Blind Sunflowers (10 page)

They put the boy to bed and sat in silence in the darkened dining room. The silence was part of their conversation, because both hid their sorrows in it. The window that gave onto the courtyard was covered by a thick, blue velvet curtain, all that remained of former times (before they had sold everything that could be sold) when there had been a sideboard with the heads of medieval knights carved on its doors, an English porcelain dinner service, and a strange Murano glass fish with a gaping mouth. Despite this, husband and wife sat lit only by the dim light from the corridor so that no one would suspect there were two adults living in the flat.

As long as there was daylight, Ricardo Mazo could move relatively freely inside the flat, if he made sure he avoided going anywhere near the windows and balconies. The rooms at the back gave on to Calle Ayala, and opposite was a cinema, the
Argel
, which in the mornings was always empty. Ricardo took advantage of this to cautiously peer at what was going on in the street outside, to watch people inhabiting the spaces the city offered, chatting, greeting one another, scurrying here and there, or strolling at leisure, in ways he could immediately identify with. But after dark, Ricardo never ventured into a lighted room. He waited until the light in the corridor was off to go to the bathroom, and stole around so quietly that sometimes he even scared his wife and son. Everything was organised so that he did not have to step into the light anywhere.

‘I have to get out of here, to try to get over the border to France.’

Elena felt across the table for her husband’s hands. There was no point telling him again that it wasn’t possible yet, that he had to wait until the thirst for revenge had died down in Spain, that the Vichy regime in France
was deporting Spanish refugees by the trainload, and that when the time came, all three of them would go. She never again wanted to be separated from what was left of her family. Their eldest daughter, Elena, had escaped with an adolescent poet at the end of the war. They had never heard anything more from her, and did not even dare ask themselves whether she might still be alive.

Eight months pregnant, Elena had fled Madrid only a few months after the war had finished, following an apprentice poet who became a different person as soon as he started reciting Garcilaso.

The youngster was afraid he would be arrested because he had published a few poems – in the Pindaric mode, according to him – in
Mundo Obrero
and some of the Popular Army’s newsletters. They hid in the house of a former maid of Elena’s parents until they had a chance to leave Madrid clandestinely in a cattle truck bound for Valladolid. Since then, the two adults had no news of the couple, although they comforted themselves with the thought that they had succeeded in escaping.

Having to speak in a whisper inevitably leads to words drying up, to their being replaced by gestures and meaningful looks. Like a still voice, fear undermines sound, because the dark side of things can only find expression in silence.

My home was divided on two sides of a central corridor. The
building
itself was split into two halves: the flats with balconies gave on to Calle de Alcalá, while the less grand ones looked out on Calle Ayala. We lived in one of these.

Even though I could describe every inch of that flat, what I will always remember most about it are the windows, which loomed endlessly in our lives. They were the most fragile part of our sense of family. When they were open, I could only talk out loud to my mother; when it was night-time, I had to wait for my father to leave whatever room he was in before I could switch the light on. There was a third element which transformed this game of silences and darkness whenever it intruded: the noise of the lift.

All three of us had internalised the length of time it took from the moment the lift started up until it reached our third-floor flat. If it came to a halt on the second floor, or carried on higher up the building, everything went on as before; but if it halted on the third floor, not only was time frozen, but the air around us became a solid block until we heard the doorbell ring at one of the other three flats on our landing. My father, my mother and I could immediately distinguish between signs of life and voices that might mean danger, and those which were simply routine. None of us ever mentioned the silences produced by the sound of the lift, just as none of us said a word when, if anyone came to our door, my father went and hid in a built-in wardrobe hidden behind a dressing table and mirror.

This was not the reason why the wardrobe had been built. Before the war, taking advantage of the fact that one of the bedroom walls was askew, a triangular space had been created. On the front, a large mirror set in a dark mahogany surround formed the door of this improvised wardrobe. There was more than enough room for one person inside, standing up or lying down, and the wardrobe door hinges were concealed by an enormous rosary with huge wooden beads and a silver crucifix showing a tortured Christ who had such a look of pain on his face that I made sure I was never left alone in the room with him.

Apart from this, in the bedroom there were two iron bedsteads with metal grapevines at the head… an oblong mirror, and an enormous second wardrobe in three sections, with a huge
looking-glass
in the middle part that I used to gaze into dreamily and imagine a world where my right was its left, and vice versa. I remember my father described my confusion as being like ‘different points of view on how to see things’. This is where my mother and I kept our clothes. It smelled of moth balls. My father’s clothes were hidden with him in his refuge. I can still recall the smell in there. Since then, I have come across it in the kitchens of the poor, in filthy fingernails, in haggard looks, in those given up as lost by doctors, those life has brought low, and in military guard-rooms. It is not the smell of prisons: they smell of disinfectant and the dank smell of cold.

