He had felt bound to that gnarled, misshapen tree ever since he was a child or, to be precise, ever since the day he went swimming in the pool in the river and one of his school friends pointed to the tree and said:
“Look, Adrián, that tree could be your brother!”
He must have been about five then, and, at the time, being compared to that tree had seemed to him a compliment, a recognition of his singularity, and he continued to think so until, ten years later, conscious now of his hunchback and his misshapen body and what this meant in terms of his social acceptability, he decided to distance himself from that “brother”, from the sawmill and from the pool, and become an eccentric adolescent who wanted not only to live like Oscar Wilde, but to be buried like him, “in a green velvet suit”. That phase passed, though, and six years on, a minor, even banal incident again changed the direction of his life. One day, he was heading towards the School of Engineering in Bilbao, when he found a fallen swallow lying on the ground next to the pond in a park. The bird had seemed to him like a kind of avian dandy, dressed for its funeral like Oscar Wilde, in a silk jacket, half-blue, half-white. When he went to pick it up, however, the bird suddenly fluttered. It wasn’t dead, after all, but simply unable to take off because its wings were so long that they touched the ground. Very gingerly he picked it up and launched it into the air over the pond. The swallow, the avian dandy, flew over the water and disappeared.
This, Adrián felt, was a sign. Not the answer to an enigma or the solution to some mathematical problem, but – or so he chose to interpret it – an order, a command, sent to him via that messenger by some superior power. He had to change. The jackets and hats he wore were unconventional, as were the Dunhill cigarettes he smoked and the music he listened to – the Doors and Kraftwerk – but those choreographic details aside, his life followed the same libretto as any other student. And that was wrong. He was different. He was misshapen and hunchbacked. And he had fallen to the ground like that swallow. He knew his fellow engineering students called him “Quasimodo”, a slightly more literary equivalent of the nickname he’d been given at Colegio La Salle. It was absurd trying to live among normal people. Normal people had the souls of chickens and it was painful to have to listen to their clucking.
He looked around him. Not far off, hundreds of swallows were lined up on the telegraph wires. They were leaving. So was he. Yes, he was leaving too. He wouldn’t stay in Bilbao for the fourth year of his degree. He would go back to the village, to the sawmill, to that tree, his Centre.
L., who had been his best friend since they were at school together at Colegio La Salle, understood and supported his decision, perhaps because he, too, had been the butt of jokes on account of his physical appearance, in his case because he was rather short, but he was the exception. Most of the people he knew tried to dissuade him, especially Beatriz, the daughter of the accountant at the sawmill.
“I heard that you’d decided to leave engineering school and devote yourself to the sawmill. I hope that’s not true,” she said when the Christmas holidays arrived and she came to see him. They had grown up together in the house that their respective fathers had built in the grounds of the sawmill, and she spoke to Adrián with an almost sisterly familiarity.
“No, it’s true. I’ve been home for over a month, and I won’t be going back to Bilbao.”
“You’re obviously suffering some kind of regression. I can’t believe it. I mean, going back to childhood has its charms, but it’s simply not possible. Work’s no joking matter, you know.”
Adrián looked out of the window at where the beech and the oak logs were drying. He didn’t want to discuss the matter with Beatriz.
“Do you remember that gnarled, misshapen tree near the pool?” he said at last.
“Of course I do. How could I forget?”
The tree and the pool were about three hundred yards upstream from the sawmill, but he didn’t recall ever having seen Beatriz there. She and the other village girls played elsewhere, usually up near the church.
“I’m going to learn my father’s trade. Then I’ll build a kind of workshop next to the tree where I can make unusual things, toys and bits of furniture.”
“So it’s true,” Beatriz said with a sigh. “When I was little, I used to dream that we would study together and then get married. Now I feel as if I’ve overtaken you and I don’t like that.”
They were the same age and had gone to the same school until Adrián’s long stays in hospital had separated them. Beatriz was now a doctor and about to marry a fellow medical student.
“Don’t go all melodramatic on me, Beatriz. It’s great that you’re doing so well,” he said. He wanted to change the subject.
“I just don’t understand your decision,” she went on. “Your father told me you were still getting good marks. Besides, you’re not strong enough to work with wood.”
“As I said, I’m going to be making unusual things, not loading trucks.”
“Well, I wouldn’t build a workshop over there if I were you. It’s very damp and that wouldn’t be good for you.”
Adrián had a sense that, from then on, Beatriz would maintain that doctorly tone, and he urgently wanted to end the conversation.
“You don’t understand. That’s where I want to be. We cripples should stick together.”
He regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth. He found all this talk about his health upsetting.
“That’s not funny, Adrián. No self-pity, please. It’s so unattractive.”
When they were children and they got angry with each other and started hurling insults, she would call him “pigeon breast”. It seemed to him that her present attitude was equally aggressive.
“Leave me alone, Beatriz. You’re becoming a real pest.”
“I’m sorry, Adrián,” she said and kissed him on the cheek.
