Elena kept back her final test for another three days. Her mistress was growing weaker, but she nonetheless refused to stay in bed and sat in her armchair as if that sign of health would be a safeguard against death. And Elena expressed an interest in The Travels of Marco Polo, or so she said, because, in fact, what really interested her was the prologue and the biographical note about the traveller. She introduced a few words of her own, saying: ‘This great adventurer travelled to China and to Mecca, among other places.’ She stopped, and feigning surprise, added: ‘Imagine that, Señora, what a long journey, all the way to China and to Mecca.’ The man’s tanned weather-beaten face turned deathly pale and, at the same time and without transition, how can we put it, his entire figure abruptly vanished, as if that ashen pallor had erased him from the air, made him transparent, a nothing, invisible even to her. And then she was sure that the man was Emiliano Zapata, murdered in his thirties by the treachery of a supposed zapatista called Jesus Guajardo, in a place called Chinameca, or so the legend goes. And she felt very honoured to think that she was being visited by the ghost of Zapata, his clothes still full of the holes made by those treacherous bullets.
Her mistress died the next morning. Elena stayed on in the house, and for a few days, saddened and disoriented, with no reason to continue, she stopped reading. The young man did not appear. And then, convinced that Zapata wanted to have the education he had doubtless lacked in life, and persuaded by the idea that in his lifetime he had suffered from an excess of reality and for that reason, after death, wished to find repose in fictions, but also fearful that this was not the case and that his presence had somehow been mysteriously linked to the old lady—a love affair with Zapata required more secrecy than any other, a secret that would have to be kept forever—she decided to go back to reading out loud in order to call him back, and she read not only novels and poetry, but books on history and the natural sciences. The young man took some time to reappear—perhaps ghosts go into mourning, for who else has more reason to or perhaps they are still wary, perhaps words can still wound them—but he did finally return, attracted perhaps by the new material, and he continued to listen with the same close attention, not standing up this time, leaning on the chair back, but comfortably installed in the now vacant armchair, his hat dangling from his hand, and sometimes with his legs crossed and holding a lit cigar, like the patriarch he never, in his numbered days, had had the chance to become.
The young woman, who was growing older, jealously guarded her secret and spoke ever more confidingly to him, but never received a reply: ghosts cannot always speak nor do they always want to. And as that one-sided intimacy grew, so the years passed, and she was always careful not to mention the name ‘Jesus’ again in any context and to avoid any words that resembled ‘guajiro or ‘Guajardo’ and to exclude forever from her readings any references to China or Mecca. Then one day, the man failed to appear, nor did he in the days and weeks that followed. The young woman, who was now almost old herself, was worried at first like a mother, fearing that some grave accident or misfortune might have befallen him, not realising that such things only happen to mortals, that those who are no longer mortal are quite safe. When she understood this, her worry turned to despair: evening after evening, she would stare at the empty armchair and curse the silence, she would ask sorrowful questions of the void, hurl reproaches into the invisible air, and curse the past to which she feared he had returned; she wondered what mistake or error she could have made and searched eagerly for new texts that might arouse the guerrilleros curiosity and make him come back—new topics and new novels, new adventures of Sherlock Holmes, for she put more faith in Conan Doyle’s narrative skills than in any other scientific or literary bait. She continued to read out loud every day, to see if he would come.