‘The boy isn’t going back to school. Tell them he’s ill.’

‘That will make them even more suspicious.’

‘We can’t ask him to put up with that nosey friar any longer. We have to change his school, or do whatever it takes.’

‘Don’t worry, between us we can manage that oily creature.’

The boy’s attempts at avoiding school became more and more
imaginative
: sometimes he coughed so much he brought up his breakfast, at others he had such a stomach ache he sat with his head between his knees while his mother tried gently to dress him. Sometimes he just cried quietly.

It was only when the walk to school became inevitable that he abandoned his laments and adopted a stance of passive resistance which meant that to take a step, receive a goodbye kiss, or put his school exercise book in his leather satchel took an eternity.

At the school gate, Elena would give her son a little push into the yard, and whisper encouragement in his ear:

‘We have to be strong to help your father. He needs us.’

She would stay pressed up against the railings until she heard a chorus of children’s voices start to sing ‘Snowy Mountains’ or some other
patriotic
hymn. The obscure routine began with these sweet voices exalting epic deeds about which the boys knew nothing, in words that meant even less. Those were days when everything was incomprehensible, and nobody tried to understand what was going on.

Wearing a dark-coloured overcoat with a wide, round collar, Elena walked back to the intersection of Calles Alcalá and Goya. There she took the metro to Calle Arguelles, and walked four blocks up to the
headquarters
of Hélices, a state-run Hispano-German company which Elena did translations for.

As well as providing her with a little money to survive on, this work gave her the right to two loaves of white bread a week from the Airforce Co-op. This helped supplement her ration book, where only she and her son figured.

In fact, it was her husband who did the translations. This helped him feel less of a burden to his wife and child. But he could only use the typewriter – a black Underwood with the name printed proudly in gold letters – when Elena was at home. If she was out, he had to write everything in longhand, and then type it up (three carbon copies) while she roamed silently round the flat or did some sewing by hand, because the noise of her sewing machine – a black nickel-plated Singer on a wooden base with elaborate iron fretwork legs – did not match that of the typewriter.

To help make ends meet, Elena also did work for a made-to-measure lingerie shop in Calle Torrijos. They kept the most delicate items for her, but although Señora Clotilde always said her work was exquisite, this did not mean she paid her any more.

That day, when she came home carrying a treatise on stroboscopy for which an urgent translation was needed, the caretaker María told her a priest had been looking for her. She said that although she had told him Elena was not at home, he had insisted on going up to her flat and had rung the bell for a long while.

My universe was clearly divided into two halves: the dark and the bright. Included in the former were my school, my teachers’ questions, and silence. In the latter were the small triangle of my neighbourhood, and the way in which the people living there related to me. With hindsight it seems to me I could swing from one side to the other without problem, thanks to what I had learned from the mirror.

Our life at home was one of talkative complicity; in the street we lived a noisy silence. Whenever I was out and about, I had to keep everything my father had taught me a secret. I also had to transform anything that happened to me outside when I was back in the flat. My friendship with other boys, for example, was a complicated balancing act.

Even though we all went to different schools, we lived in our neighbourhood without importing anything from beyond it, not even memories or the fear that our teachers instilled in us. On the corner of Calles Alcalá and Ayala, there was a dental clinic: a windowless building with marble benches outside on both streets. One was in Calle Alcalá, but we rarely used that because we kept finding bloody traces of the patients’ spit on it. The other was in Calle Ayala, where there was less traffic, so this was where we local boys congregated. We played the games that children who have no toys play: knucklebones, marbles, leapfrogging, hide-and-seek, and other games in which we were both victims and executioners, games where losing was always painful, and the reward was to cause harm. Yet another way of surviving the times we lived in.

All the boys talked a lot about their parents. Tino, who looked like an overgrown puppy and had different-coloured eyes, was proud of his
father because as well as working in an office he was a picador at bullfights. We enjoyed it when the enormous gas-powered limousine came to pick him up and he would appear in the doorway, elegant and serious-looking, in his spectacular sequinned bullfighting jacket. Another boy in our group, Pepe Amigo, boasted that on Sundays his father hunted birds in Paracuellos del Jarama, using nets in springtime and bird lime in winter. His tiny, run-down flat was full of finches in cages, which his family covered every night with cloths to still their agitated daytime fluttering. We used to admire Pepe Amigo’s father because he had a Gilera motorbike that had its gear change on the petrol tank, which meant that however fast he was going, he had to take one hand off the handlebars to change gear: to us this seemed like a huge feat of daring. And all this despite the fact that he was club-footed, and wore a huge platform on his right shoe.