Carlito chortled, remembering happily why he had chosen oral histories for his thesis. “Were you waiting until she was all grown up?” he asked his host.
Gonzalo shook his head. “No. No, I just...wasn’t ready to get married for quite a while after I left Spain. I’d had....a fairly serious girlfriend there.”
Carlito, grateful for the entry point, followed this line of questioning. “It must have been hard to leave her behind?”
Gonzalo made a face. “No,” his voice was quiet. “No. She died before I left.” He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke, although his voice was steady, he stared at the dew collecting on his beer, instead of looking up at his guest. “I suppose this is your history as well, though I don’t know if you want to know it. You’ve heard of the Mixed Brigades?” Carlito nodded, afraid that any noise would disturb Gonzalo’s narration. “I fought in one of them. And I fell in love with a girl in my company. Viviana was...quite a person. She stayed in Madrid with me, even after women were pulled from the Front. Alejandra may remember her a little, if you want to ask, when you go home. Anyway, I was wounded, a little before Christmas of ‘38, and spent quite a bit of time in the hospital. We were on the Madrid front, and by then, well...I suppose the writing was on the wall, but we didn’t want to believe it. I woke up in the hospital one morning, and found that the war was over, and Viviana was dead.”
“She was killed in the shelling of the city?” Carlito prompted, since the old man showed no signs of going on.
“What? Oh, no. No, she violated curfew a few days after the city fell to your troops. She was shot in the street by a guardia civil. It’s a long story.” Without apparent malice, the old man added. “You can ask Alejandra about it. Or your grandfather. He killed her.”
Carlito gasped. His previous interviews had made him expert at remaining silent when expressions of sympathy would have been fatuous, but he was unprepared for Gonzalo’s calm revelation. “Are you...sure?” he managed.
“Ask him,” Gonzalo repeated.
“But my grandfather’s always been a sort of godfather to Alejandra,” Carlito protested. “I mean, I don’t think he’s actually her godfather, but he’s always been like that, and if she’s your niece, and -- “
“He told me he would take care of Alejandra,” Gonzalo interrupted gently. “Just before he smuggled me very neatly out of the country, and faked my death, so that it was impossible for me to return to see my sister or her daughter again. Don’t think I wasn’t grateful,” the old man added sardonically. “He faked my death to prevent me from being really dead, in a rather painful manner. But he did it because he felt that he owed me something.”
“For Viviana?” Carlito whispered, stunned.
Gonzalo was silent, neither confirming nor denying. Carlito realized that his mouth was hanging open. He’s not badly off this way, the boy thought desperately. Lydia seems very nice. And this is a beautiful home, in a nice place. He probably wouldn’t have done so well in Spain. It probably was a kindness. And Grandpa has always taken care of Alejandra. She doesn’t hate us. I don’t think. “How-how much of this does Alejandra know?” he asked hesitantly.
“All of it, now,” once again Gonzalo’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “She only learned about the captain from me, when she visited a couple of years ago. He hadn’t chosen to tell her why he’d been playing guardian angel for all those years.”
“I’m sorry,” Carlito knew the words were pitifully inadequate, but not saying them was impossible.
Lydia put one hand on her husband’s shoulder, and the veteran’s eyes seemed to focus once more on the boy in front of him. “Not your fault. It was all a long time ago.” He smiled, and his tone was what it had been when he had spoken to Piña in La Perla as he added. “You’re sure you don’t want that drink, now?”
“I...You...you don’t mind...giving me a drink?” Carlito groped for words, and found himself unable to say exactly what he wanted to.
“Not if you’re thirsty,” Gonzalo raised his eyebrows. “Why? What would you do in my place?”
“Well...I guess...reconciliation is good. But...you must still feel a lot of resentment?” the question was a faint echo of one Carlito’s standard interview questions, neatly typed up in his notes. “Do you feel any resentment towards the other side? How much do you think the War still affects present-day Spain?” But he had never asked it with such fear before.
