The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  The next day, the African Legion’s General Varela laconically reported back to Franco, “All quiet in the Alcázar, my General.”

  This was the famous line that Franco repeated to me that morning, when he saw my salmon laid out on the riverbank, like bodies in a morgue. I didn’t know what to say. He took off his hat, wiped the sweat from its band with a linen handkerchief, and replaced it.

  He smiled dryly, and absentmindedly patted my cheek.

  “Bueno. It was a pleasure meeting you, José. You are a fine young Spaniard. But I must go now.” Franco formally shook my hand, and said, in the most officious and florid language, “Please extend my regards to your father, Don Jesús, and tell him the nation is grateful for the banking services he is providing our modern state.”

  Felipe and I again bowed repeatedly. The old man’s rain slicker flapped around his body like a loose wrapper, as he got ready to scrabble back up the goat path to the stile. But, as he turned, he also said, clear enough for everyone to hear, “Pack up El Caudillo’s fish. We will eat the salmón tonight at the Automobile Club banquet.”

  It was said, I suspect, for the benefit of the villagers staring down from the bridge, a clear reminder of who ruled Spain—even the fish in the rivers belonged to El Caudillo, particularly when he himself should have been fishing the beat. But I suspected it was also a public warning to my father and me: Using our skills and smarts to bring in great catches was tolerated only to a point. Cross Franco’s invisible line—and there would be a price to pay.

  The Moorish regiment above began clearing a path for Franco, as the drivers ran back to their cars and fired up engines. Franco and his cabinet scrambled up the goat path, as the two officers left on the river took out long knives and cut down a tree branch and began stripping it. They strung all the fish on the bald pole, hoisted the sixty kilos of swaying salmon to their shoulders, and then made their grunting way up the hill and over the stile to the lone military truck waiting to take them and the fish to Oviedo.

  When I got back to the lodge and feverishly gave my father a full account of what happened, he listened intently and then dryly said, “Relájate, José. Let’s eat. Tomorrow we return to San Sebastián—and your mother.”

  I understood, in a way, what he meant. Let’s keep Franco in perspective, he was saying. Mother was a great force—and potentially more unpredictable and dangerous than our nation’s head of state.

  SIX

  The most honest conversation I ever had with my mother took place when I was eighteen, on a dismal June day, when we were walking home from church along San Sebastián’s Paseo de la Concha.

  Mamá had just spent an inordinately long time in the confessional in the back of the cathedral. Afterward, she bent her knees and bowed her head, whispering a seemingly endless string of penance into the ebony rosary clutched in her hands.

  She finally came out of the dark, into the gray light of the day, and we began walking home together. I glanced in her direction, not sure what I should do. The penance and prayers did not seem to help her at all that day. She was wrapped up tight in her black shawl and dark thoughts, pulling at the shawl’s tasseled ends like a madwoman in an insane asylum might pull at her hair.

  “Why did you spend so long in the confessional?”

  Mother was startled by the sound of my voice. “Did I? I suppose it’s because I have so many sins to atone for.”

  “You mean your drinking.”

  She flinched.

  “I don’t regret the drinking. I do regret the decisions I make while I am drinking—and how I hurt you and your brother at such times.”

  “Please, I beg you again, stop drinking. It doesn’t help—just makes your sadness worse. Please. All Juan and I want is for you to be happy.”

  Mamá stopped dead still. She was fighting back tears, trying to hold herself together. She smiled and placed her hand on my cheek.

  “My beautiful boy. My special son. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds. Being happy.”

  “I am not special. Stop saying I am special.”

  “You are to me.”

  “Why don’t you leave Papá? Es una auténtica locura. All you do is torture each other.”

  “Aaah,” she said, turning from me and starting to walk again. “Your father is my strongest drink.”

  She sensed my increasing fury at her evasive responses, however, and after a while she said, “Weakness, José, is one of the greatest sins. I pray for God’s strength to enter me and make me whole. But even my prayers are weak—and that’s the most terrible sin of all. God will punish me for that one day.”

