The older Francisco despises Olba’s petits vices, he wouldn’t sink that low, just the occasional gin and tonic made with Bombay Sapphire or Citadelle gin, which the owner of the Bar Castañer reserves for him. He keeps two bottles on the shelf just for Francisco, who is the only one who’d ever think of asking for either. Other customers order a Larios or a Gordon’s, or, for more fanciful ones, a Tanqueray. Francisco asks for a Citadelle gin and tonic, easy on the gin, purely for medicinal purposes, you understand, to relieve the treacherous drop in blood pressure that occurs each evening, his hypoglycemia, but he never goes in for any heavy drinking. Poker, prostitutes, gambling and drugs are out: he wrinkles his small, decrepit rabbit nose when he hears comments from the other old men (whores, gambling) or from the young men (lines of coke, a joint: marijuana grows well in these sunny climes, young people grow their own, half a dozen plants in the backyard or up on the roof), because, one assumes, he has better things to do, or the same things on a different, but higher level—yes, only the best, far removed from what’s on offer in some pokey room complete with a Romanian whore who has removed any body hair with a razor or with wax because she hasn’t yet heard about laser technology or perhaps can’t afford it; rooms equipped with a toy jacuzzi. I always wonder how those jacuzzis can possibly hold the great carcasses propping up the bar at the Lovely Ladies club, men weighing in at two hundred, two twenty, two hundred and fifty pounds or more, strapping farmers, burly bricklayers, obese truck drivers and mechanics, sedentary real estate agents or bank clerks, asses of all dimensions, fat, soft and low-slung, men with wide hips, who rock from side to side when they walk, like the clapper in a bell. The Mediterranean amphora-shape which one always thought of as female has become unisex. I know many a whoremonger with wide hips, but have no idea why that should be. I can’t imagine those carcasses fitting in one of those mini-jacuzzis. I only just fit. Instead of splashing about in the pool with all those high-pressure jets, they presumably crouch over the bidet as I do when I visit, mounted on the pony (isn’t that what the French word means, a small horse? I’ll have to look it up in the French dictionary I’ve kept from my schooldays) while she scrubs your bottom and your asshole with antiparasitic soap to flush out any lice hiding inside; the pool-cum-jacuzzi is pure decoration to bump up the price of the session, an illusion of luxury that even the starving can afford. You pay for it, it’s there, but it’s so difficult to use that you give it up as a lost cause. Another time, you say, next time, or in the next few months, when I’ve lost a bit of weight on the diet the doctor has put me on to lower my cholesterol levels and triglycerides. He said I have to lose nearly thirty pounds and eat a lot of grilled chicken breasts and salads, otherwise, he said, my arteries and my heart will explode like a well-stuffed piñata. Anyway, I came here to fuck not to have a bath. I can do that at home. No, Francisco doesn’t go to places like that. In Olba one bad move is all it takes to tarnish your image, if you lose your name and reputation, you can never get it back, your picture remains sullied forever; my childhood friend, our local celebrity: while we were drinking wine from the local Misent cooperative and ordering paellas at some open-air café, he was working as a journalist in Madrid, for a national magazine, Vinofórum, as well as being a co-owner of a trendy restaurant. His wife was nominally the owner (on marriage they had opted for separation of property just in case) and, thanks to a few Castilian businessmen in Salamanca and Valladolid, he was a partner in a couple of boutique wine hotels, selling vinos de pago—that’s what they call them, not that they’re so expensive, but because it’s the lame-ass translation of what the French call cru, domain or estate: pago is a would-be medieval word and, believe me, he would say, there are still plenty of medieval Franquistas in this wretched country of ours—and he would talk to me, too, about the slopes of Burgundy and Corton-Charlemagne, which produce white wines because the emperor was fair-haired and red wine stained his beard; and about Romanée-Conti, Médoc and Château Latour. He would explain the virtues of botrytis cinerea, the gray mold used to sweeten the wines of Sauternes; and he would lecture me about the decantation time required by each wine, on which he was an expert, as well as being a writer of cook books and articles and travelogues. He was no longer interested in St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and the Thessalonians, nor in the ideas of the lay theologian Enrique Miret Magdalena; and he couldn’t care less about the Second Vatican Council and