“Welcome to my house.”
Javier looked around. There was nothing but filth, trash and, in one corner, a small mattress and a few beat-up old suitcases.
“What’s all this about?”
You poor fool, Carlos thought. Like his mother, Javier had made a grave mistake, disparaging him, thinking himself better simply because he’d been more fortunate.
“Surprised? Try not to look so disgusted. Do you ever stop navel-gazing long enough to look around and see what the world is actually like? Let me clue you in: One false step will seal your fate. You’ve got it all, and suddenly you look down and your hands are empty, you’ve got nothing. I could have been like you, but my luck ran dry: bad father, drugs, reform school, stupid shit. The thing is, you can do anything to people, put them through the worst hell imaginable, beat them like dogs, and it doesn’t matter; they can take it, as long as they don’t lose the hope that one day their suffering will come to an end. Without that hope, most people crumble and give up. But a few see the evidence and feel liberated. They’ve got nothing to lose, so they’re not held back by fear.”
Even the cruelest of torturers knows that at some point it is time to take pity. He lifted his gaze and swept his eyes across the abandoned warehouse, frighteningly detached.
“I’m one of those.”
Carlos snapped his fingers as though having just divulged a secret that Javier had not grasped. Then suddenly he became courteous and self-assured although not overly friendly.
“Come, I want to show you something. Did you know I’m into film? I’ve always thought of myself as a talented cameraman. Especially when it comes to close-ups,” he added, framing Javier’s face by holding up thumbs and index fingers. “A world of appearances, it’s all make-believe, that’s what I like about movies.”
“I thought you had something important to tell me,” Javier said, starting to feel uneasy.
“I do, but we’ll get to that, take it easy.” Carlos smiled weirdly. “You know, there are two kinds of reality: the kind that just appears and the kind you create. The first kind is like in your dreams or, worse, your nightmares; it’s all jumbled, disconnected, you can’t find a way to explain it. That’s why we produce it, like a script, we make an adaptation that’s always incomplete and almost always a lie if you compare it to what you see. We each invent our own way to tell it, and all people expect is for the same things to be retold, over and over.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Carlos. Why don’t you just tell me what you want?”
Carlos pulled the video camera out of his pocket and held it up. He hit Play and handed it to Javier. The recording had been made right there, in the warehouse.
“What do you see?”
“A rat.”
“A rat?”
Javier nodded slowly. “A disgusting, filthy black rat.”
“I see something else. I see a little boy lying in bed, frightened at the sound of the rat running around in the drop ceiling above his bedroom. I think it must have been there for a long time, judging by the horrific sounds it made. You could hear it squeaking like a lunatic. I guess even rats lose their minds from loneliness. Then one day the boy’s father grabbed a hook and ripped out the wood slats and climbed into the attic. He had a hard time catching that rat, the thing fought back—hissed, jumped, defended itself with teeth and claws. Finally, the boy’s father speared it on his hook and slammed it against the floor, over and over…So, that’s one kind of reality. A reality that can be replayed over and over, identical each time, it might even be true. But what that reality doesn’t convey is the impression it made on that terrified boy, seeing the rat’s guts spill out, its tail bang against his father’s pants leg, the blood drip onto the tip of his shoe. And it also doesn’t describe the drunken look on the father’s face, a mix of pride and scorn, when he threw the dead rat into the boy’s face, laughing as his son shrieked in terror.”
What was Javier supposed to do with all this? What good would it do for him to tell Carlos that when he was a boy he’d been afraid of the rabbits in the hutch at his grandfather Agustín’s estate in Cáceres. He was afraid of their eyes, the way they looked at him in hatred, as if they knew they were going to be killed with a karate chop to the neck, and that Javier could never do it on the first try, the way his grandfather had taught him. He was sure that was why they glared at him, gave him the same look that the tortured give the torturer.
Suddenly, with no transition, the film cut from that rat in the abandoned warehouse to a light-filled bedroom. A bedroom Javier recognized perfectly, though he had trouble recognizing the moans since he’d never heard his mother have an orgasm before.
As the images flashed by on the screen, Javier slowly shook his head. It was simply not possible that his mother had done this.
“Turn it off,” he murmured as though in a trance. But Carlos didn’t turn it off; in fact, he zoomed in. And when Javier tried to look away, Carlos grabbed his neck violently and forced him to watch.
“Here comes the best part, when she tells me she wants it up the ass. Is that some kind of obsession in your family? You all like it from behind? I bet it won’t take long for your sister to get a taste for it, too.”
Enraged, Javier thrashed away and tried to punch Carlos in the gut, but it was useless. Carlos was too big for him and almost without trying freed himself with a kick to Javier’s stomach that sent him flying to the ground. With a look of disappointment, Carlos watched Javier writhe, as though he’d expected something more.
“It’s not as easy as getting out of bed in the morning and wiping the mist off the frozen window so you can look at the scenery outside. It’s not like that when you’re on the inside, is it?” he asked, camera still rolling as he kicked Javier twice in the side, hard. “What a perfect family: the drug addict faggot son, watching his whore of a mother get screwed by her fucking angel. What are you going to do about it, Javier? Huh? What are you going to do?”
