I talk to him. Alone, at night, in the bedroom, because I keep his photo on the bedside table next to the photos of my children, but I often talk to him as well when I sit on the bench near the magnolia tree. And in spring, when I see those big flowers open, like raw silk, I’ll think of him lying there underneath, taking joy in his presence even after his death. I think: the memory of you makes me happy, it’s as if you’re immortal, because you’ll be there to keep me company for as long as I live—I’m still alive, and you’ll only die when I do, not a moment before: then we’ll both die at the same time. My husband says I’m completely mad, but I don’t know why we’re so sure that only humans have a soul, I mean, why make that stark division? His eyes, the way he used to look at me, a creature like that must have some kind of soul, I’m sure of it, a small, fragile soul. He was always so overjoyed when I came home laden down with the shopping, and he’d return my kisses too, putting out his little pink tongue and licking my face, he was a far more joyful and affectionate child than most of those I see in Olba with their jeans half falling down, showing their underpants, with their iPods stuck in their ears, or racing through the park on those noisy skateboards, not caring that there are older people sitting on the benches. A creature like that must have some kind of soul, the joy in his eyes, the sadness, the fear, aren’t those all qualities of the soul? And even if he didn’t have a soul, if he’s now nowhere to be found, he still consoles me, for me he’s still here, at least I have someone I can speak to. I’m ashamed to say so, but that’s how it is, especially now that Álvaro no longer goes to work and spends all day lying on the sofa, drinking beer, because he’s taken to drinking beer now, when he only used to drink a glass of wine before lunch and another before supper, but now he drinks can after can of beer, filling the whole house with its sour smell, tapping away on the computer or watching TV. I can understand him feeling disoriented, depressed. It must be hard to get used to his new situation because carpentry has been his whole life, but wasn’t he saying that he wanted to give it up anyway, didn’t he say that, when he retired, we’d go off traveling in an RV, moving from place to place, a life on the road? With what we have left, we could still do it, sell the apartment, buy an RV, put any remaining money in a money maker account and head off, me with my EU health card in my handbag. Now, though, I pray to my dog to free us from the misfortune that might befall us if Álvaro carries on like this.
It’s been a very long time since my sister Carmen came to stay with us as she used to, a couple of times a year, bringing the children and, sometimes, her husband. She did make a lightning visit at the time of my father’s operation, but back when the kids were small, the family would spend the whole summer here; of course, they only set foot in the house to sleep, because they’d spend all day at the beach and every evening on the terrace of one of the ice-cream parlors on Avenida Orts in Misent. Her husband would join them when he was on holiday from the textile factory, usually the last two weeks of August. The house would fill with voices and the colorful detritus that always surrounds children: plastic planes and cars, little bags of sweets and dried fruit, bits of chewing gum stuck to the bathroom shelf, and with inner tubes, flippers, snorkel and mask abandoned on the chairs in the hallway, much to my father’s annoyance. Don’t you know that salt eats into the varnish and ruins the wood? You should leave those things outside. The kids were a nuisance, it’s true, but they brought life into the house, so silent and even gloomy the rest of the year, especially after my mother died—she always used to sing to herself, almost right up until the end, while she scrubbed the floor, dusted the furniture and hung out the clothes in the backyard.
