فصل پنجم

5

Fathers and Sons

Vidal cleaned his father’s pocket watch every night, the only time when he took off his gloves. The room Vidal had made his office was the one right behind the huge wheel that had once helped grind the miller’s corn. Its massive spokes covered most of the back wall and at times gave him the feeling of living inside the watch, which was strangely comforting. He polished the richly engraved silver casing and brushed the dust off the gearwheels as tenderly as if he were caring for a living thing.

Sometimes the objects we hold dear give away who we are even more than the people we love. The glass of the watch had cracked in the hand of Vidal’s father at the very moment he died, which his son took as proof that things could survive death if only one kept them clean and in perfect order.

His father was a hero. Vidal had grown up with that thought. He had built himself around it. A true man. And that thought brought a memory, almost invariably, of the day when he and his father had visited the cliffs of Villanueva. The rugged seascape on the horizon, the jagged rocks beneath—a hundred-foot drop. His father had gently guided him to the edge and then held him fast. He had grabbed his son when he recoiled, forcing him to look down into the abyss. “Feel that fear?” his father asked. “You must never forget it. That is what you must feel every time you grow weak—when you try to forget that you serve your fatherland and your station in life. When you are faced with death or honor. If you betray your country, your name, or your heritage, it will be as if you take a step forward to take a plunge. The abyss is invisible to you, but it is no less real. Never forget it, my son. . . .” A knock on the door made the present delete the past. It was a knock so soft that it betrayed who was asking for permission to enter.

Vidal frowned. He hated anything interrupting his nightly ritual. “Come in!” he called, keeping his attention on the shiny workings of the watch.

“Capitán.”

Dr. Ferreira’s steps were as soft and careful as his voice. He stopped a short distance from the table.

“How is she?” Vidal asked.

The wheels of the pocket watch began to move in their perfect rhythm, confirming once again that there was no end to well-kept order. Immortality was clean and precise. For sure it didn’t need a heart. A heartbeat became irregular so easily and at the end it stopped, however carefully one treated it.

“She is very weak,” Dr. Ferreira said.

Yes, soft. That’s what the good doctor was. Soft clothes, soft voice, soft eyes. Vidal was sure, he could have broken him as effortlessly as he could a rabbit’s neck.

“She’ll get as much rest as she needs,” he said. “I’ll sleep down here.” That would make things easier anyway. He had grown tired of Carmen. He grew tired of every woman quite easily. They usually tried to get too close. Vidal didn’t want anyone to get close. It made him vulnerable. All order was lost when love moved in. Even desire could be confusing unless one fed it and moved on. Women didn’t understand that.

“And what about my son?” he asked. The child was all he cared about. A man was mortal without a son.

The doctor looked at him in surprise. His eyes always looked slightly surprised behind those silver-rimmed glasses. He opened his soft mouth to answer when Garces and Serrano appeared in the doorway.

“Capitán!”

Vidal silenced his officers with a wave of his hand. The fear on their faces never ceased to please him. It even made him forget what a miserable place this was, so far away from the cities and battlefields where history was written. Being stationed in this dirty, rebel-infested forest—he would make it count. He would plant fear and death with such precision that the generals who had sent him here would hear about it. Some of them had fought with his father.

“My son!” he repeated, impatience cutting like a razor in his voice. “How is he?” Ferreira still looked at him with bewilderment. Did I ever meet a man like you? his eyes seemed to ask. “For the moment,” he replied, “there is no reason to be alarmed.” Vidal reached for a cigarette and his cap. “Very good,” he said, pushing his chair back. Which meant: Go.

But the doctor was still standing in front of the table.

“Your wife shouldn’t have traveled, Capitán. Not at such a late state of pregnancy.” What a fool. A sheep shouldn’t talk like that to a wolf.

“Is that your opinion?”

“My professional opinion. Yes, Capitán, it is.”

Vidal slowly walked around the table, his uniform cap under his arm. He was taller than Ferreira. Of course. Ferreira was a small man. He was losing his hair and his scraggly beard made him look old and pathetic. Vidal loved the clean-shaven chin a sharp razor delivered. He felt nothing but contempt for men like Ferreira. Who wants to heal in a world that is all about killing?

“A son,” he stated calmly, “should be born wherever his father is.” Fool. Vidal walked toward the door, the smoke of his cigarette following him through the sparsely lit room. Vidal didn’t like lights. He liked to see his own darkness. He was almost at the door when Ferreira once again raised his annoyingly gentle voice.

