During his leave, my father tells me that in order to love a job, you must have a thorough knowledge of it, understand its purpose, know everything about the materials you work with and respect them—their qualities and defects—as well as the hard work that went into growing and harvesting them: we’re not artists, we’re artisans, although, when all this is over, you’ll be able to go back to the School of Arts and Crafts and become an artist, if that’s what you really want. Always remember, though, that a good carpenter isn’t someone who performs miracles with wood, but someone who makes a living from it; survive first, philosophize later, or make art, but whatever you decide to do, make sure you can earn enough to live on; you also need to know the precise use of each tool: look, touch this chair—he rests his hand on the back—it’s born of the combined labors of nature and man, it was made by people who speak and think, it took a lot of work. The furniture you make supports the bottom or elbows or hands as well as the papers and tablecloths and plates and glasses of someone, intelligent or stupid, rich or poor, but someone, who, thanks to your work, allows himself the little bit of comfort that offers him relief from the hustle and bustle and weariness of each day, just as the headboard on a bed protects sleeping bodies—whether beautiful or misshapen it doesn’t matter—during thousands of nights, it keeps you company while you sleep or if you’re ill, and it’s there, supporting the pillow on which you lay your head the day you die, so you see how important that headboard is. With a bed or a bedside table, your customer has given you access to a world no one else is privy to; more than that, you work with wood from trees that have grown on other continents and were felled by men using specific tools, the trunks of those trees have traveled thousands of miles to get here, they required the work of lumberjacks, dockers, drivers, warehouse workers, sailors, they’ve been hauled along by carts drawn by oxen or by mules, in trucks driven by drivers, in wagons pulled along by a steam engine whose boiler was stoked by a stoker, like the stokers on board the ship that crossed the ocean. When you think like that, then you begin to understand the importance of your work, not because you’re a genius, but quite the opposite, because you’re just one link in the chain, but if that link fails, it will ruin the work of all the others. Man is only his own consciousness, he makes himself. If you don’t know what you’re made of or what the material you use or transform with your work is made of, then you’re nothing. A mere beast of burden. Knowledge gives meaning to your work, makes you a thinking man, because man is what he thinks. For millions of people, work is the only activity that teaches and civilizes them. For others, it’s a form of self-brutalization in exchange for food or money. Yes, people are beginning to live a little bit better now—although this war is sure to bring back poverty—and even we enjoy a few more comforts, but we’re also less as people, the rebel generals doubtless have furniture made of rosewood and walnut wood in their houses, but they’re just mules, they don’t understand the value of work, they think a worker is a mere tool to serve them, unable to think for himself and with no freedom to decide his future, they don’t know the value of what they use, only what it costs, how much money they paid for it. Do you understand what I mean?
I nod.
The war ruined everything. I had to tell my son Germán before he went off to do his military service—doubtless to show him that I myself had fought in a great battle, but also because he would have a war of his own to fight—it will be no easy thing to keep your dignity among the fascist pigs you’ll meet in the barracks, especially when they find out who your father is. Expect the worst, I told him. When I was about ten years old, my father taught me how to carve wood, he kept me by his side while he was making some of the furniture for the house. Then he wanted me to go to school to learn more. He had chosen me. He said to Ramón: once your brother has learned, it will be your turn. I was the oldest, just as you’re the oldest now. There was an order to be followed. There wasn’t enough for all of us. At least one would be saved, and that one would have to help the others along. Once one of us is out of the water, he can throw the others the rope that will save us all. That was the agreement. I learned a few things in the months I spent at the School of Arts and Crafts, how to use a gouge for example. I don’t know whether I would have been any good, but I would like to have been a sculptor. Then the war came. The light went out. I had to abandon everything. For me, it was too late. At first, when I was in the trenches, I held fast to my ambition. I carved a few figures that I sent to my wife via a neighbor—I made my father a really beautiful key-ring, a five-pointed star with a hammer and sickle on it—they all got thrown away or buried or burned before the Nationalists arrived in Olba, because they were politically-charged images—the head of a militiaman, a fist, two crossed rifles, secular imagery, substitutes