However, the day after my phone call to my aunt, I had already made the easy connection between the two facts — my mother’s definite sojourn in Paris and my father’s probable adventure in a mysterious city that was not Madrid. Several times during my bumbling search for facts to support the suspicion that had arisen following that furtive meeting in the café, it had occurred to me that perhaps the two cities were one and the same, and the only new thing to happen during that brief period when I was trying to preempt my mother’s impending explanation was my sudden recollection of that business card and, for the first time, a distinct desire to use it. As I said before, the idea initially struck me as absurd, and I was tempted to reject it. Too much time had passed since those two men had turned up at our apartment, and if the older man was still running the bar, he probably wouldn’t remember or wouldn’t want to dig up such old business. Quite apart from the fact that it had been the younger man who had admitted to knowing my father in the city behind which, I thought, lurked the shadow of Paris, it was highly unlikely, even if he did remember, that he would know if my father had been alone or with my mother at the time he began his dealings with his friend. If, despite that, I ended up giving in to temptation, it wasn’t because I had changed my mind or because I suddenly began to think that he really could provide me with trustworthy information that would help me resolve the dilemma and, one way or another, put an end to the suspicion that was plaguing me. I suppose the truth is — and this is further proof of my confusion, of my uncertainty and madness at the time — that I didn’t mind if talking to him served no purpose. There were so many unknowns springing up all around me, and the unanswered questions about my parents were so numerous and so intertwined, that not getting an answer to one of them, even if it was the main one, was not enough in itself to dissuade me from my plan.
I did nothing that day, which was the third day following my parents’ meeting in the café and the first, therefore, after making the phone call to my aunt. But the following day, which was a Monday — during which my mother maintained her discouraging silence and gave no sign of nervousness or doubt, which would have been a sure indication that my aunt had, as I feared, been in touch with her — on that morning, then, instead of getting on the bus I usually took to school, I went to the nearest subway station and caught a train to Bravo Murillo. After reaching my destination, it was easy enough to find the bar, even though I hadn’t quite worked out the street numbers and had to walk quite a way. It was a perfectly ordinary bar, with the TV on at all hours and the floor strewn with cigarette butts and crumpled paper napkins, and olive stones or even larger remnants of food — the gray shells of snails and the black shells of mussels — scattered about among the other detritus. After much thought, after various turns around the block, several bold attempts to enter, followed by several equally bold retreats, several almost definite decisions to abandon my plan altogether, decisions which I swiftly rejected, I finally went in through the door, and the first thing I noticed was that the numerous and vociferous clientele was entirely male, which was still more striking given that the only person visible behind the narrow bar with its long, rectangular food display cases containing an unappetizing selection of pork rinds and potato chips was a fat woman with her hair and eyebrows dyed blood-red. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that I would see anyone else behind the bar apart from the one person I was looking for, and such was my disappointment that I would have left immediately had it not been for the deathly silence that fell as soon as I entered, and I would have found it impossibly embarrassing to turn tail and leave for no apparent reason when I was only a few yards away from the woman at the bar. I didn’t spot the man I was looking for until I had reached the bar and ordered a Coke, all the while glancing timidly over my shoulder, and the voices and sounds gradually regrouped to form the animated murmur my entrance had interrupted. He was leaning at the end of the bar where the thick, zinc counter formed a right-angle with the wall, immediately next to the section of countertop that lifted up to allow access to the area behind the bar where the woman was working away wearily and reluctantly. The man was shorter than I remembered, and he seemed less like the owner of a very ordinary bar than the manager or maître d’ of some large restaurant, who, although always ready to engage in occasional, ephemeral tasks such as bringing a plate to a table or removing an ashtray, prefers to adopt, for his benefit and that of other people, the detached, relaxed pose of someone controlling things from the shadows, ruling from afar. He was speaking in a rather desultory fashion to another man who was sitting at a nearby table with his back to me, and although I noticed him turn his head to look at me, I realized that this was out of idle curiosity, not because he had recognized me. Since, apart from a few vague, febrile plans hatched on my way there, I hadn’t come up with any real strategy as to how to make my approach, I breathed a sigh of relief and looked from side to side, at the same time trying and doubtless failing to feign an ease and command of the situation I did not feel. However hard I tried, it was inevitable that my beardless face, my scruffy school uniform would be