1

My mother’s last letter arrived three months after her death. When I opened the postbox and collected the day’s mail, among all the letters from the bank and the advertising leaflets, I was surprised to see an envelope with my address printed in block letters. I read the opening sentence (that unusual and unsettling “Dear Son”) and turned the handwritten page over. I confirmed that the message ended with the nervous, Gothic features of my mother’s signature, picked up the envelope again and searched for a return address, but there wasn’t one.

To begin with, I calculated she must have posted the letter shortly before dying and the letter had been sitting in post offices for the last three months, but when I paid attention to the postmark, I realized the letter had suffered no delay between being deposited in a postbox in Pontevedra and reaching my hands in London. At this point, I started to think that the paper I held in front of me was a posthumous act with which my mother intended to interfere in my life.

I had to admit, as well, that this gesture was quite in keeping with the attitude I had observed in her during the last months of her life. Something that had arisen as a result of her learning about her illness. I remember when she told me, she did so without any of the petty insults or fierce ironies with which she was in the habit of rebuking my decisions. This time, she opted to call me in London and ask in a serene voice when I was planning to pay her a visit. Given that she didn’t reveal her motive or even hint that the question contained an element of urgency, I postponed the meeting for another month.

When I finally paid her a visit one weekend, the message with which she received me was like a whiplash across the back.

“I only have a few months to live,” she informed me in a neutral, almost distant tone, as if referring to someone she didn’t hold in high esteem.

She observed the way her statement had rooted me to the spot and continued with a lament that was more dispassionate than anguished.

“I’m just sorry I won’t be able to do what I’d been planning for years,” she said.

“And what was that?”

“Something I wanted to write. You’re not the only one who writes in this family.”

I knew all about my mother’s passion for reading, but I wasn’t aware that she harboured an interest in writing. After this confession, I wanted to learn more about the nature of what she was writing and how important it was that she finish it, but my mother was evasive when fielding my questions. She played down the importance of the desire she had just divulged and immediately directed the conversation towards the book she was reading, a novel by Dickens.

Then we talked about her illness. I tried to give her some encouragement. I added that I would come to be with her every weekend that my activities allowed, but when she heard this promise, some of her old energy seemed to surface in her reply.

“I don’t want you here every weekend,” she said. “There are things I have to put in order and I need some time, without people coming to bother me.”

That was my mother down to a T. Someone who, instead of politely explaining to her son that she would prefer to be alone so she could see to her affairs, opts for a caustic remark that banishes any chance of people interfering in the final stage of her existence. What was I to do? What I ended up doing, which was return to London and see what possibilities there were of paying a visit with prudent, restrained phone calls in which I was forced to interpret her words and silences with the utmost caution.

My mother. The Indomitable. Never, as in those days, did I curse a family situation that obliged me to confront the situation without the intimate communion of blood ties. I had no brother or sister I could call to exchange impressions and offer support during the irreversible process. Those relatives who were closest to the patient (her physical state had taken hold of any distinguishing features in her human condition) were her nephews and niece – Rubén, Pablo and Cristina – but no sooner had I hinted at the possibility of letting them know than she ruled it out at once.

“I don’t want obligatory visits or false commiseration,” she said that first day. “From now on, I’m only here for you and Elena.”

The next four months offered little change with regard to the natural progression of her illness. Every fortnight, on a Friday or a Saturday, I would catch the plane in London and return to Pontevedra, where I would spend two or three days, having lunch with my mother and walking around the city. Like everybody else who has been used to living on their own for years, she considered the presence of a human being in the private sphere of her life an intrusion which she tolerated with more resignation than happiness. Our meetings during those last few months, therefore, were as frequent as she chose them to be.

All the same, I have to admit on each of my visits the moment I pressed the doorbell of her apartment returned us both to an affectionate feeling that, in my case, I could scarcely remember. While we were enjoying the tranquillity of a park or having lunch in a restaurant in the old quarter, my mother would conduct long, extended conversations on some theme. The first few times, I was afraid the conversations would focus on her health, but I soon realized this concern was superfluous. In the same way she hid the most visible effects of the treatment on her body, the wrinkled face and loss of hair, with a light layer of make-up and an ostentatious blue hat, she also seemed to cover any temptation to have worried thoughts with a cloth of words on aspects of the surrounding reality.

I can hardly say her attitude surprised me. If there was something that characterized my mother, it was the tranquillity with which she accepted events. Something she was capable of mixing with an iron will that was rarely defeated before achieving its objectives. As for the final verdict represented by her diagnosis, one might say she acquiesced with exemplary serenity. There were times she even seemed to forget the limited extension of time at her disposal. Probably we both forced ourselves to forget this in order not to turn our meetings into scenes of premature mourning prior to the inevitable event, which took place seven months after it was first announced.

Her death handed me the responsibility of taking charge of her property in Pontevedra. My plan was to close the bookshop, which had been her occupation, but was now a business without profit, and to sell her apartment as soon as the housing market improved a little.

These were the goals I had set myself when I received her final letter after three months. As soon as I read it, I felt an unexpected door was opening through which a past I thought was definitely closed, or on the verge of being so, threatened to enter. During the days that followed, I couldn’t help rereading it over and over again.

Dear Son,

I know I wasn’t a model mother to you. There must have been many moments in your life when you missed my presence or words that might have given you some encouragement in what you were aiming for, or else perhaps some comprehension and affection when you made a mistake or felt alone. I didn’t do this, and I’m not going to ask your forgiveness now for my attitude or seek a reconciliation that will be too late. You know that’s not the way I do things. Nor do I especially believe that posthumous redemption can be obtained by the simple merit of asking for it. To confess now that the whole of my relationship with you, however cold and distant it may have seemed, was guided by a wish to make you stronger so you could lead your life with greater success is no consolation to me. Nor does the thought that with the opposite attitude I may have caused you irreparable harm take away the sorrow I feel at contemplating such a perverse outcome. None of that can be helped. But there are still things it is in my hands to correct.

