While Francisco is talking, all the while carefully avoiding my eyes—which means that, during that conversation, Pedrós must have mentioned me among the victims of this chain of disasters—I can’t help thinking that, if this were the jungle, we would be watching the lianas beginning to twine their way around the window frames of the closed shops, to climb the walls of abandoned apartment blocks, smothering the empty penthouse suites with their foliage and thick woody stems. A lost city, like in the adventure movies we enjoyed when we were kids. For days and days you hack your way through the jungle, then, suddenly, you stumble upon a vast city, all overgrown with leaves and scrub and full of temples, statues, buried treasure. The fantasies of Jules Verne and Salgari.
My friend concludes his speech:
“I don’t know how this is all going to end, Pedrós said, whether the country will emerge from the crisis or not, but what does it matter to you and me, Francisco? There’s no way out of our crisis, we know that. It’s like Carlos Gardel says in the song: Downhill all the way. He was feeling terribly low. I felt really sorry for him.”
Bernal:
“What did he mean ‘our crisis’? Is that what he said? Is he seventy years old, like you? He’s only about forty-four or forty-five. God, he’s a sly one. He really has a way with people, trying to draw them in. You and him, two retirees contemplating their final days together. As if he wasn’t already plotting some new deal. I bet he is. This bankruptcy business is probably just some new strategy or other and it’ll turn out that all they’ve impounded is pennies, because anything valuable is in Amparo’s name.”
Yep, everyone here is still talking about Pedrós, even though, as far as I know, they’re not among his creditors—although I’m not sure where he stands with Justino—and the suppliers he hasn’t paid will be talking about him for months, and so will the people who hated him and are pleased to see him go under, and the employees he fired and their poor families; and by the ones who’d have given anything to be invited to go for a sail on his yacht. That’s his lasting bit of fame. Better than nothing, I suppose. I may be doing my best not to mention him, but I think about him all the time. I may not be making any contribution to his long-term fame, but I do keep his memory alive. The people who talk are the ones who would’ve gladly paid a fortune to watch him go under, as well as those of us who did pay a fortune for him to watch us go under with him. I take my last sip of beer, listening to them discuss Tomás’ fall from grace, and think that I should be able to get at least a couple of hours’ sleep tonight. The alcohol’s doing me good. I glance at my watch, and Justino notices. He says: It’s after eight o’clock, Esteban, time for your Colombian girl’s shift to end. During the game, I drank a black coffee with a dash of brandy and two glasses of punch. Then, when we left the card table, and continued chatting at the bar, I’d had three glasses of beer, or was it four? More or less what I usually drink in the evening. I don’t know if that comfortable feeling that wraps itself around you when you leave the bar is thanks to the card games or the alcohol, but you leave the bar as if borne along, floating on a cotton-wool cloud. I consider suggesting to Francisco that we have a gin and tonic together, from one of those bottles of Bombay Sapphire or Citadelle that the bartender keeps especially for him.
Early the next morning, before going out, I took the goldfinch up to the roof terrace and opened the cage door. The bird hesitated for a few moments: initially, just sticking its head out, fluffing its feathers several times as if preparing to take flight, then turned round and went back into the cage to peck at the seeds in the feeder; after a while, it again hopped over to the open door and, this time, it barely paused before fluttering over to the rail, where it remained perched and hesitant for a few more seconds. It turned its head nervously this way and that, repeatedly glancing across at the cage door, moving its head as if an elastic spring had gone wrong. And then, it flew off, slipping away into the faint morning mist softened with dawn light, growing smaller and smaller until it merged with the blue of the sky. My eyes filled with tears as I watched it vanish, and I felt a strange mixture of feelings: while it was beautiful to see the bird flying free, I felt very sad to lose it. And a knot formed in my throat to think that the goldfinch would not escape disaster either. Unaccustomed to finding its own food, to defending itself against any tiny enemies it might meet, it would have great difficulty surviving. And yet it was beautiful to watch it plunging into that diaphanous winter sky: the slight morning haze, the bird’s precise flight, the fragile light of the rising sun misting the blue with gold. The whole episode provided an illusion of freedom, of untarnished joy. We human beings also go out into the world with certain handicaps.