La bien pagá
,
Picadita de viruelas
,
Angelitos negros
,
Ay mi Rocío
. If, one year, they came later than usual or didn’t come at all, like the summer they went to Galicia instead, Carmen would at least send photos so that we could see how the children were growing up (with the passing years, these became the photos of those grandchildren she never once brought to see us, and my mother laid the blame for this, as I said before, on her daughters-in-law), I think Carmen wanted us—my parents and me, the bachelor uncle from whom they assume the children are going to inherit—to fall in love with them. But such long-distance courtships no longer happen, that was in the old days, when kings would receive a portrait of their future wife and gradually fall in love with her over the years, until she eventually arrived at the palace gates. Indian men would get married to some poor girl with whom they’d exchanged photos and letters, the girl would travel across the ocean, docile and frightened, to find a husband who was really a complete stranger, but who did at least provide a means of escaping the poverty she had known at home. In Olba, in the mid-1950s, there was still the occasional case of a girl hoping to do the same by falling into the arms of some supposedly rich emigrant she didn’t even know, and who, not infrequently, turned out to be a cruel, penniless bastard. Now we take it for granted that, in order to fall in love with someone, you have to get to know them, to live with them, to let them become a daily presence, someone you miss if he or she goes away, and, as I say, we only saw my sister, my brother-in-law and their children at breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays, the days when my father and I used to get up a little later. During the week, I would really only see my nephews at night, in the room I had to share with them, both of them asleep in the bed next to mine. I found them annoying while they were in the house, but missed them when they’d left. With the advent of the Internet, the old custom of long-distance courtships has, in part, been revived; adolescents—and older people too—show each other arousing photographs, this is my cunt, this is my dick,
SEVEN AND A HALF INCHES
, they talk dirty in emails and get excited, watching each other on the computer screen jerking off (have you got a web cam?) or on their cell phone, more or less as happened before (the usual thing: text and images, the ways in which we humans have chosen to present ourselves to others have remained unchanged for millennia. Before, heirs to the throne would send an oil painting, a locket containing a portrait and would accompany these with a letter, as I said: text and images), but now everything happens with more immediacy. In the past, you’d have had to be the Marquis de Sade or, at the very least, Casanova to write such filth. In the photo you can’t even see her little turned-up nose or his Brylcreemed toupee. I occasionally join these chat rooms and pass myself off as someone else, attractive thirty-six-year-old lawyer, 5' 11", 140 pounds; single forty-year-old architect seeks sex; sometimes I even pretend to be a woman and flirt with various dickheads who say I really excite them and even claim to be falling in love with me. When you check that particular email address months later, you’ll still find messages from them. They miss you. I know you don’t want anything more to do with me, they sob. I imagine them suffering, and they deserve to. If you don’t even really know the people you’ve lived with for decades, how can you possibly trust someone hiding behind a screen? The script is always pretty much the same: given what you’ve told me about your tits and ass, you really sound like my type of woman; besides, whenever I receive a message from you, I always feel that we’re two beings who understand each other, twin souls. I’m sending you a couple of photos of my cock, in one it’s relaxed. Not bad, eh? How would you like to lick it? The head sticks out a bit from the foreskin, because when I was little, I had an operation for phimosis, and they removed a bit of the skin. In the other photo it’s erect, quite a decent-sized prick, don’t you think? Do you like it? Well, this fat shiny prick is knocking at your door. Will you open up? Or will I have to batter my way in? It’s all yours. It will enter you up to the very hilt. I want you to feel it deep inside you. I can’t send you a photo of my ass, because I can’t work out how to take one on my cell phone. I’d have to ask someone else to take the photo for me and who could I ask? But it’s nice and firm and perky. And as you can see, my stomach is pure muscle, a real six-pack. When you send me a photo of your face, I’ll send you one of mine, and may I know where you live? You say you live in this same province, but you haven’t said whether you live in the capital or in a village. Why don’t you want to tell me the name of your village? Why so mysterious? Don’t you trust me? You probably live next door. That is the mechanics of communication. With a few variants: if instead of presenting yourself as a muscular male chest in the prime of life, you pass yourself off as a young girl with small, firm boobs, then the mature married men will immediately start buzzing around, predatory pedophiles, just how young are you, are you sure you’re telling me the truth about your age, I bet you’re older, more like nineteen, no fourteen-year-old girl would talk like you, unless, of course, you’re very advanced for your age. Has someone already given you a good shafting or is your little pussy not yet open for business? I bet you’ve been fucked every which way, you little bitch. Fucking hell, a hot fourteen-year-old. I can’t believe it. Shall I send you a photo of my prick, you little slut? I bet you’ve never seen anything like it (the photo of the huge prick will have been downloaded from some Internet archive). On the other hand, if you adopt the personality of a mature woman, your inbox instantly fills up with propositions from excited little boys who want to have access to what they think of as the wisdom of some remote future. The fetish of experience. All of this has very little to do with love and, if you press me, not much to do with sex either. It’s all a lot of hot air. If you want to fuck someone, just find a prostitute, male or female depending on your tastes, but don’t spend all day sending little messages in order to get aroused. And besides, love, or whatever you want to call it, is something else entirely: if even the normal way of doing things doesn’t work—meeting and getting to know someone gradually over the years—how is looking at a photo of a cunt going to do the trick, while you drink your morning coffee. I mean, putting sex aside for the moment, I’ve known my father for sixty-seven or sixty-eight years (ever since he came out of prison), and I still haven’t learned to love him. Most of the time I haven’t wanted to have anything to do with him, only on very rare occasions have I felt I understood him, and I could count the times we’ve achieved anything like closeness: I wasn’t the son he wanted, from him I almost never experienced the kind of warmth and energy I felt from being with my uncle when he used to take me hunting by the lagoon, when he would sit me on his knees to stick the stamp on a letter, when he made me a little wooden cart to play with—a catalogue of the toys of the poor: a stick between your legs is a horse you’re riding; a bird tethered by a piece of string is the pet I adopted as a friend, that I talked to and fed with little bits of bread soaked in milk, and whose sudden disappearance one morning I experienced as an act both of betrayal and abandonment, and over which I wept bitter tears. I presume the bird simply died, and that my mother removed it from view before I could see it, not realizing how much more upsetting it is for someone to leave without explanation, more troubling than death itself, which doesn’t depend on an act of will, which isn’t a decision made by the individual, at least not usually, but something that happens; and when it
is
the result of an individual decision, it causes infinite pain and remorse to the people left behind, because that’s a way of escaping, abandoning, punishing. What did we do to make him leave us like that? He had everything he could possibly have wanted, he could never have accused me of not loving him enough, didn’t I always treat him like a prince, cries the widow, I gave him the best food, the best armchair, the TV remote control. Why did he have to go and kill himself? That won’t be my problem. Leonor and Liliana, two birds of passage. The new pain covers up the pain left by the old wounds.
