by Frank Wynne
The girls set about avidly collecting foil—the silver paper, they were told, could be used to manufacture ammunition and military supplies. On the seventh of every month, in commemoration of the declaration of war on China, they would all bring their silver balls of foil in to school to hand them in. It wasn’t only the size that counted: the balls had to be packed solid, or they weren’t worth anything. The girls could never get enough foil from candy wrappers, so they also looked out for the silver linings of cigarette packs. She and her sister reminded their father over and over to bring home from the shop as many empty packs as he could, and to collect the clerks’ too. But often he forgot, and on the night before the seventh, he would find his brand new packs torn open for their spoils and ransacked.
In the fall of that same year, the girl’s class made a school trip to the city to view a Great Exhibition on Japan’s Holy War. A large relief map showed the enemy territory, with the rising-sun flag sticking out of each place Japan occupied. They saw photographs of soldiers trudging through mud, followed by lines of horses, tanks, and cannon; more photographs taken in the thick of battle; and still more of the army marching in formation and entering a city that had capitulated at last. Grenades and bayonets, weapons of war, were laid out in neat rows for the children to see. Occupying the center of the room was a huge concrete bust of the enemy’s supreme commander, his face a grotesque caricature and his head riddled with bullet holes.
A banner went up on the gatepost of a house in the neighborhood to mark a departure to the battlefront. Others soon followed. Every day on her way to school the girl would catch sight of yet another house that had given a family member to the war. Sometimes in the evenings, she heard cheers and shouts coming from two different places in the same neighborhood, celebrations for soldiers going off to fight.
One day at morning assembly her teacher appeared before them in military uniform, his head closely shaven. Her class walked with him all the way to the main train station, and saw him off to war.
In the spring two years later, the girl graduated from her grammar school and started going to girls’ secondary school. Her new school was in the city near the family shop. By now the war was in full swing. She and her sister and her brother (who was in grammar school by this time) weren’t collecting silver foil anymore. There was no more foil to be had.
The girl, who now wore a wristwatch, began commuting to school by bus and tram, but she still had to wear her primary-school uniform. Finally, in May, the secondary-school uniforms, sailor tops and skirts, were distributed. Though they seemed at first sight like the real thing, the proper navy blue serge, they were actually made of rayon, a cheap synthetic material with a brown tinge, which soon grew fuzzy and developed a nasty shine. Her mother taught her to place the skirt under her mattress every night with layers of newspaper between the sixteen pleats. Sharp in the morning, by midday the pleats would be gone.
All the students in the grades above her wore sailor suits made of proper navy blue wool. The girl felt so envious—of the deep blue of their material, of the way their blouses’ collars and cuffs crisply folded back and their skirts’ pleats opened and closed like a fan with each step. If only she’d been born a year earlier! Compared to theirs her version was miserable—and some girls in the next grade were her age by traditional count. If she had been born just one month earlier, in March, it would have been all right!
Again and again, the girl bemoaned her fate, weeping, to her parents. After a few weeks, some of her classmates came to school wearing uniforms made of the real material. They were hand-me-downs adjusted to fit, but they looked just like the ones the older girls wore. The girl couldn’t help begging her parents to let her have a uniform like these.
Her father at last asked a tailor who was a friend of his whether he would make his daughter a uniform. The man said that he would. Her father had her drop by the family business one day after school, so that he could take her to the tailor to have her measurements taken.
The family had moved to the suburbs three years ago. The girl had been coming into the city to go to school, of course, and she’d also accompanied her mother sometimes on shopping trips. But she hadn’t actually visited the family store, and she hadn’t visited O-ie-san, either, not even once, since they had all gone to say goodbye.
Seeing her father busy with a customer, the girl told him she’d be over at Grandma Hotta’s, and went back out to the street.
“Hey, wait.” Her father came out after her. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”
“But I want to visit Grandma Hotta.”
“We don’t have time.”
She hurried to collect her satchel, which she’d left inside the store.
