Chapter Text
1. 22
Jaime is heavy.
He’s heavy, resting on top of her, and he smells like one of the aftershaves from the shop. It’s a popular one, and now that she thinks of it, they’d been running low the other day, and she had forgotten to order more to be brought in from the warehouse. It would be all right; Sofía, a saleswoman who has been working in the shop since before Marta learned to walk, would have noticed and made the order before she left for the day. But Sofía, despite her experience, remains a saleswoman, while Marta was appointed store manager just six months ago, without ever having worked in the store before. So when she’s back at work, Sofía will make a point of telling Marta that she covered one of her responsibilities, and would force Marta to thank her, and they would both walk away with the uncomfortable reminder of —
Jaime moves, slipping out of her, and flops onto his back beside her on the bed, one arm outstretched beneath her head. She brings her knees together, easing some of that knotted tension in her pelvis, and rolls onto her side to face him. Her inner thighs are slick with some kind of fluid, and she remembers the mortifying conversation she had with Digna a few nights earlier. You might bleed a little, Sweetheart. Some pain is normal. It’s a good idea to use the toilet afterward, if you can slip away for a moment without offending Jaime.
Marta has read the poets, the novelists, the great tales of longing and desire fulfilled. She had wanted to ask Digna about that part of it, about why this is something people love if it’s bloody and uncomfortable and sends you to the bathroom, but she couldn’t make the words come out. Seduction, she’d assumed, was part of it. There would be things Jaime would do to make her want this, and it would make all the rest of it worthwhile.
He turns his head to face her, now, his eyes glowing with that bright, almost excessive intensity that he so often fixes on her. She wants to tell him that he can stop that, now. They’re married. It’s done. He doesn’t have to try so hard anymore.
“How do you feel?” he asks, reaching across to caress her cheek with his thumb.
Marta smiles at him. “Fine.”
For just a moment, the intensity in his eyes flickers, and Marta realizes what a terrible answer that had been, even if it had been the honest one. She feels fine; it was fine, but of course he had wanted her to tell him she was happy, that she enjoyed it, that it was wonderful.
But it hadn’t been wonderful. Not really.
It was fine.
Jaime was gentle, and he had been patient with her. She had wished for the knowledge that would have come from some kind of prior experience: some sense of what to do with her hands or her lips to make him feel like she appreciated him. Instead, she had felt like an awkward, stiff-limbed doll while he undressed her and then, with a flash of apology in his eyes as though he’d forgotten this part of things, himself.
After some time spent kissing and touching, naked, Jaime had slipped his hand between her thighs and touched her with his fingers. She’d managed to quell every instinct to squirm away, but still he frowned a little, and then kissed her.
“Let me try something,” he said, and then kissed his way down her body, until he settled his shoulders between her thighs and pressed his tongue between—
“Jaime!” Marta couldn’t help it: she laughed in embarrassment and shoved him away with a palm to the top of his head. “What are you doing?”
He crawled up from under the sheet and opened his mouth to reply, and then seemed to think better of it and ducked to nuzzle at her breasts again.
It went like this for awhile. Eventually, he asked if she would touch him, so she did, and he responded with a small groan of pleasure, pressing his body into her side. She liked that, knowing that she was making him feel good. So she ran her hands along him again, and yet again, until he stopped her and urged her onto her back. He held himself over her with one hand and touched her again with the other, those gentle, probing fingers. It felt a little better now than it had before, less strange, and she found that she could enjoy the intimacy of it, of being touched like this by someone she trusted and cared for. It wasn’t magical, nothing like in her novels, but it was nice enough.
Something inscrutable flashed over his eyes again, just for a second. Then that hand left her body and curled over his own mouth. He half-turned his head as though trying to hide what he was doing, but she could tell that he was spitting into his palm. She felt herself tense with embarrassment. Marta’s body had never struck her, or anyone else, as especially feminine, and this seemed only to be an extension of that: where womanhood was supposed to be soft and gentle and fluid, everything about Marta was angular and stiff and rigid and dry. Jaime, reading her discomfort, had bent and kissed her cheek, then her neck.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just like this for some women.”
Then he slid his fingers, slick with saliva, between her legs again.
It helped. His touch felt better wet than it had when it was dry, and she finally felt something stirring, a low hum deep in her pelvis. He must have felt something too, because he smiled.
