by David Miller
“You, too,” I said. Then I slipped into gear, released the hand brake, and pulled away, leaving him there in the slow, dark sleet. I didn’t look back through the side mirror so I didn’t see what he did next, and it wasn’t until I was some miles farther down the road that I realized that he hadn’t wanted to talk about himself at all, but was just giving me something back, and I felt sorry not to have understood it at the time, but glad, too, because, out on the road, in the cold, any gift is better than nothing.
After I dropped the boy off, the weather cleared a little, and the last ten miles took next to no time. I liked that final stretch, the road going straight along the coast for a while, the water big and empty to the south, the fields and low hills above spotted with light here and there from farmsteads and faraway cottages. By the time I turned off and began climbing the rise toward home, the sleet had stopped altogether; a few miles farther, I came within sight of my own village, not much more than a row of houses straggling along a back road, a brief distraction on the way to somewhere else. The lights here always seemed dull and brownish in comparison with the fairy-tale silver of the lights I’d seen from the high road, and it struck me, sometimes, coming home late, that I knew the place too well. I knew all the stories. I knew what the people were doing behind those windows. I could see the abandoned dinner tables and the stone sculleries, the muddy boots on the doormat, the piles of newly opened letters on the sideboard, the silent men sitting in worn armchairs in the kitchen, watching television.
When I reached my own cottage, I parked the rig in the lay-by opposite and let myself in through the side gate, coming across the garden to the back door, which was always left unlocked. The house was silent, almost dark; the one lamp burning was in the dining room, a room we hardly ever used, preferring to eat in the creaturely warmth of the kitchen. I wasn’t surprised that Sall was in there, though: that was where we kept the things that her real life was made from – the best china and the family albums and the framed pictures from what she probably thought were better days. I opened the back door and went through the kitchen as quietly as I could – quieter, those last months, than I’d ever been before, as if the promise of death had revealed a carefulness in me that I’d never suspected – and I found Sall sleeping in the big armchair by the fireplace, a magazine on the floor by her feet, an empty mug cradled in her lap. Asleep like that, unguarded, her head leaning heavily to one side, she looked old and tired, but at least the worry that usually haunted her face was gone, and, as I stood watching her, it struck me that she was dreaming. I knew she would be upset if she woke up and found that I’d come home while she was sleeping, but I stood a moment longer, watching her dream and wondering how she had spent the day, what she had thought about, what she had done. After a moment, though, I felt uncomfortable spying on her like that, and I walked back through to the kitchen, to let her rest.
It was colder than ever now, but the sky had cleared, and a bright moon had emerged from the clouds, cold and white in a pool of indigo sky right above the garden. I put the kettle on, then I stepped outside and stood on the patio, looking over the fields to the stand of trees and the long stone wall that I knew were just beyond, black and irrefutably solid in the darkness. It was almost completely silent: from time to time, a dog barked at the end of the road, or the odd gust of wind caught in the beech hedge by Sall’s flower border; then, after a minute or so, the kettle began to sing quietly, and, as I felt the silence slipping away, I tried to capture it all, to drink it all in, before Sall woke up and I wasn’t alone anymore. This was my life, these were the times when I was true: in these half hours here and there when I felt alone in the house, or those fleeting moments out on the road, when I opened a gate and crossed an empty farmyard, a stranger, even to myself, in the quiet of the afternoon. The best part of the day was getting up at dawn and going down to the cool gray kitchen, the dark garden waiting at the door like some curious beast strayed in from the fields, a casual attentiveness in the coming light that seemed ready to include me, as it did everything else, in a soft, foreign stillness. That was the best, because I knew Sall would stay in bed until after I left, whether she was awake or not – though times like tonight were almost as good. It had become more frequent of late, this coming home and knowing that Sall was asleep somewhere, the magazine she had been reading slipped to the floor, a mug of tea cooling on a side table. It felt like coming home to another house, a place full of secrets, a childhood still there, intact among the green shadows under the stairs. First love, too – though not for Sall, as it happened, even though I’d never known anyone else, or not in that way. No: if thirty years of marriage and bringing up a child had taught me anything, it was that through everything, through all the Christmases and birthdays, through all the mishaps and misunderstandings, almost nothing had been shared. Everything that happened had happened to us separately, and, afterward, in my own mind, it all had a strangely abstract feel: a marriage inferred from picture books and Saturday matinées, a love that didn’t quite materialize, a series of other lives that had involved me for a while then shied away, the way an animal does when you make the wrong move and remind it of what you really are.
The kettle was whistling now, and I thought to leave it, so that Sall would have to get up and turn off the gas. That way, I could pretend I hadn’t seen her sleeping. It felt too close, seeing her like that. It was as if I were breaking the rules we had worked for years to set up, a system of small courtesies and avoidances and slow, fluid conversations that ran for days, pieces of hearsay and local news passed back and forth over meals and cups of tea to cover the bewildered quiet that had fallen upon us. It was awkward sometimes, but it did work, and it was better than any of the possible alternatives. For a moment, I thought of the boy on the road and wondered if it would ever come to this for him, if he would ever come home and find someone he cared for, but no longer loved, asleep in an armchair. It was a tender thought, I suppose, but it wasn’t sad, or sentimental, and it had nothing to do with death. It was just a notion, passing through my mind, while I waited for the kettle to stop whistling.
