He hadn’t seen him at all since the end of August, when he’d come to stay with him for a couple of weeks and spent the mornings helping him in the fields. He only called him from time to time to see how he was doing and tell him about some adventure or other of his in Madrid and, more than anything, to reminisce about their early-morning, summer walks along the road by the river. Much of the time they walked in silence, and other times, as their usual custom had always been, commenting on the plants they were seeing or on the progress and state of the crops in the fields — if you go down there, you’ll see the henbane, his father told him the first day — but whether they were silent or talking, listening to the rhythmic sound of their footsteps on the dirt or the quiet voices of their inner thoughts and conversations, the two of them seemed to move along with a serenity that one might call a prolongation or emanation of the road itself, because perhaps it’s possible that just as a pebble can get into your shoe, there is something that can also get inside you and make your blood flow at that same, ideal pace at which water rushes along a river or leaves adapt effortlessly to the wind. Roads remove self-conceit, his father had told him one morning, they draw importance away from things that don’t have it in order to give it, but in a more resignedly sensible way, to that which does truly possess it.
But when they got to the small, stone cross beneath the promontory of Pedralén, they always stopped for a while; they would go over and over their memories and they would go over the names as if they needed to remember them all again and read them all again, and when they got to Felipe Díaz, both of them, every time, would think how this could be the name of either one of them, or how, in fact, it already was. They would be quiet then, though it wasn’t a silence of no words, it was more a din of words crowding together, colliding into each other, and piling onto one another until they were effectively neutralized and remained in the end always on the impotent, stunned brink of the impenetrable, of that which is essentially and necessarily ungraspable despite being the simplest thing in the world and always being the same, like that road, or as if the inexhaustible power of those questions we are least able to respond to, despite not doing anything else in this life other than trying to respond to them, were eternally springing from that which is always the same and the simplest.
The pandemonium of the simple, he recalled having heard his father say and having thought, himself, on several occasions, the thundering of the silent, the violent discord of that which is self-evident — namely, that one is born, and one dies, like leaves and plants; that the days pass quickly, like water in the river, and that in them there are good hours and also hours that are decidedly bad, or worse (as happens with people, too, for that matter, there are bad ones and then those who are worse still, his father — Grandfather — would always say, and you never knew if he said it jokingly, or half-jokingly, or perhaps in utter seriousness); and that sometimes things turn out well and you come out ahead and then other times you lose or things come out badly, or even really, really badly, but that’s what character is for, mettle, his grandfather would say, and his father would say, mettle with which to face it all head-on, the same way the road faced the slopes and the arid gullies of the hills, and even the sheer face of Pedralén, and also the sweet span of overwhelmingly fertile land next to the river, never with any histrionics or fuss, never with any anxiety or excessive yearning (renunciation, instead), but always in the most workable, clean, well-adjusted, and practicable way, and most of the time as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
Rare was the day, once the stone cross was left behind and they were walking past the poplar grove on the final, remaining stretch before getting to the field, that they didn’t end up talking about Grandfather.
“But he must have done something besides, there must have been some reason?” his son never tired of inquiring in one way or another.
Despite the many times he’d told him about the whole thing, it seemed he was never satisfied, that something was always missing, some bit of information or some detail that, despite its being miniscule or trivial on the surface, would never at its base be too insignificant for him to latch onto and use to explain to himself, in no matter how conceited or circuitous a way, that which he had always considered to be unjustifiable. To be able to go on trusting that men are not the evil beasts his grandfather, may he rest in peace, seemed to have always believed deep down that many of them were when given the slightest opportunity.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know; who would know better than I?” his father would always respond with more or less the same words each time. “But that’s the way it is, simple as that. Slice it however you like, there isn’t any more to it than that, no matter how you add it up.”
As for the rest, he concluded one day, though I may be getting out of my depth and into the kind of deep water where one always falls short or gets in over his head, that’s how it must have always been and that’s how it is still, and you’ve got to add to the tremendous pain of events, as if that alone weren’t enough, the pain that causes incredulity in others, incredulity and indifference. You tell them something and they don’t believe you. They think, or it’s convenient for them to think, that there has to be something more to it. Or maybe they don’t care, they don’t care a proverbial fig just so long as it doesn’t affect them, and so in the end you’re not able to tell anyone anything, and you don’t even want to. That pain, and maybe not so much the other pain, the original pain, and listen carefully to what I’m saying here, that’s the pain that does you in in the end and pushes you to the verge of desperation and the brink of who knows what. Other people don’t want to know, they would prefer to act as if it had nothing whatsoever to do with them, they weasel out, and they brush you off, thinking well he must have done something or to each his own; they’ll grow such a carapace of indifference and a coating of avoidance and cowardice will become so encrusted on their own skin that they’ll end up becoming inseparable from them and allowing themselves to be pickled from within by the vilest of all concoctions, a mindset that mistakes the victim for the perpetrator and gives the one the sort of treatment and consideration that corresponds to the other. Of course, the best way to believe or realize something is to have it happen to you one day. As long as it doesn’t happen to you, they’ll say, sealing the admission of their own disregard and lack of solidarity. But sometimes, not even that is enough — he concluded — not even that.
16
That early-October day, as soon as he got word of his son’s visit and was feeling more reassured after having come up with his own explanations for it, Felipe threw the old, faded jacket he usually wore to the field over his shoulders, grabbed the old satchel he left hanging behind the kitchen door, and went straight out to pick the last of the green beans, so that his son could have them for dinner. He hadn’t planned on going that day — he was still working on slowly fixing up the house — but the idea of preparing him freshly harvested vegetables seemed to suddenly give him wings. The cornfields on the riverside, though they still had a few green leaves, were already almost dried out, and the leaves on the poplars had begun to take on those yellowish hues that would soon wax golden and that had brightened his days ever since he was young, the way only true beauty, that which is eternal each time you see it, can brighten things. Look, Felipe, look, what splendor, he would remember his father saying in the most unerring tone imaginable and filled, what’s more, with a sense of awe he hoped to convey to his sons as well, as if that, that tone, that tone of awe, might rank as one of the most valuable items of any inheritance.