for the medallions of saints and virgins that people wore around their neck or hung on the walls before the Republic arrived. As well as medallions, I made small plates, key-rings with patriotic, revolutionary motifs. All that’s left are those little wooden figures on the sideboard, not much bigger than chessmen (a woman in profile, with her hair pulled back, a medallion showing a horse, another on which I had carved a vase of flowers). I continued making them in prison, where I would work with any piece of wood I came across; I made a chess set that kept us entertained for hours and, of course, I made spoons and forks with bits of boxwood I managed to smuggle into the cell or the block, because, at first, we weren’t even held in cells: we were all crammed into a kind of warehouse where we had to sleep taking turns because there wasn’t enough space for us all to lie down. I made key-rings and those small secular medallions that prisoners hung round their neck on a bit of string or a shoe lace: a name, an initial, a flower, a leaf from a plane tree. The political symbols had all vanished; we didn’t even think to use the symbols that had accompanied us over the last few years. It was usually the guards who gave me the wood so that I could carve something for them. When I came out of prison, though, I stopped carving altogether—I did try occasionally, I’d pick up a piece of wood, make all my preparations, but then I’d just sit staring at it like an idiot, I think it was because everything I’d lost would suddenly rise up before me. It was like reliving the whole experience. I said to Germán: Look, I may have failed, but you could be a great cabinetmaker, I can’t afford to send you to art school, as I would have liked, but I’ll show you everything I know, all the rudiments, and the rest you’ll pick up as you go along, you’ll see. Who knows, maybe one day, we’ll be able to afford to pay for some courses or you could go and become an apprentice to some master cabinetmaker. Perhaps when you come back from military service, and with your brother helping me in the workshop, we’ll be able to afford to send you to art school.
That was the first time I’d spoken plainly to one of my children about what had happened to me during the war. He gave me a hard look and said:
“But I don’t want to be a cabinetmaker, and when I’ve finished my military service, I have no intention of working here or studying. Besides, my military service isn’t going to involve going into battle, this is peacetime, they won’t be sending me off to war, but to a barracks, and I see that more as an opportunity than a punishment, it’s a way of leaving home, escaping from Olba, meeting people, getting some training, because I’m going to get my driver’s license there, an all-purpose one for buses, trucks, everything, and then I’m going to ask if they can put me in the repair shop, so that when I get out, I can set up my own garage and become a mechanic. Military service will be like school for me. I’ve got it all planned. I can learn everything I need to know there.”
My eyes clouded over. It was all I could do not to slap him. I was torn between giving him a good beating and bursting into tears.
“Well, it’s up to you,” I said.
This son of mine has inherited his mother’s lack of guts, although I don’t think it’s really a matter of genetics, but more the times we live in. And the others? At least Esteban should turn out like me,
even though physically we’re so very different. He’s more heavily built, a different physique altogether—he’s stronger and more imposing than Germán. I don’t know how bright he is, but he certainly has the physique of a man who can contain his will and his anger. But it irritates me to see him hanging around with that Marsal boy, I don’t trust that family an inch, I don’t even dare to tell him about what went on in the war, just in case he mentions it to his friend. He says they go to the Marsal house and listen to music. I told him I don’t want him to go there again, but he probably won’t pay any attention. I’ll have to talk to him one day and tell him how things were. And just who his friend’s father really is—so polite, so proper, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. And this business with Germán doesn’t help. As for Juan, I don’t know what to think, he’s too much of a child, and not just because he’s the youngest. But, as I say, what do body types or genes matter? All the children have lost the heads they were born with and been fitted with new ones, tailor-made—yes, it’s still going on. I live in my house with my wife and my children, and I feel like a stranger. It makes me ashamed to write this, but it’s as if I were surrounded by enemies in my own house. I so miss the conversations I used to have with my father, and with my friend Álvaro, but they’re both gone. Álvaro was a broken man when he came out of prison, I had a hard time too, but, perhaps I was luckier or just stronger, because when he got out, he was so embittered and so ill that he didn’t last long. I’ve learned to live with the bitterness and somehow stop it ruining my health. Anyway, I’m from another planet. That’s my choice, though, or the only choice available to me.
