At times, I would remember to tell her something. She would stop, and she would listen to me. She would rest her needles and knitting on her belly, and listen to me, and, sometimes, the knitting would begin to move all on its own.
It was our Francisco kicking inside her belly.
I would say:
‘When he’s big he’ll have to be a footballer.’
Little did I know.
Years later, recollecting those kicks that at night would sketch angles in the skin of her round belly, my wife would often repeat:
‘My Francisco started training to be a runner even before he was born.’
It was morning when I’d get to the workshop. I’d open the big door, and the echo of the key turning sounded natural from the sawdust-covered, dust-covered walls. With the sound of the first steps of my boots on the ground of the entrance hall, two or three sparrows would fly between the roof beams and hide in the shadows of the roof tiles. When the weather was fine, I would open the windows on to the patio. On the carpentry bench my tools would be where I had arranged them. Work was waiting for me just where, the previous day, I had decided to stop. It was morning, and as I held each tool for the first time — the hammer, the chisel, the handsaw — I’d feel the pleasant beginning of another day in the palm of my hand.
My uncle would arrive mid-morning. He wore the same clothes from the night before — his shirt half-untucked from his trousers, the buckle of his belt misaligned with the button. His left eye glittered in his unwashed face. When he was a child, during some game, my uncle had been blinded in his right eye. As he arrived in the workshop his right eye was the smoothest of eyelids, whiter than the rest of his skin, sitting over the empty socket. He had dry, cracked lips. His teeth bore a sticky film of red wine. He always wore a childish, genuine smile. He would say good morning to me. I would say nothing to him. Forgetting himself, he would say good morning to me again. Then he might perhaps take a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and blow his nose. Then he would go out on to the patio. If I was measuring or marking something up I would hear the arc of his urine hitting the pine-shaving floor. After a time and the sound of his footfall approaching, he would come back in and perhaps wash his face in the cold water of the running tap. The water mixed with the sawdust of the floor. His eyebrows bristling, he would smile and, finally, approach the bench where his tools, heaped in disarray, awaited him.
Mornings passed with my uncle telling stories, stories which sometimes repeated themselves and sometimes never ended; they passed beneath the stories that my uncle would tell and that I sometimes did not listen to. As I worked — hammer striking, saws crossing laths, files filing, sandpaper smoothing planks — I would stop listening to my uncle to concentrate on the sounds of the city that came in through the windows and the patio door as though from very far away — proclamations, lost voices, bicycle bells.
It was my father who left the workshop to me. Some days, when I was coming back from the market holding my mother’s hand, I would ask her:
‘Let’s go to my workshop.’
If someone heard me and understood, they’d laugh, with me so small talking like that. My mother didn’t laugh because she had been the one who had taught me to use those words.
My father died far away from my mother, exhausted, on the same day that I was born.
Throughout my childhood, on certain evenings, my mother would boil a pan of water and ask me to go out to the yard to fetch a leaf from the lemon tree. Our lemon tree had large, thick leaves, hard to detach and noisy as I tore them from the lower branches. My mother would wash the leaf and submerge it in the boiling water to make our tea. It was at that moment that she would bring to the middle of the table a parcel wrapped in brown paper which, very slowly, under my gaze, she would open. In it were two cakes she had bought from the bakery and which she would cut in half with the tip of her knife. I’d get up on to a stool and take two mugs out of the cupboard. We would sit at the table, mother and son, eating our halves of cake and drinking tea. Then my mother would tell stories that always ended with my father’s laughter. My mother almost always laughed when she described my father’s laughter. Then my mother would say that my father was priceless.
Then a pause. Silence. And my mother would tell me how, without any doubt, my father would have been proud to know that I was going to look after the workshop. That was the moment she would speak of my workshop:
‘Your workshop,’ she’d say, serious, looking me in the eye. My mother’s voice was fragile and secure, it was gentle, it was firm.
The workshop remained out of action until the day my uncle offered to take care of it, paying the small rent with which my mother managed things. There were months in which my uncle, through confusion or through drink, was late paying. My mother counted on this, and for just such occasions she would save a little money at the bottom of her sewing box. It rarely happened that, after his deadlines had passed, she had to go, determined, up the two blocks separating our house from the workshop to claim the rent. When my uncle saw her arrive, he would be ashamed; he’d lower his face, beg a thousand heartfelt apologies and, almost always, weep.
I started working with my uncle a few days after turning twelve. During my apprenticeship I tried to make out what he was telling me to do from amid the torrent of incomprehensible stories he would tell me. What my uncle had to teach me was the little he had learned from watching his father working and what he had learned from his own mistakes and attempts. At fourteen, I was already more perfect in my work than he was, and I taught him things he had never known, or that he had forgotten.
I was fourteen when my mother fell ill. In a week every bone and every vein in her body became visible. Her skin yellowed. Her gaze remained fixed on a certain point. I begged her not to die. I asked her, begged her by everything. But a few weeks passed, and she died.
It was as though she had only been waiting to see me raised.
The following weeks my uncle remained in silence. One morning he began to tell a story which never came to an end, and time continued to pass.
Absorbed in the stories he himself was telling, my uncle would rarely hear people arriving with heavy tread on the earth floor of the entrance, people who would appear at any hour to commission work or see if the work they had commissioned was ready. So he would be surprised to see them appear at the shop door. He would circle them, thrilled, speaking to them loudly and smiling. These people, even if they didn’t know him, ignored him and made straight for me. That was exactly what happened the morning the Italian arrived.
The fine moustache danced over his lips to the rhythm of the words he was saying. As he spoke, the fine moustache, waxed, assumed the most varied shapes: a tilde, a line, a right angle, a curve. At the same time he used his clean, smooth, white hands, his slender, well-tended fingers with their slightly long nails, to gesture and thus to sculpt the air before him into all manner of shapes: a noble horse with silver harnesses, halls with engravings on the ceiling, a piano. Then sometimes he would stop abruptly to check whether we had understood, and straighten his cuff buttons with the tips of his fingers or pluck at the bright collars of his morning-coat. Then he would decide that we had not understood him, and he would continue.
But we had understood everything. Everything, perhaps. From the moment the Italian started speaking, my uncle’s voice faded away, weaker, weaker, as though going down a flight of stairs, until he fell completely silent, and with his left eye wide remained just listening with lively and genuine interest. When the Italian became tired, or when he simply no longer knew how to explain himself, my uncle and I looked at one another to confirm that we had understood. The Italian played and sang at dances. He had a broken piano and someone had told him that we would be able to repair it here.