“Are you ready?”
She supposed she was. “Yes.”
So he settled his hips between her legs, and he did it.
It was painful for a moment, but the pain passed. And then it was fine. It was all fine. He moved gently, and then more erratically, and then he seized up, and she felt something twitch as he finished.
And then he collapsed on top of her, and he was heavy.
And then he rolled away and lay on his back, panting.
She feels slick between her thighs, and thinks about the bathroom and Digna’s advice. But then Jaime curls the arm that rests under her shoulders, rolling her so that she lies along his side, her head settling in the hollow between his shoulder and chest, her torso along the length of his, so she can feel the movement of his breath. He smells of aftershave and, not unpleasantly, of sweat, and she sinks into him, into the ways she has let him hold her on nights before this night, just now with nothing but skin between them. This, she thinks, is nice. This might be the nicest part of it all, his body solid and comforting against hers. She is always cold, but he is warm, and he wraps her in his arms and the blankets without her having to ask. He kisses the top of her head and runs his fingers through her hair, and that is the loveliest thing she’s felt all evening; she wants to arch into it like a cat, the pleasant tingles of his blunt nails along her scalp.
“I love you,” he breathes. “I can’t believe you’re my wife.”
She smiles, settling closer, presses a kiss to his chest where she lays. “I love you, too.”
But he is breathing deeply, and she realizes he is already asleep.
2. 22, later
Marta sits beside her father in the back seat of the family car.
The previous hour ranks among the most humiliating of her life.
Her father had taken her with him to the bank, telling her he wanted to have her registered as a signatory on the corporate accounts, entitled to solicit records and make withdrawals on behalf of the business, and to access their safe-deposit box there. She had known their banker for a long time, a middle-aged, rosy-cheeked man named Guillermo, and he greeted her like an old friend with a handshake and the obligatory dos besos. But she didn’t miss how his eyes took in her clothing, one of the new skirt sets with matching jackets that she’s purchased to suit her new corporate role. She feels a bit like she’s wearing a costume in this suit, but a fun one, like a child dressing up as a knight: it protects her, like armor. Her suit today is made of grey wool, warm for the late autumn chill, with clean-cut lapels that offset the shine of her mother’s pearls.
“Doña Marta,” Guillermo said jovially, “So wonderful to see you, and may I congratulate you again on such a beautiful wedding last month. My wife and I had the most wonderful time.”
“Thank you,” Marta said, for lack of anything else to offer. The title still feels new to her. Her father had encouraged her to start using it two years ago, when she was twenty and came home from Italy, but she had largely ignored his nudging, happy enough to stick with Señorita whenever titles were necessary. But now that she is married and taking on more authority in the company, he has made clear that the formal address is no longer optional. So she tries not to flinch when she hears it, and trusts that eventually it will stop feeling like she is being greeted by someone else’s name.
In Guillermo’s office, Marta and her father took their seats in the leather chairs. But when her father had explained the purpose of their visit, Guillermo’s ever-present grin faltered.
“Don Damián.” He leaned toward her father over the desk. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Oh, don’t worry, old friend,” Father had replied, reaching into his jacket for an envelope, “I have a letter of permission from her husband right here.”
Guillermo looked at the envelope, but made no move to pick it up from where Damian had set it on the mahogany. “It’s not that,” he said, and then glanced at Marta out of the corner of his eye, like he was afraid she might overhear. “It’s the law, you see. Women can’t be signatories on–”
“Oh, come now,” her father had interrupted. “Surely we’re not going to be bound by that silly rule?”
“Silly or not, it’s the law,” Guillermo had replied.
And so they’d gone on and on, back and forth, talking about her. In the moment, the task of keeping her mouth shut had felt arduous. I’m right here, she’d been desperate to interrupt, perhaps you might want to ask what I think? But one thing that had become clear was that Guillermo did not, in fact, care what she thought, and even if she raised her voice to be heard, she had no idea what she might say that could impact the outcome. Women, by law, cannot have signing authority on corporate bank accounts.
“I’ll speak to the lawyer the moment we get home,” Father says now, in the car beside her. “I’m sure he’ll find us a workaround.”
