Blind Sunflowers

by Alberto Méndez

  It was only when the walk to school became inevitable that he abandoned his laments and adopted a stance of passive resistance which meant that to take a step, receive a goodbye kiss, or put his school exercise book in his leather satchel took an eternity.

  At the school gate, Elena would give her son a little push into the yard, and whisper encouragement in his ear:

  ‘We have to be strong to help your father. He needs us.’

  She would stay pressed up against the railings until she heard a chorus of children’s voices start to sing ‘Snowy Mountains’ or some other patriotic hymn. The obscure routine began with these sweet voices exalting epic deeds about which the boys knew nothing, in words that meant even less. Those were days when everything was incomprehensible, and nobody tried to understand what was going on.

  Wearing a dark-coloured overcoat with a wide, round collar, Elena walked back to the intersection of Calles Alcalá and Goya. There she took the metro to Calle Arguelles, and walked four blocks up to the headquarters of Hélices, a state-run Hispano-German company which Elena did translations for.

  As well as providing her with a little money to survive on, this work gave her the right to two loaves of white bread a week from the Airforce Co-op. This helped supplement her ration book, where only she and her son figured.

  In fact, it was her husband who did the translations. This helped him feel less of a burden to his wife and child. But he could only use the typewriter – a black Underwood with the name printed proudly in gold letters – when Elena was at home. If she was out, he had to write everything in longhand, and then type it up (three carbon copies) while she roamed silently round the flat or did some sewing by hand, because the noise of her sewing machine – a black nickel-plated Singer on a wooden base with elaborate iron fretwork legs – did not match that of the typewriter.

  To help make ends meet, Elena also did work for a made-to-measure lingerie shop in Calle Torrijos. They kept the most delicate items for her, but although Señora Clotilde always said her work was exquisite, this did not mean she paid her any more.

  That day, when she came home carrying a treatise on stroboscopy for which an urgent translation was needed, the caretaker María told her a priest had been looking for her. She said that although she had told him Elena was not at home, he had insisted on going up to her flat and had rung the bell for a long while.

  My universe was clearly divided into two halves: the dark and the bright. Included in the former were my school, my teachers’ questions, and silence. In the latter were the small triangle of my neighbourhood, and the way in which the people living there related to me. With hindsight it seems to me I could swing from one side to the other without problem, thanks to what I had learned from the mirror.

  Our life at home was one of talkative complicity; in the street we lived a noisy silence. Whenever I was out and about, I had to keep everything my father had taught me a secret. I also had to transform anything that happened to me outside when I was back in the flat. My friendship with other boys, for example, was a complicated balancing act.

  Even though we all went to different schools, we lived in our neighbourhood without importing anything from beyond it, not even memories or the fear that our teachers instilled in us. On the corner of Calles Alcalá and Ayala, there was a dental clinic: a windowless building with marble benches outside on both streets. One was in Calle Alcalá, but we rarely used that because we kept finding bloody traces of the patients’ spit on it. The other was in Calle Ayala, where there was less traffic, so this was where we local boys congregated. We played the games that children who have no toys play: knucklebones, marbles, leapfrogging, hide-and-seek, and other games in which we were both victims and executioners, games where losing was always painful, and the reward was to cause harm. Yet another way of surviving the times we lived in.

  All the boys talked a lot about their parents. Tino, who looked like an overgrown puppy and had different-coloured eyes, was proud of his father because as well as working in an office he was a picador at bullfights. We enjoyed it when the enormous gas-powered limousine came to pick him up and he would appear in the doorway, elegant and serious-looking, in his spectacular sequinned bullfighting jacket. Another boy in our group, Pepe Amigo, boasted that on Sundays his father hunted birds in Paracuellos del Jarama, using nets in springtime and bird lime in winter. His tiny, run-down flat was full of finches in cages, which his family covered every night with cloths to still their agitated daytime fluttering. We used to admire Pepe Amigo’s father because he had a Gilera motorbike that had its gear change on the petrol tank, which meant that however fast he was going, he had to take one hand off the handlebars to change gear: to us this seemed like a huge feat of daring. And all this despite the fact that he was club-footed, and wore a huge platform on his right shoe.

  I also remember the two Chaburre brothers, who kept a dozen cows in their courtyard and provided the whole neighbourhood with milk, which we went to fetch in small milk pails. Their father milked them, and on the rare occasions when we were allowed in to watch, we were all impressed at how courageous he must be to handle such huge, rough-looking beasts.

  I could go on endlessly listing the qualities that made us admire the fathers living in our little triangle. That was the only consolation I had the day it became known that not only had mine not died but was at home, looking after me from inside a wardrobe.

