Blind Sunflowers

by Alberto Méndez

  ‘You’re not a priest?’

  ‘No, Elena! I’m nothing more than a deacon, a servant of the Church, and one day I hope to find someone with whom I can start a family…’

  Possibly in order to avoid having to face the astounded look on Elena’s face, he suddenly asked for the bathroom. She told him politely where it was, and took advantage of his absence to check that no traces of her husband were visible anywhere. Little by little they had managed to eliminate all signs of his presence, from the tobacco he had given up in order to avoid her having to explain it away in her ration book, to the ruled notebooks where he wrote his literary translations, and including all his clothes, which were never left to dry but were ironed still wet and put away in the wardrobe. It was as if her husband’s life was like the air they breathed: it existed, but took up no space.

  When Brother Salvador re-appeared from the bathroom, he was holding Ricardo’s razor in his hand. The deacon’s eyes swung in astonishment from the razor to Elena’s face and back again, until they became a silent interrogation behind which a host of questions came crowding in, and any answers seemed impossible.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s a shaving razor.’

  ‘I can see that. You aren’t trying to tell me that Lorenzo already shaves, are you?’

  Elena was so nervous that she burst out laughing, hiding her face in her hands. The anger on her face could easily have been taken for an embarrassed smile.

  ‘My goodness, brother, how little you know about women! Have you never heard that we shave our legs as summer draws near?’

  Not even she had the remotest idea where she found the strength to wink and smile at him as she said this.

  ‘It’s one of the little secrets of our coquettishness!’

  ‘You shave your legs?’

  ‘Of course! Nearly all women do,’ she said, and as if to prove her innocence, lifted her skirt to her knees to show him her legs.

  Still holding the razor in one hand, Brother Salvador came slowly towards her, his eyes glued on her calves. He bent down, and as if he were going to scoop up an abandoned puppy, took them in his other hand.

  The sticky touch of his moist palm and the view of the balding head stooping in front of her made Elena’s flesh creep. Feeling helpless and too frightened to call out, she angrily cursed her own charms.

  On the edge of my universe there was an empty lot that had become a rubbish tip. It was right next to the Argel cinema, so that from it you could hear the soundtracks of the films being shown behind tin doors that backed onto the wasteland. I don’t know why, but in my memory this desolate place is linked to my discovery of the forbidden.

  Next door to our building was a coal merchant’s that was always open. It was run by a huge, kindly man from Asturias who had a perfect set of teeth that gleamed white in a face invariably smeared with coal dust. His name was Ceferino Lago, and in my mind’s eye I can see him constantly shifting bags of slack, firewood and charcoal. His wife Blanca was more like his widow. She always wore black, and her constant look of mourning led her customers to offer their condolences even though they had not heard of any recent death in her family.

  The couple had two sons: Luis, a boy already possessing a great knowledge of the ways of the world – he was able to spot a whore in any woman who smoked – and another one, whose name I cannot recall (Juan?) but whose infinite capacity to be in a rage I find unforgettable. He had teeth similar to his father, except that they stuck out, so that even with his mouth closed they were visible between his soft, fleshy and moist lips. It was this coal merchant’s son (who was seven or eight years older than the rest of us) who liked to take us to the waste lot so we could hear the soundtracks of category four ‘adults only’ films. It was the ecclesiastical authorities who classified films in those days, following a system I could never understand: a few rare films were ‘apt for all publics’; then there were category three films, restricted category three ones, and category four, which were deemed highly dangerous.

  None of us could understand the reasoning behind this, but then those were days when next-to-nothing was explained. At cinema box offices, when you bought your ticket you were also sold a little piece of cardboard in the shape of an heraldic shield. We called them badges; they cost five pesetas, and had a triangular eyelet at the top that you pinned to your lapel. On the back it explained that this was a voluntary contribution to national reconstruction. As boys we did not understand what most of this meant, but since a lot of the language of the time was pure hyperbole – Crusade meant war, Reds meant devils, National meant victorious – it seemed only natural that voluntary should mean obligatory, since even if you showed him your ticket, the usher would not let you into the cinema if you were not displaying the badge.

  We hardly ever went to the cinema as such, but the coal merchant’s son’s physical dominance over us was such that he often managed to drag us outside the tin doors that were left open to ventilate the stalls area.

  We listened in hushed silence to all the meaningless dialogues and the music that swirled around them. We did not understand a thing, but the coal merchant’s son whose name I cannot recall would suddenly jump up, laughing hysterically and making gestures which I would now call obscene but in those days I simply thought of as ridiculous.

  It was thanks to him that I had the first glimmerings of something I had to hide from my parents. Secrets bound me to people like roots bind a tree to the earth. I was never quite sure what exactly my secret was, but whereas other children believed in the Virgin or in Franco, in the Pope or the Fatherland, I had my secrets to believe in. I was convinced I was becoming wise in the ways of the world. I began to understand some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the school toilets, and to guess the meaning of some of the gestures shown on the cinema billboards. This slowly created the image in my mind of my father doing all those things behind my back with my mother. The fact that he let his beard grow, that she cut it only on the days when they had lit the stove, that his hair was turning grey, or that she was being consumed by a clinging, dark sense of melancholy – all of that seemed to me the proof that something sordid was going on in my refuge. In the tight grip of moral censure that surrounded us, the body was forbidden. The feelings it transmitted were good if they were the result of suffering, but if there was even a hint of pleasure, they were to be condemned. Health was the reward of sacrifice, and sickness always came from satisfying one’s instincts. Something was being kept hidden from us children, and we had no idea what our bodies were for.