“What makes you so sure the baby is male, Capitán?”

Vidal turned with a smile, his eyes as black as soot. He could make men feel his knife between their ribs just by looking at them.

“You should leave,” he said.

He could see that Ferreira felt the blade.

The soldiers on guard duty had captured two rabbit hunters poaching past the curfew. Vidal was surprised that Garces had found that worth calling him, although all his officers knew how much he hated to be disturbed at such a late hour.

The moon was a starved sickle in the sky when they stepped out of the mill.

“At eight we detected movement in the northwest sector,” Garces reported as they crossed the yard. “Gunfire. Sergeant Bayona searched the area and captured the suspects.” Garces always talked as if he were dictating his words.

The captives, one old and one much younger, were as pale as the sickly moon. Their clothes were filthy from the woods and their eyes were dim with guilt and fear.

“Capitán,” the younger one said as Vidal scrutinized them wordlessly, “this is my father.” He gestured to the older man. “He is an honorable man.” “I’ll be the judge of that.” Although Vidal enjoyed fear in a man’s face, it made him angry at the same time.

“And uncover your head in front of an officer.”

The son removed his worn-out cap. Vidal knew why the boy was avoiding his eyes. Dirty peasant! He was proud—one could hear it in his voice—and clever enough to know that his captors wouldn’t like that.

“We found this on them.” Serrano handed Vidal an old rifle. “It’s been fired.” “We were hunting for rabbits!” The boy was proud and without respect.

“Did I say you could talk?”

The old man was so scared that his knees almost gave way. Scared for his son. One of the soldiers holding him yanked the rucksack from his bent shoulders and handed it to Vidal. He pulled out a pocket almanac issued by the Republican government to all farmers—it looked like it had been read many times. The back cover showed the Republican flag and Vidal read the slogan aloud with a sneer: “’No god, no country, no master.’ I see.”

“Red propaganda, Capitán!” Serrano looked proud and relieved that he hadn’t just disturbed his capitán for two dirty peasants. Maybe these two even belonged to the resistance fighters against General Franco, who they had come to hunt in this accursed forest.

“It’s not propaganda!” the son protested.

“Shhh.”

The soldiers heard the threat in Vidal’s hissed warning, but the stupid young peacock was too eager to protect his father. Love kills in many ways.

“It’s just an old almanac, Capitán!”

No, the boy wouldn’t shut up.

“We are just farmers,” his father said, trying to draw Vidal’s gaze from his son.

“Go on.” Vidal liked it when they started pleading for their lives.

“I went up into the woods to hunt rabbits. For my daughters. They are both sick.” Vidal sniffed at a bottle he drew out of the old man’s rucksack. Water. One had to do these things calmly to enjoy them.

Order. Even in these things.

“Rabbits . . . ,” he said. “Really?”

He knew the son would step into the trap. Oh yes, he knew how to do this. The generals shouldn’t have wasted his talents in this forest. He could have done great things.

“Capitán, respectfully,” the son said, “if my father says he was hunting rabbits, he was hunting rabbits.” He hid his pride under his lowered lids, but his lips betrayed him.

Calmly. That’s how it had to be done.

Vidal took the bottle of water and slammed it into the young peacock’s face. Then he drove the shattered glass into his eye. Again and again. Let the rage have its way or it will consume you. The glass cut and smashed, turning skin and flesh into bloody pulp.

The father screamed louder than the son, tears painting smears onto his dirty cheeks.

“You killed him! You killed him! Murderer!”

Vidal shot him in the chest. It was not much of a chest. The bullets found his heart easily. Two bullets through his dirty, ragged clothes and cardboard bones.

The son was still moving, his hands red with his own blood as he pressed them against the gaping wounds on his face. What a mess. Vidal shot him, too. Under the pale sickle of the moon.

The forest was watching as silently as his soldiers.

Vidal wiped his gloved hands clean on the rucksack, then upended it onto the ground. Papers. More papers. And two dead rabbits. He held them up. They were scrawny little things, mere bones and fur. Maybe a stew would have come out of them.

“Maybe next time you’ll learn to search these assholes properly,” he said to Serrano, “before you come knocking at my door.” “Yes, Capitán.”

How stiffly they all stood there.

What? Vidal challenged them with his eyes. He had a temper. Yes. What were they thinking now, staring at the two dead men at their feet? That some of their fathers and brothers were peasants too? That they also loved their daughters and their sons? That one day he would do the same to them?

Maybe.

We are all wolves, he wanted to say to them. Learn from me.