This is code, of course. Guillermo lacks the authority to violate the law in service of bank business, but there are surely executives there willing to do what’s necessary to protect their ongoing relations with the voluminous accounts of one of Toledo’s largest businesses, and if that executive also comes away with, say, a new Porsche, or the means to take his family on an extra-long vacation to the Costa del Sol, well, so much the better for him. And the tellers and functionaries with whom Marta would most regularly interact as signatory, including Guillermo, will not take the risk of challenging an order from an executive office.
But it remains insulting—dehumanizing, even—to encounter, so directly, how authority for her cannot be earned, only purchased, and that the gatekeepers of that authority feel no qualms about discussing it right over her head, oblivious to the irony of her own authority being something she has no say over.
“All right. Let me know what he says,” Marta replies to her father. She doesn’t take her eyes off the world beyond the car window.
Her father seems to pick up that she is not interested in continuing the conversation, so he shifts his attention to Isidro, inviting him to banter about the rivalries of the Madrid football teams, which Isidro takes up gladly. Marta sits still and bored, the familiar streets beyond the window failing to hold her interest, so after a moment she opens her father’s briefcase and helps herself to the top file inside. He has been teaching her how to parse the business’s various financial documents and ledgers, and she might as well spend the time reviewing whatever is here, for practice if nothing else. The numbers paint a picture that she is growing ever-more adept at visualising, and she settles into its interpretation, reminding herself that regardless of the skepticism of the Guillermos of the world, she is more than capable of understanding the world of business.
Damian shifts his weight, leaning forward against the back of the front seat. “Isn’t that Fina over there?”
She lifts her head at that. They are passing the public girls’ school just as it is letting out for the day. The building and its surrounding walls are still crumbling in places, not yet repaired from the damage they suffered during the war. Marta’s parents had shipped her out to school in Italy during the worst of the fighting, where she had stayed until war broke out in Italy, too. So scenes like this, so banale for most Spaniards, remain incongruous to her: dozens of tidily-uniformed schoolgirls chatting in clusters, laughing, calling out to one another, against the backdrop of a barely-rebuilt war zone.
“Yes, Sir,” Isidro replies, but Marta hadn’t needed the confirmation to recognize Fina standing near the gate. Fina is the closest thing to a peer Marta has had growing up in the Big House, which is not terribly close given their difference in age and position. Fina is thirteen now, shedding her girlhood like a snakeskin, and the woman she’s becoming is a striking one: slender, but filling out in the shoulders and hips. Marta can imagine how, in a few years, Fina will look like she walked off one of those Nationalist propaganda posters Marta saw everywhere during the lead-up to the war, when she herself had a teenager, barely any older than Fina is now. Those posters featured women with hourglass figures like the one Fina is developing, built to carry and raise the next generation of Spaniards.
There are still posters, of course. Different ones, to match a more modern aesthetic. But from time to time Marta will still see one of those old ones, hidden behind some old bins or halfway down an alley, worn and peeling but still clinging under cracked yellow paste, almost a decade old now. And every time, she remembers how those posters haunted her when they were new. Puberty had gifted Marta with six inches of excess height but no hips or breasts to speak of. She had navigated those excruciating adolescent years feeling like an ugly stepsister, all knobby joints and straight lines and sharp angles, tight and rigid, more likely to crack like old rubber than to bend with appealing feminine fluidity.
Fina is on her way to becoming as tall as Marta, but she is already disarming: strong but soft, exuding good humour, a textbook model of young womanhood. So of course, Marta notices Fina there, on the sidewalk, among her classmates. Marta can’t help but notice Fina, because due to no fault or intent of her own, Fina is incredibly noticeable.
“Is she coming home now? We should pick her up,” Father says.
Isidro’s eyes flick up to the rear-view mirror, then back to the road. “Oh, that’s all right, Sir. She’ll catch her bus soon.”
“No, no,” Damián insists amiably. “Why waste time and money on the bus when there’s an empty seat beside you and we’re right here? And it looks like it could rain any minute.”
So Isidro drives the car around the block and then pulls over near where Fina is standing with a cluster of her friends. He opens the window and calls out to her; her head snaps around, dark hair swinging loose over her shoulders, and when she sees him, she breaks out in her wide, easy smile. With a wave of the hand, he beckons her and points to the seat beside him, and she bids her friends a quick farewell and runs across the street and around to the passenger side door.
As Isidro pulls the car back out into traffic, Fina greets them. “Hello, Don Damián, Mart—"
Isidro clears his throat, and Fina corrects herself. “Doña Marta. Thank you for letting me ride home with you.”
