“I’ve just had a telephone call,” she told my mother. “José Francisco’s condition has worsened. They’ve taken him to hospital.”
Electroshock therapy. The expression entered my mind and joined the new lexicon I had begun to build with words like Antoine, pilule, Monoprix, etc. I thought that if I learned to play the guitar and formed a band, that is what I would call it. I could even imagine the photograph: four boys, three on guitar and one on drums, and on the bass drum that word: Electroshock.
The following morning, I went to see Miguel in his workshop. I wanted to talk to him about the record player and ask if he had a newer one, but he wasn’t there. I soon found him. He was in the restaurant kitchen, along with Estepani and about ten men; Estepani was standing, stirring the pots; Miguel was leaning against a pillar. His face was very red, as it had been during that San Juan lunch. His voice sounded dull and flat, though.
“What did we gain by sending José Francisco to Madrid?” he asked. José Francisco’s internment had really shaken him.
All the customers were eating the same meal – fried eggs and bacon with tomato sauce. They weren’t looking at Miguel.
“He spent two months in Madrid surrounded by strangers, and all the boy learned was that one word ‘fasten’. What was the point?”
The chorus, the customers, could have said:
“And what’s the point of you getting so upset about it, Miguel? You can’t turn back the sun the way you can the hands of a clock. There’s no returning to the past. Fate has spoken, and you have to accept that.”
But no-one said anything. The chorus, the ten men sitting round the table, continued eating their bread, bacon, tomato sauce and fried eggs in silence.
“Think of the hours that boy spent with me in my workshop,” Miguel said. “Hours and hours,” he said in answer to his own question. “And how often did he try to attack me or harm himself? Never.”
This looked as though it was set to be a long monologue. I withdrew discreetly.
The new names no longer plunged into my mind like the hazelnuts sucked down by the waters of the weir, but like the detritus swept along in a landslide. Now, the names came not only from Fans magazine or from radio and television programmes. Some, like Katia, Candy, Maribel, Juana, Bárbara and Cornélie, came directly from reality. They were the names of some of the girls who went to the dances. Many of them had fair hair and dark complexions. When they danced – when it was the moment for “Se piangi, se ridi” or other slow numbers – each would put her arms around her partner’s neck. In Cornélie’s case, she would take off her glasses and rest her head on my shoulder.
A new boy started coming to the dances, Aguiriano. Like Vergara and López, he belonged to the school’s cross-country team, and he soon became my travelling companion on the train back home. He came from a village even smaller than mine.
“You’re lucky. You get to dance a lot and with girls who like to slow-dance too,” he said to me one Sunday night, on our way to the station. “I have a terrible time. Vergara can’t get any of the girls to dance with me, and I have to spend the whole evening manning the record player. It’s a real drag. And now that Adrián doesn’t come any more, I’m going crazy with all those records to choose from. I never know what to put on.”
He was a tall, gangly youth, who wore his hair unfashionably short, like the soldiers. His clothes weren’t exactly trendy either.
He shrugged.
“It’s because of my acne,” he said. “I’ve tried all kinds of creams, but none of them works.”
“Do you fancy one of the girls, then?”
“Oh, all of them,” he said at once.
He gave detailed descriptions of Katia, Candy, Maribel, Juana, Bárbara, Cornélie and all the other girls, as if he had compiled a dossier on each of them. When it came to Cornélie – we were on the train by then – I realised I was feeling tense. Suddenly, I really cared what Aguiriano thought. Judging from his descriptions of the other girls, he obviously didn’t waste his time when standing by the record player. His descriptions were spot on.
“Now Cornélie may not look it, because of those strange glasses of hers, but if you ignore them, she’s actually the prettiest of the lot. I’ve had a good look at her when she takes her glasses off, and she’s really pretty. And she may be small, but she has a really athletic body.”
“Yes, you’re right, she has.”
“I don’t mean she’s muscular, not at all. Whereas Maribel, for example, has really big, bulging calves. Not Cornélie though.”
“Yes, I see what you mean.”
