The Pain of Others

Someone broke into Rosario’s house, killed Rosi, and kidnapped Nicolás, you hear your father say in the other room.
It’s the first thing you hear. A voice that awakens you. A phrase you’ll never forget.
For a moment, you try to tell yourself it’s a dream. You remain there, paralyzed, in the sheets. It’s five in the morning, and you’ve barely slept a wink. Your Christmas Eve dinner didn’t go down well, and for hours, you’ve been tossing and turning in bed.
They killed Rosi and they took Nicolás, you hear your father say clearly now.
That’s when you open your eyes, still baffled, jump out of bed, throw on the clothing that lies nearest to hand and run off to the living room.
Your mother’s in her nightgown next to the Christmas tree. She looks at you and starts to cry.
Rosario’s children . . . , she manages to say.
What happened? you ask.
Something bad, she responds, something bad, son. And she brings her hands to her face to hide her tears. Your father’s in the bathroom getting dressed. Your brother, the first to hear the news, is standing in the doorway trying to hurry him along.
He walks out and tells you, Come along if you feel like it.
Your mother stays home. You go with them.
Be careful, she warns. And lock the door behind you.
The cold sinks into your bones and the damp into your brain. It’s December in the lowlands of Murcia.
The three of you walk down the dark road in silence. A soft roar absorbs every sound, and it grows as you approach the road, walking in the direction of the driveway, which is dense with silhouettes that then dissolve in the morning shadows.
Soft light from a cracked fixture lights up the bystanders’ faces. No one looks at each other, and everyone speaks softly.
Three patrol cars are blocking the entrance to the house. Beside them, alone, pacing in small circles with his hands behind his back, is your friend’s father.
What happened, Antón? your brother asks as you approach him.
Nothing . . . , he murmurs, eyes trained on the ground, just that they’ve killed my Rosi and taken Nicolás with them.
This is all he says, and he repeats it over and over: to the neighbor from across the street, to your neighbor Julia, to your cousin Maruja, to anyone who stops their car and comes over and asks. He says it with that same lost look in his eyes, expression unhinged, incredulous, as if he didn’t really know what happened, as if nothing had happened at all.
Nothing.
That’s the word he begins with every time someone asks.
And that is what no one understands. This nothing that can’t be said. This nothing that creeps into every crook and corner. This nothing that immobilizes you and clouds your mind. This nothing, and two questions:
Who killed Rosi?
Who took Nicolás away?

1

“Twenty years ago, on Christmas Eve, my best friend killed his sister and threw himself off a cliff.”
“Don’t overthink it, man. You’ve got the story you were looking for right there.”
The author Sergio del Molino had come to Murcia to present his book What No One Cares About, and I had just told him that the story he recounts in that novel, the reconstruction of his maternal grandfather’s life, had left me without ideas for my own upcoming project. I was busy writing my second novel, and over the past few months, I had sketched out a few pages about my father’s father. At the beginning of summer, one of my uncles had come back to Spain from Argentina after several decades away. My brothers had organized a family lunch, and he had hypnotized us with the story of my grandfather Cristóbal. According to my uncle, his father was one of Franco’s spies in Africa, feared in Guadix for his savagery after the war. He kidnapped my grandmother soon after she’d turned twelve and took most of his family to Argentina to seek his fortune. No sooner than they’d arrived, he abandoned them all, and they knew nothing of what had happened to him until the mid-seventies, when they found his body in a ditch on the side of a country road.
Once or twice, I’d heard my father talk about my grandfather’s character, his sternness, the way, in the postwar years, the Civil Guards stood at attention in his presence, and even how he’d jumped over the wall around my grandmother’s backyard to spirit her away by force. He probably told that story about Argentina that I heard from his brother years later, but I don’t remember, and maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Children just don’t pay attention to their parents. And they don’t realize it until it’s too late. Maybe for that reason—and maybe too because, despite my uncle’s strong Argentine accent, his voice reminded me of my father—I followed his story that afternoon as if it were The Thousand and One Nights. And when he finished and paused and exclaimed, “That son of a bitch, Grandpa Cristóbal,” I felt the urge to delve into the life of that stranger I’d never even seen a photo of.
For months, the idea grew in my head. I opened a notebook and started filling it with notes, drafts, ideas. I even considered abandoning the novel I was writing at the time. But at the end of the summer of 2014, just when I had well and truly decided that my next book would try to trace out the exploits of this cruel, infamous ancestor, Sergio del Molino’s book arrived at my home and spoiled all my plans. He had written the book I wanted to write. The lives in question were different—his grandfather wasn’t a miserable bastard the way mine seems to have been—but what I wanted to tell—the story of a country and a generation seen through the life of a single person—was the very heart of Sergio’s book. And so writing this after him didn’t make much sense. Not then, anyway. And so when I saw him in Murcia a few months later, I couldn’t help but say, “You fucker, you stole my next novel from me.”
And it was then, after a conversation about autofiction, nonfiction, novels based on true events, and autobiographies, that I mentioned a story, not the one about my grandfather, but another one that I’d been holding on to for a long time. A bitter story, one I wasn’t sure I’d ever have the courage to face, but which I summarized in one raw, dry phrase: “Twenty years ago, on Christmas Eve, my best friend killed his sister and threw himself off a cliff.”
Those words contained a story. The past I’ve sought to escape from my entire life.

