1

They say, Xoana, Xoana, you who haven’t arrived yet, your slippery body still sailing the amniotic waters of my belly, that my great-great-grandmother Pepa, Pepa the Mole, got pregnant in Monterroso, during the fair in November. She never knew who’d sown the seed between her legs that would grow to be Rosa, Pérez her last name too, and with no other surname, the way it usually is with children who have nobody to call their father.

         They never found out who that man was, the one who took advantage of the darkness – the one that was part of the night and the other that was in the young girl’s eyes – and attacked her so brutally, so silently. Still, when she was old, the Mole prayed every day for his soul and blessed him for having given her that daughter, who was the light of day for her eyes, extinguished by the pox in the distant days of childhood.

         Pepa the Mole went from fair to fair and from pilgrimage to pilgrimage, guided by the hand of another blind person, who really wasn’t, a peddler nicknamed Maricallo, a trickster with a high-pitched voice whom she had to fight every day to make him dole out equal portions of the slim pickings from the show they both put on. He would wring some rasping, exaggerated notes from an old violin and, with her clear, melodious voice, she would sing coplas, popular songs, of old crimes and romance that you’ll come to know some day because I’ll write them down for you, together with this testimony.

         They say that in Monterroso, in the big fair, a lot of people went and the coins made a gleeful sound when they clattered into the tin cup that Maricallo brandished when demanding his payment. Pepa the Mole had sung long and well. A repertoire of crimes and fallen honors for an easy-going, hard-working audience that showed its generosity after selling its wares. Love affairs of knights and historical maidens for enjoying the aftermath of a meal of octopus, bread, and purrela, cheap Ribeiro wine.

         At night, after the take had been divvied up, while Maricallo was drinking and went begging around the taverns, collecting nothing more than the jeers of vendors and farmers, the blind girl clutched the apron full of coins as she lay on the dry straw of the hay shed that was her home. The girl with the face that was scarred by the measle blisters daydreamed and, in her fantasies, became the handsome woman starring in those old romances. She might have been dreaming that Einhard, the king’s kind page, visited her in her princess’ bed and that with her scent of roses, she had stolen all his color. She was probably dreaming about a beautiful romance when the ugly brute came and emptied himself in her, the girl who was homely and poor, alone and defenseless.

         When he realized she was pregnant, Maricallo wanted to take her to A Pella, the witch of Francelos, who was very skilled in the art of ending pregnancies using parsley. He argued that he couldn’t take her back home in that condition nor with a baby in her arms, because he’d promised her mother he’d watch out for the blind girl. He insisted that the road was hard enough without having to walk with a baby in her belly as well. But Pepa the Mole refused to end the life that was beating inside her. Maybe, when the pregnancy was advanced and it was hell to get around, the romance of Einhard had been replaced in her dreams by the Virgin about to give birth, on the road to Bethlehem in accordance with Caesar’s order.

         Because, Xoana, my great-great-grandmother, I’m quite sure, Xoana, you who haven’t been born yet, did not carry my great-grandmother cursing the man who left her in that condition. She simply dressed him in the garments of a figure of dreams, Einhard, the protagonist of a Carolingian romance who, if he had in fact been real, would have already been in the great beyond for about a thousand years. But my great-great-grandmother, who knew nothing about these things, knew that a child has to be born out of love and that was why she imagined it so.

         One July afternoon the trickster and the girl arrived at the hut they shared. He was laden with the few belongings they had tied in a bundle; she had a canvas sack where they kept the violin, hanging from a piece of twine over her shoulder. Rosa was born a few days later.

         Pepa the Mole was quick to return to the road because it was the only way she had to support her baby, but she returned as often as she could to check on the little one, to see she was growing up almost healthy and happy, at the knees of a grandmother who’d been hardened by work and hunger. The child would wait for her mother, who always brought her honeyed sweets and trinkets she bought from the hawkers at the fairs after they’d been picked over. And she waited most of all for the warmth of the kisses of her not very attractive mother, who lulled her to sleep with stories she told in the most beautiful voice. But the blind woman never wanted to return to Monterroso.

         Remember, Xoana, you descend from Pepa Pérez, nicknamed the Mole, who was blinded by the pox and impregnated by Einhard, the page whom Charlemagne, after finding him in bed with his daughter and thrusting his very sword between the two sleeping lovers, would later interrogate with the intention of punishing him by death.

         The boy roamed the halls of the palace, looking like a ghost, terrified by the discovery of a love that could never be, when he ran into the king: Where are you going, Einhard? You look so sad and pale. His reply saved his life: The fragrance of a rose devoured all my color.