Aguiriano said something else, but we went into a tunnel at that point and the clatter of the wheels drowned out his voice. I thought, however, that it had something to do with me.
“What did you say?”
“That you’re lucky there too. Cornélie is always after you to dance with her. She pretends she’s not sometimes and flirts with López, but only to make you jealous.”
“You don’t miss a thing, do you?” I said, laughing. I was delighted.
“Well, I need to do something to pass the time! It’s pretty dull spending four hours standing next to the record player.”
Aguiriano got off the train two stations before me. I was sorry to say goodbye to him.
“And now it’s nearly two miles to my house!” he sighed.
“Cheer up,” I said. I felt euphoric and infinitely superior to poor Aguiriano, who couldn’t attract a single girl.
“I don’t mind really. I usually run all the way home as part of my training.”
“How long does it take you?”
“Twelve and half minutes, more or less. But that’s because I’m wearing street clothes and ordinary shoes. Otherwise, I’d do it in under twelve minutes.”
The train had stopped. The moment he stepped onto the platform, Aguiriano broke into a run.
The Sunday dances had me hypnotised. Katia, Bárbara, Cornélie, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Antoine, Bobby Solo, Françoise Hardy … The names sparkled like bits of glass gleaming in the water.
At home, on the other hand, the sole topic of conversation was José Francisco. My mother went to visit him every day. Then, at night, she would give us the latest news from the hospital. We knew now what was happening to him – that he had swallowed nails and bits of metal. We knew, too – or came to know – that the internal bleeding would not stop and there was no way they could operate. Suddenly, in the first week of August, my mother lost all hope and stopped talking about him. My older brother grew increasingly sombre and also stopped talking about him. My father went to the hospital. My aunt and uncle closed the restaurant. The following Saturday, August 12, the lines from the poem I heard my mother recite on the bus became reality: “Our lives are rivers that flow down to the sea, to death.”
A lot of people went to the funeral. From where I was sitting in the second row of pews, to the right of the altar, I watched the people in the front row to see who was crying and who was not. My aunt wasn’t crying, my uncle was; my mother was crying, my father wasn’t; my older brother wasn’t crying, my younger brother was; Miguel wasn’t crying, although he sat throughout the service with his head bowed and his eyes closed. At one point, the priest made that comment about how we would never forget José Francisco’s smile.
A single candle stood on the altar, and its flame flickered and grew still, bent and then straightened, then bent again. Higher up, the saints and virgins on the retable gazed languidly heavenwards. Still higher, at the top of the retable was a white plaster dove, its body pierced by golden rays. The image of Cornélie came into my mind. Because of her glasses, no-one would think she was the prettiest girl at the dances, but Aguiriano was right, she was much prettier than she seemed at first sight. And it was true, too, that she liked to stay close to me.
The cemetery was at the top of a hill, and the funeral cortège began heading up the slope at the same slow, grave pace as the tolling bell. Once there, when we were about to
enter the graveyard, we cousins were called upon to carry the coffin on our shoulders. I was at the back, behind my older brother and alongside Didi. Shortly afterwards, all the family, those who used to gather together to celebrate the feast of San Juan and many more, formed a circle round the dug grave, and the priest began to say the prayer for the dead. I again watched to see who was crying and who was not: my uncle was; my aunt was; my mother was; my father wasn’t; Miguel was. And even more surprising, Didi and my older brother were both crying too. As for my younger brother, he did something very odd indeed: he jumped down into the grave, from which he was immediately removed.
There was a scrapyard not far from the cemetery, and we began to hear a loud clanging, like the sound of a hammer striking an anvil, ruining the peaceful atmosphere created by the church bell. The priest frowned and fell silent for a moment, but the noise only grew louder, and he hurriedly finished the prayer. My aunt and my uncle each picked up a handful of earth, kissed it and threw it onto the coffin. The rest of us did the same. The gravediggers approached then and began filling in the grave.
Everyone went down the hill to the restaurant, and I went with them, but, first, I stopped off at my house to phone Luis and ask him for Cornélie’s number.
