He went on showing us the local shops for when we had to go shopping. The loud-mouthed butcher whose translucent skin was really frightening. She spoke to us, and father translated, but it was all the same because in the end all we cared about was the fact she’d given us some lollipops. The fruit shop was farthest away, next to the bakery where father said ‘half one’. We had to try to memorise ‘half one’, thinking that it meant ‘bread’. For years we thought that ‘half one’ was the same as ‘bread’, and I wondered why at school they said bread was bread and not ’half one’. The fruit shop had that smell you only find in old shops, a mixture of the aroma of bananas and apples with the smell of cakes and pastries the lady in the check apron kept on one side of the shop. It was a smell I’d gotten to know in the provincial capital just before coming, in one of those shops that sells everything although they’re called a fruit shop. After that father took us to the pork-meat butchers and we pinched our noses the smell was so awful. Don’t do that, said father, taking our hands away from our noses. We shut our nostrils and breathed through our mouths until we were outside, but the lady serving couldn’t stop laughing, she’d more freckles than I’d ever seen on a single person. Father bought us a Pink Panther cake each and she gave us a load of different coloured sweets.
We wandered for several hours until we got back to the apartment, which was no longer the same. It smelled of the country we’d left behind because mother was already cooking. We were all happy, and felt strange with that odd but pleasant man next to our mother, who’d suffered so much. We were happy for a long time. Or that’s what I’d always thought, because that first stage lasted ages, up to the strange incident of the knife at midnight. But mother says we’d only been back in father’s life for three months when the strange incident of the knife at midnight struck, and that was the beginning of everything else.
2
The strange incident of the knife at midnight
The fact is, sometimes, you don’t know to what extent something did or didn’t happen. Whether you dreamt or lived it, whether it’s your memory or belongs to someone who’s repeated it endlessly to you. That’s why I’ve never been sure if I witnessed the strange incident or not.
If I did, then it went like this. If not, mother’s memories must be mine as well and I’ll never know where I intervened. It was like this. We were happy, I know that much. Mother says it all took place after we were visited by the wife of father’s cousin who’d come to live in the local capital before we had. She’d brought us some biscuits and mother had never liked the way she looked at her. Everyone knew she was a witch because she was a snake charmer’s daughter or something of the sort. Anyway, the biscuits were very tasty, and it was the first time mother had spoken to anyone apart from us or father. I don’t know if she was pretending, but I thought she looked happy chatting away to that woman who dressed like all the women in that local capital and not like the women in the provincial capital. You ever seen such a short skirt? Mother said as soon as she shut the door behind her, biting her lower lip. God protect us from all that sinfulness.
After that visit I was always afraid of that lady, although afterwards mother had started to dress like women from the provincial capital. Father went to her house and must have stayed very late because it all happened when we were asleep. I don’t remember if I was asleep or not when he arrived and suddenly started shaking mother to wake her up. They say it’s never a good idea to wake someone up with a start, that when you’re midway between drowsiness and sleep, frights like that can screw you up forever more. I don’t know what that fright did to mother, but she’s still pretty screwed up.
Father probably opened one can of beer after another while he bawled at mother; my brothers didn’t wake up and neither ever knew what happened that night. I heard him bawling and didn’t know what to do. I thought I could stay in bed and pretend I was asleep or try to get back to sleep, as if it had just been a nightmare. I clung to my blanket and curled up as much as I could on the metal base of a bed that went squeak, squeak.
But it was too late, I couldn’t get back to sleep. Father kept bawling, sometimes you couldn’t hear what he was saying while other times you heard a you’ll tell me or else, and don’t lie anymore because I know, I know you’ve cheated on me. I’m a laughing stock, everybody knows my horns reach to the ceiling. Mother was still in bed, sitting with the blanket over her legs while he paced around the bedroom. She said please, leave me in peace, I’ve done nothing, you’ve your mother and sisters as witnesses to that. Please, for your children’s sake and the respect I have for your parents, let me rest. You’ll tell me or else, his bloodshot eyes were no doubt bulging out of their sockets. I was in the middle of the passage when I saw him go into her bedroom. Mother told me, go away, as best she could but I could see her, stretching her neck back and the knife touching her skin. Go away, and she gestured with her hands to me to go back to my bedroom, but I was probably having one of those moments when I can’t move and am rooted to the spot unable to do anything. Come on, daughter, come and watch me chop your mother’s head off. Don’t you want to? I’d stopped breathing and mother said go away. Do you know what your mother has done to me? Tell me who it was or I’ll cut your head off now. Either my uncle on one of his return trips or the neighbour with a car who drove you to see your father, or else my brother? Who was it? Who was it? Who was it? You know I know what the answer is but I want to hear it from your lips. Come here, you can watch how your mother’s going to die, come on. Then I think I turned round, went to bed and fell asleep again, or didn’t, but in any case I realised death isn’t as difficult as it seems.