         What I’m trying to say, Xoana, is that you descend from the greatest poverty and the most brutal act, but also from the beautiful dream that filled the mind of my great-great-grandmother that night in November. That dream, greater than her misfortune, was what she nurtured, perhaps so as not to die from rage, or perhaps so she could protect the life within her. Without knowing, she did what the oyster does: she wrapped an affliction with the purest of material until it was transformed into a pearl. A pearl that is the second link – my great-grandmother Rosa – in this chain that I hope to forge for you, Xoana, in case at some point, when you’re older and life is painful, you need strength that is greater than your own.

2

I don’t know how you’re going to feel about the fact that you’re the daughter of a single mother, but I think you’ll be all right. Fortunately, times have changed, they’ve definitely changed, and single-parent families, for one reason or another, are more and more common. When Rosa was born, among the lower classes, it was in fact more common to be a “child of nature,” born out of wedlock rather than to married parents (I don’t know what that phrase “child of nature” means, because none of us is artificial and we’re all created by the same act). The problem, and there was one, was more the lack of men, of strong muscles to do the work, than the disgrace of a condition that, like I just told you, was a daily event. The disgrace was caused by the poverty in which they lived.

         Pepa’s mother, Rosa’s grandmother, died when Rosa was a beautiful young girl, but fragile and not much good at the chores related to planting and harvesting. It’s not that they had fewer plots than other poor folk who survived by working the land, but their plots were barren or didn’t produce anything because they weren’t tended to very much and back then they were a burden when time came to pay the fees to use them.

         That’s why Rosa went to work in the Big House that was more or less a league from the hut where she’d been born. Her mother, Pepa the Mole, went to visit her there, and was treated like all the other beggars who came to the house of the Lord of Mezur, an old-style Christian, religious, friend of the clergy, but who was very tempted by the pleasures of the flesh and inevitably succumbed to them. They say he had more than twenty bastard children. They say he knew all of them and helped them all out in one way or another, sometimes with a recommendation, sometimes with a loan, or with advice, or with a scolding.

         I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Don Álvaro Pardo de Outeiro, the Lord of Mezur, raped my great-grandmother, but I think there are many ways to rape a woman without using physical force. Keep in mind that Rosa was a very young lass, little more than a girl. It’s important you not forget, if you’re tempted to judge her, that Don Álvaro was her master and she was used to obeying him. Remember that back then women were trained to be submissive and to submit to the man with the most authority who happened to be around them.

         The point is that Rosa accepted that relationship as her duty, but wasn’t free of guilty feelings because of the respect she had for Dona María, the lady of the Big House. A little before her condition began to show, the lord sent her back to her hut. That was where first Carolina and then Xenxo were born. Don Álvaro visited her there (she always used Don, the formal term of address, despite the relationship they had), and he continued to provide for that spurious family he’d acquired. Pepa the Mole, prematurely aged from life on the road, returned to the hut. She brought with her the old violin that she’d inherited from Maricallo when he died, shortly before my great-great-grandmother returned home.

         My grandmother Carolina used to tell how her grandmother had taught her to play that instrument with a certain amount of skill and that she played it when she sang the old romances that she had always known to her grandchildren.

         Remember, Xoana, my little one about to be born, that you are descended from Rosa, Rosa Pérez without a second surname, the daughter of the blind girl, herself a fragile little child whom life didn’t treat very well, nor did the Lord of Mezur, who stopped visiting her because he was heartsick after he received the news that three of his legitimate children – sons – had died on the front at the Ebro River.

3

Carolina is the third link in the chain that I want to give you. She’s my grandmother, your great-grandmother, whom you’ll never know except through these pages. She was as happy as a tinkling bell and, contrary to the passiveness and lack of strength of Rosa, she was always active and a real fighter. She certainly was a fighter, as you’re going to see by what I’m going to tell you.

         I always remember her as doing something, like hoeing the potatoes in the garden, or gathering wicker branches to make baskets, sometimes herding the livestock, other times planting eucalyptus trees even between the stone outcroppings, every day thinking about making the most out of what she had. She didn’t understand why I hated those trees that weren’t native to our land and told me that thanks to them I could study what I wanted to, not like her, she hadn’t been able to go to school much, even though she’d really wanted to and had made good use of the time she’d been able to spend with Dona Remedios.

         My grandmother, as I’ve already told you, wasn’t anything like her mother and they said she took after the line of the Lord of Mezur, which is why she was as strong as boxwood, but the noble and sophisticated features of the Big House were erased in the weathered face and work-worn hands of Carolina, who knew nothing of the lazy life that side of her family led. Rosa, on the other hand, the great-grandmother I barely remember because I was such a young girl when she died, was made of porcelain and anyone would think she’d been kidnapped, thrown out of a palace, left to wither in the poverty of that hut.

         “We were so poor,” my grandmother would say when she told me things about her childhood, like when she went to the houses of neighbors to beg for clogs they might have that were mismatched so she could use them. Often they were for the same foot.

