I went cold with disgust and got off as soon as I could, one or two stops earlier than I needed to, so as not to have to look at her any more or risk hearing her recount more such exploits. I didn't say anything, you simply couldn't in those days if you wanted to survive, you could be arrested for the slightest thing and bumped off, even if you were a Republican; or like your uncle, Alfonso, who was nothing, just a boy, and the girl who was with him when they picked him up, who was even less than nothing. I glanced at the woman's face as I got off, an ordinary woman, with coarse but not ugly features, quite young, although not young enough to put it all down to the frequent callousness of youth, she might have had children of her own or had them later on. If she survived the War and suffered no reprisals (and she certainly wouldn't have been punished for the thing I heard her describe; although she might have been had she gone on to play a significant part in activities that could be more easily traced and reconstructed at the end of the War or if someone high up took against her and denounced her just like that, or on some intuitive whim; because all those early atrocities were just left in limbo), she probably led a normal existence and never gave much thought to what she had done. She'll be like a lot of women, possibly even cheerful and friendly and nice, with grandchildren she's devoted to, she might even have been a fervent Francoist throughout the dictatorship, and yet none of that will have caused her a flicker of doubt. Many people who were responsible for barbarous acts and crimes against humanity have lived like that quite happily for years; here, and in Germany, in Italy, in France, all of a sudden no one had been a Nazi or a Fascist or a collaborator, everyone had convinced themselves that they hadn't been and would even explain themselves by saying: "No, it wasn't like that for me," that's usually the key phrase. Or else: "Times were different then, you would have to have been there to understand." It is rarely difficult to save yourself from your own conscience if that is what you really want or need to do, still less if that conscience is a shared one, if it's part of a large, collective or even mass conscience, which makes it easier to say: "I wasn't the only one, I wasn't a monster, I was just like everyone else, I wasn't unusual; it was a matter of survival and almost everyone did the same thing, or would have if they'd been born." And people who are religious have it even easier, especially Catholics who have priests to wash clean their sublime regions, their innermost selves, and believe me, the priests here were readier than ever to absolve, to rationalise and to justify whatever vile or cruel deeds their protectors or comrades had committed, bear in mind that they were equally belligerent and egged them on. All that may help, of course, but it isn't even really necessary. People have an incredible capacity willingly to forget the pain they inflicted, to erase their bloody past not just in the eyes of others – their capacity then is infinite, unlimited – but in their own eyes too. To persuade themselves that things were different from the way they actually were, that they did not do what they clearly did do, or that what took place did not take place, and all with their indispensable co-operation. Most of us are past masters at the art of dressing up our own biographies, * or of toning them down, and it's astonishing how easy it is to exile thoughts and bury memories, and to see our sordid or criminal past as a mere dream from whose intense reality we escape as the day progresses, that is, as our life progresses. And yet, on the other hand, after all these years, every time I pass the corner of Alcala and Velazquez, I can't help glancing up at the fourth floor of the building which that woman on the tram, pointed out one morning in 1936, and thinking about that; small, dead child, even though for me the child has no face and no name and even though all I know about him or her are a couple of sinister sentences that chance brought to my ear.’
21
My father fell silent again, and this time I had something to say during the pause. The blue of his eyes seemed to have intensified. I said, in fact, what I had been thinking just before: 'From now on, I might also look at those buildings when I pass that corner, even though I don't know precisely which building it is. Now that I've heard you tell that story, I mean.' He made a gesture with his hand in the air, or, rather, with three fingers, index, middle finger and thumb – the latter accompanying the other two with a slight delay and purely imitatively – as if I had touched on some very ancient matter, long since debated and resolved. Almost as if he were pushing it away or rejecting it as beyond further comment.