One day, some weeks ago, we had a conversation in which I told you everybody hides the truth about their life. I knew very well what I was talking about. That’s right. There are many things in my life you don’t know about. In your current capacity as a father, I am sure this is a situation that will evoke your immediate understanding. The kind of stories I never told you, however, will not let me leave this life without offering you the chance to unearth them. This is a decision I have been pondering for years, but only succeeded in taking a few weeks ago, not without enormous doubt and wavering. I just hope I haven’t made a mistake. That is why I have taken the precaution of leaving it up to you whether you go down the path I am showing you – or not.

In this house of mine in Pontevedra, so full of books and papers of all kinds, in the trunk in the library, among my things, you will find several handwritten pages. That is where I wrote down the memory of some particularly significant episodes in my life. I started doing this a few years ago, but without any constancy or fixed order. Simply, whenever I had the time and peace of mind and disposed of the energy, I would confront this task. The uncertainty of my proposal, together with the lack of conviction that almost always overwhelmed me whenever I undertook the task, will explain why the result is fragmentary and necessarily incomplete. And yet I dare to venture that the facts I reveal will not leave you feeling indifferent. That is why I offer you this final warning: do not read them if what you want is to continue enjoying a peaceful life in which the past is simply the exemplary history you have known until now. In that case, you have my permission to gather my papers and destroy them without the slightest hint of remorse. On the other hand, if you decide to read what they say, it is highly likely a sense of unease will disturb your sleep at night and, in the daytime, pose questions you will find difficult to answer. All knowledge comes at a price, although not everybody is prepared to pay it.

There is nothing left for me to say. I am writing this letter in one of the last moments of lucidity remaining to me, no doubt. If my will is respected, you will receive this letter three months after my death. I consider it necessary for you to have this margin of time so that the decision you take with regard to what I have just told you is not influenced by the emotion of an absence that is all too recent. I will only add that I have always loved you and wish you a happy life in keeping with what you desire to be in each moment.

Your mother.

2

The first sign that showed that the decision was irreversible, and the journey without return, was not losing sight of land or the last boats working at the mouth of the estuary disappearing, but the absence of seagulls flying over the ocean liner’s deck.

They had set sail from the port of Vigo shortly after three. Around mid-morning, Amaro Carreira had located the emigration agent thanks to the slogans a young boy was shouting through a megaphone, next to the large gate of the harbour installations. “Francisco Cameselle, emigration agent, would his clients please come here?” the boy insisted on roaring. Next to him was a dark, elegant, serious-looking man in a suit who kept glancing in all directions at the mass of people in sombre clothes that had gathered in front of the installations. This must have been Francisco Cameselle himself. At one point, Amaro heard him tell the boy to clamber up the railings and shout through the megaphone from the top so that those at the back could hear him.

For months, Francisco Cameselle’s network in Galician towns and villages had provided an outlet for the ambitions of desperadoes with the drive and verve to escape misery by crossing the ocean. One of his agents, a man by the name of Ramón who had a hardware store in Carballeda, had taken charge of all the paperwork that had led Amaro to the port of Vigo.

That day, having made contact with Francisco Cameselle, he joined the group of about a hundred people, men, women and children, sitting waiting on trunks, up against the railings of the port. For Amaro, who was alone and had undertaken the ceremony of saying farewell to his parents and sister the day before in Limeres, thirty miles inland, the acts he had to carry out from then on amounted to a kind of theatrical performance: following the aforesaid Francisco Cameselle in a long line to the customs building, collecting their papers, handing over the ticket and climbing the gangway to the balcony of the first deck, which was heaving with passengers. With the same light and carefree conscience, he later contemplated the final hugs and definitive goodbyes from the metal railing, as the ship pulled away from the quay.

He was glad to be leaving. For the first time in recent hours, he was no different from those around him. He shared with all of them an identical sense of helplessness, their only point of reference being the orders of the crew. That was the first thing he thought when all eyes abandoned the east and began to turn towards the west. But he was wrong. The ocean liner had already called in at the ports of Bilbao and Gijón, and Amaro soon understood that by this stage everybody around him seemed to have a mooring they could hold on to that would prevent them being pulled under the waves of nostalgia. Most of the travellers remained in groups, talking amongst themselves in different languages, as in some enormous, cosmopolitan market. He worked out that some of them were groups of friends, all youngsters of the same age. Others were neighbours, and there were also some families, parents with two or three young children. He was the only one who seemed to be travelling on his own, without knowing anybody and without having a relationship with the other passengers.

This is how he spent the first two days. Lunch and dinner at the long tables inside the vast dining room did not provide him with an opportunity to strike up a conversation. The first day, he sat among a group of French people. One of them, a man with blond hair and clear eyes, asked him a question he couldn’t understand and, when he realized Amaro didn’t speak his language, he didn’t address him again. The second day, he had dinner next to a family of Asturians who seemed more intent on getting their food down than on holding a conversation.

On the third day, he had better luck. The time between meals Amaro spent wandering up and down the deck, an observer pushing his way through the huddles of noisome travellers. There were plenty of young people about, but some were older than him, folk in their twenties travelling in groups, while others were only just in their teens and were accompanied by parents or older siblings. At eighteen, he was the only island that didn’t form part of an archipelago.

After two days of drifting among those thousand bodies, his eyes were searching for a kindred spirit to liberate him from the surrounding indifference. He found one that very evening, under the guise of a young man in trousers and a linen jacket with close-cropped hair and a gaze fixed on the horizon, where the sun was going down. Amaro silently went up to him and, leaning his elbows on the railing, started to observe the immeasurable blue.