One evening, after months of desolation, she found that the bookmark she had left in the Dickens novel she was patiently reading to him in his absence was not where she had left it, but many pages ahead. She carefully read the pages he had marked, and then, bitterly, she understood, experiencing the disappointment that comes in every life, however quiet and recondite. There was a sentence in the text that said: ‘And she grew old and lined, and her cracked voice was no longer pleasing to him.’ Don Alejandro de la Cruz says that the old lady became as indignant as a rejected wife, and that, far from accepting this judgement and falling silent, she reproached the void thus: ‘You are most unfair, but in life, so they say, you always tried to be scrupulously fair. You do not grow old, and want to listen to pleasant youthful voices, and to contemplate firm luminous faces. I can understand that; you’re young and always will be, and you may not have had much time, and many things escaped you. But I have educated and amused you for years; and if, thanks to me, you have learned much, possibly even how to read, it hardly seems right that you should leave me offensive messages in the very books I have shared with you. Bear in mind that when the old lady died, I could easily have read in silence, but I didn’t. I could have left Veracruz, but I didn’t. I know that you can go in search of other voices, nothing binds you to me and it’s true that you’ve never asked me for anything—you owe me nothing. But if you have any notion of gratitude, Emiliano,’ and this was the first time she called him by his name, still not knowing if anyone was listening, ‘I ask you to come at least once a week and to have patience with my voice, which is no longer a beautiful voice and no longer pleases you, and now will never bring me love. I will try hard to read as well as I can. But do come, because now that I’m old, I need you to amuse and keep me company. I would miss seeing you and your bullet-riddled clothes. Poor Emiliano,’ she added more calmly, all those bullets.’
According to the scholarly Don Alejandro de la Cruz, the ghost of that rustic man and eternal soldier, who may have been Zapata, was not entirely lacking in sympathy. He accepted her reasoning or felt that he owed her a debt of gratitude: and from then until her death, Elena Vera awaited with excitement and impatience the arrival of the day chosen by her impalpable, silent love to return—from the past, from a time in which, in fact, neither past nor time existed—the arrival of each Wednesday, when he was perhaps coming back from Chinameca, murdered, sad, exhausted. And it is thought that those visits, that that listener and their pact, all kept her alive for many more years, in that city facing the sea, because with him she still had a past and a present and a future too—or perhaps they too are a kind of nostalgia.
(1998)
the resignation letter of senor de santiesteban
For Juan Benet, fifteen years late
Whether it was one of those bizarre occurrences to which Chance never quite manages to accustom us, however often they may arise; or whether Destiny, in a show of caution and prudence, temporarily suspended judgement on the qualities and attributes of the new teacher and so felt itself obliged to delay intervening just in case such an intervention should later have been found to be a mistake; or whether, finally, it was because in these southern lands even the boldest and most confident of people tend to distrust their own gifts of persuasion, the fact of the matter is that young Mr Lilburn did not discover what truth there might be in the strange warnings issued to him—only a few days after he had joined the Institute—by his immediate superior, Mr Bayo, and by other colleagues too, until he was well into the first term when sufficient time had elapsed for him to be able to forget or at least to postpone thinking about the possible significance of the warnings. Mr Lilburn, in any case, belonged to that class of person who, sooner or later, in the course of a hitherto untroubled life, finds his career in ruins and his unshakable beliefs overturned, refuted and even held up to ridicule by just such an event as concerns us here. And so it would, therefore, have made little difference if he had never been asked to stay behind to lock up the building.
Lilburn, who was just thirty-one, had eagerly accepted the post offered him, through Mr Bayo, by the director of the British Institute in Madrid. Indeed, he had experienced a certain sense of relief and somet
hing very like the discreet, imperfect, muted joy felt in such situations by men who—while they wouldn’t ever dare to so much as dream of rising to heights they had already accepted would never be theirs—nevertheless expect a small improvement in their position as the most natural thing in the world. And although his work at the Institute did not, in itself, constitute any improvement at all, either economic or social, with respect to his previous position, young Mr Lilburn was very conscious, as he signed the rather unorthodox contract presented to him by Mr Bayo during the latter’s summer sojourn in London, that, while spending nine months abroad was almost an invitation to people in his native city to forget all about him and his abilities, and implied, too, the loss—perhaps not, he imagined, irrevocable—of his comfortable but extremely mediocre post at the North London Polytechnic, it also brought the distinct possibility of coming into contact with people higher up the administrative ladder and, more importantly, with prestigious members of the diplomatic corps. Furthermore, having dealings, for example (why not?), with an ambassador could prove most useful to him—however sporadic and superficial those dealings might be—possibly in the not too distant future. And so, around the middle of September, and with the indifference characteristic of any only moderately ambitious man, he made his preparations, recommending a far less knowledgable replacement for the post he was vacating at the Polytechnic, and arrived in Madrid, determined to work hard if necessary to earn the esteem and trust of his superiors—with an eye to any future advantages this might bring him—and to resist being seduced by the flexibility of the Spanish working day.