Gonzalo shrugged. “No, not particularly.”
“Then you’ve forgiven,” Carlito hesitated. “The other side?”
“You mean Captain Tejada? Of course not. What would he want with my forgiveness?” Gonzalo smiled slightly. “He’s managed to get along without it all these years.”
“B-but if you don’t resent him - “
“I don’t have time to go around resenting,” Gonzalo said simply. “Time was when I’d have killed your grandfather as soon as look at him. Once in a while I still feel that way. But I have my family, my children, my work. You can’t go around planning to kill for forty-odd years. It warps you. And that goes for the winners in general, not just Captain Tejada.”
Carlito frowned, unsure how to understand the words, and sensing a polite lie. “When I first told you my surname, you were upset,” he pointed out. “At the Club, on Thursday.”
“More startled than upset,” Gonzalo corrected. “After all, my life - and my sister’s and Aleja’s - have been mixed up with your family for years now. My ‘death’ too, come to think of it. But it’s not often that I meet one of you face to face. I hope I wasn’t rude to you. I was really in a hurry, too. The immigration people are terrible here, and poor José would have spent the night in jail if I hadn’t gotten there before five.” The ghost of a smile flitted across his face. “I suppose you could say that what’s left of how I feel about your grandfather is an unwillingness to see a kid spend a night in jail, if I can help prevent it. That’s mostly how I got into my present line of work.”
“Then...that’s it?” Carlito was aware that this interview was not going to be any great credit to his skills as an oral historian, but he no longer cared.
“That’s not it!” Gonzalo, misinterpreting the question, was vigorously offended. “You’ve never seen a housing project taken over by the Nietos and the Kings. They’ve been getting into drug dealing these past few years, and there’s money there, and that buys the kind of firepower that we could have only dreamed about in Madrid. And that includes even the winners in Madrid! Some of our kids live in a war zone, or as good as. The Boys’ Clubs provide an alternative way, try to keep kids off the streets, and that makes the streets safer. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle.” Lydia coughed, pointedly, and Gonzalo broke off. “Sorry. This is my favorite hobby-horse, and Lydia says I’m boring once I get started. You wanted to know about Spain?”
“Well, yes. If you don’t mind telling me,” Carlito spoke conscientiously, although he actually would have been interested in learning more about the bizarre signs the boy called Piña had taught him.
“You’ve already heard the worst. What else do you want to know?” Gonzalo shrugged, glanced at the tape recorder, and then shook his head. “Shit. I was going to tell you to turn that off earlier. Oh, well. Go ahead.”
From the back of his memory, Carlito dredged up the beginning of his question list. “Where were you when you first heard about the outbreak of the war? What was the first thing you thought?”
“In Madrid. At my brother-in-law’s workshop, in Lavapies,” Gonzalo answered readily enough, and Carlito managed to run through the rest of his list of questions without undue difficulty. The story was a familiar one, though he had never heard exactly this version before, and as he reached the end of the list he said impulsively - partly to avoid asking the inevitable “and what did you do when the war ended” - “So how did you end up in San Juan, if you went to New York, in ‘39?”
“I got my Masters in --“ Gonzalo frowned for a moment remembering. “1956? 1957?”
“’57,” his wife put in. “Because Miguel had just turned three that year, remember?”
“That’s right, ‘57. We moved down to 14th Street, where there were a lot of Spaniards hanging around, and I worked around there for a couple years, until Pedro - that’s our younger boy - was born. Once I had the degree I actually did find a job in the garment district. Working for one of the unions, doing counseling for their members, if you’ll believe it. But it was boring work, and Lydia didn’t like what she was doing either. Her younger sister had moved back to the Island, and we visited her and her husband here a couple of times, and finally we started talking about it, and we agreed that we wanted the kids to grow up knowing Spanish, and....well, finally in ‘62 we came down here, and we’ve been here ever since.” Gonzalo smiled. “We never looked back really. A couple of winters here destroy you for living anywhere else. Though we do go back to New York to visit once in a while.”
