On the Edge (36 page)

That was the first time I’d spoken plainly to one of my children about what had happened to me during the war. He gave me a hard look and said:

“But I don’t want to be a cabinetmaker, and when I’ve finished my military service, I have no intention of working here or studying. Besides, my military service isn’t going to involve going into battle, this is peacetime, they won’t be sending me off to war, but to a barracks, and I see that more as an opportunity than a punishment, it’s a way of leaving home, escaping from Olba, meeting people, getting some training, because I’m going to get my driver’s license there, an all-purpose one for buses, trucks, everything, and then I’m going to ask if they can put me in the repair shop, so that when I get out, I can set up my own garage and become a mechanic. Military service will be like school for me. I’ve got it all planned. I can learn everything I need to know there.”

My eyes clouded over. It was all I could do not to slap him. I was torn between giving him a good beating and bursting into tears.

“Well, it’s up to you,” I said.

This son of mine has inherited his mother’s lack of guts, although I don’t think it’s really a matter of genetics, but more the times we live in. And the others? At least Esteban should turn out like me, even though physically we’re so very different. He’s more heavily built, a different physique altogether—he’s stronger and more imposing than Germán. I don’t know how bright he is, but he certainly has the physique of a man who can contain his will and his anger. But it irritates me to see him hanging around with that Marsal boy, I don’t trust that family an inch, I don’t even dare to tell him about what went on in the war, just in case he mentions it to his friend. He says they go to the Marsal house and listen to music. I told him I don’t want him to go there again, but he probably won’t pay any attention. I’ll have to talk to him one day and tell him how things were. And just who his friend’s father really is—so polite, so proper, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. And this business with Germán doesn’t help. As for Juan, I don’t know what to think, he’s too much of a child, and not just because he’s the youngest. But, as I say, what do body types or genes matter? All the children have lost the heads they were born with and been fitted with new ones, tailor-made—yes, it’s still going on. I live in my house with my wife and my children, and I feel like a stranger. It makes me ashamed to write this, but it’s as if I were surrounded by enemies in my own house. I so miss the conversations I used to have with my father, and with my friend Álvaro, but they’re both gone. Álvaro was a broken man when he came out of prison, I had a hard time too, but, perhaps I was luckier or just stronger, because when he got out, he was so embittered and so ill that he didn’t last long. I’ve learned to live with the bitterness and somehow stop it ruining my health. Anyway, I’m from another planet. That’s my choice, though, or the only choice available to me.

Stone carving seemed somehow a superior art, it frightened me, made me take a step back. Stone, I felt, was for truly great artists, and I really didn’t feel I qualified. Wood was different, I’d lived with wood my whole life, but stone was something else entirely. I told the teacher that I didn’t want to learn what he was asking me to learn. I felt I didn’t have the skills. I just couldn’t do it. The teacher tried to talk me around, saying that appearances can be deceptive: you’re the one in charge of the stone, you pick up the mallet and the chisel and you patiently measure and shape and work, file and rasp and polish: the stone is a compact mass that you can split or pierce using your own strength and with the help of the right tools. Sculptors can make anything out of stone, even the finest filigree. In Bernini’s statues of women, the stone becomes soft flesh into which a man can plunge his strong fingers. As with wood, the main thing with stone is to get to know it, know how to choose it, to know its density, its qualities, how it will behave, although that’s something we can never entirely predict. My teacher was right. The important thing with wood is to know how to season it, how to work it when it’s just dry enough, how to follow the grain, although nowadays I don’t know if even sculptors bear those things in mind, and, of course, we carpenters now work with wood we know nothing about, where it came from or how it was treated. Some stone is so very hard and so very difficult to work with—my teacher told me—that you’d think any statues made from it would be condemned to eternal life, but in no time at all they get worn away by water or changes in temperature or bacteria or fungus. Other types of stone, like the sort we saw in Salamanca, actually get harder when exposed to the elements. Salamanca was the one class trip we made during the Republic, thanks to a grant given by a Swedish or Dutch foundation, I can’t remember which now. But I’ve never forgotten that city, it was like a magnificent open-air sculpture museum made of a stone that can withstand the elements: San Esteban, the Cathedral, the university façade, the Patio de las Dueñas. The extraordinary sculpted figures covering entire façades, the beautiful color of the stone that changes with the light, pale in the morning and an intense coppery gold in the evening. Almost five hundred years after they were first carved, they’re still intact thanks to the quality of the stone, called Villamayor after the village where the quarry is located and from which they extract a stone that’s easy to carve when it’s just been cut, but which, with exposure to the weather and the passing of time, forms a kind of patina which, instead of attacking or dissolving the stone, as happens with other kinds of sandstone, preserves and even hardens it. It’s nearly thirty years since I saw Salamanca and yet, if I close my eyes, I think I can still see it.