Again my eyes fill with tears—I feel like crying. I bring my fist down hard on the steering wheel (watch out for the airbag, a blow like that might trigger it), before opening the door of the Toyota to make enough room for putting on the wellingtons I left on the floor in front of the passenger seat. While I’m putting them on, I again imagine the bird growing smaller and smaller until it’s lost from view. Liliana’s face: you know, I had that warm feeling you get when happiness is about to arrive, as if something’s about to happen, a kind of inner hustle and bustle, like someone tidying the house for some important visitor—putting things in their proper places, dusting the furniture and cleaning the windows, while, from the kitchen, comes the smell of a special meal being prepared. Now it’s Álvaro on the other side of the desk in the office: You might have warned me. Do you really think I knew this was how things would end? The conflicting feelings are evident in his moist eyes. I taught Álvaro to hunt and fish at the lagoon—about forty years ago—just as my uncle had taught me. Yes: in the mid-seventies—Álvaro is a keen worker, who does all the jobs at the workshop to perfection. Despite the paternal ghost hovering over us, we establish a kind of friendship. I’m just back from my most recent escapade, and he’s the same as when I left—my father’s loyal son. Sometimes he comes with me on a Saturday morning, we have lunch together and I teach him how to handle the rifle and he’s surprised at all the things I know about the lagoon: as you see, time debases everything, erases it, what can I say? Álvaro and me like two brothers, if only we had been, I wish things had turned out differently between us, of course I do, and for you too, although you can’t really complain, you’ve had a steady job without too much responsibility, a house, a family. What I regret most of all is that things didn’t turn out differently for me—if only, rather than spending decades feeling that everything was just temporary, and then realizing too late that life is nearly over and things have never gone as we expected, and that they’re beyond our control, yes, if only, if only . . . It’s his eyes, the glint in his eyes that I see in the glow of the sunrise. The bird growing smaller and smaller, becoming one with that same glow. Álvaro’s eyes. The glint in his eyes, the tiny spark that lights up the pupil, surrounded now by a wash of blood. The pupil floats in that reddish liquid, just as the sun did a few moments ago, as it emerged from the sea: a red ring floating above a pool of blood. Why am I surprised to find that Álvaro hates or despises me? I don’t like my own father, and yet I’ve spent my whole life with him. Álvaro came with me on dozens of days like today, when you can breathe in the clean winter air. The two of us alone under the clear sky, walking through this luminous space, the light outlining every object, emphasizing every shape, making each one stand out against the landscape like a paper cut-out: after the first autumn rains, the heavy air of the lagoon grows thinner, and the putrefying smell of the stagnant water is replaced by another more vegetable odor, the odor of fresh, new-born vegetables. That’s what I can smell now, like a stimulant, a tonic that helps me walk more energetically, swing my arms higher, more vigorously, take longer, faster strides, step more firmly; for a moment, I look like a man determinedly going in search of what he wants. I advance along the path: the only sound is the whispering of the reeds as I part them, the soft murmur as they swish against my shoulders
