“Did they find a camera on you?” he asked.
“No,” I said. By sheer accident—though I don’t say that to him. I had in fact intended to take some snapshots of Jill, but in my hurry I’d left the thing at home.
“They’ll probably fine you,” he dismissed the matter. “We’ll pay it off. A good thing we can still afford it.” He cracked a smile. He didn’t seem too upset. “What were you looking for out there?”
“I was at the beach.”
“On your own?”
“No.”
“And you took it into your heads to have a kiss and cuddle there, of all places?” He smirked.
I became cross. I don’t like it when the old man makes fun of my sexual desires. “We weren’t kissing.”
“Well what, then?”
“I wanted to show her something interesting out that way.”
“I see.” Father nodded, then got up and started to pace around the room. I was beginning to think he had forgotten me when all of a sudden I sensed him behind me. He placed a hand on my head.
“Enrique,” I hear his voice, “how do you spend your days?”
I shrugged my shoulders. What on earth was I supposed to say?
“Son,” he said, still in the same position, “Mother is worried about you.” Silly things come to my mind. I’m on my way to school, and he says: “Take care, son, Mother is worried about you.” Or I’m given my first car: “Be careful, son, Mother is worried about you.” Only ever “Mother,” never himself.
I didn’t know what to say, or even how to indicate what was coming to mind.
He walked away and sat down behind his desk, facing me. He switched the lamp on. It was already evening. All kinds of dark, heavy shadows stretching out in all directions into the room beyond the yellowish cone of light from the reading lamp. A homely feeling.
“Son,” he struck up again, “why aren’t you being straight with me? We have time. I’m listening.”
I let it all out then. Just as it came, disjointedly, angrily. Maybe that was the influence of Jill. I told him what I thought about it all. I told him I spent my days with nothing else but that occupying me, just that.
He heard me out very gravely, even though most of what I said was probably drivel, as I was rather on edge. Still, I could see he was taking it seriously—as seriously as I was myself. He had never looked at me that way before. It was as if he wanted to see right through me. And he had to have seen, because I wanted him to see that I wasn’t joking.
When I finished, he again got to his feet and swept his eyes round the room a few times, then sat back down.
“Is that just your opinion, Enrique,” he asked, “or is it more than that?”
“What do you mean, Dad?”
“Are you still a free agent,” he replied, “or are you already working …,” he hesitated, “for certain somebodies?” He spat it out in the end, just as stupidly as I did a few weeks ago to R.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Not yet,” he repeated. “In other words, you’ve tried?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I’ve come up against certain obstacles.”
He nodded. “Such as being called Salinas, for example.”
“For example,” I replied.
There was a glint in his eyes, which I took to be gloating. Again it nettled me.
“But it’s a barrier that can be broken through, Dad,” I continued. “With patience and determination it’s possible to break through. I believe that, and I’ll prove it, just wait and see!”
Solemnly he ran an inquiring look over my face, which had a hard expression on it, I could feel. It was a strange duel, and at the time its strangeness was all I perceived. Now, of course, I can see its sense as well.
“Listen to me, Enrique,” he spoke again. “I have information from reliable sources that they are going to reopen the university before too long.”
“Too bad,” I commented. “We’ll be under even closer scrutiny; they’ll be able to step up surveillance.”
“Undoubtedly.” He nodded. “But you’ll be able to continue your studies.”
“I don’t wish to continue them,” I said. “There’s no point.”
“You mustn’t forget about your future, Enrique.”
“I’m living for the present, Dad.”
“Ah!” He waved that aside. “The present is just temporary.”
I boiled up. “I know,” I burst out. “It only has to be accepted temporarily—temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die. Well, not for me, Dad! No and again no!”
“What do you want, Enrique?” he asked.
“Something definitive,” I answered. “Something solid and permanent. Something that is me.” And all of a sudden I came out with it: “I want to act. I want to change my way of life, Dad.”
He seemed to wince, but why worry about that! I heard only my own voice as it came out at last with my innermost desire, so categorically that at a stroke I felt everything had become simple and clear. I had nothing more to say, I wanted to get up and leave the room. Then I heard him speaking:
“This is all just a figment of your imagination, Enrique. But a figment that at any moment can turn into a bloody reality.” I don’t know what sort of gesture I made, but he raised his hands and pinned me to the chair with his fingertips. “I heard you out,” he carried on. “I expect you now to hear me out.”
He was right, and I decided to do that. I would do whatever he might say. I would listen to him as calmly as possible, then answer his presumably dreary, predictable questions.
He duly began probing me, as if to test my patience and tenacity. As though he were trying to extract a confession. How was I to know that’s what he was actually doing?
“Enrique,” he began, “let’s be serious. Maybe you will consider me cynical: I don’t mind. But I’m your father, and my worries give me the right to speak. And anyway these are questions that you are going to have to face up to if, as you say, you wish to take action.”
He paused. He pushed the cigarette box over to me. We lit up.
“You do realize, don’t you,” he kicked off, “that there isn’t a single rational reason for someone who is called Salinas to be in the resistance?”
