I rejected Francisco’s opinions (God gives no one the right to make even the most insignificant of His creatures suffer). As if reason could do anything against faith. No one had yet told me about his father’s nocturnal expeditions or his strange idea of what constituted big game; I didn’t even know at the time how my grandfather had died, nor that my father had been in prison for three years and that I’d been born during his absence. Uncle Ramón filled me in on just how much the war had influenced my life.
“Your father has always insisted that you should know nothing until you were older. ‘They,’ your father would say, meaning you and your siblings, ‘have nothing to do with it. They’ll find out soon enough. I’ll tell them how it was.’”
Later, my father did try to talk to me, but, by then, I wasn’t very interested in his stories, the delicate thread connecting us had broken. Besides, none of that information entered my discussions with Francisco. We debated more on the level of metaphysics than of history — the history that so tormented my father — and which, to us, seemed too recent, too lacking in poetry: smelly, badly ventilated rooms; the chamberpot in which my grandfather had done his business after being given an enema; sprigs of lavender and sugar warming on the stove to disguise the stench in the patient’s room; the smell of rotting entrails in the trashcan, that was what recent history meant to us. It was what we had seen and smelled at home, what we used to be and from which we wanted to escape. Far better to be in places where words do what you want them to and where blood doesn’t smell because it’s set down in ink on the page; history traps you, forces you to follow a prearranged script, one that didn’t interest me in the least:
“But how can you talk like that after reading the Bible? God doesn’t just grant the right to kill, he spends his time sowing discord among humans so that they end up killing each other. Right at the very beginning of beginnings, Genesis, there’s Cain. There are other examples too: Moses, the first supporter of liberation through violence, doesn’t hesitate to kill the man oppressing his people; the adulterer David, cruel Salomé, or that decapitator so beloved of feminists, Judith, who beheads the gallant Holofernes: his only crime was admiring her beauty, presenting her with his finest treasures, serving her the most succulent of dishes and, we assume, after all those hours spent alone in that luxurious tent, giving her a good seeing-to as well — and is that how you repay me after I placed in you the seed of the most glorious of Assyrian generals, something most women would consider the very best of gifts, namely, the possibility of engendering an heir to all my glory, and you repay me by cutting off my head? That woman wasn’t a hero, she was an ungrateful wretch and very rude too: that’s hardly the way to behave at supper, or to treat a host who receives you with open arms (appropriately enough). When someone invites you to supper, it’s not even acceptable to say you didn’t enjoy the food. Killing the owner of the household certainly doesn’t appear in any of the etiquette books. The Bible is the mother of bad manners.”