So, all in all, I think my father was lucky after the War, when many of the victors thought only of taking revenge, as in my uncle’s case and other still worse cases, revenge for fears experienced or frustrations suffered or weaknesses shown or compassion received, or often for something purely imaginary or for nothing at all — the climate was so conducive to vengeance, usurpation, retaliation, and for the incredible fulfilment of the most fantastic dreams of spite and envy and rage — and when others with more brainpower harboured another broader, wider-reaching idea, less passionate and more abstract, but with equally bloody results once put into practice: that of the total elimination of the enemy, of the defeated and, later, of anyone who seemed suspicious, neutral, ambiguous, insufficiently fanatical or enthusiastic, and, later, those who were moderate or reluctant or lukewarm, and always, of course, those they simply did not like.
So on other occasions, allowing some time to pass in between, I had asked my father again and had tried to tighten the net, though never very much, I didn’t want to distress or sadden him. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but each time it had arisen of its own accord, for I certainly had no wish to force the matter. And I said to him:
‘But with the Del Real business, did you really never know or is it just that you didn’t want to tell us about it?’
He looked at me with his blue eyes, which I have not inherited, and with his usual honesty, which has not passed to me either, or, at least, not to the same degree, he said:
‘No, I didn’t know. And when I left prison I was filled with such loathing for him that there seemed no point in finding out whether or not it was true, whether through third parties or directly.’
‘But there was nothing stopping you going to see him, or picking up the phone and saying: “What’s going on here, have you gone mad, why are you trying to get me killed?”’
‘That would have meant giving him an importance he didn’t deserve, regardless of what explanation he gave me, and the chances are he wouldn’t have had one or even attempted one. I simply got on with my life and tried not to think about him, not even when I was on the receiving end of reprisals and rejections which were all down to him and his great initiative. I erased him from my existence. And that, I’m sure, was the best thing I could have done. Not just for my peace of mind, but on the practical front too. I never saw him again and never had any contact with him, and when, all those years later, I found out he’d died, it must have been in the ’80s I think, I can’t even remember when it was now, I didn’t feel a thing and didn’t give it a second thought. As far as I was concerned, he’d been dead for decades, ever since that feast day of San Isidro in 1939. Surely you can understand that.’
‘Yes, I understand it perfectly,’ I said. ‘What I don’t understand and have never understood is that you didn’t suspect anything, that you didn’t see it coming when you were so close all those years, I mean, something like that is bred in the bone. I don’t understand why he did it, why anyone would do something like that, especially when there was absolutely no need. There must have been some cause for resentment between you, some petty argument, I don’t know, perhaps you both went after the same woman, or perhaps there was some unconscious insult on your part, or which wasn’t an insult at all, but which he might have taken as such. Surely you thought about it, went over it in your mind, pondered it. I can’t believe you didn’t, at least while you were in prison, with no idea what was going to happen to you. Afterwards … yes, afterwards, I can believe that you didn’t give it any further thought. That I find quite easy to believe.’
‘I don’t know,’ my father replied, and he sat looking at me with interest, almost with curiosity, as if deferentially reciprocating a little of the interest and curiosity I was showing in him. He used to look at me like that sometimes, as if he were trying to get a better understanding of the man I had become, so different from him, as if struggling to recognise himself in me despite the more obvious and perhaps rather superficial differences, and occasionally, it seemed to me that he managed to do so, to recognise me ‘between the lines’ so to speak. And after that pause, he added: ‘Do you remember Lissarrague? Now what he did was extraordinary; I’m sure I’ve told you the story often enough.’ And before I could say that, yes, I remembered perfectly, he refreshed my memory (this was one story he did like to recall and to recount): ‘His intervention was absolutely crucial. His father, a soldier, had been murdered, and he had contacts with the Falange, and so, what with one thing and another, he was in the Francoists’ good books at the time. My accusers asked him if he knew what I’d done during the War, and when he said that he did, they gave his name as a witness for the prosecution. But when he was questioned at the trial, he not only denied all the false accusations that had been made against me, he spoke very favourably of me. The captain in charge of the prosecution was getting more and more agitated and, astonished by Lissarrague’s declarations, he finally blurted out: “You do know you were summoned as a witness for the prosecution, don’t you?” To which Lissarrague replied: “I thought I’d been summoned to tell the truth.” The judge, taken aback, asked why, if what he said was true, there were so many extremely grave accusations being levelled at me. And Lissarrague replied succinctly and without hesitation: “Envy.” You see, he and other people saw it like that and thought no more about it. Myself, I’m not so sure that the explanation was quite that simple.’
‘That just proves my point,’ I put in. ‘All the more reason why you should ask yourself the question, given that you weren’t satisfied with the simpler explanation, the one that everyone but you found perfectly acceptable.’