Stone carving seemed somehow a superior art, it frightened me, made me take a step back. Stone, I felt, was for truly great artists, and I really didn’t feel I qualified. Wood was different, I’d lived with wood my whole life, but stone was something else entirely. I told the teacher that I didn’t want to learn what he was asking me to learn. I felt I didn’t have the skills. I just couldn’t do it. The teacher tried to talk me around, saying that appearances can be deceptive: you’re the one in charge of the stone, you pick up the mallet and the chisel and you patiently measure and shape and work, file and rasp and polish: the stone is a compact mass that you can split or pierce using your own strength and with the help of the right tools. Sculptors can make anything out of stone, even the finest filigree. In Bernini’s statues of women, the stone becomes soft flesh into which a man can plunge his strong fingers. As with wood, the main thing with stone is to get to know it, know how to choose it, to know its density, its qualities, how it will behave, although that’s something we can never entirely predict. My teacher was right. The important thing with wood is to know how to season it, how to work it when it’s just dry enough, how to follow the grain, although nowadays I don’t know if even sculptors bear those things in mind, and, of course, we carpenters now work with wood we know nothing about, where it came from or how it was treated. Some stone is so very hard and so very difficult to work with—my teacher told me—that you’d think any statues made from it would be condemned to eternal life, but in no time at all they get worn away by water or changes in temperature or bacteria or fungus. Other types of stone, like the sort we saw in Salamanca, actually get harder when exposed to the elements. Salamanca was the one class trip we made during the Republic, thanks to a grant given by a Swedish or Dutch foundation, I can’t remember which now. But I’ve never forgotten that city, it was like a magnificent open-air sculpture museum made of a stone that can withstand the elements: San Esteban, the Cathedral, the university façade, the Patio de las Dueñas. The extraordinary sculpted figures covering entire façades, the beautiful color of the stone that changes with the light, pale in the morning and an intense coppery gold in the evening. Almost five hundred years after they were first carved, they’re still intact thanks to the quality of the stone, called Villamayor after the village where the quarry is located and from which they extract a stone that’s easy to carve when it’s just been cut, but which, with exposure to the weather and the passing of time, forms a kind of patina which, instead of attacking or dissolving the stone, as happens with other kinds of sandstone, preserves and even hardens it. It’s nearly thirty years since I saw Salamanca and yet, if I close my eyes, I think I can still see it.
“And then there are those impressive sculptures cast in bronze or iron, which we find so amazing,” the teacher went on.
At the school, they showed us the works of Mariano Benlliure, and I almost died of envy, he was still a fashionable sculptor then, despite his statues of the king. What I had done up until then was little more than what shepherds all over the world do, whittling the handles of walking sticks, I had worked with my father in the workshop, and he’d taught me various techniques, but what we were looking at now was art, although my biggest surprise came when we visited an altarpiece by Damià Forment in the School of Fine Arts; that was when I realized my teacher was right, wood really could compete with the grandeur and perfection of stone and metal. My teacher told me: you’ve already worked with wood, so you’ve done the hard part, or do you imagine that Forment didn’t have enormous difficulties to overcome? As I said before, you have to understand wood, even more than you do stone, you have to find out what it can offer, its qualities, what it wants of you, where it’s leading you, the grain, the differences in density that alter millimeter by millimeter; it’s a warmer material than stone, there’s more of a flow of energy between your hand and what you’re sculpting, which is precisely why it often makes more demands on you, it won’t be deceived, it asks you to understand it, to care for it, it asks you what a friend asks at the beginning of a friendship; although I should say that, for me, the most beautiful material—my teacher was getting carried away now—because it’s the one closest to man, is even humbler than wood. I mean clay, which adapts itself to your hand, is easily marked, clay is a prolongation of yourself, after all, you yourself are clay and will be clay again one day. When you work with clay, you understand that. You realize that you are dust and will return to dust. A fragile creature working with a fragile material. And yet, in books, we see those terracotta figures from Crete or made by the Etruscans—still beautiful after thousands of years—and which, by their mere existence, show that, with intelligence and hard work, the fragility of man and clay becomes strength. Stone and metal won’t necessarily last longer than clay. When you finish making a clay object, you have the feeling that you’re letting go of a part of yourself. Rodin modeled his sculptures in clay, that was Rodin, then he cast them in bronze and it became industrialized.