  All I have left now, Father, are the ruins of memory, the wrecked justifications for my behaviour. I must start by saying I have no idea why I began following Elena after she left her boy at school. If I had been asked at the time, my excuse would have been that I sensed there was something suspicious about that woman. To confirm this, I even went to see an acting lieutenant who was posted to the Interior Ministry. Thanks to him I learned that her husband Ricardo Mazo had been a literature teacher in the Beatriz Galindo Institute and was listed as being on the run. In 1937, he had helped organise the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers, where he displayed his Masonic thinking and boasted of his personal friendship with the communist André Malraux and the Russian Ilya Ehrenburg. He was also part of the commission sent by the Red government to Plymouth to change the resolutions on Non-Intervention due to be passed by the British trade union movement. There is little else on file about him, apart from the fact that he was officially married to Elena and that they had two children: Elena, born in ’22, and Lorenzo, who was seven years old at the time. There are no baptism certificates for either of them. I went to Covadonga, the parish where they were born, in Plaza Manuel Becerra, but they had no proof of baptism either. They were both born before the Crusade, which means there was no justification for this, especially since the church in question was miraculously neither closed nor damaged during the three years of war. I was also surprised by the fact that neither the boy nor his mother ever made any reference to the elder sister, who had disappeared from their lives whilst still a young girl.

  It might be thought that my memories have little to do with the climate of fear, and yet, in spite of my parents’ efforts to shield me from that liturgy of dread, I too was terrified that the bubble in which we hid our family intimacy might burst and the outside world, their world, come rushing in and sweep away our silent tenderness, our hidden happiness. I can recall one particular day when we were playing Ludo. My parents used the fact that there were only three of us to give me an advantage as the last player, so that there were no counters behind mine, whereas theirs were in front of me and I could take them easily. I was about to throw the dice when we heard the lift start up. It was night-time, the front door to the building was shut, and in those days nobody went out at night. Although it seemed as though none of us was paying any attention to the clatter of the old lift, we all paused in the game in a way that on the surface had nothing to do with what we could hear, even if that was what was really behind it.

  It was late one Saturday. The lift came to a halt at the third floor. The silence be
came palpable: the shaker and dice seemed to hang in mid-air until we heard the front-door bell ring.

  At that, a calculated chaos broke out. My father dutifully retreated to his wardrobe. My mother picked up her counters – only hers – and put me to bed (I was already in my pyjamas) in one of the beds in her room.

  ‘Whatever happens, pretend you’re asleep,’ she said.

  She replaced the rosary masking the door hinges of the wardrobe where my father was hidden. Then, looking carefully all around to make sure nothing was out of place, she went to open the door, which our surprise visitor was banging on relentlessly.

  The room was in darkness, and as soon as my mother opened the door, silence returned as if it had never been driven away. All of a sudden I remembered that in our haste we had forgotten to pick up my father’s papers from the table. As I tell it now, it feels as though I am talking about the adventures of a boy who has nothing to do with me. I find it very difficult, because fear is so ineffable, to describe what an effort it took for that boy I can see in my mind’s eye to open the bedroom door without a sound, walk across the darkened room to the worktable where the sheets of paper my father used for his translations lay scattered, gather them up equally silently while he heard muffled voices insulting my mother on the other side of the corridor, and finally tiptoe back to the bedroom and throw them into the wardrobe where my father and his silence lay hidden. My only regret afterwards was not being able to tell all my friends of my prowess.

  Ever since the summer the war had ended, the police had not been back to search Elena’s flat, until one night when family routine was doing its best to soften the rigours of fear, four loud-mouthed men led by a younger one in a blue shirt and a felt overcoat appeared. The leader stood hands on hips to question her, smoothing his lank, greasy hair back while awaiting her replies. The other three policemen knew they were beyond redemption, but he considered himself a dandy.

  They pushed Elena rudely into the kitchen. Two of them went on up the corridor, while the young fascist and the third policeman with a pockmarked face stayed with her. The one in charge laid his pistol on the marble tabletop and launched into a chaotic interrogation that Elena barely heard, as all her senses were tuned to the two other men searching the flat. As a result, her monosyllabic replies did not always fit the questions.

  When asked if it was true that her husband was hiding somewhere in Madrid, if he had died, if she was living in sin with a priest, if her daughter was a whore in Barcelona, if she did not fancy a quick roll with some real men, if her husband had killed nuns in the war, if she was a member of the National Movement, she answered yes.

  Yet she said no when they asked if she knew that her husband was in jail in Salamanca, that he lived with a slut in the south of France, if she was a member of the National Movement, if she knew who the father of her son was, if she had contacts with the British Empire or was thinking of fleeing to Russia to join her husband who was a big wheel in the Red Army.

  The interrogation and her replies, which would have been completely different if the questions had been in a different order, were interrupted when one of the men searching the house appeared in the kitchen doorway dragging Lorenzo along by the ear. He was barefoot, and walked on tiptoe as though trying to lift himself into the air to lessen the pain.

  ‘Leave my boy alone!’ shrieked Elena, rushing over to gather him in her arms.

  From then on, the four men simply talked among themselves, swapping casual obscenities and swearing as they went through the flat, rifling through the wardrobes, books, crockery, Lorenzo’s toys, and anything else they could find which seemed to be tidily put away.

