One person who was not born, for example, was a firstborn son of my family who was under a curse, and was therefore expected in order to see the curse fulfilled in its entirety. And though I’ve already told the story twice — once as fiction, in a short story with false names, “El viaje de Isaac” or “Isaac’s Journey” its title, and again as fact in an article on real names, soberly called “Una maldición” or “A Curse”—not many people will remember it or will have read it, and its most fitting place is here, or so I believe, as if for once, and without my foreseeing it in 1978 or in 1995, I had followed the precept of the eminent short-story writer Isak Dinesen, whom I translated during my time at Oxford and according to whom “only if you are able to imagine what has happened, to repeat it in your imagination, will you see stories, and only if you have the patience to carry them within you for a long, long time, and to tell them to yourself and retell them again and again, will you be capable of telling them well.”
One of my grandmothers came from the very Caribbean Sea where Redonda lies when it does appear on maps or in photographs. She was Cuban, born in Havana; she was named Lola Manera and she was the mother of my mother Lolita. In reality, both she and her father, my great-grandfather, were less Cubans than Spaniards of Cuba, to put it in an understandable and inoffensive way. My great-grandfather was named Enrique Manera and I believe his second surname was Cao (“from Cao the Indian, Montezuma’s lieutenant,” my grandmother’s youngest sister, our Tita María, used to proclaim with folies de grandeur, holding up her index finger); he was a soldier and owned land in Havana.
While still young and unmarried, he was going home on horseback one morning when a mulatto mendicant crossed his path and asked him for alms. He refused and spurred his mount onward, but the beggar managed to stop him by grabbing the bridle, and then pronounced his somewhat baroque and unusually precise curse: “You, your eldest son and the eldest son of your eldest son will all three die when journeying far from your homeland, none of you will reach the age of fifty and none of you will ever have a grave.” My great-grandfather, who paid no attention and shoved the beggar out of the way, told the story at home over lunch and then forgot it (but someone remembered and that’s why it has reached me: perhaps a black nanny or an apprehensive mother, women who are no longer young are always the repositories, and the transmitters). That happened in 1873 when Enrique Manera was twenty-four or twenty-five, two years younger than when he published a little novel I found not long ago — books are always travelling toward me, not sparing me their acquaintance—El coracero de Froeswiller (Froeswiller’s Cuirassier), subtitled Recuerdos de la Guerra Franco-Prusiana (Memories of the Franco-Prussian War), and printed at number 4 calle del Rosario in Seville, by the press and lithographic studio of Ariza y Ruiz, according to the half title page. Its first lines are very much in the old style: “It was the 15th of July, 1870, and the nocturnal hour of eleven o’clock had just sounded on every church clock in Paris. The capital of the French empire had, at the moment our story begins, a highly strange and exceptional appearance.” And this, apparently, was not the only novel of his to reach the presses, there’s a novelistic family antecedent for me here, an Antillean antecedent. Much later, in 1898, by which time he had been married for half his life to a woman of the Custardoy family with whom he had produced seven offspring (which is why the false name in the story was “Isaac Custardoy”), my great-grandfather Manera decided he would rather not see the Stars and Stripes waving over his island, so he hastily sold off his lands and embarked for Spain — his country, which he may have known only as a name — with his entire family, including my cheerful grandmother Lola who was seven or eight years old at the time, my grandiloquent Tita María, even younger, and the first-born son, considerably older, and also named Enrique. The doctors had advised against this radical measure since my great-grandfather suffered from Ménière’s vertigo and the crossing posed a grave risk to his health. But the soldierly Manera was not inclined to dance attendance on Commodore Schley’s victory over and occupation of the island, so he paid no attention, as he had paid none to the mulatto beggar twenty-five years earlier. Halfway across the Atlantic he suffered a mortal attack of his illness, which struck while he was on deck. He was about to turn fifty and was already far from his homeland — and from the other homeland which he had never seen — when he died, and his body was thrown into the ocean, weighted down with a cannonball.