Without taking off his shoes, without removing his wool sweater, which still had blotches of dirt and sap from the old cherry tree on it, and without shaking off the droning recitation that came issuing from his mouth like the rising of a river too long stagnant, he got into his bed by himself, without turning on the light or accepting the least bit of help or the slightest gesture of consolation. For a good while still, his son in the room next door could hear the man chant on, that man he’d always known as quiet, always serene, as self-possessed as a tree and as determined as an open road, the man who would often recite those lines of Calderón that his father had taught him a long time ago: “When reason’s dull, the mind depressed,” it went, “he best doth speak who keeps his silence best.”
But after some time, which because he was half-dozing, he couldn’t have said whether it was long or short, he heard him get out of bed and leave his room without making any noise.
He didn’t follow him, he didn’t get up to keep him company or fix him something warm to eat; he knew all too well that he wouldn’t be able to offer him any relief or know how to comfort him, and that only time — solitude and time and the ability to take up his road again and go back to being who he was — could heal his wound, that deep gash in his insides, which is where, if he hoped to ever move on, he would have no other choice but to set about finding himself again, like someone who at first discovers nothing but a pin in the darkness of a room in which he can ascertain neither the dimensions of the space nor how thick the darkness might grow.
From his bed in the next room, he couldn’t figure out what he was doing or where his footsteps were leading, but when suddenly he heard the great, old, solid wood door suddenly close and the bronze knocker rattle softly for a second, he knew that if he gave him something of a head start so that he could walk alone with his thoughts for a stretch, no doubt he could catch up to him somewhere along that same old road he couldn’t help but go along to find himself, as if it were something inseparable from himself, so very himself, in fact, that he couldn’t have gotten along without its company, just as a person can’t get along without his hands or his eyes.
He knew he needed to leave him to his own devices for a bit, that he needed to leave his father alone for a little in the place where he would be sure of finding the something of himself that might have remained if not unspoiled, at least unchangeable at its core, or maybe something — something that might be his world or God or his own insides — that he could listen to or that would speak to him the way things perhaps do, rather than there being only our desire to have something speak to us.
So he figured that if he went out a bit later, in just a few minutes, he could follow him at a distance and run into him at some point or other along the road, maybe still close or maybe a little farther away from the house, but in any case walking somewhere along one of the bends in the trail. Maybe beyond the old abandoned mill, where the asphalt lane turned into a packed-earth road, or afterward, when the road turned into a bridle trail, or perhaps when the mighty mass of Pedralén came into view, or maybe even alongside the stone cross instead, directly below its highest point, beneath the circular flights of the Egyptian vultures a good part of the year, where his father’s name, which was also his own as well as theirs, had been chiseled into the base. Although it might also be that if he gave him a bigger head start, he would come upon him a bit farther along, even, where the yellowish leaves of the black poplars would project onto his questions there in the early morning a feeble, almost whispered light, entirely insufficient, but at the same time primordial. Whatever pace he might walk at, there was no doubt he would come upon him at one spot or another, and when he did, he would surely find him much more collected, more as he was, with much more himself in him than the evening before. Look, Felipe, look and listen all around you, son — he seemed to be hearing — mold yourself to it, to all of it, but do it without ever setting aside your sense of wonder, that which, as incomprehensible as it may seem, embraces all things at the same time as it frees you from everything.
On their way back — he had found him alongside the stone cross, directly below the highest point of the promontory — they agreed that after lunch they would undertake a trip to Madrid to try to see Juanjo in jail as soon as possible; to see Potote, his son said, and it instantly seemed that he regretted having done so. His father would spend that night and any other nights that were necessary in the room he boarded at while at school, and he would sleep on the dining room couch, and most likely, assuming they didn’t hit any snags, he would be able to see him right away.
“I’m not going to go in,” his son anticipated him.
His father gave a small nod of assent; the hollows of his eyes, it seemed to him when he saw him nod, were like two henbane flowers, their dark purple depths branching out in subtle, violet venations around the yellowish corollas.