Carlos kicked him savagely, taking out all of the rage he’d been holding in for so long, filming all the while.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to send your mother this little gift, along with some lovely photos of you sucking my dick. What do you think? You think she’ll like that? What’s your boring lawyer father going to think about his ideal family then?”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Javier spluttered, slobber and blood dripping from his mouth.
The almost inaudible question seemed to affect Carlos, and he stopped as though surprised.
He thought back to one Christmas Eve. His father had come home drunk and dropped his sample case in the middle of the hall. He was a sales rep for a multinational: curtains, upholstery, that kind of thing. According to his father’s theory, bars were a good place to find customers. And to play slot machines, watch soccer, and drink until you fell down; to stay up all night, meet hookers and hustlers, play illegal poker, and bet on the dog races at Meridiana. That Christmas Eve, his mother had dressed for midnight Mass and was sitting before the TV, hands pressed between her knees, paying no attention to the variety show on the screen.
Carlos had been helping her make traditional coconut cream pastries all evening. When he snuck a little of the dough, she pretended not to notice. His father stumbled into the living room, where the pastries were all arranged on little saucers on the table, decoratively displayed around the nativity scene. With a single smack, he knocked them off, scattering pastries all over the floor. Carlos saw his eyes full of rage, the way he grabbed his mother’s shoulders and shook her, as though if he did it hard enough and beat her enough, a different person might emerge. Carlos stepped between them, screaming, asking his father why he was doing that.
His father simply met his gaze and flashed a cruel smile, impervious. He lit a Rex cigarette, blew smoke in Carlos’s face, and spat: “ ‘Because I can’…th
at’s what he told me.”
The recollection had momentarily distanced him from the present. When he returned, Carlos blinked in surprise.
“Where did you get that?”
Javier was aiming the old pistol at him. His hands shook so badly he had to grip it tightly. He wasn’t sure what it was about Carlos’s call that had made him decide to bring the gun and had no idea what he planned to do with it. Threaten Carlos, maybe, so that he’d stop trying to get money out of him. Or maybe something more dramatic, commit suicide, or at least pretend he was going to. The bottom line was, Javier was at his wit’s end.
“This has to stop, it’s got to stop,” he whispered, his gaze absent. One eye had already swollen shut and blood was streaming from his nose and mouth, suffocating him.
Carlos narrowed his eyes and aimed the camera at the gun’s barrel.
“You don’t have the balls.”
The shot took them both by surprise.
It was cold. Javier knew this not because he felt it physically but because he could see his own breath as he knelt before Carlos’s disfigured face.
Patricia would to come to his bed, as she did every night; Javier would put his arm around her and say, drowsily, “You have to grow up, Patricia. I’m not always going to be here.” And she’d fall asleep there, her arm heavy as a stone on his hip. This winter she was joining the school marching band as a majorette. Their mother had been restitching the shiny buttons on her blue jacket, with white embroidery matching her white skirt and patent leather boots. Her moment of glory! She’d spent days and weeks practicing in the mirror, twirling her batons, because Javier had told her that if she really did her best she would be chosen for the first line. The day of tryouts, she dropped the batons while trying to pass them from one hand to the other, but that was the least of it. From the start, Javier had known she’d never make it to the first line and yet didn’t have the guts to tell her. Some lies and betrayals still sting, years later.
Javier contemplated Carlos’s body, slumped to one side. Innocence can be dreadful; it makes you feel dirty.
He put the gun to his chest and pulled the trigger.
PART THREE
SILENCE
21
ARGELÈS-SUR-MER, FRANCE, FEBRUARY–SEPTEMBER 1939
Although it hadn’t yet started to rain, the sky was ash gray and the rough seas had the same bleak, wintry hue. Waves crashed onto the beach.
The French officer had ordered all of the newly arrived prisoners to gather. The foppish captain in the Mobile Guard was imbued with the vital import of his mission and delivered a fifteen-minute sermon more befitting a parish priest than an army man. Accompanied by a small squadron, the captain advised them to be prudent and show restraint as well as warned them what would happen if they disrupted order or tried to escape. He was, he claimed, open to dialogue but inflexible on matters of discipline inside the camp: Rules were sacred and had to prevail over all circumstances in order to guarantee order. After all, he added, they were civilized, and he hoped that they’d behave as such during their stay in the camp, which he assured them was temporary.
Elías listened to this Robespierre stand-in, exhausted. No prison camp was ever temporary. This camp would remain with the thousands of refugees arriving every day for the rest of their lives. They would never forget it. He and Esperanza had reached Cerbère with the first waves of exiles in early February, when Franco’s troops occupied Catalonia and the Republican Army dissolved like a sugar cube. Thousands of civilians—women, old people, children—along with soldiers who, in many cases, gave up both their uniforms and their weapons, huddled together on the border for weeks, awaiting authorization to cross onto French soil, where they assumed they would be safe.
The Algerian soldiers separated the men from the women and children, which had led to scenes of total desperation and terrible altercations that the spahis resolved with their rifle butts. The men—or those tall enough to look like them, even if only twelve or fourteen years old—were to be sent to a provisional camp on the beach. The women and children would be dispersed among various humanitarian centers in the eastern Pyrenees and other nearby camps separated by riverbeds and barbed wire extending miles down the coast.