“Of course, Fina,” Father replies. “How was your day at school?”
“It was fine, Sir, thank you for asking.”
That is, Marta knows, a practiced answer. When Fina had been a child living in the house with them, she had been given the liberties that one grants to children: to speak and move somewhat freely, and to treat the members of the de la Reina family as one might expect a child to treat the people who share her home. But for a few years, now, she has come to learn the rules of her status, and what it means that she accesses that same home from the back door and shares a room with her father on the lowest floor. A question from Don Damián about her school day would have been met with an effusive answer a few years earlier, but now, Fina has learned that the question is merely a polite gesture, and not one that she is usually expected—or desired—to answer beyond rote.
Marta wonders how her school day actually was.
“That’s good,” Father replies, by equal rote, and then nobody speaks for the rest of the drive back to the colonia.
Isidro drops Marta at the store before driving onward to the house. She spends the next two hours working with the salesgirls and updating the inventory registers, and then drives her own car home. Four steps through the front door and she hears a harsh sigh of the kind only a thirteen-year-old is capable. And then she hears Digna’s voice, a soft murmur: “Sweetheart.”
Digna and Fina are in the living room, and Marta pauses just outside the frame, where they can’t see her.
“He went on and on about it. ‘Your mothers’ this, ‘your mothers’ that. Only your mothers can teach you what you need to know to become women.” Fina puts on a pinched, affected voice for that last part, and Marta immediately knows she is quoting Father Enrique, the school’s medieval priest, a patronizing fart probably old enough to have known Jesus in person.
“You know I’ll always be here for you,” Digna says gently. “I’ll be here to help you with all of that.”
Fina sniffs, and Marta understands her lack of response. Marta lost her own mother three years ago, and she knows—like Fina does—that nobody should promise to be around forever.
“Well, Esther saw that I was upset,” Fina says. “So she raised her hand and said, ‘Father, what if we want to go to secondary school?’ You should have seen his face, Digna, it got all twisted up like a toilet bowl flushing before he could stop himself. And then he said, ‘Husbands prefer to take wives who haven’t wasted their time on studies when they could have been learning how to keep a home.’”
Digna laughs. “He didn’t say that!”
“He did!” Marta can hear the laughter in Fina’s voice now. “And Esther said, ‘Well, I don’t think I ever want a husband, then,’ and I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘Me, neither!’ and the Father looked like he was going to have a heart attack right there in the classroom, and I think the only reason they didn’t haul us both off to get strapped was because they knew Esther only said it to get him to stop talking about mothers when she knew it was upsetting me.”
Marta’s spine stiffens. She’d made it all the way through her schooling without ever receiving as much as a ruler to the knuckles from her teachers. But Fina, she knows, has taken a few leather straps to the palms over the years, a consequence of speaking out of turn. Strangely, Marta has always admired her for it: it is Fina’s nature, she knows, to speak what she thinks is true, no matter what it might cost her. I wish she’d learn a few things from you, Señorita, Isidro said to Marta once, years earlier. She’s headstrong, like her mother. Doesn’t know when it’s best to keep her thoughts to herself.
The memory is enough to break her eavesdropping trance, and Marta makes her way to the stairs.
In her room, Marta sets her briefcase down next to her chest of drawers. When she stands, she is confronted with her reflection in the wall mirror, her grey skirt-suit a little rumpled from the day’s wear, but still tidy, professional. She looks like she expects to be taken seriously. But as she runs a hand down her stomach, over her hip, she remembers what Fina had looked like as she jogged across the street to reach their car, a beautiful girl on her way to becoming an even more beautiful woman, and here is Marta, as tall and straight as a streetlamp and about as sensual, too.
Beside the mirror is Jaime’s nightstand. She has to remind herself to think of it as his, even though this has been her room for most of her life, and he only slept there three nights before he returned to the boat. Each night, they had been intimate in this bed, and Jaime had looked at her like he never wanted to look away, but by the third night his eyes had flickered with disappointment when she had been no more enthusiastic than she’d been on the first.
Last year, just a few days before they got engaged, they’d gone to see The Philadelphia Story together at the cinema. Afterward, they’d strolled to a nearby restaurant for supper, loose and happy from having laughed so much, and Jaime said, “Anyone ever tell you that you look just like Katharine Hepburn?”
