‘Come on, Lorenzo, it’s eight o’clock.’
Lorenzo searched deep in his sheets for the shreds of his tattered dream.
‘We’ll be late for school… I’ll get your breakfast.’
Winter clung to the balconies as though trying to climb inside for warmth and the smell of chicory. Lorenzo was able to resist everything but the pangs of hunger, so he got up slowly but without complaining. He put his coat on over his pyjamas and stumbled along the corridor to the kitchen at the far end. His father, dressed but unshaven, was already in the room, trying his best to stoke the stove so that at least one plate was warm enough to heat the milk.
‘Good morning, son.’
Lorenzo’s reply was a brief grunt and a weary wave of the hand. Then he slumped onto the only chair in the room.
Apart from the iron stove, the only other furniture was a marble table set on a fretted iron frame painted metal-grey, and an imitation granite sink. A row of shiny, clean, carefully ordered pots and pans sat on a zinc shelf over the coal bunker.
The meshed window gave out onto a narrow courtyard into which daylight barely filtered. The privacy of the kitchen was protected by lace curtains and an unlit light bulb. Outside, the muffled sound of voices and a constant beating of eggs were evidence that the day had started.
‘Drink your milk.’
The rye bread did not even float. It sank to the bottom of the bowl, but Lorenzo had become so accustomed to hunger he knew how to wait for the dark, solid chunks to soak up the milk and become edible.
‘I don’t want to go to school.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Brother Salvador has got it in for me…’
Their conversation ended there, because at that point his mother, who by now was fully dressed, came in carrying his clothes. In that brisk, efficient way mothers have, she wiped his face with a cloth she had dipped in the water warming in a pot kept constantly on the stove. Then she put on his socks, took off his coat and pyjama top, and buttoned up his grey flannel shirt. She managed to do all this while Lorenzo was still drinking his milk and gnawing at the bread. She struggled to get a tight-fitting woollen jersey on over his head, then somehow slipped off his pyjama bottoms and pulled on a pair of dungarees. With all the deftness of a conjurer, she slid the braces under his jersey and did them up. As Lorenzo was finishing his breakfast, she dragged a comb across his head, trying to smooth down a tousled tuft of hair that made him look like a cartoon character in flight. The blue serge coat, worn at the elbows, and a green scarf that she wrapped round his neck and face so that only his eyes were showing, were the signal that breakfast was over.
‘Come on, or you’ll be late for school. Give your father a kiss.’
All the meekness with which he had allowed himself to be washed, dressed, combed and wrapped up warm while concentrating on his bread and milk was transformed into a wheedling grin directed at his father.
‘Dad, I don’t want to go to school.’
‘Not so loud, someone might hear you.’
‘He says Brother Salvador has got it in for him.’
‘It’s true! He’s always asking me questions… even at break-time.’
His parents gave each other a knowing look. Despite their haste, they tried not to sound too anxious to hear more.
‘What does he ask you?’
‘Well, what Mum does, and why you never come to school to fetch me… if I like books… all kinds of things.’
‘And what do you tell him when he asks about me?’
‘That you’re dead.’
Reverend Father, I have fond memories of my childhood. My parents’ devotion and the virtues of my teachers created a love of Jesus in me when I was still very young. I loved the boy Jesus when I was a boy, I prepared myself to be a soldier of Christ when I was an adolescent, and entered a seminary when the moment came to dedicate my life to the Holy Mother Church. I remember all this now as if my body never existed, as though the entire substance of my life has been a vocation of sacrifice. In the seminary, an overwhelming tide of devotion and suffering kept me on the margins of life, and helped fashion a soul that was content with the heroic conquest of theological virtues, a profound acceptance of Faith, and the intimate silence of meditation.
Perhaps, Father, that is why when I found myself in the midst of life, always so full of corruption and disorder, I was caught unawares. Until I saw it for myself, Reverend Father, I had no knowledge of Evil. And I think that Evil knew this.
It is true that I was happy to join the Crusade, and if my time had come while we were at war, you and my loved ones could only have said of me what the Father said of his own Son: Oblatus est quia ipse voluit. It is true that it was I who sought sacrifice, but it is also true I had no idea how terrible the world was. Boastful, gregarious, lying, sinful and heroic. Little by little I was stripped of my certainties, as if I were losing the battle.
I can talk about all that now, even though I find it hard to remember – not because my memory is failing, but because of the sense of nausea my childhood arouses in me. I remember those years as if they were a universe lived in the depths of a mirror, like something I had the ill-luck to suffer and observe at one and the same time. On this side of the mirror lay deceit, a pretend world. On the other lay what was really going on. Now, what I recall of the boy I was in those days still terrifies me, because as the years go by I am increasingly convinced that, had I not been a child, nothing of what happened would have occurred.
