‘Don’t worry, Clara,’ I whispered, hugging her still, ‘if you don’t want to know, I won’t say anything. I love you too, I’ll always love you ... little mouse, little mouse ...’
At this, she looked up at me and smiled, we hugged again and I got to my feet.
‘Please, Alvaro, don’t go in to see Mamá ...’ I closed my eyes so as not to have to look at her piteous, pleading face. ‘Not today, wait for a while. She’s seventy years old and she’s not well, Papá’s death has been very hard on her, and now all this ...’ I opened my eyes and saw that her expression hadn’t changed. ‘That’s why I came, to make sure you were all right, and to ask you, to beg you, not to upset Mamá. Please, Álvaro ...’
I took my sister’s hands in mine, and answered her in a firm voice. I was completely calm because I had known from the beginning, long before I arrived at La Moraleja, that I would hear these words, that someone would come and say these words, would hand me on a plate this perfect excuse, this ideal alibi.
‘I haven’t come to upset Mamá, Clara, I just want to talk to her, that’s all. I just want to hear her side of the story.’
‘But there’s no rush, is there?’ Clara looked at me again and with a great deal of effort managed to smile. ‘Nothing’s going to change if you wait for a week or two, just so you have time to calm down, to think about what you’re doing ... This is all ancient history, Alvaro, it happened long before we were born. I’m not asking you not to talk to Mamá. I’m just asking you to wait for a while till things calm down, the whole situation with Mai and this woman, and Rafa ...’
‘I can’t wait, Clara.’ I was still calm. ‘I have to get it over with once and for all, so I can get on with my life, so I can go back to being a normal person ... It’s not about Mamá, or you. It’s about what I am, what I’ll be when I come through this.’ What I was about to say was so obvious that I did not even stop to think of the consequences. ‘You have the right not to know, but I have the right to know.’
‘No, Alvaro,’ her voice and her expression hardened, ‘you have no right to hurt her, to tell her all these horrible things about Papá, to hurt us. And you have hurt us, you know, all of us, and for what? That woman has saddled you with all this guilt and now you want to play the hero, that’s all this is, and you have no right ...’
‘What I have, Clara, is no guilt, none at all.’ She didn’t understand, but I continued. ‘I haven’t hurt anyone, or robbed anyone, I haven’t informed on anyone or betrayed ...’
‘La-la-la-la!’ She took a quick breath and began to scream, ‘La-la-la-la-!’
Eyes tight shut, her fingers in her ears, my sister stood there screaming. It was another of her strategies, like sitting on the porch steps, neither inside nor outside, or making something she had broken disappear. She didn’t want to listen, and I didn’t want to talk any more, although I still had one or two things to say. I knew that my mother would not fall apart, her heart was not going to stop just because I talked to her, and that was all that mattered. But Clara did not want to hear, so I left her standing there, though her voice piped up just as I was about to step through the door.
‘Wait for me, Alvaro.’ She ran her fingers through her hair, tugged at her skirt and rubbed her eyes.
Together we went into the neat, deserted house. The sun streamed in, across the polished floor of the hall. At the far end of the room, sitting on a sofa with her back to the light, Mamá watched us come in. Her legs were crossed, her hands lay casually in her lap, and as we approached her, she sighed.
‘Leave us alone, Clara.’
My mother’s heart was not about to stop simply because I talked to her, this much I knew, but I had not expected her to smile at me, or to repeat her order in a calm, almost pleasant voice.
‘I want to talk to Alvaro alone, Clara.’
‘But, Mamá ...’
‘Why don’t you go and wait in the garden? Lisette took the children out a few minutes ago. The weather is beautiful, why don’t you make the most of it?’
My sister looked from Mamá to me then turned away without saying a word.
‘Close the door on your way out, darling ...’
She waited until we were truly alone, then she smiled and said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to kiss me?’
‘Of course, Mamá ...’