18
When he got there, he went directly over and sat down in one of the chairs positioned in front of the glass partition that divided the room in half. The glass was thick, double-pane, and it went from your waist up to a yard or so from the ceiling, and beyond his own image reflected in it, there was nothing but a white wall, with no decoration or furnishings, at the center of which was a completely smooth, closed, metal door. Above the door, an enormous, round wall clock presided, like those old religious symbols, over the entire halved space. He couldn’t hear it, but it nevertheless seemed to be the only thing, apart from the hum of the fluorescent lights, which he could easily imagine as being a dialectic synthesis of its ticking, that there was to perceive in the emptiness of the room.
There weren’t any people, either, on the other side of the glass or behind him, only twin metal doors sealed so perfectly tight that not the least sound could get through nor the slightest movement be discerned behind them, and more than imprisoning space, you might say that what they were detaining was, strictly speaking, time. Felipe looked at the wall, the blank, white wall in front of him, but the only thing he could see was the reflection in the double-pane glass of his own image superimposed on the perfectly visible movements of the clock’s ticking hands. With an instinctive motion, he moved his head from side to side, and the image of his face, his full, broad face covered all over with wrinkles, coincided exactly with the face of the clock. Tick-tock, he then seemed to hear with acute precision.
As if what he was awaiting were the execution of his death sentence, droplets of memories floated up into his mind, crisscrossing it with no rhyme or reason, as they say happens to the dying just before they pass. Neither the sure victory of oblivion nor the will to banish them seemed in the least able to stand against the unstoppable, growing force with which they emerged, and the images continued to imprint themselves on the glass of his memory, just like his reflection on the thick, double-pane glass that divided the room in half, even though what he saw in one was fixed and blurry, a fractioning, even, of the image in the double layer of glass, and in the other there was nothing but swiftness and clarity.
He saw the beginnings of the storm that first day he went back home from the field after his return to the village, less than a year ago, and of the one that last day before his departure from it; he saw the years spent along the road with the metalworks and the tire retread shop after that, and the dining room in his apartment, where the furniture was so garish it seemed to be arguing with whoever was using it and where he spent ever more time in his corner next to the window. He saw Asunción, he saw her increasingly incomprehensible expression, increasingly dry and disconnected from the things that had been theirs, and her face, too, so long ago, on the day they’d coated themselves with mud beneath the poplar trees by the river, the day they liked to think, because of how happy they’d been, and even though the dates didn’t work out right, that the two of them had conceived the son he was now waiting to appear on the other side of the glass. And suddenly he saw — he was still a little boy, a whelp no more than three feet high — the eyes of his father, may he rest in peace, the serene and resignedly melancholic eyes of his father — Felipe Díaz, like him, Felipe Díaz Díaz — on the desolate night when they burst violently into the house, when they virtually broke down the door, his mother would say when she told the story, those little men in blue shirts from who knows where, and it doesn’t really matter, anyway. Four or five boys, they were no more than boys — his mother narrated, because even though you can forgive and forget, my son, you should never forget, she would say — four or five boys under the orders of one of those brazen thugs who have always existed and will always exist in this loathsome world, make no mistake, but whom certain circumstances allow to do whatever they please and even to dictate the lives and deaths of others, although other circumstances, at least, do not. Those years, Felipe, my son, his mother would continue, always using almost the exact same words each time she told the story, they were the first kind of circumstances, years when even the biggest nitwit could fill his mouth with grand words that masked nothing more than wickedness and villainy, wickedness and villainy all around, she would always repeat. It seemed as if all the stupidity and arrogance combined and all the vanity in the world had gone to the heads of most everyone, and that all those of ill will, who, of course, called themselves by a different name, using appealing, almost pretty language — and those of good will right behind them, imagine that, or out in front of them, make no mistake, like little, euphoric sheep — had gotten together and made a pact to call the shots everywhere. Like Abelardo, remember him? Abelardo García Quiñones, the man with the field next to ours, in that spot where his sons would later plant nothing but poplars and then more poplars, and so it pleased God — his mother would always add at this point, as if hoping it would serve as a warning or a reminder, more than a mere, useless indulgence — to call him to account, right then and there.