‘Are you men or are you girls?’ Another image of Spain. He would stand there, his cassock buttoned up while I shivered like a freshly sheared lamb in the fine cold drizzle of sleet. ‘What are you - men or girls?’ I never joined in the enthusiastic chorus shouting ‘Men!’ because there was only one thought running through my head: ‘You bastard, Aizpuru, you fucking bastard’. Naive as I was, I tried to get my own back at the age of sixteen, as I sat stony faced through Friday mass, refusing to pray, to sing, to kneel, ‘fuck you, Aizpuru, it’s your fault that I lost my faith’. Until finally he phoned my mother, called her into school after class and had a long chat with her. He told her to keep an eye on me. ‘Álvarito isn’t like his brothers,’ he said, ‘he’s sensitive, headstrong, he’s weaker. Oh, he’s a good lad, a first-rate student, responsible and clever too - maybe too clever for a boy his age. That’s what worries me. Boys like that develop unhealthy friendships, that’s why I think it might be best for you to keep an eye on him, keep him busy.’ That night my mother sat on the edge of my bed, ran her fingers through my hair, and without looking at me, said: ‘Alvaro,
hijo
, you do like girls, don’t you?’ ‘Of course, Mamá, I like girls a lot.’ She heaved a sigh, kissed me and left the room. She never asked me about my sexual orientation again and never said a word to my father. I graduated top of my class, with the same refrain still ringing in my head, ‘you fucking bastard, Aizpuru, you fucking bastard’, never suspecting that years later I would realise that he was right, not me.
‘Álvaro,
hijo
, I know you didn’t want to wear a suit and tie today, but please, I’m begging you, at least be pleasant to Father Aizpuru . . .’ This was the one thing my mother had asked of me that morning, so I’d made sure I was the first to shake his hand so that my somewhat frosty greeting would be forgotten in the exaggerated fuss my brothers Rafa and Julio would make of him, hugging the fat old man, who ruffled their hair, kissed them on both cheeks, all of them blubbering and crying. The Marist brotherhood of brotherly love, ‘I have two mothers, one here on earth, the other in heaven’. A clever piece of bullshit. I said as much to Mai and received a swift kick for my pains. Clearly, my mother here on earth had had a word with my wife.
Father Aizpuru was right, I wasn’t like my brothers, but I was a good lad, always. I’d never been a problem child, never caused trouble the way they had. In the innumerate, unscientific world I’d grown up in, my better-than-average flair for mental arithmetic had bestowed on me a mythical intelligence that even I did not believe I possessed. Yes, I’m a theoretical physicist, and that’s a job title that causes a few raised eyebrows when people first hear it. Until they discover what it means in reality - a professor’s salary and no prospect of becoming what they would consider to be rich and important. That’s when they realise the truth - that I’m just a normal guy. At least I was until that morning when my one phobia - my morbid aversion to funerals - propelled my mind from the profound, universal grief of the survivor into a curious state of heightened awareness. It probably had something to do with the pill Angélica had given me at breakfast. ‘You haven’t cried, Álvaro,’ she said. ‘Here, take this, it’ll help.’ She was right, I hadn’t cried - I rarely cry, almost never. I didn’t ask my sister what the pill was - and maybe my detachment was simply down to me refusing to deal with my grief - but as I stood there feeling strangely alert I turned my gaze from the fat, fleshy knees of the women from Torrelodones to the faces of my own family.
There they stood, and suddenly it was as though I didn’t know them. Father Aizpuru was still blethering on, my mother was staring out towards the horizon, the sea-blue eyes of a young woman set in an old woman’s face, her skin so translucent, so fine, it seemed as though it might split from all the wrinkling, folding and fanning out. My mother’s character was not in her wrinkles, however, but in her eyes, which seemed so gentle yet could be so harsh, their shrewdness masked by the innocence of their colour; when she laughed they were beautiful but when she was angry, they flared with a purer, bluer light. My mother was still a handsome woman, but when she was young Angélica Otero Fernández had been a beauty, a fantasy - blonde, pale, exotic. ‘Your family must be from somewhere in Soria,’ my father used to say to her. ‘You have Iberian blood in you, they have blond hair and pale eyes . . .’ ‘Julio,’ my mother would say, ‘you know perfectly well that my father is from Lugo in Galicia, and my mother is from Madrid.’ ‘That may be, but somewhere in the distant past. Either that or your father had Celtic blood,’ he insisted, unable to think of any other reason for the superiority of my mother’s genes, which had produced a string of pale, blond, blue-eyed children; a string broken only once, when I was born.
