“Because I’m not paid to be interested, Cabrillo.”
“I’m not paid at all, sir.”
For that remark Luis was beaten; but he still refused to read Don Quixote.
Next year, at a school run by nuns, he got into deep trouble over the teaching of the Catholic faith.
The subject was the apparently miraculous revelations at Fatima in Portugal, in 1917. Luis’s class was told that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared, in an oak tree, to three peasant children while they were tending sheep. She gave them important messages from God. Fatima, the nun said, had now become a place of pilgrimage for thousands, millions of devout Catholics, who attend the Basilica and Chapel of the Apparitions, which was built on the actual spot where—
“Why didn’t God just tell the Pope?” Luis asked.
Sister Theresa was elderly, heavy, benign except when opposed, and slightly deaf. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“Why didn’t God just tell the Pope?” Luis, repeated, more loudly. “If God had something important he wanted the Church to know, why did he send the Virgin Mary to tell three little kids in Portugal?”
“Why does the sun rise in the east and not in the west?” Sister Theresa replied, with a rather tense smile. “Because God knows which way is best.”
“Yes, but they might have got it all wrong,” Luis said. “I mean, they were only kids. Suppose they didn’t understand? Or maybe they had rotten memories. They might have forgotten the really important bits.”
Sister Theresa’s tense smile was losing its grip on her stony face. “God selects His messengers with care,” she said.
She and Luis exchanged stares, while the rest of the class hid behind its hands and willed the argument to go on.
“It still strikes me as a funny way to do a simple job,” he said.
“It strikes you as funny, does it?” Sister Theresa said icily. “I hope you will remember that remark when you are older and you discover that God is infinitely wiser than you are.”
Luis grunted.
“Now then. To return to the Basilica—”
“What were the messages?” Luis asked.
“Don’t interrupt, you discourteous little thug,” Sister Theresa barked.
“I apologize, Sister. It just seemed to me that if God went to all that trouble, we ought to know what’s on His mind.”
Sister Theresa clenched her jaw and pursed her lips until her sparse mustache bristled. “When it is necessary for you to know, then you will be told,” she declared. The class shifted restlessly and looked at each other. “There is no great urgency about the matter,” she added. Luis shrugged his shoulders, and she could see that several other children were looking puzzled or skeptical or, even worse, amused. “Which is not to say that the divine messages were not extremely important at the time,” she said sternly. “Our Lady announced the end of the Great War. She also warned us against the evil spread of Godless Russian Communism, which despite the valiant efforts of the Catholic Church has come about, and she predicted that unless men cease from sinning an even worse war will follow.” Sister Theresa gave Luis a look of grim satisfaction: Make something of that if you can, you little fiend.
“I heard there was another message,” Luis said. “A secret one.”
“That need not concern us,” Sister Theresa said firmly, “as it was written down by one of the children, at the instruction of Our Lady, and placed in a sealed envelope which is now entrusted to the care of the Bishop of Leiria.”
“Why doesn’t he open it?” Luis asked.
“The time is not yet right.”
“Who says?”
Sister Theresa stiffened. “Cabrillo, I give you leave to reconsider your question,” she said, snapping her fingers nervously.
Luis thought about it. “It doesn’t make any sense, Sister, that’s all,” he said. “What’s the point of God going to all that trouble to send us a message in 1917 if some Bishop won’t tell us what it was?”
“The Church knows greater mysteries than your weak faith can comprehend, my son,” said Sister Theresa. Her finger-clicking grew louder.
“Yes, of course,” Luis agreed. “I have never questioned that, Sister. I just wonder who is really in charge: God, or the Bishop of Leiria?”
“God through the Bishop,” Sister Theresa ruled.
“I bet he’s opened it,” Luis said. There was a sharp intake of breath by the rest of the class, but Luis could not stop himself. “I bet he opened it and read it and it’s not a message from God at all, it’s just a load of old Portuguese rubbish, and that’s why he won’t tell—”
“Foul-mouthed wretch!” Sister Theresa shouted. She crashed her leatherbound Bible against Luis’s head and knocked him off his seat. “Evil, poisonous brute!” Her large shoes kicked him to the front of the class. Another beating was on its way. Sister Theresa died of a stroke the following year, and all the other nuns blamed Luis Cabrillo; but by then Luis was in another town, another school, and another battle.