As I walked over, I noticed her jewellery, the sheen of her silk blouse, the almost geometric perfection with which her skirt lay across the sofa like a well-trained pet. Her hair was salon perfect and there was a touch of blusher on her cheeks. My mother had dressed up and put on make-up in preparation for my visit, but her actions meant something different from the grey suit, the shirt and tie I was wearing. Seeing her, I felt bewildered, lost in the confusion of my expectations, and I surrendered to her authority with the same meek docility I had had when I was a child.
‘You’ve gone to a lot of trouble just to visit.’ She was not smiling now, but her face still seemed relaxed, pleasant. ‘You know how much I love it when you wear a suit.’ She gestured to the nearest armchair. ‘Sit down. I’ve been expecting you.’
We looked at each other as though we were strangers, as though we needed to weigh each other up, and I wondered who this woman was, this woman who had always been my mother. I realised that if my mother’s attitude was not like mine, it was also not like that of my brothers or sisters. When I had met Clara on the steps, I had not paid much attention to what she was wearing, but I could remember now, her hair was caught up with an elastic hairband, her boots were dirty and spattered with mud. ‘You’ve hurt us, all of us,’ Clara had said, and I knew this was true, that it had been painful for Julio to speak to me, more painful still for Rafa, that Angelica had not slept all night and that Clara too had suffered, sitting alone here in the garden. According to the basic measurement by which we, her children, calculated suffering, being alone, a widow, old and defenceless put my mother at the pinnacle of the scale. But it was beginning to look as if the five Carrion Otero children had made the same mistake.
I had not taken on my mother’s pain, I hadn’t wanted to think about it. I had decided to leave it until last, the vague, fabulous moment when I could tell myself it was finally over, that it was time to draw a line on the ground, jump over it, and start again on the other side. I hadn’t wanted to calculate my mother’s suffering, her despair, to measure it against my guilt, because if I had, I would have been unable to move. I was going to be a good man, a brave man, an honourable man, and maybe I was wrong, but I was doing what I felt I had to do, and I was doing it out of love.
I knew that my mother was a strong woman, a hard woman, that she would not fall apart or break down in tears, but the scene as I had imagined it was very different, and the absence of anxiety, pain or bitterness made it impossible for me to interpret what I was seeing. Her calm seemed almost offensive, it unsettled me, so much so that for a moment I thought perhaps it was not just her, not just me, that it was not just us, because I could not know how many times and in how many rooms this scene had been played out. As I realised this, I suspected that it had been my biggest mistake, my greatest miscalculation, because things were not simply different to how they appeared, they were often the complete opposite, and this had to be the result of some phenomenon, some variable that I had not allowed for in my calculations. This was why, until this moment, it had not occurred to me that what to the rest of us was a tragedy might to her be nothing more than an irritating nuisance.
Optics is a paradoxical science. Often, distance makes it easier to focus, heightens our ability to distinguish the shape or volume of an object, just as sometimes proximity can be a hindrance to unaccustomed eyes, but these rules apply to things, we cannot apply them to people.
I did not have time to develop this thought since my mother got in before me, answering a question I had not yet asked her.
‘Your Aunt Teresa, your father’s sister, lives in Germany ...’ She paused, to leave me the opportunity to say something, but I could say nothing, so she carried on in the same simple tone. ‘Well, I suppose she might be dead now, we haven’t heard from her since about 1978 ... At the end of the war she was in Algeria. Your grandmother managed to get her on to a boat leaving for Oran with one of the sisters of the man she was living with, and she stayed there. Then, after the Second World War, she married a Spanish man who had been a prisoner in one of the Nazi camps in French Africa. They had children, I don’t know how many, and they stayed in Oran until Algeria became independent. Then they lived in France for a while, and some time in the mid-sixties they moved to Germany. They settled in one of the big cities, I don’t remember which, Stuttgart, maybe, or Düsseldorf, her husband worked for Volkswagen. Your father hadn’t heard from her since he came back from Russia, but after Franco died, when the exiles started to come home, he found out through some Spanish Republican organisation, some men who had been building railways in the Sahara or something like that, I don’t really remember ...’
She talked and I listened, forcing myself to take it all in, to remember every word, all this information I had not asked for.
