At his parents’ door he hesitated. “Shall I wake them or not?”
For years he had been living far away, a time of exile, the blind years under military dictatorship, and he was dying to see his family. But he decided it would be better to wait.
He set off down the street, the street of his childhood, and he was sure the pavement recognized his footsteps. His head filled up with old stories and bad jokes, and everything seemed fresh and delightful. It was a freezing winter night, the city cloaked in frost, but he savored the cold as if it were the tropics.
It took Leonardo a long while to realize he was carrying a suitcase, and that the suitcase weighed more than a tombstone. So he crossed the street, cut through an empty lot, and sat himself down on his suitcase, back to a wall.
The cold would not let him sleep. When he stood up, he could see in the moonlight that the wall was covered in scars: symbols and words, hearts pierced by arrows, vows of true love and angry oaths at love lost, even insults (“Maria has cellulitis”).
Leonardo was also able to make out a few words that were nearly worn away, words that asked: “So where were you? What did you talk about? Who did you talk to?”
Exiles
Some years had passed since the end of the Spanish War, but the vanquished still waged it every afternoon, arguing loudly in Montevideo’s cafes. At night in the wine bars, commiserating over their defeat, they hugged each other as they sang songs from the trenches.
One of the exiles, who fought on the Republican front lines from the very beginning to the very end, recounted the entire war for me, blow by blow, at home in his kitchen. The battles took place on the tablecloth.
Teaspoons, sugar bowl, and coffee cups indicated the positions held by the militiamen and Franco’s troops. A knife reared up and fired a shell that knocked over the bloodied pot of marmalade. Glasses — the tanks — rolled forward, crushing the toast with a crunch. Hitler’s airplanes dropped oranges and rolls that shook the table and made mincemeat of the toothpicks, the infantry. At that breakfast table, my ears hurt from the thundering bombs, along with the roar of machine-gun fire, and the howls of the wounded.
Time Weaves
She was five when she left.
She grew up in another country, spoke another language.
When she returned, she had lived a long life.
Felisa Ortega arrived in the city of Bilbao, climbed to the top of Mount Artxanda, and walked the path she never forgot, toward the house that had been hers.
Everything looked small, shrunken by the years. And she was afraid the neighbors would hear the drumbeat pounding in her breast.
She did not find her tricycle or the colored wicker chairs or the kitchen table where her mother, reading her stories, had with one snip cut out the wolf that made her cry. Neither did she find the balcony where they watched the German planes on their way to bomb Guernica.
Soon, the neighbors got up the courage to tell her: No, that wasn’t her house. Her house had been destroyed. The one she was looking at was built on the ruins.
Then someone appeared from the depths of time. Someone who said, “I’m Elena.”
They wore themselves out hugging each other.
They had played together so often in the groves of their childhood.
Elena said, “I have something for you.”
And she brought out a white porcelain bowl with a blue pattern.
Felisa recognized the bowl her mother used for serving the hazelnut cookies she made for everyone.
Elena had found it unblemished amid the rubble and had saved it for fifty-eight years.
The Foot
Many did not return. Of the citizens of the world who marched off to fight for the Spanish Republic, many stayed there, buried under Spanish soil.
Abe Osheroff of the Lincoln Brigade survived.
A bullet ruined one of his legs. With one foot dragging and the other foot walking, he returned to his country.
Spain was the first war he lost. From then on, carried by his roving foot, Abe never stopped.
Despite betrayals and defeats, beatings and jailings, he never stopped. One foot refused, but the other went right ahead. One foot told him, “I’m staying right here,” but the other declared, “I’m taking you there.” Time and again that foot, the errant one, hit the road, because dissent is destiny.
That foot carried Abe across the United States from end to end, from sea to sea, and it got him in repeated trouble, marching against McCarthy’s witch hunts and the Korean War and racial segregation and the death penalty and the coup d’état in Iran and the crime of Guatemala and the butchery of Vietnam and the bloodbath of Indonesia and nuclear tests and the blockade of Cuba and the putsch in Chile and the strangling of Nicaragua and the invasion of Panama and the bombings of Iraq and Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and Iraq yet again. .
Abe was ninety and still a marcher when his friend Tony Geist asked him, just out of curiosity, how he was doing. He raised his lion’s head with its big white mane and smiled from ear to ear. “I’m still getting along, with one foot in the grave and the other one dancing.”
The Path of Jesus
Nailed by the palm of one hand, Jesus of Nazareth hung from what remained of a wall. The other Jesus, Jesus of Cambre, hung from a scaffold.
Jesus Babio, born in the center of Cambre, was a master bricklayer, master carpenter, master pipe fitter, and master blasphemer. Everything he did, he did well, but he’d been around and he knew that no one in the world could best him in the art of swearing, which like mysticism is a Spanish art. It was with pure streaks of blasphemy that Jesus, the one from Cambre, was rebuilding Santa Maria de Vigo church, burned by the reds during the war, while the other Jesus, the soot-blackened one from Nazareth, listened unamused.
“I shit on the hinges of the ciborium and on the nails of Christ and on his wounds and on his thorns, and I shit on the immaculate mother who birthed him.”
Once in a while, Angel Vàsquez de la Cruz would ride into the ruined church on horseback. From high up on the scaffolding, while hammering a wooden wedge or something, Jesus would tell him, between blasphemies, a story from his overseas travels. In his wanderings he had worked in England, Holland, Norway, Germany, even as foreign a place as Catalonia.
His stories all ended the same way. He’d point with his hammer at the empty window breached by the birds, and he’d point beyond to the path through Cambre’s woods. No one would be coming down it, except maybe some local with a load of firewood on a mule. The path was just a bit of dirt among the trees.
“See that?” he’d ask. And he’d pass sentence: “I’ve walked down a lot of roads. I shit on the road to Calvary, I shit on the road to Santiago, and I shit on all highways. Everything there is to see in this world and the next goes by on that path right there.”
The Ants’ Itinerary
The ants of the desert emerge from the deep and set out across the sand.
They search for food here and there, and in their wanderings they travel farther and farther from home.
Much later they return from a great distance, struggling to carry the food they found where there was nothing.
The desert makes a mockery of maps. The sand, swirled by the wind, never stays put. In that scorching immensity anyone can get lost. But the ants always take the shortest route home. They march in single file without hesitation, straight back to the spot from which they departed. Then they dig until they discover the tiny hole that leads to their nest. Never do they make a wrong turn, never do they enter someone else’s hole.