My heart pounded, revved up in an instant to an anxious pace. What was it? What was the next calamity going to be?
“You can’t go to school for the next year.” Francisco smiled, pleased by his joke. “I’m sorry. No matter how much you argue with me, you can’t go to school for the next year. You get to play hooky for the entire sixth grade.”
“Yay!” I said and bumped the table with my knees. I didn’t really know if I was glad not to go to school; but I was glad he had been kidding.
“No. I’m sorry. I won’t change my mind. You have to stay out of school and eat chocolates and go to bullfights. Seriously, we’ll be traveling too much for you to go to school. I can’t promise you a completely free ride. If we stay anywhere long enough, I might arrange to hire a tutor.”
“You mean, we’re going to have servants?” I knew of tutoring only from Dickens novels.
“No,” Francisco laughed. “My God, no. Although it’s so cheap here, who knows? Maybe we could afford a servant or two.” Francisco winked. “Unfortunately, it’s against my political principles. But who knows what we can afford en España? If I could sell one chapter of the book to The New Yorker—well, that’s absurd, they’ll never publish me. But, say Esquire, or Playboy, or Gentleman’s Quarterly. From the sale of one piece we could live for six months. Even the miserable New York Times Magazine that pays so little, even an assignment from them would pay for two months.” Francisco surveyed the store, emptied not only of customers but its rapid countermen. There had been four or five of them. Now only one man stood sleepily by a soup pot, his ladle scraping the sides while he stirred. My father looked in his direction and pronounced, “The Almighty Dollar. The sun never sets on her.” With that, presumably reminded of the check, Father got up to pay.
I stopped him with a question, a question that he had conveniently not raised or answered. “What about Carmelita? Is she going to be with us?”
Francisco returned to his chair. Its feet squealed on the tile floor. Maybe because of the talk about tutors that noise reminded me of the Great Neck elementary school’s cafeteria. Was I glad not to be going there, where, for all my alienation from the other kids, I was a star? I didn’t approve of Uncle Bernie and I had no fun when I was with him. With Bernie there was none of the thrill and laughter of the joyride my father made of life but there was something I could not identify, did not understand, something I both missed and resented. Francisco, still sweating from the espresso, looked at me with wavering, almost pleading eyes. Their insecure light confused me: why was he frightened of me? He had looked scared of me when I showed him his own letter the night before. How could that be? How could my big-voiced, articulate and handsome father fear me?
“Yes,” he answered like a guilty suspect to my question about whether Carmelita was going to live with us. He grabbed the sides of his armless chair and nodded at me as if it were my turn to talk.
“Are you getting married?” I asked.
Francisco nodded. He swallowed. “We are married,” he said softly. “I don’t really believe in marriage. But Carmelita and I filled out a form in Havana—that’s all you have to do there, declare yourself to be married—because she wanted it. I didn’t. I never wanted to get married again. But she’s a good woman and she loves you. She’s not your mother. She’s certainly not the woman your mother was. I loved your mother very very much,” he insisted as if I had contradicted him. He looked away and added, “There will never be another woman like her for me.” He cleared his throat again and said with a tone of finality, “Carmelita can’t replace her.”
I am convinced this extraordinary speech is an accurate memory of mine. To analyze it as a professional would require at least fifty pages of turgid abstractions. Let me shorten it for the general reader by saying that, as a way of explaining a second marriage to a child, it is a disaster.
[Besides, little needs to be added to what I have already written on romanticism in the narcissistic personality. The Hard-Heartedness of Sentimental People, I confess, was largely inspired by my efforts to understand, rather than resent, Francisco Neruda.]
Perhaps my reaction to Francisco’s explanation will seem more mystifying than my fathers speech. I said, “How can she love me? She doesn’t know me.”
For a second Francisco stared without comprehension. Then he laughed. “You’re a Gallego, all right.” He smiled, got up and pulled me from my chair. He hugged me tight, pounded my back, and said in a booming, confident voice. “I better keep my eye on you. After all, Franco is a Gallego too.” He laughed at what I assume was my shocked face and said, “I’m joking. But I have no worries with a son like you. You’re strong enough for both of us.”