“About time too,” he said when I told him why I was phoning. “You’ve finally cottoned on!”
“What do you mean?”
He said exactly what Aguiriano had said to me in the train, as if they had come to an agreement on the matter.
“You might not think so, because of her glasses, but she’s the prettiest girl at the dances.”
Luis’s words galvanised my whole body, and the tingling feeling grew still more intense when I made the second call and heard Cornélie say at the other end:
“I thought you would never phone.”
Her accent was more marked than usual, as if she had been speaking French up until the moment before I called. Her father, I remembered, was the French consul.
“Where shall we meet?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to meet Mademoiselle?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“I’ll give you a clue,” Cornélie said. “She has a white star on her forehead.”
“You mean the horse?”
I remembered the scene I had watched so often from the station platform: a girl going over the jumps on a horse with a white star on its forehead.
“So you’re the horse-rider.”
“Right. And you’re the boy who used to look at me, the student who came by train from his village,” she said and giggled. “Fortunately Luis studies at Colegio La Salle too. Otherwise, I would never have got to meet you.”
“I’m surprised.”
“I’m not surprised you’re surprised.” And she laughed again.
“I have to go now,” I told her. “We’ve been at a funeral. A cousin of mine died in really tragic circumstances.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I’ll tell you about it later.”
I felt relieved. One of the problems with Cornélie is that I didn’t know what to talk to her about. José Francisco’s death would help on our first date.
The people who had walked down from the cemetery were all gathered in the dining room and kitchen of my aunt and uncle’s restaurant. I wanted to sit next to Didi, but he was sitting at the kitchen table between Miguel and my older brother, drinking soup and listening to the priest, who was trying to explain God’s behaviour to all those present: why did He allow Evil to exist, why did He allow a life like the one José Francisco had led, why did He allow such a death or indeed any death? As usual, the chorus did not respond. They continued drinking their soup, their eyes fixed on their white soup bowls.
I left the restaurant, intending to go home again, but I met my mother and my aunt standing by the shrine.
“Have you had your soup?” my aunt asked.
I told her I hadn’t, and she took my arm.
“We’re going to have ours now. Come with us.”
We made our way slowly back to the restaurant.
We went into the kitchen. The priest had stopped speaking and, like everyone else at the table, seemed to be concentrating on his plate of beef stew with peppers and eggs. Before I sat down, I bent over to speak to my mother.
“I have to go to San Sebastián tomorrow.”
“In the morning or the afternoon?”
“In the afternoon.”
She nodded and handed me the bowl of soup my aunt had brought over.
THE MAN AND THE ECHO
The man asks the chorus: “Would you say that this young fellow, indifferent to the slow agony and subsequent death of José Francisco, had a heart of stone? I don’t think so. At that point in his life, at seventeen, he was following the dictates of Eros and responding to the primordial impulse that had been lying dormant until then in his body. Was it perhaps a victory over Thanatos? Life must go on, that is the law. One generation follows another. Indifference, which is part and parcel of being young, is essential to that process. What should he do? Let himself be weighed down by José Francisco’s death? But why grant Death such power?”
The man asks this over and over, but the chorus does not respond.
AGUIRIANO
(A MEMORY)
The four cross-country runners from Colegio La Salle went out training together. They would set off towards Loyola train station, down streets and along the main road and, from there – crossing a bridge and skirting round the barracks – they would come to some allotments. Then, after following a path by the river which led, eventually, to some bare, marshy land near the Escuela Universitaria de Guipúzcoa, they would change direction and head back across country to their point of departure, the small house in the school grounds. A total distance of about four miles.
Training took place in the autumn and winter months. Four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, they would be allowed to miss their afternoon classes, French, Spanish literature and other such secondary subjects, and become “harriers”, but only until March 21, once the Junior Championship in Guipúzcoa had taken place. This signalled the end of the season, and they would then go back to being normal students. Their names were López, Ganuza, Leblanc and Vergara.