The girl could not take her eyes off the cloth that the tailor produced for her school uniform. She looked at it from far away, then peering at it closely, stroked its smooth edge. The more she looked at it, the more difficult it was to tear her eyes away.
“It is a fine piece of cloth,” the tailor agreed. “And I’m afraid it’s my last.” As he occupied himself with taking the girl’s measurements over her shabby uniform, he remarked: “I see what you mean. No wonder you hate to wear this.”
When they left the tailor’s, her father announced that he was taking her out to dinner. The two of them walked to a nearby traditional restaurant. To her surprise, however, when they went into one of the private rooms, somebody was already waiting there: Grandma Hotta.
“Sorry we’re late,” her father said to the old lady, after greeting her.
O-ie-san brushed this politely aside and turned to the girl, and gazed at her. “Oh, how you’ve grown….” she said.
The girl found it very strange that her father hadn’t said anything about inviting O-ie-san to dinner—and anyway, it had always been her mother who took care of the old lady. Her father hadn’t objected, but she had never seen him talk to O-ie-san, let alone do anything kind for her.
But the girl knew better than to question him now.
The waitress placed a brocade scroll of gold and purple in front of her father. The girl wondered what it could be. He took hold of it without any signs of surprise.
“This place is still as nice as ever,” O-ie-san remarked to the girl’s father.
“What shall we order?” he said, unrolling the menu and studying it.
So O-ie-san must have come to this restaurant before, the girl realized. Quite a while ago, and more than once—when could that have been? Probably before the war began, maybe before she was old enough to go to school—perhaps even been before she was born.
When the dishes came to the table, the girl’s father pressed O-ie-san to eat.
“Well then,” the old lady said, bowing her head. “I will accompany you, if I may.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Of course!” echoed the little girl.
“What do you mean?” her father laughed at her. “You’re the one accompanying us.”
That day, the girl’s father, who was fond of saké, didn’t drink a drop. The three of them first talked together about how the girl had been since the family moved to the suburbs. Soon, however, she found herself silently listening to the two adults. The names of people she’d never heard of cropped up, and some of them, it seemed, weren’t even living any more.
Dinner came to an end, and it was time to say goodbye. They let O-ie-san take the first taxi and waited for a second, but none ever came.
“It doesn’t matter,” her father said, beckoning to her as he stepped out of the restaurant. “We can walk. We’ll go for a stroll.”
It was an evening in May, and only a little past eight o’clock, but even so, the streets and shops were almost totally deserted.
“Everything’s gotten so dark and gloomy, Father,” the girl remarked, carrying her satchel, as she walked with him.
“Hasn’t it. Are you surprised?”
“I didn’t think it would be this gloomy.”
Since the area was onc
e a thriving entertainment district, its lack of excitement was stark. Neon signs were against the law these days, so nothing lit up the night sky in bright colors any more. Very few of the shop windows had lights on. The whole district looked about to fall asleep, as if it were making a futile effort to keep awake only because it was supposed to be a place people spent money and enjoyed themselves. The restaurant owners had all closed up for the night. And everybody out in the dark streets was walking at a strangely brisk pace—not hurrying to reach any destination, the girl realized, but only because the streets were so empty that nobody got in their way. The sight made the girl feel even sadder about all the changes that had taken place.
“We should have telephoned Mother before we left,” the girl said, suddenly remembering.
“It’s all right,” her father replied. “Mother knows we’re together. But listen. I don’t want you to go telling anyone at home that I invited Grandma Hotta out to dinner today.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t.”
“Not even Mother?”
“Not even Mother.”
“Well, was it a secret from me, as well, really?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“But you didn’t tell me anything before we got there.”
“You found out when we arrived. Now listen: today we went to Suehiro restaurant and had steak, just the two of us. Understand?”
The girl nodded.
They walked along for a while, when she suddenly asked: “But why aren’t I allowed to tell them anything about it at home?”
“You really don’t understand, do you?” her father said, softly.