What my father taught me. At home: hold your knife and fork properly, you’ve got two hands, haven’t you, can’t you close a door without slamming it, what are those stupid posters you’re putting up, you’re ruining the walls with those push pins, the walls have got more holes in them than a colander. At work: that isn’t how you use a saw, you’ll slice your hand off one of these days, and then I’ll end up with a crippled son, yet another burden, it’s high time you learned how to use the glue without making such a mess. He always spoke harshly (spare the rod and spoil the child: always the threat of cruelty), drawing attention to my lack of skill and, above all, crushing any ambitions I might have, just as life had crushed his. What the victors from the civil war did to him, he did to me, the only son he had handy. I can’t say I’ve ever loved him. And I’ve paid for my refusal to fulfill the ambitions he placed in me. Just as the suicide kills himself because he can’t accept himself, he probably hated me because, while appearing to be his opposite (I never wanted to be an artist and never took any interest in his political aspirations), I’ve turned out to be just like him. My physique, though, is completely different; he was tall, slim, with an angular face and large eyes, and the intense gaze and the deep lines that have marked his face for decades now both contributed to giving him a vaguely dramatic air. I imagine women must have found him attractive. Women are attracted to men like that, men who seem full of inner life. Liliana says he’s still handsome even now, when he’s in his nineties; and when she looks at the wedding photo on the sideboard, she says again: He really was a very handsome man. But basically, he and I are identical. The same pessimism, the same idea that all men are nothing but a bag of shit tied up in the middle. I think it’s that idea that makes my postcoital depressions even worse: the sense that I’m drawn to that filth, that I’ve clasped one of those putrid bags of shit to me and released part of my own filth into it. I wonder why I even accepted this servile role, if, given that we’re just the same, we should have been associates or at least rivals on equal terms. It’s not easy to find the reasons, it’s not like opening up a corpse and finding heart, liver and spleen. Fears and desires are beyond the reach of scalpels. Although, to be honest, it doesn’t seem such a very grave fault not to love someone, after all, what does the word “love” mean? Most of us live together without feeling any need for an emotion we know nothing about until we read about it in novels or see it in the cinema. I think the fact that we don’t instinctively know what it is tells us that perhaps it’s something that doesn’t naturally exist in us, but is inculcated into us, imported. I think it was an old French philosopher who said that when a man declares his love for the lady marchioness—saying how much he admires her intelligence, her physical grace, her remarkable ideas, her sensitivity—what he’s really saying is that he can’t wait to screw her like a hot bitch. There is some truth in that. We confuse sympathy or pity with desire, we believe we want to cradle and protect when what we really want is to enter and violate. But that’s not true. I’ve often called Liliana “my child,” I’ve wanted to protect her, and that was quite different, a different kind of language. Despite what that French philosopher thought, language does put things in their place, either raising them up or dragging them down. Speaking well of someone confers elevation and nobility. I call Liliana what my father used to call his beloved Carmen. I say “my child.” My little child, my dear little child, my father used to say, kissing her. You’re going so far away, my child. To Barcelona. How lonely we’re going to be without you. That day was the only time I actually saw him break down in tears. The only time. Those words can’t possibly have been contaminated. Did you know that the flower of the coffee tree smells as sweet as orange blossom? It looks the same too, flowers like little white stars: all those plants, orange blossom, jasmine,
galán de noche
, or that colorful little flower called
dompedro,
all have a scent, but I think the flower of the coffee tree is the most delicate. In Colombia, we call a black coffee
tinto
, but here that means red wine. Your father reminds me of my grandpa, you know, I couldn’t say why exactly, he has the same serious face, the same rather sad eyes. He must have been a very good man, your father. It’s awful to see him like this. He has such kind eyes. What would you know, Liliana? You know about your own life, your own domestic sorrows of which I, too, know a little, because you’ve told me about them. Your sorrow touches me as if it were my own, makes me feel like embracing you, like drinking those warm tears that roll down your cheeks.