‘Gypsy’, my brothers used to call me, and my father would hug me and tell them to shut up. ‘Don’t pay them any attention, Álvaro, you take after me, see?’ In time, that fact became increasingly obvious. Father Aizpuru had been right, I wasn’t like my brothers, I didn’t even look like them. I glanced over at Rafa, the eldest, forty-seven - six years older than me - still blond, although he was now almost bald. He stood next to my mother, stiff and serious, conscious of the solemnity of the occasion. Rafa was a tall man, with broad shoulders in proportion to his height and a pot belly that stuck out from his skinny frame. Julio was three years younger but looked almost like his twin, though age had been kinder to him. Between them came Angélica - now Dr Carrión - who had extraordinary green eyes and who envied me my dark complexion, since she had pale, delicate skin that burned easily. The mysteries of the Otero/Fernández bloodlines had produced better results in the female of the species than the male. My brothers were not particularly handsome, but both my sisters were beautiful and Clara, the youngest, was stunning. She too was blonde, but her eyes were the colour of honey. Then there was me. In the street, at school, in the park, I looked completely unremarkable, but at home I was totally out of place, as though I were from another planet. Four years after Julio was born and five years before Clara, along I came, with my black hair, dark eyes and dark skin, narrow shoulders, hairy legs, big hands, and a flat stomach - the lost Carrión, shorter than my brothers, barely as tall as my sisters, different.
On the day of my father’s funeral, I hadn’t yet realised how painful that difference would turn out to be. Father Aizpuru went on murmuring and the wind went on blowing. ‘You should have been in Russia, or Poland . . .’ my father would have said, because it was cold, I felt cold, in spite of my scarf, my gloves, my boots, I felt cold even though I had my hands in my pockets and my coat buttoned up, even though I wasn’t blond and fair skinned, even though I wasn’t like my brothers. They felt the cold too, but they hid it well, they stood to attention, hands clasped over their coats, exactly as my father must have stood at the last funeral he attended. He would have worn that same expression - so different from the patient resignation I saw in the eyes of Anselmo and Encarnita, who were in no hurry, who no longer expected to be surprised, bowed only by time, drawing strength from their terrible weariness so that they could look reluctantly on the lives of others. This, I thought, was what my father had lost when his life diverged from theirs. He had been luckier than they had because although money does not make for a happy life, curiosity does; because although city life is dangerous, it is never boring; because if power can corrupt, it can also be wielded with restraint. My father had had a great deal of power and a great deal of money in his life and had died without ever being reduced to the vegetable, the mineral state of these men, these women he had known as a child, and who, at the moment of his final farewell, had come to claim him as one of them.
He was not one of them. He had not been one of them for a long time. That was why I was so moved to see them, huddled together on the far side of the grave, not daring to mingle with us, Julito Carrión’s widow and his children. If I had not stared at them, had not accepted the quiet challenge of their bare knees, the coarse woollen jackets, perhaps I might not have noticed what happened next. But I was still staring at them, wondering whether they had noticed that I didn’t look like my brothers, when Father Aizpuru stopped talking, and, turning to look at me, spoke the terrible words: ‘If the family would like to come forward.’
Until that moment, I had not been aware of the silence; then I heard the sound of a car in the distance and was relieved as its dull roar masked the dirty clang of the shovels digging into the earth, the harsh grating that seemed to rebuke me, the cowardly son, Father Aizpuru’s unruly pupil. ‘If the family would like to come forward,’ he had said, but I didn’t move. Mai glanced at me, squeezed my hand. I shook my head and she went over to join the others. Next come the ropes, I thought, the wheezing and panting of the gravediggers, the brutal indignity of the coffin banging against the walls of the grave, but I heard none of this as the profane, reassuring sound of the engine drew closer, then suddenly stopped just as the shovels finished their work.
There were not many of us, but we weren’t expecting anyone else. And yet someone had turned up now, at precisely the wrong moment.
‘What will you have, Mamá?’
