The moan is the first thing I hear, although not clearly because of the woman’s screams and the barking dogs, who must be penned up nearby, since I also hear them clawing. A moan and the whistling breath of a sick person’s lungs, then I see the figure on the floor, an old man in a silk bathrobe, his yellowish pallor in sharp contrast with the bright red of his gaping mouth and the tongue waggling in search of air, thrust out like a grotesque marine creature struggling to escape a crevice in which it has become wedged. He is clutching his neck with both hands, and when I bend down to him, he grabs the front of my T-shirt, his eyes as wide as his mouth, the color so light that it’s difficult to say whether they’re gray or blue. He pulls me to him with fanatical strength, as if grabbing on to me to keep from drowning, as if he needs to tell me something. His face is so close to mine that I can see his long yellow teeth, the red tear ducts and tiny veins in his eyeballs, and his breath is like a sewer. Bitte, he says, but it’s a death rattle more than a word, and the woman who is sobbing beside me repeats the word, shakes me with her big red hands, urging me to do something, but the man has pulled me closer to him, and I can’t free myself to listen to his chest or attempt in some way to revive him. Beside him on the dark, polished wood floor is a puddle I had thought was urine, but it’s tea. I also see a broken cup and a spoon.
“This man is choking,” I tell the woman, absurdly spacing the words, as if she would then understand me better, and I point to a telephone: You must call an ambulance. What I want most, however, is to leave, get away from there, go back to my hotel room before my wife wakes up. I manage to get to my feet, and when the old man lets go, his breathing is somewhat improved, although his eyes are turned back in his head.
On the telephone table is a small red tray with a swastika in the center, inside a white circle. I haven’t looked around the room since I came in, only now, while I’m waiting for the emergency call to go through. On one wall is a large oil painting of Adolf Hitler, bracketed by two red curtains that turn out to be two flags with swastikas. In the illuminated interior of a glass case is a black leather jacket with the insignia of the SS on the lapels and with a large, dark-stained split on one side. In an ostentatiously framed photograph, Hitler is bestowing a decoration upon a young SS officer. In another glass case is an Iron Cross, and beside it a parchment manuscript written in Gothic characters and with a swastika pressed into the sealing wax.
I see all this in one second, but the number of objects around me is overpowering, they make the room seem crowded although the space is enormous: busts, photos, firearms, burnished, sharp-pointed shells, flags, insignia, paperweights, calendars, lamps, there’s nothing here that isn’t connected with the Nazis, that doesn’t commemorate and celebrate the Third Reich. What I first perceived as confusion is actually in a perfect order that suggests museum cataloging. Meanwhile, the man lies gasping on the floor, calling out to me in a voice so hoarse it seems scarcely to escape the cavern of his chest. Bitte, he says when I hang up the telephone and again bend down to him; he stares at me, terrified. “Be calm,” I tell him, although I’m not sure whether he’s learned any Spanish in all the years he’s lived as a refugee on this coast. An ambulance is on the way. Saliva drools from one side of his mouth. He feels my chest, my face, as if he were blind; he asks me something, orders me to do something, in German. Now he is breathing a little more regularly, but his eyes are still turned back and half closed. When I check his wrist for a pulse — skin and bone and a sheaf of twisting blue veins — he digs his fingernails into the back of my hand.
WHEN THE DOCTOR RETURNS to the hotel, he will show his wife the physical marks the fingernails made as proof of what happened, the things he will tell her with such relief, still feeling a trace of revulsion. He wants to leave but can’t, even though he doesn’t know if it’s his duty as a physician that holds him there or some form of malevolence he can’t shake, no more than he can free himself from the perhaps dying man’s fingernails digging into his hand. Time crawls. His wife will be awake by now and wondering why he isn’t back. She’ll fear suddenly that something happened to him, and be irritated about his mania for running and walking at dawn. We two are most alike in our fear that everything will fall apart, that our life will go down the drain. He needs to pull away from the old man’s hand and call the hotel to calm his wife, but he doesn’t know the number, and the task of finding it seems too great an obstacle.
