He hadn’t wanted to return to the road that led to the field, and that seemed strange to him, though, on the other hand, he had watched him sitting calmly in front of the television down at the club and then linger a good while longer, standing there and eagerly following the card game in which his neighbor who brought him the honey always played. He’s getting on well enough, he thought. But one afternoon he realized that when he followed the games, more than paying attention to the players’ decisions, he was keeping track of the cards each of them received, to the tricks they had taken rather than what they did with them, and also that instead of watching whatever was being shown on the television, he seemed in fact to be seeing some sort of reflection on the screen, as if it were merely glass; he afterward thought, nevertheless, that time, in any case, would make time for itself, as it always does, and that everything would continue along its course, as it was meant to and as it usually did.
When the sun set the following day, a calm day in November, after they’d had dinner together, he finally said goodbye. The pomegranates behind the old mill must be ripe by now, he said to him as he took his leave, knowing how happy it always made him when that particular fruit ripened and cracked open; when I get back, and I’ll come back as soon as I can, we’ll go pick some.
But two days later, he woke up very early, having been unsettled by a strange dream. Several bales of hay were burning in the night, shooting up towering flames that seemed intent on burning everything; now they were licking the walls of the house he was in, and above him were the white silhouettes of birds he feared might swoop down on him at any moment. But that wasn’t the worst of it, the worst was instead a muffled, resounding sound, like someone shaking out a blanket, or a gigantic drop falling, like a dead weight, with a smothered sound onto a thick layer of dust laid down over months and months of drought. The crackling fire, rather than illuminating anything, impeded his view of what was happening beyond and, especially, his ability to hear anything or figure out what direction the sound was coming from, but he went on straining and straining to hear, until the fire ignited the poplars and the conflagration that then ensued finally overwhelmed him, preventing him from hearing the slightest sound other than the noise of everything being consumed.
As he took his first sip of the coffee he had just prepared, large and black, just like his father took it, he recalled again that over the course of the weeks he’d spent with him after their return from Madrid, he hadn’t ventured out to the field even once. So he tossed back his coffee — he saw his dream again — grabbed his jacket, and without even waiting for the elevator, he took off running down the stairs and didn’t stop until he reached the car.
When he arrived hours later and opened the great, old door with the bronze knocker, his father wasn’t there anymore. He hadn’t had breakfast, and his bed hadn’t been slept in; there was only a pencil and a completely blank sheet of paper — with a few dots grouped in the upper left — sitting on the clean kitchen table.
Without wasting a second, he took the car as far as he could, until he got to the exact place where the packed-earth road stopped being fit for anything other than a person on foot, where just past the spot where the pomegranate trees stuck out, a path descended down to where the henbane grew and another, almost directly across the road from it, gradually ascended, crossing gullies and thyme plants, to the top of Pedralén. An hour, he remembered his having told him, one hour, more or less, under normal conditions. He didn’t even shut the car door after pulling up to a sudden halt, he just stepped out into the giant dust cloud he’d kicked up and blasted off running, first along the road and then up the mountain, without losing a single instant.
He was gasping for breath, his heart was exploding, sometimes he ran and other times he climbed in great strides, huffing and puffing. Still in the distance, on the crest of the promontory, he spotted him. He was on the edge, at the highest point, directly above the modest cross hewn from the same limestone as the mountain itself and on whose base, also made out of the same stone, was chiseled, alongside four other names, the name of his father, which was also his own.
21
Debilitated, as if burdened by a weight greater than anything he had ever borne in his entire life, you might even say incapacitated or crippled, Felipe Díaz — Felipe Díaz Carrión — had finally managed that autumn morning to reach the top, on that path that weaved among boulders and crags and wound its way up the steep pitch.
Stopping every so often, inhaling sharply once and then again and then quickly beginning his trek again, he had climbed, without ever quite catching his breath completely or taking his eyes off the ground, off the pebbles he was crunching beneath his feet or the clumps of grass he was trampling, the thistles and gorse he swerved around more out of habit than for any other reason, or above all off the ground, the sere, dusty earth that it seemed to him he had done nothing in his life but walk upon, with feet increasingly just as cracked and dry as the earth itself, but more than anything, he never stopped looking at what he was looking at, he kept his eyes (might he have said facing head-on, or was it more like his final humiliation?) on that which he had focused them on indelibly — the unyielding, omnipresent expression that no matter where he looked, whether all around him or forward or backward in time, was now the only thing he could see and the only thing pulling him on, like a lead rope, the only thing that spurred him on, with a reverberation that caused everything around it that was not it and was not born of it to wilt, reducing it to a single glow, a single, fixed point, polished and sharpened to the absolute limit, on which everything hung and everything was held fast.
At the right time, he kept saying to himself, at the right time, when I could begin to sense which way the wind was blowing, as he puts it, that’s when I should have given him a nice, big piece of my mind, when I could have done it and I didn’t, or I didn’t think I had to, and when I could have seen it coming but still didn’t see it, or maybe it’s just that I didn’t want to.
Just who do you think you are, I should have told him, who do you think you are, although perhaps not in that tone of voice, not in that tone but in some other one, I don’t know, maybe more understanding, more putting myself in his shoes, trying to reason with him and see things from his point of view, to see what he was seeing.
You’ve been hanging around with whoever you’ve been hanging around with, he could have said to him, and that’s your business; you’ll have seen or they’ll have told you this, that, and the other thing, but when it comes to knowing, really knowing, knowing what’s what, as they say, you haven’t got a clue, my son, not a single clue. When it comes to feeling true concern or any sort of an inkling of real trembling in the face of people and things, and a sense of respect for the words used to talk about people and things, you haven’t got a clue. You go on all day long about enemies, about the people, about oppression, about history, and about war, about suffering, about them and our own. To sublimate, isn’t that the word you’re always using? Well that’s all it is, a sublimation of those prickings of conscience we all have and an obsession with continually twisting things around and fucking everything up. There are always a lot of messed up things in this world, son, I should have told him, a lot, and some are even worse, as your grandfather used to say, but as bad as things are, they can always get much worse still if you try to fix them by meddling around with stuff that’s better left alone, if you try to go down some road you think is a wonderful shortcut and it turns out it’s not a shortcut or even a road and it doesn’t take you anywhere except maybe, eventually, straight off a cliff.