3
Where are you, Carol-Anne?
That was how hell started. No question about it. I don’t cry anymore. As my memories seemed so unreal I had no choice but to turn it all into fiction. That’s why, whenever I remember that night, I always see myself as Carol-Anne before she touches the television with her finger and is taken away forever. That made it so much easier. She was a blonde girl, without hang-ups, living happily with her American parents in an American house and, despite her circumstances, look what happened to her and how she suffered. My poltergeist was different, but I can’t recall being in that semi-dark passage with gutted walls without long, blonde hair and a teddy bear in my arms.
Carol-Anne must be happy, at the end of the film, when everything is resolved, but I’m sure she could never completely forget the place where she’d been while her desperate parents tried to rescue her.
Our poltergeist began that very night, although what came later would be much more unpleasant, if not quite as startling as watching a person you love die up close, the fact it was so drawn out making it even worse.
Father said, that’s it, all over and done with, but he said so days after, because a kind of truce followed during which nobody said anything. The silence was endowed with a kind of brittle fragility that even we didn’t dare break. Mila didn’t even have her dog Ánima to give her support, for the first time in her life Mila had nobody in a place that was so far from everywhere. Mother grew smaller and smaller, as if she wanted to fade away altogether. Especially when father started talking again, saying stuff like tell your whore of a mother…tell your slut of a mother…tell that bitch…We just said, mother, he says that’s when we began to act as translators. He said that to us from his armchair in the dining room while she was still stretched out in the bedroom, shrinking all the time. While he rolled his cigarettes he’d first to unmake and then roll again with another paper, that butterfly-wing paper I really liked.
She got up to make his lunch or prepare his dinner, but he’d often leave it all on the plate and say he couldn’t, he couldn’t, no, he couldn’t go on with life, that he’d kill her first and then kill himself. And what else? Mother whispered quietly from her bed. I was the only one who could hear her and maybe it was then she began explaining things to me as if I were her and she were me and there was no knowing where one ended and the
other started. I think I got breakfast ready, or lunch, and washed the dishes while she was asleep and she said she’d never get up again. How did we manage to go to school as if nothing was wrong? We’d started to use the language by now, but not one of us said anything to our teachers. Not a word. From time to time father remembered to give us money to buy breakfast, and it was much better than rolls. We bought those enormous brioches filled with cream that gave you stomach ache, because we’d never eaten cream. At such moments I was happy and managed to forget the poltergeist.
Mother got smaller and smaller and I didn’t know what to do for the pain she was suffering. Especially when father started ringing that shop in the provincial capital where the grandparents were waiting and spoke to them for hours and hours. He’d come home and say those who loved you so much know all about you now, they know the kind of woman you are, they don’t want to see you even dragged across the floor. He’d brought her this kind of news several times. Until he insisted we should be there and she said no. Don’t involve them, leave them out of this. And he slapped her face to one side to remind her that in her state she had no right to say anything and that her own children would describe what their mother had done and hate her forever.
However much I tried, I could never bring myself to hate her and never wanted to speak to my grandparents, who suddenly made me dead scared.
It was Sunday, in a telephone booth at the end of the street that was so long, next to wasteland where they’d later build a park. Father said, speak, cojones, say something or I’ll hit you like I hit your mother. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be saying and even now I don’t remember if I repeated what he dictated to me. Mother has fucked father’s brother. I struggled to say that, for good reason, I’d been taught ‘fuck’ was a very rude word, the worst of all, and none of that made any sense. Repeat what I say to your grandmother so she knows the kind of daughter-in-law she’s got. Mother has fucked father’s brother, that criminal I’ll never again call my uncle.
I didn’t want to imagine the expression on grandmother’s face so many kilometres away, I couldn’t know if she was crying, shaking her head and saying he’s not normal, this son of mine isn’t normal, or if she blamed me for saying such rude things. However she reacted, I felt deeply ashamed.
Until father said to Mila without Ánima, come on, and grabbed her arm. No, no, no, you’ve told them everything, why can’t you leave me in peace? I want you to repeat to them what you told me the other night, word for word, they say they don’t believe me. Come on, get up.
Mother’s legs must have been giving way under her, and when she put on the skirt he’d given her as a present it slipped down to her feet because there was nothing for it to hang on to. She looked at me, terribly thin, when she saw it on the ground, all lilac, and she must have been very thin because I tried that same skirt on a couple of years later and it was a good fit. She went into the street and the light hurt her eyes; it was winter in the local capital. It was another Sunday lunchtime, and she whispered into the receiver what she’d told father that night of the curious incident of the knife at midnight. Just that, close up to the phone, and we never found out if her adoptive family believed such a big lie, never ever.
Cassettes arrived in the post that said if this is true, we condemn her, but we think you should both rethink things and try to find a solution, because all this pain isn’t good, son, and you know you’re not normal, don’t you? Grandmother’s hoarse voice would break off on the tape and we guessed that she was crying. Despite all that, they sent us a boat full of hugs and kisses.