Many years later, the girl learned that O-ie-san’s daughter had, in fact, killed herself. She had thrown herself into the sea, soon after finding out that Father was engaged to the woman who would become the girl’s mother. O-ie-san, who had already lost her husband and all her possessions, was left quite alone in the world. But even though he was the cause of this final blow, O-ie-san loved the girl’s father as if he were her own son.
By the time she heard the true story, the girl was nearly thirty years old. The person who told her couldn’t say for sure if her mother knew of all that had happened. Of course, by that time, O-ie-san was long since dead. The girl’s father, too, had passed away. Only her mother was still alive, but the girl never dared to ask her.
Walking through the deserted streets with her father, though, she still knew nothing.
“You see,” her father explained to her. “I wanted to treat Grandma, just once, to something really nice, while she can still appreciate it. Everything is getting so scarce, now, with the war going on. Soon there won’t be anything nice to eat. It doesn’t matter for us. We’ll be able to buy anything we want once Japan has won the war. But that’s not the case for Grandma—that’s why I thought I’d like to treat her to something special, now, while it’s still possible….”
That didn’t explain why she should not tell her mother—after all, her mother had always lavished the old lady with kindness.
But all at once, the girl was strangely moved by her father’s words.
“All right,” she promised, as if she no longer cared about the reason. “I won’t tell anybody! Not even Mother!”
Had she been moved by the intensity her father’s words seemed to contain? No, more likely it was the intensity of her own feelings about “war.”
The girl and her father walked on until they reached a bridge, where they stopped for a while. The river, once full of shimmering reflections from the shining neon night sky, now lay in complete darkness. Only the faint rippling of the water could be heard as the river flowing out to sea rose slowly with the incoming tide.
1 The “ie” of “O-ie-san” means “household/family.” The name means something like “Mistress,” and was traditionally used by the merchant class in Osaka.
THE TRAIL OF YOUR BLOOD IN THE SNOW
Gabriel García Márquez
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (1927–2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the twentieth century and one of the best in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. Upon García Márquez’s death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia, declared him “the greatest Colombian who ever lived”. As a young man, he lived in a brothel known as “The Skyscraper”. He was famously punched in the face by Mario Vargas Llosa at a theater in Mexico, beginning one of the most famous feuds in literary history. He has always refused to let One Hundred Years of Solitude be turned into a movie, claiming “they would cast someone like Robert Redford and most of us do not have relatives who look like Robert Redford”. He smoked sixty cigarettes a day until he was almost fifty. He saw his eighty-seventh birthday.
At nightfall, when they reached the frontier, Nena Daconte realized that her finger with the wedding band on it was still bleeding. The Civil Guardsman, a rough wool blanket covering his patent-leather tricorn hat, examined their passports in the light of a carbide lantern as he struggled to keep his footing in the fierce wind blowing out of the Pyrenees. Although the two diplomatic passports were in perfect order, the guard raised the lantern to make certain that the photographs resembled their faces. Nena Daconte was almost a child, with the eyes of a happy bird, and molasses skin still radiant with the bright Caribbean sun in the mournful January gloom, and she was wrapped up to her chin in a mink coat that could not have been bought with the year’s wages of the entire frontier garrison. Her husband, Billy Sánchez de Ávila, who drove the car, was a year younger and almost as beautiful, and he wore a plaid jacket and a baseball hat. Unlike his wife, he was tall and athletic and had the iron jaw of a timid thug. But what best revealed the status of them both was the silver automobile whose interior exhaled a breath of living animal; nothing like it had ever been seen along that impoverished border. The rear seat overflowed with suitcases that were too new and many gift boxes that were still unopened. It also held the tenor saxophone that had been the overriding passion of Nena Daconte’s life before she succumbed to the disquieting love of her tender beach hoodlum.
When the guard returned the stamped passports, Billy Sánchez asked him where they could find a pharmacy to treat his wife’s finger, and the guard shouted into the wind that they should ask in Hendaye, on the French side. But the guards at Hendaye were inside a warm, well-lit glass sentry box, sitting at a table in their shirtsleeves and playing cards while they ate bread dipped in large glasses of wine, and all they had to see was the size and make of the car to wave them on into France. Billy Sánchez leaned on the horn several times, but the guards did not understand that he was calling them, and one of them opened the window and shouted with more fury than the wind:
“Merde! Allez-vous-en!”