“And then there are those impressive sculptures cast in bronze or iron, which we find so amazing,” the teacher went on.

At the school, they showed us the works of Mariano Benlliure, and I almost died of envy, he was still a fashionable sculptor then, despite his statues of the king. What I had done up until then was little more than what shepherds all over the world do, whittling the handles of walking sticks, I had worked with my father in the workshop, and he’d taught me various techniques, but what we were looking at now was art, although my biggest surprise came when we visited an altarpiece by Damià Forment in the School of Fine Arts; that was when I realized my teacher was right, wood really could compete with the grandeur and perfection of stone and metal.
My teacher told me: you’ve already worked with wood, so you’ve done the hard part, or do you imagine that Forment didn’t have enormous difficulties to overcome? As I said before, you have to understand wood, even more than you do stone, you have to find out what it can offer, its qualities, what it wants of you, where it’s leading you, the grain, the differences in density that alter millimeter by millimeter; it’s a warmer material than stone, there’s more of a flow of energy between your hand and what you’re sculpting, which is precisely why it often makes more demands on you, it won’t be deceived, it asks you to understand it, to care for it, it asks you what a friend asks at the beginning of a friendship; although I should say that, for me, the most beautiful material—my teacher was getting carried away now—because it’s the one closest to man, is even humbler than wood. I mean clay, which adapts itself to your hand, is easily marked, clay is a prolongation of yourself, after all, you yourself are clay and will be clay again one day. When you work with clay, you understand that. You realize that you are dust and will return to dust. A fragile creature working with a fragile material. And yet, in books, we see those terracotta figures from Crete or made by the Etruscans—still beautiful after thousands of years—and which, by their mere existence, show that, with intelligence and hard work, the fragility of man and clay becomes strength. Stone and metal won’t necessarily last longer than clay. When you finish making a clay object, you have the feeling that you’re letting go of a part of yourself. Rodin modeled his sculptures in clay, that was Rodin, then he cast them in bronze and it became industrialized.