Half an hour later, neither had moved, but each now knew the most important information about the other’s life. Amaro had discovered that his companion was called Gabino, he was eighteen and, contrary to his initial impression, he wasn’t alone on the ship, but in the company of his parents and two sisters called Candela and Adriana, who were seventeen and fifteen respectively. They were from Bueu and had taken the decision to board that ship three months earlier, after his father’s small fishing vessel had sunk one stormy night near the island of Ons. Of the five sailors who made up the crew, his father had been one of two to save his life by swimming to the island without stopping. All the same, his life was the only thing he’d saved. With the disappearance of the boat, he had not only lost the means by which he supported his family, but in a couple of months he would also lose the very house they inhabited. Having to put up with the humiliation of the seizure and public auction of the house to pay off the loan with which he’d bought the boat was the final episode in a run of bad luck which Dionisio, Gabino’s father, had decided to bring to an end with this change of air that was taking them all more than seven thousand miles away from their point of origin.

In contrast to Gabino’s, Amaro’s story was simple and straightforward, lacking in fateful events. His parents worked the land. They were tenants on a few plots that barely sustained the five members of his family, who inhabited a stone hovel riddled with leaks.

This would have been his own destiny had Grandpa Eduardo not begun to light up the path of escape. In slow conversations, every day, while they took a siesta, lying next to each other in the same bed in the attic, Amaro’s grandfather didn’t stop telling him he had to do the same as other young neighbours who had stuffed a few things into a trunk one day, hugged their relatives and set off without looking back. It took Grandpa Eduardo three years to finally convince him. Even so, Amaro had left with the thought that he would return one day, unlike the other neighbours.

“I’m never going back,” remarked Gabino when Amaro stopped talking. “I’m going to be reborn in the belly of this boat.”

For a moment, Amaro smiled at this strange way of talking his new companion had. But Gabino did not alter his discourse. He explained he was leaving everything he had been behind. Three days earlier, the timid child who went to school and whom the teacher gave as an example in front of his classmates, the boy who sometimes went to sea with his father, the man whom many mothers in the town had started viewing as a succulent future for their daughters, had died. During the three weeks of their voyage, he would be nothing more than a foetus in formation, a being out of time. That was what filled him with hope, he declared. That was the source of strength that distinguished him from all those hundreds of downcast, melancholy people who would never detach themselves from their places of origin or the lives they had led until that moment.

“I’m even thinking of not calling myself Gabino anymore,” he said. “If I want, I can call myself Tino or Lucas or Ambrosio. The name I wish to tell the world will be my own from now on.”

Amaro did not agree with his way of thinking, but the energy and conviction that were ever present in his words exerted a strong influence on him. When it came time for dinner, Gabino asked him to join his parents and sisters at the end of a long table next to the metal wall of the vast dining room. The cod stew and vegetables he had barely touched on the first evening, and had swallowed with distaste on the second, Amaro now gobbled down while listening to Dionisio’s conversation.

“Starting from zero, without being familiar with the environment we’re going to be in, that will involve keeping all five senses on the alert,” remarked Dionisio, Gabino’s father.

Amaro stared at him with interest.

“What is it you know how to do?” asked Dionisio.

“I know how to work the land.”

“And do you like farm labour?”

“No.”

“In which case, when asked, say you know nothing of agriculture. Say you’ve always worked as a carpenter, a baker or a waiter.”

“But I don’t know anything about those professions,” declared Amaro.

“What does that matter?” replied Gabino. “Even if you did know, I’m sure what you knew wouldn’t be any use to you in Buenos Aires. We’re going to have to learn everything again, even how to talk!”

Amaro looked at Dionisio, waiting for him to refute his son’s statement, but he only intervened to confirm what his son had said.

“You have to forget what you were before. From now on, we’re only the two hands and two legs we have to work.”

Amaro didn’t say anything. He smiled and carried on eating. The din inside the canteen was deafening. To make themselves heard, the diners almost had to shout. Amaro glanced at Candela and Adriana, Gabino’s two sisters, who were eating silently. Their blond hair and blue eyes were the first two things that linked them together. Apart from that, there was a way of smiling, somewhere between timid and falsely ingenuous, that was also common to them both, but the feature that really stood out was the poverty of their clothes, their ashen garments, which were worn at the cuff, just like the jackets of the men in their family.

From that day on, they never separated. At the dining table, at lunch and dinner, Amaro became another member of Dionisio’s family. The affectionate treatment they gave him was the best medicine to alleviate the disgust caused by the sickening smell in many corners of the ship, the surreptitious creeping of fleas and lice on his skin and the repulsive cod and vegetable stew they had to eat from one day to the next.

Having breakfasted on their ration of half a dozen biscuits and half a cup of coffee, Amaro and Gabino would meet on the in-between decks and spend the morning walking through the babel the ocean liner had turned into.

At the end of the second week, they glimpsed land. In the morning mist that lay on the surface of the water, the two thousand passengers covered the metal railings on the ocean liner’s decks in an attempt to capture the landscape of the Brazilian coastline, as if the lack of that vision might condemn them to drifting eternally at sea. Amaro drank in all the features of the coast. There were ten years to go before the start of the new century, but he concluded it would be there, on the land of this new continent, where he would see the digits marking the year 1900 on a calendar for the first time.

In Rio de Janeiro, they had to remain on board, but in Montevideo, three days later, Amaro joined Gabino’s family and went to visit the city.

3

At the age of fourteen, Carlota started a diary as a way of occupying her time, in addition to reading. But she only became aware of the therapeutic properties of such an activity when she embarked on a course of teacher training a year later. As she noted then, had it not been for the opinions she recorded in her notebooks, she would have found it difficult to repress the desire to explode that often overcame her during class.

She had begun her studies with all the excitement of someone who is starting out on the path that will lead them to the practice of their vocation. But two months had been enough for her to realize she would spend the four years of her course with her eyes closed. Or rather with a complex filter in her ears that separated the information coming in and divided it into cerebral compartments labelled “toxic,” “useless” and “beneficial.” Even so, the problem was, in the labyrinthine connections of her memory, the destruction of data she had received would not be easy. There came a time when she even lamented the capacity of her memory, where things piled up with ease and remained unharmed, despite her best efforts to put them out of her mind.