         Once she told me she’d stolen something and that afterward, that night, she couldn’t sleep. Dona Remedios, the schoolmistress, had told them they had to bring a bit of cloth to make a kerchief and she would teach them how to do the hemstitch called vainica. She said she’d hunted and rummaged through all the cupboards and hadn’t been able to find anything she could use, but while she was searching the idea came to her that she’d seen a scarecrow in a neighbor’s field. There, flapping about in the wind, along with other pieces of cloth, was a remnant of material that had once been white. She walked toward it all by her lonesome, crouching down so nobody would see her, and grabbed the precious object for herself. Then she washed it and left it out in the sun until it had turned a decent white. “So I was just like the rest,” my grandmother told me before chuckling happily and repeating yet again that phrase: “It’s just that we were so poor.”

         My grandmother would grab me by the hand and take me through the family possessions. She used to tell me we could walk for hours without setting foot on somebody else’s land. It was truly the miracle of her hard work and also, I must admit, the efforts of her brother, Uncle Xenxo.

         Uncle Xenxo died when he was around sixty. He never married, after spending his life trying to fill the place of my dead grandfather. Uncle Xenxo was a man who kept to himself. He was odd, maybe even cranky, according to what people said, because I almost don’t remember him. However, I do remember his worst enemy, Severiano, who died when he was almost a hundred. Severiano was our neighbor. He lived in a miserable lean-to close to our hut, which by then was in a lot better condition, in fact it was almost a house.

         They say Severiano had a fig tree by his door that on blustery nights rapped against the glass in Uncle Xenxo’s window and wouldn’t let him sleep. They say the conversation between the two men for years was comprised only of: “You have to take down that fig tree,” “I don’t feel like taking it down,” “I’ll take it down for you,” “If you take it down, I’m coming after you.” They say that Uncle Xenxo was recovering from a fall and was in the hospital when, one night there wasn’t any storm at all and the wind wasn’t blowing, there was something like a strong, sharp crack and in the morning the fig tree was lying on the ground in front of Severiano’s door. A few hours later news arrived of the sudden death of grandmother’s brother. Severiano didn’t go to his funeral.

         I’m telling you this story about the fig tree so as a future woman of the twenty-first century, most likely skeptical and a nonbeliever, you will know that you, like the rest of humanity, are deeply rooted in mystery.

         I told you that Grandmother Carolina, your great-grandmother, was as happy as a tinkling bell and I’m not lying about that, but I could see how sometimes a dark cloud settled over her lashes. I’m certain it was when she was remembering my grandfather. My grandfather, her husband, had died when a tunnel they were building in Asturias collapsed.

         They were newlyweds, my mother had already been born, and he had left to earn a bit of money and buy the meadow by As Cruxeiras, the one that belongs to us now and that back then they were renting. My grandmother found out about the accident in the fair she’d gone to in order to buy cloth for a coat she wanted to make for her trip to Asturias. Just a few days earlier she’d received a letter from her husband asking her to come see him because after eight months, he couldn’t bear waiting any longer to see her and hug her. They’d only been together for two years. Maybe she had been holding the red fabric in her hands, maybe she was stroking it, when Uncle Xenxo interrupted the purchase: “Don’t buy it, you have to dress in mourning.”

         Grandmother Carolina loved music; she hadn’t been rocked to sleep by her grandmother Pepa the Mole’s lullabies for nothing. Pepa – the one who had a voice like a nightingale’s. She took my side when I had to overcome my parents’ reluctance to let me become a violinist. They thought anything else was a better way to make a living.

         As long as music lessons were an addition to my high-school studies, there was no problem. Things changed when I realized that my life’s dream was to play the violin. But my grandmother said: “If she wants to be a violinist, she should make up her mind to do it, but she has to be the best.” And nobody said another word.

         She never tired of listening to me practice, the exhaustingly repetitive sessions for the most difficult parts, and she even realized when my efforts met with success. Then she would say to me: “Everything is possible if you really want it.”

         My grandmother died quite a while after we got television, but she always preferred to listen to the radio. She said with the television she couldn’t be doing anything else and she wasn’t used to sitting without doing something with her hands. She also used to listen to songs on a tape recorder that she’d bought for me but I didn’t use any more. 

         One day, in her latter years, she surprised me with the request that I get her a tape of a song she’d heard on the radio. She remembered the name of the group perfectly, A Quenlla, and most of the song, too. “It’s as if it were talking about my life,” she confessed. “Letters come and letters go and words are written down, but since the day you left me, oh my love, oh my love…”

         I found it for her right away and watched how the tears filled her eyes as she listened to it over and over. I’d never seen her cry before, not even when Uncle Xenxo, her brother, died. Sure, she must have cried inwardly, despite all the laughter on the outside. There was a reason why she said that song was about her: “When I look into your eyes, my heart fills with tears, living without you is not living, oh my love, oh my love…”

         I was in Germany with a scholarship, taking courses in music appreciation when they called me because my grandmother was dying. She’d had a stroke.