As he grew older, his conflicts became more dogged. He refused to learn any geography because the school could give him no good reason why he should memorize the principal rivers of Australia. He was in trouble in the art class, where his nude studies were considered too explicit. “Unhealthy” was the word the art teacher used. “But this same human body was good enough for El Greco and Goya and Rubens and Raphael,” Luis argued. “There’s acres of flesh hanging in the Prado, isn’t there?” For once he was not beaten, but was sent out to play soccer. That didn’t work either. He tripped opponents and he handled the ball so often that the teacher who was refereeing threatened to send him off. “But tripping and handling are difficult skills,” Luis claimed. “Besides, how can the game ever develop unless new techniques are introduced?” “Shut up, Cabrillo,” the referee said. “Free kick against your team.” Two minutes later, Luis tripped the referee.
That was the day he left school for good. He possessed only one academic skill: he could read and write English and (to some extent) speak it, no thanks to any of the schools he had passed through. Luis Cabrillo had taught himself English so that he could get his moneysworth out of the American movies, which were his big interest in life. He was about thirteen when he realized that Spanish subtitles were far briefer than the dialogue on the soundtrack. This was not only a swindle but also an insult. In Luis’s experience the only things worth his attention were stuff the authorities wanted to hide. He bought a teach-yourself-English book and studied it all day in school: through geography lessons, algebra lessons, divinity lessons. The book was confiscated. He bought another. Eventually he knew enough English to identify what the Spanish subtitles were avoiding, and sometimes he took it upon himself to fill in the gaps for the benefit of others. When a cowboy punched a gambler through a saloon window, and the Spanish caption offered only a terse “Be gone!,” Luis loosely but loudly translated the soundtrack’s actual Beat it, you fourflushing sonofabitch or I’ll kick your teeth past your tonsils. He was thrown out of so many cinemas that he became known to the police. Also to the secret police.
At first that didn’t much matter. It was 1934, he was only fifteen, the disapproval of the police or the secret police meant no more to him than had the disapproval of a whole series of teachers and headmasters. And young Luis had no politics, unless chronic dissatisfaction with everything counts as politics. His parents had other things to preoccupy them: railway timetables for his father, piano-playing for his mother. She was convinced that she had talent, perhaps great talent, if only she could bully her fingers into expressing it. One of the perquisites of her husband’s job was that every time he got transferred the company moved all their belongings, free; so Luis became accustomed to traveling with her scratched and scarred grand piano. He never got accustomed to her tirelessly bad playing. Señora Cabrillo attacked the keyboard as if it were a lengthy combination lock, a bit stiff, a bit grudging, which had to be struck scientifically but ruthlessly in the correct sequence befor
e it would deliver up its treasure. Day after day she kept striking it, year after year, with chords like village carpentry and cadenzas like heavy rope, and still no treasure showed itself. To Luis each of his parents was lost on some endless, pointless search. His father was the Flying Dutchman of the Spanish railway system, and his mother had a stranglehold on her piano if only she could find its jugular. They fed, clothed and housed him, but otherwise took little interest. When the incident of the tripped referee brought about angry and tedious repercussions, he decided to leave school and get a job. Neither parent interfered.
Chapter 3
They were living in Barcelona at the time.
The man who wrote film reviews for Barcelona’s biggest evening paper, Luis noted, was also the bullfight critic and sometimes covered football matches. The editor got a letter from Luis proposing himself as the newspaper’s first full-time film critic. Attached was a review of a film currently being shown in the city. It was a miracle of compression: Luis managed to libel the star, the director, the film critic of a rival newspaper, and the owners of the cinema, all in 250 words. But he had a certain style—“the trouble with this film is that it goes on long after it has finished,” he wrote—and so the editor offered him a job as a copy boy. “I have a nose for talent,” the editor said. “Work hard, learn all you can, and maybe one day you’ll be sitting in this chair.”
