The christening party was followed by a few weeks of slow time, and Adrián began to feel uneasy. He wished the hours and days would continue to be consumed like dry wood, that the calendar would keep advancing in leaps and bounds, that life would pass rapidly from action to action, with no thoughts, no memories, and without the image of that baby lying on his bed. It proved impossible. On occasions, as he had when he was younger, he would visit the restaurants in the village or go to the cinema, but time continued to pass painfully slowly, and he sank lower and lower.
Fortunately, his father sought his help in salvaging an old project.
“You see this?” he said. Before him stood a butcher’s block on which the wood was very cracked and shrunken. “It’s made of oak, but that’s still not hard enough. A meat cleaver can reduce it to pulp within a couple of years.”
“It certainly looks in a bad way,” Adrián said, touching the wooden block. “What did you have in mind?”
He knew he could trust his father to come up with a good idea. Although in many ways a very ordinary man, his father knew all there was to know about wood.
“Butchers are fed up with having to replace their blocks every few years. If we could make a really good, solid block, our business would really take off. We could sell it in Spain and in France too. Why don’t you see what you can come up with? There’s no rush.”
Adrián spent the summer and the autumn researching, studying and travelling to France and other European countries to look at different types of butcher’s block, and his enthusiasm for the task filled up all the empty corners of his life, even in his dreams; in the winter, the first models and trials took him completely out of himself, carrying him into new territory where the talk was all of mistakes and adjustments; with the spring, though, came success – an extraordinary block made up of thousands of compressed wood particles – and then it was all celebrations and preparations, the buying of new machinery, meetings and publicity campaigns. Shortly afterwards, when summer was about to return, Adrián felt as if he were in the middle of a bonfire in which time was vanishing like smoke and feeling that he, too, had half-vanished; he had forgotten not only the baby lying on his bed, but everything; he had even forgotten about his Centre and his plan to build a workshop in which to create his own things. He decided to stop. He summoned Tártaro and suggested they spend their Sundays buying the trees he needed – mainly fine walnut trees – to make furniture and toys.
“I’ve been expecting you to ask me that,” Tártaro said. “Your father had already mentioned it.”
“Will you help?” Adrián asked.
Tártaro nodded.
“I don’t usually leave the cabin on Sunday mornings, because I tend to sleep in to recover from my Saturday night exertions. But from now on, I will. I respect your father enormously and, frankly, if he asked me to lie on my back with my legs in the air, I’d do it.”
He spoke almost like a child.
The secret of finding a good walnut tree was easy enough to learn. You just had to use a brace and bit to drill a hole in the base of the tree and see how long it took before a dark, almost black shaving appeared, because that was the unmistakable sign of quality. However, even though Adrián didn’t really need Tártaro, he nevertheless preferred to take him along with him on his excursions and buying expeditions. Tártaro was really impressive when seen from close to: his strong, muscular back as he strode along a mountain path or the veins in his neck when he picked up a log or a stone, or the ease with which he handled an axe, as if it were light as a feather. He may have been six foot tall and weigh twenty-three stone, but he wasn’t just a human beast of burden. His movements were quick and precise.
Tártaro liked to talk too, mostly about sex. He recounted exploits which, to Adrián, seemed logical enough and perfectly in keeping with the size of Tártaro’s hands and the thickness of the veins in his neck, but he nevertheless found them astonishing. Would they astonish those who led more normal lives than he did, married people, people who had a lover or visited brothels? He was sure they would.
“Do you think of nothing else but women?” Adrián would say to him, as a way of detaching himself from what he was hearing.
Tártaro’s response was always the same.
“What can I do? If I didn’t have so much spunk in me, I’d stay at the sawmill and happily work forty days on the trot, but the spunk drives me crazy.”
One Sunday, at the beginning of July, Adrián noticed that Tártaro was unusually silent. He didn’t regale him with a single anecdote and spoke not a word on a journey which, because the walnut trees were in a more mountainous area, took them more than an hour. It was the same when they were testing the trees for the quality of the wood.