“You didn’t answer me,” I said, after he paid the check and told me to button up before we returned to Madrid’s cold.
“About what?” he said. He looked tired. Once the animation of discussing the new book idea dissipated, his cheeks became slack with exhaustion, his eyes dulled by sorrow.
“How could Carmelita love me when she doesn’t even know me?”
He pushed me—not hard, but with detectable mean-spiritedness—toward the door. “That’s enough teasing, Rafe. You know what I meant.”
Within a moment he regretted that he had exposed himself and me to an unpleasant Francisco. We took no more than two steps away from the coffee shop and my father reignited his social personality. He draped an arm around my head in the frigid air, hunched down to keep his mouth nearer to my ears, and tried to sell me on his new wife. “Did I tell you what Carmelita did in Cuba? She’s an Olympic swimmer. I mean, she was on the team, but she won’t be going now, even though she was considered the best one, the one who had a real chance to win a medal for Cuba.”
“Really?” I was excited and amazed. A woman athlete for a stepmother.
“Yes. She was a champion swimmer.”
“Why isn’t she going to the Olympics?”
“Um …” My father appeared distracted. He looked at something across the avenue. I followed his glance. There was a church of modern design, not very large, on the corner opposite. Along a windowless side, neatly painted by hand in black paint were these words: JOSE ANTONIO PRESENTE! Beside them was a cross and the years of José Antonio’s birth and death.
“Why isn’t she going to the Olympics, Dad?” I asked again.
“Uh, to be with us.” He had come to a complete halt to look at the graffiti.
“What does that mean?” I asked about the writing after a few moments of silence.
“I don’t understand it. José Antonio was the founder of the Falange.”
“No,” I complained. “What does presente mean?”
“It means José Antonio is present. He is here.” Francisco removed a brown bound notebook the size of his palm from his coat and a black fountain pen. “He was the head of the Guardia Civil and the Falange, the fascist party.” He flicked his pen in the air. “If I get a contract for this book I’ll have to buy myself a Mont Blanc.”
“Are you writing that down for your book?”
“Yes. I don’t take notes, especially not while interviewing people. And I never, never use a tape recorder. But I wanted to write down the exact address since that’s a detail I’d like to get right.” It turned out later that this graffiti was hardly unique and wasn’t really graffiti since it was officially sanctioned, rather than some sort of extreme-right-wing protest against Franco, a split in the ruling class, which is what my father thought he had detected. The handwritten sign distracted me from learning more about Carmelita’s reason for giving up the gold to be with my father. Although I wouldn’t have needed more of an explanation anyway: who wouldn’t give up their own concerns for my wonderful father?
The book contracts were negotiated. The Spanish, American and English publishing houses didn’t offer nearly what he expected for the book. But living in Spain was cheaper than he had estimated and the advances would be enough for us to live rather well for six months. We traveled to G
alicia next, to Santiago de Compostela. It was very cold and we learned that the little town where my father believed our relatives lived was reachable only by a dirt road that was impassable to cars until after the mud season in March. Since we had no way of knowing when, if ever, our cousins might come into town in their horse-drawn cart (all the farmers used them) there was little point in hanging about. (Of course they had no phone, nor did the village nearest to them.) We moved on to the southeast coast, to the warm winter beaches that were already popular with German and English tourists in those days and today are mobbed by them.
