“No way,” he said.
I was most put out – or peeved, as we used to say then – but I was determined to follow the path Didi had shown me, and two days later, after both my mother and my brother had said no, I went to San Sebastián on the bus on my own and did the rounds of the record shops. I couldn’t find “Les Elucubrations” because it hadn’t yet been released in Spain, but I found a magazine, Fans, intended for lovers of pop music. I opened it and there were Antoine and Johnny Hallyday face to face. Antoine with his long hair and his huge dark glasses, Johnny with his Elvis Presley-style quiff.
In the weeks that followed, my head filled up with names gleaned from Fans, names I had never heard before: Françoise Hardy, the Beatles, the Animals, Los Brincos, the Kinks, Jefferson Airplane, the Troggs, Donovan, Los Sírex, Herman’s Hermits, Michel Polnareff, the Mamas and the Papas … At the same time, my hair – how to comb it and even how long to grow it – became my main preoccupation.
The village fiesta held in the second week of July was fast approaching, and I noticed in the programme, along with the names of the bands who were going to play at the dances, a call for floats and carnivalesque characters. I decided to have a go. I would buy a pretend guitar and a wig that resembled Antoine’s head of hair, and I would ask Didi if I could borrow one of his flowery shirts, which were hard to find in San Sebastián. Dressed like this, I would appear in the parade and observe the effect my new appearance had on others.
The day arrived, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Immediately in front of me was a young man dressed in tails and riding a kind of penny farthing, and he garnered all the looks and comments from the waiting public. Besides, hardly anyone knew who I was meant to be, because no-one had heard of Antoine or any other pop singer. The worst response, though, came from the few who did know. They sensed that, unlike the other participants in the parade – pirates, clowns and so on – I took my disguise seriously. One of them, the village’s only university student at the time, waited until I drew alongside him, then shouted:
“Doesn’t he look good! So modern!”
His companions, who were all about twenty years old, laughed so loudly that even the young man on the strange bicycle turned to look at them. I realised then that the apparent compliment was, in fact, a mocking insult directed at me, a country hick trying to conceal his true origins. As soon as I was out of his sight, I left the parade and went home.
“You just can’t resist playing the fool, can you?” said my older brother when I told him what had happened. He only went out during fiesta time to watch the boxing matches or the cross-country races. Otherwise, he sat on our back balcony, reading; this time it was a book by Dostoyevsky.
“Oh, shut up!” I said. He laughed and showed me the title of the book: The Idiot.
“You’re the idiot!” I said, but he merely laughed again.
Luis, a friend from school, used to phone me sometimes, and we would arrange to go into San Sebastián to visit the record shops. He could afford to buy as many records as he liked because his father was an army colonel, stationed in the Loyola barracks, and had a lot of money. I usually bought only one a week. The first record I took home with me was not Antoine’s “Les Elucubrations”, which had still not been released, but Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco”.
My friendship with Luis was reinforced by those tours of the record shops, and one day, he invited me to the dance that he and his friends organised each Sunday. He explained that about thirty or so boys and girls got together and played music by Elvis, the Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Everly Brothers and many others. He had a Philips stereo record player that could really blast the music out.
“Where do you hold these dances?” I asked.
“Opposite the train station in Loyola. You know the place.”
It was an annex to the barracks, a stable alongside a paddock for horse-jumping. When the train was late, we Colegio La Salle students often had to kill time at the station, and we would amuse ourselves, as we stood on the platform, watching the soldiers trundling barrowloads of hay around or cleaning out the stables, or we would watch a rider, a girl, going over the jumps on a horse that had a white star on its forehead. I did indeed know the place.
“Yes, we hold the dances in the stables, although, of course, we take the horses out first,” Luis added. It was a joke, which I failed to get.
He patted me gently on the back.
“Of course we don’t hold it in the stables, stupid. There’s a house behind the stables. The only one in the area. Come on Sunday at about half past five and ring the bell. A girl will open the door.”
The following Sunday, I arrived in Loyola at five o’clock, not half past. Initially, I hung about the station, pacing up and down the platform; then, I headed off in the direction of the school, only to walk back again to the point where the path met the walls of the barracks; finally, when it was just three minutes to half past five, I crossed the tracks and went into the paddock.
There were three soldiers sitting on a porch, smoking. The air was thick with the smell of manure and livestock. I heard a horse snort and whinny briefly, and remembered the horse with the white star on its forehead and the girl who rode it, the girl we all watched from the platform when we were waiting for the train.
One of the soldiers was holding a small blaring transistor radio in one hand. That Sunday afternoon’s football match must have been a very close thing because the commentators were shouting for all they were worth. Where were the girls and boys who went to the dances? Where was Luis? It seemed odd that there was no-one around.
I went over to the soldiers.
“How do I get to the house?”
The three soldiers stared at me. They were eating bread and canned tuna and mussels, using some planks as an improvised table. On the radio, two commentators were discussing a penalty.
