Mary Lore took the tart over to the children’s table, and Jeff started slicing up the other half with the same degree of concentration as when he had drawn those letters for me. Each slice – a perfect isosceles triangle – was the same as the previous one and the following one. He put the first slice on Mannix’s plate.
“I gladly accept this as a sign of peace,” Mannix said, winking at Earle and Dennis.
Jeff’s hands moved very coolly and calmly. He put the slices exactly in the middle of each plate. I asked him for a slice of the pumpkin pie, because I didn’t think I’d ever tried it before.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Jeff said.
“Is the chocolate tart better?” I asked.
Jeff cut a triangular slice of pumpkin tart in half, then did the same with a slice of chocolate tart, and placed the two halves on my plate.
“Wow, I bet if we measured them, they’d be exactly the same size,” I said.
He smiled.
“Remember, Garamond and Lucida may look the same, but they’re not.”
Mannix was standing up, his glass in his hand.
“At the risk of repeating myself: Happy Thanksgiving!”
Mary Lore brought in the coffee and filled our cups. The smell of coffee was pretty good too.
“Oh, and another thing,” Mary Lore said. “If you want to smoke a cigarette with your coffee, there’s no need to go out into the garden. We don’t want anyone to freeze. You can smoke in the conservatory.”
“Tonight, I’m going to smoke,” Earle said.
“Me too,” Ángela said.
“I’m up for it. Only don’t tell my trainer,” Natalie said.
Jeff and I were left alone at the table. Earle, Mannix, the teacher at the School of Journalism, Natalie, her boyfriend and Ángela went out into the conservatory; Mary Lore and Dennis had joined the children at their table. The film had ended, and they were playing Monopoly.
Jeff again took his notebook from his shirt pocket and showed me the sentence he’d written on one page: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said, “but it’s the sentence we typographers use most, because it contains all the letters of the alphabet, and when we’re trying out a new font, it gives us an overall impression. There are some fonts, though, like Braggadocio, for example, that are fine for labels, but unsuitable for a longer text.”
With slow, precise, unhesitating strokes, he “drew” the sentence on the paper: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
“This is Braggadocio,” he said, when he had finished.
“May I ask you something regarding my own language?” I said. “It has lots of Zs and Ks. And a lot of As too. What would be the best font to use for that?”
“Having lots of As is normal, but when choosing a font, you’d have to bear in mind the Z and the K.”
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. I imagined his mind as a space in which thousands of vowels and consonants were constantly churning about. Occasionally, like a sky filled with fireworks, there would be cascades of words, kaleidoscopic flowers made of Zs and Ks.
Jeff took his time. He thought for almost a minute.
“You’d have to start with Oldrich Menhart,” he said at last, sitting up and opening his eyes. “He designed it for the Czech language, but I think it would suit your language as well.”
He opened his notebook again and drew some Menhart Ks and Zs, upper case and lower case. They seemed to vary a lot, and I commented on this.
“Yes, in a way, you’re right,” he said. “The Menhart font did evolve over time, but it still bears his mark.”
The teacher from the School of Journalism was playing the piano again. “Imagine”. The guests who had gone out into the conservatory to smoke came back in and started singing along.
Sara came over to me. She was wearing her coat.
“Are we going home soon? It’s not that I’m tired, I just want to see if the raccoon has come back to the garden,” she said.
“What made you think about the raccoon now?” I asked. “We haven’t seen him for about two months.”
Sara didn’t answer and went back to the table where the other girls were still playing Monopoly.
“She was probably reminded of the raccoon by the movie they were watching, ‘Ratatouille’,” Jeff said. He handed me a card. “Here’s my email address. Why don’t you send me a short text in your language? I’ll set it in Menhart font and send it back to you.”
I said goodbye to Jeff and went over to the children’s table. It was very late. Two o’clock in the morning. Like Sara, Izaskun and Ángela wanted to go back to the house.
JOSÉ FRANCISCO
(A MEMORY)
My cousin José Francisco Albizu died in San Sebastián hospital on August 12, 1967. Three weeks before, he had swallowed some nails and various bits of metal, which had perforated his pharynx and his stomach. He was fifteen at the time.
On one of her visits, my mother asked him:
“Why did you do it, José Francisco? What made you swallow those horrible bits of metal?”
My cousin responded with a smile, his second smile, the one that appeared on his face shortly after he began taking the medication prescribed by the psychiatrists, a mere rictus, rather than a smile; he did not respond with his first smile, his childhood smile, a remote smile that always reminded my mother, quite rightly, of the “Mona Lisa”.
“We will never forget his smile,” the priest at the funeral said.
He presumably meant José Francisco’s childhood smile.
Whether it was his first or his second smile, José Francisco could never hold it for long. His whole body was constantly in movement; his head bobbed back and forth, like the head of a bird or a chicken; he twisted from side to side; he waved his arms about like someone trying to shoo away a swarm of mosquitoes.
