According to the scholarly Don Alejandro de la Cruz, the ghost of that rustic man and eternal soldier, who may have been Zapata, was not entirely lacking in sympathy. He accepted her reasoning or felt that he owed her a debt of gratitude: and from then until her death, Elena Vera awaited with excitement and impatience the arrival of the day chosen by her impalpable, silent love to return — from the past, from a time in which, in fact, neither past nor time existed — the arrival of each Wednesday, when he was perhaps coming back from Chinameca, murdered, sad, exhausted. And it is thought that those visits, that that listener and their pact, all kept her alive for many more years, in that city facing the sea, because with him she still had a past and a present and a future too — or perhaps they too are a kind of nostalgia.
(1998)
the resignation letter of senor de santiesteban
For Juan Benet, fifteen years late
Whether it was one of those bizarre occurrences to which Chance never quite manages to accustom us, however often they may arise; or whether Destiny, in a show of caution and prudence, temporarily suspended judgement on the qualities and attributes of the new teacher and so felt itself obliged to delay intervening just in case such an intervention should later have been found to be a mistake; or whether, finally, it was because in these southern lands even the boldest and most confident of people tend to distrust their own gifts of persuasion, the fact of the matter is that young Mr Lilburn did not discover what truth there might be in the strange warnings issued to him — only a few days after he had joined the Institute — by his immediate superior, Mr Bayo, and by other colleagues too, until he was well into the first term when sufficient time had elapsed for him to be able to forget or at least to postpone thinking about the possible significance of the warnings. Mr Lilburn, in any case, belonged to that class of person who, sooner or later, in the course of a hitherto untroubled life, finds his career in ruins and his unshakable beliefs overturned, refuted and even held up to ridicule by just such an event as concerns us here. And so it would, therefore, have made little difference if he had never been asked to stay behind to lock up the building.
Lilburn, who was just thirty-one, had eagerly accepted the post offered him, through Mr Bayo, by the director of the British Institute in Madrid. Indeed, he had experienced a certain sense of relief and something very like the discreet, imperfect, muted joy felt in such situations by men who — while they wouldn’t ever dare to so much as dream of rising to heights they had already accepted would never be theirs — nevertheless expect a small improvement in their position as the most natural thing in the world. And although his work at the Institute did not, in itself, constitute any improvement at all, either economic or social, with respect to his previous position, young Mr Lilburn was very conscious, as he signed the rather unorthodox contract presented to him by Mr Bayo during the latter’s summer sojourn in London, that, while spending nine months abroad was almost an invitation to people in his native city to forget all about him and his abilities, and implied, too, the loss — perhaps not, he imagined, irrevocable — of his comfortable but extremely mediocre post at the North London Polytechnic, it also brought the distinct possibility of coming into contact with people higher up the administrative ladder and, more importantly, with prestigious members of the diplomatic corps. Furthermore, having dealings, for example (why not?), with an ambassador could prove most useful to him — however sporadic and superficial those dealings might be — possibly in the not too distant future. And so, around the middle of September, and with the indifference characteristic of any only moderately ambitious man, he made his preparations, recommending a far less knowledgable replacement for the post he was vacating at the Polytechnic, and arrived in Madrid, determined to work hard if necessary to earn the esteem and trust of his superiors — with an eye to any future advantages this might bring him — and to resist being seduced by the flexibility of the Spanish working day.
Young Lilburn soon managed to establish an orderly life for himself in that foreign land and, after a few initial days of vacillation and relative bewilderment (the days he was obliged to spend in the house of old Mr Bayo and his wife while he waited for the previous tenants to vacate the small furnished attic apartment in Calle de Orellana reserved for him from 1 October by Mr Turol, another of his Spanish colleagues; the rent was too high for Lilburn’s budget, but it wasn’t really expensive if one took into account that it was extremely central and had the incomparable advantage of being very near the Institute), he set himself a meticulous and — if such a thing were possible throughout a whole academic year — invariable daily routine, and which he did, in fact, manage to maintain, although only until the month of March. He got up at seven on the dot and, after breakfasting at home and briefly going over what he planned to say in each of his morning classes, set off to the Institute to teach. During break-time, he would share with Mr Bayo and Miss Ferris his dismay at the Spanish students’ appalling lack of discipline and then, over lunch, would make the same remarks to Mr Turol and Mr White. Over dessert, he would review the afternoons lessons, which he would take at a rather slower pace than he had in the morning, and, once they were over, would spend from six to half past seven in the Institute’s library, consulting a few books and preparing his classes for the next day. He would then walk to the elegant house of the widowed Señora Giménez-Klein, in Calle de Fortuny, in order to give an hour’s private tuition to her eight-year-old granddaughter (his protector, Mr Bayo, had found him this simple, well-remunerated work), and then return to his apartment in Calle de Orellana at about half past nine or shortly thereafter, in time to hear the radio news: although, at first, Lilburn understood almost nothing, he was convinced that this was the best way to learn correct Spanish pronunciation. He then ate a light supper, read a couple of chapters of his Spanish grammar book, hurriedly memorising vast lists of verbs and nouns, and went to bed punctually at half past eleven. Any reader familiar with the aforementioned Madrid streets and the buildings occupied by the British Institute will have no difficulty in grasping that Lilburn’s life could not fail to be anything but methodical and ordered, and that his feet probably took no more than two thousand steps each day. His weekends, however, with the exception of the occasional Saturday when he attended suppers or receptions laid on for visitors to Madrid from British universities (and, on just one occasion, a cocktail party at the embassy), were a mystery to his colleagues and superiors, who supposed — based on the not very revealing circumstance that he never answered the phone on those days — that he must make use of his weekends to go on short trips to nearby towns. It would seem, however, that at least until January or February, young Lilburn spent Saturdays and Sundays closeted in his apartment struggling with the whims and caprices of Spanish conjugations. And one can only assume that he spent his Christmas vacation in the same way.
Derek Lilburn was a man of little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past: the only son of a couple of mediocre, second-rate actors who had achieved a certain degree of popularity (if not prestige) during the early part of the Second World War with an Elizabethan and Jacobean repertoire that included Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Heywood the Younger, but which scrupulously avoided authors of greater stature like Marlowe, Webster or, indeed, Shakespeare, Lilburn had nonetheless failed to inherit what used to be called a vocation for the stage’; although one might well question whether his progenitors had ever harbored such a vocation themselves. When the war was over, and the various divas, anxious to resume their positions and hungry for applause, hurried back to the theatre with vigour and assiduity, and the slow work of reconstruction as well as the return en masse of the armed forces made London, if not a more anxious city, certainly a more uncomfortable place than when the bombings were rife, the Lilburns, apparently without regret, left the capital and the profession. They settled in Swansea and opened a grocery store, doubtless with the money they had saved during their years devoted to the ignoble and thankless art of acting. All that remained of those eventful times were a few posters advertising Philaster and The Revenger’s Tragedy, and a few facts that have led me, when speaking of his parents, to give more importance to their dramatic incursions — mere anecdote — than to their true status as shopkeepers. Neither books nor erudition filled young Lilburn’s childhood, and you can be quite sure that he did not even benefit from the one vestige that might unwittingly have remained of his parents’ years spent treading the boards: an emphatic, smug or affected way of speaking even in banal, domestic conversation.