One of my grandmothers came from the very Caribbean Sea where Redonda lies when it does appear on maps or in photographs. She was Cuban, born in Havana; she was named Lola Manera and she was the mother of my mother Lolita. In reality, both she and her father, my great-grandfather, were less Cubans than Spaniards of Cuba, to put it in an understandable and inoffensive way. My great-grandfather was named Enrique Manera and I believe his second surname was Cao (“from Cao the Indian, Montezuma’s lieutenant,” my grandmother’s youngest sister, our Tita María, used to proclaim with folies de grandeur, holding up her index finger); he was a soldier and owned land in Havana.
While still young and unmarried, he was going home on horseback one morning when a mulatto mendicant crossed his path and asked him for alms. He refused and spurred his mount onward, but the beggar managed to stop him by grabbing the bridle, and then pronounced his somewhat baroque and unusually precise curse: “You, your eldest son and the eldest son of your eldest son will all three die when journeying far from your homeland, none of you will reach the age of fifty and none of you will ever have a grave.” My great-grandfather, who paid no attention and shoved the beggar out of the way, told the story at home over lunch and then forgot it (but someone remembered and that’s why it has reached me: perhaps a black nanny or an apprehensive mother, women who are no longer young are always the repositories, and the transmitters). That happened in 1873 when Enrique Manera was twenty-four or twenty-five, two years younger than when he published a little novel I found not long ago—books are always travelling toward me, not sparing me their acquaintance—El coracero de Froeswiller (Froeswiller’s Cuirassier), subtitled Recuerdos de la Guerra Franco-Prusiana (Memories of the Franco-Prussian War), and printed at number 4 calle del Rosario in Seville, by the press and lithographic studio of Ariza y Ruiz, according to the half title page. Its first lines are very much in the old style: “It was the 15th of July, 1870, and the nocturnal hour of eleven o’clock had just sounded on every church clock in Paris. The capital of the French empire had, at the moment our story begins, a highly strange and exceptional appearance.” And this, apparently, was not the only novel of his to reach the presses, there’s a novelistic family antecedent for me here, an Antillean antecedent. Much later, in 1898, by which time he had been married for half his life to a woman of the Custardoy family with whom he had produced seven offspring (which is why the false name in the story was “Isaac Custardoy”), my great-grandfather Manera decided he would rather not see the Stars and Stripes waving over his island, so he hastily sold off his lands and embarked for Spain—his country, which he may have known only as a name—with his entire family, including my cheerful grandmother Lola who was seven or eight years old at the time, my grandiloquent Tita María, even younger, and the first-born son, considerably older, and also named Enrique. The doctors had advised against this radical measure since my great-grandfather suffered from Ménière’s vertigo and the crossing posed a grave risk to his health. But the soldierly Manera was not inclined to dance attendance on Commodore Schley’s victory over and occupation of the island, so he paid no attention, as he had paid none to the mulatto beggar twenty-five years earlier. Halfway across the Atlantic he suffered a mortal attack of his illness, which struck while he was on deck. He was about to turn fifty and was already far from his homeland—and from the other homeland which he had never seen—when he died, and his body was thrown into the ocean, weighted down with a cannonball.
Twenty-three years later, in 1921, his oldest son Enrique Manera Custardoy, my grandmother’s brother and therefore my great-uncle (so I, too, have a military great-uncle, like Ewart and De Wet) participated in the War of Morroco at the rank of colonel and as adjutant to General Fernández Silvestre, who commanded the Spanish troops in their great humiliation. It is is known, but almost no one still remembers, that the Spaniards fled in disarray at what has become known as “the Disaster of Annual.” Amid the mad, scattered rout by Abd-el-Krim’s Kabyles, Fernández Silvestre, his son and Colonel Manera were isolated from the main body of the troops, completely helpless but with a small truck at their disposal. The general, in an old-fashioned gesture, refused to abandon the field of his defeat, and my great-uncle, in a still more old-fashioned gesture, refused to abandon his superior officer and defeated friend. Between the two of them, they convinced the young Silvestre to try to flee for his life with the vehicle, and there they stayed, waiting for slow death and long fire, muerte larga, fuego largo. Nothing more was learned. Their bodies were never found, and the only thing of Manera’s that was retrieved were his field glasses and his leather gear, which I saw in my grandfather’s house on calle de Cea Bermúdez (and in Spanish field glasses and cufflinks are both called gemelos, so here again only the gemelos could be identified). It’s feared that the two were drawn and quartered. Manera was forty-six years old, my age now, and was far from both his homelands, the colonial Havana of his birth and the Madrid that saw him depart for that colonial war to fall victim, in Africa, to the curse he had inherited. He had no grave, nor will he ever have one. He left only a widow, that is, a wife.