  At the time, I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  One afternoon, a month later, a phone rang at the front of Banco Álvarez’s counting hall, shattering the silence that filled every corner of the cavernous room. Señor Domingo, the bank’s cigarillo-thin chief accountant, picked up the phone and talked briefly to whomever was at the other end, then stood up from his desk and began walking the hall, his hands clasped behind his back.

  Domingo was, unusually for men of the accounting profession, as fashionable and high-stepping as a coiffed poodle out on a ramble along the port, and he was dressed that day in a blue serge three-piece suit with a gold pocket watch and fob stretched across his flank. He made his unhurried way in between the desks crammed with his staff of thirty-two accountants. They all had their heads down over eight-column ledgers and were intently scratching away at numbers, hoping he wouldn’t stop and grill them. But Domingo headed straight to the back of the room and stopped only once he reached my desk. It was the summer before I started university in Salamanca and I was working as an apprentice at the family bank.

  “Señor Álvarez Junior. Have you finished?”

  “Almost, Señor Domingo. It’s the last file.”

  He looked over my shoulder as I matched pink buy-and-sell order sheets from the Bolsa de Madrid with the sums deducted or deposited from clients’ accounts. “Give it to me,” he said. “I will finish up. Your father’s secretary just called. He wants you in his office.”

  Papá’s corner suite, on the upper floor, smelled of roasted coffee, Ducados, and the whisky trolley that rolled by every day at 4:30 p.m. He sat beetle-browed behind his desk, under the oil painting of my great-grandfather, pensively smoking a cigar as he tipped back and forth in his chair. Uncle Augustin smiled warmly over his bifocals when I entered the office suite, and asked me when I was going trout fishing with my friend and neighbor, Manuel.

  Alfonso Gorrindo Campo, the bank’s lawyer and my father’s most valued advisor, sat in the other leather armchair. Gorrindo was a big and burly Basque with a handlebar mustache and a booming laugh. When my brother and I were young, he always kept a handful of boiled sweets in his pocket to slip us when our parents weren’t looking.

  “Hola, chico malo,” he said.

  “Hola, Tío,” I replied, using the affectionate term for uncle.

  “How is Carmen?”

  “We are no longer together. She said I don’t talk enough. She found a new novio that she prefers.”

  “Aaah. The painful affairs of the heart. Well, good riddance, I say. Go unencumbered to Salamanca and roam the streets. The rest will come in time.”

  Papá buzzed his secretary to “send him in.” When I looked at him quizzically, he said, “Sit. This, too, is part of your education. We are getting paid a visit.”

  The bank’s head porter stood timidly in the doorway. Father gestured he should take a seat and asked him warmly about his family. “Now, tell us what is troubling you, old friend. I can tell you are upset.”

  The elderly porter recalled, with a quavering voice, how a leading member of the underground Basque separatist organization, ETA, had approached him in the street, demanding he pass a message on to my father. He said the man’s name. Papá knew him. They had been in elementary school together.

  “He insisted it was important the Álvarez family understood the changing circumstances of the B
asque nation,” our head porter said. “That while you and your family were not Basques, you owned one of the most important commercial banks in the entire Basque nation, and ETA thought it was appropriate, as a guest in their country, you pay a tax to their organization . . .”

  “Entonces,” Father said, stubbing out his cigar. “We are at the crux of the matter.”

  The elderly porter slid a quivering piece of paper across Papá’s desk. ETA’s conditions were precisely outlined: they wanted a dozen fictional “men” put on the bank’s payroll, each paid twenty thousand pesetas a month.

  “Think of the boys. Your boys!”

  My parents’ drunken yelling pierced the walls of their bedroom.

  “Mujer! Stay out of things you don’t understand! If I pay off ETA and Franco finds out, we are finished. And if I refuse to make the payments, ETA will cause a strike or worse . . .”

