“What a great idea! Yes, you’d have to wait your turn, like you do in the supermarket, with those numbered papers that they give out at the fish store to make sure no one cuts the line, so you’d know when it was your turn to spend a little time with the Lord, but to do what? Imagine all those people waiting like vultures to be alone with God because they’ve seen Him in paintings and pictures looking so handsome, with that long, fair hair of His; and what if, instead, you were with God all the time, just you and him, alone, because there was enough God for everyone, which is what they say about the host, and he was everywhere all the time and with everyone, every single individual, then what would you do alone together, go back to your old ways? Another husband, but with the major disadvantage that he would never die. I mean, after your experience with Wilson, would you ever marry again? The prospect of widowhood has been woman’s one great consolation. Did you know that for every widower, there are ten widows?”
“It’s a bit less than that now, what with cancer and accidents, because women smoke more, work outside the home and travel alone and sometimes crash the car on their way back from the supermarket or from work. But, yes, ten times more widows than widowers.”
“It must be even more that way in Colombia, do a quick headcount and think how few men are left, you know they can’t resist a shoot-out there—as people say: what’s a party without a death or two? No, to be honest, I don’t find the Christian heaven very convincing. Apparently, Arab men get seventy houris each when they die, and that would be exhausting for any man, not even drug dealers want that, because they’re not really into sex, they’re too coked up, they tend to toy with girls, they beat them and torture them, because they like to see them suffer, to see the look of fear on their faces, they even film them on their cell phone or camera, yes, coke makes men horny, but then they can’t get it up, and the poor girls pay the price, I mean, have you seen what they do to girls in Mexico? They kill them and make videos of the poor things dying. We women aren’t easy to put up with or to please, I mean, if you really like a man, you never tire of fucking, you’d like to have him inside you all the time, but there, in that Arab paradise, I think the same thing would happen as what goes down on those drug-dealers’ ranches, it would be a paradise for the kind of man who enjoys seeing women suffer and where it’s always the man who gives the orders. The priests say that, in heaven, there’s no unemployment and no poverty. Well, I think you should name as your household god your other brother-in-law, the one who sorted out your paperwork and has come back now with dollars in his pocket, and who, I hear, is doing very nicely, thank you, although it’s probably best not to ask how. Hang on to him, pray to him. Ask him to divide himself up like the God of the sacred hosts, a little bit of his body for each of us, and meanwhile, grab your own little piece, don’t let him escape.”
“I don’t believe in God for myself, but I want to believe in God for my children’s sake, they’re so small and helpless. I want to be sure God won’t abandon them, just as I don’t want their teachers to leave the school. I know them, I talk to them, I know they’re good people and care about the kids. Yes, God is a service I can’t do without. If you can’t entrust your children to God, who can you entrust them to? Who else is going to love them in this god-awful place? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Some pervert probably. Poor little things. I have to make sure they’re in good hands.”
