A Million Drops
Page 62
My Beloved.
Dear Ghost.
We both know that this is my last letter. And I do not write it of my own free will but because Anna Akhmatova has made it a condition for leaving our son in peace.
I was always trying to ask you if you loved me, if you ever truly loved me during the more than thirty years I spent with you. I never got a clear answer, and that in itself was your answer, although I refused to take it as such. Those whose love is unrequited are terribly vulnerable; it’s like only being able to breathe, live, or feel through the other person, through the beloved, fearing at every second and with every step that the one you love might suddenly, selfishly decide to take off, leaving you a pile of ashes. That’s how I felt with you my whole life: a mound of ashes swept this way and that by a changeable wind. Indigent, begging for your touch, your glance, a kind word that rarely came.
I don’t condemn you for it, I’ve never condemned you. I was the one who agreed to wither so that you could shine. I chose my fate, which was to be your shadow, stuck to your side. And in my own way, almost without your permission, I was sometimes immensely happy, caught up in a heady mix of desire and anxiety, the bittersweet triumph of jealousy. I was never at peace: you never granted me peace, and I never asked for it. I accepted the fact that I would always have to fight the invisible enemy sleeping between us each night: Irina. And then her daughter, Anna. I thought I would eventually beat them, because time was on my side. So many times I longed to see you grow old and tired so that I could come to you, my arms outstretched to protect you…You did me as much harm as good, and you were completely unaware of both.
Love is a decision that you make. And it hurts. There’s nothing new about that. If I’d accepted the fact that you would never be entirely mine until you wanted to, if—when the first shadow of doubt was cast—I’d said goodbye and left you while there was still time, my life could have been completely different. I might have found success on the stage in Paris. Or even before then—maybe one of those Spanish pilots might have come back for me. Why was I never able to be unfaithful to you, during the war years, the years we were apart? Why did I not let myself dream a single dream that didn’t revolve around you, no matter how small? I simply didn’t. I suppose, as they say in my country, I had hammered the nail all the way in.
And by that time, it was already too late, that first night when I saw the shed door ajar, when our daughter was barely eight years old. She was sprawled in a corner, face and arms terribly bruised, wearing a look that could bore through walls. I couldn’t break through her stubborn silence. And suddenly it was as though you had reached inside me and ripped my heart out, though I was somehow standing there breathing as you watched it throbbing in your hand. I remember running from the shed and vomiting.
Why did I not leave you then and there? Why did I not take my children and run from that house, that life? I’ve often tried to tell myself that Gonzalo was still a baby, that I was a foreigner in a strange country where I could hardly make myself understood, that there was nowhere for me to go. I looked for any excuse, but the truth was that I couldn’t believe it had happened. My mind refused to accept the evidence. Had I actually given my life, my loyalty, my love to a stranger, a monster? Absolutely not.
And then I fell into the most twisted behavior a mother can resort to: I took your side. And although I tried to protect Laura, something inside me began to hate her, and I blamed her for awakening the evil in you, saw her as living proof of my failure.
I destroyed my life and as well as my daughter’s because I was unwilling to admit that mine had been a charade, a terrible mistake.
That night, when I put you in the car to take you to the hospital, I begged God not to let you die, not to leave me alone with such a burden on my soul. I was so frantic that I almost drove off the road, blinded by my tears.
And then you—the man I’d given my life to, surrendered my daughter’s innocence to—mumbled words that were etched in my soul forever, Elías. Forever.
“Take me to her. Take me to Anna.” That’s what you said.
No one can possibly know how much pain that caused me. You were dying, bleeding to death right beside me as I held your hand, and you asked me to take you back to the place you’d never wanted to leave to begin with. To that river, the steppe, that barge.
And I did. I pulled the car to the side of the road as the last of the San Juan bonfires died down with the coming dawn. I gazed at you for a long time, and then I put my hand over your mouth and nose, and I squeezed. I squeezed until the light in your beautiful, intense green eye went out, and you put up no resistance.
I’ll take you to her, I said. To Irina. Forever.
I don’t know where the line between good and evil lies, Elías. I do know that future generations will judge us, and they will show no mercy. Why should they? Do we deserve their forgiveness, their compassion? Do we actually need it?
Yes. Or at least I do. I lost my daughter, renounced her for you, for a memory concocted to keep your reputation safe. You could have been a good man, Elías. And perhaps I could have been a good woman. We gave it our best effort; we strived, didn’t we? We withstood more than our children will ever understand. We suffered beyond all comprehension and we endured. But then at some point we lost our way, we strayed from the path and couldn’t find the way back.
The time for scorn, justice, and anger is approaching. Your son, the boy I tried so hard to protect from you, will hate us, like our daughter. Our comrades-in-arms will hate us, as will our victims. Time and History will hate us.
But who knows, maybe in time our names will be covered in dust, our son will grow old and speak of us to our grandchildren without rancor. The world will forget us. One drop in a million, we’ll simply dissolve into the vastness of humanity.
Because that’s what we always were: human. Not heroes, not villains. Just men and women. And we lived.