  “It’s unconscionable. Always that bank before your own family!”

  I winced at the sound of the slap and her sudden cry.

  “How dare you say I neglect you and the boys! Everything I do is for you and our sons! The money that pays for all your goddamn charity work comes from that bank. Don’t give yourself such pious airs, woman.”

  My brother and I had witnessed such wine-fueled brawls many times before, but there was something different in the air that night, and when Juan came down from his bedroom next to theirs, he was pale and trembling and biting his cuticles.

  “This is a bad one. I think he just hit her.”

  “Yes. They’re more drunk than usual.”

  Juan stood shivering by my side, stripped of his usual bravado. I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “If they come down here, I will distract them. Take yourself away. Go see Manuel next door and tell him I sent you—to sleep at his house tonight.”

  My brother was quiet for some time and then said, “When he hits me, it hurts and then it is over. When she lashes out, the sting in her words lasts for weeks.”

  The upstairs door suddenly slammed open, and my father came pounding down the central staircase. Mother came flying out after him, still in the sparkly evening gown she had worn to the annual Knights of Malta dinner. She leaned unsteadily against the upstairs banister, a glass of wine clutched in her hand.

  “Go,” she hissed down at my father. “Go to your whores.”

  Her neck and chest were flushed and mottled, like she had a fever working through her system, and a nasty red mark, where he had slapped her, was starting to emerge to the right of her cheek.

  My father stopped short when he saw my brother and me standing in the shadows of the foyer. “It’s nothing,” he said thickly. “Your mother and I are just having a talk.”

  Mother laughed incredulously, said something cutting, and Papá turned his attention back to the upper landing. But our presence somehow changed something inside of him, turned down the rage, because now he spoke to her in a world-weary tone.

  “For all your charity works, Isabel, you have a cold heart. No one blames me for seeking warmth elsewhere.”

  It was like he had hit her again. Mamá burst into tears and fled back to her room, as Papá left the house. Juan and I stared at each other, wondering if Mother would come down to try and win us over to her side, as she often did when she drank. But that night, much to our relief, she drank alone in her room.

  I slept badly and got up early. I went directly to Conchata in the kitchen, grabbed coffee, and sat by her, as she moved about the counters. She was reassuringly warm and kind as always: flour dusted and singing under her breath as she baked an onion pie for lunch. Conchata stopped her bustling for a moment, stroked my face with her chubby hand, and said, “Pobrecita”—poor little thing.

  I heard the click of the front door and turned to look down the corridor that led from the back kitchen to the front foyer. Papá was swaying uncertainly under the front lobby’s chandelier. His tie was loose and untied around his neck, and great sweat stains fanned out from his armpits. Papá looked so bewildered, I momentarily felt sorry for him, and went out to help, just as Jorge similarly emerged from his room to assist his master.

  “Come, Papá,” I said gently. “I’ll help you to bed.”

  “You should have come with me, Josésito. I missed you.”

  Papá was slurring his words so badly I almost couldn’t understand what he was saying. Jorge took Papá’s other arm and together we moved toward the stairs in an effort to get him up to his bedroom. Papá, draped over us, engulfed us in his sour smell of sex and alcohol. We laboriously put a foot on the lowest step, but there was movement in the air above us and we looked up.

  Mother was standing at the top of the stairs in her blue-silk bathrobe. She looked down at us and spoke in a cold and imperious voice, almost sober sounding despite the fact she, too, had been drinking through the night.

  “I hope you had a lovely evening. Just one question, marido. Are you sure Juan is your son?” She did not wait for the effect of her remark, but turned and unsteadily walked back to her room.

  My father held on to the banister. He could not move. But his face said it all.

  Enough of this mierda, I thought. I let go of Papá’s arm and climbed the stairs to pack my bag, determined to leave for Galicia that very morning. But as I was angrily pressing socks and underwear and rain gear into a duffel bag, Juanito, still in his pajamas, slipped into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. Just one look told me what I had most feared—he had heard everything through his bedroom door.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Fishing. With Manuel.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No.”