or brush against my knapsack as they fall back, the monotonous sucking noise of each boot lifting up from the squelching mud. The cawing of a crow, the fluttering of the coots: they jump out almost between my feet, I frighten them and they startle me too when I hear the beating of their wings, the whirr of the air. The dog races, mesmerized, after those fluttering wings, then stops at the edge of the water and turns to watch two ducks taking off. He barks. These noises shatter the glassy air; the splashing of some creature launching into the water: a frog, a toad, a rat; the barking of the dog amplified by the glass dome of the sky. I walk and feel as if I were immersing myself in a world apart, inhabited by other beings and ruled by other laws. Like my father, I feel a sudden desire to stay here forever. Like him, I am a divided being when I leave this labyrinth for the outside world. The dog runs excitedly up to me, overtakes me, then comes trotting back, wagging his tail; he stops, jumps up and puts his front paws on my belly. Filled with emotion, I stroke him, rubbing his head and back. Our guilt is going to take away your innocence, little dog. The wind has dropped, and the silence is almost painful, a warning of the great silence to come, the silence that will fill everything. On some winter days, the north winds bring with them the hum of traffic from the nearby main road or—more loudly from the highway—cars and trucks passing incessantly, a sound amplified beneath the wintry dome of the sky—noises which, on the other hand, the summer mists seem to swallow up the way blotting paper or a sponge absorbs liquids. Not today, there’s no wind today, no noise, not a breath. The welcome knife of the cold wind stopped. I move with a sense that I’m walking along its motionless blade. I’ve parked my SUV further up, because I want to enjoy the walk, but my contemplation of the landscape, my thoughts, are not a distraction from my goal, I know now how far I’ll be able to drive with the Toyota, I’ve calculated the width of the half-overgrown path, the state of the surface, I’ve checked that I’ll be able to drive the car up to the point where the water blocks the path, the bend in the lake, the kidney-shaped pool that, in the summer months, is cut off from the rest of the marsh: for years, my uncle and I used it as a pantry, a natural fish farm, which, tomorrow, will find its nutrients further enriched with meat to nourish its watery inhabitants, at the same time contaminating or poisoning the little spring my uncle showed me I could drink from; once again, good and evil all mixed up together. This was where I baited my first hook, cast my line and caught a couple of tiny fish (I can’t remember what they were, mullet or tench, I imagine) that my grandmother cooked for supper that evening. A stew of potatoes, garlic, sweet peppers and a bay leaf. The fish are for the boy, because he caught them. On the way home, it began to rain and we had to take shelter in the ruined building where we had left the bike. When we saw that the rain showed no signs of stopping and the sky was growing ever darker, my uncle decided to get on the bike, with me sitting on the crossbar with his waterproof cape covering me, head and all, and the rain drumming on the fabric and me inside as if in a glasshouse; I can still feel the warmth of my uncle’s body and the plip-plop of the ever larger raindrops on the cape. In these days of heavy autumn rain, or during winter, you can hear the roar of the waves even in the marshes, because the waters of the sea swell the lagoon, reaching up into the mouths of the river and the drainage canals, and then the mirror of the lake shatters into a thousand pieces, which, like droplets of molten metal, shift and jostle nervously, constantly changing shape and position. The lagoon comes alive, everything moves: the water, the reeds, the shrubs, everything. I’ve seen it dozens of times, but my memories focus on that one afternoon when the sky suddenly grew dark, and the day turned into a strange night bathed in a pale light that seemed to spring from the surface of the water. Light emanated from the leaves, the reeds, from the vegetation on the banks, an inverted light cast upward into the great, black clouds, like a photographic negative. My uncle holds my hand as we walk through that nightmare landscape as far as the ruined warehouse where he left his bike. I hear the rain hammering down on the roof tiles and see the ghostly light, like an optical illusion, on the brick wall nearest the entrance, which suddenly glows intensely red, highlighting the rough surface.