At the art school, we used to go to class equipped with a sketch pad, an inkwell, a pen, a pair of compasses and a triangle. We learned by drawing the capitals and bases of Greek and Roman columns (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan), we copied engravings from Vignola’s treatise on architecture, we copied the Piazza Sant’Ignazio in Rome, the Pantheon dome, the Parthenon frieze, the elevation of the temples of Paestum, the relief work on the Ara Pacis Augustae. I drew all those things and yet I’ve never seen any of them, I’ve never been to Rome or to Southern or Northern Italy, I’ve never really left Olba, and both the desire to see those places and the possibility were buried the day they put me on a truck and sent me to the Teruel front at the age of seventeen, part of the so-called diaper brigade. When I came home on my first leave, I tore up all those drawings—my fingers gnarled from the cold and full of cuts and calluses from digging trenches with pickaxe and spade, and my ears still ringing with the noise of the bombs and shells that had fallen around me, and I was pursued by images of the frozen corpses you stumbled over at every step and the screams of the wounded, operated on in the field hospitals without any anesthetic, and the moans of the dying being carried along on stretchers, I felt like crying or screaming too, even though I wasn’t wounded and no one was sawing my leg off; more than anything, I felt like running away. I did weep as the truck took us back to the front that first time, leaving the fields of
Olba behind. My uniform fitted me better than it had my father, but I didn’t see him that time, my leave didn’t coincide with his, in fact, I never saw him again. But I didn’t know that then. On some nights, lying on my camp bed, I felt as if my head would explode and I trembled more with fear than cold, and had to repeat the word “deserter” to myself over and over in order to stop myself from getting up and running away. Fear of the bombs and the bayonets. More horrible even than being blown up by a bomb was finding yourself face to face with an enemy, the bomb requires nothing of you, there’s nothing you can do, your fate is sealed, but in hand-to-hand combat you are the one who has to act—and my greatest fear was that I might discover I belonged to the secret army of cowards. It troubled me to think I might be a potential coward, although, with time, I realized that any man who finds himself dragged into a war, any man, that is, with a glimmer of intelligence or an ounce of sense, is a potential coward. It’s only human to want to desert and utterly absurd to decide to stay there waiting to get drenched in blood, yours or someone else’s. Not even ideas can drive that thought out of your head. Some will say that you’re fighting hard because you know you’re fighting for a good cause, but that’s not true. Only someone who has been there can speak about these things, only someone who has had that experience can know what I’m talking about—and I’m making no distinction between the people on either side—just whoever was actually there, dragging the weight of his body over those hard, icy rocks—those harsh landscapes of apparently fragile glass: having lived through all that creates a mysterious bond with the enemy, with the man who was and has continued to be your enemy, it transforms him into an accomplice, a comrade, and being transformed into your enemy’s comrade makes everything seem even more unsavory, culpable, absurd, cruel and senseless, but that’s in hindsight, when you—on both sides—know what you’re talking about and despise the ignorance of those who weren’t there and cannot know and yet who speak about war and, like parrots, repeat words like heroism, moral courage, self-sacrifice. Your enemies also know this, although they have won and have continued their cruel behavior because victory is a potent drug that makes you forget everything, creates new feelings, while mutilating and anaesthetizing others, and unleashing pride and greed; as the victor, you want peace to repay you many times over for all that you put into the war, you feel that peace is your personal property. They certainly felt and behaved like proprietors, and yet they know more than all of the people on your own side who stayed here, they understand you better than your family, than your fellow travelers who were lucky enough—or clever enough—to be posted to the rearguard, to barracks, hospitals, offices, armories, places where they weren’t obliged to fire a single shot in the three years that the war lasted. I missed the first two years, but had to endure the last. I looked at my hands and thought about those two tools, simultaneously hard and flexible, capable of working, sculpting, caressing, but also of punching, smashing, killing. I know that, nowadays, hands are worth less and less, many things are done by turning a knob, moving a lever back and forth, hitting a key, pressing a button, but, at the time, hands were still man’s greatest gift, binding him to the creator god, part of the skills given to man by the great sculptor of the universe, whom we know does not exist (although my father used to say: never forget your head—your hand is a like a pair of pliers, just a tool—but the head is the man, the seat of man’s mechanism, of understanding, desire, willpower, the ability to withstand the very worst).
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