“But what did they do?” I asked, “What had those eyes seen, Mom?”
“Nothing, just those drunks plundering the house and then walking drunkenly past the window a few times.”
“And they didn’t come back?”
“They came back to search for weapons, but, of course, there weren’t any, because we’d buried your grandfather’s hunting rifle, the one your uncle used to use, the one he gave to you, we buried it in the olive grove on the outskirts of the village. They came looking for papers and books too, but we’d burned or buried those a few days before.”
“But did they come back after that?”
“No, they never came back,” she replied sharply.
Funny, isn’t it? “Never” usually seems such a terrible word, but in those circumstances it brought hope: they would never come back. You will never come back either, Liliana, never, and I’m not sure if, in this instance, the word is terrible or hopeful, just as I don’t know if I will ever stop hearing your voice. I imagine I will: after all, in the end, everything fades, although it will take some time; as you know, bitterness lasts rather longer than love, your voice. No, today I’m not going to say anything because I don’t want to worry you, I told you I was crying over some problem I’ve got, but don’t ask what it is, like I said, I’m not going to tell you, and that’s that. But you’ve already told me, your eyes are telling me, look at me, that’s right, lift your chin and look me in the eye, you’re crying again, how can I not worry when I see you crying like that, in fact, if you don’t tell me, I’ll be even more worried, let me guess, you don’t have to say anything, just nod if I’m right. Wilson’s spent all the money again, is that it? You didn’t nod. Is it something worse? Did he hit you, you certainly shouldn’t let him get away with that, and if you report him, the state will protect you and automatically grant you Spanish citizenship. He didn’t hit you, did he? Or has he just left? Forgive me for saying so, but if he has left or if he did hit you, and even though you’ll be sad at first because he is your husband, the father of your children, and you still love him or did love him, he will have done you a big favor, because that man is more of a hindrance than a help. That’s not my view, it’s what you’ve told me yourself. You’re shaking your head. So he hasn’t left you and he hasn’t hit you. Well, whatever it is that’s happened can be sorted out, then. As I always say, neither good luck nor bad luck ever comes to stay, they stop with us for a while and then leave, head off somewhere else, have other people to deal with, other households. Luck is very fickle. Come here, no, don’t look away, let me stroke your hair, my poor child, my poor Liliana. What’s wrong? You’re still shaking your head. I don’t want to tell you the same thing all over again, I feel ashamed. But what’s there to be ashamed of, what shame can there be between father and daughter, come here, let me put my arms around you, that’s it, rest your head on my chest, you have such soft hair, thick and soft. You’re like your hair, strong and soft at the same time, because you know what suffering is, life has toughened you up. Don’t be frightened, child. That’s it, have a good cry, cry out all the sadness. Crying relieves and relaxes. Let me get my handkerchief out of my pocket and dry those tears, that’s better. It’s just that I feel so ashamed to come to you again and again with the same story, month after month, I mean, you’re under no obligation to help me, and I’d completely understand if you get fed up and tell me to go elsewhere, that it’s my problem, always the same old story: the fridge is empty, I’ve got nothing to give the kids to eat, no money to pay the rent. It gets boring, and I understand that. I’m so afraid you’ll get tired of me one day. But how can you say that, how could I ever get tired of you, you don’t get tired of a daughter, it’s not the kind of love you can pick up or put down as you wish, you carry it around with you, that’s right, have a good cry, rest your head on my chest. How much do you need this time?