At the art school, we used to go to class equipped with a sketch pad, an inkwell, a pen, a pair of compasses and a triangle
.
We learned by drawing the capitals and bases of Greek and Roman columns (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan), we copied engravings from Vignola’s treatise on architecture, we copied the Piazza Sant’Ignazio in Rome, the Pantheon dome, the Parthenon frieze, the elevation of the temples of Paestum, the relief work on the Ara Pacis Augustae
.
I drew all those things and yet I’ve never seen any of them, I’ve never been to Rome or to Southern or Northern Italy, I’ve never really left Olba, and both the desire to see those places and the possibility were buried the day they put me on a truck and sent me to the Teruel front at the age of seventeen, part of the so-called diaper brigade. When I came home on my first leave, I tore up all those drawings—my fingers gnarled from the cold and full of cuts and calluses from digging trenches with pickaxe and spade, and my ears still ringing with the noise of the bombs and shells that had fallen around me, and I was pursued by images of the frozen corpses you stumbled over at every step and the screams of the wounded, operated on in the field hospitals without any anesthetic, and the moans of the dying being carried along on stretchers, I felt like crying or screaming too, even though I wasn’t wounded and no one was sawing my leg off; more than anything, I felt like running away. I did weep as the truck took us back to the front that first time, leaving the fields of Olba behind. My uniform fitted me better than it had my father, but I didn’t see him that time, my leave didn’t coincide with his, in fact, I never saw him again. But I didn’t know that then. On some nights, lying on my camp bed, I felt as if my head would explode and I trembled more with fear than cold, and had to repeat the word “deserter” to myself over and over in order to stop myself from getting up and running away. Fear of the bombs and the bayonets. More horrible even than being blown up by a bomb was finding yourself face to face with an enemy, the bomb requires nothing of you, there’s nothing you can do, your fate is sealed, but in hand-to-hand combat you are the one who has to act—and my greatest fear was that I might discover I belonged to the secret army of cowards. It troubled me to think I might be a potential coward, although, with time, I realized that any man who finds himself dragged into a war, any man, that is, with a glimmer of intelligence or an ounce of sense, is a potential coward. It’s only human to want to desert and utterly absurd to decide to stay there waiting to get drenched in blood, yours or someone else’s. Not even ideas can drive that thought out of your head. Some will say that you’re fighting hard because you know you’re fighting for a good cause, but that’s not true. Only someone who has been there can speak about these things, only someone who has had that experience can know what I’m talking about—and I’m making no distinction between the people on either side—just whoever was actually there, dragging the weight of his body over those hard, icy rocks—those harsh landscapes of apparently fragile glass: having lived through all that creates a mysterious bond with the enemy, with the man who was and has continued to be your enemy, it transforms him into an accomplice, a comrade, and being transformed into your enemy’s comrade makes everything seem even more unsavory, culpable, absurd, cruel and senseless, but that’s in hindsight, when you—on both sides—know what you’re talking about and despise the ignorance of those who weren’t there and cannot know and yet who speak about war and, like parrots, repeat words like heroism, moral courage, self-sacrifice. Your enemies also know this, although they have won and have continued their cruel behavior because victory is a potent drug that makes you forget everything, creates new feelings, while mutilating and anaesthetizing others, and unleashing pride and greed; as the victor, you want peace to repay you many times over for all that you put into the war, you feel that peace is your personal property. They certainly felt and behaved like proprietors, and yet they know more than all of the people on your own side who stayed here, they understand you better than your family, than your fellow travelers who were lucky enough—or clever enough—to be posted to the rearguard, to barracks, hospitals, offices, armories, places where they weren’t obliged to fire a single shot in the three years that the war lasted. I missed the first two years, but had to endure the last. I looked at my hands and thought about those two tools, simultaneously hard and flexible, capable of working, sculpting, caressing, but also of punching, smashing, killing. I know that, nowadays, hands are worth less and less, many things are done by turning a knob, moving a lever back and forth, hitting a key, pressing a button, but, at the time, hands were still man’s greatest gift, binding him to the creator god, part of the skills given to man by the great sculptor of the universe, whom we know does not exist (although my father used to say: never forget your head—your hand is a like a pair of pliers, just a tool—but the head
is
the man, the seat of man’s mechanism, of understanding, desire, willpower, the ability to withstand the very worst).

END OF THE NOTES WRITTEN BY ESTEBAN’S FATHER ON THE BACK OF THE CALENDAR.

P.S. When, in a few days’ time, they come to clear the house and take the furniture to the municipal warehouse or to some other place designed to keep all the repossessed goods of the last two years, no one, needless to say, will notice this 1960 calendar lost among the piles of papers, invoices, delivery notes, catalogues, newspapers and magazines. Before the furniture is auctioned, which will happen some months later, the men will empty desk drawers and cupboards of any useless objects and throw papers and items of clothing into the garbage dump, where they will be burned along with other detritus. But that won’t be for a few months.