Adrián was an only child and had been crippled since birth. His legs were very long and his torso short and bulbous, and there was something almost equine about his long neck and head. It was said in the village that, because their main house was still being built, Adrián’s mother had spent the nine months of her pregnancy in an apartment immediately above the sawmill and that the almost continual vibration from the machinery below had damaged the foetus. He preferred the version given by the doctors in Barcelona, who blamed his deformity on the illness that finally took his mother to her grave. It was not a matter of neglect. It was simply the blind malice of nature, which doesn’t count its children in ones and twos, but in thousands, millions, and knows nothing of suffering.
The second version wasn’t exactly definitive either – the doctors in Barcelona spoke only of probabilities – but he would fiercely defend this hypothesis during the Christmas festivities or at fiesta time, when his father, prompted by memories and possibly by too much wine, would begin weeping and laying all the blame on himself.
“How could I have let her spend the whole nine months there? How could I not have realised?”
“You always say the same thing, Dad, but you’re wrong. The vibration from the machinery had nothing to do with it,” Adrián would insist, and everyone else sitting round the table, Beatriz’s father and the three or four longest-serving workers would all nod vigorously in agreement. “Besides, what does it matter? I’ve told you countless times that I don’t care about my deformity. Have I ever complained?”
The guests would nod again, and his father would end up wiping away his tears. It was the same every year.
*
Adrián’s positive frame of mind was not a pretence. As a child, he had enjoyed a privileged position in the village, because he was a member of an important local family – the owners of the sawmill. His school friends thought of him as rich, but also, and above all, as lord and master of the best playground in the whole area, and they would accept him as leader in exchange for being able to leap over the piles of sawdust and play with the axes used to lop off the smaller branches from the trees brought in from
the woods. The sawmill remained a valuable playground later too, because the castles of planks and piles of logs proved to be excellent places for smoking a furtive cigarette or for any early romantic dalliances; even some of the village dances were held there, behind one of those walls of wood, with the band standing on a caterpillar truck used for transporting the logs along the forest tracks. And as Beatriz explained when he returned from his first operation in Barcelona, even having to spend long periods in hospital gave him a certain prestige.
His mother had died when he was nine. Just days before, she had summoned him to her side and told him yet again, and for the last time, that he enjoyed a privileged position in the village, in life and in the world.
“Adrián, always remember how lucky you are, remember all your good qualities, which can never be destroyed by whatever bad things may happen to you. People who make fun of you because of your physical deformity are mere nothings beside you. You are much richer and far more intelligent than they are. Besides, you have a beautiful face and very noble eyes.”
When he did not respond, she made a comparison that was easier for him to understand, because it referred to one of the games they played at the sawmill.
“For example, can any of you shift Tártaro? No, you can’t. Well, it will be just the same with you and your good qualities.”
Tártaro was the name of one of his father’s workers, a giant weighing almost twenty-three stone and measuring over six foot tall. Tártaro used to sit on the rear of a cart, so that the back end touched the ground, while they, Adrián and four or five other boys would hang from the shafts that were then pointing skywards and try vainly to pull them down.
The example given by his mother on her deathbed remained fixed in his mind, and he would remember it whenever he found himself in a difficult situation, when he fell ill or when someone, whether intentionally or not, made fun of his appearance.
“I won’t let that throw my scales off balance,” he would think. “Tártaro will not be moved.” It became a formula, a kind of magic spell.
Later, the bad things weighed much more heavily in the scales than he had at first thought, when he was still not entirely aware of the consequences of his condition; but he managed to stand firm throughout, at Colegio La Salle, in hospital in Barcelona, and during his first years at engineering school. The memory of his mother sustained him and helped him carry on. It wasn’t all triumphs, though. He received some very hard blows, and then not even that counterweight could keep his scales steady, not at least initially. For example, he had recently been told that he wouldn’t be able to have children. A doctor in Bilbao had said:
“You have a problem with your reproductive system. And I’m sorry to say that, for now, there’s no solution, either pharmacological or surgical.”
That was when he made the decision to abandon his studies and go back to the village and to the sawmill, to his Centre. It was a response to that painful news. He could withstand people’s insults or mockery, he could place in the scales the Good that outweighed the Bad and move on; but what he couldn’t bear was the Bad continually being thrown at him by Nature. He didn’t act immediately. He didn’t want to go scurrying back to his Centre like a sad Quasimodo figure. He would return eventually, but as someone intending to conquer new and hopefully more pleasant territory; he would go back in order to live and to triumph. He would do so when he felt mentally prepared, when the scales were more evenly balanced.
It took him a year, more than a year. Then, on the day he found the fallen swallow in the park, when he received that message, he felt ready. It was time to go home.
*
When he started working at the sawmill and took over some of his father’s responsibilities, the young Adrián’s life changed completely. One day, he would be setting off with the loggers to the Pyrenees and spend whole weeks overseeing their work in the forest; another day, he would go with his father and the accountant to buy a piece of new machinery; on yet another day, he would be directing the building of a hut in the Centre of his territory, beside the pool and that gnarled, misshapen tree, and he began to study how to make furniture and toys.