  However, although they spent a long time in Elena’s bedroom commenting on the infinite pleasures they could have in the two beds if only she were a real woman, they did not discover that, behind the wooden beads of the rosary, lay the hinges of a wardrobe where a hidden man was desperately trying to stop himself bursting into tears.

  The truth is, Father, that I liked watching her walk among other people, as she returned home in that demure and graceful way of hers, with the purposeful tread of a busy woman. I twice pretended to bump into her and invited her to sit with me on the terrace of a café where they served malt and cake. My painful thoughts were always eased by the soothing influence of her emotions. I thought we were in complete harmony, like two angels from different choirs. We were entirely dissimilar, and this was what produced the harmony. I thought and she felt, I analysed and she suffered from the upheavals of the times in which she was living.

  Man uses his head to reflect, and that thought then descends to the heart to gather strength. Woman on the other hand reasons with her heart so that her instinct can find the light of truth. It is only now I realise their ways of communicating that truth are as opposed to ours as are their means of obtaining it. I was trying to uncover her enigma, she was trying to convince me of her candour. The male deals in forceful, major chords; the female is more adept at soft, hidden, minor ones. She was in tune with the harmony of the Universe.

  Father, such was my reasoning to justify all of Elena’s evasive replies, which only served to make her more desirable. I decided to get closer to her, to seek her out.

  ‘Don’t drink any more, Ricardo. You’re killing yourself.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s the drink that’s killing me, is it? Don’t talk nonsense.’

  ‘We need clear minds so that…’

  ‘So that we can go on living as though we didn’t exist?’

  ‘No, to go on being together, to resist as long as necessary. I don’t like Lorenzo seeing you in such a state. Please…’

  She quickly grabbed the bottle from the table and went to put it in the food safe in the kitchen. The flat was in darkness; the light from the corridor gave a feeble glow that only vaguely suggested the outline of everything. Even though Elena knew the flat like the back of her hand, there were times when she had to grope her way around. But when she came back from the kitchen, the light in the dining room was on, and her husband was standing at the wide-open window. Almost all the windows were open despite the cold, in order to let out the smell of poverty, the smell of fried lard and boiled cauliflower. It must have been around ten o’clock at night. Lorenzo had been asleep for some time.

  As though trying to protect him from a tongue of flame, Elena flung herself on her husband, so violently that he fell to the floor. They lay curled up together for a while, until they realised from other people’s voices and silences that nobody had noticed anything. Nothing was disturbing the cold of the night.

  They slowly squirmed closer together, holding on tight to protect one another from the night and its prying eyes. Wrapped around each other, they started to speak of their fears, of how well Lorenzo was coping with the deception, of vanished Elena, of how important it was not to lose heart.

  ‘It’s not that, Elena, it’s despair. Not at having lost a war that was lost from the first day, but at something else.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘At the idea that somebody wants to kill me not because of what I’ve done, but simply for what I think. Worse still, if I want to think what I think, I am supposed to want other people to die because of what they think. And I don’t want our children to have to kill or be killed because of what they think.’

  He broke down and began to cry in low, throaty sobs. Elena tried to catch the tears, her tongue licking his eyes and her lips pressing against his groaning mouth. Drop by drop, she dried her husband’s pain and rage.

  Elena stood up, shut the window and switched off the light. Then she felt her way back towards Ricardo, who still lay shivering on the floor. She took hold of his hands, pulled him gently to his feet, and, still keeping hold of him, led him to the bedroom. She kissed and stroked his tear-stained face, then slowly undressed him with all the delicacy she showed when dressing her boy in the mornings. She had to retrace her steps to discover the caresses they had once shared, her silent breathing growing ever more
urgent as she aroused passions hidden deep in dark, fearful corners. She guided Ricardo’s hands as they sought out her secrets, then knelt to use her lips to rekindle his flame underneath all the sad layers of ash. When he responded, their bodies entwined – on the floor to avoid any creaking bedsprings – and they possessed each other with an increasing intensity that silenced all shuddering cries, all ‘I love yous’, in the name of keeping the secret of life.

  One of the things that most surprises me is that, inevitably, we all had memories of the civil war and the siege of Madrid, the dreadful sound of bombs and shells raining down, and yet we never talked about any of them.

  At school, Franco, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the Falange, and the Nationalist Movement were things that had appeared as if by magic, or fallen from the sky to bring order out of chaos, to restore sanity and glory to mankind. There were no victims, only heroes; no dead people, only those who had fallen in the name of God and Spain. There was no war because Victory, with its capital letter, was something more akin to the law of gravity than the result of a conflict between men.

  Of all the boys who were part of our universe only one, Javier Ruíz Tapiador, wore the Fascist blue shirt, and then only occasionally. He was eight years old, but already seemed like a grown man in miniature: he had a deep voice, his hair was always slicked down with hair cream, and he wore clothes that showed his family was quite well-off. His home was warm and welcoming, and his dominant position among us was confirmed by the fact that he had an elder brother, Carlos, who told us horror stories with such passionate descriptions and such mastery in the way he invented terrifying situations that even today I am amazed at his astounding ability to make all of it up on the spot.