Only it didn’t stop, and after a while I walked back inside and turned off the gas myself. At exactly the same moment, Sall came through, her eyes bleary, an odd, faraway look on her face. She seemed surprised to see me, as if she hadn’t heard the kettle at all but had just woken up in what she thought was an empty house – and it struck me, for the first time, how difficult it would be for her, having me die first.
“You’re back,” she said. It sounded like an accusation. She glanced at the clock, but she didn’t say anything else.
“It was a long run,” I said. “I just got in.”
She nodded. “I haven’t made you anything,” she said. “I didn’t know when you’d be finished.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.”
She gave me a quick, scared look. “You’ve got to eat,” she said.
“I’ll have an omelette or something later,” I said. “I was just making coffee, if you want some.”
“I’ll make it,” she said. “You sit down. You’ve had a long day.”
I nodded, but I didn’t move. The door was still open, just enough that I could smell the cold outside, and I heard the dog barking – farther away now, it seemed, at the darker end of the road that ran past our house and into the hills, past the golden lights of farms and dairies and narrow sheep runs through the gorse, where snow was probably beginning to form – real snow this time, not the cold sleet I’d driven through in the woods where I met the boy. For a split second – no more – I wanted to get back in the rig and drive on, up into the darkness, into the origin of the approaching blizzard, just to be alone out there, the way that boy had been alone in the woods. Then, with Sall watching me curiously, and perhaps fearfully, I let go of that thought and went through to the living room, where the curtains were already drawn and the night was nothing more than a story to be told by a warm fire, with the radi
o humming quietly in the background, so that the world felt familiar and more or less happy, like the future that seemed possible when you didn’t think about dying, or the pastel-colored maps in a childhood atlas that you couldn’t help but go on trusting, even when you knew that they no longer meant what they said.
SUMMER OF ’38
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín (b.1955) was born in Wexford, Ireland. His work includes The Heather Blazing, The Master, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary and, most recently, Nora Webster. He has been awarded the Encore Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Costa Novel Award and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize several times. He lives in Dublin.
Montse held the door of the lift open for her daughter and put her hand in her coat pocket to make sure that she had her keys. She would walk Ana to her car, which was parked nearby, then, once Ana had driven away, continue on the short distance to the town center to get some groceries. It was easier like this, easier than having Ana say goodbye to her in the apartment, easier than hearing the lift door close, knowing that there was nothing except the night ahead, no other sound but the traffic outside and the birdsong, which would die out when darkness fell.
“Oh, I meant to say that the man – you know, the man from the electric company –” Ana looked at her as though the man were someone she should know. “The one I told you about – he knew I was your daughter and he’s writing a book about the war in his spare time and he asked me where you lived.”
“I don’t know that man at all,” Montse said as she closed the front door of the building. “I’ve never had anyone from fecsa in the apartment. He is mixing me up with someone else.”
She liked to sound firm and in control. It saved her daughters from having to worry about her living on her own.
“Well, anyway, he said he knows you, and I gave him the address. So if he calls on you, that will be why.”
“The war?”
“He’s collecting information on the war.”
“Does he think I was in the war?”
“I don’t know what he’s doing exactly. He’s writing a book.”
“Well, I am sure he can write it without my help.”
“He’s nice. I mean, if there’s ever a problem with the electricity, he comes.”
“Don’t be giving my address out to people.”
They had reached Ana’s car. Montse saw that Ana was not even listening to her. Her youngest daughter, the one who lived closest by, took things lightly. She was, Montse thought, probably relieved that her weekly visit to her mother was over and she was on her way home.
Montse went out three times a day, even in winter. There was always something to buy, if only a loaf of bread or a newspaper. It meant that she took some exercise and saw people.
The week after Ana had mentioned the man from the electric company, Montse saw him waiting at the front door of her building when she came home with a bag of fruit. She did know him, she realized; he was someone she often saw on the street. She must have been aware, too, that he worked for fecsa, although she couldn’t think how she knew this. She didn’t think she knew his name or anything else about him.
Once he had introduced himself, she realized that he wanted to come up to the apartment with her. She was unsure about this. Since Paco died, she had become protective of her own space and she disliked surprises. She even asked her daughters to phone at appointed times. But there was something both eager and easygoing in this man’s manner and she knew that it would sound rude if she asked him to say whatever he had to say in the hallway of the building. Also, she thought, if something ever went wrong with her electricity, it would be useful to know a man who could fix it.
“Ana may have told you what I am doing,” he said, once he was sitting in the armchair opposite hers with a glass of water in his hand.
She nodded but said nothing.