Young Lilburn soon managed to establish an orderly life for himself in that foreign land and, after a few initial days of vacillation and relative bewilderment (the days he was obliged to spend in the house of old Mr Bayo and his wife while he waited for the previous tenants to vacate the small furnished attic apartment in Calle de Orellana reserved for him from 1 October by Mr Turol, another of his Spanish colleagues; the rent was too high for Lilburn’s budget, but it wasn’t really expensive if one took into account that it was extremely central and had the incomparable advantage of being very near the Institute), he set himself a meticulous and—if such a thing were possible throughout a whole academic year—invariable daily routine, and which he did, in fact, manage to maintain, although only until the month of March. He got up at seven on the dot and, after breakfasting at home and briefly going over what he planned to say in each of his morning classes, set off to the Institute to teach. During break-time, he would share with Mr Bayo and Miss Ferris his dismay at the Spanish students’ appalling lack of discipline and then, over lunch, would make the same remarks to Mr Turol and Mr White. Over dessert, he would review the afternoons lessons, which he would take at a rather slower pace than he had in the morning, and, once they were over, would spend from six to half past seven in the Institute’s library, consulting a few books and preparing his classes for the next day. He would then walk to the elegant house of the widowed Señora Giménez-Klein, in Calle de Fortuny, in order to give an hour’s private tuition to her eight-year-old granddaughter (his protector, Mr Bayo, had found him this simple, well-remunerated work), and then return to his apartment in Calle de Orellana at about half past nine or shortly thereafter, in time to hear the radio news: although, at first, Lilburn understood almost nothing, he was convinced that this was the best way to learn correct Spanish pronunciation. He then ate a light supper, read a couple of chapters of his Spanish grammar book, hurriedly memorising vast lists of verbs and nouns, and went to bed punctually at half past eleven. Any reader familiar with the aforementioned Madrid streets and the buildings occupied by the British Institute will have no difficulty in grasping that Lilburn’s life could not fail to be anything but methodical and ordered, and that his feet probably took no more than two thousand steps each day. His weekends, however, with the exception of the occasional Saturday when he attended suppers or receptions laid on for visitors to Madrid from British universities (and, on just one occasion, a cocktail party at the embassy), were a mystery to his colleagues and superiors, who supposed—based on the not very revealing circumstance that he never answered the phone on those days—that he must make use of his weekends to go on short trips to nearby towns. It would seem, however, that at least until January or February, young Lilburn spent Saturdays and Sundays closeted in his apartment struggling with the whims and caprices of Spanish conjugations. And one can only assume that he spent his Christmas vacation in the same way.
Derek Lilburn was a man of little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past: the only son of a couple of mediocre, second-rate actors who had achieved a certain degree of popularity (if not prestige) during the early part of the Second World War with an Elizabethan and Jacobean repertoire that included Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Heywood the Younger, but which scrupulously avoided authors of greater stature like Marlowe, Webster or, indeed, Shakespeare, Lilburn had nonetheless failed to inherit what used to be called a vocation for the stage’; although one might well question whether his progenitors had ever harbored such a vocation themselves. When the war was over, and the various divas, anxious to resume their positions and hungry for applause, hurried back to the theatre with vigour and assiduity, and the slow work of reconstruction as well as the return en masse of the armed forces made London, if not a more anxious city, certainly a more uncomfortable place than when the bombings were rife, the Lilburns, apparently without regret, left the capital and the profession. They settled in Swansea and opened a grocery store, doubtless with the money they had saved during their years devoted to the ignoble and thankless art of acting. All that remained of those eventful times were a few posters advertising Philaster and The Revenger’s Tragedy, and a few facts that have led me, when speaking of his parents, to give more importance to their dramatic incursions—mere anecdote—than to their true status as shopkeepers. Neither books nor erudition filled young Lilburn’s childhood, and you can be quite sure that he did not even benefit from the one vestige that might unwittingly have remained of his parents’ years spent treading the boards: an emphatic, smug or affected way of speaking even in banal, domestic conversation.