Piel canela
. Cinnamon skin. No, you don’t know that song, do you,
ojos negros, piel canela
, dark eyes, cinnamon skin, no, you’re too young, all I care about is you and you and you and only you, says the song. You’re my only child. I have no other. At least as far as I know, none that I recognize. I did have a child, but it never got past being a little cluster of cells. What does that mean, Señor Esteban? Ah, you’re laughing. I like to see you laughing, Liliana, not like the other day. Oh, the reason I was in such a state then was because I didn’t even have enough money to make the children their lunch, the shelves in the fridge were bare and the vegetable drawer was empty. My husband’s company hadn’t paid him his month’s wages, so it’s just as well you were able to lend me some money, because, otherwise, I don’t know what we would have done. Yes, I know about your problems, Liliana, for me you’re my child, and I’m a father to you, one you can talk to about anything. Your problems, your dreams, your desires. Just pay me back when you can. Money doesn’t matter. Or, rather, it’s money that corrupts everything, spoils everything, a bad father, a cruel father, but which—oddly enough—seems to bring together so many apparently incompatible lives. That’s one of its virtues. It has others. You could say that it’s a bad father who grants his children’s every wish, who spoils them. Without the cement of money, though, think of all the broken families, all the lives set adrift. They have loans and bills to pay, obligations to fulfill, and they remain bound together until death does them part, just as they promised; although there are a lot of people who can think of nothing better to do than spend every day bickering and generally making each other’s lives miserable, and they’re afraid to change a situation they consider safe because at least it’s stable. Resentment guarantees you company, and hurling insults at each other every night does confer a certain stability. People think: What’s the alternative? Being alone? To hear them talk you’d think that being left alone was the worst of all fates. Solitude, abandonment. Sad, threatening words. Terrible: just wait and see what old age has in store for you if you make the mistake of staying single. They try to frighten you. They say: If you carry on like this, you’ll be left all alone. How terrible to die alone, like a dog, they say. And that seems to be the very worst of misfortunes; you have to die, we all have to die, but we want to do so in company, not like a dog. Dying alone is so bleak, so shameful somehow, it reveals a lack in the human being (to use Francisco’s favorite and much more touching term), a lack that should remain hidden, swept away into the shadows, behind the screen they put around the bed in the hospital ward when they’re going to do something nasty to the patient. You could also say that dying alone reveals a certain arrogance, what you might describe as excess pride. You have to share, people say, in other words, go begging for affection, for sympathy, calling in old debts: I brought you up, fed you, clothed you, lent you money, did this for you, gave you that. Now it’s your turn. Take up the sponge, the antiseptic wipes, and start washing this grubby flesh of mine, give me back some of what I gave you. Pay me what you owe me. Success in life, what people call “a good end,” consists in managing to get everyone around your bed. Putting them to work, having a whole multitude ready to wipe your ass. The more the merrier. As if the intensive care unit were a Christmas party attended by all the family, that thrilling moment when parents, children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces and nephews burst into a rendition of “Silent Night,” with the cattle lowing and the shepherds watching their flocks, as if you weren’t lying there with your tubes, your probes, your oxygen mask and with more hypodermic needles in you than a modern-day St. Sebastian, or that poor bull in Tordesillas who is chased every year by village brutes armed with lances. What do you care about anyone else at such moments? Are they being pierced or lanced? Or is it a question—again we’re back in the realm of economics—of not wanting to perform something as moving as death to an empty theater. Exploiting it to the full. Generously allocating seats so that the audience can watch the death, a high-voltage show and a useful experience on life’s Grand Tour. Capitalizing on the energy of those final moments. Being alone or accompanied seems essential to give meaning to their lives. Bringing family members and neighbors in to see the burst blood vessels, the bruises, the ecchymoses, the endless lesions caused by all those pointed instruments, by the intravenous drip that perforates and blackens the back of your hand and through which they pump serums and poisons; the probes, the cannulae, the tubes that drain viscous fluids from some other part of your body; the suction pads stuck to your chest where the nurse has used an electric shaver to remove any