The first two threats of the elaborate curse had been fulfilled so fully and exactly that it seemed impossible it wouldn’t continue on to the third generation as well. So, after the premature, remote, and unmarked death of Manera Custardoy in Annual, some family member—perhaps a superstitious nanny or an apprehensive mother, perhaps my own grandmother, the doomed man’s sister—predicted, with a mingling of consolation and fear, that the dead man must have left his spouse pregnant at his loyal departure on the fatal expedition with Fernández Silvestre. The wait lasted a month or two, but there was nothing. The oldest son never had an oldest son, and the thought of an illegitimate child is too facile and trivial. What if none of it had come true? What if all of it had come true? There was another Enrique Manera, whom I’ve met, but he descended not from the colonel who died in Morocco but from one of his younger brothers. He attained the rank of admiral—not a phony one like Franco the whaler, a real admiral—and he used to talk about his feats during the Civil War: he sank a Russian submarine with his bare hands and was put to death by the Reds, a sobering fate from which, as he told it, he emerged unscathed thanks to his short stature. The firing squad or militia had taken aim at a group of condemned men, most of whom were much taller than he was, and the bullets passed over his head, ruffling his hair. Like all the others, he fell when he heard the shots, and he pretended to be dead for hours, making use of his companions’ blood, which he was drenched in, until night fell and he saw that the field was clear—they did not bury, they did not bury, they denied him a tomb—and then he emerged from beneath the corpses and joined the living once more and managed to escape. If all this is true, perhaps the curse did try to fulfill itself to the end, despite being deprived of its final object: if not the third firstborn son in direct lineage (who never existed), then at least the man of the same blood who bore the same name that would have been given to the one who never had a name because he never came into being, though he was announced and foreseen by a mulatto mendicant in the city of Havana in 1873: the admiral was, in any case a grandson of the imprudent and guilty Manera Cao. But the veracity of this third and final attempt must be questioned, given that another of the heroic feats the admiral described involved sinking a Bolshevik submarine by hammering at it with his fists. It is certain, in any case, that there was no one to suffer the foreordained third death, before the age of fifty and far from his own land and without ever deserving a tomb.
In that short story written in 1979, a friend of the Custardoy family pondered the question in these or similar words: the oldest son of the oldest son had been prophesied, as had the form of his demise, but he had never been born, he had not reached the point of being engendered or born, yet the mulatto beggar and the unfortunate Manera who crossed paths in 1873 had already conceived of his existence and knew of him. Where had that being or concept been since then, and where was he after the death of the
man who would have been his father according to the prophecy, that bellicose death with its old-fashioned gesture, in Morroco, ruled out the possibility of his birth for all the centuries of centuries and forever more? He had to be somewhere. The friend tried to solve the enigma, and in the end, “when he was about to die,” the story says, “he wrote his thoughts on a sheet of paper: ‘I foresee that I am about to die, I shall undertake the final journey. What is to become of me? Where will I go? Will I go somewhere? Where will I go? I glimpse my death because I have been alive and was engendered and born, because I am still alive, and therefore death is imperfect and does not encompass everything, it can’t keep something else from existing, something that is different from it, and which awaits it from here, thinks of it from here: it isn’t only a subject as it would like to be, but also the object of thought and expectation, and it must yield. Only the one who has never been born belongs to it wholly, or rather the one who has never been engendered or conceived, and therefore has never entered into time or passed through it for a single second and will never have to disrupt it by leaving it. The one who is not conceived is the one who dies most. He has travelled endlessly by the most circuitous, the most intricate and invisible and silenced route: the route of possibility. He is the only one who will never live out any year or any day and will never have a homeland or a grave. He is Enrique Manera, the missing one. I am not.”
No, he was never born, the Manera who was prophesied and expected in order to conclude the curse which his nonexistence left incomplete, and perhaps pending (and has there ever been anything that was not unfinished); and maybe his absent being still moves through the other side and dark back and abysm of time, together with all that has not happened and all that has happened but without leaving a trail or a trace, neither smoke nor breath, and all that has happened but cannot be reproduced and is no longer possible and is therefore ruled out, and all that is still torn between sharp-edged memory and half-blind forgetting, like that scar on a thigh that fades away and returns and comes into focus and vanishes, as if it were trying to spare me its acquaintance (“Listen, come here, look, there is this thing on me and maybe you’d rather not see it. You still have time not to, and if you don’t then you won’t ever have to.”) Maybe everything moves through that other side of time, all that lies within our known time and all that it does not know, all that it does not register or take into account. Through that dark back may also pass the facts which, in the telling and narration and memory of them, are transformed into fictions, maybe the maritime crossing of my grandmother Lola is wandering there now, the crossing she undertook a century ago at the merry age of seven or eight, from Havana to Madrid, so that my mother Lolita could be born here and later me, from her, and maybe the girl is also roaming that abysm, the girl my mother was expecting and hoping for in that room where she gave birth to us, and who was not born because I was born in her place, though a name was already waiting for the girl, thought up and selected, Constanza, and undoubtedly her imagined face, as well. And maybe, in that case, Spain had to lose Cuba so that the journey could take place in the boat from which my island-dwelling great-grandfather was thrown to the bottom of the ocean, wrapped in a flag and with a cannonball on his chest to help him sink (“Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow, let me be lead within thy bosom and in a bloody battle end thy days: fall thy lance”). And who knows if the island wasn’t lost in order to satisfy a beggar’s private, passing curse, and for a hundred thousand other reasons of that nature which affect only individuals.