This morning, however, the calm is absolute, no engines, no voices trouble the air, and the still water reflects the blue of the sky, the passing clouds and the vegetation on the shoreline, duplicating the changing landscape. While I walk, it occurs to me that my uncle taught me pretty much everything. Handling a rifle, choosing the right bait for the right fish, laying traps baited with rotten giblets that quickly fill up with crabs, setting the nets to catch eels, even what carpentry I know I learned from him. Yes, he taught me almost everything, except my despairing view of the world, the certainty that every human being is guilty as charged. That’s in the blood, my father’s blood, which I inherited along with his harsh voice and gaze. As Leonor would say: he’s a man who still believes we’re in the middle of a war and that the most interesting battle is yet to come. That’s what my father taught me, and he wouldn’t allow me even that one ounce of innocence you need if you are to aspire to anything. I was neither a sculptor nor a cabinetmaker, which the dictionary defines as a skilled joiner who works with high-quality wood, a maker of fine furniture, Renaissance writing desks like the one created by my grandfather and my father, cupboards with moldings in the form of acanthus leaves or the petals of a flower, bedheads carved with the shapes of poppies, marquetry work, rosewood bedside tables adorned with lilies or geometric art deco designs in noble oak or ebony, none of which anyone has ever asked me to make, and none of which I would have known how to make or even wanted to. So I haven’t even really been a carpenter. Ever since I abandoned art school (after all the sacrifices I’ve made, he said: I’ve given you the chance Germán never had, the chance to do what I never managed to do, later, I discovered this wasn’t strictly true—I was a substitute for Germán, and we both failed him, more fuel for his bonfire of resentments), my father never suggested we create something together, never taught me how to be my own man and become the kind of cabinetmaker who leaves behind him a few pieces of furniture that others can admire and enjoy. When I rejected his plan, he gave up on me altogether. And I gave up on myself. In his youth, my father did have aspirations, ambitions: he wanted to get a few rungs further up the ladder than his father, who had been a good cabinetmaker but, because he’d lived here and not in a big city, had lacked the opportunities to develop his skills. He had, nevertheless, left a few good pieces, some of them still in this house that has never been mine and in which, until recently, I lived like a resident in one of those old boarding houses, who’s snapped at if he uses too much water when he showers, if he turns on the heater or reads until late into the night with the bedside lamp on.
My uncle’s justification would be:
“I was just a boy, more willing than able, and I would hammer together a few things up for local people who still remembered the workshop run by your grandfather and your father and where I’d already begun to work as his assistant. During that difficult period when I was left alone, without my father, without my older brother, the people who gave me work didn’t expect much from me, they ordered things more out of solidarity with my family, or pity perhaps, than because they thought much of my abilities. They would ask me to make a shed to store their bits and pieces, or a rabbit hutch, or a pigeon roost for the roof terrace. I never made anything for inside their houses, because even in the poorest houses, those places are still considered noble somehow, and furniture represents some kind of dignity or decency. My mother and your mother both got work scrubbing floors and washing clothes, and in the fruit-picking season, they worked as packers. When your father came back, there was almost nothing left in the workshop, most of the machines and the materials had been stolen and any furniture destroyed. The walnut chair and table that your grandfather made, and the desk of course, only survived because we hid them under hay in the shed. The other bits of furniture, a wardrobe and a dresser, were also stolen and do
ubtless still adorn some house in Olba.”
“But didn’t my father make that furniture?”
“Your grandfather started making them, and your father did the carvings.”
“And didn’t he do anything after that?”
“As I say, we saved that furniture at the very last moment, he’d just come back from the front and was so weak he could barely stand, but between him, your grandmother and me, we managed to get it all out into the yard—”
“And what about my mother? Wasn’t she there too? Didn’t she help?”
“—and we buried it in the hay, there was piles of it, right up to the roof, and then we used tools and boxes and old planks to disguise it. They came to plunder the house, although it seems ridiculous to apply a word like ‘plunder’ to a house in which there was barely enough to eat, but there were those machines and tools and, above all (some neighbor must have informed on us) the furniture carved by my grandfather—his pride and joy, his life’s work that he never finished, the treasure of a poor, wretched household, quite out of keeping with the rest of the furniture, but his plan, over time, had been to furnish the whole house, making the dining table, the beds and bedside tables, the wardrobes, he had it all there in his notebooks, he used to show me the drawings. The men who came were so drunk they spent their time chasing the chickens and hauling the rabbits out of their hutches—they didn’t even bother with the shed, with that load of old hay, assuming it wouldn’t contain anything of value.”
I looked into my uncle’s eyes and seemed to see in them what he as a child had seen.
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