  Sometimes at night I pretended to be asleep, but was in fact listening closely for any sign that my parents were indulging in sin: they must be doing something, I thought, for us to be in such a sorry state. In the end, I always fell asleep anyway.

  When I look back on it, I feel immense nostalgia for their silence.

  Father, how hard it is to become a victim again once you have been a victor! All the satisfaction I felt during the three years when I was one of the ones chosen to redirect the Stygian waters, all the glory of that victory, turned little by little into a sense of failure: I failed when I exchanged my cassock for a warrior’s uniform; I failed by confusing a warrior’s pride with the arrogance of the sword; I failed because I concealed my vocation beneath the sedition of an uncontrollable lust; I failed at the last for not seeing that what I was trying to seduce was seducing me instead.

  I became obsessed with simply spending a moment alone with Elena. I finally caught her at home and made a formal request that she confide her son to the Church’s paternal care. We were talking about the matter when suddenly, without knowing how, I found myself prostrate in front of her. For reasons not worth mentioning here, Elena had cast off her normal prudery and displayed her forbidden carnality in such a way that with a single gesture she sent all my convictions crashing to the ground. Father, the sad, touching face of Evil creates adoration rather than fear. My soul began a journey sub nocte per umbram – do you r
emember the phrase? Lost in the darkness of a night of which I had no knowledge. Elena attracted and repelled me in equal measure. I went mad, and am not sure whether I have as yet regained my senses.

  Elena, we have to escape. Yes. We’ll get out of here. We could leave the boy with your uncle and aunt in Méntrida. No, if we’re escaping all three of us are going together. All right, but we have to leave now. Yes. We can’t go on like this. No, we can’t. We’ve got savings. My uncle and aunt could lend us some money. No, don’t ask them for anything, they would only want to know what it was for. All right, I won’t ask them. How can we do it? We’ll take buses and change as often as we can. No more than fifty kilometres at a time. They check the buses less frequently than trains. But if we do that it will take forever. It will take as long as it has to. The important thing is to get out. The three of us. Yes, the three of us, my love. My love. We have to reach Almería. There are fishermen there who will take you to Morocco for three hundred pesetas. Where are we going to find that much money? I’ll sell everything I can. Including the Murano fish your father left you? Yes, that too. We can’t take anything with us. Nothing. You always said it was our talisman. Our talisman has died. Elena, my love. Love.

  The next morning, Lorenzo took Brother Arcadio a letter informing him that the boy would not be coming to school because he had to have a tonsil operation. They were infected, which meant he had to receive treatment before he could be operated on, and he could be absent from school for as long as two weeks. The letter came into the hands of Brother Salvador, who asked him why his mother no longer brought him to school.

  ‘My mother has a bad sore throat too. She may die.’

  For the same reason I never asked why my father lived in a wardrobe, because these things happened on the other side of the mirror, I never asked why my mother stopped taking me to school. At first she went with me as far as two blocks from it, and left me to walk the last part. Then she accompanied me to the intersection between Calle Alcalá and Calle Goya, and finally she did not even leave our flat.

  She spoke to the women in the ticket office of the metro so that they would allow me to use the subway to cross under the only dangerous part, because although there were very few vehicles around in those days, several streets converged at that point and all the traffic seemed to speed along because it was such a wide road. I discovered that the metro smelled of old clothes, was as warm as breath, and was lit in the same way as the rooms that sick people die in.

  Whenever I had the time, I went down onto the platforms to wait for a train. The dark tunnel was where the lepers hid, and the screech of the train wheels sounded to me like their screams as they were crushed beneath them. I was both attracted and terrified by those dark arches, because my world was situated at a crossroads where all kinds of evil could emerge. I know now that I was simply afraid.

  My father came out of his hiding-place less and less often. He stayed inside even when we were alone in the flat. I used to like that, because when I came home from school I could snuggle down beside him and share his silence. We sat for hours until my mother would disturb the quiet by offering me a bit of bread with some chocolate.

  Everyone who was my age then could write a book about the ways we tried to make those gritty, dark grains more palatable: taking a drink of milk after you had started to chew it; dipping the bread in water so that the chocolate dust would solidify; or more usually, gnawing at it bit by bit, giving time for your saliva to be able to absorb it.

  There came a time when my mother and I ate at the kitchen table while my father remained in the wardrobe to have his meal. He ate in a painfully slow, careful way, as if trying to avoid making any noise when he bit into the piece of rye bread. I felt guilty because the wardrobe began to smell like the metro and I was afraid it would end up attracting the lepers.

