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My father told me that sort of reasoning could only have occurred to a budding author. “Just keep going, and before you’ve finished your first work, I’ll buy it for you.”
“Do you promise?”
He always answered with a smile. Luckily for my father, my literary dreams soon dwindled and were minced into mere oratory. What contributed to this was the discovery of mechanical toys and all sorts of tin gadgets you could find in the bric-a-brac stalls of the Encantes Market at prices that were better suited to our finances. Childhood devotions make unfaithful and fickle lovers, and soon I had eyes only for Meccanos and windup boats. I stopped asking my father to take me to see Victor Hugo’s pen, and he didn’t mention it again. That world seemed to have vanished, but for a long time the image I had of my father, which I still preserve today, was that of a thin man wearing an old suit that was too large for him and a secondhand hat he had bought on Calle Condal for seven pesetas, a man who could not afford to buy his son a wretched pen that was useless but seemed to mean everything to him.
When I returned from Clara and the Ateneo that night, my father was waiting for me in the dining room, wearing his usual expression of defeat and anxiety.
“I was beginning to think you’d got lost somewhere,” he said. “Tomás Aguilar phoned. He said you’d arranged to meet. Did you forget?”
“It’s Barceló. When he starts talking there’s no stopping him,” I replied, nodding as I spoke. “I didn’t know how to shake him off.”
“He’s a good man, but he does go on. You must be hungry. Merceditas brought down some of the soup she made for her mother. That girl is an angel.”
We sat down at the table to savor Merceditas’s offering. She was the daughter of the lady on the third floor, and everyone had her down to become a nun and a saint, although more than once I’d seen her with an able-handed sailor who sometimes walked her back to the door. She always drowned him with kisses.
“You look pensive tonight,” said my father, trying to make conversation.
“It must be this humidity, it dilates the brain. That’s what Barceló says.”
“It must be something else. Is anything worrying you, Daniel?”
“No. Just thinking.”
“What about?”
“The war.”
My father nodded gloomily and quietly sipped his soup. He was a very private person, and, although he lived in the past, he hardly ever mentioned it. I had grown up convinced that the slow procession of the postwar years, a world of stillness, poverty, and hidden resentment, was as natural as tap water, that the mute sadness that seeped from the walls of the wounded city was the real face of its soul. One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep. That evening in early summer, as I walked back through the somber, treacherous twilight of Barcelona, I could not blot out Clara’s story about her father’s disappearance. In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbors, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn’t absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk to Ciudadela Park in the morning, and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjuïc Castle or in a common grave with no name or ceremony. Going over all this in my mind, it occurred to me that perhaps the papier-mâché world that I accepted as real was only a stage setting. Much like the arrival of Spanish trains, in those stolen years you never knew when the end of childhood was due.
We shared the soup, a broth made from leftovers with bits of bread in it, surrounded by the sticky droning of radio soaps that filtered out through open windows into the church square.
“So tell me. How did things go with Gustavo today?”
“I met his niece, Clara.”
“The blind girl? I hear she’s a real beauty.”
“I don’t know. I don’t notice things like that.”
“You’d better not.”
“I told them I might go by their house tomorrow, after school, to read to her for a while—as she’s so lonely. If you’ll let me.”
My father looked at me askance, as if he were wondering whether he was growing old prematurely or whether I was growing up too quickly. I decided to change the subject,
and the only one I could find was the one that was consuming me.
“Is it true that during the war people were taken to Montjuïc Castle and were never seen again?”
My father finished his spoonful of soup unperturbed and looked closely at me, his brief smile slipping away from his lips.
“Who told you that? Barceló?”
“No. Tomás Aguilar. He sometimes tells stories at school.”
My father nodded slowly.
“When there’s a war, things happen that are very hard to explain, Daniel. Often even I don’t know what they really mean. Sometimes it’s best to leave things alone.”
