Treasure of the Spanish Civil War Read online

  In his garden my uncle had planted twelve fruit trees in a circle, like the hours on a clock face, and to a keen observer their shadows were hands that really told the time. In the center was a majestic spreading fig tree under which my uncle would sit shaded from the sun from spring to fall. Enthroned there on seats from an old stripped car, he watched his own shadow turn and lengthen toward his memories until it turned them around so they seemed to come from the future. Never did I steal fruit from my uncle. You could steal only beyond the bounds of the family – a circle roughly three kilometers in diameter, as my father counseled me. Once outside that circle everything was permitted; allowed; within it, nothing was. Such was the law that ensured our peace.

  Uncle Gibraltar saw me coming from far away. When I was close, a few steps from his shadow, I greeted him with the words “Mama sent me for some bines for the snails.”

  He did not answer me, but pointed to the cherry tree as an invitation to pick the fruit. I had two bags with me and had been counting on taking a few cherries home. Naturally I stuffed myself like a pig, taking care not to swallow a bee for which I had become a seriously devoted competitor. I felt Uncle Gibraltar’s presence somewhere behind me. He was proud that I was eating his cherries. Then he suddenly came up to the foot of the tree and said, “You don’t even know what you are eating.”

  Of course I replied that on the contrary I did know, that I was eating cherries.

  “No. You are not eating cherries. It is Guillermo Ganuza that you are eating. This tree, this cherry tree, is called Guillermo Ganuza. You are eating Guillermo Ganuza.”

  I did not understand. I wondered why my uncle gave men’s names to trees, though I knew some people in the village who gave people’s names to dogs. True, I had noticed long ago that certain trees bore little signs at their feet, carefully branded with mysterious names. But I had assumed, since my uncle was a keen amateur botanist, that these were either the Latin names of the various species or the names of weed-killers, and I had never bothered to read them.

  “This tree is named Guillermo Ganuza Navarro. You never read its sign? You have been eating from it for years but you don’t know its name? Every tree here is a man.”

  I deciphered my uncle’s writing and, pronouncing each syllable separately, read out the sign at the foot of the cherry tree: “Guillermo Ganuza Navarro.”

  Intrigued now, I walked all around the orchard. Under the peach tree, the sign read simply Josep Sabaté Llopart. The apple tree bore the name of Antonio Franquesa Fumoll. The pear tree was Simon Gracia Fleringan, and the plum Josep López Penedo. At the foot of the lemon tree was a bicycle wheel, and on each spoke a letter on a piece of cardboard: painstaking small capitals spelt out the name F.R.A.N.C.I.S.C.O. S.A.B.A.T.É. Engraved on a birdhouse hanging from the orange tree, in florid lettering, were the words Francisco Denís Diez. In the apricot tree was a smiling photograph of Martín Ruiz Montoya, with a special mention of “Barcelona.” Directly into the bark of the olive tree my uncle had carved Ramón Vila Capdevila (Caraquemada), and, in big capitals, VIVA. On the banana tree bark had grown over the first letter of a first name: ablo. My uncle had planted a tree for each of his network comrades who had been assassinated between 1949 and 1960.

  “And this one?” I asked, pointing to the hazel, which had no sign.

  “That one? That one is me. You will inscribe my name on it when I am gone.”

  * * *

  —

  We were not supposed to pronounce my uncle’s real name. It was a secret. Because of the police, my father said. To this day I never say it. You never know.

  Amongst ourselves we always called him either Tiet del Mar or Uncle Gibraltar. He made jam with the fruit from his trees and gave it away, as winter came on, out of “solidarity” and for the children of the political prisoners. You never saw him after that until spring, when his trees were blossoming. He was happy when I ate his cherries.

  For a long time this was all I remembered of him. And then, later, other moments came back to me that seemed to emerge from the future. It was perhaps then that the fantastical notion occurred to me of writing words on tree branches. This morning I am thinking of a tree and the tree’s offspring. Of the tree’s milk. Of the tree’s mother. I review all the trees that have lost their human names in the forest.

