The bar was small, two windows onto the street and fewer than a dozen tables, and there was no one there right then but him and the waiter puttering around behind the bar, but despite all that, he had to catch his eye, like someone trying to make out something from a distance or pick someone out of a crowd. I’m here, Dad, he felt the need to say, it’s me, Felipe.
He pushed the beer bottles that had been accumulating on the table to one side and asked him what he wanted to drink. Nothing, nothing, there’s nothing there, he answered everything without him needing to make a second enquiry. You were smart to stay here.
He wanted to go back to the village that very same day, he couldn’t be tempted by any of the suggestions his son had put forward for spending the rest of the day together in Madrid, and they got home late into the night. The following morning, he again found him under the cherry tree out on the patio. He was stiff with cold, huddled in an odd position and still wearing his good jacket, which he hadn’t bothered to take off, curled up and clutching the tree trunk. Cowering like a dog, his son thought. His cheek was covered in scrapes again, and the dried blood on the scratches in the stubble along his jawline made the paleness of his face stand out even more.
He picked him up — geez, Dad, was all he could think to say to him — and he took him in to the bathroom. Then, once he made sure he was cleaned up and, as far as he could tell, calm, he went out to buy a loaf of bread, and when he got back, he made him a large, black coffee, just the way he liked it, along with his nice, thick slices of bread and some of the thyme and Spanish lavender honey a neighbor gathered every year, a neighbor from a family that had the first and last names of one of their own listed just above his father’s on the cross at Pedralén.
They didn’t speak, they couldn’t or didn’t feel like speaking, except about specific, mundane things they were doing or had right in front of them, so they each concentrated on their own coffee, just as he, the day before, had concentrated on watching his beer foam dissolving — the head, his father had told him a long time ago, the foam on a beer is called the head, just as cachaza is the foam that forms on the top of cane juice, and I suppose that’s where cachazudo comes from, calm like foam.
What dissolves like foam, he thought, or he might have thought the day before, what vanishes calmly, disappearing unperturbed, as slowly and peacefully as foam when it fades away, and also just the opposite, what is suddenly lost, what is erased in an instant, what we were used to having exist and be important or even crucial for us, whether we knew it or not, suddenly, without our even coming to completely realize it, it all falls off a cliff and disappears. Like the meaning that binds us to things, that reassures us and encourages us and signals to us from within things but then one day, before we’ve had enough time to even know what it was or what it truly consisted of, suddenly collapses or simply disappears off a dark cliff at the bottom of which there now remains only its carcass, its neck broken, at the mercy of the unsparing pecking of the great vultures of the void — the black vultures or the griffon vultures or the bearded vultures of senselessness — or any elegant, white Egyptian vulture that might swoop down and make off with its eyes.
He was scared for his father, he pitied him, but on the other hand he couldn’t bear to feel that way, nor could he resign himself to the fact that the calm strength he had always admired in his father, his quiet valor, had also masked an allotment of fear and a measure of humiliation and that it could all, from one moment to the next, come crashing so spectacularly down. One day, two nights after their arrival from Madrid, he came upon him rifling nervously through one of the drawers in the sideboard. Finally he pulled out a large, tin box stuffed to the seams with old photographs — photographs of his father (his own grandfather), and of his father and mother together, and also of him and the rest of the family, and friends of the family. Photographs of the two of them, as well, of him and Asun, and of little Juanjo when they still lived in the village.
He shuffled through them all, he looked at all of them, and afterward he slowly picked out all the ones with Juanjo in them, from the time he was born up until when he must have been about ten, when they emigrated to the north. He placed them all next to each other in a row on the table, and then he set about examining them one by one; he peered closely at them, he would pause at each one for the same not so much interminably as incomprehensibly long amount of time as he’d seen through the bar window that it took him to walk across the crosswalk, and then he would set them back down again in the exact same spot before picking up the one next to it and spending the same amount of time contemplating that one.
“You see?” he said to him after more than an hour of ignoring him completely. “You see how it’s not him? You see how he doesn’t have even close to the same look on his face?”
When he said that to him, he held one of the photographs in his hand as if brandishing it at him or offering it to him, and then he took it with him into his room.
The following morning, when he heard him get up to wash, during one of the few, brief moments he let it out of his sight, Felipe went into his room to look at it.
He didn’t recall ever having seen it before. It was a portrait of his father on the day of the village’s autumn feast day, according to the caption on the back, photographed from the waist up alongside his firstborn son. He was dressed very elegantly, with that look of health and robustness he’d had before he began to grow thin just a few years later, and both his hands were gripping the handlebars of a bicycle, while the young boy sat on the crossbar. Judging by his apparent age, eight or nine at the most, it must have been taken one of the years immediately preceding their departure from the village. Juanjo was wearing a little, peaked cap to protect him from the sun, and a wool sweater, and in his clasped hands he held a bunch of daisies that looked just picked. His expression — his little smile somewhere between shy and surprised at the photographer — was alert, pleasant, lively, and bright, and it poked out right at the top of the bouquet of flowers he held clasped in his hands at the very center of the handlebars.
His father’s wide, round face, with his abundant hair combed straight back and his full mustache and eyebrows — his few, lone hairs, as Asunción used to joke — had the same sure, melancholic expression he’d always seen on him.
“Those clasped little hands!” he said when he returned from the bathroom and caught him staring at the photograph. “Those clasped little hands, Felipe!”
The days went by one after another as they ate breakfast in silence and ate dinner in silence, as if, most of the time, words had flown off to some foreign land covered in the carcasses of signs and the cadavers of sentences, carrion even before it was dead, as they went out for walks in silence, with the exasperating slowness of someone suffering from a recent bout of rheumatism or else afflicted by an unexpected paralysis, until one night at the end of two weeks — he seemed to get on well enough now at the village club, listening to the news, which he still called the newscast, from a seat in the corner and watching several of his friends play cards — his son told him he had to go back to Madrid, that he couldn’t stay with him any longer.
“You’ve already been here too long, Felipe, my son. Go, go ahead, son.”
Every time he said anything to him those last several days, even something insignificant or some isolated detail, he would add that on like a grace note—son, my son. He’s holding on, he thought, he’s holding on to that tagline as if clutching at straws to find some way for the meaning of the words he’s saying to not slip away. Or maybe as if it were his final foothold, a lone toehold for him to cling to so as not to fall off the cliff.