“You’ve never thought of going back to Spain?” Carlito asked, a little hurt that his homeland did not seem to even figure as a possible vacation destination.
“Spain...” Gonzalo murmured, his eyes unfocused for a moment. “Spain...”
“I’d like to visit it,” Lydia interjected matter-of-factly. “If only to see where Gonzalo grew up. But we really couldn’t until a few years ago, and since then what with one thing and another we haven’t been able to get away. Gonzalo’s niece invited us to stay with her when she visited us, and I’ve been trying to talk him into going, but so far we haven’t.”
“Alejandra tells me Madrid has changed a lot?” Gonzalo gave no indication of having heard his wife.
“Oh, yes,” Carlito nodded eagerly. “It’s beautiful now.”
“It was always beautiful,” Gonzalo spoke under his breath, and Carlito, bent on defending his home, did not hear the muttered comment until he replayed the tape on the airplane home.
“And lots of people come in the summer, when it’s warm like here, and they’re building a new art museum, right near where you said you grew up, and the rose garden in Retiro’s been restored, and I’m sure you’d like it.”
“Maybe we could go this summer,” Gonzalo suggested. He leaned over the low table and glanced at the recorder. “And it looks like your tape is about to run out.”
Carlito laughed. “That’s as good a place to end an interview as any, I guess.” He picked up the little machine. “This was an interview with Gonzalo Llorente, formerly first corporal in the Carbineros, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 16, 1983.” He hit the stop button. “Thank you. Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome,” Gonzalo looked amused, and Carlito wondered again how much the old man had told the truth when he said that he held no grudges. “Now, may I ask you something in return?”
“Of course. It’s the least I can do,” Carlito flushed, hoping that the old man understood that he didn’t just mean the interview.
“How did you get interested in this project?”
It was not the question Carlito had expected, and he had to think before answering. “Well, I’ve always liked listening to people’s stories,” he said honestly, “And I did well in history in school. I had a really good teacher, my last year of bac. I thought about English, too, but then a bunch of friends of mine were doing history so...” he trailed off, unable to remember the original germ of the idea that had come to dominate his life, and unwilling at the moment to admit, even to himself, that part of the impetus had been a desire to find out more about the strange lacunae in his grandfather’s stories.
“But the war in particular?”
Carlito shrugged, uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I guess it seems like....it seems so important to everyone who was alive then and I wanted to find out why. I mean, not why the dictatorship was important, and why what happened afterward affected everyone, but why everyone at the time felt it was so important. What I was missing, if you know what I mean.”
“And have you found out?” Gonzalo seemed genuinely interested.
Carlito hesitated, unwilling to seem arrogant. “A little, I guess. But I don’t think anyone can know all of it, who wasn’t there. Like my little cousin, she’s eleven now, she doesn’t really remember before the Transition. And I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to explain it to her. So I don’t know how much I can know about the war, ever.”
“Optimistic point of view for a historian,” Gonzalo commented.
Carlito laughed, embarrassed. “Yeah, I guess. Also, my girlfriend -- her family were on your side, and I kind of wanted to find out about them. They’ve all been great about helping, really. I’m sorry she didn’t come with me, tonight. She’d have liked meeting you.”
“Bring her by, tomorrow, if you have time,” Gonzalo suggested.
“Thanks,” Carlito beamed, suddenly hopeful. “Our plane isn’t until the evening. But I don’t want to inconvenience you?”
“Noon?” Gonzalo suggested. He smiled. “I love the kids at work. But once in a while it’s nice to meet nice young people.”
His wife, who had been sitting silently, laughed as he spoke. “Hear, hear. Do come and bring your -- is this your fiancee?”
The boy flushed. “Not officially, exactly. But sort of.”