didn’t even remember it had existed (when was that? in the far-off sixties) or about Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, whose books he used to read a few years ago, indeed, we spent many nights discussing their ideas. Long before that, he used to tell me about St. Paul, although, to be honest, I was never a believer, I slightly preferred—although not by much—those German revolutionaries: they had more interesting adventures, although I was always bored by the political vein running through their various trials and tribulations; that was more my father’s territory. Francisco would have enjoyed debating with him, had my father ever agreed to such a debate, but he could never forgive Francisco for being his father’s son, and I’ve always been allergic to heroes and saints, feeling incapable of following their example, but Francisco and I used to talk about all those things, not just here, but in Paris and London and Ibiza during the months of my great escape, my Indian summer that ended with me caught in Leonor’s web. Then came those forty long years of winter. Those people from the German Weimar Republic were like family to Francisco (he had aligned himself with some really fine specimens that would have delighted his hunter father Gregorio Marsal), and the landscapes were familiar, the frozen canal into which Rosa Luxemburg was thrown by her social democrat comrades. Indeed, we knew more about their trials and tribulations than we did about those suffered by our grandparents. I had been given certain hints about how my grandfather met his end, although only in the vaguest of terms, I still knew nothing about the bullet in the back of the neck administered just a few hundred yards from our house, but I knew about the bodies of revolutionaries floating in the icy waters of the River Spree (whenever anyone mentions crime and Germany, there’s always night and fog and the waters have to be icy: even Marx in the Communist Manifesto speaks of the icy waters, although in his case they’re the icy waters of egotistical calculation, that I do remember). Nor do I think he knew of his father’s hunting tastes in the 1940s. We were in the early 1980s then and concerned with other things. It wasn’t a time of prisons or of corpses floating in cold, murky rivers, except as chapters in an adventure story, something like the exploits of Jules Verne’s hero, Michel Strogoff, in the waters of the Yenisey River, adventures in which Francisco had wished that he, too, could be a protagonist, while I opted instead for the role of curious onlooker reading about them in some book. Is it a sin to have no interest in revolution or in digging up the past? Then again, after putting out many feelers, he also turned his back on history and the struggle of the proletariat. He chose rather cosier places for his adventures, while I opted not to find out about such things even in books (or, rather, in the book of life itself). After all, the positive option, not to destroy, but to choose the best of what’s on offer—a dilemma that preoccupied him—and which he resolved at the time—seemed more in keeping with social propriety or his family’s status or, more precisely, with his family’s aspirations and pretensions, because his family enjoyed high status in the village, but in a rather confused fashion; it was best not to talk about the origin of that status (Falangist father: pistols, land seizures, black market dealings, the pursuit through the mountains of famished, fugitive scarecrows in rags) to the half-dozen families who had inherited their wealth (the so-called “good families” who had always lived in Olba and who had been able to hang on to their wealth and status without too much fuss or too much vulgar probing), the nouveau riche, however, swallowed whole the farce put on by the Marsal family, along with their pretensions, Don Gregorio this and Don Gregorio that, the uniformed maid serving at table when they had guests; as did other post-civil war upstarts an
d those who made their money in the 1960s, people who, in a way, considered themselves Don Gregorio’s heirs—following the path opened up by him in the immediate post-war years—and saw themselves reflected in his mirror: second-generation predators, some of them the children of those who used to run with the pack—of which Don Gregorio was a member in his gleaming Hispania motor car—gangmasters, riffraff, a rabble with their newly acquired wealth and a gun license just in case some bastard breaks into your house and wants to steal your undeclared earnings. Their even more credulous children have the Spanish flag emblazoned on their key rings and on their watchbands, and a racist joke always on the tip of their tongues, convinced that locker-room humor is really classy, failing to realize, the poor ignorant fools, that it is, in fact, merely the province of the buffoon. The Marsal