IN MOSCOW I REMEMBERED Madrid, and now in Madrid I remember Moscow, what can I do? If I carry Spain in my heart, the Soviet Union is my country too, why wouldn’t it be when you consider that I lived there more than fifty years, and it hurts me when people say bad things about it, when I turn on the television and see what is happening there, and read what my son tells me in his letters, which are much cheaper than phone calls. Every day I get up early, even though I have nothing to do, and I spend hours cleaning and setting my house in order. It’s small and if you’re not careful everything gets cluttered and covered with dust, then I think how lucky I am to be here, with my central heat and hot water, my refrigerator and television, my rug in the bedroom so my feet don’t get cold when I get up in the wintertime. My brother and parents never had a chance to enjoy any of these comforts, and it turns out that the silly one among us — why should I deny it, I’m the one who had the least to offer — is the one who gets everything. I sit here in the afternoons and sometimes don’t turn on the TV, don’t even turn on the light when it gets dark, and there are hours and hours of silence, of not doing anything, unlike my mother, who always had some work in her lap. I sit with my hands folded, listening to the cars on the expressway, and I remember, it isn’t as if I do it on purpose, the memories come and link together like a chain, like the beads of the rosary in my fingers when I was little and I went to catechism without telling my parents. I see people’s faces, hear their voices as it grows dark, and they walk in that door and sit down here beside me, and I hear music too, the Internationale that a band made up of the Party faithful played in our mining town, Chopin’s funeral march on the day of Stalin’s funeral, and another march I liked a lot, one they always played in Moscow on May Day. It seems I’m walking down the street and hearing it, the triumphal march from Aida, and my eyes fill with tears, it must be that I’ve turned as sentimental as the Russians. But the music I like best of all is Scheherazade, that’s what played when I opened the little mother-of-pearl box my father brought me when he came home from his first trip to Russia, when I didn’t dare look up at him because I hadn’t seen him for five or six months and he was like a stranger to me, he even had a black mustache. I kept the box beneath my pillow and would open it very slowly, and the music would begin, and I would close it fast, because I was afraid it would wear out if I let it play too long, like those perfumes that evaporate if you leave the bottle open. Somehow I lost my music box, who knows in what move. But things last longer than people, and someone must still have the box, like those antiques that sit in the flea market for a long time and then are sold, and when that person opens it, she will hear Scheherazade and wonder whom it belonged to.
america
I WOULD WAIT IN MY ROOM with the lights off until the bells in the tower of El Salvador Church struck midnight. Cautious, though I hadn’t gone outside yet, cloaked so no one could recognize me on the street, although at that hour and on those raw winter nights there weren’t many people venturing out to face the wind or rain that beat down on the large open plaza. I would walk across swathed in my cape, which was very heavy and warmer than an overcoat, with a cap pulled down over my eyes and a muffler covering half my face. You have never known winters like those, or nights so dark. There were weak lightbulbs on some corners, and metal-shaded lights strung from cables over the plaza, which shook with the wind so that the light and shadows moved as they do when you walk through a room carrying a candle. On windy nights, the plaza seemed to toss like a ship in a storm. Night was a different world. There were not many radios then, and it was rare to find electric lights in every room of a house. You took a few steps away from the brazier and the light and were immediately in cold and darkness. We would pass the lightbulb and cord from one room to another through an open hole in a corner of the wall. But the current frequently cut off, the bulb would begin to glow yellow, like a candle guttering, and soon we’d be in the dark. The children had a little song for those occasions:
Let there be light
so we can be fed.
We’ll have a nice salad,
fried eggs and fresh bread.
When the current failed you had to light a candle or oil lamp to go to bed, feeling your way upstairs to a bedroom so icy that when you crawled in between the sheets, your feet never got warm all night. How you would yearn to press yourself against the warmth of a naked woman! Day was day and night was night, not like now, when the two get confused, as so many things get confused, at least for us, who are too old to adapt to these times. The long winters and endless nights, black as the inside of a wolf’s mouth in the alleyways I slinked down after I left the house, going out of my way to avoid Calle Real, where someone might recognize me, just after the clock in the plaza struck twelve, and then the bronze bells of El Salvador, always a little slow, a deeper tone in their tall belfry with the narrow windows making the tower look more like that of a castle than of a church. The minute I heard the first peal, my heart would lurch in my chest. Alone and in the dark, I waited in my room so no one would suspect me, listening to the ticking of the clock, which was so loud it often made me open my eyes in the middle of the night, thinking I heard footsteps. But the thudding of my heart was louder than the clock, and I was so impatient I would start walking in circles around the room, quietly so no one in the room below would hear my footsteps. I would sit on the bed, wrapped in my cape and wearing my cap yet feeling the cold rising from my feet, waiting for the hour to come, for the bells to ring, just as she had told me, rather, ordered me: not one minute before midnight, and not down the main street but through the alleyways, because no precaution could be too great. One or two hours before I was ready, waiting, dying to see her, already as hard and stiff as the bolt on a gate, and from being hard so long I was almost in pain; it seems impossible today, the vigor you had when you were young. “If you love me,” she would say, “don’t be early, and don’t let anyone see you.” The first peal of the bells was like a magnet pulling me, and I couldn’t resist, I would leave my room and slip down the stairs without lighting the candle, feeling along the walls, careful not to wake anyone, and draw back the bolt. How strange it is that everything that was normal for us has disappeared, big iron bolts and door knockers, house keys so enormous that when I was a boy I imagined they were Saint Peter’s Keys to the Kingdom.