“It’s not clear to me where you draw the bounds of rationality, Dad,” I riposted.
“At realities, Enrique. Only ever at realities.”
“Money, in other words.”
“Yes, money too, among other things. But not just money.” He pondered, as if he were searching for the most apposite word. “Let’s just say at the means of earning a livelihood,” he eventually declared. “We have the means to live. Or to put it another way, we have the means of surviving: that is what I wanted to say in essence.”
“Yes,” I said, “there’s no doubt about that!”
“You do realize, don’t you,” he went on, “that we not only have the means to live but, more than that, to live in security? … Wait!” He raised a hand before I had a chance to respond. “Do you know what uncertainty is?”
I had to think about that. “Yes, I do,” I eventually said.
“How do you know?”
“I learned today, on the highway. When that cop brushed me with his boot tip. If I weren’t called Salinas, they would have beaten me to a pulp, I think.”
“Indeed.” He nodded. “I wasn’t in a position to refer to that. I’m glad you got wise to that of your own accord, Enrique. You do realize then, don’t you, that if you risk your neck, you’ll be doing so for others, not yourself?”
His question again gave me pause. “Within the narrow bounds that you’ve set, I have to concede that that is so,” I said at length.
“The bounds are always narrow.” He leaned toward me from behind the desk. “If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it make
s no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life. You have to acknowledge, though, that in our case neither of these holds true.”
“Sure, I acknowledge it,” I said. The game was beginning to intrigue me. A ghastly game it was, in point of fact; I felt a strange chill around my heart. I can’t define it more precisely than that. I felt that he was right, that every word he was saying was right, and yet my entire innermost being protested against that truth. I feared that by the end of the conversation I would have no choice but to loathe my father, whom I loved. And I was afraid of that fear, a hundred times more afraid of that than I was of the truth of his arguments.
“You do realize, don’t you,” I heard his voice continue, “you do realize that every faction with a sense of purpose needs its unsuspecting tools. Who are tools even though they are called heroes, and even if statues are erected to a few of them—only ever a very few—in public places.”
“I know,” I mumbled hoarsely.
“You do realize, Enrique, you do realize, don’t you, what you’re putting at risk?”
Again I had to think about it.
“My life,” I eventually said.
“Your life!” he exclaimed. “You say that as if you were a child throwing aside a rag doll that you’re fed up with! Enrique, wake up to the fact that you’re living among mere concepts and thinking in terms of empty words. You’re putting your life at risk, you say, but you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Try to grasp the fact that your life is you yourself, as you are sitting here, with your very real past, a possible future, and everything that you mean to your mother. Look at this evening, look down at the street, look around you in the world, and imagine it all being here no more. Grab your body, pinch your flesh, and imagine all that being no more. Can you imagine it? Do you have any idea what it means: to live? How could you know? You’re still young for that, and healthy … You’ve never been at death’s door and come back from there to rediscover life with wonderstruck joy … But do you at least realize that you were lied to at school? Do you realize that there is no afterlife, nor any resurrection? Do you realize that just this one life is given to us, and if we lose it, we also lose ourselves? Do you realize …”
I listened, flabbergasted. His words were spellbinding; I had never seen my father like this. I would never have thought him to be a coward. How was I to guess the purpose of his probing?
“I know,” I said, striving to hold myself in check, though something was quivering inside me.
“Well, if you know,” Father asked, “what more do you want? What’s the point of fighting if you have no reason to fight? Why risk your life, if it’s not in danger?” He got up from his place and came around to me. He leaned over me, grasping my shoulders with both hands. They were strong, very strong. “Why?” he entreated. “Tell me why. I want to know. Tell me!”
So I told him. I shook his hands off my shoulders and spilled it all out. Jill was still dancing in my nerves and lurking in my words. I told him that my life was not in danger, it was just that I could not be reconciled to it. “I would rather not have it,” I said, “than live it like this.” I talked about my itch to throw up, my abomination of everyday life. How I hated everything around me, everything. I hated their policemen, their newspapers, their news. I hated going into an office, a shop, even a café. I hated the furtive glances around me, the people who had been despised yesterday but were celebrated today. I hated the sufferance, the self-interest, the hide-and-seek, the perpetual one-upmanship, the privileges and the lying doggo … Also the patrolman on the highway, who didn’t have the guts to kick me, simply because my name is Salinas: I hated him more for that than for touching me with his boot. I hated the blindness, the bogus hope, the algal life, the stigmatized who, when they get a day’s break from the lashes of the whip, immediately start to sigh about how good life is … And I hated myself too, myself above all, merely for being here and doing nothing. I was well aware that I too was stigmatized, for the time being at any rate, and the longer I did nothing, the more I would be so. Jill appeared before my eyes again, the nauseatingly seductive life that she offered me.
“And,” I shouted, “in order to do more than just hate but bare my teeth as well, it’s enough for me to think of myself dutifully taking my exams, starting a family and siring children, paying my taxes and tending flowers in my garden … In short, over time becoming a happy and well-balanced jailbird!”