There was a world known as Alcalá 177, and the third-floor apartment C was my land inside it. This planet formed part of a vast, ominous universe that consisted of a triangle bordered by Alcalá, Montesa and Ayala streets. A block that did not even have four sides, like everywhere else, and yet that was my universe! Of course, there were other, more distant galaxies: the streets Torrijos and Goya on one side, and on the other the dark world of the Berro Fountain and Manuel Becerra Square. This was where children who were poorer than us lived. We were linked to them by an unreasoning but reciprocal hatred, which could only be explained because everything had to be fought for: pavements, footballs, spinning tops, rubbers, and friends. I also remember there was an anodyne, brief passageway that led to the Holy Family School, a mansion on the corner of Narváez and O’Donnell streets. A fifteen-minute walk I must have done thousands of times on my own or with others, but which was so alien to me I cannot reliably reconstruct it in my mind. The fact is that it was only when I was back inside the triangle that I felt I was in my own world.
But of all the memories I have, the one which stands out above all others is that I had a father hidden in a wardrobe.
I think today, Father, that there was something different about him which caught my attention: he was a sad child, and yet there was a serenity about him that was odd in someone so young. The way he played games without rancour, or obeyed without demur, his interest in learning and his pride in knowledge, his silence… perhaps his childhood recalled my own, and I wished to recreate in him the boy I had once been. I thought I could be a good shepherd for our Church. How wrong I was!
I noticed other differences: I remember that when all the pupils were drawn up in ranks before they left school in the afternoon to sing the nationalist anthem at the end of a day of joyous learning, Lorenzo did not show his companions’ enthusiasm for our glorious movement. He stood at attention like all the rest, but one day I crept up behind him and was surprised to notice that although he had his arm stretched out and his lips were moving, no sound came from his mouth. We wanted him to express his love of the Fatherland, and his only response was silence!
I punished him by saying he could not leave the yard until he had sung the whole anthem, but he would not do so. He stood erect and with his arm out, but did not even begin the first verse… I do not know whether I was angry at his rebellious attitude or pleased at the thought that this gave me the opportunity to impose my authority on a godless child born in a faithless century. ‘Sing!
’ I ordered him, ‘it’s the anthem of all those who want to give their lives for the Fatherland!’
‘My son doesn’t want to die for anyone. He wants to live for me,’ a soft, melodious voice said behind me. I turned round, and it was her.
Now I understand the verse from Ecclesiastes: the gaze of a beautiful but unrighteous woman burns like a fire. But at that moment I had no idea that this was the start of my madness.
They put the boy to bed and sat in silence in the darkened dining room. The silence was part of their conversation, because both hid their sorrows in it. The window that gave onto the courtyard was covered by a thick, blue velvet curtain, all that remained of former times (before they had sold everything that could be sold) when there had been a sideboard with the heads of medieval knights carved on its doors, an English porcelain dinner service, and a strange Murano glass fish with a gaping mouth. Despite this, husband and wife sat lit only by the dim light from the corridor so that no one would suspect there were two adults living in the flat.
As long as there was daylight, Ricardo Mazo could move relatively freely inside the flat, if he made sure he avoided going anywhere near the windows and balconies. The rooms at the back gave on to Calle Ayala, and opposite was a cinema, the Argel, which in the mornings was always empty. Ricardo took advantage of this to cautiously peer at what was going on in the street outside, to watch people inhabiting the spaces the city offered, chatting, greeting one another, scurrying here and there, or strolling at leisure, in ways he could immediately identify with. But after dark, Ricardo never ventured into a lighted room. He waited until the light in the corridor was off to go to the bathroom, and stole around so quietly that sometimes he even scared his wife and son. Everything was organised so that he did not have to step into the light anywhere.
‘I have to get out of here, to try to get over the border to France.’
Elena felt across the table for her husband’s hands. There was no point telling him again that it wasn’t possible yet, that he had to wait until the thirst for revenge had died down in Spain, that the Vichy regime in France was deporting Spanish refugees by the trainload, and that when the time came, all three of them would go. She never again wanted to be separated from what was left of her family. Their eldest daughter, Elena, had escaped with an adolescent poet at the end of the war. They had never heard anything more from her, and did not even dare ask themselves whether she might still be alive.
Eight months pregnant, Elena had fled Madrid only a few months after the war had finished, following an apprentice poet who became a different person as soon as he started reciting Garcilaso.
The youngster was afraid he would be arrested because he had published a few poems – in the Pindaric mode, according to him – in Mundo Obrero and some of the Popular Army’s newsletters. They hid in the house of a former maid of Elena’s parents until they had a chance to leave Madrid clandestinely in a cattle truck bound for Valladolid. Since then, the two adults had no news of the couple, although they comforted themselves with the thought that they had succeeded in escaping.
Having to speak in a whisper inevitably leads to words drying up, to their being replaced by gestures and meaningful looks. Like a still voice, fear undermines sound, because the dark side of things can only find expression in silence.
