Without daring at first to keep going, or daring to do anything, in fact — his heart was so clenched it seemed like it would explode — he quickly got up to look for the rest of the newspaper. He didn’t know where he could have left it after he’d pulled out the two middle pages; he didn’t know how to walk, he didn’t even know that things had to be in one particular place or that a single space could be so full of places, and the limp heaviness of his limbs astonished him, as did the fact that his eyes were used for seeing things and were not actually the things themselves.
But it had to be around there somewhere, it couldn’t have gone very far, if only, he managed to reason, because he hadn’t set foot outside the kitchen since his son had brought it in and left it lying there—ffflt, he recalled the sound again — right there on the table, so he couldn’t not find it, he couldn’t not go on scrambling around for it like a man possessed, in order to read, no matter what, that first page it said the line of text had come from. Though not exactly in order to read anything, in fact, or at least not right away, or to keep reading anything yet except the single first name that had been cut off and separated from the two last names at the beginning of the continuation of the article on the middle pages he was holding, to read it all together, one first name and two last names, and say it all together, confirming what he didn’t want to confirm no matter how much he already knew, and knowing what he wouldn’t ever have wanted to know no matter how many times he may have been able to sense it. It could still be a mistake, it could still be a coincidence, pure chance, they were two very common last names, after all!
He found the rest of the newspaper lying on the chair that was right in front of him, and without stopping to look at anything else, without even stopping to look at the most obvious things, the headlines and the photograph, he went straight to the last two words of the lead, front-page story. He read them once, and then he read them again, and again, looking away from the paper and then coming back to stare at the exact same spot where the two words were indelibly written. Juan José, it said clearly each time, and that’s where the text on the front page came to an end, the text of the article that then continued on the middle pages of the paper, beginning with those two last names, first Díaz and then García, and then, after a comma, after a comma grammarians would have called “explanatory,” the sentence reading,“who perpetrated the assassination.” It said “the assassination,” it said it again and again, no matter how many times he reread it hoping it would eventually say something else—“who perpetrated the assassination.”
It was hard to take in the fact that his son’s name had come to be present in a sentence like that, to be — as he had been taught in school — the subject of a predicate like that,“who perpetrated the assassination,”“who perpetrated the assassination,” or, more than hard, it was terrible in fact, the very core of terribleness, the scrapings of bitterness, as his father used to say, comparing things to fruit. His son, a murderer. His son, a murderer who has killed another person who is now no longer living and can never come back to life because his son, his own son, the fruit of his loins, has taken that person’s life — the thought pounded away in his brain again and again but with a sudden, ensuing sense of calmness, as if something, some scavenger, for instance, had just dived down and stripped him of his softest parts, his heart and his lungs and also his tongue and his eyes, and so he could finally finish reading with the empty sockets of his eyes, which were now incapable of shedding tears, and the empty space of his heart, which was now incapable of registering a single beat.
With the tentativeness of someone who is afraid of breaking something or afraid that the floor on which he is walking will fall away beneath him if he walks too fast, if he doesn’t take one step at a time, testing out the firmness of the pavement and the soundness of the road, he continued reading that paper he had been planning to roll up into a cone in a minute and throw into the trash along with all the leavings. “The person to whom investigators also impute,” he read,“two other assassinations, that of the aforementioned journalist and anti-Francoist fighter, and that of the young Guardia Civil member,” and following this, the latter’s two last names, the first of which was García, like his son’s, preceded by a first name he’d never heard prior to the years he’d spent walking along the highway with the metalworks and the tire retread shop after that.
Obsessed by the text itself, he hadn’t even looked at the photographs yet, either the one of the murdered Law professor, the illustrious jurist, the caption said, champion of freedoms and democratic rationality, or the other one, of his son, handcuffed and being escorted by two agents, sporting a two-day shadow of a beard, a short jacket he didn’t recognize, two sneakers — like always, sticking out from a pair of jeans — and, most especially, smiling, haughty, with that sarcastic smile of defiant petulance that he knew came not so much from a feeling of resolve or contempt as, more than anything else, disgust, rancor, and an air of bitter repugnance that was as incomprehensible as it was grotesque.
Without being aware of what he was doing, so mechanically, so cut off from his own self that he almost had the impression it was someone else doing it, he put a fistful of salt into the water, which had been boiling in the pot now for an amount of time he was unable to judge, and he began steadily, almost, you might say, in slow-motion, putting in the beans, the carrots and potatoes, the onion, and the block of lamb shoulder. Then, with the same slowness and the same mechanical, abstracted manner, he went about throwing the leavings into the trash, almost, you might also say, not so much like someone who is throwing things out and disposing of them but instead like someone holding onto something, like someone keeping something, setting it aside. But he didn’t throw them away inside the cone of paper he usually made, instead he picked them up them with his hands, he held them unhurriedly in his hands and felt deep within himself the strange pleasure of getting them dirty, grimy, he might have put it, with the peels and the scrapings, as if only through contact with something material, something dirty and disposable, terminal, could he find not consolation or support but at the very least something to be near to. Then he opened the door to the patio, walked over to the old cherry tree his father had planted, and put his arms around the trunk, letting himself drop to the ground.
With his face pressed against the trunk, pressed so close and hard against it that it would not have been easy, given the amount of light at that hour, to say where one began and the other ended, where the skin of one ended and the sheath of the other began, he slid slowly downward, scraping his cheek as though he wanted the bits of the bark that broke off when he did so, or the sap the old trunk secreted, to stick to it, and also, most likely, so that the bark, too, could become impregnated with the blood of the scratches and scrapes it produced.
And this is the state — collapsed on the ground across the roots of the cherry tree, which had begun to lose its leaves, holding on to it in a position that seemed as compressed as it could possibly be — in which his younger son found him a short time later. He picked him up — come on, Dad, get up, let’s not have this get the better of you, too — and once he was on his feet, he shook the leaves and stems from his wool sweater and wiped off his face with his handkerchief. He allowed himself to be taken in hand, he was like a dead weight and at the same time seemingly as light as a feather, and his son tried to lead him by the arm to the kitchen. I’m coming, I’m coming, don’t worry, he said to him, and he refused to lean on him.