“How much spunk have you got, Adrián? A lot or a little?” Tártaro suddenly asked him when they were driving back.
“A little,” Adrián said somewhat reluctantly.
“Well, be grateful to God for that. You will never be as unfortunate as me. You will never live in a cabin in the woods and you’ll never get shot at the way they shot at me. They almost killed me.”
Adrián didn’t know what Tártaro was talking about, but he did remember seeing him once using crutches.
“The problem now is different, but just as serious,” the giant went on. “I’ve asked your father to give me leave from the sawmill for a while. He’s agreed and told me not to worry. Your father’s a good man.”
“So you’re leaving,” Adrián said, surprised. “I didn’t know.”
Tártaro’s answer surprised him even more.
“I have some cousins who live in Nevada. They have a ranch with more than three thousand sheep. If all goes well, I’ll be having lunch with them next Sunday.”
The workshop Adrián had built in his Centre included a small living area – lounge, bedroom and kitchen – and he would sometimes sleep there if he happened to work late on a particular piece of furniture. If it was a very hot night, he would leave the workshop and go and lie beneath the gnarled, misshapen tree, and stay there for hours, keeping very still, listening to his own breathing and to all the other sounds: the water slipping through the cracks in the dam, the rustling leaves, the singing of the toads and the night birds in the wood. Of all those sounds, though, only one really penetrated his mind: the singing of the toads. “Oh!” said the toads. “Oh! Oh!” and it seemed to Adrián that something must have impressed them so deeply that they could not stop exclaiming “Oh! Oh!” over and over, and the stars seemed to be keeping time too, blinking on and off to the rhythm of the toads’ “Oh! Oh!” The sound penetrated still deeper inside him, and Adrián could then clearly see the scales balancing Good and Bad. He could see that the positive side of the scales was full, fuller than ever thanks to the success of his butcher’s block, but that wasn’t enough. Nothing could console him for the misfortune that Beatriz’s daughter had so clearly revealed to him. It was very hard to be excluded from the march of life, from the march of those intertwining generations. How he would love to take the logs he was keeping in the pool and make furniture from them that he could then offer to a woman like Beatriz! And then choose the finest wood to make a cradle! “Oh! Oh!” sang the toads. “Oh! Oh!” Adrián would get up at that point and go to his bed in the workshop.
It was a particularly hot night. Adrián suddenly heard a different noise. On the path that led to Tártaro’s cabin, a dry twig snapped.
“Are you back already?” he asked, sitting up. He could see nothing.
More sounds of snapping twigs, which took on the rhythm now of someone’s footsteps. Soon Adrián could make out a shadowy figure.
“Where is he?” the shadow asked. It was a woman and she spoke with a foreign accent.
“Do you mean Tártaro?” he asked. He knew what the answer would be, but he needed time to adjust to the situation.
“Where is he?” the woman asked again.
“He’s gone to Nevada,” answered Adrián.
The woman
let out a scream, an incomprehensible word. Doubtless a curse.
“Look, we can’t see anything here, why don’t we go inside. We’ll be more comfortable there,” he said.
They went into the workshop and sat down in the lounge.
She was a rather plain young woman and heavily pregnant. She told Adrián that she was Russian and worked in a bar near the motorway.
“Tártaro was my lover. A very stubborn man. He refused to take any precautions and so in the end the inevitable happened,” she explained, sitting down and lighting a cigarette. She seemed tired, but not particularly upset. “Anyway, I didn’t come here for sentimental reasons. I’m in this country illegally and I need money for the baby.”
“Why didn’t you have an abortion?” Adrián asked.
“Precisely because I’m here illegally, and I thought that if I had the baby, Poli would marry me and then I’d be eligible for Spanish nationality.”
He was amused by the name “Poli”.
“His name’s Policarpo, but everyone calls him Poli,” she said, as if guessing his thoughts. “By the way, my name’s Nadia,” she added, holding out her hand.
