interview that the new Executive Director did in his brand-new office.

  Ever since I finished the career of Business Administration and Management, three years ago, I had lived on the tight rope of temporary jobs and the desire to eat the world. I worked as a pollster in the airport of El Prat, book saleswoman, phone operator and congress stewardess. I looked for temporary jobs to dispone of money and time, because one without the other was in imposible ecuation to resolve. I traveled a lot and cheap. I often got lost in unknown cities with the desire to discover what tourist maps didn’t indicate. I enjoyed every second, I got drunk, I was irresponsible, I lived... until one day I got tired of playing as the young carefree girl that I actually never was and decided to focus on my professional career. To be the woman of success I always dreamed of being. I recycled myself, reinvented myself and started to look for a job, a “real” job.

  Unfortunately, for a long time, the stars did not align to my favor and mi résumés must have ended in hundreds of recycling bins throughout the city of Barcelona and its periphery. The phone did not ring and my dreams were slowly accumulating dust next to my university degree. <>. What a pretty phrase, so useless back then.it seemed that the letters where crying for my failure. One thick sheet framed in my green walled room, the one I painted when I entered my adolescence, the one that still smelled of tobacco and gin, to that part of me that got away during that hang over morning, like a long graduation party that lasted the right amount of time to have fun and get bored after.

  The day a placement agency called to offer me a job interview at three in the afternoon of the next day, I didn’t even jump of excitement. I thought it would be just another one of those absurd job proposals, as a pyramidal saleswoman or a fake organizator of sports events that actually sold matresess. It was not the first time that after going through a job interview, I was facing a ridiculous day of testing surrounde
d by young people, deceived and consumed by their own ambition. Boys and girls of my same age that worked from sunrise to sunset, wanting to believe that a person, behind the wooden table and their enmoquetated office, promised them the day they signed a contract as false autonoms and turned into slaves of their own greed. They thought themselves as future stars of the world economy while loosing time, friendships and a good part of their life.

  Luckily my ambition was limited and I did not fall in the traps of a laboral world that is not apt for romantics and dreamers but I begun to think that my future would be the sum of temporary jobs.

  When I arrived at the door of the cristal building, the one that corresponded to the address given to me by a nice lady on the other side of the phone the day before, i got on the elevator up to the second floor. The receptionist, a very elegant woman of about sixty years old, politely invited me to wait seated on the only black leather couch of a living room that made sometimes of a lobby. The place smelled of vanilla, there were no magazines, ni books over the table in front of me, just a painting with abstract lines sketeched from one part to another of the rectangular figure. While I waited, alone in the room and under the attentive stare of the secretary, I thought that maybe that was a serious company, that maybe, finally I could aspire to a real job, a contract (undefined where bigger words) and a salary of four ciphres at the end of the month.

  I begun to worry having arrived with empty hands, for not having references or a printed résumé, for not having ironed my black pants and instead I was wearing those decolored jeans, for wearing sandals instead of shoes and for not having a pen in hand just in case the stars had aligned (it was about time) and I could sign my first serious contract of my short and colorful job life. The frustration and the despair with which I attended to that appointment, had led me to not prepare for the interview, I didn’t even nokw what the company dedicated itself to and I was not able to remember the name. it was in English, that I remembered. It started with the letter B, that too.

  - Miss Bas - the receptionist said to me while I was trying to put my ideas in order and save the situation with dignity. -Come with me.

  I followed her, as if only she could know the luck of my destiny. I later discovered that her name was Nanda, short for Fernanda, that every morning she drank a large coffee with no sugar in the same cup and that she had three more years before retiring.

  We crossed a long carpeted corridor of light brown color. The tables, each one with their own computers, folders, documents, family photographs and coffee cups, outlined the involuntary corridor through which we both walked, more than thirty years apart and with an opposite security. In the background, a wooden door broke the transparency of an office closed by two large cristals and two windows facing each other. They were almost a reflection.

  That office looked like a step towards the infinite. The beyond that was waiting for me behind a silver lock of its door.

  - Mr. Cuevas – and the voice of the woman repited – This is Miss Bas.

  That is me, I thought.

  I did not start to sweat until question seventeen. My personal information I knew very well, my academic resume I remembered without efforts but my work expectations came out in an improvised and unknown succession to me.

  - Work is one of the most important parts of my life – I said to an attentive Mr. Cuevas -. Here, in this company, I’m going to spend at least one third of my day and my personal satisfaction will depend at least a thirty percent of everything that happens here. That is why I am always going to give the best of myself, because is not just a job that’s at stake, eight hours a day or a salary at the end of the month, my happiness is at stake and maybe, the rest of my life.

  I released it like that, fluidly, without thinking, as if a had spent years preparing a speech and finally somebody had given me the opportunity to say it. Where the hell was that speech coming from? I didn’t even know if I really thought so.

  - Your mother is English right? – Mister Cuevas asked me.

  - Yes – I responded.

