Treasure of the Spanish Civil War Read online

  I understood her haste when, from our garden which overlooked the road, I saw a long convoy of the gendarmerie’s blue vans.

  So my shirt was now part of a compound sentence. A letter at least, possibly a whole word. I was proud. I had been conjugated – I was almost a verb in my own right. I existed in my mother’s secret language, an important word she had never used before, for it was the first time she wanted to leave my shirt all alone on the line.

  So it was that I too, with my shirt, was speaking to the mountain. That shirt was a signal, a warning to “those on the other side.” I ran towards the clothes line bare-chested. The vans on the road, just behind the barn, were disgorging dozens of security police armed with machine-guns. Their chief called to me just after I had hung up my shirt and was gathering up the sheets lying flat on the grass.

  “Where do you live?”

  I replied by pointing to the house behind me. He asked if I had seen any men coming down from the mountain. I told him no, then went back inside, noticing police hiding behind and all along the cemetery wall. No sooner was I through the door than my mother quickly relieved me of the sheets, which were not yet quite dry, and began ironing them methodically on the table. A sort of peace filled her eyes and she began to sing. That day I found out how to read in a way far beyond books. My shirt, all alone, fluttered like a poor man’s flag. I was a semaphore unto myself. Nobody came down from the mountain and the security police down in their vans down on the road had left in their vans. Their “friends” on the other side must have misinformed them.

  * * *

  —

  My mother has never abandoned the habits of her underground days. Even today, every morning, she drapes washed clothes to dry all over the place. No one says she is crazy, because no one sees her. She spreads her things out inside the house, over chairs and in the most unlikely places. Every morning she remembers the days when freedom was built not with the mouth but with the hands.

  My mother is still “building” freedom; she has preserved its signs. Her underclothes scattered about the shack are still unknown letters intended to be read by heaven through the window. The washing is always hung up, in the single room where she lives, because one must always be on the lookout for ways to help the belly of freedom give birth at short notice to a new child.

  In her shack she is forever expecting a compañero from the other side to come down into the valley with his heavy pack, exhausted. Her words are still pants, bed sheets, torn pullovers, black dresses like flags, underwear, dungarees, and tattered bedspreads. These days the mountains are inside her shack, and so is her freedom.

  It seems to me that even here she is helping those “from the other side” to get through, for even though they are nowhere to be seen, and even if there is no more “other side,” the security police are still everywhere and their presence needs to be signaled.

  I no longer want the doctor to come and see her. My mother’s mind is all there. It is the doctor who does not understand. The Civil War is not yet over.

  La Cega

  THEY CALLED HER La Cega. In the language of beyond the mountains, cega meant blind. La Cega was either Grandma or the Old Woman – it depended who was talking. The boy did not know her real name because she had always been called La Cega. Each morning she touched his face and traced his features with her fingers. He loved this hand stroking his head. In the house with her chair and her cane she waited for the sun, begging for its light as she groped her way along the wall. From her corner by the hearth to the window, from the door to the bed, then back to the window. Her cane was the hand of a secret clock whose time only the boy could tell. All day long she followed the movements of sun and shadows. It was as if she were directing the light with her stick.

  We all knew what time of day it was from La Cega’s location. When she was sitting down, not far from the flowers and near the dishes, it was getting on for nine o’clock. When she was at the second window it was ten – time for the mailman to come in and wish her good morning. When La Cega went to the hallway, where the front door was open summer and winter, it was noon. At four in the afternoon she would be by the back door. And when night fell time-telling was over, and she would tend the fire. La Cega was a flesh-and-blood clock keeping time in our valley.

  “What time is it?”

  “Look for La Cega and you’ll find out,” my father used to say.

  La Cega was over a hundred years old. She had outlived short breath, failed dreams, dead fires, and lost eyes. Her saliva produced apparitions of birds, dogs of dust, and men with fistfuls of knives. A face known to her alone drew near every night, making the stars shine more brightly. The old woman kissed that face come from within her hollow eyes for a long time. She washed it with silence. She attached a past to it that was wrenched from a future itself arisen from the past.

  Her cane and her straw-bottomed chair were the regalia of her royal standing as widow of the light. With her white eyes La Cega saw everything, in front of her and behind her, inside and outside and above and below her grotto of light. People feared her because she saw what they could not see. La Cega treated the boy as her eyes. She kissed him too from within her own eyes. La Cega used to call the stars the night’s eyes and flowers the day’s.

  The boy often asked La Cega to sing. Standing before the open window, she would seem then to be looking at herself in a mirror. She was the light, the light that came in through the window. La Cega was the window looking at the light. La Cega brought the day in behind the light.

  At first she would not want to sit down. She would bat away a fly that only she could see. A kind of prayer. She would add a piece of wood to the fire and push smoldering logs around with her cane. It was her job to call up memories and poke the fire. Only after a while, once a flame began to lick at the wood, did she start gently stroking the boy’s head.

  “Cega, sing to me in your language.”

  And she always made the same reply: “But why do you want me to sing in a language that nobody speaks and that is good only for dogs?”