He gets his servants to do the shopping, even if all he needs is some bread or a newspaper, he sends the maid or the gardener who looks after the courtyard, the kind of big courtyard you only find in the old houses built here originally for the wealthy bourgeoisie; it’s got a palm tree, a jacaranda, orange trees, an araucaria; and there’s a pergola overgrown with a thick thatch of bougainvillea and jasmine that provides protection from the sun’s rays for two wicker chairs, upholstered with cool cotton cushions and cream-colored antimacassars embroidered with flowers; it’s one of the few courtyard gardens left in Olba. He’s had it restored so that it’s just as it was when the Civera family lived here, in the fine tradition of all bourgeois families. Yes, he sends the servants, even though the bakery and the newsstand are only a couple of hundred yards from his house. He gives—or wants to give—the impression that he hasn’t left much behind him despite all the years he spent in Madrid, and all the traveling he’s done. He doesn’t seem to have many visitors, although he may be in touch with people by phone. He doesn’t bring his cell phone to the bar with him, which, for a modern-day man, indicates little or no work activity and a complete absence of any social life. There are, of course, those escapes from Olba, about which he says nothing, but which leave the blinds of his house closed for weeks at a time. In our conversations, he occasionally mentions the person who was his wife—she wanted, she did, she decided, she would have liked, she couldn’t bring herself to—and I find it odd that I feel nothing, no vibration, no inner stirrings, no tremor. I slam down the double six on the marble table top or strike the table with the back of my hand when I throw down a card with the angry gesture all players affect. It’s a way of saying “I’m a man,” a faint memory of when these games were played by armed men. Francisco mutilates her lovely name, Leonor, abbreviating it to Leo, and, in doing so, he makes it ordinary. It seems incredible to me that a writer should show such a lack of sensitivity. After all, he calls himself a writer, so you’d think he’d be aware of the importance of words and their music. Or is that mutilated name part of a demolition strategy that continues beyond death? Making it clear that, without him, she is not a complete woman, not the woman who got out of the car, keeping her knees together and showing off her elegant high heels, her beautifully cut skirt, and, a moment later—when she got to her feet after that initial gyratory maneuver that allowed her legs to appear first—her patterned silk blouse or a tailored jacket in a soft pastel shade. Not a trace of the original stuff she was made of. She was another woman, an outsider with no history. What was their relationship like during all those years when I hardly had any news of them? Did they continue to lie together, to interpenetrate, to form that shameless eight-limbed creature I cannot bear to imagine? A deformed beast, a monstrous graft, because while she continued to be Leonor, I was no longer me. So many years have passed, and I still reject the image of those two well-lubricated, tongue-and-groove pieces pistoning away, an action I knew so well, and yet in which one of the parts has been replaced by another, just like when you take your car into the garage to be repaired. Were they in love? Did they feel affection, friendship, camaraderie for each other? Or desire? Or is that just another way of saying the same thing? The question that wounds me most is: did they desire each other right until the very end, with her ill and him penetrating her, rising and falling above her until she could no longer move? (I read in a newspaper that, in Egypt, they want to make it legal for a husband to have sex with his wife’s corpse, a kind of macabre farewell), or did they focus, above all, on maintaining shared strategies, business deals and bank accounts? No one will ever know. It’s part of what I don’t know and will never know, like the names I’ve lost along the way and whose forgetting provokes such foolish anxiety in me when I wake in the early hours, along with the anxiety of knowing that, however much I might want to, I will never see Liliana when she’s fifty or hear her fifty-year-old voice. My nocturnal apnea. The return to wakefulness, that hand held out in extremis to pluck you from the grave into which you were falling. My sudden awakening. In the middle of the night, the image comes back to me of the two of them locked together, a single body, and then I feel as if I’m suffocating. One more night. I sit up in bed and fumble for the light switch. I’m drowning in all the stuff leaking out from that crack in the floodgate of my memory, the tank containing everything that was and that is now draining away. It seems that only the most