“I’m Adrián.”
They shook hands. The woman stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer on the coffee table and asked for a glass of water.
“River or bottled?”
“Bottled.”
“I’m going to make myself a gin and tonic. Would you like one?”
The woman hesitated and glanced at her wristwatch.
“It’s a bit late. I start work at half past eleven,” she said. “I work at the bar now that I’m pregnant. I’m eight months gone.”
She made as if to shoo away a fly.
“Oh, what the hell, I’ll have one too,” she said.
She had a strong accent, but spoke very fluently.
The fluorescent light in the kitchen transformed the ingredients of the gin and tonic as he took them from the fridge: the little bottles of Schweppes sparkled; the ice cubes glittered like glass; the green of the gin bottle took on an emerald tone; the yellow of the lemons gleamed like wax.
He cooled the glasses first by swishing the ice cubes round inside them; then he poured in the gin followed by the tonic water. Suddenly, as he was squeezing the slices of lemon on the edge of each glass, he had an idea, a plan.
He handed the woman her drink, then sat down in front of her. They both took a sip.
“That’s the best gin and tonic I’ve had in a long time,” she said. “The ones they serve at the club practically drill a hole in your stomach.”
“What are you going to do with the baby, Nadia? Do you want it?” Adrián asked.
She lit her second cigarette.
“Even if I did, I couldn’t keep it,” she said. “Besides, I’m planning to go to the States. Apparently, they treat Russians well over there.”
The smoke from her cigarette dissolved before it reached the ceiling. Outside was utter darkness. A moonless night.
“Listen, you and I are going to make a deal,” Adrián said. “We won’t leave here until we’ve come to an agreement.”
Once those words had rushed out of his mouth, he felt an enormous sense of relief. He had taken the first step.
After that night, time seemed to stop. The days, hours and minutes were no longer made of tinder-dry wood, but of stone, which neither burned nor was consumed. Adrián neglected his work at the sawmill and spent his days going back and forth; he couldn’t sleep and felt increasingly weary; nevertheless, he went ahead with the plan he had drawn up after his conversation with Nadia. One day, he visited his lawyer; on another, he wrote a document in which he acknowledged that he was the father of the child she was about to give birth to; on yet another, he visited the Russian embassy and picked up the papers he needed to arrange a proxy marriage with a woman ‘resident in Russia’. He accompanied Nadia to the clinic where she was going to give birth and paid all the costs up front. He was trying to do with his plan what he had done with the butcher’s block, gathering together a thousand fragments and compressing them into a solid block, except that he was dealing with people now and his calculations could not be as exact. He would occasionally shut himself up in his workshop and try to work on a piece of furniture or perfect a new expression for the face of one of his dolls, but he would soon abandon the task and go and lie beneath the gnarled, misshapen tree and wait for night to come. And night would come, but the toads would not sing. Autumn was approaching and it was getting colder.
One September morning, when he was beginning to think his plan was a mere chimera, he saw his father coming down the path to the workshop. In his right hand, he was carrying a piece of paper, which flapped about as limply as if it were a handkerchief.
“Someone’s left a baby outside our door, and according to this document, it’s yours,” his father said once the two of them were face to face.
Adrián saw that there were two signatures on the document. Nadia had kept her word.
“So it’s a girl,” he said, laughing. “Excellent. Now Beatriz’s daughter will have a ready-made friend.”
They walked back together towards the sawmill, when he was suddenly assailed by doubt.
“Is she healthy?” he asked.
“Absolutely, and she’s big too,” answered his father.
When they reached the sawmill, Adrián ran up the steps into the house. The newborn baby was lying on his bed just where Beatriz’s daughter had lain that other day; she was wrapped in a blanket decorated with little flowers and other folksy Slavic motifs. A souvenir left by Nadia for her daughter.
The little girl had reddish, wrinkled skin and was fast asleep.