family are held in high esteem by the local developers, the dealers in construction materials, paint and metalwork, the bar owners, as well as the multitude of new arrivals who, over the last thirty years, have vied to be even more fascist than their immediate predecessors: the children of the winning side. Put Adolfo Suárez up against the wall. Santiago Carrillo wasn’t just a commie, he was a war criminal. Hitler didn’t go far enough in killing the Jews. This is how they show their colors, by socializing with Don So-and-So and Don Somebody-or-Other, supporters of the regime, brothers of the air force general or the colonel of the civil guard and, inevitably, by sporting the Spanish flag on their key ring, which they proudly brandish whenever they start the car, or having their cell phone belt out the Spanish national anthem in the middle of lunch in a restaurant, and letting the Falangist anthem, Cara al sol, blare forth on their CD player as soon as you climb into their SUV, not to mention the camouflage gear they wear in this most urban of settings, and their taste for weapons lightly disguised as a passion for hunting. This was very far from being Francisco’s world when he left, nor would it have become his world had he stayed. On the contrary, these people were his nightmare, his shifting sands, the ones who might reveal his shame, the half-buried corpse that lies behind any recently acquired fortune. He left precisely in order to escape from this world, he wasn’t prepared to be a buffoon, a flunky, which—when all’s said and done—was what his father and his cronies had been, entertaining governors, deputies and high-ranking officers visiting the area. Preparing paellas and eels all-i-pebre; taking them out on boat trips to see the cliffs of Misent while they bit off prawn heads (the head is the tastiest part, General) and to the club where the best-looking whores could be found. When he began to learn more about his family history, he spat on the photos his father had pinned up on his office wall, photos of his father as a young man, blue shirt and military belt, the yoke and arrows embroidered on his shirt front—although he was careful to wipe away any traces of spit before his father came in—and he was not amused by the bronze bust of José Antonio used as a paper weight. He kept that sanctuary, with its proof of original sin, hidden away from his friends. I think I was the only one ever allowed to see the room, which he considered ignoble because it revealed the murky origins of Gregorio Marsal, his father. He rejects that room, because he has escaped into another world in which, like an astronaut, he enjoys zero gravity, with nothing binding him to the solid ground of recent history, which is pure vulgarity: Don Gregorio’s card games, which he presided over wearing his shoulder holster, cheap music, Mom’s croquettes, the chamber pot under the bed, his grandfather’s enema, he erases all of that; he enjoys not having to set foot in the dust from which he sprang, he lives in a state of weightlessness in which one can build a new, improved self. His new world: crepinette and crème parmentier, foie gras from Perigord and poulardes de Bresse, the golden forests of France in autumn, the vineyards somewhere in Burgundy, the red vine tendrils glinting in the fragile October sun. I—like everyone—we’re now in the 1980s, in what seems to be the new Spain—would listen open-mouthed. His little hare’s nose discovering a whole fruit stand in a glass of wine: cherry, apricot, plum; a whole timber yard: cedar, oak; a complete grocery store: honey, sugar, coffee; a submerged garden: there’s a background of aquatic flowers—he would say—irises, water-lilies, clear still water. As if he didn’t know that irises and water-lilies, like all marsh plants, stink of rotten fish. Gastronomic and oenological knowledge, a mastery of haute cuisine. At night, I would search the sparse book shelves in my bedroom, looking for something by Luxemburg, Gramsci or Marx, and I discovered that my copies had disappeared too, although how I didn’t know. Not one remained. I couldn’t even remember what I could have done with them. I had probably only read them because Francisco lent them to me. Or perhaps I hadn’t even bothered to read them. I talked about them without having glanced at a single page. They were there in the air. A dense, middle-European fog, Nacht und Nebel, icy water, filled my brain and swamped all memories of the life I had abandoned when I decided to come back to Olba, an epic narrative I never really felt was mine. When I returned to the workshop, the past had ceased to exist. I couldn’t bear my father’s—always mysterious—allusions to things that had happened. At first, I didn’t understand the allusions; later, I found them boring and, ultimately, disgusting. He thought I had accepted carpentry as a kind of vocation, and then he