Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (31 page)

Suddenly, I heard the sound of squeaky, tinny music, like the tone of a mobile phone, it took me a while to recognise it - it wasn't easy - the hackneyed notes of a famous and terribly Spanish paso doble, it was probably that tired old tune 'Suspires de Espana' which is so often used in my country by novelists and film-makers in order to create a certain tacky, ersatz emotion (people with left-winger stamped on their foreheads love it as much as cryptofascists do), a ghastly thing, he must have chosen it for his mobile phone out of pure racial pedantry, De la Garza I mean, poor De la Garza, and to think only a while ago I had thought 'I'd like to smash his face in', I had thought it on the dance floor and afterwards too, with that business of the shoelaces, and perhaps before as well; but it was just a manner of speaking, a figurative use of words, in fact, it's very rare that anyone actually means, literally, what he or she is saving or even thinking (if the thought has been sufficiently clearly formulated), almost all our phrases are in fact metaphorical, language is only an approximation, an attempt, a detour, even the language used by the most ignorant and illiterate, or perhaps they are the most metaphorical of all, maybe only the technician and the scientist are safe from it, and even then not always (geologists, for example, are very colourful in their use of language). Now I was watching as he was being beaten — not slapped, Tupra had not once attacked him directly with his hands, not even now that he had his gloves on, they were getting wet, they would have to be thrown away - and I was very frightened and shaken, not only because I didn't know just how much harm Tupra was going to inflict on him - if he would be transformed before my eyes into Sir Death or if he would remain plain Sir Blow, which was quite enough, or Sir Wound or Sir Thrashing (he was, in any case, already Sir Punishment), it was unpleasant to discover any of these
characters in someone who was a close acquaintance, and even more so to have to observe his actions - but also because the long habit of seeing violence on screen, and of hearing every punch and kick as if it were a thunderbolt without the lightning or a dynamite blast or a collapsing building, has led us to believe in a rather venial form of violence, when there is nothing venial about it at all, and seeing it for real, perceiving its emanations from close to, feeling it physically throbbing beside you, smelling the immediate sweat of the person getting angry and hitting out and of the person who shrinks back and is afraid, hearing the creak of a bone as it dislocates and the crunch of a broken cheekbone and the tearing of flesh, seeing fragments and slivers and getting spattered with blood, isn't just horrifying, it simply makes any normal person feel ill, physically sick, apart, that is, from sadists and those who are used to it, those who live with it every day or every so often, and, of course, those who make a profession of it. I had to assume that Tupra belonged to this latter category, having seen how determined and expert he was, his movements almost routine.

My father had spoken to me about it once, during one of our conversations about the past or rather about his past and not mine, about the Civil War and the way people were trampled upon during the initial Franco era, which lasted so very long and, indeed, seemed eternal because we weren't really sure when it had finished and because, now and then, it came back.

'Your generation and the generations after you,' he had said to me, using, as he often did, the second-person plural, always aware that he had four children, and when he spoke to one of us, it was, more often than not, as if he were addressing us all, or as if he were sure that his current interlocutor would later pass on his words to the others, 'have been fortunate enough to experience very little real violence, it's been absent from your day-to-day existence, and if you have encountered any, it's been the exception and never anything very grave, someone getting beaten up at a demonstration or during a brawl in a bar, the kind of thing that always comes to a natural halt and is never
given free rein and doesn't tend to spread; a mugging perhaps, or a robbery. Fortunately, and I very much hope this continues, you haven't been in situations where violence was unavoidable, I mean, where it was certain, where you knew it was bound to surface at some point during the day or the night, and if there happened to be one day when there was no violence or you didn't yourself come face to face with it and only heard about it - no one was free from that, from stories and rumours - you could be sure that this was a gift that would not be repeated the following day, because the law of probabilities did not allow for such excellent good fortune. The threat was always there, as was the state of alert. For example, one afternoon, my room was shelled, a direct hit, a huge hole in the wall and the interior completely destroyed. I wasn't in, although I had been shortly before and was about to return. But it could have fallen on me somewhere else, walking down the street or travelling in a tram, in a café, at the office, while I was waiting for your mother outside her house, at the radio station or in the cinema. During the first months of the War, you saw arrests everywhere, people being pushed around or hit with rifle butts, or else there were raids on houses, they would take away whole families along with anyone who happened to be visiting, on any corner you could come across a chase or a shooting, and, at night, on the outskirts, you'd hear the so-called
paseos,
the random executions, or a few isolated shots from the
pacos
(the sharpshooters I mean) on the rooftops in the evening or very early in the morning, especially during the first few days, and any shots you heard at dawn would be shots fired point-blank into the head or the back of the neck of a victim who, sometimes, but not always, would be kneeling in the gutter, if you were very unlucky, you might actually witness this and see someone kneel down and have their brains blown out, and I don't mean that metaphorically, you'd actually see their brain matter spill out. It was best just to keep walking and not to look, to get away from there as quickly as possible, there was nothing you could do, and if you did only see it out of the corner of your eye, you
could count yourself lucky. Other executioners started work at nightfall, they couldn't be bothered to go very far if they didn't have a car available or were short of fuel, and so they would slip down an alleyway where there wasn't much traffic and finish people off there, they were impatient and couldn't wait until the city had half fallen asleep, because it never did entirely fall asleep, not during those three long years of siege, hunger and cold, nor afterwards either, because from 1939 onwards, Franco's police would burst into people's houses in the middle of the night, just as their first cousins, the Gestapo, were doing in the rest of Europe. Others were more organised and carried out their shootings in cemeteries when they were closed or when they themselves had closed them for that purpose; and so for a long time afterwards, when peace had supposedly been declared, there were some areas where you would go on hearing shots late into the night. There wasn't a great deal of peace or only for those on the other side, they could sleep peacefully enough. I'll never be able to understand how they could do that, with so much killing going on. There were a few decent people among them, but most were just really proud and smug.'

