“Shall I clean the board?”
“No, I said ‘No’.”
He was defending his words now like a cornered animal. He called for silence. The boys could already sense that it was time for the end-of-lesson bell to ring. The proximity of that moment made them restless. They kept looking out of the window, at the boys at the back of the class, at the coats hanging on the coat-rack… Don Eloy Millán was a kind man. He was distracted. Perhaps he had a headache or was tired. There was a flash followed by a distant rumble of thunder. The boys glanced up at the clouds for a moment, slightly pale, slightly troubled and excited, as if they were watching the approach of a majestic, silent, deadly caravel. He set them an exercise to do from their books. He asked Cubero where in the exercises they had got to. He walked up and down the centre aisle between the desks. He gazed from the back of the room at his words written on the blackboard, his own words. The clouds were stealing rhythmically, hurriedly away towards other places in the world.
“Sir, shall I clean the board?”
“Can I, Don Eloy?”
The bell rang. The boys sprang to their feet, noisily snatching up their satchels and putting away their books, scraping chairs and desks, taking their coats from the rack and calling to one another. One of them grabbed the board rubber and, tenaciously, from top to bottom, from left to right, with wild, forceful, feline gestures, cleaned the whole blackboard.
Don Eloy Millán slowly picked up his briefcase and his coat from the desk.
“Bye, sir!”
“Goodbye, Don Eloy!”
“Goodbye, Señor Millán! See you tomorrow!”
He was left alone, putting on his gloves. He thought: “They didn’t even erase me slowly.” He was looking at the black rectangular board, like a precise, deep, dark hole. The now silent blackboard. He had been written on that board and now he had been erased. And with such rancour, such haste! His heart, he sensed, was clouding over. “How many others like me,” he thought, “lie behind that board, forgotten, lost, erased for ever, just like that?”
He stood for a long while, staring at the blackboard, anxiously searching for a fragment of just one of his words or even half a word, anything, the tail of a letter, the dot on an “i”, searching for himself, fearfully searching that black rectangle.
THE CAR
I WANT TO PAY HOMAGE to the car because it has borne us on its back for many years now. Don’t ask me about the engine, the make, the number plate, what kind of fuel it uses, or even if it was mine, because after looking at it all these years, I no longer know to whom it belonged: to me, to him or to her, or to those who came and went and shared the journey with us for a season or longer.
The car carried us along like a cheerful, trusting blind man. There was a pillow inside, some old blankets, a few guides and maps, breadcrumbs, dried rosemary, a rip in the fabric made by a child, mud from the tracks — long since crumbled to dust — left by a dog from Navas del Rey, who really loved us. There were other things besides, which were hard to explain or at least hard to believe. If I were a teller of tales, the car itself would be speaking by now. But then the car, for me, would be a worthless fool. We were the ones who talked — or didn’t talk — while the car behaved like what it was: a car.
The car even took us out at dawn, when we were still half asleep. Past pine trees or oaks, past olive trees. In sun and rain, laughing or sad, like the fields, the streams, the animals and the noises at dusk.
The carpets were not exactly what one would find in a palace, but they had felt the spur of the kind of high heels favoured by young women, and even the occasional lone shoe, possibly lost at midnight, and whose other half I never did find. And briefcases, too, containing notes, poems, books.
We argued violently in the car, as if we could not simply get out and escape from one another, as if it were the only room in the world. We would sing, too, as we used to at school. We made plans as if we were going to stop the car right there and immediately put those plans into action. We occasionally grew irritated when we were driving along without knowing why, and it seemed as if something that had been ours had got mislaid along the way, to the right or to the left, or we felt sure that out there lay another world and other people, too, and we felt distant from each other, prisoners of the car, yes, prisoners. There were times when we needed to fill the car with a different voice, a different hope, a different life. And on days like that, we almost forgot about the car, which was like forgetting about ourselves.
I don’t quite know who we were or even if we knew ourselves. I remember her fair hair — simple, natural — and how he, sometimes, had to strain his voice to be heard above the engine noise. On many days, no one saw us pass and we saw no one. Air, rivers, skies, trees. The road was a strange, sleeping, endless blue vein. Had God ordained a new Noah’s Ark without us knowing? We also saw a lot of people pass, inside and outside the car. Ah, if that car could only speak…
The car was a waiting room. We waited for grief and also for happiness, or simply to find out if that mysterious thing, the heart, was still beating. On hot days, the car itself seemed to be beating. Perhaps we were waiting to love each other more or to part one day as everyone does.
Sometimes the car was like a distinguished, comfortable, well-cut suit. At others, it was so ill-fitting that we felt awkward in it.
Its engine made no more noise than a Sunday crowd or the fountain in the square or school children reciting their times tables. I can’t hear the noise it makes, or perhaps I hear it all the time. It travelled at a human speed, and we were its sole destination. I can hear its silence too.
I could be more precise, but I don’t want you then to tell me that the same thing happened to you once or to a friend or relative of yours. Although I know these things do happen. I just want to say that the car bore us away and can’t come back; it never has, it has always simply gone, don’t ask me where. You, too, have a car? Yes, but that, of course, isn’t what I mean… I mean something else…
We rarely ate in it, no; we thought, talked, looked, loved, hated. (Hated? No, I don’t think so.) With friends who were only there for a while and with lifelong buddies, with anodyne or occasional acquaintances and even with people wearing cassocks and habits, as if we were on our final journey. An opening and closing of doors farther up the road. A turning on and off of the lights farther up the road. Get out this side… Get in here… Come on… Today we’re going to…
As far as I know, this car has never knocked anyone down. Apart from us occasionally. Once, a bird crashed into it — even though we weren’t exactly travelling through the highways of the air at the time. The thud of that bird hitting the car was a stone thrown by God and it made us shudder and fall silent and think. In spring and summer, insects splattered the car — squashed, dead, shapeless, still fluttering. That’s how it was.