  Now I see my uncle again, Uncle Gibraltar, his arms full of apples that are not apples but men’s heads. Now that bloody laundry is bubbling in a flag-draped washtub. Now that there are no more trees. Now that the dead hold onto our legs to keep us standing up. Now that I am motionless, contemplating little pasts that I sometimes take for the present. Now that there are no more flags.

  Meticulously, letter by letter, I carve “Tiet del Mar” on the hazel tree. Not his real name. You never know. As I watch the sap run, I plunge into its eyes, spitting out cherry pits. Like memories, or bullets from a pistol.

  As our family friend Margherita still often says, when she goes into the garden, “Our pistols are old but our bullets make new holes.”

  The Scarab’s Revenge

  SANTAMARÍA TOOK ME by the hand and gave me more advice on how best to approach the man I wanted to kill: “Don’t forget, you should never focus on the center but always just away from the center, and that goes for a star, a rat, or for that matter a fly. If you want to hit a bird in full flight, don’t fire when you have it in your sights but aim ahead of it, so that your bullet goes to the place where the bird in motion will encounter it. If you aim at your target itself, the bird will escape the bullet by outpacing it and the projectile will go to waste in its wake.”

  Then Santamaría opened a jar full of scorpions, picking one of them up and carefully placing it in an empty matchbox.

  “At the last moment,” he went on, “take your live scorpion and slip it into a glass of hard liquor. You will see it struggling. Be sure to remember before you drink which way the scorpion turns first. That is the angle from which you will attack and deliver your first thrust.”

  “Should I swallow the scorpion live?” I asked him, looking sideways at the killer he had chosen for me, which was trying to rear up in its box.

  “When you see that the Little Creature is no longer moving, and that it has drowned, you can drink the rum. But do not swallow the Little Creature as though you were trying to bring back a lost love. Along with the rum all its spirit of hatred will enter into you and inhabit you from now on. Keep the dead Little Creature under your tongue. Before opening your knife, push it out between your lips and spit it at the feet of your enemy. In his eyes you will see the dawn of a tortured fear of the scorpion.”

  Throwing a fly into a small fire he had just started with straw in a black clay pot, Santamaría concluded with these words: “Oh Lord of the Three Powers, preserve us from the vengeance of the earth and of the venom eater!”

  * * *

  —

  At first light on this day, live scorpions had to be collected for certain secret and higher deadly purposes. Ever so cautiously, Santamaría would capture Little Creatures by describing a circle around them with his stick, then coaxing them one by one into a leather pouch which he later emptied into a metal box. For the scorpion kills like a contortionist, its flanks folded over an invisible rod and a fiery dagger held between its ankles of iron.

  “Oh Lord of the Three Powers, preserve us from the vengeance of the earth and of the venom eater!”

  * * *

  —

  A Little Creature was scuttling through the dust.

  As was his custom, Santamaría placed his foot gently on the killer’s head and watched the vain thrashing of its lethal tail. With his knife he cut off the tail, picked it up delicately and placed it in the leather bag hanging at his waist. Then he continued on his way, following the zigzag tracks of other scorpions.

  “When a Little Creature crawls under your left foot,” he said, “it should be cut in tw
o and its tail saved for death. When one crawls under your right foot, you save its head for love. If it crawls in front of you, you keep it for courage.” Then, once again, between clenched teeth: “Oh Lord of the Three Powers, preserve us from the vengeance of the earth and of the venom eater!”

  Santamaría went down to the riverbed along a pathway of stones and trees whitened like the vertebrae of a great stretched-out skeleton. The sun dazzled him briefly and he cast a furtive glance to his left. Another Little Creature had halted on the rocks. Yet again he intoned: “Oh Lord of the Three Powers, preserve us from the vengeance of the earth and of the venom eater!” And with lightning speed he scooped the Little Creature up into his leather pouch, which he then emptied with a flick of the wrist into the metal box.

