“Don’t look at me like that, as if I were robbing you of what’s left of your father.” Her voice was clear and dry, toneless, maybe the same voice of a quarter of a century before when she quietly stood her ground as the mustached, uniformed man and the tall, black-clad woman tried to persuade her, predicting disaster. “Your father is alive, and he doesn’t want to know anything about you or any of us. At the end of the war, the French government gave him a decoration and a large payment, but he never bothered to send us one centime. The last time he wrote me was to tell me that he had begun a new life and was therefore ending all contact with us. I didn’t want you to see that letter. You were still a little girl and always fantasizing about him. He lives in France and has another family, he even changed his name. He’s a French businessman now, that’s why the Germans couldn’t find him. If you want to see the man who was your father, take a train and get off at a French border town called Cerbère.”
wherever the man goes
THE NEW HOUSE, recently occupied, sparely furnished, still echoing empty, the paint fresh on the walls, wood floors smelling of varnish, all trace erased of those who lived there until a few months before, presences of long years’ standing abolished overnight, like the rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung. Only one thing defines the austere utility of each room, now that it is stripped of decoration: in the bedroom a large iron bed, in the office a table and chair.
The new house, the new life, recently begun in a different city, far from the dreary provinces, in a Madrid neighborhood unknown until now, a small enclave in the heart of Madrid, where the streets are poorer, hidden, working-class, with a blur of strange people of uncertain sex, of skin tones and facial features denoting faraway places, languages heard in passing that carry the sound of Asia, of Muslim settlements and African markets and Andean villages.
Going outside every morning was a journey of discovery, and the customary errands often ended in aimless ambling, in the simple inertia of walking and looking, of hearing indecipherable tongues spoken in telephone booths on Augusto Figueroa, words of the circular and sinister vocabulary of heroin, the ringing, timeless voices of neighborhood women yelling back and forth, of elderly ladies who come to their doors in their bathrobes and look with resigned amazement at what they see or choose not to see, the way their barrio has changed, the affected voices of men transformed into women, although not completely, as sometimes a manly beard shows on cheeks puffed with silicone, or a male bald spot through a blond, tempestuously back-combed mane, or feet much too wide and sinewy in high-heeled patent-leather shoes.
On every street corner stand the living dead, so pale that the veins snaking up their forearms stand out beneath transparent skin. So habitual and quiet in their waiting are these specters that you quickly learn not to see them, to pass them as if they were already in the world beyond. They stare into space or keep their eyes fastened, vigilant and expectant, on the nearest corner, where sooner or later a dealer or a police car will show up. Then they move, slowly, with the lethargy of saurians, trying without conviction to act natural before the police who ask for IDs, as if their identity weren’t known, their dead faces and names not radioed from patrol car to patrol car. Led off in handcuffs, they go with the weariness of actors in a bad play.
A man or woman follows an individual with dark glasses and a scrawny beard. Shoulders back, hands in the back pockets of his jeans, the individual hurries so that the follower must struggle to keep up, though bent over and abject as an old beggar, holding out a dirty and insufficient amount of money, which the dealer slaps to the ground with one hand, not even turning to the person who is now on his knees, scrambling to pick up the bills and coins scattered beneath cars or in the filth of the sidewalk.
At first they are disturbing strangers, these figures who appear on a street corner or at the end of a sidewalk, huddled between cars, defecating or shooting up, curled up in the shelter of a stairway or entryway. But soon they became familiar presences, as common in the barrio as the transvestites and old ladies in bathrobes and knife-thin silhouettes of the dealers. The dealers walk with a swing of the shoulders, looking to the side, disappearing into an entryway or kneeling behind a hedge in Chueca Plaza, in the miserable garden at the mouth of the metro. They return with what they never show, speak words that cannot be heard, and there is a quick and secret contact of hands, a little packet in the palm of one hand and dirty bills in the other, and they move on, bend down to a car stopped with its motor running, throw the driver a glance, rest reluctant elbows in the open window.
So many voices, lives, and worlds juxtaposed in a narrow space, even the rarest and most sinister things soon become ordinary, each inhabitant an unwritten noveclass="underline" the young man roaming in search of heroin who on the narrow sidewalk crowded by parked cars passes the neighbor woman who’s come down in slippers and robe to buy bread and has learned not to look at him. The women-men babbling away with little squeals and hands flipping; the blind men tapping the ground and walls with their white canes; the Chinese packed tightly into dark apartments and unventilated cellars; the small Native Americans who at three or four in the morning congregate by the telephone booths and hold long conferences in Aimara or Guarani or Quechua with who knows what relatives left behind on the Altiplano or in the jungle. The man in pajamas who sits every evening on a balcony, in a wicker chair beside a butane burner, watching without expression and suffering fits of coughing that bend him double and force him to rest his damp brow on the iron railing.
He was gone for a while, and when he reappeared, in the same pajamas, sitting in the same wicker chair beside the butane burner, he had a white mask across his mouth, and a thin plastic tube emerged from one of his nostrils. He didn’t cough now but still sat looking down at the street, at the people passing, the neighbor women, unshaven transvestites, countless Chinese, An-deans with their babies bound in shawls on their backs, the new couple with a baby and a dog who just moved into the apartment across the street. Sometimes after midnight, when the barrio was deserted, a carefully dressed and made-up old woman ventured out. She always carried a chair that looked as if it had been found at the dump and a plastic bag tied in a knot. She would choose one of the garbage pails lined up along the sidewalk and set her chair before it; then, very serious and neat, she would undo the knot of her plastic bag and pull out a checked tablecloth, the remnants of a meal, crusts and crumbs, a plastic glass, a knife and fork, and finally a large, dirty napkin that she tucked beneath her chin. She sat down at her table as if sharing a distinguished meal with someone, sipping water as if savoring a fine wine, and dabbing at the corners of her mouth, smearing crimson and grease across her chin. When she was finished dining, she collected everything and put it back into the plastic bag — empty sardine tins, bakery wrappers, glasses, plates, and silverware — removed the napkin, folded the cloth she used to cover the garbage pail that served as her table, and left with her bag and chair, not be seen outside until the next midnight.