What meaning does this fleeting passage have, this project, someone like me, born of the same father and the same mother, in the same house on calle de Covarrubias where all five of us were born, someone who can be remembered, who was given a name and whose first words were noted down, his face still visible in a painting and in photographs — and perhaps that is something of an affront though it doesn’t seem at all grotesque — and my mother, his poor mother, with her black hair and very white skin, the effort made in vain and the diminutive footsteps that left no trace or only in the sharp-edged memory of the person who taught him to take them and made the mistake or had the audacity and went to the effort to imagine a small, blonde head that had barely began to move when it was captured in a portrait, the child as a costly and superfluous luxury expelled from the earth at once like a breath, not even allowed to be put to the test because neither history nor time claims or seeks him except to leave pain and a few unusable old-fashioned toys in his trailing wake. (I’ll have to look for that zoetrope in my father’s cellar.) My mother must have thought, as she died, that she was finally going to take care of him again after life and death had separated them for twenty-eight years, and perhaps she felt impatient if she knew he was nearby, being a believer must be a comfort, not because of any mystically divine hope but because of the prospect of reunion. In any case, their bodies, at their different ages, lie in the same tomb and though I don’t believe they can know this, I know it and so does my father, and he knows, as well, that there is still room for him and his far more advanced future age there, and that is enough. If the child had lived longer, I might not have been born or might not have been the same person, the two things are identical. And so what, if I hadn’t been born, and so what, if my brother faded away and said goodbye so soon, as if the world’s weak wheel lacked the strength to include him fully in its revolutions and time lacked the time to take in his enthusiasms and affections and grievances, or rushed to rid itself of his incipient will and forced it to cross over to its opposite side, its dark back, transformed into a ghost. There is time for so many other people, time to take in my life, but not his, it’s only an example. I look at a photo of myself at an age close to the final age reached by the brother I have never seen, or else I’m even younger, I must not be more than two — and we don’t look much alike, Alvaro looked more like him, perhaps the shape of the face, there might be some family resemblance there, but I don’t look thoughtful nor do I have serene or wide-open eyes, nor do I give the impression of understanding much about the world, even less than my age would have warranted, I’m always slow to catch on. I’m crouching, and laughing, my eyes narrowed, almost winking in great contentment. Maybe Julianin would have thought I was a lunatic, if he’d known me, that is, if I’d been born into a world with him in it, with him on his course. Maybe he would have said about me, to his mother, “Let him do it. He’s a little crazy, but he’s good.”
16
“It’s over now, there, there, it’s all over,” mothers often say to their children to calm them after a fright or a nightmare or some other woe, lending disproportionate importance to the present, almost as if to declare, “That which is not here now has never been.” Perhaps it’s understandable, intuition or memory tells us that for children the present is so strong every moment seems eternal and excludes whatever is not there in it, whatever is past or future, which is why children find it so hard to bear even the slightest setback or reversal, they believe them to be definitive; they see no more than the now they live embedded in, so if they’re hungry or thirsty or need to pee they cannot wait, they fly into a rage if there’s nothing to be done but get to a café or home to solve the enormous disruption, that’s how they experience any delay, even if it’s only two minutes long, they don’t know what a minute is, or an hour or a day, they don’t know what time is, they don’t understand that in fact it consists in just that, in passing and being lost, in its own passage and loss to the point of sometimes becoming impossible to remember. I’ve seen the same impatience or incomprehension of the passage of time in certain women, rarely in men, men seem to rely more on the future, and some of them even know that the future exists only to become the past.
When, as a child, I saw a movie that scared me or made me sad, I remember that my mother’s way of alleviating my fears also made use of the past if the story was historic, or appealed to fiction if it was invented. Still very young, I was greatly bothered by the film Lili, which I saw several times nevertheless, with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer, and by its melancholy song, and I was also frightened by one entitled Safari, I think, in which the Mau-Mau hordes killed a child, daughter of a none-too-bereaved Victor Mature — his expression was invariably one of disgust, whether during a kiss or at a funeral — nor was I at all entertained by one called Escape from Zahrain, with Yul Brynner and a gang of Arab terrorists who committed murder in the streets and marketplaces and made you think there was nowhere you would be safe, which is true enough (with terrorists), and another called The Secret Line, which some crazy babysitter took us to under false pretences, telling us it was about the subway; in the opening scene some gangsters threw a man who was pleading for his life out a skyscraper window, and I couldn’t get that scene out of my head for the rest of the film, about which I remember no more than that, and for several days more after that, I’m talking about when I was four or five years old. And in those cases of the Mau-Mau or Zahrain, seeing how I worried about what I had seen and how difficult it was to convince me that it was all made up, or out of a desire not to lie to her sons, my mother used to chase the clouds away by saying, “Yes, those things did happen once, but not any more, that was all before.” (So as not to lie to us about history, at least, perhaps in the spirit of the free-thinking Institución Libre de Enseñanza. With what scant inner conviction she must have said it, though, when during our war, not long before, she had seen people of all stripes fighting on both sides and her seventeen-year-old brother had been arrested and killed in cold blood in Madrid, and she had gone to all the police stations looking for him without knowing, fearful that he would be a corpse and she would find him like that, but it wasn’t even the body she found, only a picture of him, my uncle Emilio, dead, not much time for him either, only half the time there was for Wilfrid Ewart.) Before I was born was what this invariably meant to me, as if I needed to believe that I had arrived in the world just after it had finally calmed down. “Oh good,” I thought with practical relief, but that didn’t stop me from thinking about what had happened “before,” which I had seen with all the force that representations have, what had happened once could happen again, and it also seemed as if the past were still throbbing somewhere, it still seems that way to me, the ever-lengthening past. At other times, as with Lili and the other films that made me sad, however fanciful they were and however happily they ended, my mother tried to explain that the actors who suffered and died on the screen hadn’t really suffered or died at all; afterward they’d picked themselves up off the bed or the floor, had a good laugh together at what they had all just pretended to do — the living and the dead, good guys and bad guys, enemies and friends, an enviable general reconciliation — and went very happily home to dinner. Which helped us to keep from growing too sad without preventing us from feeling sorry for the characters and their story, it’s the fault of the representational dimension: it isn’t only that you know what is happening, you are present, so it’s hard to forget. That is where I began, I imagine, to differentiate between reality and fiction, and to learn that though they do coexist and are not mutually exclusive, they do not intermix, each travels across its own territory and both have great vitality. “Don’t be silly,” my mother would say if she saw me looking downcast or troubled by what I had witnessed in a dark theatre. “Don’t you see, that can’t happen now!” And she must have crossed her fingers as she said it, or silently commended herself to God.