Their trainer was Santiago Oroz, or Don Santiago, who had been the gym teacher at the school throughout the post-war years. When the runners set off, he would follow them with his binoculars from the balcony of the house in the school grounds and, if someone happened to be with him – the Prefect, José María, or Don Ramón, the priest who said Mass in the chapel – he would provide a commentary, as if he were a radio commentator.
“Vergara’s in the lead, followed by Leblanc and Ganuza, with López bringing up the rear. But López has put on a spurt now and has taken the lead from Vergara. Come on, López!”
He was mad about cross-country running and about all long-distance races – 1,500 metres, 5,000 metres, marathons – and his dream, which he even included in his prayers, was to discover an athlete like Paavo Nurmi, Alain Mimoun or Emil Zátopek, to have God place a similar prodigy in his hands before he died, and to be able to read in El Diario Vasco or La Voz de España something similar to what Emil Zátopek was quoted as saying in a Prague newspaper: “I owe an enormous amount to the trainer I had at school. I think of him every time I win a race.”
On many afternoons, while his wife was listening to the latest radio serial, he would sit in his armchair and imagine himself at school again, alongside Prefect José María and Don Ramón, excitedly following the runners doing their training.
“That new boy can really move! He makes López and the others look like real slowcoaches. He’s a locomotive! A new Zátopek!”
He would close his eyes and conjure up these chimerical figures: the new runner powering along the muddy path by the river, López thirty yards behind him, Vergara and Leblanc perhaps fifty yards behind, and Ganuza, poor Ganuza, who hadn’t even made it into the top
sixty in the Junior Championship, was still lost in the allotments somewhere. Sometimes, when he managed to prolong his fantasy, the images in his mind altered, and he would see himself running, he, Santiago de Oroz, cross-country champion of Navarra in 1934 and 1935, Spanish champion in 1936, just months before the start of the Civil War. And then, during the war – and although he would rather not remember what happened, he often did – the mortar exploding, leaving a piece of metal in his head, the operation at the Military Hospital, and, finally, his return to the land of the living, but with a piece of platinum permanently lodged in the side of his head.
“You seem miles away. Are you alright?”
This was his wife’s perennial question whenever she found him sitting daydreaming in his armchair, eyes closed. She was twelve years older than him and had been his nurse in the Military Hospital before she became his wife, but as often happens with couples who meet in time of war, they were not a perfect match. They had different tastes, different interests and very different temperaments. Fortunately – that word “fortunately” frightened him sometimes – she had grown quite frail with age and was quite content to listen to radio serials and repeat that same question: “You seem miles away. Are you alright?”
“Daydreams hurt no-one,” he would say, and that was enough for his wife to leave him alone.
And yet he, too, was affected by time. He wasn’t frail and had all his wits about him, but he was a failure. He found it hard to accept that word, “failure”, but why deny the truth? And the truth was that, despite having been the gym teacher at La Salle for more than thirty years, he hadn’t discovered a single truly exceptional runner, no human locomotive à la Zátopek, or even anyone to compare with such Spanish champions as Antonio Amorós, Fernando Aguilar or Mariano Haro. Besides, things would become even more difficult in the future, because now there were some marvellous runners from Africa, athletes like Abebe Bikila or Mamo Wolde, who seemed to come from another planet, who flew over the muddy track and crossed the finishing line without so much as a speck of mud on them. They were birds, butterflies. He had seen Abebe Bikila run in the Zarautz marathon, had followed him for the entire distance in the organisers’ convertible car, feeling a mixture of joy and sadness, an urge both to laugh and to weep. Bikila ran so beautifully, keeping his arms close to his chest, and taking long, straight, regular strides, long, long, long strides, so utterly different from the other runners! In Zarautz, he came in five minutes ahead of his nearest rival, the Spanish champion, Carlos Pérez. And Carlos Pérez was certainly not your average runner; his record in the marathon was 2:22:45. After seeing Bikila run, Don Santiago had returned home feeling deeply troubled, unable to talk to anyone, overwhelmed by emotion.
Nevada Days Page 17