painful things are destined to remain. I read somewhere that the cross was originally a representation of the sexual act: the horizontal, the woman’s body; the vertical, the man who has her nailed down. The cross that, for a time, was composed of the two of us, Leonor and me. The cross that kept me nailed to Olba, or that I’ve come to think of as the excuse that kept me nailed to Olba. Did they live permanently nailed to that cross as we did during those months of our youth? If that worked for them, then everything else must have worked too, the overwhelming power of sex, although now that I think about it, that’s not true, it certainly wasn’t in our case. She always aspired to something more. I couldn’t understand it at the time. When Francisco talks to me about her, it’s the plenitude of the cross he’s trying to express, that he wants me to believe, but, at this stage, nothing he can tell me is of any help. The mark of her teeth on my neck, her tongue drilling into my ear, her nails digging into my back, the drumming of her heels on my buttocks, the hoarse, rattling moan. That is my story, reserved for my own exclusive use. That’s how it was and how it ceased to be. Anything that Francisco can tell me now is an entirely biased, mutilated version. I would need to know the part he doesn’t mention, what he didn’t see, doesn’t want to see or couldn’t. Just as I couldn’t see what it was that suddenly drove us apart. To see through the eyes that gazed at him—the same eyes I used to gaze into as I thrust deep inside her, eyes that once gazed back at me—secretly hoping to confirm that what I see is the memory of a relationship that wasn’t even unhappy (because that would at least grant it a certain nobility), but simply banal. That consoles me. But those eyes are no longer here, they’re nothing but darkness. I can’t retrieve what they saw of me. But you said you loved me, Leonor. She laughed: People say all kinds of things when they’re fucking. It’s all part of the game, just as we play tute, brisca and dominoes. And when Francisco, for whatever reason, mentions her name, I feel not a tremor, not a flicker of emotion, I remain as cold as a slab of fish or as a scaly reptile, but I see her just as I can see her now as I walk over the soft, damp, tender grass, so well watered by the autumn rains (it rained torrentially a couple of weeks ago, the last of the season’s storms), a face, a body that moves and breathes behind glass: her hair floats around her head, weightless, unreal. Her skin has a greenish, bluish quality. Fish in an aquarium look like that, surrounded by that special, underwater light, a milky, fluorescent mist. Yes, her hair moves with the weightlessness of the inhabitants of an aquarium. Although now, this vision of Leonor is more like a melancholy echo of the voice hammering away inside my head, the voice of Liliana, who is still dense, fleshly matter:
¿le provoca un tintico, Señor Esteban?
Ah, you laugh now, but the first time I said it, you protested, because you thought I was offering you
un tinto
,
a glass of red wine in the middle of the morning, when what I was offering you is what we Colombians call a
tinto
, a cup of coffee. A coffee made from beans grown in the shade of the guamo trees. Do you know what a guamo tree is? Of course you do, I’ve told you before. The guamo trees are the ones that shade the coffee plantation. They protect the plants from being scorched by the sun, just so that you can drink this
tintico
I’m making for you now. We speak the same language, but we speak differently, people say it’s all Spanish, but we call our mosquitoes
zancudos
and we call you Spaniards
godos
, but that’s not a nice word. It’s a bit like here when you call us
conguitos
or darkies. The guamo trees protect the plants from the harsh sun. They shelter the coffee plantations, just as you have so often sheltered me. The shade protects us. And that voice, your voice, is leaving me alone and helpless: Fuck you, Liliana. Fuck you and your guamo trees.
How old am I? Four or perhaps five? I’m sitting on my uncle’s knee, watching as he folds the sheet of paper and hands to me, like a lavish gift, the possibility of being the one to put it in the envelope, then stick on the stamp that will allow this newly written business letter to reach its destination: I can feel again the tremor of excitement as I run my tongue over the sickly, gluey surface and give the stamp a good thump with my fist so that it’s firmly stuck down; once that’s done, I gaze, entranced, at the colored design. I wish I could keep it for my collection, but these stamps are all destined to leave, to disappear into the mouth of the box in which I myself post the letters. Whenever he sends a letter, he always lets me lick the stamp with its sickly taste of glue, and then thump it down firmly with my fist. I don’t like dull stamps bearing