But he would have burst out laughing, he said to himself, he would probably have burst out laughing regardless of when I might have told him or what sort of tone I might have used, he would have just laughed and insulted me. When does a light capable of blinding everyone inside a house, and then everyone else, begin to glow, and what are its symptoms and its conditions? Is it all just chance, the paucity of what one has, the sheer power of bewitchment? And what kind of dawn is that, he went on wondering, stubbornly dissecting the question, tethering his ascent to a ballast heavier than any other possible load.
Of course, he could have called the police at the very outset, he said to himself; but how could anyone report his own son, and for what, so early on? This kid is an idiot, he could have told the cops, this kid is an idiot, but it’s better to nip it in the bud before it goes any further and he turns into something else. But how could anyone report someone for being an idiot? How could anyone ever report his own son for being an idiot, or tell God that this whole thing is grotesque, that’s it’s not even tragic but grotesque — foolish, grotesque rancor and defiance.
Like someone who goes around and around in his thoughts and continues to weigh himself down with the impossible burden of what could have been but wasn’t, Felipe Díaz slowly dragged his limbs, numbed by a feeling of guilt he was unable to dispel and petrified by the lactic acid that shot through that look, that rare, obsessive glow of a single image, fixed before his eyes, that was superimposed with overwhelming arrogance on the glass behind which the land and the plants of that exhausting ascent, and also the impeccable blue of the sky, lay apart. But as it got to about noon, when everything was so still it seemed almost as if not even silence itself could be heard up there, Felipe Díaz finally reached the highest pinnacle on the rocky crest of Pedralén.
He had never gone up there before — his shadow coincided almost exactly with the small space taken up by his feet — and he had never wanted to; he had always simply passed by, just as he had with most other things in life, come to that, at the foot of the immense rock he walked the entire length of and where he often looked upward from directly beneath the highest point of the pinnacle. He would look at that sort of small apex at the summit, where he was now standing, and he would also look at the nests of the Egyptian vultures, their gliding, their soaring — the soft parts, he recalled, the soft parts, like the eyes and the tongue — and then he would hear the voice describing what he was seeing, and even when it was seeing the worst, it described it nevertheless without bitterness or malice or resentful malevolence, exactly, but, at most, with a sort of quiet indignation or resigned hostility, a sort of impenetrable melancholy and pure, and therefore inexhaustible and perhaps even cheerful, sadness.
What could anyone possibly have against simplicity, he had wondered to himself on other occasions. What is it that makes the infinite splendor of simplicity and the roaring of the incipient storm that always follows it, if you’re out to see it, go so unnoticed? What blindness isn’t making a killing? But what he was wondering now and what was pounding away inside his head as he dragged himself up the mountain, practically gasping for air, was something quite different — namely, whether being such a small thing, whether having remained such a small thing, whether not having been important enough when it was necessary to be so, or being so generally unimportant were things one could be guilty of, whether his having been nothing — nothing, it echoed in his head, nothing at all, do you hear me, a fucking dried-out, squashed old turd sitting there in the middle of the road, a dirt-poor nonentity who has no place in this world — were in fact something to be guilty of, and his not having reacted or acted or taken the initiative, his not having spoken up and raised his voice and fought enough, made him somehow just as guilty as his son. As guilty as someone who had narrowed his gaze to a single, rigid, abstract point of things that eclipsed everything else, leaving them on the outside, like strangers, like enemies, of that never ending, forever changing interplay of perspectives that allows all things to be seen, and from that single viewpoint, with that unwavering fixedness and that sole perspective, he had pointed the barrel of his gun with the homicidal simplicity of a metallic hollowness that had spent years rattling and bouncing and rolling around, back and forth, as only emptiness can rattle and roll.
Didn’t you come here to talk? — he couldn’t help hearing the words echo in his head as he huffed his way upward — so talk, goddammit, say something, you pitiful nonentity, you have no place in this world and you’ll never have any fucking place in it your whole goddamn life!
Now he was going to have a talk with him, he was thinking, now he was going to have a talk with him, just the two of them, or maybe with her, too, or who knows who else; but even then he was only going to talk to them in his own way, wordlessly, silent like raindrops before a storm, those giant, fat raindrops that pound into the dust, but with facts — or would they just be names again? — with the facts that always, each time you recall them or speak them aloud, albeit softly, sound the same and mean the same thing, limitless in their simplicity.
22
Among the talk going around the village about that dawn a few days after the beginning of the war when his father and his four other unlucky companions in misfortune were thrown from the top of that cliff, the news spread that one of them, a boy of barely twenty, had started to shout and cry so despairingly that you could hear him all the way over in the village, and that they’d amused themselves by shooting, there at the very edge of the cliff itself, at the feet of another of them — anarchist scum, they continued to call him to the last — who had surprisingly, according to the word on the street, fallen to praying. All right, one of them must have said sarcastically, let’s see if you can finally make a nice, straight line now on your way down. But there didn’t seem to be much of a consensus, as far as he had heard, regarding his father.
Some said he was praying to himself the entire time as they went along the road; others said that at one point during the ascent, aided by the low light, he had somehow managed to loose the bonds on his wrists and had tried to grab one of the squadron member’s pistols. But the only thing they all agreed on was that Felipe Díaz, Felipe Díaz Díaz, said nothing at all in the end; all he did was to look at them, to look at each one of them with an expression of desolate sadness, and then he looked from that tall perch at all the space stretching out in every direction, and with all of that in his eyes — dawn was just beginning to break, according to what everyone had always said — they must have simply tossed him off the cliff.
He recalled this, and he then he stopped looking at the cross he had been looking at, so small down there below him, and instead he, too, slowly raised his eyes up from the edge of the crag and out onto his immense surroundings. He was still gulping in air from his climb, and his legs, numbed, or you might also say petrified, just like that mound of stone, were shaking. But after few moments, unexpectedly, as soon as he took in the vastness whose view his vantage point allowed him to command, he felt instantly secure, strangely secure, as if he were resting upon or being held up by all that immensity more than by the narrow strip of rock on which he was standing.