My school was on the mezzanine floor. In the mornings, there was no light on the stairs and very little in the classrooms. I don’t remember if I had a male or female teacher, although she was probably female, because, had I gone straight from being with my overly solicitous godmother to being with a man, I would have been sure to notice the change. The teachers at school rewarded those students who could sit for as long as possible with arms folded and in silence, and I can see myself now looking very disciplined and keen, very alert. However, my eagerness to learn at that school proved ill-placed. My shirtsleeves grew crumpled with all those hours of stultifying inertia.
When I left our apartment in the morning, my godmother would wait on the landing, looking down the stairwell, until I reached the hallway and the street door; then she would run out onto the balcony and watch me until I disappeared around the corner. She stayed at home, where I expected to find her when I came back.
A year earlier, the apartment had been a hive of activity, and I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that this was how all apartments were. No, my mother was dying, and a daily procession of relatives and friends came to visit her and my father; they would give me a kiss or gently pinch or pat my cheek. I didn’t understand about death, not even when she died. Then came the great void, the silence, my godmother’s cheerfully chaotic approach to running a household, the black pinafore they gave me to play in and my dear father, also in black, who worked nights and went to bed in the early afternoon in the now dark, inaccessible bedroom — without my mother.
One sunny day, when there were lots of people out in the street — for ever after, crowds became associated in my mind with loss — two things happened: I had gone out without a handkerchief and when I came back to our apartment from school, I rang the doorbell again and again, but no one answered. I went back down into the street, and, I suppose, looked around, without crossing the road again, at the trees of La Moncloa and at my immediate surroundings. Seeing no one I knew, I set off towards the bar on the corner, where I went over to the bench and sat down with my back to the trams. And what loomed largest for me was not that I had been left alone, but the terrible thoughtlessness that lay behind my not having a handkerchief — which I’m sure I didn’t need that urgently — and my whole being softened and crumpled at the thought of the lack of consideration implied by their going out like that without any warning and leaving a small boy without a handkerchief with which to blow his nose or dry his tears, which seemed to me the very height of neglect and carelessness.
A boy I didn’t know sat down beside me and, on that sunny noonday street, with the dizzying crowds of people coming and going, I remember telling him that I was sitting on that bench because there was no one at home and I had nowhere to go, that I didn’t even have a handkerchief nor was I likely to have one, because my godmother would be in Africa by now with her boyfriend, a corporal in the army, whom she loved more than she did me, and that my situation was grave in the extreme because I didn’t know how long I would have to sit on that bench. I think I may even have asked about his parents, and he doubtless gave some foolish reply that I have since forgotten.
I can see that scene now and I don’t know why I chose a public bench in order to tell my story to a complete stranger and why, with a kind of brilliant sixth sense, I invested that handkerchief with such importance and concocted a lie that soon ceased to be one, because while my godmother didn’t go off to Africa with her corporal, she did, a few months later, go back to her parents’ house.
I still don’t know why I invented that story, but that, I suppose, is what I’ve continued to do to this day.
AN EPISODE FROM NATIONAL HISTORY
I REMEMBER THE THICK LIPS, the hiccoughing laugh and the check scarf of that small, skinny boy with innocent eyes and a man’s gruff voice, who, at only eleven, poor thing, was burdened with the name of Plácido Dornaleteche, and with whom, at that tender age, I was doubtless unwittingly bound by the shared oddity of our names. We would leave school, go round the corner of Mártires de Alcalá and up Santa Cruz de Marcenado, but we took a very long time to reach the corner of Conde-Duque because we were talking and laughing so much and, when we did arrive, we would continue to stand there chatting, with neither ears nor time for clocks, until he crossed the road and walked along by the barracks to Leganitos, while I continued straight on and went in the street door of No. 4. We were studying for the first year of our bachillerato (a shrill word that set our teeth on edge) with names that were full of bounty and light, like Antonio Machado, Helena Gómez-Moreno and Julia or Carmen Burell, and others that were full of fear and foreboding, like that of the miserly-looking man, unshaven, grizzle-haired and wild-eyed, who was the author of at least one book on mathematics — ours — and who would occasionally spin the class globe and then gleefully, noisily spit on it. Like us, he had been weighed down as a child with a problematic name: Adoración Ruiz Tapiador.
I remember Plácido trying to instil in me the radiant hope of his beliefs or, rather, those of his older brother, whom I never met, but who apparently wore — for reasons I did not entirely understand — a blue shirt with red arrows embroidered on the breast pocket and who sang a song that my friend would perform with appropriately martial gestures, and of which I remember only — although possibly not exactly — the first two lines: “Marching along the white road / comes a strong and gallant lad…” And he would ask if I knew Marx. Who? Carlos Marx. And I would say No, although he obviously didn’t know him very well either, because he would say, oh, no matter, but what my brother and his comrades want, you see, is the nationalization of that Marx fellow’s doctrine; he was Russian or something, an atheist and a good-for-nothing, but he had some useful ideas about bringing bosses and workers together and uniting them once and for all in fraternity and justice. Plácido was like a small, bright, whitewashed window, full of pots of geraniums, through which I could see Madrid and my mother and grandmother’s village flooded with sunlight and happiness, so much so that my sheer impatience to see this change come about quite overwhelmed me with contentment, because in my mother’s village there were always a lot of men standing around in the square, and in Madrid we were constantly seeing the riot police cordoning off fires or baton-charging students.
I was due to take my exams that year, 1935–36, and in late March we moved from No. 4 Santa Cruz de Marcenado to No. 9 Españoleto, and I doubtless gave Plácido Dornaleteche my new address, although I had never been to his house and knew only the name of the street.
On 18 July, the offended parties on both left and right decided to improve Spain by destroying it and plunged into a civil war with horrific massacres perpetrated by both sides, and we would-be high-school graduates living in Madrid were unable to continue our studies until well into 1937. We had to stand in long queues in order to satisfy our hunger with lentils, sweet potatoes and sunflower seeds and make day-long walks to vegetable gardens outside the city and to nearby villages, only to return with a loaf of bread or three lettuces, but we boys took advantage of the barricades in the streets to hurl stones at the war, and each evening the radio bulletin about the war wafted out through the open windows, seeming to spread and thicken the blood-dark twilight.
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