We rented a two-bedroom apartment in the first of two high-rise hotels that had been built on the beach at Alicante. It wasn’t that different in look or feel from a place we had once stayed in outside Tampa. The difference was the people, in particular the habitués at the bar downstairs. I became a regular there while my father took one- and two-day trips to various cities researching his book. (Very little of these excursions can be found in his memoir, Land of Guns and Sighs.) Carmelita wasn’t much of a playmate. She didn’t seem able to get enough rest; no matter how early to bed and how late to rise, she took a long nap every afternoon. I wandered the beach until five, playing with the German and English kids who came and went every few days, and then I stopped in at the bar for a Coke and a small bowl of green olives stuffed with pimentos. The young bartender, a handsome eighteen-year-old named Gabriel, or Gabby as the English called him, pretended I was a real drinker. He set me up with a flourish and joked if I ordered a second Coke that I might not be able to make it upstairs safely. He refilled my bowl of olives without charging me—that was crucial to my being able to afford a second Coke. Gabby was popular with all the tourists, especially with one middle-aged woman, the widow of an American businessman who had worked in Spain their entire married life and thus his death left her without a home, literal or figurative, in the United States. I realize today she was an alcoholic who spent her afternoons and evenings gradually getting drunker while she flirted safely with the dark-skinned, sleek-haired muscular Gabriel. She portrayed herself as a beauty whose sensibilities were too delicate for the corrupt world. She claimed her hope was that a wealthy tourist would fall in love with her and provide another ready-made life, but she made little or no effort to meet one. I don’t remember her name. She was Southern and talked in her lovely drawl with me and Gabriel about the adulterous love affairs she had during her husband’s business trips. “I was neglected,” she would declaim defensively. “I was terribly, terribly neglected.” Her dyed blonde hair draped down the exposed front of her generous bosom, a chasm that Gabby often took a lingering look into as he wiped the counter. I was frequently pressed against it when I said something precocious. Gabby flashed his bright teeth and told her she was still the most beautiful woman on the beach and that every man wanted her. Sometimes his flattery would move her to tears. She and Gabby performed this second-rate Tennessee Williams one-acter each afternoon, except that Gabby’s secret life wasn’t that he was gay—it was that he wanted to be a bullfighter. He confessed his ambition to me on a rare day when our Southern belle was absent. I had already cultivated the therapist’s attitude of uncritical listening: I was privy to the longings of many of the adults at that bar during those months. Gabriel’s in particular impressed me because I was also tempted by bullfighting as a calling.
By then I had seen a bullfight with my father on a trip to Sevilla and become a fan of El Cordobés, the most controversial of the fighters. He outraged purists not only with his long hair but more gravely by his flouting of the formal conventions of the ring. He invented such stunts—in fact I saw him do this one—as kissing the bull on the snout after a particularly brilliant series of passes left the animal dazed and confused. If his bull was especially unaggressive, El Cordobés would taunt him into a rage by hitting him on the nose with the sword or mooning him. Outside the ring, he was known for his love of rock and roll and American movies. Women loved his lean body and Beatles haircut, and he was insanely brave—even his detractors acknowledged that he was exceptionally brave. El Cordobés was sparing in his use of the banderilleros and the picador. The banderilleros were the men (this part of the fight looked very unfair to me) who used brightly colored sticks with sharp hooks to stick into the upper back of the bull and the picador was a tormentor on a horse who drove a stabbing instrument on a long pike between the animal’s shoulders. These wounds force the bull’s head lower, dropping his dangerous horns and exposing the vulnerable area for the matador’s killing blow. A cowardly fighter would overuse them, virtually rendering the bull both defenseless and incapable of offense.
My father and I were lucky enough to see El Cordobés for our first fight and he was brilliant. He killed two fierce and gorgeous animals. (I can still see the brilliant trickle of blood drip down the bull’s black fur, oozing from the gold handle of El Cordobés’s sword.) His bulls were of the aggressive Miura breed and yet El Cordobés waved off the picador, so they weren’t crippled. He did kiss his second bull on the nose but I didn’t agree with the old men around us (they were probably in their forties and fifties) that El Cordobés’s style was rude and demeaning to the animal. He seemed to love the bulls and I thought his execution of them was exquisite. His lean body vaulted above the horns and split their deadly points as he buried his sword to the hilt, killing the bull in an instant. They died a beautiful death, a death as magical as it’s shown in art, but in reality isn’t. [Bullfights are barbaric, savage, pretentious and thrilling—and, of course, provide a nearly perfect mass release for the Spanish id. Taking the violence of my childhood into account, especially the loss I had suffered without appropriate acknowledgment, my attraction to this spectacle seems inevitable. To symbolically control and triumph over death secreted a wish for the reclamation of my mother’s life underneath the more obvious fantasy inherent for all males in bullfighting.]