What am I doing out of bed? What am I doing wandering about the house that is only dimly lit by the moon when I walk past the windows in the dining room and pitch-black when I go down the corridor and past the door to my brothers’ bedrooms? Perhaps I woke up and, seeing my uncle’s bed empty, set off to find him. I’m five years old. To the right of the corridor are the stairs that lead down to the workshop. To reach the door handle, I have to stand on tiptoe. I manage to open the door. I don’t know what I think I’m going to find. At the bottom of the stairs, there’s a line of light beneath the door into the workshop, and I advance slowly toward it, afraid I might fall, feeling my way along the wall, feeling carefully for every step, and when I do finally open the door, there is my uncle, sitting, head bowed, eyes fixed on something I cannot see, but which, as I approach, I discover to be a little wooden cart, which he’s holding in his hands. Filled with excitement, I race over to him and he looks up, surprised. I grab the cart and try to wrench it from his grasp, but he holds on tight and looks at me, amused, making the wheels of the cart spin with one finger tip, and I release my grip and discover, lying on the bench to his right, a very thin piece of wood which is, in fact, the silhouette of a horse. The first thing my uncle does when he sees me is to hide the horse beneath a cloth next to him, but when he realizes that I’ve already seen it, he smiles resignedly, sets the wheels spinning again, gently pushes away my hands and returns to the task he was immersed in when I entered. He’s making the horse a pair of reins, threading a slender piece of leather through the tiny hole next to the horse’s mouth. I was expecting you. Santa Claus’s little helper woke you up. Santa Claus says you can see the cart and touch it for a moment, but that you must then go back to sleep so that he can leave it at the end of your bed the day after tomorrow, which is the day when children get their presents. Now I’m the one making the wheels spin with one finger, looking at my first real toy, it’s the first time Santa Claus has ever visited the house. I celebrate the fact that on this night I’ve left my room, walked down the dark corridor, feeling my way along the wall, before being drawn to the line of light under the workshop door. He takes me back to my room, turning on the lights as we go. How did you manage to come down the stairs in the dark? You could have fallen and cut your head. Now let’s both go back to bed and go to sleep, you and me, he says as he draws back the blankets so that I can get in, then pulls them up to my chin. Imagine walking about barefoot on such a cold night, he says. Then he sits down on his bed and starts taking off his shoes. Why did my father, who either did or didn’t carve the elaborate desk, never once make me a toy, a cart, a Pinocchio with a long nose, a wheel? I don’t remember him making any of us a toy, not even Carmen. I’m thinking this as I once again see my uncle’s hand as he accompanies me to the fair and wins a prize at a shooting gallery, a small tin truck hanging on a wide strip of paper that he took just two shots to perforate and tear. The man running the booth congratulates him on his marksmanship and asks: Are you a hunter? And my uncle turns to me: you’ve enough to set up your own freight company now and earn your living, he says, laughing, you’ve got a cart, a horse and a truck, all you need is some gas. Then he places one hand on my shoulder and guides me toward the bumper cars, where we both climb aboard. The metallic sound of the music blaring out from the loudspeakers, the lights, the colored Chinese lanterns, the grown-ups dancing, the music, I can see it all now and hear the music, the couples dancing beneath the lights and the little Chinese lanterns, the songs of Antonio Machín and Bonet de San Pedro, the songs my mother sings as she does the ironing, and now I can hear my uncle’s voice, twenty years later: always remember, great oaks from little acorns grow. I’ve finished my military service, I’ve abandoned art school, and I’ve told him that I want to stay and work as a carpenter in the workshop, and he says: small things are the embryo of larger things, just as every fully grown man starts out as a fetus. And on this sunny morning, I think he was right, happiness can be summed up in that skinny wooden horse and its cart, the tin truck, the lights of the fair and the metallic clang of the bumper cars and the sparks crackling
from the web of wires crisscrossing overhead. And the smells of the fair: candy floss, toffee apples, the burnt oil from the stall selling fritters