  Despite all this, the fact that I went and came back from school on my own offered me lots of exciting opportunities. I could stop and look at all the shop windows I liked, and even stare at the unfortunate creatures I passed. I used to go down to the metro platforms in the mornings, on my way to school; on my way back, I would stop to stare at a stooped old woman who darned stockings with such meticulous care that had it not been for the ceaseless movement of her hands I could have sworn she was made of wood, like the saints on the church altar. After lunch, on my way back to school I ran down to the hell of the metro platforms once more, and after school I would take a route that invariably meant I walked along an esplanade we all knew as the old Bullring. It was there I discovered that Brother Salvador was following me dressed in ordinary clothes.

  Father, with my pride wounded and at the same time ashamed of an obsession that threatened to undermine my priestly vocation, I asked for temporary permission to leave the monastery and the school. With my family’s help, I moved to a boardinghouse run by a devout old woman in Santa Gema parish. It was then I began to feel like one of the dispossessed. My Faith, my vocation, my Victory, my integrity had all been taken from me by a woman who was refusing to give me what I had never asked her for. She was refusing it out of her sense of failure, her lack of piety, her defeat – and, I admit it now, her beauty. How could a woman buffeted by so many failures remain unmoved by all the proof of my devotion? I had to have an answer.

  Piece by piece, the remaining furniture disappeared from the Mazo household. An ironmonger took the chestnut hat-stand, a friendly neighbour who lived in the attic and realised what was going on bought the sewing machine, a second-hand clothes seller paid next-to-nothing for the linen sheets and a crocheted bedspread that had been part of her grandmother’s dowry, and had been used only on her wedding night, that of Elena’s mother, and on her own. It still reeked of passion and mothballs. Elena had given a matching bedspread to her daughter when she fled with the adolescent poet just before the end of the war. The dining-room table was too big for anyone to want it, but the typewriter was bought by a bookkeeper at the Hispano-German company for whom Elena did translations.

  Her fear that Ricardo would fall ill added a further sense of urgency to their plans to flee. Every single one of his friends had died or gone into exile, so there was no one to help them should his depressed state turn into something more serious.

  They had collected almost enough money to be able to leave, but the desolate, empty house seemed to be closing in all round Ricardo. He did not even come out of the wardrobe to sleep. The boy, who no longer went to school, spent hours with him reading passages from Lewis Carroll to try to make him smile. Whenever the lift stopped at the third floor, he stopped reading. Then came a day full of silences and empty gaps when somebody rang their doorbell, waited in vain for a reply, and then pressed the bell insistently in a way that had all their hearts in their mouths. The subsequent banging on the door and a voice shouting in the stairwell set their escape routine into motion, even though they were going nowhere: Ricardo shut himself in the wardrobe, Lorenzo slipped into the kitchen, and Elena tidied her hair before sliding back the bolt. It was Brother Salvador, dressed in ordinary clothes but dishevelled and wild-looking: he froze as he saw how astonished Elena was at his noisy insistence.

  ‘I’ve come to see Lorenzo. How is he?’

  I now regret the fact that I never told my parents Brother Salvador was following me, because the day he came to visit it caught them unawares. He was kicking at the door and making such a racket that my mother had to let him in. There was almost no furniture left in the flat because strangers were taking it all away for reasons I did not dare ask but which I thought must have to do with their poverty rather than ours.

  Brother Salvador swept in like a whirlwind, calling for me the whole time until he found me in the kitchen pretending to read Alice in Wonderland. He asked how I was feeling, snatched the book from my hands and immediately gave it back, then asked me point-blank if he could speak with my mother alone.

  For many years afterwards I was overcome with remorse at doing nothing more than call on the lepers to come
and devour this dervish attacking my mother, because when I came running in a panic in response to her screams, I was in time only to see my weak, powerless father throw himself on Brother Salvador as he sat astride her, while she desperately tried to protect her face from the stinking breath of this pig slobbering at her neck. My father had left his wardrobe.

  Sine sanguinis effussione, non fit remissio: It is true, without shedding of blood there is no remission. Now I understand the full meaning of that Letter to the Hebrews. God had used me as his instrument of justice. That was why I took sides with those who conquered empires, those who stopped the mouths of lions, obturaverunt ora leonum, with those who escaped the sword’s edge, effugerunt aciem gladii. Saul! Saul! Like Gideon, like Barac, like Jephta and like Samson himself I had in my own hand the weapon with which to punish those who, turning a deaf ear to God’s will, se patriam inquirere, are still searching for their Fatherland.

  Driven by a force I still find hard to acknowledge as part of me, Father, I launched myself at the temple which that woman was denying me. And the tiniest part of my wrath was sufficient to lure the cause of this Evil from his lair, to flush out the abject schemer who had devised all this web of deceit. Elena’s husband was hidden in the flat.

  Shrieking something unintelligible, Ricardo flung himself on Brother Salvador. The cleric managed to scramble to his feet with the other man clinging on his back. He had no idea what was going on. He struggled free from this apparition who had his hands clasped round his neck as though trying to strangle him, and with a single blow sent his attacker literally flying across the room. For a brief moment, he seemed more dumbfounded than angry. He turned to Lorenzo who was standing in the doorway and asked him: