Even the insides of houses had changed, and when he visited people at their homes, the same accumulation of junk, furniture, and the most disparate of décor, which seemed to be arguing with its own owners, was at times suffocating to him, even from the very first moment of stepping inside. How eager everyone is to fling themselves into the arms of the worst, to thoughtlessly abandon whatever little or much they actually have! — he marveled. Is it really so hard to figure out how to embrace the best of the new and set aside the worst of the old that people so often end up doing just the opposite? What pride in one’s own judgment and what stubbornness of vision doesn’t run the risk of eventually taking hold of everything?
“I’m going to leave everything as is,” he said to his son Felipe. “I’ll install heating, I’ll change the plumbing and the lighting fixtures, the bathroom and a few things in the kitchen, and the rest will stay the same. White, with the same sideboard and the same pantry and the same four chairs as always, which I’ll have reupholstered. How does that seem to you?”
It seemed good to him, and it also seemed to him that his father now had the chance to remake his life, to resume it, to breathe again the breath of things that had made him what he was and afforded him the fortitude he possessed, and foremost among the first several things he resumed, just as if it were actually himself he was resuming, was his walk along the road to the field by the river.
But that day, which might rightly be said to be the first day in twenty years when he went back to doing what he should probably never have stopped doing in the first place, when he saw that the weather had quickly turned as stormy as it had been on the last of the afternoons he had walked along the road after having walked along it almost daily for so many years, he wondered what that coincidence might mean, if things in fact meant anything, or if they merely happened and we were the ones who implored them to say something to us.
Do things resume when we resume them? — he put the question to himself again. Or is it simply that we give free rein to a feeling of nostalgia for something that has gone forever because it is in its nature to be always going, not only in terms of time but even of space, away from us, and perhaps in exactly the same measure as we ourselves are going?
13
Just as on that other day twenty years ago that was so different and yet such a mirror image of this one, as soon as he sensed the storm descending on him, he gathered everything up hurriedly and locked the old door that time and lack of care had turned completely gray. Without pausing even a moment, so that the downpour wouldn’t catch him out on the road, he went up the pathway flanked by patches of elder, bisnaga, and danewort until he got to the path that would take him back to the village. In total, from the little door of gray, rotten wood to the great, sturdy door with the bronze knocker at his house on the outskirts of the village, it wasn’t much more than two and a half miles along a road that was much more than a mere road to him or a simple connection between two points, it was in fact his character and the mettle of his life, the nature of his inclination toward the world, and his renunciation of or disappearance from it. It was also a good portion of his understanding, as if he had gradually been forging his experience of life and his relationships with people on that path, on that low coming and going and ruminating on what he saw and seeing what he was ruminating about, on that measured placing and settling of things, seeing the common in the different and seeing things that were the same differently, accepting the slings and sorrows of life — by allowing the positive to reign — gradually moving beyond his personal emptinesses and solitudes while listening to the impenetrable sound of the water in the river and the wind in the leaves of the poplar trees, which he interpreted differently depending on the day and the light and the season. That, perhaps more than any other source, is where he got that sort of silent energy of his from, and his rare, taciturn, melancholic wisdom, which was as thoughtful as could be imagined and at the same time resolute and forceful, and which some people chalked up, for the sake of chalking it up to something, to his reading.
Well-read? Me? — he would usually object. That is to say, reading, as in reading, I mean, I’ve read a little (and if he was at his house, he would point out the two or three stacks of books he had obviously read and reread in detail), but really what I’ve done is to listen, to listen to my father, may he rest in peace, what little I could and to listen to whomever might be speaking to me, to listen and above all to see, he would stress, to look around with my eyes as open as I could make them or as open as others would let me.
At the beginning, before reaching the immense hulk of Pedralén from the field by the river, the road curved two times along the hills to the right, while on the other side, by the river’s edge, there grew in rows a thick, broad stand of black poplars, whose leaves would whisper when the wind blew through them and always kept him company with their questions and which spread their coolness and their memories along the length of the path. The leaves sounded odd that day, as if they were nervous or anticipating something, and he went around the grove more quickly and less calmly than he could recall ever having done before. But despite his hurry, despite the fact that it wouldn’t have been in the least an exaggeration to say that the storm was now upon him, when he arrived at the imposing wall of stone, he could not but slow his pace, as he’d done when he’d passed by earlier in the other direction, and pause to lay his eyes a moment on the modest, stone cross that had been erected there, directly below the highest point of the rock, one of the years he’d been absent from the village.
It was at the beginning of the autumn of ‘77, during the days when changes in the entire country seemed to finally accelerate, when the town council decided to erect that somberly sculpted cross that measured a bit more than a yard off the ground. It had been hewn from the same stone as the immense crag that rose on the other side of the road, and the footing that served as its base, also from the same stone, had several names chiseled into it. Some of them, three, had full first and last names, while two others had only one last name. Among these latter was his father’s name, Felipe Díaz, Felipe Díaz Díaz, in fact, but since it was only the name and the first surname, it could easily have been his father’s or his second son’s or even his own. He would have liked to smile this time, too, but all at once, as if something inside him had suddenly turned on a hinge forged from the murky metal of an enigma, he became enshrouded in a strangely indecipherable expression.
After the rocky ravine of Pedralén, where the Egyptian vulture kept its nest from mid-February well into August, there was still more than three-quarters of the road left before he got to his house on the outskirts of the village. On the other side of the river, completely unaware of the approaching storm, the watchers who were following the progress of the vultures from the wide shoulders of the highway seemed to continue impassively with their pastime. What’s more, it seemed that the imminence of the storm, far from upsetting them, seemed to actually increase the attraction for them, and so you could see them watching ecstatically — probably for the last time that year, since there could only be a short time left until they emigrated to other climes — as the vultures soared and glided, their wings extended as if they wanted to embrace all that immensity. They gazed unconcernedly and coolly toward the break in the ridge, they watched the nests, they watched the imposing, intimidating flights of the vultures or waited calmly for them to return from their long absences in search of carrion; although it’s possible — and there was no evidence to the contrary — that some of them were focusing on him, on his tiny, defenseless progress past the foot of the immense rock, beneath the circling flight, perhaps, of an Egyptian vulture.