The Professor. He wasn’t a genius, no doubt of that. But more brilliant teachers had scowled when he asked their advice about a subject for his thesis. The Professor had shown immediate understanding of his situation as a middle-aged student and a father. “I hope, at least, that you’re not like those presumptuous young fellows who, instead of recalling our country’s heroic past, look only to a radiant future.” And he had answered, cautiously: “Every form of government has its good points, Professor. It’s only that today the past of which you are speaking is in total disrepute.” Their understanding, at least at the start, was based on mutual respect, and was advantageous to him. Working out his thesis didn’t take too long; the worst part was the typing. He stayed up until all hours pecking away at a typewriter which Cecilia brought home every evening from the office. The reproachful look on her tired face was underlined by the hardship of carrying an old Olivetti, as big as a tank, up four flights of stairs while Gianna memorized geometry theorems in the kitchen. The rest went smoothly enough. Top marks for the oral exam; the thesis was substantial and the Professor, when he wanted to, could count on the support of some of his colleagues. Publication, too, turned out to be fairly easy, at the hands of a printer who also ran up university lectures and did not make the usual charge on this occasion. The dedication To my Master seemed useful as well as necessary. Bitterness came afterwards, when it was a question of a post as an assistant in the department. The Professor’s talk had become less guarded and neutral. Gone were the days of mutual respect; he demanded approval and complicity.
When he left home, he did it in the most proper and painless manner, leaving a letter behind him. It was the day he got his first salary payment as an assistant. A pittance, but enough for one person to live on. He had found a room in an old building behind the hospital, very small, with a window overlooking a courtyard filled with stretchers. It was not attractive, and he spent a week whitewashing the walls and installing a table bought from a junk dealer, a chair, and a coat rack. There was already a bed; he had only to add a mattress. An outsider might have called the room a miserable affair, but he saw it as an example of sobriety. He thought often of Machado, who lived in a room like this one, with a table, a chair, a bed, and an iron washstand, in the boarding house kept by Dona Isabel Cuevas. He had read Campos de Castilla and found in it a spiritual affinity. Especially in the Retrato which opens the collection, with a sort of catalogue of events, sometimes anecdotal in character but at the same time allusive, summing up a whole life: restrained but firm ethical and ideological statements and a joking reference to his mode of dress. It was a Sunday afternoon and he sat at his work table, re-reading the Retrato for the nth time. First he underlined three lines and then transcribed them. Mi historia, algunos casos que recordar no quiero. IYa conosceis mi torpe alino indumentario. /Hay en mis venas gotas de sangre jacobina. “My story, some events that I do not want to recall. / Already you know about my shabby clothes. /There are drops of Jacobin blood in my veins.” Those lines, he thought, belonged to him personally, they could have been his own. And then he copied two more. He was looking out of the window at the hospital courtyard. It was May, and the slender trees were green. At one point, a nurse, holding a little girl by the hand, stepped out from a small iron gate bearing the word “Radiology” in a yellow triangle above it. They were advancing very slowly because the child’s legs were encased in two metal braces all the way up to the hips. The legs were scrawny, rigid and deformed, and she walked with obvious difficulty, as if imitating the pathetically grotesque waddle of a duck. She seemed no more than eight years old, with fair hair and a checked dress. The nurse sat her down on a stretcher, tapped her on one cheek, made a reassuring gesture indicating that she should be patient, and then went away. The girl sat there patiently, looking at the empty courtyard, while the nurse re-entered the hospital. At this moment a white cat came out of the opposite corner. Hard to say whether the cat or the child was the first to see the other. They exchanged stares and then the cat trotted towards her like a puppy and jumped nimbly onto the stretcher, where the little girl took him into her arms and kissed him. He lowered his eyes to the poem before him and re-read the line Mi historia, algunos casos que recordar no quiero. He saw that the printed words were quivering through his tears and, in his notebook, added three more lines to those he had already copied: Pero mi verso brota de manatial sereno IY, mas que un hombre al uso que sabe su doctrina /Soy, en el buen sentido de la palabra, bueno [But my verse flows from a source serene/ and, rather than an everyday man who knows his doctrine,/ I am, in the best sense of the word, good].