Lydia turned to her husband, eyes dancing with amusement. “And these are nice young people! Can you imagine what my father would have said about my traveling across the Atlantic with a boy who I was sort of unofficially engaged to?”
“I can remember what he said about your traveling to New Jersey with someone you were actually engaged to,” Gonzalo retorted.
“My parents were a little upset,” Carlito admitted.
Gonzalo gave him an uncannily young grin in an old face. “Times change. And as long as you’re not wearing beads and giving me the gang signs you’re a welcome change from my kids.”
The social worker’s words reminded Carlito of an earlier question. He hesitated a moment and then said. “I wonder?”
“Yes?”
“It’s not part of my research, but...could you show me that handshake you did with that boy, Ramón? Piña?”
Gonzalo laughed, obviously tickled. “Stick to gangs in one decade, kid,” he advised. “You’ll have your hands full if you try to get to the bottom of the Nietos and the Falange. Here, hold out your right hand.”
“Are they political, too?” Carlito asked, curious, as the old man guided his clumsy fingers through an elaborate clasp.
“No,” Gonzalo shook his head. “Most violence in this country isn’t. It’s very odd, when you think about it.”
“Well, don’t sound as if you’re disappointed by that!” Lydia said.
Gonzalo sighed. “I’m not, really. It’s just, sometimes it’s hard to deal with kids who believe in nothing. Hard to make them understand why anything besides violence is worthwhile. When I was their age we were violent but...there was a lot to believe in.”
“How do you deal with kids who believe in nothing?” Carlito asked.
Gonzalo snorted. “Carefully,” he said wryly. “And optimistically. And with the understanding that you’ll almost always fail.”
The young man stared. “And you enjoy this work?”
“One gets used to failure,” Gonzalo shrugged. “But making the attempt is one of the few things I still believe in.”
Carlito shook his head, telling himself that he was merely young and impatient and that doubtless this sort of calm wisdom would come naturally to him one day. Or else possibly that Llorente was crazy. “I think I’d go nuts if I thought that I was permanently going to be failing,” he said honestly.
Gonzalo Llorente said nothing for a moment. Instead he leaned forward and inspected his guest minutely. Carlito, who felt that he was being weighed and found wanting, flushed, ashamed of the sentiments he had expressed. He was surprised when Gonzalo smiled and said, very gently. “You know, I hadn’t noticed it before, but in some ways you really resemble your grandfather very closely.”
*****
Notes on “The New World”
This story grew naturally out of “Hostages,” and was written more or less at the same time as The Watcher in the Pine. When I was writing “Hostages” I took a certain amount of pleasure in placing Gonzalo Llorente in Puerto Rico. It made me happy to think that after all of his suffering in Death of a Nationalist Gonzalo ended up in a place that I knew and loved as a child in the 1980s. In early versions of “Hostages” I considered having Alejandra, or even Gonzalo himself, telephone the Tejadas in Madrid upon hearing of the coup attempt. It seemed like an appropriate irony to have Gonzalo be in a position to offer Tejada refuge, so many years after their last conversation in Death of a Nationalist. I ultimately rejected this option, because I thought that it was implausible that Gonzalo would be so concerned with his old nemesis. The end of Death of a Nationalist remained the only the time that the two men actually spoke to each other.
But I was still intrigued by the idea of what Gonzalo might be doing in Puerto Rico. Furthermore, I discovered after Death of a Nationalist was published that many readers found him somewhat passive and dull compared to Tejada. I thought this was very unfair, since Death of a Nationalist basically takes place over the course of the worst week of Gonzalo’s life, and someone suffering from terror, hunger, and most of all acute grief is not likely to present a very active, cheerful picture. I wanted to show Gonzalo at his best, as well as at his worst; as a contented, active, humorous, and compassionate man, who had not only survived but was still fighting a good fight, and trying to protect the weak and downtrodden, by peaceful means this time.
What Happened When the War Was Over; further stories of Gonzalo Llorente and Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon Page 9