Elías and Esperanza hardly had time to say goodbye. They saved their words and tried to put all of their feelings into looks that expressed their anguish and uncertainty. He smiled, trying to appear calm. They’d be together again soon. He wasn’t going to let the same thing happen twice, there was no way he was going to lose her.
It wasn’t far from the border to the fisherman’s beach in Argelès. And yet their march had begun far earlier, in December 1938, when evidence of their impending defeat could no longer be ignored. Each of those men and women walked the last few miles coming to terms with the evidence that life as they knew it was over. Random images of their retreat had been etched in their minds: houses abandoned, the furniture all left behind, sheets on the bed, sometimes even breakfast on the table. Land left untilled, tools frantically thrown down in panic, schoolbooks left on desks, chalkboards still bearing the last lesson: “First declension: rosa, rosae…”
And the long column of refugees loaded down with chairs, blankets, mattresses—things that would sooner or later be abandoned because they slowed them down and proved useless—walked to the sound of church bells ringing, to the sight of nationalist flags flying, graffiti on walls and banners on occupied town halls: ¡Arriba España! ¡Arriba Fascism! Images of Franco, of Hitler, of Mussolini accompanied them, mocking, and day and night the Luftwaffe’s planes droned overhead, sometimes firing on them or doing low flyovers just for fun, to terrify them and watch them scatter, like a giant stepping on an anthill for sheer amusement. And they, the ants, would pick their way back to the road and slowly resume the horrific procession to the border.
Defeat was this: a conscious, collective, deathly silence, a silence that would remain with them forever more. On the way to France, people abandoned all forms of identification and the roads filled with shredded membership cards and IDs—Communist, Socialist, Catalan, workers, but also birth certificates, national identification, military ID. No longer were they Spanish or Basque or Catalan or Republican. They became instead a superstitious mob, exhausted and frantic, panicked by rumors that were sometimes true but more often sheer nonsense, tales of massacres in the occupied zone, warnings of the proximity of Italian or North African expeditionary forces. And, propelled by their fear, the silent mass grew furious and desperate and quickened their steps to the border, clashing violently with gendarmes. Many—too many—were killed by a foreign bullet or bayonet after believing they were safe.
Elías would have preferred to stay in Spain, to cross the lines and enter Madrid while the city was still an island of resistance inspiring the epic compassion of Europeans and the indifference of their governments. But he could already hear gunfire in the outskirts of Barcelona while organizing the transfer or destruction of thousands of MIS documents, and a brief and bureaucratic telegram arrived from Moscow, leaving no room for debate:
You are hereby ordered to travel to the border, acting as one of the people. You are to organize comrades in the Argelès camp, oversee the morale and principles of the Party, and await new orders.
Signed:
Colonel Orlov
The so-called camp that Elías was transferred to was in fact nothing but several miles of empty coastland, fenced in by barbed wire. During the day, the north winds blew so hard that the flying sand bit into his skin like a plague of mosquitoes. There was nothing but fleas, lice, hunger, scarcity—and the misery they’d brought with them in lieu of luggage. The fence’s inside perimeter was patrolled by the 24th Regiment of Senegalese Riflemen, but these soldiers in their red berets, armed with ancient rifles and World War I bayonets, were in no way prepared for the human avalanche that descended upon them. Elías observed them and, as with the guards on Na
zino, realized that behind their violence lay fear, dread, and exasperation. They worried about what would happen if these thousands of refugees were to rebel. Who would stop them from spreading across the south of France like a plague of hungry locusts? As he suspected, the Senegalese applied themselves with rage, arrogance, and disgust in an attempt to maintain order.
This being the case, reality did not live up to the prisoners’ expectations. They had hoped to be received warmly, like heroes, united with France’s Popular Front against the imminent threat of Nazism; instead they’d come to a pigsty and been met with suspicious looks, mistrust, abuse, and hardship. The only thing to partly allay their misery was the solidarity shown by nearby residents in Argelès and surrounding areas, but soon even these well-intentioned locals felt overwhelmed by the unending human tide of exiles rushing in.
In spite of the chaos and the terrible facilities, people quickly began to organize, and something resembling life started to take shape. Initiatives were set up by international aid organizations, and even the French authorities—daunted by the size of the catastrophe—had asked the Red Cross for help. They tried to assist small children, some of whom had been separated from their parents in the mayhem and were reunited with their families. They set up dispensaries, recruiting medical staff from among the prisoners. Those who had been rural elementary school teachers joined forces with university professors and started something resembling a school, where they attempted to teach basic French to peasants who barely spoke Spanish, having used nothing but their native Catalan until that point. They tried to get back to normal, following—to the degree possible—a regular school calendar for the littlest ones. Soon the exiles created associations by affiliation, family, or neighborhood; they organized laborers to build their camp, as they had in Nazino, although here they had tools with which to dig latrines and erect columns and fences, and there were entire drums full of powdered disinfectant whose smell, at certain times of the day, was so overpowering that it became intolerable.
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