Twenty-three years later, in 1921, his oldest son Enrique Manera Custardoy, my grandmother’s brother and therefore my great-uncle (so I, too, have a military great-uncle, like Ewart and De Wet) participated in the War of Morroco at the rank of colonel and as adjutant to General Fernández Silvestre, who commanded the Spanish troops in their great humiliation. It is is known, but almost no one still remembers, that the Spaniards fled in disarray at what has become known as “the Disaster of Annual.” Amid the mad, scattered rout by Abd-el-Krim’s Kabyles, Fernández Silvestre, his son and Colonel Manera were isolated from the main body of the troops, completely helpless but with a small truck at their disposal. The general, in an old-fashioned gesture, refused to abandon the field of his defeat, and my great-uncle, in a still more old-fashioned gesture, refused to abandon his superior officer and defeated friend. Between the two of them, they convinced the young Silvestre to try to flee for his life with the vehicle, and there they stayed, waiting for slow death and long fire, muerte larga, fuego largo. Nothing more was learned. Their bodies were never found, and the only thing of Manera’s that was retrieved were his field glasses and his leather gear, which I saw in my grandfather’s house on calle de Cea Bermúdez (and in Spanish field glasses and cufflinks are both called gemelos, so here again only the gemelos could be identified). It’s feared that the two were drawn and quartered. Manera was forty-six years old, my age now, and was far from both his homelands, the colonial Havana of his birth and the Madrid that saw him depart for that colonial war to fall victim, in Africa, to the curse he had inherited. He had no grave, nor will he ever have one. He left only a widow, that is, a wife.
The first two threats of the elaborate curse had been fulfilled so fully and exactly that it seemed impossible it wouldn’t continue on to the third generation as well. So, after the premature, remote, and unmarked death of Manera Custardoy in Annual, some family member — perhaps a superstitious nanny or an apprehensive mother, perhaps my own grandmother, the doomed man’s sister — predicted, with a mingling of consolation and fear, that the dead man must have left his spouse pregnant at his loyal departure on the fatal expedition with Fernández Silvestre. The wait lasted a month or two, but there was nothing. The oldest son never had an oldest son, and the thought of an illegitimate child is too facile and trivial. What if none of it had come true? What if all of it had come true? There was another Enrique Manera, whom I’ve met, but he descended not from the colonel who died in Morocco but from one of his younger brothers. He attained the rank of admiral — not a phony one like Franco the whaler, a real admiral — and he used to talk about his feats during the Civil War: he sank a Russian submarine with his bare hands and was put to death by the Reds, a sobering fate from which, as he told it, he emerged unscathed thanks to his short stature. The firing squad or militia had taken aim at a group of condemned men, most of whom were much taller than he was, and the bullets passed over his head, ruffling his hair. Like all the others, he fell when he heard the shots, and he pretended to be dead for hours, making use of his companions’ blood, which he was drenched in, until night fell and he saw that the field was clear — they did not bury, they did not bury, they denied him a tomb — and then he emerged from beneath the corpses and joined the living once more and managed to escape. If all this is true, perhaps the curse did try to fulfill itself to the end, despite being deprived of its final object: if not the third firstborn son in direct lineage (who never existed), then at least the man of the same blood who bore the same name that would have been given to the one who never had a name because he never came into being, though he was announced and foreseen by a mulatto mendicant in the city of Havana in 1873: the admiral was, in any case a grandson of the imprudent and guilty Manera Cao. But the veracity of this third and final attempt must be questioned, given that another of the heroic feats the admiral described involved sinking a Bolshevik submarine by hammering at it with his fists. It is certain, in any case, that there was no one to suffer the foreordained third death, before the age of fifty and far from his own land and without ever deserving a tomb.
In that short story written in 1979, a friend of the Custardoy family pondered the question in these or similar words: the oldest son of the oldest son had been prophesied, as had the form of his demise, but he had never been born, he had not reached the point of being engendered or born, yet the mulatto beggar and the unfortunate Manera who crossed paths in 1873 had already conceived of his existence and knew of him. Where had that being or concept been since then, and where was he after the death of the man who would have been his father according to the prophecy, that bellicose death with its old-fashioned gesture, in Morroco, ruled out the possibility of his birth for all the centuries of centuries and forever more? He had to be somewhere. The friend tried to solve the enigma, and in the end, “when he was about to die,” the story says, “he wrote his thoughts on a sheet of paper: ‘I foresee that I am about to die, I shall undertake the final journey. What is to become of me? Where will I go? Will I go somewhere? Where will I go? I glimpse my death because I have been alive and was engendered and born, because I am still alive, and therefore death is imperfect and does not encompass everything, it can’t keep something else from existing, something that is different from it, and which awaits it from here, thinks of it from here: it isn’t only a subject as it would like to be, but also the object of thought and expectation, and it must yield. Only the one who has never been born belongs to it wholly, or rather the one who has never been engendered or conceived, and therefore has never entered into time or passed through it for a single second and will never have to disrupt it by leaving it. The one who is not conceived is the one who dies most. He has travelled endlessly by the most circuitous, the most intricate and invisible and silenced route: the route of possibility. He is the only one who will never live out any year or any day and will never have a homeland or a grave. He is Enrique Manera, the missing one. I am not.”
No, he was never born, the Manera who was prophesied and expected in order to conclude the curse which his nonexistence left incomplete, and perhaps pending (and has there ever been anything that was not unfinished); and maybe his absent being still moves through the other side and dark back and abysm of time, together with all that has not happened and all that has happened but without leaving a trail or a trace, neither smoke nor breath, and all that has happened but cannot be reproduced and is no longer possible and is therefore ruled out, and all that is still torn between sharp-edged memory and half-blind forgetting, like that scar on a thigh that fades away and returns and comes into focus and vanishes, as if it were trying to spare me its acquaintance (“Listen, come here, look, there is this thing on me and maybe you’d rather not see it. You still have time not to, and if you don’t then you won’t ever have to.”) Maybe everything moves through that other side of time, all that lies within our known time and all that it does not know, all that it does not register or take into account. Through that dark back may also pass the facts which, in the telling and narration and memory of them, are transformed into fictions, maybe the maritime crossing of my grandmother Lola is wandering there now, the crossing she undertook a century ago at the merry age of seven or eight, from Havana to Madrid, so that my mother Lolita could be born here and later me, from her, and maybe the girl is also roaming that abysm, the girl my mother was expecting and hoping for in that room where she gave birth to us, and who was not born because I was born in her place, though a name was already waiting for the girl, thought up and selected, Constanza, and undoubtedly her imagined face, as well. And maybe, in that case, Spain had to lose Cuba so that the journey could take place in the boat from which my island-dwelling great-grandfather was thrown to the bottom of the ocean, wrapped in a flag and with a cannonball on his chest to help him sink (“Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow, let me be lead within thy bosom and in a bloody battle end thy days: fall thy lance”). And who knows if the island wasn’t lost in order to satisfy a beggar’s private, passing curse, and for a hundred thousand other reasons of that nature which affect only individuals.