Medardo Fraile - Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories

He stood for a long while, staring at the blackboard, anxiously searching for a fragment of just one of his words or even half a word, anything, the tail of a letter, the dot on an “i”, searching for himself, fearfully searching that black rectangle.

I WANT TO PAY HOMAGE to the car because it has borne us on its back for many years now. Don’t ask me about the engine, the make, the number plate, what kind of fuel it uses, or even if it was mine, because after looking at it all these years, I no longer know to whom it belonged: to me, to him or to her, or to those who came and went and shared the journey with us for a season or longer.

The car carried us along like a cheerful, trusting blind man. There was a pillow inside, some old blankets, a few guides and maps, breadcrumbs, dried rosemary, a rip in the fabric made by a child, mud from the tracks — long since crumbled to dust — left by a dog from Navas del Rey, who really loved us. There were other things besides, which were hard to explain or at least hard to believe. If I were a teller of tales, the car itself would be speaking by now. But then the car, for me, would be a worthless fool. We were the ones who talked — or didn’t talk — while the car behaved like what it was: a car.

The car even took us out at dawn, when we were still half asleep. Past pine trees or oaks, past olive trees. In sun and rain, laughing or sad, like the fields, the streams, the animals and the noises at dusk.

The carpets were not exactly what one would find in a palace, but they had felt the spur of the kind of high heels favoured by young women, and even the occasional lone shoe, possibly lost at midnight, and whose other half I never did find. And briefcases, too, containing notes, poems, books.

We argued violently in the car, as if we could not simply get out and escape from one another, as if it were the only room in the world. We would sing, too, as we used to at school. We made plans as if we were going to stop the car right there and immediately put those plans into action. We occasionally grew irritated when we were driving along without knowing why, and it seemed as if something that had been ours had got mislaid along the way, to the right or to the left, or we felt sure that out there lay another world and other people, too, and we felt distant from each other, prisoners of the car, yes, prisoners. There were times when we needed to fill the car with a different voice, a different hope, a different life. And on days like that, we almost forgot about the car, which was like forgetting about ourselves.

I don’t quite know who we were or even if we knew ourselves. I remember her fair hair — simple, natural — and how he, sometimes, had to strain his voice to be heard above the engine noise. On many days, no one saw us pass and we saw no one. Air, rivers, skies, trees. The road was a strange, sleeping, endless blue vein. Had God ordained a new Noah’s Ark without us knowing? We also saw a lot of people pass, inside and outside the car. Ah, if that car could only speak…

The car was a waiting room. We waited for grief and also for happiness, or simply to find out if that mysterious thing, the heart, was still beating. On hot days, the car itself seemed to be beating. Perhaps we were waiting to love each other more or to part one day as everyone does.

Sometimes the car was like a distinguished, comfortable, well-cut suit. At others, it was so ill-fitting that we felt awkward in it.

Its engine made no more noise than a Sunday crowd or the fountain in the square or school children reciting their times tables. I can’t hear the noise it makes, or perhaps I hear it all the time. It travelled at a human speed, and we were its sole destination. I can hear its silence too.

I could be more precise, but I don’t want you then to tell me that the same thing happened to you once or to a friend or relative of yours. Although I know these things do happen. I just want to say that the car bore us away and can’t come back; it never has, it has always simply gone, don’t ask me where. You, too, have a car? Yes, but that, of course, isn’t what I mean… I mean something else…

We rarely ate in it, no; we thought, talked, looked, loved, hated. (Hated? No, I don’t think so.) With friends who were only there for a while and with lifelong buddies, with anodyne or occasional acquaintances and even with people wearing cassocks and habits, as if we were on our final journey. An opening and closing of doors farther up the road. A turning on and off of the lights farther up the road. Get out this side… Get in here… Come on… Today we’re going to…

As far as I know, this car has never knocked anyone down. Apart from us occasionally. Once, a bird crashed into it — even though we weren’t exactly travelling through the highways of the air at the time. The thud of that bird hitting the car was a stone thrown by God and it made us shudder and fall silent and think. In spring and summer, insects splattered the car — squashed, dead, shapeless, still fluttering. That’s how it was.

We have been to so many places that a lot of them have been erased as if we had never been there at all. We have seen so many people that we could go back and reintroduce ourselves. What joy and sadness there was in all those exits and entrances! What a shame we couldn’t have got into another car or followed the road we passed back there on the right or the left! And what a shame that we must leave this one behind! One day, the car will drive us itself.

Where is it? What’s happened to it? Nothing. We’re still here, still in the car. But I looked at it rather differently today, the way you might look at your own arm, with the attachment, disbelief and anxiety with which some of us look at ourselves in the mirror.

SEÑOR OTAOLA would go up the stairs at nine o’clock sharp, with an absent look in his eyes, a cold, correct expression on his face, and, if he happened to pass a colleague, he would raise one long, pale, bony hand in greeting. When he spoke to someone, he would bend deferentially towards him or her, wrinkling up his whole face in an attempt at a smile, and address them quietly, seriously, in clipped, military tones. Señor Otaola did not get out of breath climbing the stairs. He did not change his pace if something happened nearby. He merely looked very hard at the perpetrator, with cold, condemnatory eyes and a slightly haughty, weary look of deep understanding. Señor Otaola taught Natural Sciences. There was no haggling over marks with him; each pupil had to accept what he was given and that was that. And the mark stayed there, in the teacher’s mark book, waiting to be added up at the end of term. His classes were not noisy or intense, but diverting and gentle.

In winter, at nine o’clock in the morning, the cold in the classroom was as taut as a drum. Señor Otaola, who always wore a waistcoat, never wore an overcoat, raincoat or waterproofs while at school. Perhaps he left them in the staff room or the secretary’s office. He began the lesson impassively, as if the cold did not affect him, striding up and down the central aisle between the desks. It was very, very cold, and yet he spoke about silkworms, ladybirds, grasshoppers and butterflies. Those flies, dragonflies and grasshoppers gradually warmed the hearts of the boys, as if it were summer or else spring, late spring: the sun poured in through the windows, the shadows cast by the leaves of a poplar blinked and flickered on the desks; in the Natural Sciences class there really were flies, and then Señor Otaola would speak about sandstone, rushing streams, fluvial erosion, waterfalls, glaciers, moraine, erratic blocks…

Señor Otaola had a hoarse, muffled voice, as if he were suffering the chronic after-effects of some youthful expedition into jungles or up rivers. He would often half close his pale eyes as if the landscape he was describing dazzled him: the bright reflection from the pelagic zone of the sea, the sparse vegetation of the tundra, or the knifelike ridge of a rock. Señor Otaola wore gold cufflinks, a pocket watch and a wedding ring.