Blind Sunflowers

by Alberto Méndez

  He told his stories by the light of a candle that made him look even more ghostly, in a rhythmic voice he scattered with onomatopoeias that put the wind up all of us. Each tale began with some gruesome incident he himself had witnessed.

  The characters in his stories were always a group of boys of our own age, threatened by an army of lepers who came lurching in our direction as if the only way they could survive was by disembowelling us. Leprosy was not an infectious disease, it was a disease of the soul, dangerous not because we could catch it, but because of its voracious cannibalism.

  I hesitated a great deal before writing this letter, and now I am tempted not to finish it. Yet I need to tell the truth in order to understand it, because it slips through my fingers like rainwater through those of a shipwrecked sailor. What I cannot do, Father, is feel remorse, because nobody ever taught me to differentiate between love and lust, and I sincerely thought I was falling in love. I blamed the torment my soul was suffering on Nature – but that came later.

  I kept this fear of lepers for many years, and whereas other children imagined ogres, the bogeyman, the devil or witches on broomsticks, my mind was filled with images of these bloody figures advancing slowly and inexorably towards me, strips of their flesh dropping off as they closed in to devour my entrails.

  With each passing month, Ricardo became increasingly sullen. Elena realised that telling him what was going on beyond the walls of the flat only made him angry, and so she stopped saying anything about life beyond their front door.

  The idea that the city had returned to its normal routine after three years of siege, that everyone behaved as if they had not lost a war, that what brought his former friends together was not a sense of defeat but a wish to wipe the slate clean and start again: all of this enraged him.

  Little by little Ricardo began to shrink. His head drooped on his chest. He had always been a smart, neat man, but now he let days go by without shaving. He looked unkempt, he was moody and spent long periods brooding darkly.

  It was increasingly rare to catch a glimpse of the strong, resolute man who had won Elena’s hand in days when words were important because they were used to construct thought; increasingly rare to see the thinker who pondered on how a collective project could be made a reality, the intellectual who believed that what was human was all that mattered.

  Instead he became more and more listless. He tried to be increasingly transparent, to take up less and less space. Even when he was alone in the flat, he spent hour after hour sitting in the wardrobe.

  It was only thanks to Elena’s overwhelming tenderness – her subtle hints that he should do this or that to please her, her insistence on him finishing the Milton translation he had begun in the midst of the war, or suggesting that he write down exactly what he thought about Lope de Vega’s lack of taste, as well as a thousand other little tasks intended to encourage him to think of himself as the teacher he had once been – only this could restore a lively gleam to eyes that were increasingly submerged in shadow, increasingly oblivious to the world around them.

  Only when Lorenzo was at home were there brief glimpses of the forceful man who could win round and cajole a child beset by fears.

  I tried to avoid inviting anyone back to my flat so that my father did not have to go and hide in the wardrobe, but my mother, either out of love or calculation, established a routine of meetings with my friends on my behalf. Whenever this happened, my father shut himself in the wardrobe with a carbide lamp and a pile of books until they had all left. Fortunately, the mean-spirited, foul-mouthed caretaker and her husband Castro, an emaciated labourer who suffered from silicosis, would fly off the handle whenever a boy from outside tried to enter the building they so zealously guarded. Their attitude, as well as adding yet another element of fear to our lives, at least meant that none of my friends could come to call unexpectedly, with all the commotion that inevitably caused.

  I will never forget one occasion when my friends had come round and my father felt a desperate need to go to the toilet. Although the dining-room door was closed, one of them saw a shadow through the lace curtains out in the corridor.

  In order to explain this away, my mother invented a story about a ghost who came to visit us from time to time. Naturally, this made my friends’ blood turn to ice in their veins, but we were so accustomed to fear, so used to images of hell, we were such experts in horror and the fearful monsters inhabiting it, that they all accepted the explanation. We went on playing Ludo, until all of a sudden we heard the sound of the lavatory cistern, which made a soughing noise like the wind in the trees as it refilled. My astounded friends were paralysed with terror, but as if it were the most usual thing in the world, my mother merely said: ‘That ghost always does the same. He pulls the chain then vanishes.’A sense of relief swept across their faces, and we went on playing as though absolutely nothing had happened.

  There is something sweet about the sublime, flebile nescio quid, as the poet said, and that is the gift of heart-rending tears. Father, I saw them well up in Elena’s eyes one day when, after she had dropped the boy at school, I followed her to a place in Calle Torrijos and burst in on her. I now realise it was morbid curiosity that made me do it. I had started following Elena not so much to keep an eye on her as for the pleasure of admiring her. Even today, now that inexorable facts, extinxerunt impetum ignis, have extinguished the strength of the flame, I am still overwhelmed by the memory of her graceful way of walking.

  She went into a building with a noble-looking gateway. I followed, and was in time to see that the lift stopped on the fourth floor. This turned out to be a workshop for making female undergarments commissioned by wicked women who were doubtless among the most dissolute elements of our society. Elena sewed at home for this workshop, and I must confess that it angered me to see hands that were created to caress her children and her loved ones being misemployed in such a futile way. I am at a loss to explain why, in the midst of all those mannequins all too explicitly suggesting the use to which these garments were to be put, I took her hands in mine and raised them to stroke my face, while whispering that God had made them for far nobler purposes. She did not pull them away, Father, and I thought she had understood. As I let them lie on my face I could feel the zephyr of her fingertips stirring the foundations of my priestly vocation, distorting my intentions, confounding me as a deacon.