  The fact that my mother was from Norfolk had always been a point in my favor. Until I turned three years old, I did not pronounce a single word but when I did, I knew how to distinguish with no difficulty the language en which my mother was talking to me, English and the ones that to me were “the others”. I mean, Catalan and Spanish.

  I grew up being trilingual in a country that boasts of about having an average level of English in their academic-professional curriculum but quite disastrous at street level. Therefore, my command of the anglo-saxon language was always an advantage.

  - Do you think that your familiarity and the affection that I imagine you have for the British island, can harm when it comes to closing commercial agreements? – question seventeen.

  - Excuse me, but I don’t see how my mother’s birth place may be harmful to me. – I begun to sweat.

  - Forty percent of our clients have their offices in the United Kingdom – good, I thought – so you would have to be constantly in contact with people that, in a way, are your countrymen – I nodded -. Maybe this last thing makes you feel... how do I say it? – Mister Cuevas took a few seconds until he found the word he was looking for – Twinned. My question is, in a negotiation, what would be your principal interests?

  - The companie’s. – I answered.

  - Are you sure Miss Bas? – he always did that. When he wanted to study a person, to see beyond their words, to listen to what the person in front of him was really thinking, mister Cuevas, would approach his body a few centimeters towards his “oponent”, he would tilt his head to the right and breathed slowly, letting the silence to uncover the truths that could not be told.

  - Yes – I answered bluntly -. Part of my family is british, part catalan, andalusian... I have an uncle in Uruguay and the mother of my paternal grandfather, was born in Prague. My genealogic tree does not sign the contracts or closes the agreements. My company’s interests will be my own and the nationalisms I leave for whoever wants to live with them.

  He relaxed his back, his arms and I felt my answer had convinced him.

  We kept talking for more than twenty minutes about negotiations, real estate values, types of clients, investements... until he got up from the table, adjusted his pink and white checkered shirt under his pants, turned the computer screen off and offered me a glass of water.

  - Yes, please – I thanked him.

  He came out of the office. I saw him talking to a woman of maybe forty years old, big, tall, corpulent... at plain view I would have guessed she was german. They both looked at me carelessly. The receptionist gave him my glass of water and mister Cuevas went back to his office, walking slowly, letting my nerves to boil in the slowlyness of his steps, in his eyes hidden behind fine metallic galsses. He entered in silence, placed the glass in front of me, he settled into his big chair observing the gray day behinf the windows of the room the traffic of a Wednesday in Barcelona, the life of the last day of the month of September and ask:

  - Tell me miss Bas, why should I give you the job?

  - Because I am the best – I answered without thinking.

  His laughter resonated in the crystals, the books, the dozen pens tighted in an aluminum bowl, the calculator and the last drops of my glass of water. I still don’t know how I had the courage to respond to him like that, but I did and I was not afraid.

  - Look Elena, I have many years in this profession, more than twenty – he said staring at the photograph of two kids between ten and fifteen years of age whom I imagined were his sons – and I am going to do something I have never done – drumroll

  - You are hired.

  I wanted to hug him, kiss his face the way every grandmother in town do it to kids after a long winter of absenses. I wanted to jump, dance, shout...

  - Thank you so much mister Cuevas – was all I said. With a smile that was a breath of tranquility, the satisfaction of my first job agreement closed. That interview had been my first negotiat
ion and I had just won it.

  - Don’t thank me, show me that effectively, you are the best.

  And I did, of course I did... the next Monday I premiered as a worker of Beauty Building Company, a company that was dedicated to purchase and restructuring classic buildings to rent later to international hotel chains. I belonged to the department called Product Procurement Specialist, a role that was harder to pronounce tan the task i had to do. Basically, I was in charge of relationships with distint real estate agencies or private propiertors with which I negotiated the purchase of one or several buildings on behalf of BBC (beauty building company). My work supposed few office hours, a lot of Blackberry hours and a lot of weekly trips to europen cities to meet with our suppliers.

  I got used to infinite meetings right away, high heels, the frenetic ruthm of an office that never ceased, the postponed sleep in front of a monitor, ciphres to match, increase, improve. Foreign objectives that became my own.

  The hours of waiting in the airports, the flights and solitary hotel nights, were the only time where I could allow myself to read one of the many books that traveled with me from one place to another, from one country to another, wthpout finding a stable spot on my night stand. I liked my job, I knew I was good in it and that made me feel powerful. My personal insecurities were hiding in the shadows of my professional accomplishments, those which both society and me believed were the most important. I only dated people related to my job, I studied an online master in negotiation during my little free time and when I arrived home, in the solitude of a little room with a broken windiw and the same furniture the seller had when he put the “for rent” sign, I watched movies with subtitles in german, to improve my poor knowledge of the language. I never bothered in arranging the house I was living in, I spent so little time in it, just the necessary. I understood later that my house would be one day, my temple, but I hadn’t gotten there yet. Was I happy? I don’t know, I did not have the time to ask myself that.