As I leave the workshop where I’d gone looking for a job, I wonder how people can be so cruel, so rude. You have to be pretty hard-nosed to say such things to a married man with three children, without even knowing him. They throw all your limitations in your face. How do they expect a man, a worker, to recover his pride? What right do they have, these people you don’t even know, to call you useless, to play with you, the way a cat plays with a frightened mouse. They stand in the doorway to watch you leave, a cigarette between their lips, hands in their pockets, lips twisted into a half-smile. They don’t have to look for work, they don’t have to humble themselves or borrow money. They have plenty of bread on the table, and the haves have always acted cruelly toward the have-nots. Their power comes from knowing that they can decide whether other people’s mouths are empty or full, that’s the origin of that half-smile, that cigarette clamped between the lips. During military service, the mess sergeants wore the same disgustingly smug smile, the smile of someone who has what others need and want. My father often used to say the same.
The biggest treat my grandfather gave my uncle was to sit him on his knee and allow him to lick the stamp for the letter he’d written to a supplier ordering something for the workshop. He would let him stick on the stamp, then walk with him, hand-in-hand, to the post office, where he would lift him up so that he could reach the open mouth of the bronze lion that served as the letter box and slip the envelope into his mouth. This became a kind of hereditary game, because my uncle went on to have the same ritual with me. When I came home from nursery school, he would sit me on his knee and place before me a few envelopes and a diminishing sheet of stamps. I would then tear along the perforated edge, taking great care not to damage the stamps, and once I’d removed a single stamp, I would lick it very carefully, stick it on the top right-hand corner of the envelope, and thump it hard several times with my fist. On this bright morning, I can still remember that sickly glue taste on the tip of my tongue and the sadness I felt at letting go of those little bits of colored paper when I posted them in the post box. Why don’t you make a stamp collection from the letters you receive at home, my grandfather suggested, but we didn’t receive enough letters at the carpentry workshop to make a collection, and the few that did arrive, from suppliers or from the savings bank, had stamps all stained by the postmark.
“But,” he insisted, “those are the stamps some collectors value most, the post-marked ones, showing the date the letter was sent and where it came from.”
It was my Uncle Ramón who let me stick the stamps on, who gave me a little wooden cart and a real bird tied by a thread to a perch, the person who took me to the fair and won me a tin truck at the shooting gallery. If I look up now, I can see — through the sharp leaves of the reeds — the bare, blue, rocky mountains on which a small clump of pine trees somehow manages to grow, and the lower slopes, their terraces dotted with olive trees and the occasional dense green stain of a carob tree. It’s the same landscape I used to look at with him. On this cold morning, I can still feel the sickly taste of glue on my tongue.
When he came back from the war, my father considered hiding in the reedbeds near the lagoon until the worst was over, but my mother persuaded him to go to the town hall and turn himself in.
My grandmother’s suspicions about my mother date from that time, with my mother asking him to give himself up and my grandmother telling him to leave, to hide somewhere no one could find him. She had a vague sense that my mother selfishly wanted to have him near even if that meant putting his life in danger. During his time in prison, though, the idea lodged in my grandmother’s head that her daughter-in-law, all revolutionary fervor gone, now regretted her earlier “indiscretion” as well as her Republican wedding in the presence of other comrades, her first child — Germán, my older brother — who was already running around the house, and her second child, namely me, who was chewing on her dry, malnourished breasts, a child whom her husband didn’t even know because, for months, she refused to take me with her to visit him in prison, saying that I was too small and frail for such a difficult, dangerous journey. I don’t want to put the child at risk, she said, who knows what might happen in the train or outside the prison. She and my grandmother used to take my brother, but not every time. Often her parents would look after him. My grandmother believed that my mother wanted another husband, perhaps one in a better position to face the new era that was just beginning. After all, those civil marriages were invalid now, null and void. There remains something confusing about this story, however, something no one has ever explained to me. My grandmother didn’t trust or even like my mother, a clumsy, empty-headed girl, who poured all her energies into cleaning the house, doing the laundry and the cooking, but always sulky and tearful, because my father was away and she was left at the mercy of her authoritarian mother-in-law. My grandmother expected a different kind of energy from her. They had been driven apart by the arguments that raged between them about having my father hand himself over to the authorities. And that rift remained for as long as my grandmother lived. Your father gave himself up so as to get away from those women and their bickering, Uncle Ramón would joke when he told me about it years later.