All Men Are Liars (15 page)

We are growing old but, in truth, without bemoaning it much. Margarita not at all, and myself very little. There are things that I would still like to do, or that I would have liked to do differently, but that's how it is, and that's how it would always have been. During my first few years of financial exile, I received, through an intermediary, a communication from one Mendieta, retired police inspector, now presumably interviewing the Archangel Gabriel. Of course, I pretended not to heed it, but the nature of his questions revealed that this obscure and perspicacious Spaniard had guessed the truth. The thing is, we can never complete anything. Every artist knows that he is destined for imperfection.

I hope that these notes are useful for you, or at least that they help you in forming a picture of that skinny, ashen man who still wanders into my dreams from time to time. Then I can feel that his ghostly presence is shared. For a time, he unwittingly occupied my place in the universe. May he now occupy a place of his own. Let's not be small-minded, my esteemed Terradillos. Our molecules (our grandparents would say “our spirits”) mingle, and in this vast cosmos of ours, it's impossible to know for sure to whom each particle, once belonging to a sun or star, now belongs.

I have the honor to remain, sir,
he who was, long ago and far away,

Marcelino Olivares

4

The Study of Fear

 

If fondness moves you

To call yourself ingenious

For having found death for men where death was not,

To the study of fear we owe in turn

The design by which you lent a mere respite

To icy death from all its many blows.

 

—FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO,
“TO THE INVENTOR OF THE ARTILLERY GUN”

 . . . nothing. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I feel nothing. I advance through a thick fog, earth-colored, like dirty water. But I'm not even sure that this fog is real. If I raise a hand (that is, if I believe myself to be raising a hand), I cannot actually see it. If I try to touch my face with my fingers, there is nothing to let me know that I've achieved this aim. I can't feel my fingers, I can't feel my face. At the moment, for example, I believe myself to be speaking aloud, but I can't make out any sound. I pull my hair, I bite my tongue, I scratch my forehead: no pain, no discomfort. I walk, I lie down, I sleep, I talk to myself, all the while sensing nothing. Nothing.

I thought someone asked me something.

Impossible. There are no voices here. There never were.

There are, and were. I don't even know what is happening to me. And what happened before.

Before what?

Before this nothingness. I thought that voice spoke again, the one I can't hear.

I carry on.

Backward, sideways, in circles. It's all the same.

And always through this fog, the color of dried blood.

Now I remember.

Something like this happened to me when, as a boy, I suddenly found myself in a sandstorm. Everything disappeared in a great cloud that stung my eyes, face, and hands, choking the mouth and nose. One could not see, speak, or hear. The world had become sand, and one feared becoming sand, too. Then my father came out to look for me, pushing and shoving me back into the house.
Even the bitches know not to go outside when the wind gets up,
he said. I was always disappointing him.

Once, lost in a storm, I stumbled on some animal bones, gradually being polished by the sand.
I am going to end up like that,
I thought. Whitening bones, ever more transparent. And then, nothing.

I have a measured, smooth voice. I've been told that it's a lovely voice. My father, on the other hand, had a voice evoking something between thunder and barking.

My father's voice resounds, now, in my head. I don't hear it, in the silence that surrounds me, I don't hear anything, but I still have the impression of someone talking to me. It's a hoarse voice, malicious, sarcastic, accustomed to being obeyed. His military training lent him a certainty absent from other voices in my village, even the priest's. Our prestige depended on that voice.

I touch (but my fingers don't feel it) something metallic, something cold and embossed. His saber's sheath. My skin remembers it.

The other boys showed off their lead toy soldiers, their bicycles. We showed my father's saber, which we took down secretly in the dark sitting room among the furniture covered in dust sheets. Compared to his saber, the security guard's machete was a mere penknife. This (my unfeeling hand slides over the surface, divested of weight and consistency) was our town's most precious emblem.
Colonel Gorostiza's saber,
say the voices I cannot hear.
Has he ever cut a man's throat?
asks one
. He must have done, of course,
answers another
. They say that, under a special light, you can see the bloodstains on the blade
. At night, we children told each other, the blood on the saber cries out in a very sharp, high-pitched shriek that only the bitches can hear.