I have a photograph taken the year he died: six boys standing on a bridge, next to the restaurant owned by my aunt and uncle, José Francisco’s parents. I’m the oldest. I must be about sixteen or seventeen, and I’m wearing my hair Brylcreemed into an Elvis Presley quiff, in imitation of an Elvis imitator, a school friend called Luis at Colegio La Salle. I’m looking straight at the camera, as are three of the other boys. José Francisco, on the other hand, is looking away, as if searching for something in the cornfield or in the shrine in the background. But there’s nothing there. The shrine, a small stone building dedicated to San Juan, is closed.
The restaurant, a renovated inn-cum-tavern, also acted as a boarding house, and normally, during the week, the guests sat down to eat at the big table in the kitchen. It was a place in which “good humour reigned supreme”, as I heard the village priest say once. However, he must have been referring to José Francisco’s childhood. Afterwards, the atmosphere changed. My aunt never seemed happy. Nor did she seem sad either. She had the intense gaze and the stern face of a landlady, which is what she was, because she was the one who ran the restaurant, and she spoke very little. She sometimes quarrelled with her son, but always indirectly, addressing the people having lunch or supper at the table, using them as a chorus:
“José Francisco is a very bad boy. He hits his mother and makes her sad.”
She had a beautiful voice, firm and clear.
The chorus could have responded:
“Woman, that boy is the kind of child the Spartans would have hurled off a cliff, but he’s your own flesh and blood and, if necessary, you would conceal him from the civil guard if they came for him. And yet he hits you. Why resign yourself to your fate? How much longer are you going to put up with being mistreated?”
However, the guests who sat at the kitchen table did not know how to speak in that tragic tone, and so said nothing in response to my aunt’s complaints.
You could never grab José Francisco’s arm or push him or get in his way. He would think you were going to hurt him and would react with anger, punchin
g and biting, and it could take two or three men to subdue him. Sometimes, he did fall out with other people and would then inflict harm on himself, banging his head on a wall or rolling around on the ground until he bled.
We all knew that José Francisco could be dangerous. Both to himself and to others. His mother, my aunt, found this hard to accept. She treated him as if he were perfectly normal, and if he disobeyed her orders – “Go to the chicken run and bring me some eggs” – she would put this down to naughtiness or obstinacy or laziness. One day, she got angry with him and threatened him with a broom handle, and José Francisco pushed her so hard that he hurled her backwards against the kitchen wall. My aunt ended up on the floor with a broken rib.
At first, until José Francisco was five, the family thought he was deaf and dumb, but doubts soon arose. It seemed that the problem was not just with his hearing and his vocal cords. There was something else, probably some mental deficiency, although, given his appearance – he was a tall, fair-haired boy with green eyes – this was hard to believe. And then there was that Gioconda smile of his.
When he was seven, they took him to Madrid. My uncle knew an admiral in the Spanish navy, to whom he had acted as aide during military service, and thanks to him, they were able to have José Francisco admitted to a clinic run by a doctor who “knew all about the mind”. Later on, I discovered, from a receipt my mother kept, that the doctor was called López Ibor, and the clinic, Mirasierra. He was not perhaps the worst option in post-Civil War Spain, where most sinister psychiatrists – with Antonio Vallejo-Nájera at their head – publicly defended the supposed link between Marxism and a lack of intelligence, or the intellectual atrophy that was said to afflict all women from birth; but at any rate, it turned out to be a wrong decision. My aunt did not speak Spanish and could not go with her son to Madrid; nor could my uncle, because, quite apart from helping out in the restaurant, he worked as a truck driver six days a week; as for my mother, even though she had studied and was a teacher, she was nevertheless rather unworldly and would have been completely at a loss in a big city and among psychiatrists. Given the circumstances, the family knew almost nothing about the treatment given to my cousin, only that its purpose was to draw him out of his silence and teach him to speak.
José Francisco spent nearly two months in Madrid. He did not learn to speak, or, rather, he learned just one word: “fasten”.
The word sounded strange in our world, because, as in the case of my aunt, most people in the village knew very little Spanish. As an example of our linguistic situation, I remember what happened the day the first television set was installed in my aunt and uncle’s restaurant. They didn’t put it in the kitchen, but quite high up on a shelf in the dining room, and all the girls and boys from round about sat down to watch a Tarzan film that was just beginning: “Trek to Terror”. The film opened with a voice loudly repeating the title: “The Trek to Terror!!!” The boy sitting in front of me turned round: “Zer da ‘trek’?” he asked. “What does ‘trek’ mean?” As soon as I had explained, another four or five heads turned to me: “Eta ‘terror’? Zer da ‘terror’?” “And ‘terror’? What does ‘terror’ mean?” In that atmosphere, knowing the word ‘fasten’ only emphasised José Francisco’s oddness.
José Francisco had always been obsessed with fastening things. If someone approached him with the buttons of his jersey or shirt undone, he would get upset and insist on doing them up. If he saw the neighbours’ dog running loose, he would grab it by the collar, drag it over to its kennel and chain it up again. In the morning, as soon as he got out of bed, he would rush to the shoe cupboard and tie all the shoelaces together. He used to do so silently, but after he came back from Madrid, he would shout: “Fasten! Fasten!”
When José Francisco turned fourteen, my aunt and uncle decided to send him to San Sebastián, to a residential school for children with special needs. By then, there was a name for his illness.
