…
My father spent that whole week with his eyes glued to the floor, consumed with remorse. He bought a new lightbulb and even told me that I could turn it on, but not for long, because electricity was very expensive. I preferred not to play with fire. That Saturday he tried to buy me a book and went to a bookshop on Calle de la Palla, opposite the old Roman walls—the first and last bookshop he ever entered—but as he couldn’t read the titles on the spines of the hundreds of tomes that were displayed, he came out empty-handed. He gave me some money then, more than usual, and told me to buy whatever I wanted with it. It seemed the perfect moment to bring up something that I’d wanted to say to him for a long time but never found the opportunity.
“Doña Mariana, my teacher, has asked me whether you could go by the school one day and talk to her,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“Talk about what? What have you done?”
“Nothing, Father. Doña Mariana wanted to talk to you about my future education. She says I have possibilities and thinks she could help me win a scholarship for a place at the Escolapios—”
“Who does that woman think she is, filling your head with nonsense and telling you she’s going to get you into a school for rich kids? Have you any idea what that pack is like? Do you know how they’re going to look at you and treat you when they find out where you come from?”
I looked down.
“Doña Mariana only wants to help, Father. That’s all. Please don’t get angry. I’ll tell her it’s not possible, and that’s it.”
My father looked at me angrily, but controlled himself and took a few deep breaths with his eyes shut before speaking again.
“We’ll manage, do you understand? You and me. Without the charity of those sons of bitches. And with our heads held high.”
“Yes, Father.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and looked at me as if, for a split second that was never to repeat, he was proud of me, even though we were so different, even though I liked books that he could not read, even if Mother had left us both to face each other. At that moment I thought my father was the kindest man in the world and that everyone would realize this if only, just for once, life saw fit to deal him a good hand of cards.
“All the bad things you do in life come back to you, David. And I’ve done a lot of bad things. A lot. But I’ve paid the price. And our luck is going to change. You’ll see.”
…
Doña Mariana was razor sharp and could figure out what was going on, but despite her insistence I didn’t mention the subject of my education to my father again. When my teacher realized there was no hope she told me that every day, when lessons were over, she would devote an hour just to me, to talk to me about books, history, and all the things that scared my father so much.
“It will be our secret,” said the teacher.
I had begun to understand that my father was ashamed that others might think him ignorant, a residue from a war which, like all wars, was fought in the name of God and country to make a few men who were already far too powerful when they started it even more powerful. Around that time I started occasionally to accompany my father on his night shift. We’d take a tram in Calle Trafalgar that left us by the entrance to the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery. I would stay in his cubicle reading old copies of the newspaper and now and then trying to chat with him, a difficult task. By then, my father hardly ever spoke at all, either about the war in the colonies or about the woman who had abandoned him. Once I asked him why my mother left us. I suspected it had been my fault, something I’d done, perhaps just being born.
“Your mother had already left me before I was sent to the front. I was the idiot, I didn’t realize until I returned. Life’s like that, David. Sooner or later, everything and everybody abandons you.”
“I’m never going to abandon you, Father.”
I thought he was about to cry and I hugged him so as not to see his face.
The following day, unannounced, my father took me to El Indio, a large store that sold fabrics on Calle del Carmen. We didn’t actually go in, but from the windows at the shop entrance my father pointed at a smiling young woman who was serving some customers, showing them expensive flannels and other textiles. “That’s your mother,” he said. “One of these days I’ll come back here and kill her.”
“Don’t say that, Father.”
He looked at me with reddened eyes, and I knew then that he still loved her and that I would never forgive her for it. I remember that I watched her se
cretly, without her knowing we were there, and that I recognized her only because of a photograph my father kept in a drawer, next to his army pistol. Every night, when he thought I was asleep, he would take it out and look at it as if it held all the answers, or at least enough of them.
