Between My Father and the King (21 page)

He fell asleep. Perhaps there was a storm outside; the sea was angry, spitting beer and salt in the darkness.

You will have to imagine that someone else is writing my story, for I can write only my signature as it is printed on my identity card. When I write my signature it must be done in secret, in my bedroom, where I perform all my most important and personal actions. Perhaps Fernando is writing my story? He is my smart friend who likes to show his browned skin to women, as proof of his health and his ability to march for days without food or wine; provided of course that the women march with him — the tourist women who are so impressed with his gallant ways and his white teeth and his tanned skin and the words of English which he learns from a set of gramophone records.

‘Goodnight,' he says to you every morning. ‘Goodnight. My tailor is not rich. My tailor is not rich.'

Fernando is very clever, and may cross the frontier anytime by bus or private car or on foot, on the main roads. That is because he has a country and his identity card will last him forever, and
no one will ever arrest him for pretending he is Fernando when he
is
Fernando.

No, I do not think he is writing my story. I do not know who is writing it.

As for me, I have received notice from the French Office and the Italian Office and the Spanish Office, that soon my identity card will be out of date, and I must prove that I am still myself, that I was born where I was born and when, that I am a dark-haired celibate of forty. They are not interested to know that I am a political refugee from my own country; that my mother, who was very fat — this wide, you can see by the way I hold up my arms — has been dead for many years; that my father still lives in Milan, near my sister and her family who are happy or unhappy; that in my life I have had no women but the street women who ask you to pay. Somehow I have not had good sense with women. On the days when the tourists are here, and it is full summertime with the English and American women wearing clothes to show their neck and the shape of their breasts, so that you want to reach out and touch, well, no matter how I dress myself up and promenade in the square, and smile and make soft whistlings after the tourists, they do not seem interested in me. I am poor; my tailor is not rich; I have no tailor.

I remember that one day I found an English woman and spoke to her. She was sitting at the next table in the café. She had been buying all the things that English women buy when they come here for the summer — prettily shaped glass bottles that break if you touch them too harshly; scarves painted with scenery from a hundred different countries; baskets, woodcarvings;
recuerdos
,
recuerdos
. Well, I do not speak English, but I smiled at this woman, and spoke, the first time for many months, in my own language — Italian. She looked unhappy and turned away. At first I thought it was because her lover had lately died and she was reminded of him, but tempted by my smile. Yet when I told
Fernando, who is much more clever than I, what had happened, how I had nearly got myself a woman, Fernando explained that there was food sticking between my teeth, and that the space between my trouser-leg and my socks showed that my skin was white, with little sores on it. My face is tanned, certainly, and my arms have big muscles from pulling at the trees, but my legs have little sores on them, from the time I lived in the concentration camp, in France.

No doubt Fernando will marry a rich English woman: no, he will not marry her, he will take her sightseeing over his country, and have wonderful amusements with her, in the sun. Or perhaps he will go with a French woman, for the English are cold, and press their lips together, and stare straight ahead, and they do not wear beautiful
talones
on their shoes.

Ah, some day I will find a woman who is my type. I will take her walking in the mountains, and after we have drunk our wine and eaten our bread and sausage and cheese, I will give her this ring that I keep in my bedroom, and promise her that I will earn one thousand francs a day, to marry her. But where shall we live? I have no country. Whenever I cross the frontier into Spain or France I must go illegally, through the mountain passes, the shepherds' way where they take the sheep before winter and the wild storms come. I must fill my wineskin, take my loaf of bread, and set out alone in my thin shoes, walking up and up, past the fields of dried tobacco sheaves, and the spilling foamy streams, and, if it is early spring, the full manured smell of the waiting cattle. On the way I pick the violets whose smell the snow has stolen, and the daisies; and I like to sit and rest under the terrible rocks that hurl themselves down, tomorrow and yesterday. I like to play with the lizards, throwing them crumbs which they dart after, their tongues flicking. They never learn that crumbs are not butterflies; they are never undeceived. What a fine day it is, I say. Soon full summer will be here and the cattle will blink from
the dark barns into the floating blue sky. And the pine trees will crash, dead and bleeding, and I will reach my arms around them and strip them of branches, and trample the foot-high tiny ones with their fuzz of purple flowers.