  Juan lowered his head, looked at his hands. “You’re going to leave me alone with them. Please. Let me come fishing with you. I won’t bother you.” The sadness in his voice was unbearable. I stopped packing, went over, and put my arm around his shoulder, pressed my temple against the side of his head.

  “Juanito, look, I love you. But right now I have to leave and be alone and get away from anything that reminds me of all this. I can’t breathe. I need to be alone.”

  “And what will become of me?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. Stay in your room or go be with your own friends. That’s your choice. I am leaving.”

  He turned away from me and for a few moments stared out the window.

  Then he got up and walked from my room.

  “Have fun,” he said on his way out my door.

  My best friend, Manuel, and I headed west in his mother’s Fiat 500 Topolino, the tiny car crammed with our fly rods and nets and silver-tinseled sea-trout flies. We camped in a farmer’s field along the River Eume. For those ten blissful days, I forgot about everything going on back in San Sebastián. We cooked sausages and toasted bread around the campfire in the predawn; we stood on the gravelly riverbed, as the sun burned off the mist, working the river pots with our flies; and during the heat of the day, we napped in the stifling, fly-filled tent, resting up for the next high tide and the sounds of night pouring into the valley, when our second shift of fishing took place.

  The moon was already visible, fizzy and bright. We followed the sound of gurgling water down the path, our feet landing on the crunching gravel bed. Swarms of gray bats dropped from the tree branches across the river and soared out into the night, greedily gulping down mosquitoes and gnats. In the water near our feet—black as coffee but laced with silver ripples as the full moon caught the edges of the current—I could just hear little sucking sounds, plops, and splashes. There, under the moon, we cast with short lines for the sea trout—and all was good with the world.

  I had a dream the night before we returned to San Sebastián. My brother and I were sitting in the living room of the family house, watching our parents drink and attack each other. Jorge came into the room holding a silver tray heaped with fish bones. “It’s not what they say,” he whispered in my ear. “The truth is the silence that hangs like tombs between
the words.”

  Manuel and I drove back to San Sebastián after we caught a record 712 sea trout. We sold them, along the way, to the best restaurants on the coast, ending our fishing holiday with all our expenses paid and a 13,700-peseta profit. News of our catch spread, and a newspaper photographer took a photo of us as we sold the last three-dozen fish to the popular seaside restaurant Salinas. The next day, the afternoon paper in Santiago de Compostela came out with a photo of Manuel and me, unloading from the Topolino our last box bulging with fish.

  When we pulled into the family house, Guardia Civil sentinels with carbines stood duty at the gates of our driveway, leaning through the car window to ascertain who we were. We handed them our papers and they waved us in.

  So that’s that, I thought. Papá has refused to pay off ETA and even informed the authorities. Manuel, sensing my upset, clapped me on the back. “Don’t let them get you down, José,” he said. But then Manuel quickly backed out of our gates and pulled into his driveway next door, almost like he couldn’t get away fast enough from the tension emanating from our house.

  I stood for a few moments in our hall foyer, reacclimatizing myself to the cold and familiar silence—and the sickening feeling that was once again filling my stomach. The hall smelled of beeswax and roasting dorada.

  Jorge came out of his room off the central hall.

  “Hola, José María. Welcome home. Was the fishing good?”

  “Yes. Very good. Are they here?”

  He took my fishing gear. “In the parlor.” He knew what I was thinking and smiled kindly. “All is calm at sea. Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes.”

  Papá was smoking in his wingback near the fireplace, reading El País. Every now and then his hand reached out from behind the paper, to lift a tumbler of scotch. Mother sat across from him, erect on the couch, her legs folded to the side. She had her head down over her embroidery, her hand rhythmically weaving the blue-silk thread through the linen held taut by the wooden frame.