That summer he made a trip to Spain and Portugal. The Professor, through the “Friends of Spain”, got him a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There were no strings attached; it was an invitation, a reward for his interest in Spanish culture. Spaniards were proud of their culture and flattered if scholars from foreign universities wanted to consult their libraries. The only obligation which he incurred was the delivery of the proofs of an article written by the Professor for a review in Madrid to which he was a contributor. It was a no-account review, but that wasn’t his affair. Barcelona overwhelmed him. An immense, sunlit city with tree-lined boulevards, splendid late nineteenth-century buildings and cordial and affable people — the city which had suffered the worst damage during the civil war. After ten days he felt that he belonged there. His heart, his very nature were akin to those of the people who thronged, in the evening, to the lower part of the city, the harbour, the cafes, the wine shops, and the sordid taverns in the alleyways. It irked him to have to stay in the luxury hotel where he was put up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While he took his dinner in the brightly lighted dining room, in the company of well-dressed travellers eating shellfish, he longed to be among the simple, noisy folk in the taverns which he had glimpsed during his afternoon walks, drinking in, with an almost physical pleasure, the liquid Catalan speech, so different from the dry sonority of the Castilian. All of this reinforced his anti-Franco feelings. His heart was unequivocally with the victims of the war; he remembered, suddenly, all that they had endured and was deeply moved by it. He decided, on the spot, to learn Catalan, as a tribute to Catalonia. Meanwhile he thought of another tribute, the book by Orwell, which he had read on the train and thrown into a rubbish bin at the frontier railway station, because it was the tribute of an English snob, of the same class as the travellers eating shellfish at his hotel, people who knew nothing of the soul of the common people of Spain. He felt more and more bitterness towards certain false progressives of his acquaintance and boundless affection for the crystal-clear figure of Dolores Ibarruri. She was the earthy embodiment of the Spanish people, she was generosity and self-sacrifice in person. La Pasionaria! He really should have gone to Moscow, to shake her hand and embrace her, instead of to this wretched dictator-ridden country where he was to deliver the Professor’s rhetorical pages to a pro-Franco review. Meanwhile the train was taking him to Madrid. The journey was monotonous and the headquarters of the review disappointing, a colourless office in a building near the Prado, where a distracted employee thanked him in a perfunctory manner. Now Madrid was all his, even if he didn’t take to it. He hated the aristocratic monumentality of the public buildings, the elegance of the fashionable section, the vastness of the Prado, the paradoxical, shapeless Goyas, all in the detestable styles of baroque monstrosity and romantic fantasy. He couldn’t resist the temptation of taking a train across the Castilian plain, on a pilgrimage to Soria, a stripped, sober town to which he was drawn by a poem. The room in Dona Isabel Cuevas’ boarding house was intact: a table, a chair, a bed, a washstand. He wandered with emotion through the unpretentious town, encircled by the lunar desert of Castile. In an antiquarian bookshop, he found, after considerable insistence, a photograph of Machado with a dedication in his own writing dated 22 January 1939, when the poet, hounded by Franco’s police, was fleeing towards the frontier and death. The bookseller was a circumspect, suspicious fellow, fearful, perhaps, of a trap, and so, although his Castilian was first-rate, he spoke in Italian. His reassuring words obviously came from the heart; he held out the money and got what he wanted. Back in his Madrid hotel, a letter from the Professor awaited him, and it was in the terms of an obligation, an order laid upon him. He was to proceed to Lisbon on another errand; a first-class railway ticket was enclosed. Well, he was glad enough to go. The Professor wanted to place another of his stale articles in a Portuguese review, and he would take it there and make the necessary arrangements. Why not? It was almost a satisfaction, a sort of subtle revenge. The melancholy, honest face of Machado smiled at him from the bottom of his suitcase, he covered it with the Professor’s pages and his personal belongings, took the train and, at the border, told the customs officer that he had nothing to declare. The slight risk that he was running was his revenge and his talisman.