God knows we lived, when so many died.
Two years later, in March 2012, my version of this story came out. It was published without much fanfare, making it onto the shelves of a few friendly bookstores. It got a lukewarm reception, a little mild criticism, and some praise that was more benevolent than ardent.
I never heard from Tania Akhmatova, and so didn’t learn her opinion of what I’d done with her tale. I tried to track her down, to no avail. The one person I did manage to find was Luis, Gonzalo’s ex-brother-in-law. He’d spent ten years in a penitentiary center, and although he’d served only part of his sentence, it was impossible to have any sort of coherent conversation with the man. He spent the entire interview rubbing the knee Alcázar had shot and making erratic comments entirely unrelated to the reason for my visit. The only thing about him that moved me was this: On the wall by the headboard of his bed hung a dog-eared photo of his son, Roberto.
As far as I know, Agustín González never went to jail. He got the trial postponed repeatedly with multiple recusals and ended up being absolved of the charges of money laundering and conspiring with organized crime bosses. From what I understand, he died in Bangkok, in bed with a high-class prostitute forty years his junior, in 2008. Neither his daughter Lola nor either of her children agreed to speak to me. Javier served out his sentence without complaint and moved to the United States when he got out. Patricia is in her first year of law school, which would have pleased her father; she’s planning to train at the firm that Luisa, Gonzalo’s old assistant, now runs in the same building. Lola remarried a wealthy young Australian, and they live on the estate her father left her in Extremadura.
I met Atxaga’s ex-wife. She’d become a depressive alcoholic who sold her body on street corners for a few euros. Her face was completely disfigured and I didn’t dare to bring up the past that, for her, was present every time she looked in the mirror. I took her out to lunch and gave her fifty euros, and left feeling like a miserable wretch. Floren Atxaga was
killed in jail—oddly enough the same one where Alcázar died, although a different cellblock. It’s more than likely that the two never met. According to the warden I interviewed, who remembered Atxaga, he was found hanging from the bars of his cell. No one shed too many tears.
I visited Gonzalo’s grave, as well as his mother’s and the columbarium where Roberto and Laura’s ashes lay. But there is no emotion in the dead, only silence.
Also silent were the ruins of the lake house, by that time overrun by weeds and roots that had broken through walls and roof. The dam that people call “the lake” is still there, and I wonder if Elías’s body is still at the bottom of it. Or if it was ever there to begin with. I would have liked to meet Alcázar and his father; they may be the only two people who ever knew what actually happened to his body at the end of that night.
I never heard anything from Anna Akhmatova. I visited the place where Karamazov Bookstore used to be, but today it’s a drugstore and the current owners had never heard of her. Oddly, when I asked a friend on the mossos d’esquadra, the Catalan police force, about anything like the Matryoshka, he looked at me and said blithely there were dozens of mafias operating in Barcelona that he knew of, but none with that name, and certainly none headed by a woman.
I assumed that was the end of this story. Esperanza was right when she said in her letter that everything turns to dust and oblivion if you have the patience to wait.
But then one day in 2014, two years later, when the story had faded from my mind almost as much as it had from the protagonists’ memories, I got a package in the mail. It was certified, sent from somewhere in eastern Russia.
It contained a photo of a good-looking boy, about twelve years old. He was standing with Tania, posing in front of a rusted cross in the ground, in the middle of a high meadow. At the cement base was written:
NAZINO 1933–1934.
IN MEMORY OF THE INCREDULOUS, WHO WERE VICTIMS OF THE INCONCEIVABLE.
Also in the package was a silver locket. My heart skipped a beat. Irina’s name was engraved on the back. I touched it, stroked it with my own fingers, and it was like touching Elías, and Esperanza, and Anna, and even Irina herself, and I was filled with a strange emotion.
I opened the locket. Inside was a photo of Gonzalo and Laura as children: two smiling kids, the boy with gaps between his teeth, the girl in braces. Innocent, pure, still full of love.
Tania had had two lines of verse engraved inside:
The first drop to fall starts breaking down the stone.
The first drop to fall begins to form the ocean.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A story like the one told here could never come exclusively from a writer’s imagination. Many people have helped me make sense of things, and I am grateful to them all. Many thanks to Memorial, the Russian NGO; to Robert de Torcatis in Perpignan for putting me in touch with so many people who lived through Spanish Republicans’ retreat and exile; thanks to Gildas Girodeau for giving me new perspective on the beaches of Argelès and for our trip back in time at the castle at Colliure; thanks to Carlos Pujol for sharing family memories with events in my narration, and for locating them so precisely in the Barcelona of the day; my gratitude goes to Alfons Cervera for his lucid discussion on the importance of memory and our talks about dignity and utopia; thanks to Alfonso at Maite Bookstore for putting me on the trail of the Nazino tragedy.
And my most immense gratitude goes to all of those anonymous people who in one way or another lived through what has been told here; thank you for breaking your silence and sharing it with me. Words may not always do justice, but this small victory is for all of them, in the hopes of meeting their expectations.
And on a very personal level, infinite thanks to my father.
Barcelona, February 2014