The old man’s pupils are again visible in the slit of his eyelids and fixed on him. The doctor looks away and makes a sign as if to get up, but two skeletal hands stop him, tugging at his T-shirt. He hears the old man’s breathing, smells it, becomes conscious of the monotonous roar of the sea at the foot of the cliff. Between the murmuring and prayers of the woman planted like a monolith and the barking that hasn’t let up for an instant, he thinks he can hear, still far in the distance, the wail of an ambulance.
cerbère
THE LETTER FROM THE German embassy must have arrived when we’d been living in the new house for less than a year. I noticed the postmark, that it was dated several months before, and that the address on the envelope was the old one, the one in the apartment building in the Las Ventas barrio where I was born just as the war broke out, and where I saw my father for the last time, the day before the Nacionales entered Madrid, although I was too young to have any memory of that. The letter had been going from place to place for a long time, and the mailman who handed it to me said it was hard work to find us because at that time everything in the barrio where we were living was new and many of the streets didn’t have names yet, and sometimes there weren’t even streets, just open lots that became mud pits whenever it rained. Now you go to the neighborhood and that seems impossible, everything’s so well arranged, so established, and the trees are tall, as if they were planted a long time ago, but then, when we arrived, they were as rare as street lamps, and the first blocks of buildings were far apart, separated by embankments and empty lots, and the country was only a step away. There were wheat fields, orchards, and flocks of sheep, and you could see Madrid in the distance, looking prettier than ever, with its tall white buildings, like the capital of some foreign country in a movie. People said, mockingly, “You’ve gone to live in the country,” but that didn’t matter to me, I actually preferred it. I liked going out on the balcony of my new apartment and seeing Madrid in the distance, liked roaring into the city on my husband’s new Vespa with my arms around his waist. For the first time we had rooms with ventilation and a bathroom, and hot and cold water, and as soon as I became pregnant my husband bought me a washing machine, and before long he got his driver’s license, which at that time seemed almost better than if he’d had a profession. One morning I heard a horn and went out on the balcony and there was a new car in front of the house, a light blue Dauphine, and my husband was driving. He made the down payment and they gave it to him, just as they gave us the apartment and washing machine with only a down payment. The very words down payment scared me, but they pleased me too, and they still sound good if I stop to think about it, because we had the feeling we were starting a new life, exactly as when we walked into the new apartment and smelled fresh plaster, and when I got into the car the first time, it smelled a little like that, new and clean, because where we’d come from everything smelled old, the houses, streetcars, clothes, corridors, closets, dresser drawers, the toilets on the landings, everything was old, dirty, used, sour. Life had been so hard for so many years, everything in short supply, and suddenly it seemed that all you had to do to get something was want it, because they handed it to you with just that down payment, the way they gave us the keys to the apartment even though it would take us more than twenty years to pay it off. The patio of our old building in Las Ventas, near the bullring, was always crowded and cramped, and there were always people around: the neighbor women who listened even though you weren’t talking loud and who seized any excuse to come in and snoop around your place, some with no good in mind, so that when I walked into my new apartment in Moratalaz for the first time, it seemed enormous, especially when I opened the living-room window that looked out on wide-open country, with Madrid way in the background: it was like a movie screen in Technicolor. Everything new: my kitchen, which I didn’t have to share with anyone, my washing machine that didn’t stink of plumbing or other people’s filth, my bathroom, with the white ceramic tile, and a toilet and bidet so white that the fluorescent light was dazzling when it reflected off them, a really good light, not those sickly bulbs we had when I was a girl. My mother complained because she’d lived all her life in Las Ventas and couldn’t get used to being away from her neighbors and the shops she knew, and in the new barrio she got lost the minute she stepped out the door, she said it was like being an invalid, always at the whim of whoever would take her and bring her back, because in those days neither the metro nor the bus went as far as our barrio, it wasn’t even on the maps of Madrid. I didn’t want to show my mother the letter. But since she was so suspicious, she shot out of her room to ask who knocked, and when I told her it was the mailman, she wanted to know who’d written us, but I said it was the wrong address and went into my bedroom to open the letter by myself. My heart was pounding, because by that time we’d got over being hungry, but we still had the fear that we’d fall on hard times again, that they’d take my mother away again, the way they did after the war, when it was days before she came back and my grandmother went around to all the police stations and women’s prisons asking about her. My father told her, if you don’t come with me something so bad will happen to you that you’d be