seems to me that your generation, and the younger generations too, don't care much about the good bad name of the dead, but for us it still matters. Besides, give that he was a man in the public eye, one day someone probably reveal all anyway and, who knows, no one will much as bat an eye or see it as shameful, or even as a stain, his apologists will just ignore it as if it were purely anecdot this country is not only superficial, it's also arbitrary partisan, and once someone has been issued with an indulges it's rarely taken away. But I Won't be the one to tell the: nor will it come out because I was foolish enough to tell yc no, it won't come out through me or because of some slip of mine. Most of the other men who were present must be dead by now, there were five of us round the table when I heard him tell the story, and I'm sure it wasn't the only time he had told it so brazenly, quite a few people must know it (although there can't be many of us left alive). But I wouldn't be in the least surprised if that was the last time, if after that little gathering he tried to keep quiet about it and even began the meticulous cover- up job of later years. It's quite likely.’
'What little gathering? What was it he told you?' I asked, although without emphasising the interrogative tone. I realised that I did want to know, despite the fact that, generally speaking, I did not try to worm information out of my father even if I was really curious, I left him and his memories alone unless he summoned them up on his own account and of his own accord – and despite having lied to him a little and having, in passing, lied to myself a little too, albeit only momentarily: it wasn't true that he could tell me anything, with no consequences, I mean, for my state of mind or my sorrow, nor that the unpleasant events related by him were more bearable or less awful to know about than the worst atrocities read about in history books or the contemporary atrocities seen on television. What he told me was not only as real and true as the siege of Vienna in 1529 or the terrible fall of Constantinople to the Turkish infidels in 1453; as
'One morning, I went to the publishing house of Gomez-Antiguedad,' that voice told me, 'to see if they had any translation work for me to do, even though I wouldn't be able to sign it with my own name, or if there were any other anonymous, occasional jobs, reports on foreign books and so forth. The son, Pepito, was pretty much in charge of thlcompany at the time, and I knew him slightly from university and from the famous Mediterranean cruise we'd been on as students, and he was one of the few people on the winning side who, as you know, behaved with great decency and generosity he helped quite a number of people who were being singled out for reprisals, those whom he considered to be the most able, and he did that during the early years, when it was almost impossible for us to find any kind of work at all, things were really difficult up until 1945 and not a great deal easier between then and 1953. Your mother and I had only been able to get married thanks to the French classes she gave, a small loan from her godmother, who had money and had managed somehow to hang on to it, and to occasional commissions from the
'Oh, I remember the Cafe Roma,' I said, 'it was still there during my first year at university.’
'Possibly,' he replied, not wanting to pause. I felt that it was best not to interrupt him again, he had embarked on a story that was very hard for him to tell, and it was best not to give him time to have second thoughts or doubts, as he had with my mother, when he returned home after hearing the story and decided to keep it to himself. 'As soon as we went in, some friends or acquaintances of his called him over to their table and asked us to join them. I don't know if they knew who I was, I mean, if my name meant anything to them when I was introduced, but I certainly knew who two of them were, although not the other two. One was the writer I've told you about, and who, at the time, was still a shiny new Falangist, and the other I was a monarchist, of the kind with infinite patience and in no particular hurry, that is, a Francoist through and through. Both were already safely ensconced in their respective cushy jobs. The writer was really only beginning to be talked about as such: he had published a volume, or possibly two volumes, of rather old-fashioned verse, much praised for obvious reasons; later on, he abandoned poetry and devoted himself to the novel, which is where he made his name; he also wrote a few dull plays and the odd dull essay as well. These two men appeared not to have seen the others for a very long time, and people then were still in the habit of recounting to each other what had happened to them during the War, what they'd suffered or made other people suffer. And this was the case with them. They were swapping experiences, stories, the occasional exploit, the occasional hardship, the occasional atrocity. Gomez-Antiguedad contributed a little, I not at all. And in the middle of all this, the writer mentioned a name which I knew and admired, that of a former university friend. We hadn't been close friends, he was a year below me, but I'd enjoyed talking to him from time to time, and he was just a very nice man: Emilio Mares, an Andalusian, very friendly and bright, he was rather vain, but in a funny, self-consciously frivolous way, he made out he was an anarchist, but there was nothing solemn about him at all; even when he got on his high horse about something, he did so with a degree of self-mockery, and he always looked immaculate, impeccably dressed, certainly not the kind of anarchist you read about in novels; a really lovely man, always in a good mood. He was in Andalusia when the War broke out; by 18 July a lot of students who weren't from Madrid had gone back home to spend the summer with their families, and he was from a village near Malaga or Granada, I'm not quite sure where, but his father was, I think, the socialist mayor, in Grazalema or Casares off Manilva, somewhere round there. We had heard, when the War was already in full swing, that he'd been killed in Malaga by the Nationalists, and we assumed that he'd been killed there in February 1937 when the Italian blackshirts moved in, more than ten thousand of them. We imagined that he would have been summarily shot. The repression or, rather, revenge was particularly ferocious there, because the city had resisted for seven months and the people of Malaga had committed a lot of barbarous acts themselves, random shootings, indiscriminate looting, the burning of churches, the settling of personal accounts, just as happened at the beginning of the War here. It was said that when the Nationalists took the city, under the Duque de Sevilla, they corrected the imbalance and went still further, and that in the first week alone about four thousand people were shot. It may have been fewer than that, but it doesn't matter, they certainly served up plenty of coffee, because that, as you know, was the euphemism used by Franco and his cohorts for ordering executions,