felt an urgent need to talk to me about the past, to tell me that he had been part of that epic narrative, but I didn’t want to listen. I said to him: All that bitterness just keeps you from living. It’s over, don’t you see? Like Francisco, I, too, had landed on a weightless planet. Leonor had set me floating, then dropped me. I learned something from all of that, from that time of adaptation, the spell of decompression divers need before returning to the surface, although what I did mostly was suffer horribly, she was there in everything I saw and touched: it wasn’t love, love doesn’t last that long, because, by then, a few years had passed; it was probably bitterness, which has no expiration date, she flies off and escapes, and I remain alone, anchored to the earth, flailing around in the mud, and I rage at her, it’s not fair—I can’t bear it, you bitch—me coming home late at night, sometimes furious, sometimes barely able to keep from crying, and always very drunk. I’d brood on what I had lost by not being brave enough to leave. I could have freed myself from those German martyrs and icy canals without necessarily coming back home to my father and the workshop. Francisco managed to step free and yet he had believed in them in a way I never did. My father was a domestic Liebknecht, and I had shut myself up with him, drowning in the same icy canal. We were both floating, but my planet bore no relation to his. Saw, hammer, chisel, lathe, brace and bit, my father’s voice, the voices of the card-players in the bar, the compulsive drinking, adding up my earnings at the end of the week to see if I could afford half an hour in a room at the Lovely Ladies club, forty years in a world as coarse as sandpaper, vulgar, sordid, and with my one love—who didn’t want to be the mother of my child—married to my best friend, living in a paradise filled with dinde farci aux truffes, poulardes, canard à la Rouennaise, polyglot people and hotel rooms with a view over Lake Geneva. I felt like a useless astronaut, left behind on an inhospitable meteorite, watching the rest of the crew travel on to an unknown blue planet, covered in lush vegetation, with a scattering of lakes and a population of temptress nymphs and eager fauns. Lack of ambition, environmental factors—I used to think: I am the owner of my own deficiencies. The only thing I own is what I lack, what I cannot reach, what I’ve lost, that’s what I have, what is actually mine, the empty vacuum that is me. I have what I don’t have. And I felt infinitely sorry for myself, filled with a bitterness that sometimes verged on hatred of her, a false hatred (no, I don’t think I ever hated her, I still felt aroused whenever I saw her, I desired her, yes, I desired her right up until the end, she was the only woman for me), and a false hatred of Francisco which extended to my father (and did I really hate him, do I still hate him?), or vice versa: love in absentia. They were two sides of the same coin—on one side, what seemed to me unattainable and, on the other, what was denied to me: Francisco showing me wha
t could have been, and my father showing me the depths of the nothingness that had become my sole property. He rubbed my nose in what was not to be: the workshop, the furnished apartment where I had no space to call my own, the caged goldfinches that I took care of after Mom died, Saturday afternoons spent in my tiny room whose walls were covered in posters of Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed until they grew too old and faded and I tore them down; the velvety bluish or reddish flesh standing at the bar of a club that changed locations and names over the years, but always remained the same, the half-vanished paths traversing the marsh, the smell of damp, rotting vegetation, the feathers of a duck, wet with mud and sticky with blood, the steam given off by the skin of a panting dog. The only things that were mine—before the word “mine” became only the empty space left by what I had lost—were the few escapes into adventure that I squandered and that Francisco was able to turn to his advantage. We undertook those adventures together, or, rather, Francisco dragged me along in his wake: a few months in Paris, probably for the sole reason that, in order to live life in style or at least try to, it was assumed you had to go to Paris; a spell in London because, at the time, that was where the avant-garde was happening—op art and pop art, everything that was “in” was there; a few months in Ibiza, before the hippies arrived, but where there were already a few people who grew marijuana and somehow or other got hold of Mexican or Guatemalan peyote, which they chewed slowly with religious unction, following the teachings of their shaman, Castaneda. Laila used to make some delicious hemp seed cakes and, after eating them, we would laugh or cry at the memory of something or