“You can’t pass without permission from the sergeant,” said one of the soldiers, whose head was completely shaven. His fingers were sticky with the orange-coloured sauce from the mussels, and he was busily licking them clean.
“The colonel’s son invited me,” I said.
“Well, the colonel himself invited us!” said the soldier, and his two colleagues burst out laughing.
Apparently grown weary of the commentators’ shouting, the soldier slammed one hand down on the radio to turn it off and offered me the bottle of wine that was cooling in a bucket.
“Go through the stable and you’ll see the house straight ahead. But you’d better have a drink first. You need to get up your courage before you meet the girls.”
The other two soldiers laughed again. They clearly knew about the dances.
I declined their offer of a drink, thanked them and walked briskly away. I heard them laughing behind me, and then, once again, the hysterical voices of the sports commentators on the radio.
The stable was made up of two rows of stalls and a central walkway. The stench of manure and livestock was even stronger there. The smell of manure was slightly sour; the smell of livestock – although there were only horses in the stalls, not cows or donkeys or chickens – was slightly sickly.
A noise made me turn round. A horse was peering over the door of one of the stalls. It had a white star on its forehead. It observed me quietly.
Far from the soldiers, the silence in the stable was absolute. I went closer and spoke to the horse.
“I’ve seen you being ridden by that girl,” I said.
Then I became aware of someone else in the stable, smoking a cigarette. I caught the whiff of tobacco first, then I saw the smoke, and finally I saw the smoker.
“Ah, the student who talks to horses,” he said. Then he came towards me, holding out his pack of cigarettes.
It was a brand I hadn’t seen before. He went to the same school as Luis and me, but he was a year ahead. Initially, I could only think of his nickname, Hump, a reference to his hunchback. His chest and back bulged out, and he had
one shoulder lower than the other. He was tall and very thin.
I took a cigarette. He lit it with a mother-of-pearl lighter.
“Let’s get out of here. Horses don’t like the smell of Virginia tobacco.”
“Plus there’s a lot of straw around,” I said.
I suddenly remembered his real name: Adrián.
“There’s the house,” he said, going ahead of me down a neat gravel path that led into a small wood.
The house was like a rather run-down version of the one in the school grounds, its walls painted dark yellow and with white blinds at the windows. There were cracks in the walls, and some of the windows had come off their hinges. Withered climbers hung from the balcony.
When we reached the door, we saw another path, at the end of which, less than a mile away, we could see the school and its adjoining house.
“Yes, the houses are identical,” Adrián said, as if he had read my mind. “They once belonged to the same family. Then they shared them out, giving one to the school and one to the army.”
He took a drag on his cigarette and looked me straight in the eye, as if expecting me to say something. My thoughts, however, were elsewhere.
“Have people already arrived for the dance?” I asked.
Adrián rang the bell, which jingled merrily. Then he turned and set off back to the stables.
I could hear the song being played inside. “Ticket to Ride” by the Beatles.
“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked Adrián, who was already some way off.
“No, I want to have a word with the horses first,” he answered, without turning round.
I didn’t know what to do with my cigarette end, so I threw it down on the ground and stubbed it out in the gravel.
A girl opened the door.
“Hi, my name’s Cornélie,” she said, holding out her hand. She had a strong French accent. She was fair-haired and was wearing glasses with turquoise-coloured frames. She beckoned me in.
“Where are you from?” I asked. “Ticket to Ride” was playing at such a high volume now that we had to shout to make ourselves heard.
“From Lyons. My father’s the French consul.”
She took off her glasses and waved them around to indicate that I should follow her.
The room where the dance was being held was packed with people. Next to the record player, three boys were playing air guitar, and singing the words exactly as they sounded on the record: “Shee’s gotta tikit to ra’a, shee’s gotta tikit …” The air was filled with cigarette smoke.
Cornélie was just about to explain something, but Luis grabbed my arm and dragged me off to meet the people who were, according to him, going to be my “rivals”. Five minutes later, I was standing next to the record player again, trying to memorise the names of my supposed rivals: Miracoli, Vergara, Ernesto, Micky, Dublang, López, Álvaro, Miguel Ángel … Luis introduced me to the boys studying at Colegio La Salle by their surnames, and those studying at other schools by their first names.
The record player stopped, and so did the dancers. I looked at the records, of which there were many.
“Careful now, don’t get them mixed up!”
Vergara and López were by my side. They were not in the same year as me, but I knew them because they were members of the school’s cross-country team. They both came from rich families.
The records were divided into three piles. Vergara placed the palm of one hand on each pile in turn, as if they were packs of cards.
“These are to be played from six until seven; these ones from seven until eight; and these ones from eight o’clock on.”
He again patted the three piles of records.
“Fast, medium fast, slow.”
“I see, so every record has its moment,” I said, accepting the role of disc jockey. I felt comfortable next to the record player.
A lot of the groups and singers were new to me. Most came from England or America – Black Sabbath; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Roy Orbison – but there were French and Italian singers too: Claude François, Adriano Celentano, Bobby Solo …
I saw Adrián come into the room. He took off his maroon jacket and hung it on the coat rack. His grey-and-white floral waistcoat was very baggy, but not enough to conceal his bulging back and chest.
