Blind Sunflowers (12 page)

I kept this fear of lepers for many years, and whereas other children imagined ogres, the bogeyman, the devil or witches on broomsticks, my mind was filled with images of these bloody figures advancing slowly and inexorably towards me, strips of their flesh dropping off as they closed in to devour my entrails.

With each passing month, Ricardo became increasingly sullen. Elena realised that telling him what was going on beyond the walls of the flat only made him angry, and so she stopped saying anything about life beyond their front door.

The idea that the city had returned to its normal routine after three years of siege, that everyone behaved as if they had not lost a war, that what brought his former friends together was not a sense of defeat but a wish to wipe the slate clean and start again: all of this enraged him.

Little by little Ricardo began to shrink. His head drooped on his chest. He had always been a smart, neat man, but now he let days go by without
shaving. He looked unkempt, he was moody and spent long periods brooding darkly.

It was increasingly rare to catch a glimpse of the strong, resolute man who had won Elena’s hand in days when words were important because they were used to construct thought; increasingly rare to see the thinker who pondered on how a collective project could be made a reality, the intellectual who believed that what was human was all that mattered.

Instead he became more and more listless. He tried to be increasingly transparent, to take up less and less space. Even when he was alone in the flat, he spent hour after hour sitting in the wardrobe.

It was only thanks to Elena’s overwhelming tenderness – her subtle hints that he should do this or that to please her, her insistence on him finishing the Milton translation he had begun in the midst of the war, or suggesting that he write down exactly what he thought about Lope de Vega’s lack of taste, as well as a thousand other little tasks intended to encourage him to think of himself as the teacher he had once been – only this could restore a lively gleam to eyes that were increasingly submerged in shadow, increasingly oblivious to the world around them.

Only when Lorenzo was at home were there brief glimpses of the forceful man who could win round and cajole a child beset by fears.

I tried to avoid inviting anyone back to my flat so that my father did not have to go and hide in the wardrobe, but my mother, either out of love or calculation, established a routine of meetings with my friends on my behalf. Whenever this happened, my father shut himself in the wardrobe with a carbide lamp and a pile of books until they had all left. Fortunately, the mean-spirited, foul-mouthed caretaker and her husband Castro, an emaciated labourer who suffered from silicosis, would fly off the handle whenever a boy from outside tried to enter the building they so zealously guarded. Their attitude, as well as adding yet another element of fear to our lives, at least meant that none of my friends could come to call unexpectedly, with all the commotion that inevitably caused.

I will never forget one occasion when my friends had come round and my father felt a desperate need to go to the toilet. Although the dining-room door was closed, one of them saw a shadow through the lace curtains out in the corridor.

In order to explain this away, my mother invented a story about a ghost who came to visit us from time to time. Naturally, this made my friends’ blood turn to ice in their veins, but we were so
accustomed
to fear, so used to images of hell, we were such experts in horror and the fearful monsters inhabiting it, that they all accepted the explanation. We went on playing Ludo, until all of a sudden we heard the sound of the lavatory cistern, which made a soughing noise like the wind in the trees as it refilled. My astounded friends were paralysed with terror, but as if it were the most usual thing in the world, my mother merely said: ‘That ghost always does the same. He pulls the chain then vanishes.’A sense of relief swept across their faces, and we went on playing as though absolutely nothing had happened.

‘Do you love your mother very much?’

Lorenzo nodded. Brother Salvador stroked his head as a sign of approval. More than a hundred young boys were rushing about the playground in a noisy, chaotic swarm that only they knew how to
disentangle
. Since there was not enough room for them all, the different groups were mixed up together, but their games remained strictly separated, as they all knew who they were playing with and against.

‘Doesn’t your father write to you?’

This time, Lorenzo shook his head.

‘Why is that?’

‘Because he’s dead.’

Brother Salvador stroked the back of the boy’s head again, and spoke of God’s will, his inscrutable designs, the lessons of the saints, and many other things Lorenzo did not understand.