other, and end up snuggled against somebody’s chest. I think her name was Laila, although I’m not sure now. And I can’t remember either if I had anything much else on my mind then. I occasionally returned from those adventures feeling slightly disgusted (although now I couldn’t say quite why) and totally broke (and I do know the reason for that). In bullfighting terms, I would say that I felt the bull’s tendency to return to the same spot in the ring, I was building my own corral, voluntarily fencing myself in, drawn by the call of house and cradle; if you press me, I would say I was answering the call of the womb, and Leonor gave me that: after all, what is sex but the desire to be enclosed again in that soft, pink arena: to climb back inside someone through any one of her orifices, a desire to return to that warm, dark inner space, to be rocked in amniotic fluid, cradled by mucous secretions. Equally uterine were the washed shirts, ironed and neatly put away in the chest of drawers, the dazzling white underwear (my mother’s block of Lagarto soap, her laundry bluing bleach, the clothes swaying in the sun on the washing lines on the terrace roof beneath the blue dome of the sky, I can see it, smell it), the hot succulent risotto in a bowl on the table cloth and made variously with beans, turnips, greens, pig’s knuckles or ears, and blood sausage. And yet even now I blame my father for my frequent scamperings back home. That’s the version I’ve given to other people, although not to anyone in the village, I haven’t told them anything, what would be the point, I’d just be providing them with fodder for jokes or sideswipes, it’s not a good idea to tell people in Olba any truths, but I did talk about it to the friends I met abroad, with some of whom I remained in touch either by letter or phone (what will have become of them? nearly fifty years have passed since then and yet I still remember them, how many of them will now be nothing but skin and bone?), who were friends for a while, and with whom I used to drink a café Calva near the Bastille in Paris, opposite the stop for some bus heading out into the suburbs (Vitry, Ivry, Maisons-Alfort, Vincennes), or a pint of beer in Camden; the friends I made during the few months I spent at art school and never saw again, it’s the story I’ve always told myself, whining on about what I could have become but didn’t. I tell myself that it was my father who tied me to the workshop, who clipped my wings the way farmers clip the wings of the geese in the pen so that they won’t fly away when they hear the call of the migrating birds heading north from the lagoon (ornithologists ring them every year and have proved that they migrate to England, Russia and Sweden, all the great-great-grandchildren of the goose who carried Nils Holgersson in the books I read as a child), the padre padrone who demanded that I stay by his side, because all the other children had flown the coop. One of them had traveled beyond the nebulous destination of those migrating geese: Germán had, for some months already, been living in the land of no return. Carmen had just escaped to Barcelona, almost a child, said my father with tears in his eyes—the only time I’ve ever seen him cry—and the third, the flim-flam man, Juan, was flitting about who knows where. I returned home to the rule of staying put. My father’s insistence on this had become more urgent since my eldest brother died. His need to possess. He wanted me here, to be with him, he wanted an assistant and an heir who would give meaning to his work (at least try to be a carpenter, he said), he wanted me to give meaning to his life. A workshop in which he was the only carpenter lay bare his empty futurist rhetoric, his egotism, as if everything he had was for him alone. If he wasn’t working for someone else’s sake, to safeguard someone else’s future, his life had no meaning, his betrayal (which is how he saw it) would only have benefitted him. He would have been a coward not a martyr, not a cornered bull, like me. My mother was too small a territory over which to exercise his authority. He felt he was too important to govern only a timid little woman whose love he had never been sure of and whose family of well-to-do farmers had never forgiven her precipitate civil marriage to an adolescent carpenter, the son of a poor, left-wing carpenter, who had given her a child. He needed to expand his territory. My brother German’s death kept me tied to the workshop, even though he had never wanted to stay there, or precisely because he hadn’t wanted to stay and ended up paying for this with disease and death. That’s the official version. It sounds pretty convincing, Death Kept Me Tied to the Workshop could be the title of some Soviet tragedy or a socialist variant on one of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. But that feeling of guilt has stayed with me