“But I don’t want to be a cabinetmaker, and when I’ve finished my military service, I have no intention of working here or studying. Besides, my military service isn’t going to involve going into battle, this is peacetime, they won’t be sending me off to war, but to a barracks, and I see that more as an opportunity than a punishment, it’s a way of leaving home, escaping from Olba, meeting people, getting some training, because I’m going to get my driver’s license there, an all-purpose one for buses, trucks, everything, and then I’m going to ask if they can put me in the repair shop, so that when I get out, I can set up my own garage and become a mechanic. Military service will be like school for me. I’ve got it all planned. I can learn everything I need to know there.”
My eyes clouded over. It was all I could do not to slap him. I was torn between giving him a good beating and bursting into tears.
“Well, it’s up to you,” I said.
This son of mine has inherited his mother’s lack of guts, although I don’t think it’s really a matter of genetics, but more the times we live in. And the others? At least Esteban should turn out like me, even though physically we’re so very different. He’s more heavily built, a different physique altogether — he’s stronger and more imposing than Germán. I don’t know how bright he is, but he certainly has the physique of a man who can contain his will and his anger. But it irritates me to see him hanging around with that Marsal boy, I don’t trust that family an inch, I don’t even dare to tell him about what went on in the war, just in case he mentions it to his friend. He says they go to the Marsal house and listen to music. I told him I don’t want him to go there again, but he probably won’t pay any attention. I’ll have to talk to him one day and tell him how things were. And just who his friend’s father really is — so polite, so proper, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. And this business with Germán doesn’t help. As for Juan, I don’t know what to think, he’s too much of a child, and not just because he’s the youngest. But, as I say, what do body types or genes matter? All the children have lost the heads they were born with and been fitted with new ones, tailor-made — yes, it’s still going on. I live in my house with my wife and my children, and I feel like a stranger. It makes me ashamed to write this, but it’s as if I were surrounded by enemies in my own house. I so miss the conversations I used to have with my father, and with my friend Álvaro, but they’re both gone. Álvaro was a broken man when he came out of prison, I had a hard time too, but, perhaps I was luckier or just stronger, because when he got out, he was so embittered and so ill that he didn’t last long. I’ve learned to live with the bitterness and somehow stop it ruining my health. Anyway, I’m from another planet. That’s my choice, though, or the only choice available to me.
Stone carving seemed somehow a superior art, it frightened me, made me take a step back. Stone, I felt, was for truly great artists, and I really didn’t feel I qualified. Wood was different, I’d lived with wood my whole life, but stone was something else entirely. I told the teacher that I didn’t want to learn what he was asking me to learn. I felt I didn’t have the skills. I just couldn’t do it. The teacher tried to talk me around, saying that appearances can be deceptive: you’re the one in charge of the stone, you pick up the mallet and the chisel and you patiently measure and shape and work, file and rasp and polish: the stone is a compact mass that you can split or pierce using your own strength and with the help of the right tools. Sculptors can make anything out of stone, even the finest filigree. In Bernini’s statues of women, the stone becomes soft flesh into which a man can plunge his strong fingers. As with wood, the main thing with stone is to get to know it, know how to choose it, to know its density, its qualities, how it will behave, although that’s something we can never entirely predict. My teacher was right. The important thing with wood is to know how to season it, how to work it when it’s just dry enough, how to follow the grain, although nowadays I don’t know if even sculptors bear those things in mind, and, of course, we carpenters now work with wood we know nothing about, where it came from or how it was treated. Some stone is so very hard and so very difficult to work with — my teacher told me — that you’d think any statues made from it would be condemned to eternal life, but in no time at all they get worn away by water or changes in temperature or bacteria or fungus. Other types of stone, like the sort we saw in Salamanca, actually get harder when exposed to the elements. Salamanca was the one class trip we made during the Republic, thanks to a grant given by a Swedish or Dutch foundation, I can’t remember which now. But I’ve never forgotten that city, it was like a magnificent open-air sculpture museum made of a stone that can withstand the elements: San Esteban, the Cathedral, the university façade, the Patio de las Dueñas. The extraordinary sculpted figures covering entire façades, the beautiful color of the stone that changes with the light, pale in the morning and an intense coppery gold in the evening. Almost five hundred years after they were first carved, they’re still intact thanks to the quality of the stone, called Villamayor after the village where the quarry is located and from which they extract a stone that’s easy to carve when it’s just been cut, but which, with exposure to the weather and the passing of time, forms a kind of patina which, instead of attacking or dissolving the stone, as happens with other kinds of sandstone, preserves and even hardens it. It’s nearly thirty years since I saw Salamanca and yet, if I close my eyes, I think I can still see it.
“And then there are those impressive sculptures cast in bronze or iron, which we find so amazing,” the teacher went on.
At the school, they showed us the works of Mariano Benlliure, and I almost died of envy, he was still a fashionable sculptor then, despite his statues of the king. What I had done up until then was little more than what shepherds all over the world do, whittling the handles of walking sticks, I had worked with my father in the workshop, and he’d taught me various techniques, but what we were looking at now was art, although my biggest surprise came when we visited an altarpiece by Damià Forment in the School of Fine Arts; that was when I realized my teacher was right, wood really could compete with the grandeur and perfection of stone and metal. My teacher told me: you’ve already worked with wood, so you’ve done the hard part, or do you imagine that Forment didn’t have enormous difficulties to overcome? As I said before, you have to understand wood, even more than you do stone, you have to find out what it can offer, its qualities, what it wants of you, where it’s leading you, the grain, the differences in density that alter millimeter by millimeter; it’s a warmer material than stone, there’s more of a flow of energy between your hand and what you’re sculpting, which is precisely why it often makes more demands on you, it won’t be deceived, it asks you to understand it, to care for it, it asks you what a friend asks at the beginning of a friendship; although I should say that, for me, the most beautiful material — my teacher was getting carried away now — because it’s the one closest to man, is even humbler than wood. I mean clay, which adapts itself to your hand, is easily marked, clay is a prolongation of yourself, after all, you yourself are clay and will be clay again one day. When you work with clay, you understand that. You realize that you are dust and will return to dust. A fragile creature working with a fragile material. And yet, in books, we see those terracotta figures from Crete or made by the Etruscans — still beautiful after thousands of years — and which, by their mere existence, show that, with intelligence and hard work, the fragility of man and clay becomes strength. Stone and metal won’t necessarily last longer than clay. When you finish making a clay object, you have the feeling that you’re letting go of a part of yourself. Rodin modeled his sculptures in clay, that was Rodin, then he cast them in bronze and it became industrialized.