He left the Alliance, obeying the militiaman’s brusque orders when he should have gone to find Negrín, who must have been in the office of the prime minister at the foot of the Castellana, so close he could have walked there in less than fifteen minutes. Nothing could shock Negrín. In exceptional circumstances he unleashed, knowledgeably and without hesitation, his formidable capacity for action. Too late now: they were beside the small truck, its motor running, and the militiaman who’d accompanied him jumped in the back where his comrades were, sitting in the shade of the canvas, laughing as they passed around a bota of wine, perched on gasoline drums and lighting cigarettes. War was a job for the young. Older people who took part did so with the cold sordidness of propagandists, or were themselves caught up in a delirium of imbecilic rhetoric and monstrous vanity. The driver waited in front, younger than the rest, bareheaded, with an overgrown boy’s round face, round glasses, and curly hair flattened by combing it back with pomade. The war was an obscene slaughterhouse of defenseless people and very young men. Dressed in bizarre military fashion — officer’s shoes, worker’s trousers, peasant’s jacket, leather straps, a pistol — the driver seemed a recruit destined for the battalion of the dimwitted.
“Don Ignacio, don’t you remember me?”
In the young face he could see enduring signs of a childhood that had been familiar to him. The driver blushed as he smiled.
“Miguel Gómez, Don Ignacio. Eutimio’s son, the foreman at the School of Medicine…”
“The Communist?”
“Did my father tell you that? With the Unified Young Socialists, for now.”
“Miguelito…”
Ignacio Abel put both hands on his shoulders, resisting the temptation to pull him close, as he would have done not many years before. He must be twenty-one now, twenty-two at most, but he was still chubby and hadn’t grown much. Only his eyes had the intensity of an adult, anguished life, fevers fed by reading until the small hours of the morning, debilitating arguments about philosophy and politics. “My kid’s turned out to be a reader on me, like you turned out on your father, may he rest in peace,” Eutimio once told him. That the boy had the same name as his own father and son caused a rush of tenderness in Ignacio Abeclass="underline" he’d been the boy’s godfather, and Eutimio had asked his permission to name him after the elder Miguel. He recognized him fully when he saw him climb awkwardly into the driver’s seat, the pistol’s holster catching on the door handle. This Miguel had been a late child, the last of Eutimio’s five or six, weak when he was little, and several times it seemed he might die of a fever or develop lung disease. He started driving the truck with an abrupt acceleration that provoked laughter and falls in the rear, intimidated perhaps by Ignacio Abel, who’d been a mysterious presence in his childhood, the godfather he was sometimes taken to visit in a building with an elevator and marble stairs that seemed immense to him, though he and his father didn’t walk on them or take the elevator, they climbed up the narrow, dark service staircase; the distant protector from whom came toys and books on his saint’s day; the man who’d intervened when he was a little older so that instead of going to work as an apprentice in construction like his other brothers, he could study for his high school diploma (perhaps Ignacio Abel had used his influence to get the boy enrolled in a good school free of charge, or had taken on the payments without telling anyone). A maid would open the door for Eutimio and Miguel and show them to a room that had a window overlooking an interior courtyard. They waited in silence, Eutimio stiff in a chair, uncomfortable in the boots he seldom wore and that squeaked when he walked and pinched his feet; Miguel’s chair was so high his feet barely touched the floor. Just as when he was a child, it was difficult for Miguel to look into his godfather’s eyes and speak to him. “Thank Don Ignacio,” his father would say. “Nice and loud, we can hardly hear you.” He was a careful driver, conscious of Ignacio Abel’s presence, afraid of seeming clumsy or making a mistake, his chest over the wheel, his glasses sliding down his nose at each jolt of the truck. The former child was now a man with the beginnings of a beard and had a pistol at his waist and his own convictions. Ignacio Abel liked saying the name aloud, Miguel, like my father who died so many years ago, like my son, whom I don’t know when I’ll see again, and if I do see him, he’ll already have made a huge stride in time that will take him out of childhood and away from me, even more irreversibly than physical distance.
“Your Miguelito must be a man by now.”
“He’s twelve.”
“Hard to believe! You’d bring him and the girl to University City and my father would bring me so I could watch them and play with them. How they fought. Scratching like cats.”
“Your father used to take care of me when he worked on my father’s crew.”
They’d crossed the Toledo Bridge and were driving up the dusty slope of Carabanchel. When they saw the red banner of the Fifth Regiment flying from the cab, the militiamen at the checkpoints moved to one side to let them pass, raising their fists. Groups of men with an air of city people unaccustomed to such tasks were digging trenches that were more like shallow ditches at the sides of the road, their barracks caps pushed back.
“Is it true your father was one of the founders of the Socialist Party?”
“I don’t think so. But he joined when he was very young, and the union too. Pablo Iglesias liked him a lot. He once asked him to do a small job in his house.”
“My father told me he was at your father’s funeral. Do you remember?”
“Pablo Iglesias? Your father has a good imagination. What he did was send my mother a letter that a comrade from the union read aloud at the cemetery. Calle Toledo was filled with people, construction workers from Madrid grouped by trade, directed by the UGT. Neighborhood women gossiping because it was a secular burial. My mother was very religious, but when the priest from San Isidro arrived, she thanked him and said there was no need for him to stay. She’d go alone to pray afterward, but her husband would be buried in the way he would have wanted.”