Asunción kept the apartment, which they had finally finished paying off just a short while earlier, in one of the six identical buildings alongside the highway leading to the factory; she also kept the furniture that was so garish it seemed to be arguing with whoever was using it and whatever other objects it was meant to be used with. And he held on to the field by the river and the house on the outskirts of the village, which had belonged to his father, and before that to his grandfather, and which his great grandfather had, according to what he had heard from them, apparently built when he came back from America with just enough money for a place to live, which wasn’t much compared to the elegant magnificence of the typical homes of Spaniards returning from America.
“I’m going back to the country,” he’d said to Asunción over the phone.
“You’ve always loved that precious countryside of yours,” she replied sarcastically.
“That must be it.”
Asunción had been elected as a councilwoman in the most recent municipal elections, representing a party everyone knew all there was to know about without actually having to know anything. People wondered whether her son Juanjo, whom nobody called Juanjo anymore, but Potote, and who’d been working in France and whom he hadn’t seen in more than two years, might not have been involved in some way in her election. One day, one day during the final month he spent working at the chemical factory, he’d gone to eat his sandwich with his coworkers at a bar nearby — it was his birthday, sixty years old, sixty big ones, so it was up to him to treat everyone — and he found himself mesmerized by a photograph in the newspaper he had used, following his general practice, to wrap up his sandwich before leaving the house. Next to three other women, sporting that exact same hairstyle that was not so much old-fashioned as it was primeval or primitive, Asunción posed for the camera with a smile he attempted to recognize and that ended up seemingly gnawing at him from within. The photograph was taken in the same square where he, alongside a few others, had gone, every day at the exact same time, week after week for almost a year, to call for the release of a man buried alive; you might even say, if you looked closely, as he was doing, that it was the exact same spot where they themselves had stood behind their banner, swallowing the ire and malevolence of certain people and the indifference or cowardice of others, in order not only to demand, by their mere presence, respect for a single person’s life and freedom but to remind everyone of what, in a supposedly civilized country, you would think it might not be necessary to remind anyone of anymore, and yet it was necessary to do so, over and over again, unflaggingly, and that was, namely, that every person sees and thinks in his own way but that, as convinced as someone may feel that he is right about something, or in the right about something — you can always convince yourself of whatever you like and for whatever reason, his father always used to say — that doesn’t mean that other people are under any obligation to see and think like him, nor that that person has the right to any such thing, much less any right that could be assigned pretty words and turned into some sort of standard or smokescreen, and that a person can even do whatever he wants, as he liked to explain again and again, but not just whatever he feels like.
“You just don’t get it, Felipe,” they said to him again as they watched him stare unblinkingly at the photo of his wife on the page of a newspaper he now bought himself. “You know it, but you don’t want to admit it.”
He had unwrapped his sandwich, slowly smoothed out the paper, moving the palm of his hand across the photo, which he didn’t take his eyes off even for a moment, and it was as if that simple act of passing his hand back and forth over the wrinkled surface of the newspaper were the only thing that could allow him to stand looking at it, by presenting it to him intermittently, in brief flashes, just like the headlights of the cars and trucks passing him as he walked at night along the shoulder of the highway.
So that’s it, he said to himself upon arriving home that day a bit after nightfall, that’s it. In her smile in the photograph, which he hadn’t managed to decipher at first, a strangely veiled smile, a smile someone who had known her a long time might call an artificial smile, small-town, that was the term that sprang to mind, though he didn’t know why, a small-town smile, you could see the impassable distance that separated them and had been growing at the same pace and to the same proportions as that smile that had been forming on her face. It wasn’t her smile, that was the first thing that occurred to him, or rather it wasn’t the smile of the person he had first met, instead it seemed more like his son’s smile the last time they could be said to have spoken to one another, when he’d actually said my son, do you understand, my son? Her smile also revealed, more than anything else, more than thankfulness or satisfaction at having gotten the post, and much more, especially, than any real happiness or joy, which were completely absent, something else — rivalry, hostility, and in the end repulsion, a grimace of concentrated, defiant repulsion and an air of self-satisfied, vindictive stubbornness identical to his son’s expression the last time he’d called him my son and spoken to him as one speaks to a son. Juanjo, he sounded out each syllable as he walked along the shoulder of the highway, past the immense, windowless hangar next to which he could never figure out why he felt so vulnerable and alienated. Juan José, my son, Juan José.
If the syllables of a person’s name could contain some meaning and weren’t just expanding pockets or metallic hollowness, that nocturnal utterance of his would surely encompass it all. Are emotions, he put it to himself, what give meaning to names? Or love, even when thwarted or unrequited? Or is it just desperation?
The cars blinded him for a moment as they passed; it was drizzling again, and in the brief interval of time in which their headlights lit up the road in front of him, he could see the water falling almost half-heartedly. Although it was gradually soaking him, he liked to see the raindrops for the instant they hung there; they filled with light, and the dark background against which they shone seemed, just then, less dark, less able to attract and absorb everything, to swallow it all up. He went on watching them as he walked — when he came to a puddle on the shoulder, he would quicken his pace, so that any cars driving close to the curb wouldn’t splash him — and then suddenly he had the urge to see the laughing eyes and warm, calm expression of the woman he had fallen in love with almost forty years ago. He remembered what both of them always said had been the happiest day of their lives together, the day they were dead set on insisting, despite the dates not adding up right, that they’d conceived their first child.
It was a dry, Sunday afternoon, and the heat felt as if it couldn’t be any more oppressive, and the sky, so clear you could almost reach out and touch it, as if it were something solid, nevertheless made you feel as though it were softly embracing everything in its care. Under the poplars, in the field, lying on the grass in the shelter of elders and danewort, everything was good, so good they could never remember it having ever been as good before or since. The leaves on the trees, swaying in the intermittent breeze, created a play of tremors of light and flashes of shadow on the pristine nakedness of her body, like sequins on the exigent mystery of her pubis and the manifest fullness of her breasts. For a moment he thought — or perhaps it was now that he was thinking it — that it was uncertain whether the light was coming from on high, from the clear flesh of the sky, or from below, from the smooth sun of her body. Above and below, just like matter and spirit, din and silence, were dimensions no longer counterposed; they became superposed, like their bodies and the fluids and the breath emanating from their bodies. In a place of no sound, you could hear the whispering of the foliage, the twittering of birds, the disquieting exactitude of water flowing in the river right nearby, and the deep breathing — her soft moaning — each time he, with a tranquility that seem to emerge from the very earth on which they were lying, penetrated her as if he had done no other thing in life, nor believed he ever would, than enter her.