‘No, I wasn’t satisfied,’ my father replied with a hint of intellectual amour propre. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I ever came up with a more complicated explanation, or that trying to find one interested me enough for me to devote my time to it or to speak to the man again, to call him to account. There are some people whose motives don’t deserve further investigation, even though these may have led them to commit the most terrible acts or precisely because they did. I know this goes completely against the current trend. Nowadays everyone wonders what leads a serial killer or mass murderer to kill or murder serially or en masse, or what makes a collector of rapes constantly add to his collection, what makes a terrorist, in the name of some primitive cause, despise all life and try to put an end to the lives of as many other people as possible, what makes a tyrant endlessly tyrannise or a torturer endlessly torture, be it in the name of bureaucracy or sadism. There’s an obsession with understanding the loathsome, there’s an unhealthy fascination with it, and it does the loathsome a huge favour. I don’t share the modern world’s infinite curiosity about something that can never be justified, however many different explanations you come up with, psychological, sociological, biographical, religious, historical, cultural, patriotic, political, idiosyncratic, economic, anthropological, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to waste my time on the bad and the pernicious, its interest, I can assure you, is minimal at best and usually nil, I’ve seen plenty of it. Evil tends to be simple, although not always that simple, if you know what I mean. But there are some investigations that sully the investigator, and even some that infect you without giving anything valuable back in return. There is a taste today for exposing oneself to the base and the vile, to the monstrous and the aberrant, for peering in at the infra-human and rubbing up against it as if it had some kind of prestige or charm and were more important than the hundred thousand other conflicts that besiege us without their ever plumbing quite those depths. There’s an element of pride in all of this too: you plunge into the anomalous, the repugnant and the wretched as if the human norm were respect and generosity and rectitude, and we had to make a microscopic analysis of anything that deviated from that norm; as if bad faith and treachery, ill will and malice did not form part of that norm and were the exception, and therefore merited all our effort and attention. And that isn’t true. It’s all part of the no
rm, and there’s no great mystery about it, no more than there is about good faith. This age, however, is devoted to the silly, the obvious and the superfluous, and that’s the way it is. Things should be the other way around: there are actions so abominable and so despicable that their mere commission should cancel out any possible curiosity we might have in those who committed them, rather than creating curiosity and provoking it, as is the imbecilic way of things now. And that was the case with me, even though it was my case, my life. What that former friend had done to me was so unjustifiable, so inadmissible and so grave from the point of view of friendship, that everything about him instantly ceased to interest me: his present, his future and his past too, even though I existed in that past. I didn’t need to know anything more, and I had no wish to delve deeper.’
He had stopped and was looking at me again, hard and expectantly, as if I were not one of his own familiar children, but a much younger friend, a new friend who had come to see him that morning in his bright, welcoming apartment in Madrid. And as if he could expect from me a novel reaction to what he had said.
‘You’re a better man than I am,’ was my response. ‘Or if it isn’t a question of better or worse, you’re certainly freer and more astute. I can’t be sure, but I think I would have sought to avenge myself. After Franco died, or whenever it would have been feasible to do so.’
My father laughed, and this he did paternally, more or less as he had when we, as children, came out with some wildly ingenuous or tactless remark in the presence of visitors.
‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘you do have a tendency to hang on to things, Jacobo, and it’s sometimes hard for you to let go, you’re not always good at leaving things behind. But that’s mainly a sign that you still feel very young. You still think you have unlimited time, time enough to squander. It may be hard for you to understand this, but trying to avenge myself would simply have meant wasting more of my time because of him, and those months in prison were quite enough for me. Besides, it would have given him a sort of a posteriori justification, a false validation, an anachronistic motive for his action. Bear in mind that when you look at your life as a whole the chronological aspect gradually diminishes in importance, you make less of a distinction between what happened before and what happened afterwards, between actions and their consequences, between decisions and what they unleash. He might have thought that I had, in fact, done him some harm, it didn’t matter when, and then he would have gone to his grave feeling more at peace with himself. And that wasn’t and hasn’t been the case. I never wronged him in any way, I didn’t harm him and I never had, either before or afterwards or, needless to say, at the time. And that perhaps was what he could not bear, what hurt him. Some people can’t forgive you for behaving decently towards them, for being loyal to them, for defending them and giving them your support, let alone doing them a favour or getting them out of some difficulty, that can, on occasions, sound the death knell for the benefactor, I’m quite sure you can come up with your own examples. It’s as if they felt humiliated by being the object of someone’s affection and good intentions, or thought that this implied a degree of contempt towards them, it’s as if they could not stand to feel indebted, however imaginary the debt, or to be obliged to feel grateful. Not that they would want to be treated otherwise, of course, heavens, no, they’re always terribly insecure. They would be even more unforgiving if you behaved badly or disloyally towards them, if you denied them favours and left them firmly stuck in their own mire. Some people are simply impossible, and the only sensible thing to do is to remove yourself from their presence and keep them at a distance, and not to let them near you for good or ill, or count on you for anything, quite simply, to cease to exist for them, not even in order to fight them. That, of course, is the ideal. Unfortunately, you can’t make yourself invisible by sheer will-power or by choice. For example, when I was in prison, our friend Margarita came to visit me (there was a metal grille between us), and she became so passionately indignant about the things she had heard my betrayer saying about me that this attracted the attention of the prison guards. They asked her who she was talking about, fearing, no doubt, that it was Franco himself. She, being of a highly excitable nature, told them, and they made her go with them to Del Real’s house to find out if what she had said was true. There they found his mother, who, of course, Margarita knew (we all knew her, we had been good friends for many years), and whom she attempted to persuade to get her son to see reason and to withdraw his unfair and incomprehensible accusations. His mother, who was very fond of Margarita, listened with a mixture of astonishment and discomfort. In the end, though, maternal faith outweighed everything else, but all she could say in her son’s defence was: “La patria es la patria” — “One’s country is one’s country.” To which Margarita replied: “Yes, and lies are lies.’”