For years I would return to the doors of that store to spy on her. I never had the courage to go in or to approach her when I saw her coming out and walking away down the Ramblas, toward a life that I had imagined for her, with a family that made her happy and a son who deserved her affection and the touch of her skin more than I did. My father never knew that sometimes I would sneak round there to see her or that some days I even followed close behind, always ready to take her hand and walk by her side, always fleeing at the last moment. In my world, great expectations existed only in the pages of a book.
…
The good luck my father yearned for never arrived. The only courtesy life showed him was not to make him wait too long. One night when we reached the doors of the newspaper building to start the shift, three men came out of the shadows and gunned him down before my eyes. I remember the smell of sulfur and the halo of smoke that rose from the holes the bullets burned through his coat. One of the gunmen was about to finish him off with a shot to the head when I threw myself on top of my father and another of the murderers stopped him. I remember the eyes of the gunman fixing on mine as he debated whether to kill me too. Then, all of a sudden, the men hurried off and disappeared into the narrow streets between the factories of Pueblo Nuevo.
That night my father’s murderers left him bleeding to death in my arms and me alone in the world. I spent almost two weeks sleeping in the workshops of the newspaper press, hidden among Linotype machines that looked like giant steel spiders, trying to silence the excruciating whistling sound that perforated my eardrums when night fell. When I was discovered, my hands and clothes were still stained with dry blood. At first nobody knew who I was, because I didn’t speak for about a week and when I did it was only to yell my father’s name until I was hoarse. When they asked me about my mother I told them she had died and I had nobody else in the world. My story reached the ears of Pedro Vidal, the star writer at the paper and a close friend of the editor, who, at his request, arranged for me to be given a runner’s job and to live in the caretaker’s modest rooms in the basement until further notice.
Those were years in which bloodshed and violence were beginning to be everyday occurrences in Barcelona. Days of pamphlets and bombs that left strewn bodies shaking and smoking in the streets of the Raval quarter, of gangs of black figures who prowled about at night maiming and killing, of processions and parades of saints and generals who reeked of death and deceit, of inflammatory speeches in which everyone lied and everyone was right. The anger and hatred that years later would lead such people to murder one another in the name of grandiose slogans and colored rags could already be smelled in the poisoned air. The continual haze from the factories slithered over the city and masked its cobbled avenues, furrowed by trams and carriages. The night belonged to gaslight, to the shadows of narrow side streets shattered by the flash of gunshots and the blue trace of burned gunpowder. Those were years when one grew up fast, and with childhood slipping out of their hands, many children already had the look of old men.
With no other family to my name but the dark city of Barcelona, the newspaper became my shelter and my universe until, when I was fourteen, my salary permitted me to rent that room in Doña Carmen’s pension. I had lived there barely a week when the landlady came to my room and told me that a gentleman was asking for me. On the landing stood a man dressed in gray, with a gray expression and a gray voice, who asked me whether I was David Martín. When I nodded, he handed me a parcel wrapped in coarse brown paper, then vanished down the stairs, the trace of his gray absence contaminating my world of poverty. I took the parcel to my room and closed the door. Nobody, except two or three people at the newspaper, knew that I lived there. Intrigued, I removed the wrapping. It was the first package I had ever received. Inside was a wooden case that looked vaguely familiar. I placed it on the narrow bed and opened it. It contained my father’s old pistol, given to him by the army, which he had brought with him when he returned from the Philippines to earn himself an early and miserable death. Next to the pistol was a small cardboard box with bullets. I held the gun and felt its weight. It smelled of gunpowder and oil. I wondered how many men my father had killed with that weapon with which he had probably hoped to end his own life, until someone got there first. I put it back and closed the case. My first impulse was to throw it in the rubbish bin, but then I realized that it was all I had left of my father. I imagined it had come from the moneylender who, when my father died, had tried to recoup his debts by confiscating what little we had in the old apartment overlooking the Palau de la Música: he had now decided to send me this gruesome souvenir to welcome me to adulthood. I hid the case on top of my cupboard, against the wall, where filth accumulated and where Doña Carmen would not be able to reach it, even with stilts, and I didn’t touch it again for years.