I was naïve, Father, because I believed that everything in this world had already been named, classified. And I thought this was the basis for harmony. For me it was enough to call things by their name, to look up emotions in the dictionary of the Sacred Teachings to know if it was a question of Grace or Perdition. Yet there is a no-man’s-land, Father, which is not where sin and punishment are to be found, but is not where virtue and its rewards reside either: if I had to draw a map, I would draw a broad dark border which, as is a discoverer’s right, I would be so bold as to name Elena. Elena was – is – Lorenzo’s mother. Voluntas bona, amor bonus; voluntas mala, amor malus. Saint Thomas would have been taken aback by the complexities of my map! In every landscape there are dark areas that we can never reduce to a question of geography. Father, there is a dark region within us that the Holy Fathers never contemplated: between the beatific and the abject there is a vast expanse untouched by the problem of Good and Evil, an ambiguous territory which as I now know, is precisely where the sons of Adam live. One has to be one of God’s elect not to have to choose between the divine and its opposite. I am only a man, Father, the son of our original sin and the curse this brings with it.
My home was divided on two sides of a central corridor. The building itself was split into two halves: the flats with balconies gave on to Calle de Alcalá, while the less grand ones looked out on Calle Ayala. We lived in one of these.
Even though I could describe every inch of that flat, what I will always remember most about it are the windows, which loomed endlessly in our lives. They were the most fragile part of our sense of family. When they were open, I could only talk out loud to my mother; when it was night-time, I had to wait for my father to leave whatever room he was in before I could switch the light on. There was a third element which transformed this game of silences and darkness whenever it intruded: the noise of the lift.
All three of us had internalised the length of time it took from the moment the lift started up until it reached our third-floor flat. If it came to a halt on the second floor, or carried on higher up the building, everything went on as before; but if it halted on the third floor, not only was time frozen, but the air around us became a solid block until we heard the doorbell ring at one of the other three flats on our landing. My father, my mother and I could immediately distinguish between signs of life and voices that might mean danger, and those which were simply routine. None of us ever mentioned the silences produced by the sound of the lift, just as none of us said a word when, if anyone came to our door, my father went and hid in a built-in wardrobe hidden behind a dressing table and mirror.
This was not the reason why the wardrobe had been built. Before the war, taking advantage of the fact that one of the bedroom walls was askew, a triangular space had been created. On the front, a large mirror set in a dark mahogany surround formed the door of this improvised wardrobe. There was more than enough room for one person inside, standing up or lying down, and the wardrobe door hinges were concealed by an enormous rosary with huge wooden beads and a silver crucifix showing a tortured Christ who had such a look of pain on his face that I made sure I was never left alone in the room with him.
Apart from this, in the bedroom there were two iron bedsteads with metal grapevines at the head… an oblong mirror, and an enormous second wardrobe in three sections, with a huge looking-glass in the middle part that I used to gaze into dreamily and imagine a world where my right was its left, and vice versa. I remember my father described my confusion as being like ‘different points of view on how to see things’. This is where my mother and I kept our clothes. It smelled of moth balls. My father’s clothes were hidden with him in his refuge. I can still recall the smell in there. Since then, I have come across it in the kitchens of the poor, in filthy fingernails, in haggard looks, in those given up as lost by doctors, those life has brought low, and in military guard-rooms. It is not the smell of prisons: they smell of disinfectant and the dank smell of cold.
I felt like a shepherd. I was happy that there were lost sheep in my flock. How little did I realise, Father, that I was the wolf! Like Bossuet, I filled my cup to give them the Lord’s secrets to drink. I began to pretend to meet Elena by accident.
I never again forced the boy to sing, though I was aware of the pretence he went through every day. As soon as they were dismissed each afternoon, all the boys rushed for the school exit. I kept a close watch on Lorenzo, and quite often had the opportunity to see his mother again. At first we simply exchanged formal greetings, but little by little, although she refused to hold any real conversation with me, we began to talk about the boy, then about how unruly children could be, the mission of teaching, and other to
pics I thought could lead me to speak about the truths of the soul.
I noticed, Father, that I enjoyed being in her company, but thought that if God had chosen to give man a companion in his image, adjutorium simili sibi, it was also His will that I should feel this pleasure. Lorenzo was always silent on these occasions, although I did see him exchanging insolent glances with his mother. Far from understanding what was going on between them, I was pleased because I thought they showed the love of a son for his mother. Pitch is thick and black so that it cannot be penetrated, Father.
I will not deny that in Elena I glimpsed the descendant of Eve. Not that beautiful, pure and gracious Eve created to enchant the heart of man and ascend with him to the presence of God. No, the fallen, naked and repentant Eve, the first instigator of Evil. In spite of this, I made it a habit to accompany Lorenzo and his mother part of the way home. There was something in Elena that led me into this battle. Those were my happiest days as school deacon.
‘The boy isn’t going back to school. Tell them he’s ill.’
‘That will make them even more suspicious.’
‘We can’t ask him to put up with that nosey friar any longer. We have to change his school, or do whatever it takes.’
‘Don’t worry, between us we can manage that oily creature.’
The boy’s attempts at avoiding school became more and more imaginative: sometimes he coughed so much he brought up his breakfast, at others he had such a stomach ache he sat with his head between his knees while his mother tried gently to dress him. Sometimes he just cried quietly.
Blind Sunflowers Page 9