Blind Sunflowers (13 page)

The lift came to a halt at the third floor. Elena was in the kitchen sifting lentils. She stopped as if she had been struck by lightning. Ricardo, happy because he had found a way to translate a devilishly difficult verse of Keats’, sat with his fingers suspended in mid-air as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. After the bell rang, only the clock on the dining-room wall moved calmly on.

Then the stillness gave way to a swift but silent routine. Elena tiptoed along the corridor to make sure that Ricardo was properly hidden in the wardrobe. She replaced the rosary over the hinges, went to the table where her husband worked, and picked up all the sheets of paper he had written on. She opened the windows onto the balcony to let in the spring air, then crept as quietly as possible back to the front door. She stood there listening hard to see if there was any sound that might identify the visitor, until all of a sudden a second ring on the bell startled her so much she could not help giving a stifled cry.

It was Brother Salvador. Through the spyhole she could see his round face and receding hairline. He was smiling through firmly-set lips, and his half-closed eyes had an expression somewhere between beatific and imploring. When Elena opened the door, he strode in, unctuously wishing her good day, good day, good day…

Once he was in the hallway he asked if he might speak to her, and it was only then that she said, ‘Of course, come in, father,’and accompanied him to the dining room. She did not ask him to sit down, but he did so anyway, complaining how hot it was wearing a cassock all day long. Elena offered him water, but the beatific expression returned to his face as he suggested that a little glass of wine might be more appropriate.

When Elena returned from the kitchen carrying the bottle and a glass, Brother Salvador held some books he had taken from the shelf in one hand. He muttered something about reading and loneliness and raised the glass she had given him with a ‘to your health, Elena’. He drank it down in short gulps, then gave a loud, rude smack of the lips which ended in a gushing encomium of the virtues of the Valdepeñas wine. He said he wanted to talk to her about Lorenzo.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, quite the opposite. He is a wonderful boy. If he were not so timid, he could be top of the class…’ With that he launched into a speech about the need to learn about life, how a boy had to be strong to be the best, a ‘
primus inter pares
’, the very best in the eyes of the Lord. ‘Perhaps because he has no father…’

When Elena said nothing in reply, he went on with a long-winded description of the sacrifices that teaching demanded, the satisfactions it offered, the need to be able to identify the best in order to encourage them as much as possible so that they could become the champions of great causes.

‘I could see to it that he entered a seminary.’

Elena could not help smiling.

‘He’s only a boy!’

‘But we must direct them, Elena, it’s our duty to point them along the right path. That’s what is expected of us. There is nothing compulsory about it. He would receive an excellent education, a preparation for the future which if Lorenzo so wished would not necessarily mean he ended up in the church. Look at me: I spent twelve years in a seminary, but now I’m not at all sure I want to be a priest…’

‘You’re not a priest?’

‘No, Elena! I’m nothing more than a deacon, a servant of the Church, and one day I hope to find someone with whom I can start a family…’

Possibly in order to avoid having to face the astounded look on Elena’s face, he suddenly asked for the bathroom. She told him politely where it was, and took advantage of his absence to check that no traces of her husband were visible anywhere. Little by little they had managed to
eliminate
all signs of his presence, from the tobacco he had given up in order to avoid her having to explain it away in her ration book, to the ruled notebooks where he wrote his literary translations, and including all his clothes, which were never left to dry but were ironed still wet and put away in the wardrobe. It was as if her husband’s life was like the air they breathed: it existed, but took up no space.

When Brother Salvador re-appeared from the bathroom, he was holding Ricardo’s razor in his hand. The deacon’s eyes swung in
astonishment
from the razor to Elena’s face and back again, until they became a silent interrogation behind which a host of questions came crowding in, and any answers seemed impossible.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a shaving razor.’

‘I can see that. You aren’t trying to tell me that Lorenzo already shaves, are you?’

Elena was so nervous that she burst out laughing, hiding her face in her hands. The anger on her face could easily have been taken for an embarrassed smile.

‘My goodness, brother, how little you know about women! Have you never heard that we shave our legs as summer draws near?’

Not even she had the remotest idea where she found the strength to wink and smile at him as she said this.

‘It’s one of the little secrets of our coquettishness!’

‘You shave your legs?’

‘Of course! Nearly all women do,’ she said, and as if to prove her innocence, lifted her skirt to her knees to show him her legs.

Still holding the razor in one hand, Brother Salvador came slowly towards her, his eyes glued on her calves. He bent down, and as if he were going to scoop up an abandoned puppy, took them in his other hand.

The sticky touch of his moist palm and the view of the balding head stooping in front of her made Elena’s flesh creep. Feeling helpless and too frightened to call out, she angrily cursed her own charms.

On the edge of my universe there was an empty lot that had become a rubbish tip. It was right next to the Argel cinema, so that from it you could hear the soundtracks of the films being shown behind tin doors that backed onto the wasteland. I don’t know why, but in my memory this desolate place is linked to my discovery of the forbidden.

Next door to our building was a coal merchant’s that was always open. It was run by a huge, kindly man from Asturias who had a perfect set of teeth that gleamed white in a face invariably smeared with coal dust. His name was Ceferino Lago, and in my mind’s eye I can see him constantly shifting bags of slack, firewood and charcoal. His wife Blanca was more like his widow. She always wore black, and her constant look of mourning led her customers to offer their condolences even though they had not heard of any recent death in her family.