the face of some old man—now I know they were politicians, writers, painters, musicians or scientists—but sometimes they’re brightly-colored and represent flowers, birds or flags. At night, I can feel Leonor nibbling my ear in the darkness of the movie theater, the damp, moving warmth of her tongue tickles the cartilage, and that warm, vibrant, viscous feeling spreads like a shudder through the rest of my body and makes me catch my breath. Adrift in the night are old photos, me and my classmates standing outside the school, or me sitting alone at my desk with a pen in one hand and the map of Spain on the wall behind me. Photos of her, of Leonor: in one she has long, shoulder-length hair. As the poet says: We sing what we have lost. She’s wearing a very short skirt, in a pale fabric, and a floral print blouse; the top two buttons are undone to reveal a hint of cleavage. In another, she’s with her father—she gave me that photo because I told her it was the one in which she looked the prettiest; her father: dark shirt, large hands as hard and stiff as if covered by a carapace, a man of the sea. I burned those photos. They’re only there in my head now, where they will remain for just a few hours more. In my memory, Leonor’s brothers are also hard, sinewy youths, I still see the older one occasionally, he’s a fisherman in Misent, like his father; I remember the other two wearing overalls: they would leave the garage with them on, I remember them walking home or standing chatting in the local bar. Of the two, one died young, and the other opened his own business in Misent—apparently, later on, he bought my brother’s garage from my sister-in-law Laura after my brother died—and now he owns a car dealership, I remember them then as serious and compact, pure sinew: they hadn’t yet acquired their father’s opaque air, his breadth or weight. He reminded me of the French actor, Jean Gabin; the older brother, Jesús, the fisherman, has filled out since, grown heavier; the second brother, José, never reached the solidity to which he was predestined by his genes, because destiny cut short the evolutionary process—he died test-driving a car on the sharp bends of the road to Xabia; that was over thirty years ago now, his slender, muscular body lying, headless, next to the car, I didn’t see him dead, but others have talked about it hundreds of times in the bar, describing his death in detail; so many people claimed to have seen it that I ended up seeing it too, and can see it now: his decapitated body and the overturned car, its wheels still spinning. So much time has passed since then, and here I am, seeing these images in the dark, seeing Leonor, who always looked like a modern young woman, as if she belonged to a different family, she had a more urban beauty, as if, right from the start, she was destined to escape from here; she had, above all, a slightly affected vivacity: in another of those now non-existent photos, you can see it in her face, in the way the neck of her striped polo shirt—she looks like a petite urban sailor—reveals the soft skin at the base of her throat, her short hair, she’s a little sailor-girl straight out of a sewing magazine or a musical, and not the daughter of a fisherman, which is what she was; not the daughter of a boat-owner, but the daughter of a fisherman whose wages depended on how much fish he caught each day, the kind of people who formed a small, marginal population within Misent, or, rather, in one corner of Misent, because they lived right on the sea front, in small, crammed-together houses protected from storms by low dikes built parallel to the façades so as to shield the steps that led up to the front door on the upper floor, where they lived and had their furniture and any objects of value, because every year, come the autumn storms, the ground floor was flooded. I can see faces and bodies, as well as the old houses that were demolished years ago now, I can also see the sea, which I don’t think resembles today’s sea, something has changed, perhaps the color, no, that’s not possible, how could the color of the sea change? That’s absurd, but the sea does seem different. Alien. Faded. Perhaps my capacity to distinguish colors has changed. The marsh remains the same in its degradation, when I look at it now it seems identical to how I remember it; it smells the same. In my nightmare, it’s gradually taking on the form of a huge, dark hand that I can see from the air, as if I were riding on the back of one of those migrating ducks. The duck flutters its wings and shakes its back, as if trying to dislodge me and hurl me into that dark watery hand—that’s another night when I wake up, anxiously reaching for the light switch. It takes me a few attempts to find it. I grope around. I’m submerged in the dark water of the lagoon, the giant hand is squeezing me, until, at last, I find the switch. Only then do I relax, make myself breathe regularly and try to empty my mind, but I can’t. A while ago, I was the little boy dozing peacefully, lulled by the dull regular thud of the iron on the blanket covering the ironing board: the child closes his eyes and has a sense that this is true happiness, the warm, damp, soapy smell filling the room in which he lies drowsing while his mother does the ironing, the moment when his mother holds the iron close to her cheek to see whether the iron is hot enough, and soothed now by the light of the bedside lamp, I am the old man who closes his eyes and begins to breathe more easily because the woman is ironing by his side and singing to herself,