‘Anyway, Teresa’s husband had been one of them, some of the men who came back remembered his wife, and they gave your father her address. Papá wrote her a long letter, telling her about his life, saying he would like to see her again. She wrote back straight away. Half a page. She told him what I’ve just told you, that she was fine, that she didn’t need anything, that her children had grown up and married and were living in Germany, that if her brother hadn’t thought about her for forty years, she didn’t know why he was bothering now. That was it.’
She looked at me again, her lips curling into a strange, indeterminate expression that looked as though it might be a laugh, an expression of surprise or one of disdain.
‘I thought maybe she had some strange idea. Papá thought it would be useful to have sister who was communist, I don’t know, something stupid like that ... Her letter was so short, so curt, that he didn’t write back. I could tell you he was upset, but that would be a lie. The truth is I didn’t understand why he had written to her in the first place, and I still don’t. They hadn’t seen each other since your father was fifteen and she was twelve ... But one night, he was watching an interview with a writer living in exile, and they showed all these photos, and footage of people crossing the border. Suddenly your father got up and said, “I’m going to look for my sister.” “Your sister?” I said. “Why?” but he didn’t answer. He just went ahead and did what he wanted, as he always did, you know what he was like.’
‘But you never said anything to us about it.’ My voice sounded as if I had not spoken for years.
‘Of course not,’ my mother looked surprised, ‘why would I have said anything to you? If your father’s sister had shown up, it would have been different. He wanted her to come and meet you all, he suddenly felt sentimental, you wouldn’t believe it, afterwards he could hardly believe it himself ... Papá never talked about it, but I think he often thought about his mother ... It had been so long and we’d had no word from them, then suddenly,’ there was a note of irritation in her voice, ‘suddenly it was republicans this and republicans that, dead republicans and exiles in Mexico, France, Argentina, the children of Russia, the children of Belgium, it was republicans all day long, in the papers, in magazines, on television ... It was boring beyond belief, it was like there’d never been another war and we were somehow guilty of something ... Anyway, your father got it into his head to look for his sister, but when he got that letter, it was obvious she wanted nothing to do with him. We never heard from her again. Nor did we want to.’
‘Why are you telling me this now?’
‘Because it’s the only thing you don’t know, isn’t it?’ She folded her arms and we looked at each other. ‘And because it’s the only thing I’m going to tell you.’
In the silence that followed, I realised that nothing had changed, nothing had trembled or hardened inside her. She remained motionless for a moment, as though posing for a portrait, but then Clara’s oldest son, who had been playing football with his brother, came up to the window, tapped on the glass and mouthed ‘Cuckoo! Grandma!’ My mother shifted, turned towards the window and waved, pursing her lips again and again to blow kisses to him. She went on waving and blowing kisses to Fran until Iñigo noticed and ran up to the window too, and I thought about Clara, Rafa, Angelica and Julio, I thought about my son, my nephews, about all the children yet to be born, about my father, his money, this house, and I thought about my mother. Suddenly I felt there was no air, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t spend another minute in this room. But the children ran away again as quickly as they had appeared and their grandmother regained her composure.
I needed to talk, I knew I owed it to her but I could not bring myself to do so, I didn’t dare ask her to suffer, and yet this was the only thing that my mother could do for me, the only thing that would have comforted me, would have reconciled me to my name, my past and their past, to the love that I could not pluck from my memory.
I should have spoken, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, only to think them. ‘Suffer, Mamá, please,’ I repeated it to myself once, twice, three times, ‘suffer just a little, for Clara, the little girl out there all alone as — little mouse, little mouse, will you marry me — the whole world comes crashing down around her. Suffer for Rafa, suffer for him, Mamá, because his face is a bloody mess and he has a prosthesis in his nose because of me, because of you, because he stood up for you, suffer just a little, Mamá, even if it’s only for Julio, the one who says he doesn’t suffer, who doesn’t take life seriously, he was always your favourite, and mine, suffer once and for all, Mamá, please, for Angelica who’s torn apart by this, torn between what she thinks she should think and what she can’t help feeling, suffer for her, Mamá, and suffer for me too, even if I am the most ungrateful, the most cruel, of your children, suffer for the terrible loneliness you’ve condemned me to.’