The couple had two sons: Luis, a boy already possessing a great knowledge of the ways of the world – he was able to spot a whore in any woman who smoked – and another one, whose name I cannot recall (Juan?) but whose infinite capacity to be in a rage I find
unforgettable
. He had teeth similar to his father, except that they stuck out, so that even with his mouth closed they were visible between his soft, fleshy and moist lips. It was this coal merchant’s son (who was seven or eight years older than the rest of us) who liked to take us to the waste lot so we could hear the soundtracks of category four ‘adults only’ films. It was the ecclesiastical authorities who classified films in those days, following a system I could never understand: a few rare films were ‘apt for all publics’; then there were category three films, restricted category three ones, and category four, which were deemed highly dangerous.

None of us could understand the reasoning behind this, but then those were days when next-to-nothing was explained. At cinema box offices, when you bought your ticket you were also sold a little piece of cardboard in the shape of an heraldic shield. We called them badges; they cost five pesetas, and had a triangular eyelet at the top
that you pinned to your lapel. On the back it explained that this was a voluntary contribution to national reconstruction. As boys we did not understand what most of this meant, but since a lot of the language of the time was pure hyperbole – Crusade meant war, Reds meant devils, National meant victorious – it seemed only natural that voluntary should mean obligatory, since even if you showed him your ticket, the usher would not let you into the cinema if you were not displaying the badge.

We hardly ever went to the cinema as such, but the coal merchant’s son’s physical dominance over us was such that he often managed to drag us outside the tin doors that were left open to ventilate the stalls area.

We listened in hushed silence to all the meaningless dialogues and the music that swirled around them. We did not understand a thing, but the coal merchant’s son whose name I cannot recall would suddenly jump up, laughing hysterically and making gestures which I would now call obscene but in those days I simply thought of as ridiculous.

It was thanks to him that I had the first glimmerings of something I had to hide from my parents. Secrets bound me to people like roots bind a tree to the earth. I was never quite sure what exactly my secret was, but whereas other children believed in the Virgin or in Franco, in the Pope or the Fatherland, I had my secrets to believe in. I was convinced I was becoming wise in the ways of the world. I began to understand some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the school toilets, and to guess the meaning of some of the gestures shown on the cinema billboards. This slowly created the image in my mind of my father doing all those things behind my back with my mother. The fact that he let his beard grow, that she cut it only on the days when they had lit the stove, that his hair was turning grey, or that she was being consumed by a clinging, dark sense of melancholy – all of that seemed to me the proof that something sordid was going on in my refuge. In the tight grip of moral censure that surrounded us, the body was forbidden. The feelings it transmitted were good if they were the result of suffering, but if there was even a hint of pleasure, they were to be condemned. Health was the reward of sacrifice, and sickness always came from
satisfying one’s instincts. Something was being kept hidden from us children, and we had no idea what our bodies were for.

Sometimes at night I pretended to be asleep, but was in fact listening closely for any sign that my parents were indulging in sin: they must be doing something, I thought, for us to be in such a sorry state. In the end, I always fell asleep anyway.

When I look back on it, I feel immense nostalgia for their silence.

Elena, we have to escape. Yes. We’ll get out of here. We could leave the boy with your uncle and aunt in Méntrida. No, if we’re escaping all three of us are going together. All right, but we have to leave now. Yes. We can’t go on like this. No, we can’t. We’ve got savings. My uncle and aunt could lend us some money. No, don’t ask them for anything, they would only want to know what it was for. All right, I won’t ask them. How can we do it? We’ll take buses and change as often as we can. No more than fifty kilometres at a time. They check the buses less frequently than trains. But if we do that it will take forever. It will take as long as it has to. The
important
thing is to get out. The three of us. Yes, the three of us, my love. My
love. We have to reach Almería. There are fishermen there who will take you to Morocco for three hundred pesetas. Where are we going to find that much money? I’ll sell everything I can. Including the Murano fish your father left you? Yes, that too. We can’t take anything with us. Nothing. You always said it was our talisman. Our talisman has died. Elena, my love. Love.

The next morning, Lorenzo took Brother Arcadio a letter informing him that the boy would not be coming to school because he had to have a tonsil operation. They were infected, which meant he had to receive treatment before he could be operated on, and he could be absent from school for as long as two weeks. The letter came into the hands of Brother Salvador, who asked him why his mother no longer brought him to school.

‘My mother has a bad sore throat too. She may die.’

For the same reason I never asked why my father lived in a wardrobe, because these things happened on the other side of the mirror, I never asked why my mother stopped taking me to school. At first she went with me as far as two blocks from it, and left me to walk the last part. Then she accompanied me to the intersection between Calle Alcalá and Calle Goya, and finally she did not even leave our flat.

She spoke to the women in the ticket office of the metro so that they would allow me to use the subway to cross under the only dangerous part, because although there were very few vehicles around in those days, several streets converged at that point and all the traffic seemed to speed along because it was such a wide road. I discovered that the metro smelled of old clothes, was as warm as breath, and was lit in the same way as the rooms that sick people die in.