'Yes, I know. Perhaps one should never tell anyone anything,' he said. 'I mean, nothing bad. When you children started to arrive, your mother and I asked ourselves the question: how were we going to tell you about what had happened right here, in the country where you lived, only fifteen or twenty years before you came into the world, or even more than that in the case of your sister? It seemed to us that it wasn't something we could tell our children, still less explain, it wasn't explicable even to ourselves who had witnessed it from start to finish. There hadn't been enough time for us to begin to forget, and besides, it was still all too fresh in our minds, the regime made sure of that. There was never any process of psychological healing, no attempt at assuagement, the regime showed a consistent and thoroughly totalitarian lack of generosity, which was evident in every order and in every sphere of life, even the most intangible. I left the decision to her, to your mother, who spent more time with you than I did; you were always more her children than mine, which is why it seems so dreadfully sad that she ended up knowing you far less than I have, for fewer years and only when you were young and, how can I put it, less finished than you are now, although you're all still fairly unfinished, especially you, but don't take that the wrong way. And then there are your children, your siblings' children and yours, whom she never even knew. Anyway, I always felt her decision was the right one. She believed that you should never feel threatened, personally anxious, fearful for yourselves, afraid that something terrible might happen to you, insecure about your daily lives and your actions. That you should all feel protected and safe. But she didn't think it prudent or right that you should know nothing about how the world works, about the kind of thing that can happen or has happened. She thought that if you found out gradually, without going into gruesome, ugly, unnecessary detail, you would be forewarned and better prepared and have more resources with which to deal with life. It also depended, of course, on the questions you asked. She always hated lies. I mean she really did, she couldn't bring herself to tell you that something that was true wasn't. She could tone down or disguise the truth a little, but not deny it. The tendency today is to enclose children in a bubble of foolish happiness and false security, by not bringing them into contact even with the mildly disquieting, and by keeping them ignorant -of fear or even of its existence, indeed, I understand that nowadays you can buy – and that some people actually give or read these to their children – censored, doctored or saccharine' versions of classics like Grimm or Perrault or Andersen, stripped of all the darkness and cruelly, of anything that's threatening and sinister, and probably with all the upsets and deceptions removed. Rank stupidity in my view. Namby-pamby parenting and irresponsible teaching. I consider that a crime of neglect, really, and a dereliction of duty. Because being exposed to other people's fears provides children with a lot of protection; they can imagine it serenely from the background of their own security and can experience it vicariously, through others, especially through fictional characters, like a short-lived contagion which, while only borrowed, is nevertheless not pure fakery. By imagining something you are starting to resist it, and that applies to things that have already happened as welclass="underline" you can withstand misfortunes more easily if, afterwards, after experiencing them, you can manage to imagine them. And, of course, the way most people do this is by talking about them. Not that I think everything could or should be told, far from it, but neither is it admissible to over-falsify the world and send idiots and dimwits out into it who have never known the slightest disappointment or anxiety. Throughout my life, before telling something, I have always tried to gauge what could be told. To whom, how and when. You have to stop and consider what stage or moment in their life the person listening to you has reached, and to bear in mind that what you tell that person will stay with them for ever. It will become incorporated into their knowledge, just as the murder I heard about on a tram became incorporated into mine, even though it was just one of many. And, as you see, I haven't managed to dislodge that story from my knowledge, nor another story from the War which, for example, it never occurred to me to tell your mother at the time, even though she was accustomed to horrors and even though I was in quite a state when I returned home after hearing it. But what is the point, I thought, what is the point of upsetting her with yet another story, now that the War has ended, I'll get over it, I'll forget about it in time without having to share or pass the burden on to her. And I did slowly get over it, because one does get over almost everything. But I've never forgotten it, that would be too much to hope for, how could I? This particular gift was given to me by a notorious Falangist writer who later ceased to be a Falangist, as most of them did, and, can you believe it, during Franco's latter years, never mind after his death, the man had the gall to pretend he was a veteran of the Left, and people swallowed it too. They weren't ignorant people either, but journalists and politicians. And so, with Spain 's characteristic ethical superficiality, he was always celebrated, under two different flags.’