  Over the morning Santamaría caught nineteen black scorpions and just one that was all white – almost transparent. “This Little Creature is the most powerful,” he said. “You take no more than seven breaths after it stings you. Little Creatures are like stars. Never look a distant star right in the eye, or you will not see it. You must look just alongside it. Only when you proceed in this way can you see it, the very center of it.”

  Santamaría kicked a tree stump with his bare foot, causing dozens – a veritable hailstorm – of scorpions to pour out onto the ground.

  “If stars are the eyes of the night, Little Creatures are the eyes of the desert. You must look at them sideways also, if you want to see and understand them.”

  * * *

  —

  Santamaría sold scorpions, spiders and snakes, dried badgers, remains of birds, and braided amulets made from horses’ tails or women’s hair. At the town market everyone was familiar with the power of his homemade cures for stomach ailments, alienated affections and jealousy, backaches, headaches, dysentery, and every kind of fatal malady.

  Santamaría was the finest teller of souls and reverser of fortunes for miles and miles around. Nine days after the death of a child people would come to consult him and, standing by a crate with a red candle burning on it, he would speak in the voice of the deceased. But what made the Master stand out from all the other healers who swarmed in the valley was his scorpion tea.

  “Drink it down all at once,” he would say, “and you’ll see your vigor return and tackle whatever confronts you.”

  Santamaría revitalized old men and fertilized childless young couples and helped women retrieve the love of men who had left them for someone younger. Mixed with an old corn spirit that burnt your stomach like flaming gasoline, his tea built up the strength and ensured the success of anyone out for vengeance for an infidelity or dishonor. Santamaría could see in the night and interpret images in the sun without looking away.

  As I was wrapping the matchbox containing the live scorpion in my handkerchief, I observed Santamaría’s face. His eyes were separated by a long scar running down the middle of his forehead, testament to a blow from a machete that he had managed to deflect one night during a brawl with a hunter. Ever since, Santamaría’s face had resembled a hand. He did not look at things: rather, he stole them with his eyes. His nose was a finger that breathed and his mouth was a thumb and forefinger that he clamped together when he spoke. His ears were yet other hands that grabbed words floating in the air.

  Santamaría did not look at the living: rather, he stripped them down to their dead bodies. When you spoke to Santamaría you had to look at him sideways – the way you look at the stars.

  Looking sidelong was a mark of courtesy. When words were spoken, the gaze had to conform to a ritual geometry that contained and guided them. By describing triangles and hypotenuses with his hands and semicircles with his feet, Santamaría prevented the listener from saying certain things.

  Looking someone straight in the eye signaled death. Thus when I conversed with Santamaría I was always hovering between life and death. During each conversation there was a moment when you had to look down at the ground so as to be neutral, and you were always obliged to strike a balance between those words that could be uttered while looking right in the eye and those which were to be delivered obliquely. Knowing how to speak meant knowing how to observe what you were saying.

  “The eyes we have are only minor eyes, for our real eyes are on our backs. If the Little Creature looks at you with its tail it is because it kills you with its tail. Dying means closing the eyes on your back.”

  * * *

  —

  Santamaría had learnt in the forest how to create living brooches with scarabs, whose carapace he scored lightly so as to insert chips of amethyst and blue shell. He would then attach the insect’s body to a piece of wood with a tiny chain.

  On returning home, fashionable city ladies would carefully remove their living brooch, which they had been sporting at their shoulder, and place it gingerly in a pot by a potato or avocado plant on which it would feed avidly.

  In the village all the women went about with their living jewel on its chain, while the men avoided looking at it for fear of bewitchment or amorous enslavement.

  It is said that one day Santamaría had set an emerald and diamond chips in the wings of a scarab for a foreigner who paid him with a thick wad of dollar bills. He had then meticulously cut out the green eye of God featured on each of these notes and stuck them at eye level on the wooden walls of his shack. The remainder of the bills he had reduced to ashes in a ceremony that incorporated photographs of lottery winners clipped from an old newspaper and displayed between images of an iguana and an owl.

