Communist Manifesto speaks of the icy waters, although in his case they’re the icy waters of egotistical calculation, that I do remember). Nor do I think he knew of his father’s hunting tastes in the 1940s. We were in the early 1980s then and concerned with other things. It wasn’t a time of prisons or of corpses floating in cold, murky rivers, except as chapters in an adventure story, something like the exploits of Jules Verne’s hero, Michel Strogoff, in the waters of the Yenisey River, adventures in which Francisco had wished that he, too, could be a protagonist, while I opted instead for the role of curious onlooker reading about them in some book. Is it a sin to have no interest in revolution or in digging up the past? Then again, after putting out many feelers, he also turned his back on history and the struggle of the proletariat. He chose rather cosier places for his adventures, while I opted not to find out about such things even in books (or, rather, in the book of life itself). After all, the positive option, not to destroy, but to choose the best of what’s on offer — a dilemma that preoccupied him — and which he resolved at the time — seemed more in keeping with social propriety or his family’s status or, more precisely, with his family’s aspirations and pretensions, because his family enjoyed high status in the village, but in a rather confused fashion; it was best not to talk about the origin of that status (Falangist father: pistols, land seizures, black market dealings, the pursuit through the mountains of famished, fugitive scarecrows in rags) to the half-dozen families who had inherited their wealth (the so-called “good families” who had always lived in Olba and who had been able to hang on to their wealth and status without too much fuss or too much vulgar probing), the nouveau riche, however, swallowed whole the farce put on by the Marsal family, along with their pretensions, Don Gregorio this and Don Gregorio that, the uniformed maid serving at table when they had guests; as did other post-civil war upstarts and those who made their money in the 1960s, people who, in a way, considered themselves Don Gregorio’s heirs — following the path opened up by him in the immediate post-war years — and saw themselves reflected in his mirror: second-generation predators, some of them the children of those who used to run with the pack — of which Don Gregorio was a member in his gleaming Hispania motor car — gangmasters, riffraff, a rabble with their newly acquired wealth and a gun license just in case some bastard breaks into your house and wants to steal your undeclared earnings. Their even more credulous children have the Spanish flag emblazoned on their key rings and on their watchbands, and a racist joke always on the tip of their tongues, convinced that locker-room humor is really classy, failing to realize, the poor ignorant fools, that it is, in fact, merely the province of the buffoon. The Marsal family are held in high esteem by the local developers, the dealers in construction materials, paint and metalwork, the bar owners, as well as the multitude of new arrivals who, over the last thirty years, have vied to be even more fascist than their immediate predecessors: the children of the winning side. Put Adolfo Suárez up against the wall. Santiago Carrillo wasn’t just a commie, he was a war criminal. Hitler didn’t go far enough in killing the Jews. This is how they show their colors, by socializing with Don So-and-So and Don Somebody-or-Other, supporters of the regime, brothers of the air force general or the colonel of the civil guard and, inevitably, by sporting the Spanish flag on their key ring, which they proudly brandish whenever they start the car, or having their cell phone belt out the Spanish national anthem in the middle of lunch in a restaurant, and letting the Falangist anthem, Cara al sol, blare forth on their CD player as soon as you climb into their SUV, not to mention the camouflage gear they wear in this most urban of settings, and their taste for weapons lightly disguised as a passion for hunting. This was very far from being Francisco’s world when he left, nor would it have become his world had he stayed. On the contrary, these people were his nightmare, his shifting sands, the ones who might reveal his shame, the half-buried corpse that lies behind any recently acquired fortune. He left precisely in order to escape from this world, he wasn’t prepared to be a buffoon, a flunky, which — when all’s said and done — was what his father and his cronies had been, entertaining governors, deputies and high-ranking officers visiting the area. Preparing paellas and eels all-i-pebre; taking them out on boat trips to see the cliffs of Misent while they bit off prawn heads (the head is the tastiest part, General) and to the club where the best-looking whores could be found. When