Everything is so random and absurd, it’s incomprehensible that we can grant any transcendence whatsoever to our birth or our existence or our death, determined by chance combinations as fickle and unpredictable as the voice of time when it has not yet gone by or been lost, when it is not yet ambiguous, when it is not yet even time, that voice we all know and hear murmuring as we move forward, or that is what we believe, because really it is the voice that moves forward; how can any importance be conceded to our fragile and insignificant passage which could so easily not have occurred because of a lie or some false testimony, or could indeed occur because of the excessive fancifulness and hatred of two of Franco’s informers—two future professors, both made so in recompense, though one may already have been a professor—who fabricated accusations that were finally too improbable and novelistic about the man who couldn’t yet even dream of being my father, or anyone’s; how can we even take our own breathing seriously, this breathing that we owe to an attack of an antiquated illness or vertigo on the deck of a ship travelling into exile, or to the capricious, baroque curse a mulatto beggar hurled at a contemptuous horseman one hundred and twenty-five years ago, across the ocean, on an island off the coast of another continent; or that we lose this breathing because of a bullet that goes astray on that same continent, in the enthusiasm of a Mexican New Year’s Eve, or because a tree struck by lightning falls on the head of a foreigner waiting to go into a theater shortly before emigrating to be safe on that other continent; or more simply because one page has been brought to a close and there is no desire to write the next; or, even more innocuously, because one December evening the only son who was missing, the fourth one, comes home; or, still more painfully, because the treacherous onset of a sudden fatal illness leaves a zoetrope ownerless, bringing it to a stop and laying it aside until the end of time or of the world that the toy imitated and represented, the toy with its flimsy wheel that no longer spins. Put out the light and then put out the light. And put it out.
Yet all we can do is grant ridiculous importance to the products of these inchoate combinations, to each one and to our own—or rather, the one that we are—to those already obliterated and to those that are present, and even to those that are fictitious, if we don’t want our passage through time to be entirely idiotic as well as fragile and insignificant. So we spend our lives pretending to be unique and chosen when in fact we’re interchangeable, each the random outcome of a spin of the wheel of fortune at a dank, decrepit carnival. The pretence is necessary, but what’s bad about it is that our actions or misfortunes or good luck make most of us forget, in the end, that that was all we were doing, just pretending. There are people who become convinced they were destined for what they attain or endure, as if the enduring or the attainment explained their history and the reason or cause for their birth, it is the cause, it is the cause. I’ve said what I’m saying here before, in a novel, but that doesn’t matter: everything has to be said again and again so it won’t be lost, until nothing is said any longer and there is no longer: the short-cuts and twisting paths taken by our efforts are what make us vary though we end up believing it was destiny, we end up seeing our whole lives in light of the last or most recent thing, as if the past had been only preparation, as if we were gradually coming to understand it as it withdraws from us and will understand it entirely in the end. And therefore the mother believes she had to be a mother, the spinster that she had to remain unmarried, the murderer a murderer and the victim a victim, the ruler believes that from the beginning his steps were leading him to command other people, and the genius’s childhood is dredged up when his or her genius becomes known; the king convinces himself that it was his lot to be king, if he reigns, and that it was his lot to become the martyr of his lineage if he does not; and the person who lives into old age finally remembers the whole of his life as a slow arrangement for elderliness: the life that has passed is seen as a story or merely a sign and thus it is twisted and distorted. And the man who dies young will always be seen as a man who died young, even in the portraits made when he was alive, which are now contaminated.
In fact, it wasn’t me who said this (except for the last phrase); it was a character in a novel named the Only One or Solus, a real king, even if he was fictitious, and not the literary king of a fantastic realm that even so sometimes appears on maps, and when it does it is a harsh blackened rock, uninhabited or inhabited only by boobies, a diminutive island not far from Cuba that takes its name
from a church in Cádiz and is only the territory, the superfluous vessel of the imaginary. Who knows whether it hasn’t disappeared into the depths of the sea like my great-grandfather Manera, after the tremendous eruptions of the Soufrière volcano last year on the larger, neighboring island of Montserrat, where Shiel, or Felipe I, the first monarch, was born, Montserrat now almost reduced to ashes in an urn, like Shiel, and perhaps scattered (there’s no one on Redonda to send any news). It’s a realm inherited through irony and writing, never through solemnity or blood, the realm of Shiel’s successor Juan II, who chose me when he reached the age of seventy-three, and of Juan I, the beggar poet, who became a kind of anachronism, living on handouts and sleeping on park benches in the final days of his long death, and who certainly must have hurled more than one curse against someone, there on his native island, our continent’s largest, unleashing by those curses who knows what combinations or pandemoniums, then dying in a hospital, forgotten and penniless, under his true, recovered name of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, “a poet” according to Vinten the civil servant, and Lewis the informant, who certified his death. This cursing or poetic voice is nevertheless not entirely silent and now murmurs in my house, in what for some time I’ve been calling “Gawsworth’s room,” as if it were a butler’s room, or a ghost’s.