  And then in her scratchy voice, like a little girl with gray hair, rocking back and forth, La Cega would begin to mumble verses in a language that neither day, nor schoolteachers, nor books, nor night could understand.

  The sky was dull. Amidst the thorn bushes the men were drying themselves with the torn rags of their lost republic. The language of the North had traveled upriver, following paths that moons ate up along with iron insects. Hope was a locked book of water opened from time to time by a lightning bolt. La Cega’s language was as secret as a key, an egg, a knife.

  It was the language of the hill that sloped down to the first church, of the field with the three fig trees, of the horizontal gaps in the sky, and of the ropes that escaped the boy’s grasp as he hauled trees from the meadow toward the river. A language that traveled on down to the plain, barking and chasing after the horses. It followed the valley as far as the boulder that furnished the old time to the entire bottomland. It was said that the devil had passed that way once, gliding above a wild stream, and when nearby goats failed to recognize him he turned them into rocks for evermore. But, as the old woman confided to the boy one day, there were certain nights when, warmed by the moon, those rocks came back to life and began to move about.

  Along with La Cega the boy understood the secret of the cloud and the eagle’s shadow as well as the law of the smoke around the sun. He learned about the silence of the stunted flower by the church, about the quavering logics of dust, and about butterflies lashed by the salty spittle of horses.

  La Cega stuffed herself with sand. She chewed the wind and pieces of broken birds. In her mouth was a house built then blasted by a storm. A house that she bought and sold incessantly as she went in and out the door. At the top of the stairs in this house was a window beyond which the sky passed and never turned back. La Cega was the instant that halted the progression of
the day. In her mouth too was an eye observing everything that spoke.

  La Cega would sing. The boy told himself that Saint Francis, whose statue kept watch over the crossroads, must also speak her language, because the animals understood him. Each time the two went for a walk, La Cega, pointing to the statue covered in bird lime, would say: “Look, the birds love him. They could go and shit somewhere else, but they only shit on him!”

  * * *

  —

  The boy’s father, a road worker, also had something in common with animals. He too had a private language that only certain people understood. Those building the road along the river were all foreigners: some from beyond the mountains at the head of the second valley and some who had come back from the two concentration camps by the sea. The father had crossed the mountains to get to the plateau in the depths of winter before his son was born.

  One day at noon, after getting out of school, the boy had raced yelling towards the new road and the heaps of steaming tar that he took for caramel. The stuff had a Sunday smell to it, but the unknown confectioners shoveling this delight across the roadway shouted to him not to come any closer or he would get burnt.

  The language understood the stars. It answered the clouds. It was an ugly language, thick with bone and gravel. A language that gathered spit and forced it between the teeth, then came back by way of the nose and ended up at the back of the throat with a rasping tree-like sound. It sounded like bulls. Or like horses. Dog language spat cock’s crowing amid the h’s and m’s that vowels separated like green-wood pickets immune to fire itself.

  Everyone was afraid of La Cega because she spoke dog language. Never did she speak to a dog in French but always in its own tongue. Whenever she sang secretly to the boy in that language, dogs would come and lie whining at her feet as if they understood her.

  La Cega would say: “Watches injure time.”

  La Cega had two gold watches that did not work and that she wore simultaneously, one on each wrist. When she wanted to leave she would say “Es tiempo.” It is time.

  La Cega knew time. On her watch leaking water had washed off the numbers and the hands had been stilled by eyes looking at them too much. Dozens of times and weeks of figures had crowded into the watch’s circle of signs.

  She would say: “Gold stops time.”

  The hours of her watch were wooden boards fixed to crucified little lights and tiny ravines. She had a jewel box containing piles of watches that didn’t work. She knew it was time that dwelt there, buried amidst the rings and bracelets.

  She would say: “A watch needs to be wrong.”

  When a watch doesn’t work it is because it is consulting another watch. Watches ask one another for the time, and some watches prefer to die so as to be still closer to the great time that circles above us. Every watch restarts the series of all watches.

  La Cega would say: “A real watch never tells the time.”

  Stopped watches weave invisible garments for numbers. With their fragile hands they fashion circles that they slip around the wrists of the dead.

  Dog Language

  THE DOG WAITED patiently for the boy to regurgitate the meat. But the boy ingested the morsel whole, for, to avoid vomiting, he had thrown his head back. With the open newspaper lying in the mud, he tore the meat apart. It was a piece from the belly, the butcher had said. Bloody, some of it almost black with iron, lumps of it went down his throat and filled it with their barbarity. The bluish parts, streaked with white and yellow tendons, turned pink as the boy tore at them. The bitter taste, at times almost sweet, overwhelmed his nostrils and taste buds and made him want to throw up at every mouthful. This was the first time he had eaten raw meat. He gulped down everything without chewing as though in a hurry to finish, repressing a retch from time to time. The dog at his feet, usually calm and obedient, gazed at him hungrily, its eyes full of frustration.