ay mi Rocío, manojito de claveles,
she has a very clear, almost childish voice,
capullito florecido
, and beneath the blanket, all is safe and certain, warm as a nest, I can close my eyes now, because the woman with the child’s voice is protecting me, and a limitless future opens out before me. I can be whatever I want to be and achieve whatever I want to achieve. The old man splashing along the marsh paths feels a pressure in his chest that grows and thickens like the kefir the Turks use to ferment milk. I reject the old man’s anxiety. I want to be in those memories, to enjoy them before they vanish: my mother crossing my scarf over my chest before I set off for school. I can see the diaphanous light, the thin, fragile, winter light, like today; I can feel the cold air on the parts of my face not covered by my cap and earflaps and scarf; suddenly, it’s my father who’s at my side, watching how I hold the plane; he takes my hand so that I’m holding it properly, not like that, like this, he says, and his hand, that hand-cum-tool, grips mine like iron pincers, and his sour voice drills into my ear, but from behind comes my uncle’s voice, leave him to me, I’ll show him how to do it, and I immediately feel his large, warm hands, like a rough bird’s nest, enclosing mine. Simultaneously hard and soft. He never shouted at me, and I could count on the fingers of one hand the times he raised his voice above his usual grave, calm tone, my father never shouted at me either, or hit me, it was just that harsh voice, which seemed to emerge straight from the ill-shaven cheek that sometimes brushed roughly against mine. My father. Tomorrow, I’ll make him sit on the toilet until he has a proper bowel movement, and then I’ll give him a thorough wash. We must be clean, Dad. I wouldn’t want our trip to be sullied by such sordid details, by excrement and foul odors. We’ll go to the place where my uncle taught me to fish and to drink the clear water from the spring, the place where I caught just a glimpse of the thing we seem to have spent our lives looking for. It’s a shame, though, to poison the waters. Tomorrow: I’ll put on my latex gloves to remove his incontinence pad before turning on the shower, then take off his pajama top. I can’t help feeling a certain distaste when I press my bare chest to his. I sit him down on the stool, struggle to remove his pajama trousers, help him up, then remove the incontinence pad. The stench fills the bathroom. I put the pad in a plastic bag and tie it up before throwing it in the garbage can next to the sink. I hold his hands to help him walk. He’s in front of me now, I can see his back, I watch him stumble unsteadily forward and warily place his feet in the shower basin, excrement sliding down his thighs, I press lightly on his shoulders to make him turn to face me, all the time talking to him. He stares at me blankly, as if he didn’t understand what I was saying. He groans and moans and waves his hands about, rubbing his eyes with his fists: his shrunken chest, hard as a board, the wrinkled, bluish nipples of an exhausted mammal, his chest a cracked board that still has a troublingly youthful pallor. I have him in my grasp, I grab his shoulder, support him with one hand so that he won’t fall and, with the other, run the sponge over his face, I lift his chin, see his eyes sunk among the wrinkles and, in among the wrinkles, the whiteheads, like fossilized nodules of fat; I rub his chest, and I do so with unnecessary vigor, a vigor into which I channel all my anger and weariness at having to do this every single morning; I see the fuzz of hair barely visible beneath his navel, but which grows thicker around the pubis, gray hairs that immediately merge with the soap bubbles left by the sponge. I wash around his balls, and with the tips of two fingers, push back the foreskin of his penis and rub the place that rubbed against and entered my mother’s body, the topographical origin of me, the genesis of the lines on my face—partially disguised by fat—and the geography of age spots, more and more like his, on the backs of my hands. My father stares down at my gloved hand, with a look of astonishment that