by Maria Duenas
“No idea.”
Although I didn’t know who they were, I wouldn’t have minded being one of them. So radiant and carefree.
“This is me,” she explained, pointing to the girl with the braids.
“No!” I said with a loud laugh.
It was really hard to imagine that the elegant and mature Rebecca Cullen I knew was that girl with scanty shorts whose bosom proclaimed world peace.
“And there is someone else you know. Take a good look . . .”
I did, but unsuccessfully. Then she placed her finger on the last figure, the tall man with long hair and beard.
“Take a good look . . .”
Suddenly I thought I could recognize him. Although I could barely see his face, there was something in his figure that made me intuit who it might be.
“Daniel Carter?” I ventured to ask.
“Exactly,” she confirmed with a nostalgic smile. “My God, how much time has gone by! Look, how young we were, the clothes we wore—the hair.” She pointed again to the photo, moving her finger over the remaining figures. “This was his wife, and this is my ex-husband, Paul.”
I stopped myself from asking what had become of them. There was no need, however, because as Rebecca moved away from the photos and got ready to pick up the chairs, she began to elaborate.
“That photo was taken in Cabo San Lucas, in Baja California. Although I look very young, my three kids were already born. Paul, my husband, was a philosophy professor here in Santa Cecilia. We’d moved to California from Wisconsin three years earlier. The Carters arrived a little later and we became good friends.”
We were going up the stairs, Rebecca carrying the folding chairs, me dragging a table behind.
“At the time, I was centered exclusively on my family. I didn’t work. The kids were still small and had come one after the other. We’d just finished buying this house; it was in ruins and we were still fixing it up. My parents came from Chicago that summer and stayed with our kids for a week so that we could finally have a vacation.”
We’d reached the kitchen, and the efficient Rebecca of the present returned to reality. “Well, now let’s go and load all this into the car. I think it’s best if we put the table in first, because it takes up more space. Then we’ll put the chairs in and the rest of the things on top, okay?”
I assented, although I really wanted her to keep telling me things about her life, about that summer when they were young and drove down the Pacific Coast in a dusty old car.
To my good fortune, Rebecca, like the efficient woman she always was, managed to do both things at the same time.
“Paul left us four years later. He took off with a doctoral student. My daughter Annie was nine at the time, Jimmy seven, and Laura five. He told me it was an animal passion, a force beyond him that he was unable to control.”
We’d reached the front garden, next to the car. It was already dark.
“He came and went for a time, confusing the children and making me crazy,” she continued. “He’d disappear for a week and then return begging for forgiveness, promising that his affair was over, swearing he’d be faithful for the rest of his life. This went on for four or five months.”
She put down the chairs and opened the trunk while continuing to speak naturally and without drama, and at the same time without an excess of frivolity, with the right amount of aloofness that comes to us over time. Macan, the dog, had followed us from inside the house and observed the scene phlegmatically while lying on the grass.
“Annie, who up to then had been a sweet and diligent girl, became surly and quit making an effort at school. Jimmy began to wet his bed. Laura was only able to fall asleep if I would lie beside her. When I was no longer able to stand the situation, I filled a couple of suitcases and we left for Chicago, to my parents’ house . . . Put the table in the back first, please.”
I obeyed without a word and then she began putting the chairs in one by one.
“I settled there with the kids, but Paul would constantly call,” she said. “He’d realized everything had been a mistake, that he’d behaved like a real idiot. He insisted that his romance had ended, that he’d never see that girl again. Natasha was her name; she was half Russian. He begged me to return to Santa Cecilia, saying that he couldn’t live without the kids and me. He yelled like a madman that I was his only love. Finally he showed up in Chicago. He spoke to my parents and to us. He apologized for all the suffering that he’d made us go through; he promised everything would go back to normal. Now pass me the processor.”
She spoke without pain, with her usual voice, concentrated and working methodically at her task.
“Until he convinced me. We came back home together and for several months all was perfect. The best of fathers, the most loving husband. He’d spend hours playing with the kids; he bought them a puppy. He’d cook in the evenings and place candles on the table; he’d bring me flowers all the time. Until one morning after breakfast, which he’d prepared for us all, he went off to the university and did not return. Not that night, nor the next, nor the following one. On the fourth day he came back. Is that all, Blanca?”
“So what did you do then?” I asked as I handed her the sangria pitcher, the last of the items.
She closed the trunk with a dry thump.
“I didn’t let him back in. I told him to go to hell and I started looking for a job.” She turned around and regarded me, her clear eyes framed in a handful of harmonious tiny wrinkles beneath the garden lights. And despite the sad story she had narrated, with a gesture not lacking sweetness, she smiled.
“I wish that summer in Cabo San Lucas had been eternal. None of us imagined back then how hard life would end up treating us.”