  The dog had devoured everything it could. Now it was eyeing a richly marbled piece dangling from the boy’s lips because he couldn’t swallow it. The red, half-chewed hunk hung from the delicately sculpted human mouth like a bloody hand with its fingers cut off. The dog thought that the boy was sticking his tongue out. Then the boy jerked the morsel from his mouth and gave it to the dog.

  The boy watched the dog swallow the meat and, unable to help it, started throwing up over the animal’s head. This further excited the dog’s mad hunger for flesh. Its gaze no longer fixed on the boy’s mouth, it began wolfing down the pieces that had been spewed up and now lay around it. The boy had regurgitated everything, but he had to keep on eating the meat. So he picked a piece up again and began chewing it with eyes shut.

  The idea of eating raw meat had first come to him when, with his mother in the butcher’s shop, he saw a whiteboard on which, in shimmering red letters, he read:

  MEAT FOR DOGS!

  The boy immediately thought of La Cega, who spoke to him in dog language and he decided that this meat was reserved for him and La Cega. His mother, however, took him by the arm and whispered in his ear so that the butcher would not hear: “We mustn’t buy any of that meat. If we eat it, it might kill us.”

  The boy concluded that the language of La Cega could kill, and that there must be a special meat for words and for knowledge of the deep secrets behind speech. Might La Cega have gone blind because of eating “meat for dogs”?

  The boy waited for the butcher’s van. He had spent three days longing to buy meat for dogs. He chose the moment when the butcher was packing up to ask the man for dog meat. The man tossed him some horsemeat wrapped in newspaper, telling him that the dogs would have a feast and assuring him that the meat was fresh.

  Trembling, the boy thrust the package under his shirt. He went round the back of the house to find the dog, which was in its kennel. In the ditch by the fig tree he opened up the blood-soaked newspaper. And then, without any consultation between boy and dog, the two fell upon the meat.

  Even though he was afraid of dying or of going blind like La Cega, the boy swallowed the raw, bloody pieces of horsemeat one after another. He was sure of it: he too was going to speak La Cega’s language – but then, would he not lose his own language and start barking like a dog? The idea flashed through his mind, but he remembered that La Cega spoke two languages but did not bark like a dog.

  The boy got to his feet and set off at a run down the road. New words began to bark in his throat. The dog’s red eyes fastened on his mouth in hopes of another attack of nausea. But the boy deliberately forced himself not to vomit again. He must become a dog if he was going to speak the language of La Cega. Once back at the house he could not help retching when the dog barked.

  Like a clock on two legs, dressed all in black, La Cega was waiting for him at the door. She was mumbling verses in a tongue that only angels and ghosts understand. She gave the boy her hand. As they walked along, they deliberately overturned ashcans of stars. The boy knew that it was night now and that time was no more. Clinging to the dress of the old woman so as not to fall, he began to sing in dog language.

  Cherry Thief

  THE BIRDS HAVE stopped checking the shadows. The light flows through the leaves in a black stream. Behind me a bee is drinking up time. My hands grasp the highest stone in the wall and then, silently, I hoist myself over onto the cherry tree. Stealing a cherry is a rite of freedom. The child and the thief belong to the same family. Eating a cherry is stealing it. Looking at a cloud is likewise a way of removing it. Icarus forgot to steal the air before growing wings on his back. Falls always have a cause.

  The memory of the first theft is always the memory of the original crisis, a feeling of sin like an explosion in your mouth. All the same, the cherry stolen from a garden cherry tree by scaling a forbidden wall on a June evening has the taste of happiness.

  All children are cherry thieves. Even today I cannot imagine buying cherries from a market stall, and I always catch m
yself grabbing a handful and slipping them quickly into my bag. You don’t buy cherries, you steal them while awaiting the fulminations of an old man all riled up and racing down the garden row, gun in hand.

  Every June, in the bird-thronged tree behind the church, fat black cherries awaited us. We were like armed sparrows: we did not ask permission and we were ever willing to scatter in every direction on a quest for fresh thievery. We had a special technique for eating our cherries: we did not breathe, and we stored the stones in our cheeks, in reserve for the bombardiering that would follow the feast. We organized contests with mouths full of stones, but they were mute contests, oddly silent, like flights of birds in the sky, so that the tree’s elderly owner would not hear us. And then, as per our custom, each standing on a branch, we would piss on the hives on the other side of the wall and take off as fast as our legs could carry us down the lane before the bees could exercise their legitimate right to vengeance.

  One morning, however, for an hour now, I had not been stealing but simply eating the cherries of Tiet Gibraltar – my “uncle from the sea.” Mama had sent me to him to get vine shoots for a snail bake. My uncle lived in a refuse dump behind the co-operative. His house was surrounded by a fence made of old planks and tires held together with wire. A well at the bottom of his garden supplied a sandy and salty water that we took care to filter before we drank it.

  Uncle Gibraltar was short and dark. His crabbed fingers, like licorice sticks, were forever stroking a dog lying between his feet. I always saw him digging in his garden. Uncle Gibraltar was from far away, as his name seemed to suggest. He was not my aunt’s husband, though the pair had been shacked up since the Civil War. So he was just a courtesy uncle to me, but you were never to say that he was not married to my aunt.