masks some unknowable emotion; I have the impression that the number of skin tags on his back and on his reddened buttocks—as wrinkled as those of a new-born baby—are increasing on a daily basis—and yet on his thighs and on the areas that are usually clothed and have never been exposed to the sun, the skin is surprisingly delicate, like marble, not newly carved Paros or Macael marble, but marble that has been exposed to the elements for centuries, exposed to the wind and the rain, which have worn it away and created a slightly porous texture, with a patina of curdled milk. I rub the rough sponge over his penis, a sponge that doesn’t so much rub as scrub. I begin gently, barely brushing the crinkled skin around his balls, but then rub harder, almost fiercely and his skin becomes covered in blotches, not red or pink, but a bluish or even intense iodine yellow, the color of stagnant or slow-flowing liquids, pent-up human fuel. The skin tags on my father’s body make me think of the ones that, for some time now, I’ve noticed appearing on the base of my neck, in my armpits and the inside of my thighs. If, when I take a shower, I look in the full-length mirror in the bathroom, I see reflected in the mirror over the wash-hand basin a mottled, milky-white back. My skin has the same deathly pallor as his. My brown hand stands out starkly against the white skin of this man rhythmically repeating the same feeble groans of complaint. I know it hurts, but I have to give you a thorough wash, I tell him as I continue scrubbing away at the areas that were covered by the incontinence pad. We have to wash away all the muck that gets lodged in the pores, so that you’ll be as clean as a new-born baby. If it was up to him, he would never bathe. Ever since he first began to lose his reason, even before he had the operation on his trachea, he’s developed a hatred of water; the struggle begins as soon as I start propelling him down the corridor to the bathroom. It’s sheer torture trying to undress him, he puts up a fierce resistance, folding his arms so that I can’t take off his pajama top and kicking his legs when I try to remove his trousers. He falls into a sulk each morning when I tell him it’s time for his shower. It seems that the slightest contact or pressure hurts him, and he complains when I grab his elbow and make him raise his arms so that I can wash his armpits. It hurts him to stretch up; his muscles—his dwindling muscles—are painful, like his joints. And yet, for his comfort, I always try to dress him in a bathrobe and in pajama trousers with a drawstring waist that are easy to get off; in summer, he wears just a light robe that reveals his blotchy legs. I look at his wrinkled hands, his gnarled, calloused fingers, with their irregular, deformed tips, the hands-cum-tools that have so often, pincer-like, gripped mine: the tip of his left thumb is missing, as is the tip of his right index and middle finger. The tip of my right thumb is missing too, I’ve also lost part of my left index finger, and my right index finger is somewhat squashed. Do you know any carpenter who hasn’t suffered these minor mutilations? The benign wounds of kindly St. Joseph’s peaceable profession. I look at those hands that were once strong and skillful, and stroke them chastely, as if I were simply washing them, but which I am, in fact, caressing. I suppress the urge to kiss them. Hands are no longer important, the concept of being good with your hands, once so respected, has vanished, things now are made by machines or made any which way by anyone—some better than others—you just have to see how clumsily the bar staff serves coffee or beer, sticking their thumbs in the empty glasses or the full plates. Waiters are incapable of carrying a tray properly. Hands no longer have the sacred importance they once had: they were necessary for work, but they also blessed and consecrated, hands were laid on the sick to heal them. When an artist, a writer, painter, sculptor or musician, was on his deathbed, a mold often used to be made of his hands. Used to be. Was. Were. Had. Everything is in the past tense. My mother is ironing, my uncle is making me a cart pulled by a little wooden horse, he lets me stick on the stamps and takes me to the fair. I see him at the shooting gallery, the butt of the rifle hiding part of his face. He’s aiming at a strip of paper on which is pinned a small tin truck. The festivals where colored Chinese lanterns were hung from the cables that hung above the dancers’ heads, the sort of lantern you could open out like an accordion and close again using the wooden sticks at either end, like flowers, and we children thought they were really beautiful. Bonet de San Pedro, Machín, Concha Piquer. the metallic clang of the bumper cars and the sparks crackling from the web of wires crisscrossing the ceiling. My mother is singing.