I remember that my father paused at that point or, rather, only afterwards did I realise it was a pause. He had fallen silent, I wondered if he had forgotten what he wanted to talk to me about or tell me, although I doubted that he had, he, too, always used to pick up the thread, or it was enough for me to give the thread a short tug for him to return to the subject. He sat staring straight ahead of him at nothing, his clear, blue eyes gazed back at that time, a time he could doubtless see with absolute clarity, as if he were able to observe it through a pair of supernatural binoculars, it was very like the gaze I had noticed on occasions in Peter Wheeler, or, to be precise, on the occasion when I went up the first flight of his stairs to point out to him and to Mrs Berry where I had found the nocturnal bloodstain that I'd taken so much trouble to expunge and for which neither he nor she had any explanation. It is a gaze one often sees in the old
even when they are in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far off, back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean. It isn't an absent or a crazed look, but intense and concentrated, focused on something a very long way off. I had noticed it, too, in the bi-coloured eyes of the brother who kept his surname, Toby Rylands. I mean that each of his eyes was of a different colour, his right eye the colour of olive oil and his left that of pale ashes. One keen and almost cruel, the eye of an eagle or a cat, the other the eye of a dog or a horse, meditative and honest. But when they adopted that gaze, his eyes became the same, as if they were, somehow, above mere colour.

'It fell to me to see what went on here in Madrid,' my father continued, 'and I heard more than I saw, much more. I don't know which is worse, hearing an account or actually witnessing what happened. Perhaps, at the time, the latter is less bearable and more horrifying, but it's also easier to erase it or blur it and then deceive yourself about it, convince yourself that you didn't see what you saw, to think that you anticipated with your eyes what you feared might happen and which, in the end, did not. A story, on the other hand, is closed and fixed, and if it has been written down, you can go back and check; and if it's spoken, it can be told to you again, but even if it isn't, words are always less equivocal than actions, at least as regards the words you hear compared with the actions you see. Sometimes actions are only glimpsed, like a flash that lasts no time at all, that dazzles the eyes, and which, afterwards, can be manipulated or cleaned up in your memory, which, however, does not allow such distortion with things heard or told. Of course, it's a bit of an exaggeration to describe as an account what, for example, I happened to overhear one morning on a tram, a few words spoken quite casually, in the weeks after war broke out, weeks of murderous intensity and utter chaos, many people simply gave in to it and were just seething with rage, and if they had any weapons, they did whatever they liked with them and took
advantage of the political situation to settle personal scores and wreak the most terrible revenge. Well, you know what it was like, the same in both sectors: in ours, later on, they did at least try to put a stop to all that, but not hard enough; in the other sector, they made almost no attempt at all for the three years the War lasted, nor afterwards either, when the enemy had been defeated. But I was so shocked by the violence described to me - well, not to me, but to anyone within earshot, that's the awful thing— that I can remember precisely where the tram was at that particular moment, the moment when those words reached my ears. We were coming down Alcala and turning into Calle de Velazquez, and a woman sitting in the seat in front of me pointed at a house, at an apartment on one of the top floors, and she said to the woman she was travelling with: "See that house. Some rich people used to live there. We took them out one day and finished off the lot of them. And the little baby they had, I took it out of its cot, grabbed it by its legs, swung it around a few times and smashed its head against the wall. Killed it straight off. We didn't leave a single one of them alive, wiped out the whole damn crew." She was a rather brutish-looking woman, but no more so than many others I'd seen hundreds of times in the market, at church, or in someone's living room, poor and wealthy, shabby and smart, dirty and clean, you get brutes like that everywhere and in every class, I've seen equally brutish women taking communion at midday mass in San Fermin de los Navarros, wearing fur coats and expensive jewellery. The woman talked about the atrocity she'd committed in the same tone as she might have said: "See that house. I worked there for a while, but after a few months I couldn't stand it any longer, so I left, just like that. I walked out on them. That showed them." Perfectly naturally. Without giving it any importance. With the complete sense of impunity that people felt in those days; she didn't care a bit who heard her. She was even rather proud of it, and certainly boastful. And she had nothing but scorn for her victims, of course. And obviously it would have been naive to have expected any remorse from her, even a hint.