Until father said we’ll record a tape for the grandparents. None of us liked recording our voices, speaking to people who weren’t there but who you had to imagine, reminding yourselves who they were and then telling them how much you were missing them. But it was even worse having to repeat what father forced us to say. I’ll not say that, the eldest said, I will not say that. And he was walloped and then beaten round the head, so we all took note and asked the grandparents to banish uncle from the family. He’s not your uncle, I told you, he’s the biggest criminal ever known, and that sinner will burn in the fires of hell forever. And we had to curse him as well, with a string of formulas that seemed like spells. Mother said, do it, your grandparents know he’s forcing you to.
They say they destroyed the tapes so as not to listen to such terrible things and so nobody could have proof of that living hell. But someone must have believed father, because they say our aunts had come to hate us so much they burnt all those photos the grandparents had of us in their house.
Mother was getting smaller and smaller, until one day she couldn’t get out of bed and father had a flash of light. He seemed frightened and carried her with her arms around his neck to the taxi waiting outside. Don’t move from here, he told us, and don’t do anything you shouldn’t. We’d been living as if we were by ourselves for some time now and we took the opportunity to put the telly on louder than when they were around.
Mother told me her intestines were on the point of shutting down and the doctor said if she didn’t start eating there’d be no going back and they’d never open up again. That if your intestines close down, you can’t live because you can’t eat. Or at least that’s what she gleaned from father’s translation.
I, who didn’t know when it would all end, started to read the dictionary.
4
A dictionary of the Catalan language
If you want to escape from the poltergeist and don’t have a loudmouthed little mistress like Tangina Barrons, you should laugh a lot till you feel your ribs are about to explode, or cry a lot till you feel drained, or you should have an orgasm, that, at the end of the day, is also a way to get drained. I still didn’t know how to get an orgasm, father didn’t like anyone crying and mother didn’t like anyone laughing. So I started to read that dictionary of the Catalan language word by word. Everybody said what an intelligent girl, what a studious girl, but it was only so I could find one of those three things.
A period of truce was established. We’ll act as if my parents had never existed, or him, or anything at all. Not even yours. Nobody. I don’t want to hear their names pronounced. Anyone mentioning them should watch out. That was our truce. No talking about our grandparents, aunts or uncle. Especially mother, she wasn’t even allowed to say your father, your mother. Shush, he’d say, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets. Shush, I don’t have parents, and you mustn’t talk about them. All because they hadn’t damned his brother for the big sin he’d committed. Nothing should exist before our journey. Nothing. Perhaps we should see in this a sign that father was capable of love, but it was the gradual closing down of her intestines that really forced him to sign the peace treaty. You eat and I’ll forget all that. I don’t remember mother looking bad enough to give him such a fright, but I’d probably reached B. Baador was an adjective and baare another, while baba was a child’s name for grandmother, and not what trickles from the corner of your lips when you’re asleep or slaver that drips down. I didn’t understand all this, but I’d read it aloud all the same, to see how it sounded.
I was his favourite, the apple of his eye, he loved me more than anyone in the whole wide world, even more than mother, even more than my elder brothers, even more than the women he’d had before we’d arrived. It wasn’t an easy love, but it allowed me to go everywhere with him. A margin of freedom women don’t usually have and which I enjoyed, quite unprecedented in the line of patriarchs.
I’d do crosswords in the bar on our street. The omelettes were like sponge and the waiter bald and paunchy, with marks on his forehead that was no longer a forehead. There were caged birds everywhere and the smell of cigars or cheroots, which I couldn’t tell apart. Father preferred Ducados and smoked one packet after another while he drank his expresso with a drop of milk, bearing his whole weight on one leg and leaning his elbow on the marble counter. He gulped it down in one while the little spoon was still whirring round and said ch
ange this for me, Ramon. And Ramon gave him a fistful of coins he then put in the strawberry machine. The strawberries were capricious. They only agreed to line up and start playing the prize tune once in a blue moon. I got bored, but father said stay here, you’re company for me and so on. And so I used the time to fill the gaps where the letters of words went that I didn’t know even existed. The boss of the bar said, Manel, your daughter’s doing all the word games in the newspaper! And he probably said so what, don’t you know she’s a very clever girl? It all depended on the strawberries or if he’d said a beer or a rum and coke after the third coffee. After he’d downed another beer, and another, and another, and another rum and coke, come on, the last one, he’d tell me go home, it’s late, go and help your mother. My brothers ran down the street blowing chewing gum bubbles. Mother always asked what’s he doing and I’d reply: The usual. He’s in the bar, he’s still not won anything and won’t leave until they shut, and he keeps saying, just a few seconds more, Ramon, I’m almost there, this bloody whore’s going to give me back what she stole from me any moment now.
The Last Patriarch Page 13