         Before going to the hospital I stopped by the house and got the tape recorder and the tape with the poem by Neira Vilas. I know she could hear it, close as she was to the other side, because she still smiled a bit when she heard oh my love, oh my love.

         My mother said: “You’re really crazy, you know, look what you decided to do.” But she was crying like I was.

         Remember, Xoana, my little girl who is about to enter the world, that you had a great-grandmother named Carolina, who was widowed when she was not much more than twenty years old, and that she spent her whole life smiling on the outside, even though her heart might have been crying. Don’t forget that she worked hard, perhaps to defeat and get revenge against her greatest enemy – poverty – that took her away from the person she loved most.

4

Now I’m going to tell you about Carme, your grandmother, my mother, whom you might be able to meet, God willing. You already know she was still in the crib when her father left for Asturias. She was starting to walk around the time the sad news arrived, but as you might imagine, she doesn’t remember anything about that.

         Uncle Xenxo was like her father. That taciturn man, so they say, was entirely different when he was with the little girl. He made funny faces, told her stories, made up riddles, played hide-and-seek with her, would arrive loaded with gifts from town, and basically cleared the stones from her path so nothing and nobody could hurt her.

         The story goes that when after a few years Carolina decided to send her to a boarding school which she had a right to attend because she was an orphan, Uncle Xenxo went a whole month without saying a single word to his sister, and was extremely upset and hurt because the decision had been made without consulting him.

         I told you it was “a boarding school which she had a right to attend because she was an orphan,” but the right was very limited. At that time, in this country the man who was in power had taken control by force, he was a dictator. In those days they called justice charity, and the latter, charity, had very little to do with love as far as a religious virtue. You’ll understand that when I tell you what your grandmother’s life was like in that nuns’ school in Zaragoza.

         The girl, accompanied by her mother and village schoolmistress, had arrived at the city on the Ebro River after a long trip by train. They left her there, not without tears on both sides, under the care of some women who were oddly dressed and had no laps or kisses and rarely smiled. Orders, cautions, always general and impersonal, only became specific, directed at one girl in particular, when they became admonitions. The girl had arrived speaking a different language that condemned her to silence for months.

         There were two halls: one for those who could pay for their keep, and the other for the children infected with the bad sin of poverty. There were two classes of students: the pretty girls who would one day be ladies, and the unfortunate ones who would have to serve them one day, faithfully and skillfully. The first group, in addition to the organized system of studies, learned to play the piano, had parts in plays, and belonged to a choir in which their young voices sounded like angels singing. The other group, the ones who were there for free, spent those hours helping with the cleaning and cooking chores.

         Their classrooms weren’t the same either. The ones who paid studied for the secondary-school certificate or were going in that direction. For the ones who paid nothing, there was an effort to provide them with some general culture that would serve them in making a living.

         There was no contact between one groups and the other. Even though they coincided in the patio during recess, they were forbidden to speak to one another.

         Even their first communion did not make them equal. The pews in the chapel of the rich girls were lavishly decorated on that important day, while those of the other girls remained starkly naked. The thing is that in chapel, before God, there are classes too. That’s how that society, so Christian and faithful to the Gospel of universal brotherhood, saw things. Ultimately, although isolated from the world, the nuns were part of it and had to follow its rules.

         I’m telling you all these things without resentment, you must believe me, but you have to know about them in order to understand how your grandmother’s character was forged. That girl from the village, over the years, became an active union member and fought to end the inequality that had done her so much harm.

         In the first years of the boarding school Carme suffered, most of all because she was so far from her family and because of her freedom, which was considerable in the village. Because she was so young, she didn’t understand the differences. She missed her uncle Xenxo’s kindness and her mother’s kisses. At night she was cold in that long row of beds and, hunched up, she hugged herself and sometimes cried without making a sound. Once she tried to console herself and to console another girl who was sad like she was, but the nun on duty immediately appeared and talked about “special friendships” and other things the little girl couldn’t understand. What she did know, because of the punishment she received, was there must have been something really bad about looking for warmth in the bed of another girl in her group.

         With the passing of time your grandmother began to understand the world she lived in, and sadness gave way to rebellion and anger. She talked back to the nuns, started fights with the privileged students, was a very bad influence over the group of non-paying girls, according to the teachers, and over all, they said, she was a real troublemaker. That’s why they had to get her out of the school. The point is they expelled her.

         Carolina, her mother, was very upset, most of all because of the letter that informed her of the reasons for the expulsion. That’s how she learned that her daughter was the type of person whose attributes could best be described as those of a “troublemaker,” “gruff,” “arrogant,” “ill-tempered” and much more, common enough in those days but which the mother didn’t understand.

         Uncle Xenxo didn’t say anything, but he smiled with a triumphant air when he saw her walk through the door, knowing she’d never return to the boarding school.