I went cold with disgust and got off as soon as I could, one or two stops earlier than I needed to, so as not to have to look at her any more or risk hearing her recount more such exploits. I didn't say anything, you simply couldn't in those days if you wanted to survive, you could be arrested for the slightest thing and bumped off, even if you were a Republican; or like your uncle, Alfonso, who was nothing, just a boy, and the girl who was with him when they picked him up, who was even less than nothing. I glanced at the woman's face as I got off, an ordinary woman, with coarse but not ugly features, quite young, although not young enough to put it all down to the frequent callousness of youth, she might have had children of her own or had them later on. If she survived the War and suffered no reprisals (and she certainly wouldn't have been punished for the thing I heard her describe; although she might have been had she gone on to play a significant part in activities that could be more easily traced and reconstructed at the end of the War or if someone high up took against her and denounced her just like that, or on some intuitive whim; because all those early atrocities were just left in limbo), she probably led a normal existence and never gave much thought to what she had done. She'll be like a lot of women, possibly even cheerful and friendly and nice, with grandchildren she's devoted to, she might even have been a fervent Francoist throughout the dictatorship, and yet none of that will have caused her a flicker of doubt. Many people who were responsible for barbarous acts and crimes against humanity have lived like that quite happily for years; here, and in Germany, in Italy, in France, all of a sudden no one had been a Nazi or a Fascist or a collaborator, everyone had convinced themselves that they hadn't been and would even explain themselves by saying: "No, it wasn't like that for me," that's usually the key phrase. Or else: "Times were different then, you would have to have been there to understand." It is rarely difficult to save yourself from your own conscience if that is what you really want or need to do, still less if that conscience is a shared one, if it's part of a large, collective
or even mass conscience, which makes it easier to say: "I wasn't the only one, I wasn't a monster, I was just like everyone else, I wasn't unusual; it was a matter of survival and almost everyone did the same thing, or would have if they'd been born." And people who are religious have it even easier, especially Catholics who have priests to wash clean their sublime regions, their innermost selves, and believe me, the priests here were readier than ever to absolve, to rationalise and to justify whatever vile or cruel deeds their protectors or comrades had committed, bear in mind that they were equally belligerent and egged them on. All that may help, of course, but it isn't even really necessary. People have an incredible capacity willingly to forget the pain they inflicted, to erase their bloody past not just in the eyes of others - their capacity then is infinite, unlimited - but in their own eyes too. To persuade themselves that things were different from the way they actually were, that they did not do what they clearly did do, or that what took place did not take place, and all with their indispensable co-operation. Most of us are past masters at the art of dressing up our own biographies, or of toning them down, and it's astonishing how easy it is to exile thoughts and bury memories, and to see our sordid or criminal past as a mere dream from whose intense reality we escape as the day progresses, that is, as our life progresses. And yet, on the other hand, after all these years, every time I pass the corner of Alcala and Velazquez, I can't help glancing up at the fourth floor of the building which that woman on the tram, pointed out one morning in 1936, and thinking about that; small, dead child, even though for me the child has no face and no name and even though all I know about him or her are a couple of sinister sentences that chance brought to my ear.'