But he wasn’t there. Or, rather, Plácido was there in his tent, sitting on his kit bag, but he barely responded to my words and barely looked at me. And it was then that I felt the enormity of that day — which, at only twelve years old, I could have done nothing to avoid — when he and his mother came to my apartment asking for help. His tent was only thirty or forty metres from mine, and we saw and passed each other several times, but we never again spoke. Years before we were born, our French teacher had written a line of verse, saying that one of the two Spains would freeze our hearts.*
* A famous line by the great poet Antonio Machado, who died shortly after crossing the French border, as he fled Franco’s troops, along with his mother and his brother José and family. For a few years prior to the Civil War he taught French at the school mentioned in the story.
THE LAST SHOUT
WHEN GRANDMA ANA came to live with us, she was wearing five skirts, one on top of the other, and in each skirt there was a pocket on the right-hand side, and in each pocket, in this order, from the outside in, she kept a rosary, the keys to her house in Villaboscosa, some loose change, a picture of San Francisco Solano and, in the deepest, most private of those pockets, the letter Grandpa wrote to her when they got engaged.
My mother gradually liberated Grandma from her skirts and placed the contents of their pockets, in the same order, in five small boxes: the rosary in box number one, the keys in box number two, and so on. My grandmother resisted at first, because, according to her, she was being stripped of all the things she always liked to have easily to hand, and, besides, despite the heating, she still felt cold; my mother bought her a handbag, which my grandmother rejected, and then some cotton petticoats and a woollen skirt, and, with that, she seemed finally to settle down.
On Sundays, she would open box number three and give me two ten-céntimo pieces or one real, which wasn’t much use to me, because you couldn’t buy anything for that price, but my parents always added a little something. Each night, before sleeping, alone in her bedroom, she said the rosary. The keys to her house in the village may have changed, because the house had been sold, but that was where my mother and my uncle had been born and where she had lived ever since she got married, and she always said that, regardless of whether the house had been sold or not, it was still hers, because she visited it every day in her memory and sometimes even rearranged the furniture. She would kiss San Francisco Solano before going to sleep and thank him for everything, and every Friday she would read my grandfather’s letter, because it had been on a Friday in May in 1896 that she’d received it.
She had a completely different way of naming the world to the rest of us. Spring was “the greening” or “the sweetness”; summer was “the great unbearable” or “the redness”; autumn was “fall time” or “the yellowing” and winter “hanky time” or “the greyness”. And, for her, the last day of life was “the last shout”.
“Nowadays,” she would say, “people know when the seasons start by the date on the calendar and often can’t tell the difference between the greening and fall time. Before, we used to feel it in our hearts, sense it in the smells and in the air. And who in the village knew when one was beginning and another ending? Possibly Don Emerio, the schoolmaster…”
Sometimes, she felt unwell, and Don Luis the doctor would come and see her. On some days, she would have backache or say she was too stiff with rheumatism to move, and yet she never stayed in bed. And if anyone came to visit or our neighbour Petra popped in for a chat, my grandmother would always give the same answer when asked:
“So how are things, Doña Ana? How are you today?”
“Much as you would expect. Waiting for the last shout.”
“Why don’t you go to bed? Wouldn’t you be more comfortable there than sitting in your armchair all day?”
“No, no, I’ve never been a lie-abed.”
That business about the last shout troubled me, because I could never work out if it was death that caused the shout or if the shout caused death, and from that point on I took great care never to shout, come what may.
I thought that all saints were born without a surname, and one day I asked my grandmother why she only kissed San Francisco Solano and not Santa Teresa, my namesake, or San Pedro, my father’s patron saint. And why he had a surname while others didn’t.
“There’ve been so many San Franciscos. I suppose it’s so as not to confuse him with all the others.”
“And why do you kiss him every night?”
“Because he’s the saint who was always saying ‘Praise God!’, which is what I used to say sometimes. And what better thing to say! I’d never even heard of him until María Antonia, Doña Carmen’s cook… you remember Doña Carmen, don’t you? The lady who used to give you sweets whenever you came to the village? Well, María Antonia lived for a long time in Argentina and, when she lost her husband, she came back to the village with her son, and she used to praise San Francisco Solano to the skies; she told me he was the most important saint in all of South America and that whenever he saw a bird he’d never seen before or a tall, ancient tree, or a fine, broad, fast-flowing river or a range of vast mountains, or any one of the many marvels they have out there, he would gaze up at the heavens and say: ‘Praise God!’ And I really liked that…”
“And is that why you kiss him?”
“Yes, and because I asked him for something once and he granted my wish.”
“What wish was that?”
“Don’t be so nosy… Remember, curiosity killed the cat… All right, I’ll tell you. Your Grandpa and me wanted to have children, but when more than two years had passed and there were still no children in sight, I began to lose hope. Then, one day, it occurred to me to ask María Antonia’s saint, and it worked, because your uncle Raúl was born.”
“You mean it was a miracle.”
“Well, I don’t know about a miracle, dear, but yes, maybe you’re right, because having children is a kind of miracle. The thing is that miracles happen so often, they seem normal to us, the morning comes and then the night, the sun and the moon rise and set, the earth gives us harvest after harvest, and we say, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow’ and tomorrow we’re still alive to do it. Yes, dear, you’re right: reality is a miracle…”
Mama was bustling about in the kitchen and heard what her mother said.
“But, Mother, if reality was a miracle, it wouldn’t be reality.”
My grandmother looked doubtful for a moment and did not respond. Then, as if talking to herself, she muttered:
“I don’t know… and neither do you. No one knows. Time passes and brings with it new ideas… and ideas pass, too…”
Quite oblivious to her great age, I was constantly pestering her with questions, and Mama was always telling me off:
“You’ll make her dizzy with all your questioning. Leave her alone!”
But one day, when my parents had gone out and Grandma and I were alone, I asked her one last question, although I didn’t know then that it would be the last:
“And what about Grandpa’s letter, why do you keep reading it? You must know it by heart.”
“Almost. But that’s not really the point, dear. I read it because it’s so lovely, that’s all. At the time he wrote it, he saw in me everything he wanted to see in me… and I was probably never like that at all. I mean, in the letter he compares me to a radiant dawn, to a rose, and says he has built a nest for my voice in his heart! What nonsense! Love turned him into a poet. One day you’ll enjoy nonsense like that, too. You’ll see. Then we got married and, needless to say, we had our ups and downs… because that’s what life is like. But we loved each other…”