Among the things she jotted down as most “toxic” in the diary of that time were some of the teachings she received. “Today, Dona Amelia talked to us about the Catholic Monarchs,” she wrote. “The cause of Queen Isabella’s government, she thinks, was in the rigidity of her customs, which reflected her absolute faith in Christian morality. All she had to do in order to bring about a great political work was apply them. That was Dona Amelia’s conclusion. She then diverged from the theme a little and told us, in our work as schoolteachers, we should give our pupils models of life and government like those of Queen Isabella. History has to serve as a way of providing good models of behaviour rather than as a way of teaching lots of facts that will not help our girls in the slightest. That’s what she said. I felt like asking whether we should keep quiet about the part of History that doesn’t offer such models of behaviour, but I’ve learned to suppress what shouldn’t be said in such situations. The thing that annoys me the most is finding lots of the other women on the course are in agreement with what she says. Even if they’ve never thought it before or used to hold the opposite opinion. I feel like the odd one out in class.”

That was what she wrote on 23 October 1923, at the start of the first year of teaching training. The thirty-five young women attending class every day soon learned that the Cortes of Cádiz, the Republican governments of the nineteenth century and the liberal system did not form part of the history of Spain. Meanwhile, topics such as the Catholic Monarchs, the Peninsular War and the absolutism of Ferdinand VII were very likely to come up in important exams. What all the other women saw as an advantage, reducing the material they might be examined on to just over half the official syllabus, for Carlota was an irritating limitation that made it pointless to study the period that interested her the most.

One day, as Dona Amelia was talking about the battles of Salamanca, Bailén and San Marcial, about Espoz y Mina and the Undaunted, and qualifying the victory over the French in the Peninsular War as a great, patriotic feat, Carlota had the impression the material they were studying was a kind of mental battleground for their teacher. For Dona Amelia, history seemed to be a question of opposing sides: reason and fanaticism, the country’s survival against the enemies who wished to destroy it, Christians and Muslims. At every stage, she would quickly align herself with the winning side, which was the one that was always right. Because the history of Spain had invariably taken the right course, she would explain to the young women. If the enemies (fanatics, invaders, idolaters, in her words) sometimes won, their victories were only ever temporary, lasting until the heroes of the nation reinstated the true government. Hearing her talk like that, Carlota almost instinctively sided with the group being criticized by the teacher.

And yet she had always repressed the desire to contradict her. Until the day she heard her praise Ferdinand VII’s government, which had been installed after the victory over French troops in the Peninsular War, and then, for the first time, she raised her hand. With a slight smile, pleased no doubt that there was a pupil who wanted to take part in her class, Dona Amelia allowed her to speak.

“I think the Spanish were deceived when fighting in that war,” declared Carlota.

“Oh, really? And what makes you think that?” asked the teacher.

“Had they know what kind of government Ferdinand VII was going to install, then probably lots of them would not have fought for his return. They might even have fought on the French side, which after all was the one that offered everybody more freedom and more possibilities of progressing economically and socially.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Yes.”

“So you think the Spanish people opted for the wrong side in the Peninsular War,” remarked Dona Amelia in a tone that was less ironic than the one she had probably intended to use.

“Exactly.”

“And we’d be better off now if we were governed by the French?”

“Most likely. Apart from avoiding a century of pointless disagreements, as a people, we would have learned to value effort, education and respect for one another’s opinions and we wouldn’t be clinging on to our traditions, with our backs to modernity.”

The teacher, Dona Amelia, nodded slightly, as if she needed this gesture to persuade herself that she had really understood the kind of arguments she had just heard. Then she said:

“Very good, young madam. I see you’re a daring pupil – too much, perhaps. And sooner or later daring is paid for. But let us get on with the subject, if that isn’t too much to ask.”

4

Mother Isabel gave her a bath in the morning and made her put on clean clothes while telling her the couple she’d met two days earlier would come and pick her up that afternoon. From this point on, Maribel didn’t stop thinking. Her thoughts were constantly mixed up with memories of the last three years and with images of what she imagined her new life was going to be like. For hours, sitting on the bench in the courtyard, opposite Matías’s vegetable garden, she went over it all: the cold of the first few days, when she slept close to María, the other girl her age who had been taken shortly afterwards, the nuns’ curt orders, the cornbread and milk in the morning, her questions wanting to know whether she also would have some parents one day, Matías’s words telling her not to think about that and finally, when she’d lost all hope of being adopted by a family, the arrival of this couple who had agreed to take her for the very same reason the others had rejected her: the fact she was a girl and was older than the rest.

That afternoon, the couple came to collect her in an enormous, black car that made a lot of noise. The journey lasted fifteen or twenty minutes. During this time, she stared out of the window at the life going on in the streets: men in jackets, shirts and hats walking alone in front of houses and bars, women with two or three children clinging to their skirts, some youngsters on bikes, a horse and cart loaded with coal, which a group of people clustered around…

The woman leaned her head over the seat and asked whether she was pleased to leave the orphanage, to which Maribel answered at once, “Yes.” Then, recalling Mother Fernanda’s advice, she added, “Yes, mother.” The woman displayed no reaction to this treatment. She looked back towards the front, where the street was now formed by rows of two-storey houses, with little plots of land between them. When they reached the penultimate house in one of the rows, the car stopped and the mother got out. She pushed the seat forwards and gave Maribel a hand so she could get out.

The house Maribel was going to inhabit from now on was large and dark. She soon discovered it was also silent. Apart from the parents, it was lived in by a fat, old woman called Hilaria, who was in charge of the housework. The following day, Maribel climbed on to a chair and contemplated what was on the other side of the window: a small lawn, at the end of which a chained dog started barking furiously as soon as it saw her behind the window.