Over my Cokes and olives, I quizzed Gabby about his training. He explained that since he couldn’t afford to go to a proper novillero school (novillero meaning a novice bullfighter) he and some others would slip into the slaughterhouse pens at night and take their chances with both the animals and the night watchmen. I pleaded with him to bring me along. At first he didn’t believe I was serious; then he became alarmed and made me promise I would say nothing to my father. Finally, tired of my nagging, he offered a compromise. He said he would take me one Sunday afternoon to a pasture about forty-five minutes inland where a friendly farmer used to allow him to play with the baby bulls whose horns were merely nubs. He said I could ask my father if that was okay (most Spanish boys ventured that far into the fantasy of bullfighting) but when I did ask Francisco, although he smiled proudly, he said, “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“If you want to do something athletic, let Carmelita teach you how to swim.”
“I know how to swim.”
“But she can teach you to be an Olympic swimmer.” Over my protests, he walked into the kitchen to find Carmelita. She was preparing a fish soup for dinner. She stopped chopping up the vegetables when he told her his notion and answered in an irritated tone. That was when the evidence became too obvious for me to deny it. I had learned a lot of Spanish in the previous two months so I understood her reply and by now the obvious visual clue of her belly had become more pronounced—a round jutting shape that couldn’t be mistaken for fat. She complained she didn’t have a suit that would fit her with the baby. I knew I wasn’t the baby she referred to. Besides, to illustrate, she pulled her loose dress taut around the basketball in her stomach. She talked about the baby ruining her stroke so she couldn’t show me the correct moves and what my unconscious had known for weeks vaulted to the foreground. My mouth dried up. I interrupted their discussion of buying her a new bathing suit and said in parched English to my father: “She’s having a baby.”
He glanced at me and smiled. “Isn’t that great? You’re going to have a baby brother.”
I couldn’t
answer. My mouth was too dry.
“Or maybe a sister,” he added. There was no wariness or self-consciousness in his voice. He was unaware that this news might trouble or displease me. If that seems astonishing, my father being a sophisticated intellectual, all I can say is that I agree; it is astonishing, but entirely consistent with his narcissistic and sentimental personality.
“I can’t swim like this,” Carmelita insisted. Tears came into her eyes. Again, I understood a lot in a flash: why she slept so much and seemed so unhappy. She was distressed by the malformation of her athlete’s body.
“You can stand on the shore and instruct him,” my father said.
“No.” She was firm. “You are his father. You teach him.” She walked out. A moment later, the door to their bedroom slammed.
Francisco turned to me. “Women,” he said in Spanish, accompanied by a look of rueful exasperation, a man-to-man look of our shared burden. “I’d better calm her down,” he added in English.
They were in the bedroom, with the door shut, long enough for me to examine thoroughly the unwieldy box of this information: all its edges were razor-sharp; I saw no way to embrace the contents without wounding myself fatally. To my mind I had one asset in my fathers eyes and that was my status as his only son. Countless times Francisco had thrown his powerful arm around my head and squeezed while saying, “You are my only son, the last of the Nerudas. Someday the world will say, Took at this man, the grandson of a Gallego peasant, who is so brilliant and handsome. How did he come so far?’ And I’ll answer, That’s my son, my only child, my heir.’” From my point of view I had so little left: no mother, no home, no friends, no family other than this man and his unique relationship to me and now even that was lost forever.
I left the apartment and went to find Gabby. He wasn’t behind the bar. But my Tennessee Williams heroine was on a stool beside a new boozy middle-age flirtation, this one an American who, surprisingly, seemed to be attracted by her garrulous self-aggrandizing style. In fact, he was so responsive, she was glad to see me. (The prospect of a successful consummation of a flirtation obviously appalled her.) She introduced me. His name was Tommy, an odd diminutive for a man who looked like a retired football player: six feet tall, thick-necked, face blotched by liquor, his crew cut almost entirely gray.
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