My leg brushes against the shaggy coat of one of my father's bitches—all of them are a mix of German shepherd and Russian wolfhound and of something else indefinable, like those great prehistoric wolves that I found once in a magazine. With the right hand that I can't see, I try to stroke one of them, but it is like stroking the wind. I call them: Annunciation! Visitation! Nativity! Presentation! Discovery! None of them replies.

My father was a mason and an ardent anticleric. He used to say that the notion of a god demanding constant praise filled him with contempt.
Your god needs more pampering than a French whore,
he lambasted the poor priest
. What sort of an Almighty can he be, if he needs people to tell him day and night: You're mighty! You're strong! You're awesome!
What crap!

My mother had tearfully begged him not to name his puppies after the Five Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. He didn't deign to reply. My mother never dared to call them by these sacred names. Fearful of blaspheming, she would say,
here, here,
when she wanted them to come. Now I feel that it is her voice echoing mine.

Come along with us!
bark the bitches through this cotton-wool air. They must be running the way they used to run then, in a long-haired pack, raising red dust. Only my father's voice restrained them.

My father liked to put on his uniform in the morning, the boots shining like ebony bowls, the belt pulled tight under his stomach, and then to go and sit at the door onto the street, drinking maté, the dogs sprawled at his feet. A smell of corn chowder filled the house (I am smelling it now), and my siblings and I, in starched smocks, took our leave of him with a brief reverence as we set off for school. The red dust clung to every part of us, even when there was no wind. But not to him, as though out of respect. Not even one grain dared to touch him.

As a young man, he had worked for an Irish landowner, who had wanted him to rid her land of Indians. A black plait, a memento of this work, hung in the dining room next to the saber and a flag. Apparently, before I was born, a pair of Indian ears hung there, too, but my mother refused to enter the house until he took them down. She had shown such uncharacteristic resolve in this matter that my father shrugged his shoulders and threw the ears out of the window.
The plait's staying,
was all he said.

The bitches keep howling. They want me to go with them; they demand it with their shrill yapping. Within this dream (which isn't mine), I sense them run toward something that they are going to tear to shreds. When they were lying at my father's feet (he would stroke their bellies with one hand while the other held on to the maté), I used to look at their terrible teeth, exposed by the black lips, and imagine them sinking into flesh, grinding bones. The bitches' soft, brown eyes gazed at my father.
How can they belong to the same face, those eyes and those teeth?
I wondered. Then my father smiled, his brow softened, and a gold tooth showed between his lips, beneath the mustache.

The owner of my nightmare shivers.

Now I know that the bitches have reached their prize. They're not my bitches anymore, or rather they are, but they are also different, wilder, with enormous alabaster fangs. I can see them now, on the other side of a vast dump, pouncing on a boy who falls facedown in the filth. Someone shouts at them to stop, but it's too late. The boy tries to stand up, his shirt is torn to shreds, part of his left cheek is missing.
For fuck's sake!
says the colonel (another one, not my father—this happens years later, I'm a man now).
Let's see if next time someone can control these animals!
A group of soldiers scares the hounds away.
Next time,
an echo repeats in my head, across the unfathomable depths of time. That experience at the dump ought to have taught me something. Perhaps I would have been able to endure all this better.

I advance.

There are things one doesn't learn from, only remembers.

Who's asking me something? What does she want?

What, stuck in the house again? You're going to make yourself ill, Titito, with so much reading. Let me bring you a better light.
My mother comes and goes, anxious. I read everything: the poems of Capdevila.
Billiken
. The Sopena dictionary.
An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians
. My mother always looks worried. She has my brothers and sisters to look after. There are seven of us. No, eight. Santiago was born so much later than the rest of us that we forget to count him. My father never mentions him.

My father was clear about hierarchies.
Friends first, then country, and family last of all,
he would say. And to us:
pissing and making you lot—it all came out of the same hole.

My mother's voice is joined by my father's.
Tell that poofter son of yours that I don't want to see him indoors until the afternoon. He can go where he likes so long as it's out in the sun.
The sun only shines for a few hours during these winter months. I take the opportunity to practice the poems I've written, but find myself reciting others, the ones I know by heart, thanks to the books that Señorita Amalia, my teacher, lends me. Joaquín V. González, Rubén Darío, Espronceda.
“Sail on, sailing boat, without fear
.
”
That “without fear” implies that he is, in fact, afraid,
I write in my notebook. I'm learning to read poetry.