“Hello. How are you?” Adrián asked, taking her hand. The baby gripped it hard. “Good! I can see you’re going to grow up to be a big strong girl!”
His father was standing at the bedroom door.
“More than that,” he said. “In future, she’ll be able to haul whole tree trunks along, like Tártaro.”
He was beginning to understand what had happened.
WILD HORSES
Earle and Dennis had an appointment with someone at the office of the silver mine, and I was waiting for them in Earle’s Chevrolet Avalanche. The sky was blue, the desert an ochre yellow that took on a reddish tinge on the round hills beyond; the wind was blowing over the bushes, combing them clean.
I found the sky, the desert and the warmth inside the car very comforting. They were combing my mind clean too, dissolving what remained of the unease I’d felt an hour before when I spotted a rattlesnake as we were walking among the rocks decorated with petroglyphs – the drawings made by the Indians thousands of years ago.
As happened with Sara when she slipped on the steps at College Drive and hit her head, I was struggling to keep awake. Gradually, the image of that snake just three feet away from my shoe evaporated from my memory. I closed my eyes.
Then I opened them. Standing right next to the nose of the car were two wild horses looking at me. They were very still. One of them had a white star on its head like the horse at Loyola that Cornélie used to ride. Where would Cornélie be now? I hadn’t heard from her for possibly thirty years. An image came into my mind: the head of a horse peering over a stable door, and a figure nearby smoking a cigarette: Hump or Adrián.
The other horse was black, like the one in my village that got electrocuted, although that had been a much bigger breed, a Percheron. His bones would still be lying in the empty plot of land behind the house where I was born, although it was no longer an empty plot, but a parking lot.
There were more wild horses about three hundred yards away. One of them started galloping, like in the Marilyn Monroe / Clark Gable film, but not because it was being pursued by a hunter. Horses were only hunted on the reserves of the Paiute and other Indian tribes.
The Indian tribes: Paiute, Comanche, Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Apache, Arapaho, Navajo, Oglala, Iroquois, Dakota … I was reading about their history in Dee Brown�
��s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which was even sadder than Sarah Winnemucca’s account. It made one want to weep for Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Cochise, Geronimo and all the other Indians who lost the war against the white men and were driven from lands they had inhabited for eight thousand years – because that’s how old some of the petroglyphs are.
In a passage devoted to Crazy Horse, Dee Brown explains that for Crazy Horse, the world we inhabit was merely the shadow of another world, of the real world, and that he could only get into that real world through dreams, and in his dreams he saw his horse dancing wildly, crazily, which was why he called himself Crazy Horse, and it was in his dreams, too, that he acquired his skills as a warrior, because it was there, in the real world, that he discovered new ways of fighting the white man.
I, too, wanted to enter the real world and, for a moment, I did. The two wild horses in front of the car started whirling round and round as if they were on a carousel, and with them whirled Cornélie’s horse, Franquito’s black horse and all the other horses that were part of my past. It seemed to me – although, as I said, only momentarily – that this was an image of my life, and I thought how easy it would be to place human creatures alongside those horses, or indeed replace them entirely with, for example, the woman who used to read Reader’s Digest, the man in hospital who felt caged in like a monkey, José Francisco, Didi, Adrián, L., myself, Ángela, Izaskun, Sara … Once around, twice, three times, four times, and so on until the carousel stopped. But where was the centre? Where was the axis around which everything was turning?
The two wild horses remained quite still, looking at me. I opened the window and, as José Francisco’s mother, my aunt, used to do, I addressed them as if they were a chorus:
“Tell me, horses, what axis are we turning around? What is it that gives order and unity to our lives?”
“Shh,” Dennis said. He and Earle were standing next to the car.
Hours before, when we drove into the desert and Earle suggested we drive over to look at a herd of grazing horses, Dennis had been firmly opposed to the idea. They were wild animals. We should respect them. They were a living symbol of the American West.
Nevada Days Page 31
