Why bring her more grief, why afflict her with some new horror that could not be changed and for which there could be no solace and, of course, no compensation. Especially since she really liked bullfighting, much more than you might realise, a liking she inherited from her father, but one that she preferred not to pass on to you children. On more than one occasion, when we told you we were going to the theatre or the cinema, we actually went to the bulking.' And my father chuckled briefly to remember and to confess that small, innocuous deception. 'I didn't want to ruin bullfighting for her, because it doubtless would have. I myself didn't particularly enjoy bullfights, they left me pretty cold really, but it took a long time and a lot of effort on my part to prevent the story of Mares' death spoiling them for me entirely: at first, every fight we went to reminded me of him, and that cast a pall over the whole event, I felt his shadow slip in between me and each stage of the corrida. It's just the same, I suppose, as when I pass the corner of Alcala and Velazquez, I always think of the little child whom the militia-woman claimed to have killed by slamming against the wall.’
My father had grown tired, as I saw when he paused again; he closed his eyes as if they ached from having gazed for too long into the far distance. But it was not yet time for lunch; I glanced at my watch, it would be another twenty minutes before the woman who did the cooking came in to call us to the table or before my sister arrived, she'd said she would drop in and have lunch with us if she managed to finish what she had to do early. And he had not yet taken up the thread again; then, after a while, he decided to continue talking, although without immediately opening his eyes. 'I saw many things, we saw possibly worse things,' he said, using an ambiguous plural after that unequivocally singular T. 'Many simultaneous deaths, people I knew and didn't know, suddenly, during a bombardment, and then you don't have time to think about any of them, not even for a second, what tends to prevail is a sense that it's all over, a desire simply to give up, a feeling of being on the brink of extermination, that is what you feel then, and you're full of contrary impulses, wanting to survive at all costs, to simply step over the surrounding corpses, to seek shelter and save yourself, but also to stay with them, I mean to join them, to lie down by their side and form part of the inert pile of bodies and stay there; it's a feeling almost akin to envy. It's odd, but even in the din and the collapsing buildings and the chaos, as you're racing to help someone who's wounded or to protect yourself, you know at once when someone's a hopeless case. Not a threat to anyone, but at peace, at rest, gone in a flash. It's likely, in fact, that if you followed the second impulse, you would unintentionally achieve the same effect as the first, because the next bomb would never fall in the same place as the previous ones: the besiegers didn't squander their bombs, the safest place might well be alongside the already dead. But, as you see, I've told you about two things that I didn't see, that we didn't see, but which were recounted to me or, rather, which I happened to hear, in neither case were the words addressed to me personally, or at least not exclusively; and yet they've stayed in my memory as clearly as if I had seen it myself, possibly more clearly, it's easier to suppress an unbearable image than it is to suppress someone's account of an event, however loathsome those events might be, precisely because narrative always seems more bearable. And in a sense it is: what you see is happening; what you hear has happened already; whatever it is, you know that it is over, otherwise no one would be able to tell you about it. I believe that the reason I have such a vivid memory of those two stories, those two crimes, is because I heard them from the mouths of the people who had committed them. Not from a witness, not from a victim who had survived, whose tone would have been one of justifiable reproach and complaint, but also, therefore, of a more dubious veracity, there is always a tendency to exaggerate any description of suffering, because the person who endured it tends to present it as a virtue or as something to be admired, a noble sacrifice, when sometimes that isn't the case at all and it was just bad luck. Both of the people who told the stories did so unhesitatingly and boastfully. Yes, they were showing off. To me, though, it was as if they were accusing themselves and without even having been asked to do so, the Falangist writer and the woman on the tram. That, at least, is how my ears reacted, they were not amused, they did not admire the cruel acts they described, but were horrified and disgusted; and my judgement condemned them, passively of course.' ('With my tongue silenced,' I thought.) 'It gives you an idea of how other people experience violence; of how simpler, more superficial people – although they're not necessarily more primitive or less educated – grow accustomed to it and then see no need to place limits on it and consequently don't; and it gives you an idea of just how much violence there was. So much, and so taken for granted, that the people who perpetrated the most brutal and gratuitous acts of violence, committed out of a senseless, baseless hatred, could talk about it in public with perfect aplomb, could boast about it. I mean what possible need was there to bash a baby's brains out; what need was there to stick banderillas and lances into a condemned man and then mutilate his body. But there were others among us who never got used to it, you never do if you keep your sense of perspective and don't fell into the lazy way of thinking that says 'What does it matter, after all…' which lay behind the comment that other man made to the writer when he asked if the