‘Doesn’t your mother have anyone to help her?’

‘Sometimes Señora Eulalia comes. But she’s in jail at the moment.’

‘Why is she in jail?’

‘For selling bread on the black market.’

At last he could say something that was true! Eulalia was a tall,
broad-beamed
woman in her sixties whose face was lined with deep wrinkles that made her eyes look like burning coals, and her smile a cameo silhouette.

She eked out a living as a cleaner, but the households she worked in were so short of money that they wanted her services only irregularly.

Whenever hunger got the better of her, she would ask Elena for a crust of white bread, which she took down to the market in Calle Hermosilla to sell openly. Elena, who had known her since childhood because she had worked in her parents’ house, was happy to give her the
bread, and promised she would go and visit her in Las Ventas women’s prison.

This was because white-haired Eulalia, dressed in her long,
medieval-looking
skirts, always made sure the police saw what she was doing: every time she was arrested it meant she was guaranteed two meals a day for ten days or a fortnight, depending on how disrespectful she was to the
stern-faced
magistrate.

On Thursdays at six, Elena and Lorenzo would stand on the pavement opposite the women’s prison and wait until they saw a handkerchief being waved at one of the windows, the signal that Eulalia was inside, gathering strength to help her survive after her release.

Lorenzo was staring at a group of boys playing ball. Brother Salvador gave him a slight push so that he could go back to them, then stood watching as he joined in a game whose rules only those involved could comprehend. The priest did not know why, but Lorenzo’s replies had made him feel so content he did not even tug the ear of a toothless youngster who, like the Jews had done to Jesus, spat in the face of a companion who had stolen his spinning top.

The noisy shouts of the boys at play, the warm sun and clear air, the simple honesty of Lorenzo’s replies, everything in its place and time neatly divided according to a timetable, the flock and its shepherd, the sense of a natural hierarchy: all this lent the present the sweetness it had once had in the days when Brother Salvador was not a victor but someone striving for Victory. He felt like one of the dispossessed who was about to inherit the earth. ‘Because they will be filled,’ he thought, and almost without being aware of it, he crossed the yard muttering to himself:
Saturabuntur
!

At Calle Alcalá 179 lived a disturbing character: Silvenín. He was slightly older than the rest of us, but it was not the difference in age that made him stand out. He was stocky, and was always bent so far forward it seemed as though he had to keep walking to avoid falling over. He was only rarely part of our group. His father was a
nondescript
sort whom no one would have noticed but for his wife, who without being beautiful was so kind that even today I remember her as a quiet refuge among all the harsh adults who controlled our destinies. She would always say hello to us; Silvenín’s father did not even do that.

Silvenín had his father’s serious demeanour and his mother’s blue eyes and smile: we were all in awe of him. I remember once when we were all congregated around the bench outside the dental clinic on Calle Ayala and the priest from Covadonga church came past. He was a grimy old man with dandruff and a cyst on his forehead, with blubbery lips that sprayed us with saliva whenever he was
inveighing
against sin during his Sunday homilies, and were covered in thick white bubbles at the corners when he whispered his prayers. As we had been taught to do at school, we all rushed to kiss his hand, which he left dangling by his side in order to receive our fawning token of respect. All of us except for Silvenín, that is. When we had all regrouped around him, his only comment was: ‘Do you think priests don’t wipe their arses?’

The other boys laughed at his joke, but I was filled with an irrational fear that our family’s secret might be found out, while at the same time I felt a deep sense of sympathy with this neighbour of ours. I have no idea why I felt this way, since as far as I can remember my parents never talked to me about the Church or the clergy, and still less about religion. At school, I learned about it in Sacred History and Catechism, which made it something I had to try to study and remember, and they helped me in this. Now I wonder whether they were not scared to teach me what they thought, while I was just as frightened to find out what their beliefs were. It was yet another way that we stuck together, like the wardrobe where my father lived, or the pretence that my mother was a widow. It was all real, but none of it was true.