That was fine and very encouraging, except for one thing: Luis was fifteen and the editor (as he discovered by looking up his file in the obituary department) was fifty-three. Luis took the job but he wasn’t willing to wait thirty-eight years. For a couple of weeks he trotted about the building, carrying copy from writers to sub-editors, from subs to typesetters; taking proofs in the reverse direction; fetching coffee; finding taxis; listening to arguments over pictures, headlines, expenses; getting a sense of the way a daily newspaper gradually winds itself up from a slightly bleary sluggishness through a brisk professionalism to a manic, mannerless, get-the-hell-out-of-my-way rush, as if the paper itself were a wild beast which had to be set free; and then the slump, the anti-climax, the taste of flatness when there was nothing left to do but read the damn thing.
He quite enjoyed it but after a couple of weeks he was still just a copy boy.
The paper published its film reviews on Tuesdays and Fridays. The following Tuesday, as he picked up the cinema critic’s copy, Luis respectfully asked him which film he intended to honor with his comments on Friday. When Friday came round, Luis again collected the man’s words, took them to the entertainments editor, and hung around until he was given the pages to be set. He went away and hid them inside his shirt. The typesetters, he knew from observation, would need about twenty minutes to do their work. He delayed until the last possible moment, and then gave them his own film review.
It almost got through. The printers accepted it—Luis’s version looked convincing, even to the extent of a few corrections in the entertainments editor’s green ink—and after that, time was so short that nobody bothered to read the proof very closely. This was not unusual: the film critic was stiflingly tedious. In fact Luis’s rogue column was actually printed in a few thousand early issues meant for the suburbs. As the bundles were being loaded onto the vans, they were recalled for pulping. His headline had given him away.
New French Film Is Good News For Insomniacs, the editor read as he glanced through his rush copy. He read it again. It looked odd; not like the usual stuff: too crisp, too sharp. He read the opening paragraph and laughed aloud, twice. Then he picked up the phone, killed the column, (they put in a picture of swans at sunset instead) and fired Cabrillo on the spot.
Luis found out later where he had gone wrong, and it taught him a lesson. “You can be too good,” he told his father. “Now if I’d written a dull, boring headline, the kind of thing they run every week, my piece would have gone through.”
“So why didn’t you?” His father never went to the cinema and rarely read a newspaper.
“Because the whole point was to show them how much better it can be done.”
“For God’s sake,” his father complained, “I thought you said that’s why they sacked you.”
“So it is,” Luis said angrily. “And I lost a week’s pay.”
“Well, serve you right. You knew your job, didn’t you? You should have stuck to it. Suppose I needed a locomotive—”
“I’m not a damn locomotive,” Luis said. His father stared. “Oh, to hell with them,” Luis muttered. “It was a lousy job anyway.”
“Then get yourself another. I can’t keep you in cinema-tickets.”
He went to work for a wine merchant and for ten days he corked bottles. Next morning he arrived with both hands heavily bandaged. “Broke my fingers in a boxing-match,” he announced. “Can’t cork.”
The owner swore a bit, found him a fairly clean white coat and put him in the front office, to help attend to customers. At first the arrangement worked well. Luis was quick and courteous. He was old enough and grown enough to have the beginnings of a presence, yet he still conveyed some of the innocence and vulnerability of youth. And he was handsome as only a young Spaniard can be, with a trace of melancholy, a hint of tragedy, and a glimmer of amusement that anyone should be taken in by either. His eyes were a cool, dark brown. His skin was flawless, shaded olive and stretched over high cheekbones and strong brows in memory of some distant Moorish ancestor. He had a brief but brilliant smile for the customers’ wives which made them forget their boring husbands. For the husbands, sampling wines, he had an attitude of interest and respect which made them feel like Baron Rothschild. Luis rarely spoke, he simply attended; but he was a definite asset to the front office.