It was impossible to patrol that labyrinth of water, mud and reeds. The pursuers set fire to the vegetation, intending to smoke out the fugitives, to flush them from their burrows as if they were animals (which they were), dogs were sent in along with the patrols that squelched through the mud, but it proved too costly to track the fugitives down, among the pools, bogs and tiny islands that turned out to be nothing but clumps of plants set adrift or vegetation rooted to the lagoon bottom, and, after all, the eight or ten desperados who had taken refuge there presented no real threat, they were not—as they were elsewhere—guerrilla fighters, but, rather, a handful of cornered, desperate castaways, more dead to the world and more forgotten than those who really had died many years before and whose photographs and names their descendants could see on their headstones in the cemetery, although a few women did continue to make secret visits to the marsh to see their husbands or boyfriends. Locals would see them disappear off into the reeds and return, at nightfall, a couple of days later. As children we heard others mention these men under their breath, when they had probably all long since died, and we imagined them then to be amphibious beings with membranes between their fingers, a kind of web-footed creature covered in scales like the sad aquatic beast from a movie I saw a few years later,
Creature from the Black Lagoon
, beings condemned to endure a bestial life. Some chose suicide. A revolver pressed to the temple. Or perhaps the muzzle of a rifle placed in the mouth: they would take off one alpargata (although, by then, they were probably barefoot, their alpargatas having long since been eaten away by the damp) and use their big toe to squeeze the trigger. Their comrades would bury them somewhere, or their corpses would be left exposed to the elements, their flesh devoured by animals, and time would eventually cover their bones in mud and scrub. But that wasn’t the story my father kept in his head; for him, the life of the marsh fugitives had a nobler aura. I caught a certain note of satisfaction in his words when he spoke to me of those who had shot themselves: they were not poor beasts worn down by despair, but the only locals who still had the right to call themselves men. Caked in mud, bearded, half-naked, wearing only rags or a loincloth made from the remnants of old clothes or woven together from leaves. He himself had not had access—or else had relinquished the chance to have such access—to that moment when you are absolute master of your own destiny—that moment when you grip the barrel of a rifle with your teeth, when your lips kiss metal. That, for my father, was the moment when a man was almost a god—the only real contact with freedom that life afforded. And his family, we’d been the ones who had forced him to linger on as a lesser being. Well, today, Dad, I agree with you: you’ll never be the master of your own fate, you’ll never be closer to being entirely your own man, the dictator of your own agenda. You have accepted that you’ll never succeed in opening the eyes of a dead child, not even a god can do that, but you can snatch back from death its arbitrary power, by imposing an order, a time and a date: I may have no control over my life, but I do have control over how long my life will last, I own that decisive moment. No greater power has been given to us—we are able to close forever eyes that would otherwise remain open. Whatever priests, politicians and philosophers may say, man is not a bearer of light, he is a sinister breeder of shadows. Incapable of giving life (how can I say this, when I myself came so close to creating life and when humanity continues ceaselessly to reproduce, but I know what I’m saying), he can kill at will. The greatest power a man can wield is that of taking away life. Squeezing the trigger and seeing the bird that had been flying swiftly across the sky suddenly drop like a stone to shatter the mirror of the water. I close my eyes and listen to my father, the noise of his false teeth crunching their way through a lettuce leaf, grinding away at a cookie. That noise gets right inside me. It’s like the sound you hear when you step on a cockroach. Those grinding teeth, the smell when I remove his incontinence pads, his eyes fixed on mine, although I have no idea what lies behind them. The old may have poorer memories than the young, but they are also the ones who forget least. The soft mud, the smell of putrefaction. Into my head come memories that belong to me because I myself amassed those memories, along with others I inherited, but which are no less vivid for that, part of the vortex of a life: they whirl past on a carousel, protagonists and bit-part players, and not only them, because, this touring theater company of mine takes with it the trunks containing the costumes and the crates containing the scenery for all the plays that are to be put on, and yes, the props as well: there are the faces, the gestures, the voices (yes, I can hear all those people talking, there’s no point covering my ears), but there are also the clothes they wear or wore; the rooms in which they lived, the furniture. My nightmare includes both the façades of the houses and the interiors with their own particular smell, because every room has its own smell; the landscapes, the sounds, the light that changes depending on the time of day or night, the temperature—hot or cold, the dense air, the cloying humidity of evening—the languor that fills you as you watch the rain snaking down the window pane, my mother holding the iron close to her face to see if it’s hot enough, or sprinkling the clothes with a few drops of water that sizzle into nothing as the iron touches them; Uncle Ramón’s red eyes as he comes down the brothel stairs, feeling his way along the wall, and when he fastens his seat belt on the passenger side and watches through the window the soul-less warehouses, the places where neon signs flash on and off day and night, the shadows of the orange trees, the emerald-green rice fields, their glow prolonged by the last rays of sun as if the greenness itself were giving off light rather than receiving it, the reeds and the bulrushes.