But too soon winter comes. Then there is no work. In the house where I live with Juan and Maria and the two children and the lodger with the gold teeth, there is no room to breathe. In the winter time Juan also has no work; you cannot build houses in the snow; the children are hungry. Maria fills the big bowl with water and puts it on the stove, and sprinkles flour in it, to make it thick and seem like something to eat, and we sit around that table with our fine flour and water, or in the morning with our bread and milk, and because it is so dark outside each one of us must think: This is the last winter of all. Last winter it seemed as if it were the last, and the winter before that, but we were mistaken. There is no mistake this time. This is the last winter.

We have finished talking, and we quarrel. The cat stays inside and messes in the four corners, and his fur falls out, day after day, and his eyes water and are red. The children catch colds and must stay in bed with the shutters closed forever, and always the bowl of eucalyptus leaves burning, burning, on the box by the bed. The littlest child calls out, Mama, Mama, Juan is drinking cold water, Juan is drinking cold water. They have no toys that the tourist children have. They read in their school books over and over that Cain killed his brother Abel; that self-sacrifice is good for the soul; that if they are not good their mama will spank them hard. I hear them reading, and quarrelling, and crying. Maria shouts at them, Juan shouts at Maria, and I shout at the children, or hit them. The man with the gold teeth is silent. Then he coughs and shows his private
joyeria
of teeth.

But at night, in the quiet, with the snow slipping from the roof and the sound of water flowing and falling, I can hear, in the room next to me, Juan and Maria making love. Will the time come, I
think, when I can find myself a woman?

Perhaps some day: I do not give up hope. The winter that was the last is not the last, and soon the shopkeepers begin to clean their windows and arrange their goods more carefully, and mark up the prices, and smile, being most polite to everyone. Then, when I know that the tourists are coming, I prepare my best suit for promenading in the square. Who knows? Ah, how well I am fitted out with mountains and snow and amusing lizards and pine trees — and memories —
there's
a rich tailor for you, in the sun and the wind and the sky, and in the long time ago when I played in the streets of Milan, and rode my blue bicycle in the races.

But now, without a country, and without a woman, I am poor. Don't you think that I am poor?

The back of the van swung open, netted and hinged, like a huge meat safe. Two men, heaving and struggling through the front door of the house, carried an unprotesting silent piano up the path and through the gate, and into the back of the van. Other furniture followed: plumpy floral armchairs, their tiny circular oiled feet whizzing round and round with shock; polished one-legged and two-legged tables, scarred with cigarette ash and the marks of ashtrays; a crippled kitchen stool; sealed teachests edged with dark silver, inscribed with exotic names in blue chalk.

Two children, a boy and a girl, stood on the side of the road, watching. The boy stood nearest the house, up against the fence, possessively, for it was his place. He held a pocket-knife which he kept snipping open and shut; and the blades, three of them, kept pouncing back. He ran his finger along the largest of the blades, carefully, just near enough not to slice his skin. The girl watched him; she had long dark hair drawn together at the back
and twisted through a rubberband.

The boy spoke, pointing to the knife.

‘It's to keep me quiet,' he said, ‘while we shift. It's got three blades, a corkscrew, and a spear.'

The girl glanced over at the men stowing the furniture.

‘Is your father bankrupt?' she said. ‘When people take your furniture away you're bankrupt.'

The boy did not take the remark as an insult. He was too well assured. He thought — it might have been a dream — but he
thought
he had heard someone say that his father could buy up the whole country if he wanted to; and seeing as he hadn't, it was assumed that he didn't want to. Pity, the boy thought, it would have been handy to have.