He says:
“Esteban, we cannot make large things without first making small ones, for example, the maquette that a carpenter makes contains the whole building the architect then goes on to construct, there are no big professions and small professions. I’m glad you’ve decided to stay here with us in the workshop, but you must remember that. Don’t forget: God sits on a chair, eats at a table and sleeps in a bed, just like anyone else. He can make do without the altarpieces and statues and books dedicated to him—including the Bible—but he can’t manage without his chair, table and bed.” My uncle was trying hard. He wanted me to feel at ease with my profession, to begin to love it. He thought I felt like a failure for dropping out of art school. He probably sensed that I needed to love myself a little. But to me, it sounded like empty rhetoric—which it was—because I had just started going out with Leonor and she was what I loved and, through her, I was learning to love myself. I was learning about my body with each part of her body, and my own body was gaining in value because it was part of hers, her complement, I thought we shared two bodies that could never be parted, could never live without one another. We saw each other whenever we had a free moment. When I finished work I would race off to find her. My father: And where are you off to in such a hurry? We would take refuge in the back row of the cinema in Misent (we would go in when the film had already started and the lights were down, so that no one would recognize us), we would make love in the sand dunes, we would rent rooms in boarding houses where sailors went with whores. I brought her to the marsh, and her body was the only one that never made me feel I was soiling the place. Her mud-smeared body was beautiful, even when it smelled of the putrefaction in which we’d been lying. We would wash at the spring, where the water was cleanest, the excitement of treading on that soil slippery as snake skin, the caressing touch of the plants floating in the water, the green filaments clinging to her white flesh and making her body look as if it were wounded and begging for a little tenderness, the faint smell of slime and putrefaction. My uncle’s rather labored hymns to the lathe and the saw seemed to me as futile as my father’s gloomy complaints. Ah, the cool water of the untruth, so easy to drink. But truth was that flesh I could touch, her saliva, her teeth biting into my neck as she moaned with pleasure, the moist, sticky body I embraced in the mud. I didn’t want to stay in the workshop, but then I had no idea what it was that I did want.
The back of the calendar for 1960 kept hidden away by Esteban’s father in one of the many invoice files piled up in the cabinet in that glazed room known as the office and which was reached by a set of steps. Only the first page of the calendar, the cover, is missing, but one can safely assume that it does date from 1960 because—even though the year doesn’t appear on each month’s page—on the very bottom of the last page, December, in tiny print, is the name and address of the printer and, underneath, the date when the calendar was presumably printed. September 1959. Since his father wrote these notes, no one has had access to them, not even Esteban, who hasn’t bothered to look through the mountain of old papers that fills nearly the whole cabinet, which has eight shelves and is about eighteen feet wide by ten feet high. The twelve leaves of the calendar are illustrated with images of women in regional dress posing before familiar landscapes or well-known attractions or sights from the area they represent. The explanatory note for the January image says: Castilian woman standing outside the city walls of Ávila; February: A Navarrese woman from the Valle de Ansó. March: A Catalan pubilla outside her farm; April: A young woman from Seville standing next to the Torre del Oro. May: A Valencian woman in traditional dress. June: Fisherwomen from La Coruña. July: Woman from Coria (Cáceres). August: “Dulcinea” standing near the windmills of Campo de Criptana. September: Basque housewife. October: An Aragonese woman dressed to dance the jota at the Fiesta del Pilar in Zaragoza. November: Woman from the Canary Isles next to the thousand-year-old dragon tree. December: Woman from the Balearic Islands. The hand-written notes are on the back of the pages from June to October (inclusive). The penciled notes are in tiny writing and some parts have faded so completely as to be illegible. That is why they are not included here.