  The other seamstresses, obviously infused with a profound respect for my cassock, had all paused in their labours. When I looked at Elena’s face, I saw she was silently crying. What did she feel so sorry for, Father? For wasting her exquisite hands on such an ignoble task? Or, as I thought at that moment, was she moved because of the obvious intensity of my feelings? I know now, Father, that it was for neither of these reasons, but alas! a man has had to die for me to understand that.

  I stammered out an excuse, not caring how ridiculous it might sound, to try to explain what I was doing there. Then I went back to the school, pleased because in my own way I had conveyed to Elena the fact that I was willing to offer her my protection. If she did not accept it, that would be as contrary as a statue rejecting its pedestal.

  ‘Do you love your mother very much?’

  Lorenzo nodded. Brother Salvador stroked his head as a sign of approval. More than a hundred young boys were rushing about the playground in a noisy, chaotic swarm that only they knew how to disentangle. Since there was not enough room for them all, the different groups were mixed up together, but their games remained strictly separated, as they all knew who they were playing with and against.

  ‘Doesn’t your father write to you?’

  This time, Lorenzo shook his head.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because he’s dead.’

  Brother Salvador stroked the back of the boy’s head again, and spoke of God’s will, his inscrutable designs, the lessons of the saints, and many other things Lorenzo did not understand.

  ‘Doesn’t your mother have anyone to help her?’r />
  ‘Sometimes Señora Eulalia comes. But she’s in jail at the moment.’

  ‘Why is she in jail?’

  ‘For selling bread on the black market.’

  At last he could say something that was true! Eulalia was a tall, broad-beamed woman in her sixties whose face was lined with deep wrinkles that made her eyes look like burning coals, and her smile a cameo silhouette.

  She eked out a living as a cleaner, but the households she worked in were so short of money that they wanted her services only irregularly.

  Whenever hunger got the better of her, she would ask Elena for a crust of white bread, which she took down to the market in Calle Hermosilla to sell openly. Elena, who had known her since childhood because she had worked in her parents’ house, was happy to give her the bread, and promised she would go and visit her in Las Ventas women’s prison.

  This was because white-haired Eulalia, dressed in her long, medieval-looking skirts, always made sure the police saw what she was doing: every time she was arrested it meant she was guaranteed two meals a day for ten days or a fortnight, depending on how disrespectful she was to the stern-faced magistrate.

  On Thursdays at six, Elena and Lorenzo would stand on the pavement opposite the women’s prison and wait until they saw a handkerchief being waved at one of the windows, the signal that Eulalia was inside, gathering strength to help her survive after her release.

  Lorenzo was staring at a group of boys playing ball. Brother Salvador gave him a slight push so that he could go back to them, then stood watching as he joined in a game whose rules only those involved could comprehend. The priest did not know why, but Lorenzo’s replies had made him feel so content he did not even tug the ear of a toothless youngster who, like the Jews had done to Jesus, spat in the face of a companion who had stolen his spinning top.

  The noisy shouts of the boys at play, the warm sun and clear air, the simple honesty of Lorenzo’s replies, everything in its place and time neatly divided according to a timetable, the flock and its shepherd, the sense of a natural hierarchy: all this lent the present the sweetness it had once had in the days when Brother Salvador was not a victor but someone striving for Victory. He felt like one of the dispossessed who was about to inherit the earth. ‘Because they will be filled,’ he thought, and almost without being aware of it, he crossed the yard muttering to himself: Saturabuntur!

  At Calle Alcalá 179 lived a disturbing character: Silvenín. He was slightly older than the rest of us, but it was not the difference in age that made him stand out. He was stocky, and was always bent so far forward it seemed as though he had to keep walking to avoid falling over. He was only rarely part of our group. His father was a nondescript sort whom no one would have noticed but for his wife, who without being beautiful was so kind that even today I remember her as a quiet refuge among all the harsh adults who controlled our destinies. She would always say hello to us; Silvenín’s father did not even do that.

  Silvenín had his father’s serious demeanour and his mother’s blue eyes and smile: we were all in awe of him. I remember once when we were all congregated around the bench outside the dental clinic on Calle Ayala and the priest from Covadonga church came past. He was a grimy old man with dandruff and a cyst on his forehead, with blubbery lips that sprayed us with saliva whenever he was inveighing against sin during his Sunday homilies, and were covered in thick white bubbles at the corners when he whispered his prayers. As we had been taught to do at school, we all rushed to kiss his hand, which he left dangling by his side in order to receive our fawning token of respect. All of us except for Silvenín, that is. When we had all regrouped around him, his only comment was: ‘Do you think priests don’t wipe their arses?’