The girl persisted. ‘Where are you shifting to, then?' she said.

‘Up north,' the boy said. ‘The town's dead, there's no future in it,' he added precisely, echoing his father and his elder brother.

The girl looked puzzled and pulled at the end of her dark hair; the wind tugged at it too, blowing heavy with sand from the beach. The girl screwed up her eyes against the sand. She did not quite understand what the boy meant, but she had heard her own mother and father say the same thing. There's no future in it; the town's dead.

‘Grandma died,' she said. ‘Like this I can see red and blue railway lines and noughts and crosses. The dead people grow in the cemetery and turn into grass. It's tomorrow, isn't it?'

‘My grandma died too. What's tomorrow?'

‘The future.
We're
not shifting. And what are you shifting out of a new house for? I thought people stayed in houses until there was an earthquake or fire.'

‘It's not new, it's older than me.'

‘My mother said it was new. What's new then?'

But the boy was scarcely listening to her now. He was watching the men staggering along the path with a wardrobe, it was the best
wardrobe that they didn't use, and it had a tall mirror. He could see the pine tree in the front garden, bobbing about in the mirror; and the sky, and the sand blowing through the air; once or twice a man's face danced across the mirror, and cut clean through the pine tree, sharp as the blade of a pocket-knife. Then the men bore the wardrobe longways, and slowly, like a grandmother's coffin, with the mirror lying long and undisturbed and blue, facing the sky.

The boy put his pocket-knife safely in his pocket and turned to the girl.

‘How much do you get a week?' he asked.

The girl looked thoughtful.

‘If I make my bed and sweep the bedroom I get sixpence, but not always. Why, what do you?'

The boy exclaimed in derision, and drawing out his pocket-knife he again snipped open the largest blade, and jerked it securely into place.

‘You should press for a rise,' he said, using the words that came to him often now, and that he didn't always understand; but he liked the sound of them.

‘You should press for a rise, as things are today.'

He made an imaginary slice at the sky, carving his rightful share; and while he was about it he helped himself to the bright sea just visible over the sandhills, and to the part of the street that he would live in for half a day more. Then he turned to the girl.

‘Up north,' he said, ‘everything's different. They have pictures all day starting from early in the morning; there are machines that spout out chewing gum and bars of chocolate, standing just like postboxes in the street. I don't suppose,' he said grandly, ‘that you've been on a staircase that walks you to the top?'

‘No,' the girl said. ‘Have you got two pianos?'

‘No. That's an old organ. You work it with your feet, like running. See, it's got a mirror at the top for signalling your face.'

‘Why do mirrors signal your face?' the girl asked. ‘And do the
machines talk? And why don't you stay here, at Clinton? There was a dead dog on the beach last week,' she said temptingly. ‘And shells, I've got shells with pearls in them, pink pearls.'

The boy was not tempted. ‘It's of no moment,' he said, feeling the intoxication of high-up words that came, strange and complete. ‘It's of no moment; the town is as dead as mutton. If you like I'll let you come into our house now it's empty and you can walk in it, and hear yourself walking.'

The girl, screwing up her eyes and unscrewing them, not sure whether to give her attention to the railway lines or the pocket-knife or the now-empty house, tried hard to think of something wonderful that would cajole the boy into staying so she could play with him, and cut with his pocket-knife.

‘We're getting white rabbits,' she pleaded.

‘Rabbits! Come on, we'll sneak in and walk through the house, big and trampling.'

He thrust his pocket-knife away and, pulling the little girl's hand, went up the front path and in the open front door. The men were now sitting on a packing-case, drinking tea and eating scones that his mother must have bought for them at the corner shop. One of the men had a creek of butter running down the front of his dungarees.

‘Well, kids,' the first man said.

‘What's it like to be young,' the second man said.

The girl and boy took no notice. The boy said quickly,

‘There's scones. I know where.'