         I won’t tell you about how my mother managed to finish high school and study typing and accounting. The point is that when they built the factory and needed some of our land, my grandmother knew how to take advantage of the opportunity to get her a job in the office.

         I’m also not going to tell you about the factory that transformed the way of life of the whole surrounding community. The people who got jobs there only worked the land as a secondary activity, but my grandmother and Uncle Xenxo remained faithful to the land, adding to what had previously been a small inheritance.

         At work Mama met the man she would marry, your Uncle Pedro, an industrial technician with a position as a clerk. It was a quick marriage, I think it was urgent, when I think about how soon afterward I was born.

         They always seemed to be in love and I don’t recall they ever argued, except for the days Mama was involved with the union. Then they did fight, a lot, especially when a contract was being negotiated. Mama threw it in his face that he, part of the management, even though he occupied the lowest rank, never considered himself working class. Papá would fire back that different classes and levels would always exist because education and work were not the same. He always ended up saying that strikes never achieved anything, they only caused losses and lack of respect. My mother would have the last word. With her dander up and no longer using good arguments, she would call him a sell-out and other things, but it never did any good.

         I also heard them argue when I said I only wanted to study music. At that moment, like I already told you, my grandmother Carolina had the last word.

         Now your grandfather Pedro is retired and soon Mama will be too, but she’s still the same, strong-willed and outspoken, always fighting for what she feels is right.

         Don’t forget, Xoana, Xoana, every day more real to me and closer, that you carry the rebelliousness of your grandmother Carme, the girl who was a non-paying student in a cold Zaragoza convent, in your blood. I’m sure it was there that, stripped of her family and her language, little by little she began to develop the idea of changing the world. Because that’s who Carme is, the woman who’s always determined to change the world.

5

You’re so close now, Xoana, that it makes me shiver thinking about it. It’s not giving birth that I fear. It’s you, the life you bring with you. Life, that sharpest of darts that always reaches deep, hits bone, that question for which I might not have an answer.

         The day they gave me the results of the amniocentesis I cried a lot. They told me you were doing well and that you were a girl. I cried because, although I already loved you, I wasn’t sure if I should allow you to be born. I wondered if I had the right to bring you into the world without a father to love you. I didn’t know if you were going to like that world you were going to enter. I wasn’t sure about my ability and my strength to be a mother. I went back and forth, in a word, from love to a sense of guilt, and from guilt to love, in a continuous da capo. And I’m explaining it this way, with this musical term, because there’s one thing I know for sure, and it’s that you will know music.

         I don’t pray, but I’ll never tell you God doesn’t exist, because that would mean affirming something that’s still not certain for me. But that day, in my own way, I prayed. I went to get my violin – not the Bausch that I usually play in concerts – but the one that Pepa the Mole inherited from Maricallo and that cost me so much to have restored, and I played Gounod’s Ave Maria for you, for me, for my uncertainties. And it was as if everything fell into place and everything had an undeniable order that I should not and could not disobey.

         Through my memory, maybe through my veins, there paraded Pepa the Mole, pregnant and blind, weaving the veil of a dream along the way to cover the pain of a rape. And Rosa Pérez, fragile as glass, abandoned by her lord and master, left alone to bring up two children in a miserable hut. And Carolina, my grandmother, widowed when she was little more than twenty, fighting against poverty and always smiling, even though her heart might be weeping. And Carme, my mother, thinking beyond her own needs to demand a better future for our country and for its people. A beautiful chain of life in which I too am a link, a link which joins you to it as well and which I will not break.

         It was at that moment when I decided to tell you all these things, to give you these names and these lives as talismans for a future that is uncertain, like all futures.

I’m going to talk to you about talismans, those objects, both physical and symbolic, that we turn to when we are alone at night. Perhaps those of us who were only children have a greater tendency to use them. Maybe that’s because adults don’t have the ability to examine the fears of childhood, regardless of the fact that one way or another they might continue to suffer the stigmas. The best-kept secret of a boy or girl are the fears that give them goosebumps. But when they have someone like them close to them, the most likely thing is that they’ll end up talking. When they don’t, there are talismans.

         I had, and still have, many talismans. A piece of quartz that weighs more than five kilos and always goes with me to places I have to be more than a month. It’s not that I believe in the healing or damaging effect of stones, it’s something else. With its shades of color that range from mauve to violet, it’s like a flower with polyhedral petals, a great little miracle of nature that constantly reminds me of the beauty and perfection that appear in the midst of so much chaos.

         Aldebaran, a star I’ve never seen and that’s in the southern hemisphere, might be simply a melodious name, but I know that behind that name, thousands of light years away, the star is shining.

         A hippocampus, one of those tiny seahorses, now so rare, that was a gift years ago from my first summer love.

         The yellowed scores of three sonatas by Mozart for violin and piano that I bought in a second-hand bookstore in Paris the day I met François.

