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“I made them,” he explained proudly.
I was incapable of understanding how they worked or even what they were supposed to be, but I didn’t say anything. I just nodded in admiration. It seemed to me that this oversize, solitary boy had constructed his own tin companions and that I was the first person he was introducing them to. It was his secret. I shared mine. I told him about my mother and how much I missed her. When my voice broke, Tomás hugged me, without saying a word. We were ten years old. From that day on, Tomás Aguilar became my best—and I his only—friend.
Despite his aggressive looks, Tomás was a peaceful and good-hearted person whose appearance discouraged confrontations. He stammered quite a bit, especially when he spoke to anyone who wasn’t his mother, his sister, or me, which was hardly ever. He was fascinated by outlandish inventions and mechanical devices, and I soon discovered that he carried out autopsies on all manner of appliances, from gramophones to adding machines, in order to discover their secrets. When he wasn’t with me or working for his father, Tomás spent most of his time secluded in his room, devising incomprehensible contraptions. His intelligence was matched by his lack of practicality. His interest in the real world centered on details such as the synchronicity of traffic lights on Gran Vía, the mysteries of the illuminated fountains of Montjuïc, or the clockwork souls of the automatons at the Tibidabo amusement park.
Every afternoon Tomás worked in his father’s office, and sometimes, on his way out, he’d stop by the bookshop. My father always showed an interest in his inventions and gave him manuals on mechanics or biographies of engineers like Eiffel and Edison, whom Tomás idolized. As the years went by, Tomás became very attached to my father and spent ages trying to invent an automatic system with which to file his bibliographic index cards, using parts of an old electric fan. He had been working on the project for four years now, but my father still showed great enthusiasm for its progress, because he didn’t want Tomás to lose heart.
When I first introduced Tomás to Fermín, I was concerned about how Fermín was going to react to my friend.
“You must be Daniel’s inventor friend. It’s a great pleasure to make your acquaintance. Fermín Romero de Torres, bibliographic adviser to the Sempere bookshop, at your service.”
“Tomás Aguilar,” stammered my friend, smiling and shaking Fermín’s hand.
“Watch out, my friend, for what you have here isn’t a hand, it’s a hydraulic press. I need violinist’s fingers for my work with the firm.”
Tomás let go of his hand and apologized.
“So tell me, where do you stand on Fermat’s theorem?” asked Fermín, rubbing his fingers.
After that they became engrossed in an unintelligible discussion about arcane mathematics, which was Dutch to me. From that day on, Fermín always addressed him with the formalusted or called him “doctor,” and pretended not to notice the boy’s stammer. As a way of repaying Fermín for his infinite patience, Tomás brought him boxes of Swiss chocolates stamped with photographs of impossibly blue lakes, cows parading along Technicolor-green fields, and camera-ready cuckoo clocks.
“Your friend Tomás is talented, but he lacks drive and could benefit from a more winning demeanor. It’s the only way to get anywhere,” Fermín said to me one day. “Alas, that’s the scientist’s mind for you. Just consider Albert Einstein. All those prodigious inventions, and the first one they find a practical application for is the atom bomb—without his permission. Tomás is going to have a hard time in academic circles with that boxer’s face of his. In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.”
Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermín had decided that he needed to develop my friend’s latent conversational and social skills.
“Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ‘ethical behavior,’” he argued. “It’s pure biology.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating?”
“Sometimes you’re so naïve, Daniel.”
Tomás had inherited his tough looks from his father, a prosperous property manager with an office on Calle Pelayo, close to the sumptuous El Siglo department store. Mr. Aguilar belonged to that race of privileged minds who are always right. A man of deep convictions, he believed, among other things, that his son was both fainthearted and mentally deficient. To compensate for these shameful traits, he employed all sorts of private tutors in the hope of improving his firstborn. “I want you to treat my son as if he were an imbecile, do you understand?” I would often hear him say. The teachers tried everything, even pleading, but Tomás was in the habit of addressing them only in Latin, a language he spoke with papal fluency and in which he did not stammer. Sooner or later they all resigned in despair, fearing he might be possessed: he might be spouting demonic instructions in Aramaic at them, for all they knew. Mr. Aguilar’s only hope was that military service would make a man of him.
Tomás had a sister, Beatriz. I owed our friendship to her, because if I hadn’t seen her that afternoon, long ago, holding on to her father’s hand, waiting for the classes to end, and hadn’t decided to make a joke in very bad taste at her expense, my friend would never have rained all those blows on me and I would never have had the courage to speak to him. Bea Aguilar was the very image of her mother and the apple of her father’s eye. Redheaded and exquisitely pale, she always wore very expensive dresses made of silk or pure wool. She had a mannequin’s waist and wandered around straight as a rod, playing the role of princess in her own fairy tale. Her eyes were a greeny blue, but she insisted on describing them as “emerald and sapphire.” Despite her many years as a pupil at the strict Catholic school of the Teresian mothers, or perhaps for that very reason, when her father wasn’t looking, Bea drank anise liqueur from a tall glass, wore nylon stockings from the elegant shop La Perla Gris, and dolled herself up like the screen goddesses who sent my friend Fermín into a trance. I couldn’t stand the sight of her, and she repaid my open hostility with languid looks of disdain and indifference. Bea had a boyfriend who was doing his military service as a lieutenant in Murcia, a slick-haired member of the Falangist Party called Pablo Cascos Buendía. He belonged to an aristocratic family who owned a number of shipyards on the Galicianrías and spent half his time on leave thanks to an uncle in the Military Government. Second Lieutenant Cascos Buendía wasted no opportunity to lecture people on the genetic and spiritual superiority of the Spanish people and the imminent decline of the Bolshevik empire.
“Marx is dead,” he would say solemnly.
“He died in 1883, to be precise,” I would answer.
“Zip it, bonehead, or I’ll kick you all the way to the Rock of Gibraltar.”
More than once I had caught Bea smiling to herself at the inanities that her boyfriend came out with. She would raise her eyes and watch me, with a look I couldn’t fathom. I would smile back with the feeble civility of enemies held together by an indefinite truce but would look away quickly. I would have died before admitting it, but in my heart of hearts, I was afraid of her.
·13·
AT THE BEGINNING OF THAT YEAR, TOMÁS AND FERMÍN DECIDED to pool their respective brains on a new project that, they predicted, would get us both out of being drafted. Fermín, in particular, did not share Mr. Aguilar’s enthusiasm for the army experience.
“The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population,” he would remark. “And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there’s no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.”
Fermín Romero de Torres’s anarchist-libertarian leanings were to be shaken one October afternoon when, in a twist of fate, we had a visit from an old friend. My father had gone to Argentona, to price a book collection, and would not be back until the evening. I was left in charge of the counter while Fermín insisted on climbing up a ladder like a tightrope walker to tidy up the books on the top shelf, just inches from the ceiling. Shortly before closing time, when the sun had already set, Bernarda’s profile appeared at the shop window. She was dressed in her Thursday clothes—Thursday was her day off—and she waved at me. My heart soared just to see her, and I signaled to her to come in.
“My goodness, how you’ve grown!” she said from the entrance. “I would hardly have recognized you…why, you’re a man now!”
She embraced me, shedding a few tears and touching my head, shoulders,
and face, as if to make sure I hadn’t broken anything during her absence.
“You’re really missed in the house, Master Daniel,” she said, with downcast eyes.