She soon discovered almost all the orders would be dictated by Hilaria, with whom she spent most of the time. The day started when Hilaria came to wake her up in her bedroom, shortly after eight, and it finished at nine in the evening, when the housekeeper left her in her room so she could go to sleep. After a week, this plump, taciturn woman had become the silent alidade she used so as not to be afraid of the space she inhabited. The first thing she discovered was that in this house there were lots of rules and the punishment for disobeying them could be severe. She found this out one morning when she came in from the garden with muddy shoes and left dirty footmarks on the tiles in the hallway. As soon as she saw this, her mother started shouting at her.

“Just remember that you’re still on trial,” she said at the end of her outburst. “If you don’t behave well, we will return you to the orphanage.”

During the days that followed, Maribel would ask Hilaria what she should do in each moment. She quickly learned that the best way not to make a mistake and so arouse her parents’ anger consisted in not being too close to them most of the time.

The habits of the house made this easier for her. The only time the family usually came together was for lunch and dinner. At this point, her father would turn up in uniform and take his seat in the dining room opposite her mother so that Hilaria could serve the food. That said, during the week, Maribel would have lunch and dinner with Hilaria in the kitchen. On Sundays, and sometimes Saturdays as well, Grandpa Ricardo would come and have lunch with them, and then the mother would oblige Maribel to sit at the table. With the adults, she always kept silent, but she endeavoured not to miss a single word of what they were saying. This was her secret game.

“Now all those bastards want to get on the cart,” she heard Grandpa Ricardo say to his son one day. “We have to sift properly and separate the wheat from the chaff.”

Of course, Maribel didn’t know what Grandpa Ricardo was referring to, but because of his tone, which revealed deep anger, and the instant agreement displayed by both his son and his daughter-in-law, she quickly realized that he must be right. When she repeated his sentiment to Hilaria that afternoon, at a time when the two of them were alone in the kitchen, the housekeeper looked at her in horror.

“You mustn’t repeat those things,” she warned her. “Let alone ask what they mean.”

“Why not?” asked Maribel.

“Because I say so,” Hilaria raised her voice, turning towards her with a plate dripping soapy water in her hands.

She saw Maribel’s look of alarm and lowered her voice to confide to her:

“Besides, your mother and father wouldn’t like you questioning the things they say when you’re with them.”

Hilaria’s words made Maribel realize she should be more careful if she didn’t want her game to be discovered. That said, because of the housekeeper’s explanation, the game became instantly much more interesting. From now on, she devoted herself to listening to what was being said with far greater intensity. After the first few weeks, the mother started taking her with her on afternoon outings, when she went to visit her women friends in their houses or met up with them in the park or the Casino café.

Maribel discovered that each of her mother’s friends had her own idea about how things should be in the future. But when it came down to it, all their ideas were alike.

“They have to understand who gives the orders and who obeys,” said one of her mother’s friends in the Casino café one day. “Those who were born to be workers should be content with their lot and not fill their children’s heads with strange ideas.”

The woman carried on talking. Maribel left aside the domino tiles she’d been playing with on a nearby table and gazed at this woman who was talking. After a while, the woman seemed to become aware of her presence. She stopped talking and stared at her. First of all, Maribel carried on playing with the tiles, turning her head with rapid, nervous movements. But then she heard the woman lower her voice to talk to her mother and tried to understand what she was saying. She couldn’t make out the words, but she realized they were talking about her.

On the return journey that day, her mother told her she was very impolite, she shouldn’t be listening in to adults’ conversations and she would have to learn quickly if she didn’t want to be taken back to where she had come from. With tears in her eyes, Maribel promised to do everything she was told. She pleaded not to be taken back to the place she’d come from, and her mother said she was only on trial, not to forget that.

During the weeks that followed, Maribel abandoned her listening game. Whenever her mother chatted to friends, she would try to move away under some pretext. One afternoon, she left the café and started playing with a puppy in the garden opposite. Time passed without her realizing, until suddenly she heard her mother’s booming voice calling angrily to her. Maribel didn’t know what it was she’d done wrong this time. She went over to her mother, who began to shout at her for having dirtied her dress by playing with the dog.

A few weeks later, Maribel was told to get back in the car. She asked where they were going.

“On a trip,” she was informed.

As the car advanced along the streets of the city, she felt more and more anxious. When the vehicle stopped in front of the orphanage gates, she burst out crying. Silently to begin with, but then she started sobbing with small noises that quickly turned into shouts when her father grabbed her by the arms, tore her off the seat and put her back inside that house.

5

Why was he remembering that day now? Anxo Daponte wondered. What was so special about it? There had been others that were much more meaningful, much more important, but with time they had slipped out of his memory. This one, however, never seemed to leave. It appeared to wield some kind of unique charm, as if his mind were instinctively searching for ways to try and calm the pain and sorrow afflicting his spirit. So there they were, again and again, the images of that distant day.

It was a weekend in October. Anxo had stayed in Pontevedra. On Saturday morning, he was alone in the pension house, reading a book, when Martín Rocha came looking for him, in what Anxo could only consider a surprise visit. They hadn’t arranged to meet that day – he didn’t even remember having told his work colleague the name of the pension where he was living. Martín Rocha suggested going for a walk in the city, overlooking his surprise.

After they had wandered the streets for more than an hour, he invited him to his house. The thing that surprised Anxo Daponte the most was the confidence Martín Rocha’s family showed towards him from the start. All the members of his colleague’s family who came up to shake his hand or offered their cheeks so he could kiss them both accompanied the gesture with a smile, and the smile with a casual remark, as if talking to somebody who had returned from a long journey. This was a new experience for him. The only memory he had of invitations was of the sporadic family lunches in Porto Meloxo to celebrate some anniversary, when various uncles, aunts and cousins would gather around the table, but the air of these meetings was always dominated by the adults’ measly character. The sorrow and sad news acquired much more consistency than the laughter and jokes, and the overwhelming solemnity of the occasion was rarely dissipated by a joke or a snippet of gossip about some neighbour.