he began to learn more about his family history, he spat on the photos his father had pinned up on his office wall, photos of his father as a young man, blue shirt and military belt, the yoke and arrows embroidered on his shirt front — although he was careful to wipe away any traces of spit before his father came in — and he was not amused by the bronze bust of José Antonio used as a paper weight. He kept that sanctuary, with its proof of original sin, hidden away from his friends. I think I was the only one ever allowed to see the room, which he considered ignoble because it revealed the murky origins of Gregorio Marsal, his father. He rejects that room, because he has escaped into another world in which, like an astronaut, he enjoys zero gravity, with nothing binding him to the solid ground of recent history, which is pure vulgarity: Don Gregorio’s card games, which he presided over wearing his shoulder holster, cheap music, Mom’s croquettes, the chamber pot under the bed, his grandfather’s enema, he erases all of that; he enjoys not having to set foot in the dust from which he sprang, he lives in a state of weightlessness in which one can build a new, improved self. His new world: crepinette and crème parmentier, foie gras from Perigord and poulardes de Bresse, the golden forests of France in autumn, the vineyards somewhere in Burgundy, the red vine tendrils glinting in the fragile October sun. I — like everyone — we’re now in the 1980s, in what seems to be the new Spain — would listen open-mouthed. His little hare’s nose discovering a whole fruit stand in a glass of wine: cherry, apricot, plum; a whole timber yard: cedar, oak; a complete grocery store: honey, sugar, coffee; a submerged garden: there’s a background of aquatic flowers — he would say — irises, water-lilies, clear still water. As if he didn’t know that irises and water-lilies, like all marsh plants, stink of rotten fish. Gastronomic and oenological knowledge, a mastery of haute cuisine. At night, I would search the sparse book shelves in my bedroom, looking for something by Luxemburg, Gramsci or Marx, and I discovered that my copies had disappeared too, although how I didn’t know. Not one remained. I couldn’t even remember what I could have done with them. I had probably only read them because Francisco lent them to me. Or perhaps I hadn’t even bothered to read them. I talked about them without having glanced at a single page. They were there in the air. A dense, middle-European fog, Nacht und Nebel, icy water, filled my brain and swamped all memories of the life I had abandoned when I decided to come back to Olba, an epic narrative I never really felt was mine. When I returned to the workshop, the past had ceased to exist. I couldn’t bear my father’s — always mysterious — allusions to things that had happened. At first, I didn’t understand the allusions; later, I found them boring and, ultimately, disgusting. He thought I had accepted carpentry as a kind of vocation, and then he felt an urgent need to talk to me about the past, to tell me that he had been part of that epic narrative, but I didn’t want to listen. I said to him: All that bitterness just keeps you from living. It’s over, don’t you see? Like Francisco, I, too, had landed on a weightless planet. Leonor had set me floating, then dropped me. I learned something from all of that, from that time of adaptation, the spell of decompression divers need before returning to the surface, although what I did mostly was suffer horribly, she was there in everything I saw and touched: it wasn’t love, love doesn’t last that long, because, by then, a few years had passed; it was probably bitterness, which has no expiration date, she flies off and escapes, and I remain alone, anchored to the earth, flailing around in the mud, and I rage at her, it’s not fair — I can’t bear it, you bitch — me coming home late at night, sometimes furious, sometimes barely able to keep from crying, and always very drunk. I’d brood on what I had lost by not being brave enough to leave. I could have freed myself from those German martyrs and icy canals without necessarily coming back home to my father and the workshop. Francisco managed to step free and yet he had believed in them in a way I never did. My father was a domestic Liebknecht, and I had shut myself up with him, drowning in the same icy canal. We were both floating, but my planet bore no relation to his. Saw, hammer, chisel, lathe, brace and bit, my father’s voice, the voices of the card-players in the bar, the compulsive drinking, adding up my earnings at the end of the week to see if I could afford half an hour in a room at the Lovely Ladies club, forty years in a world as coarse as sandpaper, vulgar, sordid, and with my one love — who didn’t want to be the mother of my child — married to my best friend, living in a paradise filled with