better off hanging yourself or jumping off the balcony, but she wouldn’t budge, she didn’t want to leave Spain, although she knew perfectly well what lay in store for her, not because she’d done anything, because politics had never mattered to her and she didn’t even know how to read or write, but just because she was married to him. I was three years old when the war ended, the day my father showed up one morning in our building in Las Ventas to take us with him. I don’t remember anything about it, but I can imagine the scene perfectly. Knowing how hardheaded my mother was, she would have been sitting in a corner, very serious, head down, and no one could have budged her. I can imagine my father, talking and talking and telling her that we all had to go to Russia, trying to convince her, promising her things, arguing just the way he did at his political meetings, where it seems he always won, which was why he rose so high. He had a golden tongue, my grandmother told me, the only person he couldn’t convince was his wife, he’d never been able to get her to come to any protest, she was never interested in his meetings and politics and didn’t believe a word of anything he promised her, didn’t admire him for the higher and higher positions he held during the war, or for the stars he wore on his cap and cuffs. He would go away, leave in the morning and come back maybe that night or not till after a week or a month, he’d come back from jail or from the front, disguised so the police wouldn’t find him, or dressed in his military uniform, and she never asked where he’d been, listening without a word to his explanations, which she probably didn’t understand. But she always kept a clean house for him and the kettle on the fire, and sometimes she treated his wounds or fixed him bowls of broth or hot coffee at every hour of the day or night to ease his hunger, and when what little money he’d given her ran out she would go out on her own and try to make a living by scrubbing floors or selling water in the Plaza de Toros with a clay jug and tin cup, and if she had to she would go to the parish church to ask for clothing for us, although she hid that from my father, who would never allow any priest to help him. The last time I saw him must have been that night he came looking for us, already in hiding, because if the war hadn’t ended it was close to it, and he told my mother that he had a car with its motor running waiting at the door, that he was going to take us that very night, I don’t know whether to Valencia, where there would be a boat, or to an airport, and that we’d go straight to Russia and would never be hungry again and have every comfort. In the meantime the car with the driver was at the door, and Franco’s troops were at the edge of the city, and my mother sat there as if she were listening to it rain, I can see her so clearly, shaking her head, staring at the floor, saying no, no, he could do what he pleased, he always had, but he wasn’t going to take her and their children anywhere, least of all to Russia, so far away, because going was easy, but whoever saw anyone come back from so far? And he paced the room; I have no memory of him, but I can see him, tall, handsome in his uniform, the way he looks in one of the photographs they gave me at the embassy and that later my mother tore into tiny pieces and burned in a pile with all his papers, letters, drawings, and documents, things I’d like to have now as a reminder of him. “Then I wash my hands of anything that happens to you, and to the children,” he would have said, and she would have leaped up like a lioness, “As if you haven’t always washed your hands of us, you with your politics and adventures and revolutions, if we’d depended on you, your children would have gone begging in the street.” Or they’d be in Russia, well fed and cared for, not having to pay the price they had to pay here because of her contrariness, because one other time, when I was two, my father wanted my older brothers to go on one of those expeditions of Spanish children to Russia, but my mother refused then too. She told me that I was sleeping in the room beside theirs, that the shouting woke me up and I came out crying, that when I saw my father I didn’t recognize him at first and ran to bury my head in my mother’s skirts when he tried to hug me. But there was another woman in the room; as I tell you this, it’s as if I remembered it, I see her so clearly, a tall, dark woman, vigorous, beautiful, dressed in black as if in mourning, she had been a neighbor of ours and had a daughter who sometimes looked after me and played with me, a daughter even more beautiful than she was, and she also had a strapping son who was in Russia two or three years. The woman picked me up and sat me on her knees, my mother told me, and said to her, “Please, if not for yourself, at least do it for this child, who isn’t to blame for anything.” The woman rocked me so I would go to sleep, and sang a song in a low voice while my father kept pacing and arguing with my mother, and all the while you could hear cannons in the distance, but less and less frequently, because the war was in its last hours and everything was lost by then. “And do you know who that woman was?” my mother would ask me, lowering her voice the way she did when she was telling about the things that happened that night. “She was La Pasionaria, who followed the same politics as your father, and she told me that her children already spoke Russian and were getting along stupendously in the Soviet Union, just as we would if we went that night.” My mother didn’t answer, just sat with her head down, staring at the floor, and my father lost control