right up until now, although I’ve always had a sense that, biologically, I’m a slave in search of a master, and whether that docility is in my genes or I imbibed it with my mother’s milk, I can’t tell. A son worthy of my mother, that queen of sighs and of tears, falling as if to be seen by no one, but that were, in fact, intended to be seen by everyone, the apparently furtive dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief always managed to make her tears the undisputed protagonists of the moment, be it a farewell, an argument, a disagreement, an order flouted or a sudden sharp word. Instant tears and sighs. With my father’s growing rage as counterpoint. I’ve often wondered if perhaps my grandmother wasn’t right to doubt that my mother was still in love with him after insisting he give himself up, yes, I’ve thought that many times, because those falsely modest tears and recriminations were a way of bringing out the worst in him, of stripping away the little pride he had left. His uncontrollable rage at seeing her cry, the slammed doors and the ensuing hours of tense silence as he took refuge in his workshop or in the small room he called his office, with her crying and him furious and then doubtless hating his own brutality and sinking into self-pity for days at a time, despising himself and realizing that his whole life had been a mistake. And it’s been in that climate, or in the silence that filled it after her death, that I’ve spent my almost fifty years in the workshop, trying to erase the pages of the past, to leave them blank, adapting my habits and aspirations to those of everyone else—pure nothingness, a glass of brandy at lunchtime, a game of cards in the evening, a visit to the Lovely Ladies club a couple of times a month (before that, it was called The Cozy Corner and, before that, Caresses, and, as I said, while it may have changed name and location, it’s remained essentially the same). Since the 1980s and 1990s, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, I’ve always been alone, avoiding all witnesses, and some people take me for a queer now, no girlfriends now, no lovers, no more prostitutes, I know what some people say behind my back; and othe
rs I’ve run into sometimes, propping up the same bar, consider me an oddball; the workshop, meals with my parents, then just with my father, the two of us alone, not talking to each other, moving about among the machinery and the wood panels, passing each other tools: a gesture, an order, pick that up, grab that plank, we’ve got to finish this today before we close so that we can deliver it to the customer tomorrow; the house with its three closed bedrooms and my room with its two beds, one of them empty (Uncle Ramón used to sleep there when my brothers were still living at home), except when my sister and her children used to visit, and then the two kids would sleep in the bed next to mine; the rest of the time, I was like the residue of what had once been a family: initially, I used to read and listen to music; then, after my mother died, my father took to sleeping in the room next to mine (why that room and not the one he’d shared with his wife at the far end of the corridor? or the one that used to be my sister’s room, also down the corridor? why was he spying on me through the wall, listening to my sighs, to the creakings of my bed, turning them all into guilty secrets?) and banging on the wall whenever I turned up the volume on the record player. I haven’t read a book or listened to music for years now, but I do listen to those radio stations that the lonely can call up in the early hours: desertions, unsatisfactory sex, broken hearts, terrible incurable diseases, that’s what you hear; at night, the world reveals its unsavory underbelly. The radio captures it, showing it to us as if wanting to make it more palatable or make us believe that it’s more palatable than it really is, and while I listen to this caramel-coated catalogue of woes, I think every night about all the people I knew but haven’t seen again; with some I only remember their names, and I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with any of them, since we’re not connected by a single mutual acquaintance, nothing—people who’ve fallen through the cracks—and I think of those who’ve gone—which ones? how many?