But writing's shit. My father always knew that, and I didn't believe him.

A brief bio-bibliographic interlude. I studied literature in Río Gallegos, I enrolled in a course on European literature, but it was useless—one boring class after another. I tried to make friends with other students.
Yes, me, too! Of course—where do I sign? United we stand, unto victory or death.
We'd protest against any old thing, demanding our right to be heard.
Never a step backward. (But to what end?
I asked myself, though I did not dare say so aloud). And at night I wrote.
Let me sing of my land, things I imagined I loved.
But now I was composing jingles. Exalting armed combat, against enemy tigers. Songs, hymns, marches. Before leaving for Buenos Aires, I published a little book at the local press. I paid for the printing myself. A thousand copies.
Red March
. My childhood as I wanted it to be, and a eulogy to the revolution that I had never seen and which mattered little to me. The owner of the press, an anarchist from Asturias, gave me a hug and a discount.
Poetry is also politics,
he told me,
of the best and strongest kind
. I took away my books wrapped up in brown paper and secured with twine. In Buenos Aires I left little piles of them in bookshops, when no one was looking. Thieving, in reverse. Then I started working at an insurance company.

I confess that I never had a single reader, let alone a review. The world failed to register the presence, the existence, of my verses. One day I saw, at the entrance to a bookshop, beside the discarded cardboard and packaging, half a dozen copies of my book waiting for the rubbish collectors. I gave them a wide berth as I passed, denying them, like a traitor.
Never again,
I told myself,
never again. I made a mistake. I dared to do something improper
. How could I have been so presumptuous as to think I might be read? I kept a few copies at the back of my closet, like someone hoarding the pornographic magazines of his adolescence.

I stop.

In this fog, names keep coming at me. Of the places where I've worked. Of the places where I've lived. Of friends who have died. Of half-read books. Of anonymous faces. Of cities that I do not remember having visited. Of train stations. Of publicity posters. Like a great invisible parade of names, a mob of fanatics brandishing flags. Colonia Mariana. Gerstein Insurance Company. Elsa. Villa Plácida.
Songs of Life and Hope
. School friends. Juan Ignacio Santander. Ovidio Goldenberg. Boedo. Ostrovsky's
How the Steel Was Tempered
. Cela Mondacelli. El Sordo.
El Cronista Comercial
. Los Gatos restaurant in Madrid. Blanca. Goytisolo's
Campos de Níjar
. Bilbao.

The letters dance around, dissolve, coalesce. I am overwhelmed by a cacophony of words I don't understand. More barking.

Who's calling me?

I wish I could tear off this unfeeling skin in order to feel again.

I move forward.

Anyone who has ever set words down on a page never loses the habit of writing, even when not writing. The calligraphy persists, like an army of ants that can't be stopped. Behind closed eyelids, the words gather, call one another, pair off. An anthill of letters bursts forth and pursues me, black and red battalions which attack one another, get mixed up in the sand, climb up the bitches' legs, burrowing into their fur. They bite, advance, devour. The bitches howl. A dictionary has launched itself into this inconceivable space in which I am walking.

Visitation. Presentation. La Perla. Don Felipe Pereira. Colonel Aníbal Chartier. Carrasco.
Consider the lilies of the field
. Liliana Fresno. La Resistente. Señorita Amalia. Cáceres. Hendaya. Belem and Sons. Angélica Feierstein. Quilmes Beer.

That's enough.

After I started working at the insurance company, I never wrote again, or scarcely.

Only once, years later, reading that long-forgotten writer Manuel J. Castilla in an anthology that was prohibited at the time, did I once more feel the urge to make something out of words. Castilla had written:

 

He who goes through the dead house,

and who along the corridor at night

remembers the afternoon of leaden rain

as he pushes open the heavy door.

 

But no, it was impossible now.

Before, as an adolescent, everything moved me. The flat landscapes of my village. The red hills on the horizon. Winter and the feeling of cold in poor people's houses. The misery of those who worked on the large plantations. The suffering of others, which I tried to imagine as my own. To sing of the mason's hands, of the widow's eyes, of Tolstoy's and Ciro Alegría's redeemed heroes. To be their poet.

But no, you fool. You should never have tried it.
I still feel ashamed of it.