I’m fifteen years old and I’m listening to my father. He’s home on leave from the front for the first time, I touch his soldier’s uniform admiringly, not noticing that it’s made from bad quality cloth and looks as if it were meant for someone four inches shorter than him and weighing forty pounds more. I do not yet know that, very shortly, I will be wearing the same one. The war has just begun. He’s in a hurry to tell me what he knows. He takes it upon himself to educate me, about what it is that surrounds every life and gives it meaning, what frees you from notions of destiny or so-called Divine Will and makes you into a man capable of making his own decisions: you’re the only one who can make the best of what nature has given you, you’re not obliged to do more than that—but you must do nothing less either; that’s what he tells me over and over. Knowing that he’ll soon have to return to the front, he thinks he may only have a brief time in which to teach me what he knows. Everything seems to happen very quickly during the war and no one makes any long-term plans. But if I think of him even ten years before that, I see the same pedagogical impulse: I go back to when I was eight. He’s holding my hand and telling me about the origins of the wood piled up in the port of Valencia: the forests of the Congo, the Amazonian jungle, Scandinavia, Canada or the United States, places I saw later on in movies and on the newsreels. I think he’s making it up. I don’t know if the timber arriving in Valencia at the time did actually come from so many different places. Or perhaps I’m the one distorting my memories and putting in his mouth words he never said, but I don’t think so. I can relive that afternoon in the port of Valencia as if it were yesterday, but quite why exactly we’d gone there, I’m not sure. It was the first time I’d ever seen a big city. Later, during the war, I was in Madrid and Zaragoza, and a few years before the war, I had been on an art school trip to Salamanca. But that was all—then it was prison and after that and ever since, Olba. I think we went to Valencia to visit one of my grandmother’s sisters, because she was ill, and my grandmother said she wanted to see her one last time: a family trip. We had lunch in a little apartment that smelled of medicines, of alcohol and iodine and cat pee, of pills and potions kept in chestnut-wood drawers. An old person’s apartment. In the afternoon, the tram travels down the long avenue leading to the port, and from there, we go to the pier where you catch the boat that takes you past the docks and as far as the estuary. During the whole trip, I feel my father’s hand resting on my head, gently guiding me, pointing out the cranes with their dangling loads of wood and the piles of timber on the wharfs that we can see from the boat. The trunks look enormous. When we leave the boat, the others stay on the beach: my grandmother and her sister, my mother, the wife of one of my father’s cousins, who used to live in Valencia and who was also there that afternoon with her two children, two boys I don’t recall ever meeting again, and three other men, I’m not sure who they were, but probably more of my father’s cousins. We were on Las Arenas beach, near the hotel and the beach huts for rich people. The memory of my father on that happy day, the day when he gave me the gift of a train journey, of a visit to a big city with its lively streets, elegant women and cars; I get on a tram and a boat and he’s there with me, holding my hand or guiding me, the palm of his hand resting on my head, and his presence in the memory is part of that gift. The two old ladies, who can’t crouch down, sit on the rented beach chairs. The others lie or sit on the sand, my mother on a towel so as not to stain her skirt, which she tucks up between her knees against the wind, Ramón (who would be, what, two or three years old?) is playing with the sand, running barefoot through the fringe of foam left by the waves as they slowly retreat. They’re drinking—beer and anis for the men, horchata for the w
omen and children—and he separates me out from the group, not even taking my cousins with us—we have some business to attend to, he says by way of an excuse—and he takes me for a walk along the wharfs: from the cranes hang huge tree trunks, white, golden, reddish, dark brown. There’s a book in the office that describes all the woods piled up on the wharf and that my father is now telling me about as we walk past train carriages, vans, carts pulled by great Percheron horses, the drivers idly smoking as they lean against the back of their carts or sit in the driver’s seat, and stevedores bustling back and forth like busy ants. I compare those trunks with the images in the book: there, on the wharf, I see them for the first time life-size and in full color, dark or pale, brown or honey-hued, not in black and white as they appear in my father’s book. Back home, sitting beside him in the workshop, I read, guided by his finger that pauses beneath each word as I pronounce it: the maple tree originates—Dad, what does “originate” mean?—in the Rocky Mountains and Canada, it is a mellow brown, excellent for hard floors, roller-skating rinks or dance floors; rosewood comes from Brazil and is much used in the making of luxury furniture. The Paraná pine or araucaria also comes from Brazil and is highly prized for its unusual honey-colored wood and because it lacks growth rings; the pino amarillo or yellow pine also comes from the Americas and, because it is so strong, has been widely used to provide rafters for the houses in our region. His finger resting on the illustrations shows me the wood that I can now see lying on the concrete and other kinds of timber that, forty years on, I have still never seen. While I’m reading, I keep asking him the meaning of the words I’m saying out loud. Many I don’t understand: originates, excellent, mellow, rafters. But the mystery contained in that unknown vocabulary only increases my curiosity. I will spend weeks trying to introduce those words into my conversation and so I say things like: milk originates in a cow or this bread is excellent—that makes me feel like a grown man who knows certain secrets.
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