—and that I’m about to go too, and that when I do, no one will remember them and no one will remember me. No one is thinking about me in the middle of the night. I myself am appropriate fodder for the radio dial-up: feeling that you’re a shadow you could walk through, that you lack all substance, that you’re someone who isn’t like the others but who tries very hard to conform, except that you’re trying to be what the others no longer want to be. I’m a stranger in a house that has never been mine, either by law or habit: the doors never opened or closed when I wanted; my father’s anger when, as a young man, I came home late: this isn’t a hotel, you know, the next time you can sleep out in the street; I wasn’t allowed to put up the paintings or posters I would have liked, my own bedroom has been a burrow guarded by a ferocious ferret: we’re not thieves in this house, you know, there’s no need to shut your door. Take that trash off the walls, by which he meant a few political posters—he was calling “trash” things that were a continuation of his own aspirations, but which, in me, in my ignorance, seemed to him, quite rightly, mere frivolousness—and a few pictures of pop groups that Francisco brought for me: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Janis Joplin. Whenever anyone comes to Bernal with a problem, he always laughs: The Lord is good enough to keep us alive, so what are you complaining about? What do I have to complain about? I’m in relatively good health for someone of seventy. Many people would envy me. My cholesterol and my triglyceride levels are on the high side, so are my blood pressure and pulse rate, but then the same could be said of anyone my age lucky enough not to be suffering from something far worse. What is happening to me, what has happened to me, is all of my own making. I snipe at Francisco, and it’s true that I’m not as fond of him as when I was a boy or a young man, I don’t know when that resentment first began to brew inside me, it was before the business with Leonor, I’m sure, but I don’t envy him now as I did for all those years: I recognize that he did, at least, dare to take a chance. He had, of course, put down more solid foundations than I had. In between escapades, he’d found time to study philosophy, take some courses in law and, after that, journalism. He learned to think, to write and to do business as dictated by the rules you need to abide by if you want to succeed. I trotted along beside him like a puppy, but my adventures were pure dissipation, pure prodigality, I thought I was squandering my time, but really I was squandering myself. If you have no idea where you’re going, any path will do. I failed to realize this and, as it turns out, I was using up the few provisions Providence had placed in my knapsack. On the other hand, let’s not forget that his engine was running on the top-quality fuel his parents were pumping into him, the money he pretended to despise (or that we both pretended to despise), that and a few discreet but useful contacts. These are not venial sins. You shouldn’t exclude any details if you want your story to be credible. But apart from that, and perhaps because of that, he had a plan. Traveling, screwing around, taking drugs, going to the movies, listening to music, discussing this and that with whoever happened to be around, was all part of what Marx calls the primitive accumulation of capital. For his father this had taken the form of those night-time raids, trips with the powers-that-be to view the cliffs of Misent or visit the local nightclubs. The methods had changed, but the mechanisms still worked. Even spitting on his Falangist father’s photo was part of his education. It was a matter of laying the foundations on which to build the business-of-all-businesses that has been Francisco Marsal. This is doubtless easier when your accumulation of capital is not exactly primitive, but a second-generation increment, because your father, in his accumulative labors and during his own educative process, did things that were far less instructive than the things you do, which meant that you didn’t have to actually dig in the manure one usually needs in order to create a plantation: having a little bit of capital behind you already gives you a sense of continuity, of multiplying synergies, the kind of capital you can’t acquire when you jump from one job to another, from one temporary post to another, which is what I did in London and Paris, doing the odd cleaning job here and there, mixing with all kinds of different people, as the Charles Aznavour song says, rien de vraiment précis: you end up in a tunnel with no light at its end, a suffocatingly hot tunnel that wears you down. It’s very unlikely that a dynamic like that will produce a miracle. He was fabricating, or should I say constructing, his CV—I don’t know which is the better way of putting it—beginning with a rapid exit from a badly-paid job as a schoolteacher, a job he had accepted not because he needed the money, but as one of the rites of passage demanded by his own particular bildungsroman: first it was the Catholic youth movements he belonged to, then the visits to working-class areas, his political engagement, which he again abandoned to devote himself entirely to politics proper, which he also soon tired of, as soon, in fact, as he had woven the web that would allow him to entrap his prey.
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