At the spot where you can turn and go down to where the henbanes grow, but on the opposite side, if you’ve noticed, there’s a path that goes up the hillside. I’ve never taken it, but if you follow it, after about an hour of walking you’ll come to the top of Pedralén. That’s the path they turned off onto, and when they got to the top, at the very highest point of the promontory, and it had to have been first light by then, they set them up at the edge of the cliff, and with no further ado they started tossing them off, one by one, the two of them — Paco and my father — and three other poor, unfortunate souls they had brought up from the village. Those are the names chiseled on that cross they put up in ‘77, the names of those four people and your grandfather, whose name is the same as mine.
He didn’t say mine and yours, he only said mine, and then he spent practically the rest of the trip in silence, as if his aunt had slapped her hand over his mouth again.
19
After a time, a time that, despite its sitting there right in front of his eyes, ticking itself out on the clock in the perfectly appreciable movements of its two hands, he wouldn’t have been able to say at first whether it felt infinite or was perhaps just a single instant drawn completely out or perhaps contracted to its smallest possible expression, Felipe Díaz Carrión saw the door in the middle of the wall before him open, and immediately afterward there came a pair of guards who each instantly took up a post to either side of the door, followed by a pair of off-white sneakers poking out from under the somewhat frayed hems of a pair of worn jeans. He watched the sneakers come in, he watched them approach the other side of the glass in which his own image was reflected, but he suddenly lacked the courage to raise his eyes, to impart even the slightest movement to his eyelids that would allow him to finally look him in the face and see his eyes, in case they now had, or, rather, still had, that expression that had been haunting him an entire lifetime, making it impossible for him to erase it from his imagination or get a moment’s peace, that expression that emerged from the past and had returned to hem in the present and was not simply presumptuousness or disdain, nor merely annoyance or defiance, but instead, and in addition to all that, disgust, rancor, bitter repugnance, and foolish repulsion, all crowning the grotesque emptiness of what they cruelly believed to be not only beyond good and evil but beyond any single limit, as confusing or changeable or skittish as it might be.
“What’s this? You don’t even have the guts to look at me, or what, you halfwit?” his son spat at him suddenly.
And then, gradually, as if that slight movement of eyelids required an enormous dose of an energy that he would never be able to fully muster, he raised his eyes, he lifted them little by little from the spot where the sneakers he saw come in were, although he could no longer see them, up to the worn jeans, then to the belt buckle, and the wool sweater, and when he finally got to his eyes, but even before then, in the angle of his chin, the sneer on his lips, he knew what he had perhaps never stopped knowing, no matter how much he might have wished not to know or believed he didn’t — namely, that there was nothing to be done, there was no possible way out and no going back, regardless of how little he was able to explain it to himself or perhaps even admit it to himself, and that by virtue of all that, and by virtue of all that was at stake for him, he was irredeemably condemned.
His image in the glass that halved the room where it seemed only time alone dwelt was superimposed on that of his son, his resigned, melancholic expression superimposed on the other’s dismissive repugnance, which was now, once again, opening its mouth and, with fingers interlaced in a gesture that had already been engraved on his memory—“What’s with you? Cat got your tongue?” he’d said to him — mockingly inquiring whether he wasn’t going to dish him out one of his bullshit, preachy, hopelessly fascist spiels.
“You’re such a coward and such a nobody,” he burst out, “that you don’t even have the guts to speak. That’s what you’ve always been, a nobody, an absolute nothing, do you hear me? A fucking dried-out, squashed old turd sitting there in the middle of that stupid road you love so much, a dirt-poor nonentity who has no place in this world and has never had the least idea about anything. Didn’t you come here to talk? So talk, goddammit, say something!”
There were a lot of things he would have liked to say, or perhaps the only thing he could have done would have been to say a lot of things, to explain to him once again, for instance, that each of us sees and thinks in his own way — or at least that’s what he believes — but that that doesn’t change the fact that as much as a person might like what he thinks, or as fond as he may be of what he’s dreamt up, or as confident or convinced as he may be that he’s right or in the right — and you can always convince yourself of whatever you like and for whatever reason — other people aren’t under the least obligation to think like he thinks or want what he wants, nor does that person have the right to any such a thing, much less any kind of right that could be labeled with one of those grand, pretty words that a lot of people use as a mantle to hide those most broken-down of ideas they’re peddling; and that a person can do whatever he wants, of course, but not just whatever he feels like, because then he will have to answer for it personally. And after that, he would have liked to say, or perhaps would have only been able to say, do you understand me? Do you understand me now, my son?
But it was no longer really that, and it no longer had anything really to do with that, nor could it — at this point he couldn’t even nag him — and apart from looking into a pair of eyes and assuring himself of their expression, the only thing he had really come to do was to say to him what have you done. What have you done, my son? Do you understand? Do you understand that you’ve killed someone? That you’ve taken the lives of several men? Do you understand that? Tell me, tell me if you’re capable of actually thinking about what you’ve done, if you have the freedom, that word you all use so much, to be able to truly think about what you’ve done. You’ve taken a man’s life; the thing I raised, the life I produced, has suddenly resolved to take the lives of other people who, for whatever confounded reason, he has decided to consider not as people but as things, burdens, obstacles, abstractions. How could you do it? How is it possible that a son of mine, who is — and let me just say this — flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, or at any rate is at least my handiwork, has been able to go to such lengths of imbecility? Which is what evil is, first and foremost — pure, completely idiotic imbecility. What did I do wrong, tell me, what must I have done wrong? What part of this is my fault?
But he couldn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t, say anything, or rather he wasn’t able to articulate a single word out loud. He just looked at him, looked at him the way you look at an image that you have done nothing but look at with fear your entire life and try to run from, to scare off, to shoo away as you might shoo a horsefly or a persistent, insistent bumblebee. It had seemed to him that if he attempted to speak a word, he wouldn’t know how to pronounce it, that it wouldn’t actually come out, and that even if it did, even if he was, in the end, able to pronounce it and then go on to articulate even whole sentences, even possibly those same sentences he had uttered other times before, he wouldn’t actually be able to make himself understood, because things could no longer be said in the same way, or words no longer meant the same things, they couldn’t be modulated or put together the same way as before, as if something in their relationship, in the way they were strung together or made to follow on one another, or in their way of being stitched or assigned to things, something in their gift for expression, you might go so far as to think, had become so jumbled and muddled that words no longer meant what they said and no longer made of things what they were. They were no longer enough — it seemed to him — neither of them were, because words no longer linked him to things or brought them closer to him, they only snatched things from him and moved them farther away. Something had wormed its way into them and hollowed them out, or wormed its way into our way of saying them, he thought, some central beam had become so utterly rotten that there was no longer any firm surface upon which to stand that wouldn’t have collapsed, and now nothing he might say, assuming he ever managed to be able to say it, could come anywhere close to saying what things were and what it was he felt, or even to simply making himself understood as he would have liked to be. Because on top of it all, words, too, whether we like it or not, have, and always have had, it’s true, their own other side of the glass, and it might be that the only thing that could get there was their mirror image, the empty profile or the hollow shell of their sound, which might now elicit nothing more than mocking or derision from him.