By contrast, around the long dining table in Martín Rocha’s house that day, they talked of Pontevedra and its history, theatre, films – the latest cultural novelty in the city – and the Liceo’s dances and parties. As they chatted for two hours, Anxo Daponte realized a pleasant tone kept all polemical references or controversial questions out of the conversation. None of the members of Martín’s family, his parents, grandfather or two sisters, asked him anything about his family, they were interested only in the exercise of his profession. At some point, Mateo, the father, said if he weren’t a lawyer, he would undoubtedly be a teacher.

“As you can see, in this family, the last thing we follow when it comes to choosing a profession is family tradition,” he remarked. “My father, here present, was an obstetrician until the day he retired. My son, Martín, is a teacher, and my daughters, Laura and Carolina, wish to devote themselves to education and to music and dance respectively. Carolina has yet to decide which of these two vocations is hers. Or have you made up your mind this last week, my darling?”

Carolina, a twelve-year-old with long, blond hair and large, blue eyes, sitting opposite her father, looked up from her plate and answered:

“No. But I will let you know as soon as I have.”

“Perfect,” replied Mateo. “That will enable us to reject another profession for any future grandchildren. I’ve no idea what they’ll do, but for sure it won’t be anything someone else in this house has done before them. All we can hope is that it’s legal and permits them to live.”

At the end of lunch, Martín led Anxo to the drawing room. There, the first thing Anxo did was approach the bookshelves and gaze at the titles of the books. For several minutes, he remained examining the leather and paper spines that lined the shelves. From time to time, he would pull one out and have a look before putting it back in its place with a careful gesture in which could be detected a hint of farewell. At least that is what Martín must have understood as he watched him, because he immediately said he could borrow any of the books he wanted. Anxo, however, had never liked borrowing books because this deprived him of the pleasure of personal notes and fragmentary rereading a posteriori, so by way of rejecting the offer he told Martín he wouldn’t know how to choose one and leave the others behind.

“Perfect. Take them all. That will give us space for more,” joked Martín.

“Anyway, my French isn’t good enough to read some of these books,” concluded Anxo, pointing to several volumes that were mixed up with the Spanish ones.

“Well, you’ll have to do something about that.”

Martín immediately explained that a good reader should never be content to read only in their own language if they aspire to keep up to date with the latest advances in art and science. Anxo Daponte replied even if he did acquire a good knowledge of French, English or German, it wouldn’t help him very much.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t have the means or the opportunity to travel abroad and buy books in other languages.”

“Nonsense,” remarked Martín Rocha. “The means is a question of will. Every three months, my father receives catalogues from two publishing houses in Paris and one in London. All the books you see here in those languages have been sent to us by post.”

“All of them?”

“Absolutely. So now you know: perfect your French or learn some other languages if you want to enrich your mind and not just your body.”

“Don’t listen to my son,” said Adela. “All he wants is for his friends to be like him, a bore and a know-it-all… I don’t know how they put up with you.”

The mother’s arrival served to introduce the peculiar rhythms of the rest of the family into the quiet atmosphere of the room. Behind her came the father, Mateo, who sat down to read a newspaper in an armchair by the fire. Then into the room came Laura, who took a book and settled down to read in another armchair, followed by Carolina, who started to play the piano. At this point, Martín asked whether he would like to go out, but Anxo Daponte realized he had made this proposal not because of a real wish to go outside, but because of the awkwardness Anxo might feel.

“I prefer to stay here,” replied Anxo. “Where do I have to fill in an application form to join this family?”

“You can say you’re a part of this family when you come again.”

Anxo gazed at the various members of the clan.

“As you can see, this room is like the cave of prehistoric man, we all gather around the fire,” observed Martín.

During the minutes that followed, the two of them occupied two armchairs at the far end of the drawing room, next to the bookshelves, and chatted about their work at school. As the sun began to go down behind the windows, there was a knock at the door, and three new people, two young men and a woman, irrupted into the room. Martín Rocha got up to greet them and immediately introduced them to Anxo Daponte.

“These are my friends Norberto and Moisés, and this is Alicia, Moisés’s girlfriend.”

After that, they went to a café in Michelena Street and chatted at a table for a while. To start with, Anxo Daponte barely opened his mouth, overawed by the camaraderie between the other four and by the verbosity they displayed. They would sometimes trip over their words, appear to be arguing and even proffer dismissive insults regarding someone else’s opinion. But the way they spoke about their literary tastes or a particular philosophical theory or historical figure was never irate or imbued with aggression.

“We all like to talk passionately about such themes,” explained Moisés at some point. “But don’t worry, we never lose our temper!”

It took Anxo Daponte until the third round of beers to pluck up the courage to join in the conversation. Albeit his interventions that day were sporadic and brief. Having emitted an opinion, as soon as he perceived the sound of his voice amid the others’ silence, he would immediately fall quiet so the others could speak. That was when he realized that the emphatic tone often used by Norberto, the sometimes cruel irony adopted by Martín Rocha and the strict judgements given by Moisés in relation to literary questions were just the natural effect of the way they expressed themselves.

6

“What you said to the history teacher was right.”

These words caught Carlota by surprise as she was walking home. She turned her head and came across Regina, one of her classmates, walking next to another pupil called Estela.

“You think so?”

“Yes. I don’t suppose she’s going to forget it…”

“And not precisely so that she can give you a high mark,” continued Estela.

“But you had the courage to say what Estela and I have been wanting to say to her ever since the start of the course.”

Carlota had been intending to walk to Real Street and from there to enter the maze of alleys that led to the new part of the city. But she’d barely taken a couple of steps when she heard a voice behind her and then saw these two classmates coming up beside her: Estela Graña and Regina Salgueiro. Regina was tall, dark, with freckles, black eyes and smooth, jet-black hair that cascaded down her back. Estela was shorter, blond, with a permanent twinkle in her clear eyes. Carlota had noticed they sat together in one of the last rows and were always taking notes during classes.