It was a new era for him. Life seemed to consume time more and more quickly, as if it were fire, and time were a heap of tinder-dry wood; as if the calendar advanced by leaps and bounds and jumped suddenly from June to September or from November to March. Events rushed forwards at full tilt: he learned that Beatriz was expecting a baby, then that she’d had the baby and it was a girl, and, shortly afterwards, that the baby was three months old and he was invited to the christening.
The celebratory meal was held in a restaurant in the village, and he took with him, in his jacket pocket, a doll he had made.
“Oh, how lovely!” said Beatriz when he gave it to her. “Did you make it yourself?”
“The wooden part, yes, but I haven’t yet learned how to sew.”
“Well, it’s really pretty. Thank you.”
Beatriz seemed different, as if another woman had emerged from her body, smaller and paler than the previous one, but much happier. She was a beneficent presence, and all the guests responded to her influence, laughing and talking, pleased to be there. Even Adrián’s father seemed cheerful, which he never usually was at such celebrations. When coffee was being served, he said to Adrián, winking at Beatriz’s father as he did so:
“We’ve been working together for a while now, son, and so far we’ve had no secrets from each other, but it would seem that things are changing. A little bird tells me that you’ve been storing wood down at the hut by the pool without your foolish father even noticing.”
His father was smoking a very slender cigar and pretending to take a great interest in the smoke rising up from it.
“This little bird of yours, is he about six foot tall and weighs in at about twenty-three stone?” Adrián asked, poker-faced.
“Yes, Tártaro. And quite right too. Otherwise, I would still be entirely in the dark.”
“I’ll have to have a word with that little bird, and tell him that neighbours should be more discreet.”
The giant who used to play with him years before was still working at the sawmill and lived in a cabin in the wood, about a hundred yards from the gnarled tree. He chose not to live in the village and, as he himself admitted to Adrián when they happened to meet one day, instead of paying rent to a landlady, he preferred to spend his money on women. And this wasn’t just idle talk on his part: he was famous for his nocturnal adventures. Adrián found it hard to believe that the two Tártaros, the one from his childhood and the one who was now his neighbour, could be the same person.
“I understand you’ve been buying cherry and walnut wood,” his father said.
It was true. He had spent some time examining and buying those two kinds of wood and currently had ten logs soaking in the dam. He had read in a book that walnut becomes purple in water and cherry wood turns maroon.
“I’m thinking of building a small workshop once I’ve finished the hut,” Adrián said after a pause. “I enjoy making furniture and toys, like the doll I made for Beatriz. But only in my spare time. It’s just a bit of fun.”
His father again winked at Beatriz’s father.
“Your mother wouldn’t be pleased to hear that you were spending money on ‘a bit of fun’. And the worst thing is you’re buying poor-quality walnut wood. Next time, take Tártaro with you. He’ll teach you how to tell good from bad.”
The meal ended in the same high good humour. Then, at his father’s suggestion, all the guests were invited back to the sawmill to continue celebrating there.
Adrián arrived after all the others, because Beatriz had left the doll at the restaurant and he had to go and fetch it. This circumstance – as banal as him finding that swallow in the park – would prove decisive in balancing the inner scales on which he now and then weighed up Good and Bad.
When he reached the house, he pushed open the door and went towards the living room, where all the
guests were gathered; first, though, he turned and peered into his bedroom to see what it was lying on his bed. There she was, partially wrapped in a white towel, the newly christened baby. She was moving her little feet very slowly, and her eyes, still blue then, were gazing up at the ceiling.
Then he understood. The beneficent presence at the meal, and which he and all the other guests had felt, had been the baby not Beatriz, and now his bedroom seemed calmer and more luminous than ever. He sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed, and his thoughts, which he did not try to force or direct, gradually took on the rhythm of the baby’s gently kicking feet. He thought:
“This is how life is propagated, this is how pain and misfortune vanish, this is how death is vanquished, with the continuous intertwining of the generations, with the bodies that emerge from other bodies. That would be my way out too, to take part in the game and make a leap towards health, to cancel out the backward leap that took place before, either with me or my mother; but that happiness will be denied to me too, because I’m impotent and cannot have children.”
When he emerged from these thoughts, he met the baby’s blue gaze. She was looking at him as if to say: “Here I am, a little marvel, and I wasn’t born of you.” He felt his inner scales totter, as if he were again staggering from the blow he had received from that doctor in Bilbao.
“Thanks for keeping an eye on her. I couldn’t find her clothes,” he heard someone say. It was Beatriz, who had just come into the room. “Bath time, sweetie!” she said, dangling the child above her head.
“Sorry to have commandeered your bed, Adrián, but don’t worry, we’ll get out of your way now so that you can lie down,” Beatriz’s father said from the door.
“I wasn’t intending to lie down,” Adrián said.
“Did you find the doll, Adrián?” Beatriz asked before leaving the room with the baby. “You did? Well, give it to me now so that I can put it in my bag. I wouldn’t want to forget it again.”
Adrián took the doll out of his pocket and handed it to her.
Nevada Days Page 30