Then Nena Daconte, wrapped in her coat up to her ears, got out of the car and asked the guard in perfect French where there was a pharmacy. As was his habit, the guard, his mouth full of bread, answered that it was no affair of his, least of all in a storm like this, and closed the window. But then he looked with more attention at the girl wrapped in the glimmer of natural mink and sucking her hurt finger, and he must have taken her for a magic vision on that fearful night, because his mood changed on the spot. He explained that the closest city was Biarritz, but in the middle of winter, and in that wind howling like wolves, they might not find a pharmacy open until Bayonne, a little farther on.
“Is it serious?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” Nena Daconte said, smiling and showing him the finger with the diamond ring and the almost invisible scratch of the rose on the tip. “It was just a thorn.”
Before they reached Bayonne, it began to snow again. It was no later than seven, but they found the streets deserted and the houses closed to the fury of the storm, and after turning many corners and not finding a pharm
acy, they decided to drive on. The decision made Billy Sánchez happy. He had an insatiable passion for rare automobiles and a papa with too many feelings of guilt and more than enough resources to satisfy his whims, and he had never driven anything like the Bentley convertible that had been given to him as a wedding gift. His rapture at the wheel was so intense that the more he drove the less tired he felt. He wanted to reach Bordeaux that night. They had reserved the bridal suite at the Hotel Splendid, and not all the contrary winds or snow in the sky could hold him back. Nena Daconte, on the other hand, was exhausted, in particular by the last stretch of highway from Madrid, which was the edge of a cliff fit for mountain goats and lashed by hailstorms. And so after Bayonne she wrapped a handkerchief around her ring finger, squeezing it tightly to stop the blood that was still flowing, and fell into a deep sleep. Billy Sánchez did not notice until close to midnight, when the snow had ended and the wind in the pines stopped all at once and the sky over the pastureland filled with glacial stars. He had passed the sleeping lights of Bordeaux but stopped only to fill the tank at a station along the highway, for he still had the energy to drive to Paris without a break. He was so delighted with his big, £25,000 toy that he did not even ask himself if the radiant creature asleep at his side—the bandage on her ring finger soaked with blood and her adolescent dream pierced for the first time by lightning flashes of uncertainty—felt the same way too.
They had been married three days before and ten thousand kilometers away, in Cartagena de Indias, to the astonishment of his parents and the disillusionment of hers, and with the personal blessing of the archbishop. No one except the two of them understood the real basis or knew the origins of that unforeseeable love. It had begun three months before the wedding, on a Sunday by the sea, when Billy Sánchez’s gang had stormed the women’s dressing rooms at the Marbella beaches. Nena had just turned eighteen; she had come home from the Châtellenie school in Saint-Blaise, Switzerland, speaking four languages without an accent, and with a masterful knowledge of the tenor saxophone, and this was her first Sunday at the beach since her return. She had stripped to the skin and was about to put on her bathing suit when the panicked stampede and pirate yells broke out in the nearby cabanas, but she did not understand what was going on until the latch on her door splintered and she saw the most beautiful bandit imaginable standing in front of her. He wore nothing but a pair of fake leopard-skin string briefs, and he had the peaceful, elastic body and golden color of those who live by the ocean. Around his right wrist he wore the metal bracelet of a Roman gladiator, and around his right fist he had coiled an iron chain that he used as a lethal weapon, and around his neck hung a medal with no saint, which throbbed in silence to the pounding of his heart. They had attended the same elementary school and broken many piñatas at the same birthday parties, for they both came from the provincial families that had ruled the city’s destiny at will since colonial days, but they had not seen each other for so many years that at first they did not recognize one another. Nena Daconte remained standing, motionless, doing nothing to hide her intense nakedness. Then Billy Sánchez carried out his puerile ritual: He lowered his leopard-skin briefs and showed her his respectable erected manhood. She looked straight at it, with no sign of surprise.