“I’d start with ‘Pretty Woman’,” he said, coming over to the table and choosing the Roy Orbison record from one of the piles.
I followed his advice.
“Play a couple more tracks, then try ‘Mrs Robinson’ by Simon and Garfunkel. If you agree, of course. Forgive me interfering.”
He spoke very politely.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” I answered, adopting the same polite tone. “I don’t honestly know which songs to choose.”
“No, it’s not that easy. Some records have fast and slow tracks. How about putting this one on next?”
He was holding a record by the Mamas and the Papas. It was one I knew. Luis had bought it when we were on one of our record-buying trips.
When “California Dreamin’” began to play, Adrián offered me another of his cigarettes.
I took one and he lit it with his mother-of-pearl lighter, then lit another for himself.
We moved from the first pile of records to the second. Around eight o’clock, the curtains were drawn, and the room was left in semi-darkness. Luis came over to us.
“It’s time to start playing the slow songs,” he said.
He sorted through the third pile and handed me a record by another singer I hadn’t heard of: Bobby Vinton.
“Play the first track: ‘Blue Velvet’.”
Then Adrián said he had to leave, and shook my hand.
“See you again.”
“You never change, do you, Adrián?” Luis said to him. Then he turned to me: “You know Adrián, don’t you? He’s a real artist. Everything he does, he does well. Last year he won the Coca-Cola essay competition – for the whole of Spain! This year, he came top in the regional art competition, but he won’t take part in the most important competition of all. He keeps well away from girls.”
Adrián put on his jacket and waved goodbye from the front door. “It must be dreadful to have been born with a hunchback like that,” Luis said. “But he’s a real artist and he really knows his music.”
“Yes, I could see that.”
Cornélie came over to us. She took my arm.
“Aren’t you going to dance? You can’t spend all evening just being the D.J.”
I could feel myself blushing.
“My last train leaves at ten past nine,” I said.
Cornélie whispered in my ear:
“We’ve got lots of time.”
I thought I could detect, as well as her perfume, a faint whiff of the sickly smell I had noticed in the stables.
“Take that record off, will you, and put something nicer on,” she said to Luis.
“Françoise Hardy?”
“No, Bobby Solo.”
“Se piangi, se ridi?”
“Yes.”
Cornélie led me to the other side of the room and put her arms around my neck. I placed my hands on her waist.
*
My hair had become a matter of vital importance to me. Most of the boys who went to the dances sported a Beatle cut; Luis did too, having got over his quiff-and-Brylcreem phase. In my case, it was more difficult. The problem was that because I had curly hair, it tended to go all frizzy, a look I didn’t like at all. When I went to San Sebastián, I would investigate not only the record shops, but the barber’s shops too, hoping to find a barber who could give me a modern hairstyle.
On one of those occasions, I met my mother in the square where I caught the bus back to our village. She had just been visiting José Francisco, and immediately started talking about him. My cousin’s behaviour at the residential school was exactly as it had been at home. He would gather together all the shoes from all the bedrooms and tie them up – “Fasten! Fasten!” – sometimes tying m
ore than ten pairs together at a time. The most worrying thing, though, was his tendency to self-harm. Sometimes, he would have terrible rages, and the nurses would have to lock him up in a padded room.
The river that ran parallel to the road was usually pretty filthy because of the effluent from the paper mills. On that day, as I could see from the bus window, the waters were covered with a layer of white foam. My mother looked out at the foam and started softly reciting a poem: “Our lives are rivers that flow down to the sea, to death.” The only poem I had heard her recite until then was a prayer that she said every night before going to bed. “It is not the heaven you promised me, my God, that moves me to love you …” and somewhat alarmed by her mood, I did not dare bring up the subject going round and round in my head. Apart from getting a fashionable hairstyle, I wanted a new record player. The Telefunken we owned was very old and the sound was poor.
A week later, while we were having supper, my mother gave more details about José Francisco. He was not at all well. The doctors at the residential home didn’t know quite what was wrong, but he was very poorly, so weak he could barely stand.
“And he’s so pale,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to be in pain, but he looks dreadful.”
“Is he going to die?” my youngest brother asked.
“I think so,” answered my older brother. He sometimes went with my mother to visit José Francisco and was familiar with the situation.
“Please, don’t talk like that,” my mother said.
“You know I always speak my mind,” my older brother said.
As usually happened whenever the subject of José Francisco came up, my father mentioned Miguel. He thought they were connected in some way.
“Miguel isn’t normal either. Everyone knows that. How long did he spend in the insane asylum? Almost six months, wasn’t it?” he said. “Who knows, without the treatment they gave him, he might never have recovered. What did they call what they did to him? I know it involved putting a sort of helmet on his head.”
“Electroshock therapy,” my older brother said, and as soon as those words were out of his mouth, my aunt suddenly appeared. She knocked twice on the door and came into the kitchen.
Nevada Days Page 16