‘Nothing,
hijo
.’
‘Mamá, you have to eat something . . .’
‘Not now, Julio.’
‘Well, I’ll have the
fabada
, and then after that . . .’
‘Clara!’
‘What? I’m pregnant. I’m eating for two.’
‘Let her have whatever she wants. Everyone has to grieve in their own way.’
‘Really? In that case I’ll have the eel.’
‘Don’t even think about it!’
‘But Papá, Aunt Angélica said . . .’
‘I don’t care what Aunt Angélica said, you’re not having eel and that’s final.’
‘Has everyone decided what they’re having?’
‘Yes. The boys will have lamb chops’ - my nephews snorted but didn’t dare to argue - ‘I’ll take care of the main courses. Mamá, at least have some soup.’
‘I don’t want soup, Rafa.’
‘Have a starter, then.’
‘No, Rafa.’
‘Tell her, Angélica . . .’
‘Can I say something?’
‘What is it, Julia?’
‘Well, you said the boys had to have lamb chops, but I’m a girl and I want garlic chicken.’
‘OK, all those who want chicken put up their hands . . .’
My sister-in-law, Isabel, assuming her husband’s rights as the firstborn, took over and, ignoring the waiter, started to count hands; everyone fell silent as if someone had pressed ‘Pause’ on a film we had seen a thousand times: the Carrión Otero Family Meal, twelve adults - only eleven now - and eleven children, soon to be twelve.
‘Mamá, who was that girl who showed up at the end ?’
There was a long silence.
‘What girl ?’ My mother threw the question back at me.
‘What are you having, Álvaro? I haven’t got you down here.’
‘Be quiet a minute, Isabel.’ Mamá’s blue eyes sparkled with curiosity. ‘What girl, Alvaro?’
‘There was a girl, about Clara’s age, tall, dark, with long straight hair . . . She turned up right at the end in a car, but she stayed by the cemetery gate. She was wearing trousers, huge sunglasses and a raincoat. You didn’t see her ?’
No one else had seen her. She had crept slowly into the cemetery, stepping carefully so that her high-heeled boots wouldn’t sink into the mud, yet she wasn’t looking at the ground or the sky, she was looking straight ahead, or rather, she was allowing herself to be looked at. She walked across the recently mown grass as though walking down a red carpet; there was something in her bearing, in the way she moved, shoulders relaxed, arms gently swinging as she walked, utterly different from the involuntary, inevitable, almost theatrical stiffness common to mourners at a funeral, even if they did not really know the deceased. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could see her mouth; her lips were slightly parted, serene, almost smiling, though she did not actually smile. She drew level with me and stopped, far from the fur coats and the coarse wool jackets. Perhaps she knew I was her only witness, the only one who had noticed her, the only one who would later remember having seen her, perhaps not.
‘I thought maybe she worked with you?’ I turned to my brother Rafa, my brother Julio. ‘Maybe she was once Papá’s secretary or - I don’t know - maybe she worked for the estate agents.’
‘If she had, she would have come over and said something.’ Rafa looked from me to Julio, who nodded. ‘I certainly didn’t mention the funeral to anyone at the office.’
‘Neither did I.’
‘Well . . . I don’t know. But I did see her. Maybe she knew Dad better than she knew us, perhaps she was a nurse at the hospital, someone who looked after him? Or she didn’t feel comfortable coming over to talk to us . . .’
But these were things I had thought of afterwards to try to justify her departure, which had been as sudden and inexplicable as her arrival. At first, I stupidly thought that she had made a mistake, she hadn’t known there was a funeral and had some other reason for being in that small, remote cemetery on that cold Thursday morning in March. It wasn’t just her attitude, the studied casualness of a woman with no particular place to go, a woman who simply wants to be seen. There was something worryingly incongruous about her presence at my father’s funeral. Those present fell into two diametrically opposed groups: the people my father had known as a child, and those he had known as an adult. This woman was young, well dressed, wrapped up warmly, yet in spite of her expensive boots, her hair was loose and she was wearing no make-up. If she had been related to Anselmo or Encarnita - or to any of the people of Torrelodones - she would have gone over and said something to them. But she didn’t. Instead, she had opened her handbag, taken out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, lit one, taken off her sunglasses and stared at me.