body hair, leaving patches of whitish skin, the tangle of cables and tubes emerging from somewhere or other, including from your index finger, the ventilator they’ve stuck up your nose or through a hole in your throat, the metal of the stretchers and the IV drips, the plastic bags with their troubling liquids, serums and solutions that flow directly into the blood, the huge amount of money invested in the health industry. The visitors contemplate the dying man, unrecognizable now (he’s so thin, and his skin is almost gray, he won’t get out of this alive) and, as if in passing, they also admire the progress, the advances made in our hospital system in the ward for the terminally ill, they gaze, reverently, fearfully, at all that complex apparatus. And this vast input of skill is wasted if you experience and suffer it in solitude. My mother used to say to me: before I die, I want to see you married to a nice girl who loves you and who’ll take care of you if anything happens. You have to remember, my son (I was my mother’s son, just as Carmen was my father’s daughter), that right now you’re all set to go out and conquer the world because you’re a young man, because you’re healthy, the young only think about the present, they don’t notice the pages from the calendar falling one by one. You may laugh, but when the time comes, you’ll see how important it is to have someone by your side, how important affection is as the years pass. Someone to be with you and to clasp your hand in the final moments (although what other part of a dying man’s body would you be likely to clasp?). And while you’re listening to people talking like that, listening to your mother, you feel anxious, and you can actually imagine yourself being unable to get out of bed, lurching from chair-back to chair-back in order to move around inside the house, feeling your way along the walls to reach the toilet, your body drenched in sour, senile sweat; or choking on something, a piece of half-chewed meat, a sip of water, a breadcrumb, one of those pills you take for your blood pressure or for cholesterol or hyperglycaemia; you’re choking on your own spit: you cough, gasp for air, with no one beside you to slap you on the back or put their fingers down your throat to help you cough up the thing choking you, someone to call the ambulance or bundle you into a car and drive at top speed to the hospital or the nearest clinic. People think loneliness is the worst of all evils. What can I say? It may well be, because, in the end, loneliness—like nakedness, malnutrition, excessive heat or cold—is only a manifestation of the one real evil, a truly terrible evil, one that anyone with any intelligence should avoid at all costs, and that is poverty, yes, Liliana, poverty has been the only real evil since the world began, not that I’m telling you anything you don’t know already. What else were you running away from, what were you escaping from when you came to live here in Spain? The philosopher said: I am I and my circumstances. Exactly. Well, you’d better get used to the idea that “I” is the money that allows you to fund your circumstances; if there’s no money, you’re stuck with your empty “I,” a mere shell without any circumstances worthy of the name: and that opportune hand ready to slap you on the back to help you cough up the piece of half-chewed chicken currently blocking your epiglottis, that hand won’t be there (I don’t mean you, Liliana, how could you even think such a thing, I’m talking in general, I know
you
would never abandon me); on the other hand, if you have money, you can pay for company, for a nurse, male or female. Right up until the very last moment, you can pay for a chiropodist to buff away the hard skin on your feet and cut your toenails—a task that has become more exhausting each time you attempt it—and to trim your nails so that they don’t become ingrown, a delicate, expert fellow who removes your corns and treats the dangerous sores on the bottom of your foot which, because of your hyperglycaemia, threaten to become chronic, and which, if they fail to heal and begin to spread, can become gangrenous and might then lead to you having your foot or leg amputated; money allows you to pay for a masseur and a barber who cuts your hair and shaves you in bed, a pharmacist who gives you the most effective sedatives to help you up to heaven quickly, to hear the celestial bells and see the soft wings of the angels (did you know that in the church of a nearby village, they worship a feather from the archangel Michael’s wing?), and you can even afford to pay some gorgeous piece of ass (and forgive the crude language, Liliana) to give you a hand-job. And all this in a comfortable house or clinic in Lucerne, a lovely bright room with views of a lake, green meadows, the cows from the Milka chocolate bars and the snows of Kilimanjaro, while you recline on a memory foam (is that what it’s called?) mattress, on which you are dying like someone taking their four o’clock tea if you’re English or a pre-lunch beer and a dish of calamares