In the same mechanical, empty way he had been doing everything, he turned off the stove, removed the lid, put the plates on the table, and served the food, before finally sitting down in his chair as though he were a man at least twenty years older than the one who had just a scant few minutes ago sat in the very same chair.
17
They ate in silence, deliberately rather than slowly, bringing the food to their mouths with a strange feeling of self-awareness, spacing out their mouthfuls not so much as if it took a great deal of effort to chew but as if chewing, having something between their teeth and in their mouths, were the only way they could truly feel that they were where they were. But when they each finished their last bite, as if that were the signal to end a truce, they instantly fell to speaking, clumsily, confusedly, skirting the issue at first and almost as if reluctantly trying to trick themselves and one another by beating around the bush and dodging the question at hand, until gradually they were able to clear the way and begin navigating the obstacles and come to the point. None of this is your fault, his son said to him at last, none of this is your fault.
“Some of it must be,” he immediately replied.“There must be something I didn’t know how to do, or I didn’t know how to say, perhaps, in the way it needed to be said or at the moment it needed to be said. There must be something, Felipe, there must be something. These things don’t happen for no reason, and I’m his father.”
His son explained what he knew as far as he could, what he had suspected at first and then known and later confirmed again and again through details and ever more details and from more than one person. Do you remember that day I came home from school bleeding, he said to him, because I’d gotten really good and beaten up? The fascist little brother, they called me, the asshole little brother. Every day, they wrote Felipe Díaz on the blackboard inside a bull’s-eye, and there were even some teachers who left it up there and wouldn’t erase it for the entire class.
Without budging, without uttering a word or making a single peep, his father listened with the full and complete attention of someone who, more than listening, is in fact seeing what is being told. But at a certain point, at a point that must have coincided with the mention of a bull’s-eye, inside a bull’s-eye, he began to repeat over the top of his son’s words, as if they were a counterpoint to them, the exact sentences from the newspaper he had just read, again and again. The perpetrator, the perpetrator of the assassination, he repeated more than anything else, he was the perpetrator of the assassination, and he said it as if he were not only saying the words but putting himself inside them in order to have been within what they were saying, as if he had immersed himself in their language to such an extent and become one with them to such a point that he could have actually been in the place where the events unfolded and even been, himself, what was done.
He must have been waiting there — he said suddenly with a look in his eyes that seemed to have no need to look in order to see everything — in the bathrooms or the hallway, just as he must have waited there before, on other days, blending in and hiding himself in the chaos of students, and he must have seen that day, like the others, that after a certain time there were fewer and fewer people left in most of the offices, and especially in the hallways, but that the professor nevertheless, like every other day, went on working all the same in his office, night already fallen, the building finally quiet, the hum, now only of the city, on the other side of the glass, all alone, as usual, in the silent light of his lamp, until the time the building would close. And when a long time had gone by without him seeing anyone, without anyone coming to his office to consult with him or talk to him about anything, and the humming of the fluorescent lights in the hall was the only sound you could hear, unless his own heart was beating, which I doubt, then it was he who approached the half-open door, who rapped on the door; knock-knock, knock-knock, the poor man inside would hear, and he would say come in, please come in, have a seat, don’t just stand there, mostly likely without yet raising his eyes from the work he was doing — one more paragraph, one more sentence, one word to try to understand something more about the world, to try to make some order out of it. But once he felt the presence, standing in front him, of the person he’d invited in, his figure only barely lit by the desk lamp shining its light onto the open books and the loose pages he was writing on, he would raise his eyes fully and then he would see, with a shock more chilling than anything he would have ever felt in his entire life, the outline of the individual and the shadow of the pistol that were taking him at that exact moment to the next life, the flash of the gunshots, two to the chest and another, with him now slumped over his writings, to the back of the neck — two to the chest and another, with him now slumped over, to the back of the neck, he repeated — and the shadow of the eyes of that person who was my son and had decided, he or whoever it was, like a God, and at the same time like the most imbecile of fools, to take him from this world forever.
With these same words, with these same sentences that he went on shaping, polishing, and perfecting as if trying to make them worthy of emerging from an oracle’s mouth, he went over the scene again and again, like someone reciting a chant. Some moments, it was true that he seemed to his son like an oracle, but other moments he just seemed like a drunk, a man fatally inebriated with guilt and pain, obsessed, perhaps with what he can see better than anyone else or perhaps with the urge to not to see anything more, precisely because he’d seen, better than anyone else, what he’d seen. But little by little, by dint of going over it again and again, his voice was beginning to crack, getting thinner, becoming ever more indistinguishable, inaudible, almost only a murmur, or a tremor.
After several hours, when exhaustion had taken as much of a toll on them as anguish, his son motioned as if to help him up from his chair and take him to bed. But at his son’s first movement, it was he who quickly got up, who pushed back the chair in which he had let himself go, and once on his feet, as if he had reawakened on the way to his room, he again took up his litany. Or the other poor guy — he said — the journalist. He had been in his same old bar having his same old coffee prepared by the same old hands, he’d been breathing the same old air and hearing the same old words and seeing the same old light of that lousy day, and maybe glancing at him, brushing shoulders with him, and then at the exit, that poor man with his newspapers under his arm, and his wife and children waiting for him so they could all go somewhere because it was Sunday, that man steps out the exit and he follows him, right behind, not so close that he notices him or so far that he might get out of range, and as soon as he turns the corner onto the alleyway leading to the man’s home and he sees that no one is coming, that no one is coming up ahead or behind him, that there’s no one to the left or to the right, or down below or, most especially, up above, in the heavens, because there is no God whatsoever for any of these people, unless you count the grotesque ideology that passes for Him, so he goes and readies the gun in his hand, the same gun he had already used to kill the poor man working as a member of the Guardia Civil and would subsequently use to kill the professor, and he quickly lets off two shots, two shots to the back of his neck, two shots in the back, just like that, bang, bang, and the way the man was walking in front of him, with nothing but his newspapers in his hand and his eyes on the road, he didn’t have time to see, even out of the corner of his eye, the brave specimen of a scoundrel who took his life exactly as if he were some sort of supreme judge, this petulant, sickened scoundrel who is my son and who most likely didn’t even open his mouth other than to say take that, suck on this, you fucking hack, or you fucking chalk pusher, or you pansy-ass fucking pig.