Twenty years ago . . .

I had just turned eighteen, I was living with my parents in a small village in the Murcian lowlands, and I had begun studying art history at the university. My father packaged windows in an aluminum workshop, and my mother was taking care of Nena, her aunt, who was past ninety and spent her days sitting there and looking out the window. My three brothers, who all married when I was still a kid, had left home some time ago. I would stay there, though, in the middle of nowhere, for some time, with Nena and my parents, who were so much older than I, they could easily have been my grandparents.
I was coddled, spoiled, the baby. I had everything my parents and brothers never could. And that meant I had no right to complain, because I didn’t know what it meant to work like a dog or scrounge money just to eat. And so I had to study, try my best, take advantage of that opportunity everyone else had been forced to pass up. Study so you don’t end up working in the fields. Get a certificate in whatever, accounting, automotive engineering, electronics. Or better, take the college track, pass your exams, and if you’re lucky, you get into university. You can study whatever. Ideally law, or education, or psychology. Even art history. That was still a degree. And a degree was a future. I was the first person in my family to go to college. What a source of pride. All their efforts, all that overtime, all those sleepless nights, they were finally worth it. My son, the college graduate, was what my mother yearned to say, he shuts himself in his room to study and hardly ever sees the light of day, but someday, he’s going to be somebody.
Her son—me—was for the moment just a fat kid. A fat kid and not much else. A fat kid with hang-ups who bought black T-shirts two sizes too big so no one would notice his love handles. A studious fat kid, but invisible, who passed unnoticed through elementary school and high school and still had no idea that he’d one day show a knack for memorizing slides of Greek temples and Baroque paintings. A fat kid who hadn’t written a single line, who hadn’t even hit on the notion of becoming a writer. A fat kid who read till his eyes ached and compulsively devoured whatever book fell into his hands.
That was me. The fat kid who read in a world where no one else did. In my house, there were no books until I started showing up with them. First they were loaners, from the library at school; then from the libraries in the surrounding towns; finally, I started buying books of my own. At the bookstore in the village and the kiosk in the square. New books and secondhand ones. Classic and contemporary. Dostoevsky and Stephen King. Hermann Hesse and Dean R. Koontz. I didn’t have standards. Or my standard was simply: Books are good, all of them, and they all need to be read. And that’s what I did. I read till my eyes burned and my vision was blurry. Until reality vanished and a different world opened before me. Like those nights I spent in a kitchen chair with The Little Vampire when I was eight years old and still didn’t have my own room. Or the week I bundled up in the quilt on the sofa to read The Neverending Story two times through, like Bastian Balthazar Bux, illuminating the pages with the same square flashlight my father took out at night when the men went to water their lemon trees.
I think about it now, and that image seems like a condensation of my two worlds. The world under the quilt on the sofa and the world outside. The universe of books and life in the lowlands. The place I wanted to flee to and the place where I was forced to live, a small old world, closed, claustrophobic, where the very air was heavy. In 1995—the twenty years ago of the phrase printed above—I set out on my own private attempt to escape, though I didn’t yet know it. College, the city, the world beyond the lowlands—that would be my salvation. There, I would find a place I belonged. The place I should have been born. But there were burdens still that wouldn’t let me leave and that kept me bound to that territory I returned to every afternoon. One of these had been my shadow, my source of oxygen in the past, the boy I grew up next to: Nicolás, Rosario’s kid, my neighbor on the farm. I’d put some distance between us, but I still considered him . . .

. . . my best friend.