Marta’s eyebrows must have shot up to her hairline, and she back-handed him gently on the shoulder. “What? Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly!”
“Jaime—”
“I’m not! You look just like her, tall and regal and poised. A modern icon. The woman of the future, Marta, that’s you.”
She had decided, right then, that if he asked her to marry him, she would agree. Because he called her beautiful and convinced her that he believed it, yes. But even more because he cared that she believed it. Because she enjoyed his easy company, and because she knew to the depths of her soul that he would only ask her to marry him if he truly desired to make her happy.
And then, not long after, as she expected, he proposed to her. And now they are married. And she does believe, truly, that he wants her, and that he wants her to be happy with him. Before he left for his ship, he had made sure the banks would give her full access to the accounts in his name, and he had written that letter for Father supporting their petition for her to be given access to the company accounts. That was more than many husbands would have done.
Marta grits her teeth. Is this, truly, what she’s expected to be grateful for?
Without thinking, she heads out of her room and makes her way downstairs, to the living room. Fina and Digna are still there, sitting on one of the sofas and talking, ignoring Fina’s history textbook laid out on the coffee table. Fina jumps to her feet when Marta enters, and Marta supposes that Isidro has been coaching her on that, too. Before this moment, Marta is not sure she would have thought anything about how Fina should behave when she, or any other member of the family, enters a room. This house is Fina’s home, just as it is her own, and Fina is here with Digna, who is not a member of the house staff. She should sit if she wants to sit.
But Marta doesn’t say anything.
Digna approaches her, arms open for a greeting. “Darling,” she says, “I heard about the bank. Don’t worry, your father will get it straightened out.”
Digna hugs her, and Marta does her best to offer a smile.
“Please, sit,” Marta finally says to Fina, who is still hovering awkwardly near the sofa. With a look of relief, Fina flops back down where she was sitting before.
“I didn’t intend to disturb you,” Marta continues. “I just—I overheard you a few minutes ago.” Her eyes shift from Fina’s face to the textbook and back again.
Fina bites her lip. “I’m sorry, Marta, I know I need to learn to be quieter.”
Digna opens her mouth, and Marta shakes her head subtly. She knows that Digna intends to correct the title as Isidro did in the car, and this is not the moment for that. Fina is not a member of the staff of this house. Fina is a child who lives here, and she has known Marta since she was born, and Marta will not suddenly become a new person to her just because she is supposed to address her by a different word.
“No, it’s not that,” Marta says. “I didn’t mind. I just wanted to ask: was it Father Enrique who tried to suggest you should leave school after this year?”
Fina half-smiles, and she nods.
Marta feels herself bark a dry, unladylike laugh. “Well, don’t listen to that old idiot. Don’t quit, Fina. I mean it. No matter how hard they try to convince you. I’ll drive you every morning myself if I have to.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Fina says, still with a little half-smile. “My mother always said that knowledge was the only possession nobody could ever steal.”
Adela had died long before the war, and long before anyone could have imagined what it would leave in its wake for her daughter, and for Marta, and for most women in Spain. And still, her words were prophetic.
“She was right,” Marta says. “The only power they can’t take from us is the power to think for ourselves.”
Marta approaches the coffee table and picks up Fina’s history textbook, flipping absently through a few pages, and then closing it and holding it out for Fina to take in her hands. “It will get harder, and they won’t help you when you struggle. But I will, if you need it, all right? Just find me and ask.”
Fina’s eyes dart down to the textbook cover and then back up to Marta. “All right. Thank you, Mar—Doña Marta.”
Digna clears her throat, and Marta startles—she had, however briefly, forgotten she was there. Marta looks over at her now, where she’s just off to Marta’s side, and Digna is looking at her with a fond expression. Marta finds it inexplicably irritating, Digna’s faintly patronizing pride, as though Marta had offered Fina a share of her sandwich and not help completing an education that neither school, church, nor government wants to give her. But before Marta can act on her annoyance, Digna brings her hands together, indicating a change in topic.
“It will be time to eat soon, Marta. Let’s go to the dining room.”
“I should go downstairs and see if my father needs me,” Fina says, standing, textbook in her hands. But then she looks at Marta again. “Thank you, again, Doña Marta. I mean it.”
And Marta smiles, feeling like despite everything, something worthwhile has come from this wasted day.