  The other boys laughed at his joke, but I was filled with an irrational fear that our family’s secret might be found out, while at the same time I felt a deep sense of sympathy with this neighbour of ours. I have no idea why I felt this way, since as far as I can remember my parents never talked to me about the Church or the clergy, and still less about religion. At school, I learned about it in Sacred History and Catechism, which made it something I had to try to study and remember, and they helped me in this. Now I wonder whether they were not scared to teach me what they thought, while I was just as frightened to find out what their beliefs were. It was yet another way that we stuck together, like the wardrobe where my father lived, or the pretence that my mother was a widow. It was all real, but none of it was true.

  Is it only through renunciation that we may gather the flowers that grow from the thorn bush of life, I wondered, or could I become the sturdy oak that forces its way skywards as a result of sin and repentance, straying from the path and returning to it, feeling in turn proud and humiliated? I will confess to you, Father, that after so many years of winter and drought, I sensed within me the buds of a blossom that might bear fruit. I considered abandoning my vocation as shepherd to become one of the flock. More than six months had gone by since my first conversation with Elena, and there had been other deliberate or chance meetings with her, so that by this time I had distilled the purity of my feelings and even, as I have already said, the vehemence of my watchful friendship.

  The loss of her husband, who despite being one of those condemned by our historical truth was nevertheless the father of her children, the lack of news from her daughter Elena, whom the storms of war had driven to an unknown, sullen land, and the urgent need to bring up a child who was both lively and sad – all this and many other things besides seemed to me enough to explain her sweet shyness, her lack of willingness to talk of anything but her boy, her haste to bring our meetings to a close, and the timidity she displayed whenever she talked about herself. At that time, Father, I justified her attitude as one of decorum.

  I went to her home several times during school hours to tell her of my intentions towards her, but I never found her in. Possibly this fact in itself, so unusual in a woman, should have alerted me to the true situation, but my confusion at the sudden possibilities for my future did not permit me to analyse just how odd things were.

  Despite the fact that I had a purely administrative role at the school, and my absences were justified by the need to collect contributions for the proper functioning of our Order, my superior, Brother Arcadio, did have occasion to reprimand me for my erratic behaviour. He was right to do so. Our prayers seemed to me to drag on endlessly; our religious ceremonies no longer produced in me that sense of unease that every sinner ought to feel in the presence of God; and believe me, Father, that of everything I read in the Bible, of all the hours spent in contemplation, the only words I could remember were from the Song of Solomon: thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

  The lift came to a halt at the third floor. Elena was in the kitchen sifting lentils. She stopped as if she had been struck by lightning. Ricardo, happy because he had found a way to translate a devilishly difficult verse of Keats’, sat with his fingers suspended in mid-air as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have. After the bell rang, only the clock on the dining-room wall moved calmly on.

  Then the stillness gave way to a swift but silent routine. Elena tiptoed along the corridor to make sure that Ricardo was properly hidden in the wardrobe. She replaced the rosary over the hinges, went to the table where her husband worked, and picked up all the sheets of paper he had written on. She opened the windows onto the balcony to let in the spring air, then crept as quietly as possible back to the front door. She stood there listening hard to see if there was any sound that might identify the visitor, until all of a sudden a second ring on the bell startled her so much she could not help giving a stifled cry.

  It was Brother Salvador. Through the spyhole she could see his round face and receding hairline. He was smiling through firmly-set lips, and his half-closed eyes had an expression somewhere between beatific and imploring. When Elena opened the door, he strode in, unctuously wishing her good day, good day, good day…


  Once he was in the hallway he asked if he might speak to her, and it was only then that she said, ‘Of course, come in, father,’and accompanied him to the dining room. She did not ask him to sit down, but he did so anyway, complaining how hot it was wearing a cassock all day long. Elena offered him water, but the beatific expression returned to his face as he suggested that a little glass of wine might be more appropriate.

  When Elena returned from the kitchen carrying the bottle and a glass, Brother Salvador held some books he had taken from the shelf in one hand. He muttered something about reading and loneliness and raised the glass she had given him with a ‘to your health, Elena’. He drank it down in short gulps, then gave a loud, rude smack of the lips which ended in a gushing encomium of the virtues of the Valdepeñas wine. He said he wanted to talk to her about Lorenzo.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, quite the opposite. He is a wonderful boy. If he were not so timid, he could be top of the class…’ With that he launched into a speech about the need to learn about life, how a boy had to be strong to be the best, a ‘primus inter pares’, the very best in the eyes of the Lord. ‘Perhaps because he has no father…’

  When Elena said nothing in reply, he went on with a long-winded description of the sacrifices that teaching demanded, the satisfactions it offered, the need to be able to identify the best in order to encourage them as much as possible so that they could become the champions of great causes.

  ‘I could see to it that he entered a seminary.’

  Elena could not help smiling.

  ‘He’s only a boy!’

  ‘But we must direct them, Elena, it’s our duty to point them along the right path. That’s what is expected of us. There is nothing compulsory about it. He would receive an excellent education, a preparation for the future which if Lorenzo so wished would not necessarily mean he ended up in the church. Look at me: I spent twelve years in a seminary, but now I’m not at all sure I want to be a priest…’