On the afternoon of Luis’s second day in the white coat, the owner received a semi-important local politician and his wife. For half an hour they tasted samples which Luis poured, holding each bottle in a white napkin and demonstrating a small flourish of pride, while the owner released his limited wine-vocabulary a word at a time, like toy balloons: mature … discreet … robust … challenging … brave …
He opened a fresh bottle and handed it to Luis.
“Now this is something different,” he said. “Those others are good wines, excellent wines some of them. But this I have kept apart for several years, awaiting …” He leaned forward and watched closely as Luis poured. “… awaiting a palate which can appreciate the gift of time.”
Luis stiffened. The politician’s wife noticed this, and glanced at him. Luis finished pouring, but omitted the usual small flourish.
They raised their glasses and examined the wine. “Once in a lifetime,” the owner said. “Perhaps, if God wills it, twice. Ten years ago, when I was privileged to make this discovery, it was so small and so rare that I made the decision that I must bottle it all myself, with these very hands.”
“No you didn’t,” Luis said.
Three heads turned and stared. The owner’s eyes were sick with rage. Luis tightened his grip on the bottle and breathed deeply.
“Explain yourself,” invited the politician’s wife.
“He didn’t bottle this stuff ten years ago,” Luis declared. “I bottled it last week. There’s enough of it downstairs to drown an elephant.”
“Get out,” the owner ordered. “The boy is feeble-minded,” he told them, smiling savagely.
“Two elephants,” Luis said. His heart was galloping, squeezing all the air from his lungs.
“Ignore him, the child is drunk,” the owner said. He wanted to grab Luis but Luis had moved behind a table and the owner was afraid of a humiliating chase. “He is a halfwit, you see. I took him on as a favor, a halfwit, he says these things, stupid meaningless things.” The owner was sweating like old cheese. “And when I am not looking he drinks. A drunken halfwit.”
“I am not a child,” Luis said evenly. “I am fifteen years old.” He pressed his thighs against the edge of the table to stop them trembling.
The politician and his wife looked at ea
ch other. “Well, my dear,” he said. “Shall we taste the wine?” They tasted the wine and gazed past each other, lips pursed. The owner stood with his fingers curled and straining at his cuffs. His jaw muscles flickered with tension, and Luis could hear his teeth make a faint squeak. Luis began to be afraid.
At last the politician swallowed, and looked into his glass. His wife swallowed, and he glanced sideways at her.
“The boy is wrong,” she said quietly. “This is not fit even for elephants.”
They put their glasses on the table in front of Luis, and she gave him just the beginnings of a smile. They went out, escorted by the owner, who was thunderous with silence. As he closed the door behind them he turned and snatched up a walking-cane. “You stinking little bastard streak of whore’s-piss,” he whispered in case the politician and his wife heard. “I’m going to cut your ass into strips for that!”
Luis showed him four bottles of the firm’s irreplaceable five-star brandy, each bottle individually numbered, dated and signed by a monk who was long since dead. He held two bottles in each hand, like Indian clubs. “You come near me and I’ll smash them all,” he said.
“I’ll kill you!” the owner hissed. He realized that the politician and his wife were out of earshot. “I’ll kick your filthy guts out!” he roared.
“You were going to do that anyway,” Luis said. His arms were starting to ache. The owner took a sudden step forward and Luis twitched, so that the bottles clinked. The owner froze.
“I want a taxi,” Luis said. “Get it outside the front door with the engine running. When I’m inside it, you can have these back.”
The owner cursed and stamped about the room, while Luis braced himself and prayed that his fingers would not lose their grip. Eventually the man stormed out and shouted furiously for a taxi. Luis followed, cautiously, and eased himself into the back seat, never taking his eye off the owner. “When I say go,” he told the driver, “please drive like hell.” He thrust the bottles out of the window and into the owner’s arms. “Go!” he shouted. The taxi leaped forward with a scream of wheelspin, flinging Luis back against the cushions. The last he saw of the owner was a contorted figure desperately failing to stop one bottle slipping through his arms and smashing on the cobblestones.
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