Unlike the majority of their classmates, they never asked for clarifications or raised their hand to reply when one of the teachers aimed a question at the class in general. Carlota hadn’t paid them much attention until the day the music teacher asked Regina a question, and Regina spent five minutes talking non-stop about Baroque music. The others had been amazed by her exposition.

For the first time that afternoon, she realized that shared antipathy can also generate sincere sympathy between people. Estela and Regina carried on chatting with her for a while as they headed home and then, when their paths were due to separate, they stood on the pavement for several minutes, continuing the conversation. They talked of their teachers and discovered the three of them had very similar opinions about them all, but they also talked about what they did at weekends and discovered they had hobbies in common.

The following day, Carlota arrived in class early and occupied a seat next to those normally taken by Regina and Estela. From that day on, she remained in that place. The following weekend, she invited them to come and visit her on Saturday afternoon. She showed them the large room on the second floor of the house she used as her private study, and her two classmates were astonished by all the space she had for her activities.

They admitted she was the only friend they had who lived in a two-storey building with such a large amount of space. Carlota felt awkward as Estela and Regina inspected the ample building she showed them in response to their wish. There was nobody at home at that time, and the silence of the rooms made the character of the space and furniture around them seem even more opulent. As her two visitors examined the books on her shelves and the small pictures she had done in her painting lessons, Carlota tried to put some order among the cushions that covered the sofa at the far end of the room, where she used to lie and read.

“If I had a room like this just for me, I’d never go out into the street,” said Estela.

“I don’t go out that much,” replied Carlota. “My hobbies don’t require a lot of space.”

“What is it you like doing?” asked Regina.

“Reading. Going to the cinema, the theatre. What I don’t like is cafés and walking down the street in a group to while away the time.”

“We don’t all have the good fortune to live in a house like this,” declared Estela.

“You can come whenever you like.”

“I’d be careful about extending such a generous invitation,” remarked Regina. “You run the risk of us taking you at your word and turning up here every day.”

She said this as a joke, but the reality that imposed itself after several weeks wasn’t all that different from her prognosis. First, they started coming only at weekends. The three of them would spend Saturday and Sunday afternoons chatting for hours in the large room upstairs. Sometimes, they would talk about books, and Carlota would lend them some of her recommendations. Other times, they would chat about the theatre or music. In the end, their conversations succeeded in making Carlota’s affection for the cinema and the theatre common to all three of them. These were two activities Regina and Estela had only heard about. Up until then, they had thought they were more suitable for men and women of a certain age, but Carlota invited them to go to a Charlie Chaplin film being shown at the New World Theatre one day and, when they came out, neither of the other two complained about having been in an audience whose members were mostly their parents’ age.

Little by little, they started going to Carlota’s house on weekday afternoons as well. They would arrive with books and notes on some of the subjects they had in class and spend hours studying together, doing collective projects on the table Carlota had asked her father to purchase for her friends.

7

After six months, when he looked back and glimpsed the vast plain’s green horizon, Amaro couldn’t work out the exact point where he had started laying down track ballast. The line was advancing at such speed the workers’ involvement, more than a necessary effort to build the line, seemed a tiny obstacle which the line pushed out of its way with a gleaming lustre of iron that cut through the Pampas. It was, for sure, the only thing that was making any progress. Amaro could no longer be persuaded otherwise. That blasted line, and the speed with which they were laying it down, was sucking up all their energy and turning into the main obstacle that prevented the workers from making any progress themselves.

“The land round here has no wealth to offer,” he remarked to a colleague, Lautaro, one Sunday, as they were drinking maté at the foot of a monkey puzzle tree, near the metal shack.

“You have to be patient. There’s always time to change job,” answered Lautaro.

For the first time since they’d met, Amaro felt an almost physical sense of disgust when he heard him.

“I didn’t abandon my home and cross an ocean in order to have the same life as in the place I left.”

“Life is different everywhere,” retorted Lautaro.

“For the poor, life is the same everywhere. It was a mistake to leave Buenos Aires.”

“Why?”

“In the city, there are greater opportunities.”

This statement left his lips in a mournful tone that made it sound like a complaint about the decision that Lautaro had somehow taken for him. Was it not Lautaro’s fault that the two of them were now there, in the Pampas, like two slaves outside time? With his affectionate attitude and cheerful conversation brimming with optimism, in only a couple of minutes, Lautaro had filled the gap left in Amaro by Gabino’s family the day after their arrival in Buenos Aires.

Dionisio had found a job as a waiter, left the Immigrants’ Hotel and moved with his wife and children to a tenement house, and Amaro had suddenly found himself without the reference point that had given him encouragement and security since landing in Buenos Aires.

At this point, Lautaro had appeared. At breakfast on the third day in the Immigrants’ Hotel, chance had seated them together. Lautaro’s chitter-chatter infused confidence as quickly as Amaro was capable of building a cage to trap birds. He came from a small town in the south of Chile, near Puerto Montt. As he confessed while the two of them gobbled down bread soaked in white milk, between the certainty of marine work in southern waters and the uncertainty of the obscure references that talked of business and unexploited land on the far side of the Andes, he had chosen to cross the border and confirm whether the rumours were true. He had travelled by carriage, train, on horseback and on foot, across vast tracts of wasteland, with little human presence. Just as he was beginning to think these rumours were apocryphal voices spread by the wind and bad faith, he had reached Buenos Aires. He had then decided to adapt himself to the orthodoxy of his condition. He had checked into the Immigrants’ Hotel, and there he was, ready to grab the number the lottery considered most appropriate after a quick personal examination.

