He saw his father’s eyes — he heard his mother’s voice — and he saw, too, the shiny boots, the buckles, the intruders’ glistening leather jackets on that dazzling night, and more than anything he saw their guns and he saw their expressions, which now, so many years later, were still as overlapping as his reflection in that glass that divided the room in half. The boastfulness of the revolvers, he thought, the boastfulness of the revolvers and the fatuous braggadocio of their haughty, disdainful expressions, and now there rose up again to imprint themselves on his memory those furious, contemptuous, cocksure smiles that he’d spent his whole life trying to run away from, that he would have given anything to be able to bury once and for all in oblivion, but whose lurking image, apparently no matter how much time passed or how hard he tried to avoid it, he seemed to be condemned, like someone condemned to some sort of life sentence, to witness. Because he knew that just as others are pursued their whole lives by bad luck or disease or the inability to match their strength to what needs to be done, his sentence, his real leap in the dark, which he had already taken, was the oppressiveness of that impertinent, smug glow, the black glow of malice and imbecility in the smiles of those who arrogate to themselves absolute power over the lives of others and act with treacherous superiority upon the deserted defenselessness of others.
And now he saw that glow again, now he saw it again at the same time as he saw, alternating with it, the eyes of his father, so tall, gaunt, erect and yet at the same time such a small thing on the threshold of the doorway between the kitchen and the patio. The breeze — he remembered as if it were yesterday — made the leaves tremble on the cherry tree, whose fruit they had recently picked, and his father, may he rest in peace, told them that they could look wherever they wanted, but they weren’t going to find anyone there.
“Look, Felipe, you’re playing with fire here, I know you have that anarchist vermin around here somewhere, and you really are playing with fire. So I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“All I know, Abelardo, is that the person you’re calling a vermin of whatever sort — and I don’t really care about any of that and I never have — is a good man and an honest man through and through, incapable of doing anyone wrong, no matter what, and as a worker, and you know this better than anybody, he’s second to none. That’s what I know, and you know it, too.”
“Felipe, Felipe, I’m telling you, you’re playing with fire here, don’t push your luck now, just tell us where you’re hiding him, because in the end we’ll find him, and then where he goes, you’ll go, too, head first. Felipe, think about your wife and your son.”
“That’s what I’m doing, Abelardo, and I’m wondering if you’re doing the same.”
They took him. My mother, your grandmother — he told his son as they traveled in the train to Madrid — went out after them, screaming like a madwoman and clutching at Abelardo’s jacket, at Abelardo, our neighbor, the owner of the plot next to ours, where the poplars are now, pleading with him by all that he held dear to not hurt him, it was Felipe, Felipe, his neighbor, a man he’d known his whole life.
I’d stayed behind with my aunts and uncles next to the open door, he went on, I was crying and crying as hard as I could from seeing my mother screaming like that, and through my tears I saw her lying on the ground, lying there but still shouting, with her arm outstretched in the direction they were taking him, before she, too, broke into a fit of sobbing I will remember the rest of my life.
I quickly jumped from my uncle’s arms — he’d been restraining me as best he could — and I went running to her. I don’t know how the word could have popped into my head or where I’d gotten it from, I must have been barely nine years old, but I said it, shouted it, rather, or I shouted it at them before bursting into tears again, because my aunt had sped straight after me and slapped her hand over my mouth. Murderers, I shouted, murderers, and the whole village, hidden behind half-closed shutters and barely-cracked balcony doors, heard it and will always remember it. The child who called them by their true name, they said.
Since then, he continued, I think I’ve always had that hand of my aunt’s covering my mouth, and that unspoken desire to break into a run and shout all the things that are exactly what words sometimes say they are. But at the same time, and above all, what I’ve also always had, what has always been with me, what has never stopped stalking me, hounding me, without my being able to undo the ties that bind me to it always, constantly, without a moment’s peace, without being able to look behind me or ahead of me, or outside, or even, would you believe, inside my own house, is that dread, that dread like a deer caught in the glow of a smile I think I can recognize as clearly as a metal detector locates ancient coins or spear tips under a layer of earth. A fear whose snake I have, perhaps as a result of wanting so badly to run away from it all and pretend like it had nothing to do with me, allowed to hatch from within my very insides.
What happened next? What happened next you already know, he went on telling his son on the train. Paco, the Straightedge — that’s what they nicknamed him, because he couldn’t live with even a single crooked furrow and would drive the plowshare back in again and again and as many times as it took for it to come out as straight as he wanted it, that was the man’s obsession — was found in a sort of low cellar, very well hidden, that my father, your grandfather, had made for him under the shed in the field, which now just holds a bunch of old junk. They turned everything inside out, they took some of the baled hay and burned it there in the dead of night to light up the area, it must have made one devil of a pyre, until they finally found the hideout. They must have exchanged some words there, although nobody can know what was said, and then they took him and my father, may he rest in peace, back along the road.