completely out of place there, even though, as I soon found out, the other customers were far more diverse than I had first thought. They all seemed to know each other, and sitting in their various groups, talking at the bar, playing cards around a table, or distractedly watching TV, they could have been members of a supporters’ group, a confraternity, or some village society or dining club, such was the air of fellow feeling and grave dignity that surrounded them. But beneath that secret, almost tribal camaraderie binding them together, I could nonetheless spot notable differences between them, contrasts in clothes and manners, which made their palpable complicity, their harmonious coexistence beneath the same roof, incomprehensible, or at the very least enigmatic. The range was very wide. From the almost destitute, complete with their sinister gestures and accents, to apparently modest representatives of the most humble trades; from harmless old men to besuited cigar-smokers, all gold rings and lighters and tie pins, to two individuals with alert faces who were dressed more informally, more fashionably, in leather jackets, jeans, neck scarves, and ostentatious sports watches and seemed to be the main focus of the admiring or indulgent attention of their companions. It really was a very striking group of people, simultaneously disparate and similar, bound together by secrecy, by mutual dependence, by indecipherable codes of loyalty, by the knowledge, one might say, that each had something of the others’ sins. Now that I think about it, they could have been gambling addicts or practitioners of some kind of perversion that was either frowned upon or actually criminal. They could have been normal citizens who happened to be unemployed and, thanks to a chance coincidence of tastes when choosing a place to spend the long, tedious hours, had acquired an invisible shared aura. It could have been anything, and yet what I thought, after that brief glance over my shoulder before I turned back to my as yet untouched Coke, is that they belonged to the same profession as my father, a profession in which the distance between success and failure is measured by a fate as ephemeral and fragile in its kindness as it is unavoidable when it turns against you. This, of course, was a purely subjective impression, predetermined before I even entered the bar, and to which, for that same reason, I give no particular value, even though it still persists. Whatever the truth of the matter, and precisely because I was aware it could not be trusted, that impression had no influence on the feeling which — imperceptibly at first, and then conclusively and emphatically — began to take hold of me only moments after I picked up my glass of Coke and took one tiny sip, meanwhile sneaking another furtive glance at the old man. I still had no idea how to proceed. My one quick look around the bar had not helped me to decide, and I didn’t know how to begin that sought-after conversation, how to justify my presence there, or what attitude to adopt regarding my father. I felt uncomfortable, intimidated, and fearful, like someone, I suppose, who having gotten himself nominated to a post or for a prize using only the weapons of intrigue and demagogy, finally faces the challenge of making good his promises with deeds. I didn’t know what to do and felt increasingly oppressed by my indecision. I looked at the old man, who had stopped talking now and was immersed in studying some advertising flyers piled up on the bar; I looked at my glass of Coke, telling myself that however slowly I drank it, I was bound to finish it eventually or, even worse, draw attention to myself by taking too long, and however hard I tried, I couldn’t come to a decision. Then, at a certain point, as if touched by a sudden breath of clear-sightedness, I suddenly knew that I would do nothing, that I would leave just as I had arrived, and far from feeling frustrated or trying to deceive myself by saying that I would come back another time, I experienced an intense, unexpected sense of well-being, a feeling so in keeping with my newly accepted powerlessness that it felt more like an unequivocal acceptance of that decision than the weary resignation or the logical relief one might feel after a burden has been lifted from one’s shoulders, as if the fear that had stopped me taking that step up until then had merely concealed a far greater fear of the possible consequences. At the same time, the feeling of oppression also lifted, and with it, the feeling of discomfort, of being observed. The awkwardness I’d felt ever since entering that place also disappeared, and I was able to shift my position slightly and thus gain a more panoramic, detailed view of those men with their evasive, smug, or defiant faces, faces that contained the very essence of my father. I observed them slowly, and slowly observed myself in that strange setting, and while I was looking from one man to the next, while I was noticing their ways of speaking and moving, while I was absorbed in the sound of laughter and overheard comments, and although the memory of my mother with my father, of my mother alone, and of my mother with me did not abandon me but hovered above my thoughts and before my eyes like an invisible film, blurring my vision, distorting and transforming the whole scene, filling it with irrelevant meanings, slowly, inevitably, like a great rush of warm water come to rescue me from the sharp sting of an icy sea, I noticed that between me and them, between myself and everything that the bar and even my parents meant, an extraordinary wall of distance was growing.