         The compact disc with Bobby Vinton singing Sealed With a Kiss, a song that Bryan Hyland had recorded in 1962, ten years before Vinton. At that time the song was thirty years old, a few years older than I was.

         Pepa the Mole’s violin. Rosa Pérez’s portrait. The last letter from my grandfather with its blurry letters, smudged ink, clumsy handwriting and awkward turn of phrase because he wasn’t writing in his language. The letter in which he asks Carolina to visit because he hasn’t seen her for so long.

         A book of poems written in Cyrillic, with my annotations all over the pages. The author is Leonid Nikolayevich Martynov, a Russian. Between the pages, a dry sprig of the herb of love, sea thrift. Alexei forgot it there, or maybe he left it for me on purpose.

6

I’m taking a while to talk about things like talismans because it’s really hard for me to talk about myself. Maybe I shouldn’t do it, maybe you should be the one to write this chapter after years have passed. But I think that if while you’re growing up something should happen to me your chain will not be linked, the memories I want to leave you will be broken, Xoana, my little girl whose arrival will change the musical score of my life, you who will become that allegro giocoso it hasn’t been until now.

         And perhaps, as someone once said, everybody buys sadness where they want and how they want.

         I’m trying to say that maybe I didn’t know how to create happiness, that I did not make prudent use of that wealth of happy moments life gives us. Or perhaps I gave myself to ephemeral things – often the most beautiful ones – with too much passion, and I wanted them to be eternal, which was contrary to their very essence.

         The fact is your mother tends to be melancholic.

         I already told you that I was born not too long after my parents were married. I already told you that I always thought they seemed very much in love, so it’s not hard to imagine that I’m a love child and maybe the only thing they could accuse me of is that I arrived a little ahead of time, but they didn’t do that. I never felt I wasn’t loved, even when I did things they didn’t like. You already know how close I was to Grandmother Carolina, whose absence is still painful.

         I went to school, to an agrupación escolar, primary school, and I completed what was then called Ensino Xeral Básico. My grades were good. I didn’t really study that much, but I paid attention in class and after read a lot. I read everything I could get my hands on.

         Around that time a mayor who was a music lover supported the creation of a basic conservatory in the town. That was a stroke of luck for me. I was excellent in music theory as well as the violin and balanced them with no problem in the required curriculum. When I’d finished high school and the basic and mid-levels of music, I left for Compostela, where I did advanced courses. After that I went to Madrid to study Harmony and Composition. Later, as you know because I told you about it when I talked about my grandmother’s death, I received a scholarship to study in Germany. I also added to my knowledge in Paris, with a violinist who was internationally famous. Don’t take this as a lack of humility, but I’m one of the greatest interpreters of Mozart, which means I have to travel a lot because I’m invited by different orchestras to perform with them. But my job is with the Philharmonic, where I’ve had a seat for several years. Since Alexei the first violin left, I’ve been mentioned as his substitute and in fact I’m already serving in that capacity. I think that if I don’t officially have that role it’s because in this country the idiocy that leads us to respect those from other countries more is still in effect. These things make me feel like leaving, but the truth is that like one of Atahualpa Yupanqui’s songs goes, “I like the air here.” I want to live and work in my country, which has been so drained by the loss of those who had to go elsewhere to earn a living. In any event, I won’t bore you any more with my curriculum, because you can find it in the programs and reviews I’m saving for you.

         I would, however, talk to you about what music is to me. Beyond the definition of the art, which can be found in any dictionary or manual, beyond the definition of the term, there are the connotations that are based upon each person’s experience. How could I explain a passion, a desire, an infinite obsession to you? How could I explain the wings of the wind that takes me away, the claws of the bird of prey that grabs me, the ecstatic shiver that grips me? Yes, my daughter, who when you read this will be a grown woman, it’s the same as love. But this thing, music, never let me down. Now it’s time to tell you about the other.

7

If it’s hard for me to talk about myself, like I said, it’s even more difficult now that I’m going to talk about my love life. You can probably guess the details, read between the lines, interpret the silences. That’s because, if there’s one part of our personality where we have a hidden room we don’t want anybody to enter, it’s the place where we have our most intimate feelings. Do you know why? Because that’s where everything hurts more, where our flesh is exposed, without skin, the armor that keeps us separate, but also protects us.

         You’ve probably noticed three names that are still linked to other talismans of mine. I want to talk to you about them. It’s not that there weren’t others, but like the boy who gave me a seahorse when I was a teenager, they were just summer clouds, and so they passed through my life without leaving a trace.

         I don’t want you to think that your mother is promiscuous, under any circumstances. However, I have to tell you that in all truthfulness, until now, I’ve always been open to new relationships. When one of them was over, I would promise myself not to get so involved again. It was like preserving my armor, my skin, so that love would not harm me. Follow the advice of the poet who recommended cutting roses without getting wounded by the thorns. But it was never possible for me: it’s the nature of that feeling that, like music, is one of rapture.