Chapter 17
* * *
Daniel Carter left for Ramon J. Sender’s native Aragon toward the end of October 1958. In the province of Huesca he visited Chalamera, the village that had seen the author into the world, and those places in which he’d lived during childhood, which would endure in the writer’s memory. Alcolea de Cinca, beneath the mountain that, as he himself said, seemed to have been carved with a knife. Tauste, which would be the setting of his Cronica del alba (An Account of Dawn), revisiting his childhood love for Valentina.
Daniel trod many paths, sheltering from the rain in ruined chapels, sleeping in cheap inns, and speaking to the common folk, from whom he learned a never-ending string of words. He drank from the wineskins handed to him and ate what the generosity of others put on his plate. From Aragon he went on to Navarre, from Navarre to both Old and New Castile. Taking trains and buses when he was able to and hopping onto as many carts, vans, and pickup trucks as there were well-disposed drivers before him, the American student wandered through the old world, captivated by all that appeared before his eyes. In villages and fields he came upon recurring scenes of grimy children, women with large baskets balanced magically on their heads, pigs and chickens along the muddy streets, and toothless men in berets seated atop old mules. The geography changed as he traveled south, but the differences were never substantial. Backwardness and misery abounded in a Spain that five years earlier had reached only the same miserable per capita income as prior to the war.
Nothing could have been more different from what he’d left behind: a prosperous and dynamic nation with a young baby-boom generation and citizens who were increasingly living in modern homes in tree-lined suburbs; a country of Ford Fairlanes and Chevy Impalas, in which household appliances were no longer luxury goods but rather basic gadgets for the most mundane homes. A contradictory America, where prosperity and leisure pursuits lived side by side with anticommunist paranoia, the last throes of segregation, and the threat of nuclear war.
Regardless of the immense contrasts he kept stumbling upon during his Spanish journey, he enjoyed every moment in that hard land of stale crusts of bread, porridge and bacon, chicory, hand-
rolled tobacco, church bells, imperial songs, and the Guardia Civil. The cold was biting when he got back to Madrid toward the end of November with calluses on his feet. He had five notepads full of his jottings, several rolls of film to be developed, and the feeling that he’d squeezed the utmost out of that initiatory trip.
Back again under the wing of Señora Antonia, he spent a few days savoring her stews before returning to his obligations and visiting Cabeza de Vaca.
He handed the professor the report that he’d spent two days typing in his room at the concierge’s. In it he detailed his adventure step-by-step: his perceptions of that land of Sender’s, his conversations with country folk, his visits to cities and villages. What he’d seen, lived, felt, and learned.
“Excellent, Mr. Carter, excellent,” the professor said, putting the pages away in a drawer. “And now it’s time to tap Madrid. I’ll be waiting for you at the Prado Museum tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
“Thank you for your interest, Professor, but I already know the Prado. I was there for an entire afternoon, I saw Las Meninas, The Surrender of Breda, and The Third of May, and also . . .”
Cabeza de Vaca’s arching eyebrow suggested that it was best he keep quiet.
“Consider it my contribution to your comprehensive education, young man. Two intensive weeks of introduction to Spanish painting. Under my tutelage.”
This is how the American spent the last stretch of the year, admiring famous paintings and absorbing lessons from his new mentor while they both slowly roamed the halls so removed in time. Through the professor’s mediation Daniel also attended a few classes related to his interests and met some students who invited him to a couple of parties and an excursion to La Granja. And thus he passed the remaining days of autumn in Madrid, with its street vendors selling chestnuts and lottery tickets, promising an opulent future to a people still lacking in so many aspects of their life.
Without Señora Antonia having to insist too much, he accepted her invitation to spend Christmas Eve with the rest of her family at the home of her son Joaquin, who at the time lived in the Calle Santa Engracia. He had a wife by the name of Teresa and three girls who were captivated by that giant who spoke Spanish with a strange accent, ate polvorones, Christmas cookies, two at a time, and sang Christmas carols with them at the top of his lungs. He was so absorbed by it all that he didn’t notice the pair of furtive tears that slipped out of the old widow’s eyes as she remembered her Marcelino and those lost times, both atrocious and endearing, that remained frozen forever in her memory.
“You’ll spend New Year’s Eve with us, right, kid?” she asked him a couple of days later.
“Well . . . You know how grateful I am for your hospitality, but I was thinking . . . I am thinking . . . that perhaps I’d like to spend that night out on the town, if it’s all right with you.”
He had other plans. Or, to be more exact, he had another plan: to go to the Puerta del Sol in search of the roaring crowd. Nothing else. He tried to be faithful to Cabeza de Vaca’s advice: “Don’t just stay in the anecdotal; don’t simply scratch the surface.” And yet, knowing that this would fall into the category of the most banal and commonplace, he could not resist the temptation of eating his first twelve grapes at the chiming of the midnight bells, surrounded by a boisterous crowd complete with cider and noisemakers, overflowing with soldiers on leave and revelers of every sort, all dressed up for a party.
“Why don’t you dine with us and then take off? I’ve already told my daughter-in-law that I’m going over to her place early in the afternoon to roast a piglet that comes from my village and which will turn out quite tasty, at least as tasty as those in Casa Botin.”