As every morning over the previous two days, after breakfast, Amaro had gone over to the wall at the far end of the dining room, where several dozen guests of the hotel were huddled together. Hanging on the wall were various blackboards where multiple jobs were offered in hastily scrawled, tightly packed lines of writing. The people gathered there examined the various possibilities and then chatted amongst themselves. They exchanged opinions, then headed to the entrance and gave one of the four men sitting behind a counter the number of the job they were willing to accept from the list. The contract papers appeared on top of the counter as if by magic, and some brief clarifications preceded the signature that would take the contracting party in an unknown direction.

Amaro would examine the list, think about it, hesitate and end up waiting until the following day for another opportunity. That was what had happened on the previous two days, but on this occasion Lautaro was standing next to him, and Lautaro seemed to be clear about things. He only needed a couple of minutes to take a decision for them both. He picked out numbers 78 and 79 from the jobs on offer.

“Why?” asked Amaro.

“They’re building the railway. I don’t know where,” answered Lautaro with his irrepressible sense of optimism, “but wherever it is, we won’t have anywhere to spend the money we earn.”

The following day, they were four hundred miles away from the Argentinian capital, part of a group of navvies occupied in laying down a line through the heart of the Humid Pampas in the direction of Santa Fe. They worked from morning to night at the orders of a foreman who went up and down the line on horseback, giving out orders to the teams of ten or twelve men pushing barrows of gravel and sand without looking up any more than was necessary for their work. At night, the navvies would gather around the metal shacks built at regular intervals along the line. Outside each shack, they would light a fire to grill steaks and warm their bodies, susceptible to the cold of winter, and after dinner would lie down to sleep on mattresses next to the walls of the shack.

They only ever rested on Sunday. On that day, most of the labourers would while away the hours lying on mattresses or on the grass of the vast plains surrounding the shack. The more restless, fun-seeking workers would climb into a carriage or on to the back of a beast of burden and visit a nearby town to sate their desire for alcohol or women.

“You know what’s going on?” Lautaro said to him that Sunday six months later, as they were drinking maté. “Taking a rest from your daily chores has an adverse effect on your thoughts.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely. We earn a decent wage and save the lot. What more do you want? OK, I get it. Women. But even those you can have if you accompany the others into town.”

“I don’t need to go with women.”

“Oh, really? Why not? Don’t tell me you’ve got a girlfriend hidden away somewhere.”

“Would that be so strange?”

“You never said anything to me.”

“Do I have to tell you everything?”

“No, but…”

“OK then. I have a girlfriend. In Buenos Aires. I met her on the boat. What else do you want to know?”

Lautaro remained silent, staring at him, not daring to speak. Amaro was overwhelmed by the desire to confide in someone and started telling him the story: how he’d met her thanks to the friendship he’d struck up with her brother, Gabino, how she was a pretty, happy-go-lucky girl and he’d been secretly drawn towards her from the moment he’d set eyes on her, but hadn’t known he was in love until the previous Christmas, when he’d gone to the house of his friend’s family to celebrate the festivities and seen her for the first time in new clothes, all nicely dressed up, giving off the relaxed air she had from working in a hair salon and dealing with numerous customers every day. The conversation between the two of them had grown longer and more dynamic. She had ended up realizing what was meant by this attention he showered on her, and there had come a time when the two of them had wanted to be together, but they couldn’t, and who knew how long it would be before they could caress each other, kiss each other, even give each other a hug.

“Do you know what that is?” Amaro concluded his story.

“Why can’t you?”

“She’s fifteen.”

“And you’re nineteen.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What then?”

“The one trying to seduce me is her elder sister, and she’s seventeen.”

8

Having spent a few days in Galicia among my mother’s papers, one of the first phone calls I received on my return to London was from Terry Cox, my editor, who asked if we could meet for lunch. Over the previous three or four months, our communication had been reduced to the simple exchange of emails. He would use them to check out my state of mind, obviously intending to find out how the next novel was going, but I would always reply with some remark about the book I was reading.

It had been a year since the publication of the previous instalment of Detective Murray, and in that time I hadn’t fed him any information about a new storyline I was working on. I imagine this had started to worry him enough that, instead of making do with a cold reply by email or phone, he now wanted to engage in a longer conversation over lunch.

We had known each other for twenty years, but in the way he insisted I saw again how dependent Terry Cox was on me. Over time, his dependency had cancelled out the one I had had at the start of our relationship. Given his attitude, the way we had met seemed now to form part of a dream, with no more substance than any of the narratives I had written.

It had all started when I sat down to write my first novel, three years after reaching this city. This was the story of a Galician emigrant in London who goes from job to job, meeting the strangest people: an anorexic chef, a street musician who can’t stand groups of bystanders, a tightrope walker who wakes up one morning to discover he suffers from vertigo, a bank employee who’s a compulsive gambler… The novel, London Underground, relates with heavy doses of humour and imagination the feelings I myself had experienced on arriving in this city in 1980. I had gone through half a dozen jobs, from waiter to assistant in a bakery, and paid attention to the most compelling characteristics of the people I had come across.

I was utterly convinced I had written a story that would irresistibly attract the reader, but having been rejected by seven literary agents and more than twenty publishers I had sent the text to, after a year I had lost all hope of ever publishing the book. I went through a period of depression. I drowned the overwhelming sense of apathy I felt in beer, whisky and gin, in the solitude of the room in an apartment I shared with two Dutch students. Seeing the unbounded euphoria with which my two roommates spent their days between the Faculty, girls and conversations about their plans for the future was a painful reminder of my own failure. Until suddenly, one afternoon I was lying on the sofa, in front of the TV, I received a phone call. On the other end of the line, the deep voice tinged with a hint of solemnity of someone who introduced themselves as Terry Cox, said they had read my novel carefully, appreciated its merits, and the publishing house Southwest was willing to publish the book if I would agree to make certain corrections to the text.

Text © Xosé Monteagudo

Translation © Jonathan Dunne