“Apparently, he’s autistic,” my mother told us, after going with my aunt to see the doctor. “And the school specialises in caring for such children.”
My father remarked laconically:
“I don’t know why they waited so long.”
My mother said that they already had a date for his enrolment: June 25.
“I suppose that means there won’t be any family lunch,” my father said.
He was referring to the lunch my aunt always prepared on the eve of San Juan, as part of the fiesta held at the shrine near the restaurant.
But there was a lunch. My aunt didn’t want that year to be an exception. About midday on June 24, twenty-five or so relatives, mostly from outside the village, were gathered in their various groups: the men, holding glasses of white wine, were standing round the radio, listening to the broadcast of the pelota match between Azkarate and Atano X; the women were wandering about near the shrine, which had been decked with flowers for the occasion; we, the adolescents and children, were sitting near the weir at the watermill, a short distance from the restaurant, looking at the postcards of pop singers brought by our French cousin Didi, who lived in Hendaye.
The dining room filled with voices when we sat down at the table, and everything seemed to indicate that we were going to enjoy the same celebratory lunch as we had in previous years, undimmed by José Francisco’s imminent departure. The table – made up of five normal-sized tables – had been dressed beautifully by my aunt. On the white linen tablecloth the fine Bidasoa plates were arranged in two parallel rows, and between them, forming a more or less homogeneous line, were the soup tureens and the serving dishes: fish soup, Russian salad, ham, croquettes and asparagus. In between the serving dishes and the tureens were little bunches of flowers. “They were left over from the shrine,” my aunt told anyone who made jokes about such “luxurious touches”. Among the flowers stood the gleaming bottles of cider brought up from the river where they had been cooling.
At first, while we were enjoying the fish soup and eating the ham, croquettes, Russian salad and asparagus, the conversation followed its usual quiet, banal course, interrupted only by some of the men arguing about something that had happened in the match between Azkarate and Atano X. Then the next course arrived – fried fish and roast chicken with red peppers – and one of José Francisco’s uncles began to protest at the decision to send José Francisco away to a residential school. The pleasant atmosphere vanished at once.
“What are they going to do to him? The same thing they did to me?” he said, picking up his plate and bringing it down hard on the table.
He had chosen hake to eat, and a piece of fish fell onto the tablecloth. His face was scarlet.
His brother, José Francisco’s father, turned to him and said:
“Be quiet. The last thing we need is you getting all worked up!”
Miguel ignored him and continued shouting:
“I don’t need to die in order to find out what hell is like! I found out when I was in the insane asylum!”
“Oh, no, here we go: the same old story!” said José Francisco’s father, folding his arms.
“What are you talking about, Miguel?” my mother said. “No-one is sending José Francisco to an insane asylum. He’s going to a school for children with special needs.”
Miguel wasn’t listening and he continued to protest until my aunt called to him from the kitchen door.
“Miguel, I need your help. I’m not sure how this new oven works.”
He immediately fell silent and walked meekly over to the kitchen.
A quarter of an hour later, they both returned, accompanied by Estepani, the woman who helped in the kitchen, each of them bearing a chocolate soufflé.
“Would anyone like cheese as well?” my aunt asked. We all said no.
“Have you calmed down now?” my uncle asked his brother.
Miguel was too busy eating the fish still on his plate to respond. My aunt and Estepani returned to the kitchen, where José Francisco was having his lunch, because he never ate with e
veryone else.
The weir by the watermill was surrounded by hazel trees, and we, the younger members of the family, escaped there once we had devoured the chocolate soufflé. Our French cousin Didi continued to do most of the talking. He was the star of the group, because he was French and because of the way he looked. His hair was “long as a girl’s”, and he wore flowery shirts. The one he was wearing then was green with purple roses.
Didi talked to us about a new singer who had just released a record in France. His name was Antoine, and he’d had a huge hit with a number called “Les Elucubrations”, in which he made fun of the French rock star, Johnny Hallyday. Hallyday had responded that same week with a song entitled “Cheveux longs et idées courtes” – “Long on hair, short on ideas”. Didi preferred Antoine. He was more modern. In his song, he said that you should be able to buy the pilule – the Pill – in your local Monoprix supermarket.
Antoine, Johnny Hallyday, Monoprix, pilule … Those unfamiliar names and words plunged into my mind like the hazelnuts that tumbled into the waters of the weir at the mill. At night they plunged still deeper, and, the following morning, I ran to find my mother. Accompanied by my older brother, she and my aunt were going to San Sebastián to take José Francisco to his new school.
“Could you buy me this record?” I asked.
I wrote the name down on a piece of paper: Antoine, “Les Elucubrations”. We had an old, refurbished Telefunken record player at home, a present from Miguel, who owned the local repair shop for electrical goods, and I was dying to hear that song.
“You won’t forget, will you?” I said.
My mother got angry. They were going to San Sebastián in a taxi, and the residential school was nowhere near the town centre. Besides, it wasn’t going to be easy leaving José Francisco there. It would take time. It wasn’t like dropping off a parcel. She was still in a bad mood after the previous night’s argument with Miguel.
“Would you buy it for me?” I asked my older brother.
Nevada Days Page 15