The death of his father, which occurred when young Derek was just eighteen, meant that he could take personal charge of the business, and the death of his mother, a few months later, served as a good excuse to sell the establishment, move to London and pay for his own higher education. Once he had gained his degree, with the deceptive brilliance of the diligent student, he worked as a teacher in state schools for a few years—without, in that brief interval, being assailed by any vocational doubts—until, in 1969, thanks to a superficial and entirely self-interested friendship with one of the teachers at the Polytechnic, he was appointed to the very post he had now rejected in favour of a brief stay abroad—a period which he sensed would somehow be a transitional one.
It is well known to all those familiar with the Institute, whether as teachers, students or merely as regular visitors to the library, that its doors close at nine o’clock sharp (half an hour after the last evening classes end). The person charged with closing up is the porter, to give him his conventional title, even though his duties, and this is more or less the norm in all such coeducational establishments, often depart from those implied by his title and more closely resemble those of a librarian or beadle. This man has to keep an eye on the entrances and exits of anyone not employed by the Institute; attend to any orders, errands or demands issued by teachers; clean the blackboards which, for reasons of carelessness or forgetfulness, have been left, at the end of the day, covered in numbers, illustrious names and notable dates; ensure that no one takes a book from the library without its loan having been duly recorded; and, finally—and leaving aside a few lesser tasks—make quite certain that, at five minutes to nine, the building is empty and, if it is, lock the doors until the following morning. Fabián Jaunedes, the man occupying the busy post of porter when young Derek Lilburn arrived i
n Madrid, had, for twenty-four years, been carrying out his duties with the perfection of one who has virtually created his own job. And so when, in early March, with some haste and urgency, he was admitted to the hospital for a cataract operation and thus forced to abandon his duties for at least as long as it would take him to recuperate (a recuperation that would necessarily be incomplete or partial and which would, at any rate, take far longer than those running the organisation might desire), the internal life of the Institute suffered far worse disruption than one would have thought. The director and Mr Bayo immediately rejected the idea of taking on a replacement, for, on the one hand, they thought that, at such short notice, it would be hard to find someone with good enough references who would be prepared to commit himself for what little remained of the term, only perhaps to find himself replaced (they doubted the old porter would make such a speedy recovery, but it seemed to them that filling the vacant position for more than five months was tantamount to getting rid of Fabián for good, which would be a gross act of disloyalty to someone who had himself been so loyal and given such good service for so many years). On the other hand, they soon revealed that ability or obscure need to turn a minor sacrifice or compromise into something truly epic—an ability or need so prevalent among the unimaginative and among people of a certain age—when they decided that, in view of this unexpected setback (which they would have described, rather, as an adversity), it would not be unreasonable to call for a minor sacrifice on the part of each and every one of the teachers, who could easily share the absent porter’s various duties and demonstrate en passant their selfless devotion to the Institute. The librarian was left in charge of keeping an eye on any strangers who went in and out of the main door, which she could easily see from her usual position; Miss Ferris was to keep the flyers and announcements on the bulletin boards in the entrance hall up to date, although without allowing too many to accumulate; every few hours, Mr Turol was to inspect the state of the toilets and the boiler; those teachers who finished their classes at half past eight were urged to appoint one of their students to clean the blackboard before leaving; and, lastly, among the members of staff who had not been assigned any specific task, an equitable rota was put in place: someone must remain in the building until nine at night to check that all was in order and to lock the doors. And although this represented a disturbance to Lilburn’s rigid routine, he had no alternative but to miss his appointment with Señora Giménez-Kleins granddaughter one evening a week and to collaborate with his superiors and colleagues in the smooth running of the Institute by staying in the library until the usual time of nine o’clock every Friday from March onwards.