My father fell silent again, but this time he didn’t look at me, but at the arm of his chair. He seemed suddenly tired, or perhaps distracted by something that had nothing to do with our conversation. I couldn’t tell if he had become slightly lost amongst his memories and did not intend to add anything more, or if he was still going to connect the last story to the one before and offer me a conclusion. It seemed unlikely that I would find out because my sister had arrived (perhaps my father had heard the lift) and had just come into the living-room, but only, I imagine, in time to hear Margarita’s quoted words, because she immediately asked us in a jovial, chiding tone:
‘All right, what are you two arguing about?’
And I said:
‘We’re not, we were talking about the past.’
‘What past? Was I there?’
My sister always had a particularly cheering effect on my father, even though she resembled my mother rather less than I did. Well, not exactly: she resembled her more in that she was also a woman, but less so in her actual features, which I reproduced in my male face with disquieting fidelity. He replied with an ironic, happy smile, his usual harmonious blend:
‘No, you weren’t, not even as the embryo of a plan of a hypothesis of a possibility.’ Then he went on to conclude, addressing himself solely to me: ‘Lies are lies, you see. There’s not really any more to say or time to waste on such things.’
‘No, not once you’ve emerged from them, more or less unscathed that is,’ I said.
‘Yes, of course, once you’ve emerged from them, scathed or unscathed. That’s obvious, I mean if I hadn’t emerged, we wouldn’t be talking now, you and me, still less this young woman here.’
‘Is this some deep dark secret you two are talking about?’
That is what my sister said then, I remember it well, and those were the memories that came to me as I finally climbed into the familiar bed prepared by Mrs Berry many hours before, but first I returned to its place in the next room the copy of From Russia with Love with its dedication. I had, I thought, left almost everything in order, and had even cleaned up a strange bloodstain that I had neither spilled nor provoked and which now, in the midst of my drunkenness and tiredness, and just as I had foreseen before erasing it for good and expunging its rim or last remnant, was already starting to seem unreal to me, a product of my imagination. Or perhaps of my readings. Without realising it, I had read a great deal about the days of blood in my own country. The blood of Nin, the blood of the uncle who never was my uncle, the blood of so many people without names or who had to abandon their name and who inhabit the earth no longer. And the blood of my father which they sought but did not manage to spill (blood of my blood which did not spurt forth or spatter me). ‘La patria es la patria’, the traitor’s poor, trapped mother. An inextricable phrase, meaningless like all tautologies, empty words, a rudimentary concept — that of fatherland, homeland, mother country — and fanatical in its application. Never trust anyone who used it or uses it, but how would you know someone was using it if they were speaking in English and said ‘country’, which usually translates as ‘país’, as in ‘What country do you come from?’,
or ‘campo’ as in ‘countryside’, which are both entirely inoffensive in Spanish. From the top floor I could hear the murmur of the river even more clearly now, quiet and patient or indifferent and languid; sound rises, or was it just the part of the house I was in, lying in bed at last. I could already see a little light in the sky or so I thought, it was barely noticeable, my eyes might have been deceiving me. But there you can’t help but notice, even at dead of night and at the hour we Latins used to call the conticinio — a word now forgotten by my own language — because of that strange English penchant for sleeping without blinds on the windows, something I never did grow accustomed to, there are no blinds, they don’t have them, indeed, they don’t always have curtains or shutters, often only transparent net curtains which neither shelter nor conceal nor calm, as if they always had to keep one eye open when they fall asleep, the inhabitants of that large island on which I have spent more time than is advisable and more than was foreseeable, if I add up the before and the after, the now and the then. ‘Lies are lies’, another meaningless tautology, although this time the word is not empty, nor the concept rudimentary, nor its application fanatical, but, rather, universal, effortless, routine, constant, almost mechanical and casual at times, and the more mechanical and casual, the more difficult it is to identify, to distinguish, and the truer the lie, for lies have their truth, the more defenceless we are. ‘Lies are lies, but all lies have their moment to be believed.’ Just as I might believe the river as I lay listening to its murmurings, and, thinking I understood, repeated what it said, as I drifted off to sleep, keeping one eye open, as is the custom in this country, which is also, for some, their patria, softly and languidly, with the open eye of my contagion and the non-existent lightness in the sky: ‘I am the river, I am the river and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night, I take on the likeness of past times and past events too, I am the river. But the river is just the river. Nothing more.’