  These eyes of God protected the center of his house and paralyzed with respect all who entered it in search of his counsel. His medicine was indisputably the strongest for bringing good luck, and people came to his house one after another for a prayer to the Virgin under the staring, timeless, and reduplicated eyes from the dollar bills.

  As a general rule, however, Santamaría did not inlay scarab wings with precious stones; rather, he bought sour candy drops from the market, bit off chips and stuck these onto the insects.

  “The spirit of the scarab loves women because it carries every color. A color is an eye that watches the color that resides in time and within things. Women are the true guardians of color: they prevent colors from taking their revenge in a single night by becoming all the nights that black out the day.”

  One morning the Mayor, Don Isidro Zapato, the largest landowner in the area, son of Don Isidro Joan Zapato, leader of the province’s Catholic Party and husband of a conquistador’s descendant, decided he wanted to give a present to his favorite daughter, Doña Inés. Having heard tell of the magic powers of the Master’s living jewels, he thought that such a scarab would protect her from misfortune.

  Don Isidro Zapato was an oily individual whose reputation for cruelty surpassed anything known in the valley or even in the mountains. Sotto voce, people called him Zapo, or Toad, and a favorite game of the village children was to roast a wretched batrachian until it exploded as a riposte to his proclamations and diktats. “Doing a toad” developed into a sport practiced almost daily outside police stations and other seats of authority. Practical jokers regularly opened up sacks of toads in front of Don Isidro’s mansion or threw them over the wall into the banks of roses and flowerbeds of the Japanese garden that was his pride and joy.

  Don Isidro Zapato, the largest landowner in the area, son of Don Isidro Joan Zapato, leader of the province’s Catholic party, and husband of a conquistador’s descendant, knew that they called him Toad. Whenever he heard a croaking, his brow blanched and he began to perspire over his blank notebooks and his speeches. The rainy season became an absolute nightmare for his bodyguards, who were ordered to hunt down the humiliating batrachians day and night. He even issued an edict banning the release of toads in the town and regulating their sale and transport under the pretext that they were a species under threat of extinction and in need of protection; any infringement courted imprisonment.

&n
bsp; But there was nothing for it. At official events a perfect imitation of the call of the toad from an unknown source invariably reached the assembly hall, a croaking that sullied the glass chandeliers and the white shirts of the guests. “Toad to the swamp! Toad to the swamp! A lighted cigarette to blow up Toad!” The cries of the people battered walls and blew in windows before fading away in the mansion’s remotest grounds. One year, on the first day of Carnival, a new mask made its appearance in the midst of the crowd: that of a toad, destined, naturally, to be raised high and burnt in front of the governor’s mansion. Don Isidro Zapato, the largest landowner in the area, son of Don Isidro Joan Zapato, leader of the province’s Catholic party, and husband of a conquistador’s descendant, never did win the Battle of the Toad.

  Santamaría knew Toad. In the days of the land occupations, by all accounts, his mother had perished when her house was set on fire by soldiers.

  “If you don’t tell us where your husband is hiding,” the soldiers’ commander had said, “you will burn with your shack.”

  The mother had said nothing, and the house had burned down, with her in it, like a lake of bubbling rocks. On the same day her brother went mad after soldiers had forced Coca-Cola under pressure up his nose to make him talk. Thereafter, in the village, he wandered around humming and shrieking whenever he saw a fire.

  Santamaría called his revenge The Thing.

  The Thing went round and round in his head like a wild compass needle. North was anywhere. Sometimes The Thing grabbed hold of him like a lady of the night and plunged him into alcohol and the mirrors that you cannot see. Often it left him asleep on the floor with his dogs, under his hammock, until noon. But one spring morning The Thing in flesh and blood came to pay him a visit in the shape of an envoy from the mayor who knocked on his door wishing to place an order for a living brooch.