         Yet I never experienced love without fear. I experienced love with fear because from the beginning I knew that perfection doesn’t last because it’s a journey. And journeys, Xoana, wear out the soles of shoes and we finally discover how rough the terrain is. Love doesn’t last because it’s a flight and one’s wings grow weary from beating so hard against the wind of habit. Love doesn’t last because it’s a provocation, it raises two fingers at death, and death, Xoana, won’t put up with irreverence.

         I have no right to leave you the dregs of my coffee here, since you didn’t drink it. If I’m daring to talk to you this way it’s because I know that, despite everything I’m telling you, you’re going to create your own itinerary and reach your own conclusions.

         I met François in Paris, in a bar near the Sorbonne. I had arrived not long before and made plans to meet Marcial Iturralde there. He was a fellow I’d met in Madrid, an instructor of classical guitar who was teaching a course in the university there. Marcial was going to help me look for a studio and without meaning to he ended up helping me begin my first stable relationship. He introduced me to François, a teacher of medieval literature from Brittany. We connected immediately and talked, maybe too much for a first meeting, and without realizing we were marginalizing our common friend, who’d introduced us. Our friend soon said good-bye and left, upset or distracted, without giving me the addresses he’d brought for me.

         François was the one who ended up finding me a place to live and guiding my early visits through the city I’d been dreaming about and seemed to know, perhaps since reading Cortázar’s Hopscotch. The day we met, he’d gone with me to a used bookstore that specialized in musical scores, where I bought Mozart’s sonatas, that other talisman of mine I told you about.

         I’ll spare you the details of how we fell in love, because we did. I’ll only tell you that, after the similarities between Brittany and Galicia, after medieval poetry, in which he was a specialist and I knew about as well, after our strolls through the city, we started to talk about ourselves, losing ourselves in the forests of our childhoods, that place where people in love always meet.

         I moved into François’ studio and lived with him for eight months. Then, after the course was over, I had to return home. I visited him and he visited me for another two years, but distance put an end to our relationship.

         You might wonder, Xoana, if those days in Paris, or to be more exact, that time with François, affected me in any way. To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t know because I’m never sure if love has memory and as such is printed on the pages of our spiritual bodies, of our embodied spirits, or if memory is in fact a recreation, a re-elaboration of what was or what wasn’t. I don’t know if we refuse to admit that something we imagined was one of a kind and marvelous might die, forgetting that there’s nothing new under the stars. My little girl, I can guarantee that I’m absolutely certain that memory survives. I never stop loving.

         I recall a movie I liked a lot, Splendor in the Grass, that ended with some lines of verse I can recite you from memory:

                   Though nothing can bring back the hour

                   Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,

                   We will grieve not, rather find

                   Strength in what remains behind.

         François was tender and kind, passionate and strong. And Paris, like someone said, was a movable feast.

8

I met Lalo in Silvio’s house. I hope that when you read this you will already have met Silvio and seen that he’s a magnificent hyperrealist painter. He organizes really entertaining parties in his house in Oleiros, where he invites me and where I always, always have to accompany him with my violin while he plays fragments of works by Kreisler, his favorite musical style. After the “concert” we always end up dancing to old romantic songs until the wee hours of the morning.

         The aesthetic of the body is all-important in that house, both in the many paintings of the owner and those of other male and female painters. Silvio always has a court of ephebes, which doesn’t leave much doubt about his own sexual orientation, but there are also women, most of them from the art world. In any event, it’s a space with an atmosphere of great freedom and it makes us all feel very much at ease.

         Sealed With a Kiss, sung by Bobby Vinton, was playing when Lalo came over to me and asked me to dance. You can’t imagine how gorgeous he was. So gorgeous that I didn’t say a thing, since I’d noticed him before and thought he was Silvio’s latest conquest. Silent and with my guard up, I just let him take the lead. And when the song was over and he put his lips on mine, it was as if he had sealed my mouth forever, because I swear to you that was the relationship we had, a pure and unique body language.

         It’s hard for me to tell you these things because maybe you’ll think I’m a loose or frivolous woman and nothing could be further from the truth.

         There are other languages besides the spoken one, and naturally the dialogue we shared was perfect. So perfect that sometimes I think I invented Lalo, made him up.

         Lalo left the same way he came, without speaking. Later I heard he’d gone to work as an instructor in a school for elite sportspeople, but I never saw him again. He did send his regards through our common acquaintances when he ran into them. It’s been quite a while now since I’ve heard from him.

After these things winter usually settled in and the sky would cave in on me, but every cloud has a silver lining. One morning the sun would come out and start to shine again. Meanwhile, I always had music.

Cesare Fiorino had left the Philharmonic to go to London and Alexei Mikhailovich arrived to fill his place with a two-season contract.