“Do you think I’ll have time?” Daniel asked, savoring it already. The widow knew that the young man’s belly was a surefire avenue of attack.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure we’re done by eleven.”
And so it was: at eleven thirty he was in the Puerta del Sol. He even had time to buy a few postcards, scribble a few words on them, and drop them into an overseas mailbox.
On waking up on New Year’s Day, he saw a kitschy new 1959 calendar on the wall near the dining table. Recently brewed coffee and warm fritters had been set out for him, just as on every other day.
“Well, kid, so it seems we have another year on our shoulders. What are your plans now: to stay in Madrid or take off like last time, to tread those godforsaken roads?”
“To leave, to leave. That’s what I’ve got planned. I must get down to work.”
“And where are you off to this time, if I may ask?”
“To the Canton de Cartagena, if I can find out how to get there.”
Since Mister Witt en el Canton was the novel that won Ramon J. Sender the 1935 National Prize for Literature, Daniel had made up his mind that his second trip would be to that significant place in the author’s body of work. The widow, ignorant in geography, was unable to help out, so he had no other choice than to study his worn-out map of Spain after breakfast.
Moving the empty cup of coffee to one side, he spread the map over the table. Taking the capital as a reference, he traced with his forefinger the outskirts of Madrid and continued outward to the nearby provinces, but what he was looking for didn’t appear there either. He extended his search to the periphery, finally tackling the coastal areas. It took him a while to locate that corner of the peninsula and find the name of Cartagena: the Canton part was nowhere to be found. But there it was, tucked away in the southeast. He pulled out a red pencil and marked it with an X, thereby confirming his next destination.
Chapter 18
* * *
Crossing the peninsula by train from the capital was, toward the end of the 1950s, a heroic adventure that Daniel Carter experienced from the seat of his third-class coach like a privileged spectator in a royal box. On purchasing his ticket at the Atocha train station, he hesitated briefly about which class to travel in. Although back in his country he wouldn’t have been able to choose between classes so lightly, the cheap prices of his host nation allowed him to consider all available options without making much of a dent in his pocket. First class, he thought, promised a comfortable journey but lacking in flavor. Second, neither great comfort nor new experiences. He finally decided on third class, a further step in his eagerness to discover the true essence of the Spanish people. He was not disappointed.
Coal locomotives were still the backbone of the ferrocarriles nacionales, the state-owned railway company, a crippled backbone for which maintaining schedules was a mere illusion, dependent on the crisscrossed traffic of dozens of mail and freight trains. In the coaches with wooden-slatted seats, people endured winter as well as they could with the warmth generated by the bodies lumped together. The chugging of the engine died down in the stations only to be replaced by the hammering of wheels, the hiss of boilers, and the relentless screech of brakes. Through the windows loads of wooden suitcases went in and out, along with cardboard boxes tied with strings, military backpacks, and bundles wrapped in cloth that concealed God knew what. He even saw a couple of chickens and a rolled mattress being passed from a father to his son in the town of La Roda.
Daniel marveled at how the platforms turned into provisional markets in which, depending on the locality, cakes from La Mancha, Albacete knives, or raffle tickets for a ham were being hawked. He was even more fascinated, in the absence of restaurant service, by the constant traffic of baskets of loaves of bread and lunch boxes brimming with slices of thick bacon accompanied by an encouraging “Would you care to try?” The wineskins passed from hand to hand while with ferocious bites the travelers devoured newspaper-wrapped sardine sandwiches the size of torpedoes. “Take a swig, my friend,” they would tell the American, or “Try this sausage; have a piece of this black pudding, it’s from our own slaughterhouse, you’ll see how tasty it is.” To nothing and to no one did Daniel ever say no.
The
dense smoke of the cheap, unfiltered Celtas Cortos cigarettes and the thick smell of feet hovered over the endless kilometers. Mothers breast-fed babies, old ladies in eternal mourning sighed, and strangers exchanged comments about the coming crops, Antoñete’s last corrida, and relatives who had immigrated to Barcelona the previous year.
At times, and with a great effort, he was able to concentrate on Mister Witt en el Canton, its cover discreetly wrapped in newspaper, as its author remained in exile. He’d read it in Pittsburgh the previous winter but now needed to cull some information. Despite the surrounding distractions, he proceeded to underline in pencil passages and names associated with the revolutionary fervor of the city to which he was now headed. Twenty-three days, according to what Fontana had told him, was what it took Sender to write in his agile prose the adventures and misadventures of the insurgent Cartagena during the First Spanish Republic of 1873.
Two plainclothes policemen walked up and down the aisle asking for identification with unfriendly faces. The volume of conversation dropped sharply and the eyes of travelers were fixed silently on the floor. Once the procedure was over, the lively conversations quickly resumed, with some passengers throwing fleeting glances or hiding a sigh of relief. Eventually sleep began to take over: some lay on the floor to snore soundly; others began to nod off with jerking motions on their neighbor’s shoulder.