“I am trying to chart every event of the war, just in this valley and the mountains,” he said.
“I wasn’t involved in the war,” she replied. “My father wasn’t even involved. And I had no brothers.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t to ask you anything, but to say that a retired general in Madrid – actually, he’s from Badajoz – who was here during the war is coming back to show me where the dugouts were and exactly where the guns were positioned. He hasn’t been here since then.”
“One of Franco’s generals?”
“Yes, though he wasn’t a general during the war. I found his name and address and wrote to him. I didn’t expect a reply, but he is coming. I spoke to him on the phone and the only person he remembered here, besides the other soldiers, was you. He remembered your name and said that he would like to see you. I asked around, because I didn’t recognize your maiden name. I asked around without telling anyone why.”
“And what is his name?”
“Ramirez. Rudolfo Ramirez. He was high up in the Army when he retired. I didn’t ask him how old he was, but he sounded in good shape. Still drives a car.”
Montse nodded calmly and then looked toward the window, as though distracted by something.
“There were a few of them,” she said. “I’m not sure I would remember him. We didn’t have much to do with them, as you can imagine.”
“Anyway, he’s coming here on Saturday of next week. There will be no big fuss – I’ve assured him of that. I’ve told no one that he is coming, except you. He’ll show me what he needs to show me and then I’ll take him to Lleida to catch the train back to Madrid. But he said that he would come for lunch at Mirella’s, and when I told him that you were still living here he asked if you might join us.”
“I’m here all right,” she said, “but I don’t go out much.”
“I understand. But no one will know who he is. I could collect you and drop you back if that would suit you.”
“The war was a long time ago.” She was going to say something else and then hesitated. “It was fifty years ago. More.”
“I know. It was hard for all of you who lived through it. The more I find out about it, the clearer it is how much it divided people. I’m trying to get the facts right while there is still time. It’s history now – at least, for the younger generation it is.”
She smiled.
“Anyway, yours was the name he gave me, and he seemed delighted to hear that you were well.”
“I’m not sure I would know him. In fact, I’m sure I wouldn’t.”
“Shall I drop by next week and see what you think?”
“If you want, but I don’t go out much. I’ve never been to Mirella’s.”
“Well, it’s Saturday week at two o’clock, and, as I said, it would be just the three of us and no one any the wiser. He won’t be in uniform, or anything like that.”
“I’m sure he hasn’t been in uniform for a long time if he was one of Franco’s generals,” she said, and then instantly regretted having sounded so sure, so up to date, since she wished to give the impression that she was old and living in her own world.
“It is good of him to come,” the man said. “I was surprised.”
Montse looked back toward the window and did not reply. She hoped that it was clear to her visitor that he should go.
Rudolfo would be over eighty now, she calculated. But he would still have something of what he had then, even if it lurked beneath sagging flesh and stiff hesitant movements. She pictured an old man getting slowly out of an old-fashioned car, his hair white, his frame frail. Maybe he would still have something of the effortless charm that had come to him that summer as naturally as light did to the morning.
It was the summer of ’38, when the prisoners had all been taken to Lleida or Tremp. Those who had avoided capture had fled to the mountains or crossed the border into France or fled south to Barcelona. The town was quiet for a week or more – no one was sure who would come back or what would happen. The dam was being protected by Franco’s soldiers, that was all. Then more of his soldiers began to pile in, and th
ey took over the town hall, and they put up tents on the grounds of the school. Orders were given that shops and bars were to resume their normal hours.
At first, she remembered, people were afraid and stayed indoors. There were rumors that they were all going to be taken away, every house cleared, even the houses that had nothing to do with the war. Under cover of darkness, some people made their way into the mountains or toward the border. Everyone was waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened except that ordinary life came back, or something like it. Once the shops had reopened and there was Mass again on Sundays, the talk was about the dam and how carefully it was being guarded, and about a clearing that the soldiers had made by the edge of the water and the makeshift bar they had built and the fire they lit every night to keep the mosquitoes away. The talk was of the supplies of food they had, and the guitar playing and singing and dancing.
She did not go there at first, but girls she knew did and even some of the older people who wanted to forget about the war.
Later, Rudolfo told her that he had seen her on the street, noticed her as she went shopping with her mother and her sisters, but she did not think that that was true. However, she was sure that she had noticed him the night she first went down to the makeshift bar. It was the way he seemed to be amused by things that drew her attention, the way he smiled. His hair was cut short; he was not as tall as some of the others. He was in uniform, his shirt unbuttoned. As he sat there watching, the soldiers began to play music you could dance to, slow songs. Some of them danced with girls from the town.
There was, she remembered, a swagger about the soldiers, which faded slowly as the night wore on, and there was something uneasy, too, which meant that when the music became sad they all seemed more comfortable, even the ones who were not dancing. When the soldiers were joined by others, who had just come off duty, there were sudden bursts of gaiety – shouting and clapping and drinking. Only Rudolfo sat quietly, observing the scene.