I stopped talking and looked up into Father’s smoldering eyes. Overcome by an odd feeling, I faltered. It was as though those mute eyes were looking right through me, as though they knew something that I didn’t. Again I sensed his strength, and felt that I was a child.
I was disconcerted. “You can’t understand,” I said.
“Why do you suppose that?” he asked deliberately and gravely.
“Because … because …” I tried but couldn’t find the right word. As if he had me in his power merely because his gravity, his strength, and his gaze towered over me.
“Do you think I’m a coward? A cynic? Stupid?” he asked.
“No, of course not. None of those things,” I said. And all at once I found my own voice again. “It’s just that you can’t step over your own shadow.”
“You think I’m middle class, a bourgeois. A property owner and stock market speculator. Right?”
I don’t know if I did think that; I don’t know if I could think that. When it comes down to it, that is what I am as well. I am privileged because he’s my father. All the same, I said:
“Yes. And I can’t come to terms with your patience.”
“Why?” he asked.
I thought I was going to fall off the chair. He was as inexorable as an examining magistrate. Was I to start all over from the beginning?
“Because,” I exclaimed, “I no longer have patience for even half an hour!” I jumped to my feet. “Don’t you understand that I can’t bear to go on living like this? I’m sick of doing nothing, of my situation, of mediocrity!” A good word that; I was pleased with it. “Yes, that’s it: sick of mediocrity,” I repeated. “Mediocrity is a sickness. Yes, Dad,” I added. “Mediocrity is downright pathological!”
And I rushed off toward the study door. I felt that I had said all I had to say and that I should not allow myself to listen to any more of his arguments. And I felt that I had to escape from the force of his gravity and his gaze in order to be alone and truly able to stand up to him at last …
My hand was on the door handle when his voice arrested me.
“Stop, Enrique! Come back! Take your seat!” he commanded. And I obeyed him, as if … yes, as if I were just waiting for something more, I don’t know what, but something more plausible—some deliverance from this nightmare.
I should note—though I don’t know why I consider it to be of any importance—that Dad was not sitting but standing behind his desk, leaning with his hands on the desktop. Not on the palms of his hands, to be precise, but on his ten splayed-out fingers, inclined slightly forward.
“I heard you out,” he said. “You, however, have not heard me out.” He paused. “I’ll make you a proposal,” he eventually continued. “Consider it. My proposal is that we work together, Enrique. Take part in the work of the sort of men to whom I belong.”
I don’t remember what he said. I mumbled something. All that I noted exactly was his response:
“Yes, Enrique, of course. Only I didn’t know how seriously I could take you. But on the basis of what has been said, I conclude that I can count on you.”
Thereupon he produced a bottle and two glasses from his cocktail cabinet. We clinked glasses. Then we chatted, very seriously for a long time before going across into the dining room. Mother was already seated in her place, dishing out the supper. I ate well, with a hearty appetite.
I am closing Enrique’s diary: I have no further need of it. The rest was our business—Diaz’s, Ro
driguez’s, and mine, the new boy’s. Oh, and a matter of the logic that led us to Enrique and Enrique to us.
That logic was not without its flaws. Who said it was? It was initially more just an idea; only later did it become logical. At that point, for instance, we were not aware of Enrique’s diary. How would we have been? It came into our hands only in the course of the house search. And even then none of us read right through it: we didn’t need to, and above all, we didn’t have the time. Things were getting distinctly uncomfortable for us around that time, with incidents coming thick and fast. The Colonel was nervous. We had got wind of an impending atrocity. We had to prevent it, or at least try, with every means at our disposal: Homeland and Colonel demanded that of us. The shaggy-haired weirdos all went into hiding. We circulated their details nationally but with about as much success as if we had been searching, let’s say, for half a dozen irregularly yellow-striped Colorado beetles in a twenty-five-thousand-acre field of potatoes.
We had to go with what was on hand, in other words. And Enrique happened to be on hand. We identified him in a photo among the people who were not on hand. How had he found his way into the photograph? Was he one of them? If he was, why hadn’t he gone into hiding as well? Might he have been left as bait? Or did he have an assignment out in the open? In which case, how could they have let him find his way into a photograph? Or did he have nothing to do with them and appeared in it only by chance?
Questions and yet more questions. We had no time to fiddle around with questions. A huge mechanized apparatus, with records, informers, and all those flatfeet, was looking for something to do: we were set up for organizing, for taking action, not for solving crossword puzzles. We did the broad-brush stuff, not the finicky detailed work. Enrique’s name came up in a search of the records: there was a squeal on him from Ramón. Then that offense on the highway. And now the photo. All of these bits had been there previously, properly filed: we hadn’t taken a look at him. Now, though, we wheeled him in because we needed him, and that altered the complexion of things. Everything is a matter of logic. Events per se mean nothing. Life itself can be regarded as an accident. The function of the police, however, is to bring logic to bear on Creation, as I heard Diaz say many a time. A wise man, Diaz was. I personally did not have much liking for him; he caused me a lot of headaches. But never in my life did I see a flatfoot to beat Diaz. No getting round it. He was born for the work—it was his vocation. Above all, he knew what he wanted, and in our line of work that’s a big deal.