         At that time we were rehearsing Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. You know the story: a faun, weary from chasing nymphs, sits under the shade of a tree beside a warm Sicilian beach. The sun is setting. At first his siesta is pleasant, but then it’s disturbed. Among the flutes, the oboes, the horns, the harps, the cymbals, the crotales, the cellos and the double basses and, among the violins, Alexei’s violin and mine. At the end, a sweet flute melody like the last ray of sun as it goes down behind the hills. That is how we met.

         These last few months, precisely the ones I’ve spent waiting for you and talking with you, are that flute solo, the final melody that everything has become.

         He was a sad faun, but he was not searching for nymphs. He was simply trying to forget in order to survive. Or, to put it another way, he was trying to keep the world that he’d left behind in his country below the surface, in a state of hibernation. But I was the sands of Sicily and his Siberian ice melted and created cascades and now you’re coming, you are like a river, but he doesn’t know it.

9

He never hid it, he told me right from the beginning that he’d left a wife and children in Moscow. Nor did I get my hopes up and I didn’t try to make him stay even a day more when his contract was up and he packed his suitcases to leave. By then I’d already confirmed my pregnancy and was waiting for the time I could have amniocentesis, because the doctor had recommended it given that I was thirty-six. But I didn’t say anything to Alyosha.

         That’s what I called him, Alyosha. He took quite a while to tell me his nickname and when he did, I think he was actually sorry he had, as if it were a betrayal of all he’d left behind. I could see him tense up every time he heard me call him that. At one point I thought about not calling him by that familiar name, but I felt it was more honorable on my part if I didn’t add to the deception. Maybe you don’t understand that and you think I’m silly. Maybe you believe I should have made him stay with me, but that’s not who your mother is. I’m not a masochist and I loved him, but not that way. Alyosha, like I told you, had a far-away world that he couldn’t give up without losing his identity.

         Now you’re probably wondering how I could be with him, knowing he wasn’t free, and that’s what I wanted to explain to you.

         We hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words, but our violins had already met, not just in the symphonic poem that we were rehearsing, but also in those improvised sessions we people in music hold to tune up our instruments. I’d already replied to his Kalinka with the traditional Galician song Axéitame a polainiña, “Help me put my stocking on,” our roots had already touched.

         One day he waited for me by the exit and we went to have something to eat. We didn’t talk much, but it was enough for me to realize he didn’t know what to do with his free time in a city where he didn’t know anybody. It was a Friday and I promised to come by for him on Sunday to show him the Costa da Morte, “Death Coast.”

         He didn’t talk much on the trip, either. He seemed distracted, he looked like he wasn’t focusing on anything, softly singing tunes I didn’t understand but found pleasant. On one of the stops we made he noticed some sea thrift and cut off a stem. I told him that here we called it herba de namorar, the love-potion herb, and that people believed that if you put it in a person’s pocket without their noticing, that person would fall in love with the one who’d done it. He joked, threatening to leave the sprig in my pocket, and it was the first time I saw him really laugh. Afterward he told me he had a wife and children and he missed them a lot, then he was submerged in silence again.

         From then on we went out many times and many times he came to my place. And… how can I explain it to you? It happened.

         He’d been reading that book that I want you to have one day, the one by Leonid Nikolayevich Martynov that has the translations of some poems written in the margins. I remember this one from that day:

                   There is

                   Something new in the world.

                   People want songs.

                   People ponder the lute and the lyre.

                   A world without songs is worthless.

                   […]

                   And I travel

                   through this world.

                   And I want to find this lyre

                   or – whatever they want to call it –

                   the instrument that is to be touched

                   by my fingers, trembling with inspiration.

         While he read those words, holding the book of poetry in one hand, he caressed me with the other. I jotted the translation down later, it’s true.

         I don’t have a lot more to tell you about your father and I’m quite aware that I haven’t told you much. Beside this, I’m certain he didn’t have much interest in speaking our language. He knew that music was enough communication for us. I’ve got a few photographs of your father so you can decide if you look like him or not. I’d like that because he’s very good-looking. You’ll see… See how Slavic he is!

         Daughter, don’t ever ask me again to talk to you about Alexei because, like Pepa the Mole, I’ve also woven my own dream in order to survive. You come from the old Slavic songs and our Galician cantigas, which met one day by means of two violins, a Leman from Russia and a Bausch I’d bought in Germany with the money from Grandmother Carolina’s eucalyptuses. Or you come, perhaps, from a faun’s siesta.

         But keep in mind, in case some day you get to see that old movie with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, that I reject the ending I liked so much in the film Sunflower: the main character returning to Russia to fulfill the promise he no longer remembers and sacrificing a love that had begun on a beach in Italy.

Text © Marica Campo

Translation © Kathleen March

This title is available to read in English – see the page “Novels”.