I

Over fifteen years had passed, and my mother still referred to that summer night in 1960 as the Night of the Fall. This poetic ellipsis turned my father’s suicide into an involuntarily fatal act, and more importantly, spared her the pain of looking for explanations. My father’s death cast a pall over my mother’s soul and turned our apartment in Gran Vía n˚2 into an embassy of wretchedness. Without realizing it, and maybe without meaning to, my father, Ramón Costa, a sales and transport agent and the delegated executor of the Beckmann Family Trust, had inked the final period in a tale that was as much ours as it was his. My name, Paula Costa Beckmann, appears in the first lines of a new saga: I’m the three-year-old girl crying in the dark.

         Vigo lies dormant, its windows open to the break of day. The heat and salt in the air are liquefied in my irrepressible sobs. Eight floors below, my father has just plunged head-first into the pavement beside the avenue. The headlights of a Ford illuminate the viscous mass of his brain, which has splattered onto the tram rails and the branches of a tree. At Hotel Lisboa on the other side of the street, some guests switch on their bedside lamps after being woken by the noise. A woman staying at the hotel for her wedding night looks out the window in her nightgown and screams. What she sees: a constellation of viscera, a stopped car, people approaching…She imagines it was a car accident and, without tearing her eyes from the scene, calls to her husband, who’s lying naked on the bed. More screams, more voices. The hotel receptionist exits onto the street as someone inside dials the police. Then the woman looks up from the mutilated corpse and glimpses two shadows, also in nightgowns, at the top of the Albo building. One is my mother, both arms crossed in front of her face to contain her horror. The other is Delfina, the maid, my Delfina, our Delfina, the woman who picks me up, while my mother, her eyes fixed on the pavement, calculates the chasmic depths of her ruin. I’m convinced that it was during this final accounting, as she gazed down at her beloved’s pulverized corpse, that all her future bitterness took hold within her, as the most lethal dart of all came slicing through the August: that of lost time, the three years she had to share Ramón with me, an absurd little thing who, even in this intimate moment of farewell, wouldn’t keep quiet and stop crying.

II

I called the Hospital Xeral this morning to confirm the time and date of an upcoming test, a bronchoscopy. There’s something I hate about the phrase rule out. Its semantic charge in a doctor’s mouth. Rule out, says Dr. Quirós in his office on Rúa Colón, holding some chest scans. “Do you see this darker region?” This darker region. “We’re going to perform a lung biopsy, so that we can rule out…” I focus on his gold ring, the hair covering his large hands.

         “You smoke a lot,” he says, “and I don’t need to remind you how important it is that you quit. You’re fifty years-old. It’s about time you started taking care of yourself, don’t you think?”

         There’s an affectation to his severity, I know. It’s a part of the job. Like his thoughtfulness, or his bewildering use of the plural. We’re not going to eat anything seven hours before the test, he says. We’ll use local anesthesia. Then, after ten or fifteen days, we’ll have the test results and we’ll evaluate the situation from there. Rule out, evaluate…Dr. Quirós walks me to the doorway of his office and takes my hand.

         “You have nothing to worry about, Paula. Would you mind seeing her out, Inés?” he says to the nurse.

         I follow her down the certificate-lined hallway.

         “So, how’s everything going? How’s your son? He must be almost grown up by now, right? And your mother? Give her my best. I’m going to pencil you in here, pau-la-cos-ta-beck-mann, June-twelfth. How’s this time work for you? Perfect, you’re all set. If you need anything, you know, we’re just a phone call away.”

         As Inés pushes the door open, it seems to me that her smile, like an everlasting menthol lozenge, is going to remain hanging in the air for the rest of time.

         I walk up Rúa Colón with the sea at my back. The wind flutters my skirt and brings a chill to the afternoon. I place my hand on my chest. You have nothing to worry about…I pass the corner where the Abanca Bank headquarters are located. Rule out, diagnose…The Fraga Cinema…Evaluate, admit …The old stop for the tram to Baiona, my mother in a white dress, wicker basket in hand. Rule out, evaluate, radiate, intubate…Rúa Urzaiz. Weep, suffer, leave…And halfway down Urzaiz in the direction of the Calvario neighborhood, where Gran Vía begins, I look up at the proud figurehead of my home, the peak of the Albo building. Gran Vía. Leave. Gran Vía. Forget. Gran Vía. Disappear…

         “Hello?” I call out as I walk into the apartment.

         My mother’s rose oil scent envelops me the moment I set foot inside the apartment. I never hear her approach. She’s that rare type of person who can materialize out of thin air. One moment she’s not around, and the next, voilà, there she is. Always five feet away. Her Eau de Parfum serves as the prelude to her arrival, and hangs in the air after she’s gone, filling the space with that expensive, intoxicating aroma.

         “Oh, Paula, it’s you. I heard the key in the door and thought it must be Thomas or your uncle. They both went out,” she says.

         She’s getting ready to leave too. She grooms her platinum blonde hair with a tortoiseshell brush while she talks, head tilted and eyes half-closed.

         “So?” she asks in mock exasperation. “What did Quirós say? Is everything alright? I’ll bet he scolded you for smoking…”

         “I have to go in for a biopsy,” I say. “There’s a darker region on the X-rays and he wants to rule something out.”

I try to feign a lack of concern, to convey impassivity, but the quiver in my voice and the whisper of weakness in my words work together to give me away. My mother’s loud, forceful brushing gradually slows until it stops entirely. There’s a silence. She purses her rouge-covered lips and, with a look of disgust on her face and her posture unchanged, she says:

         “A biopsy? Well…” She goes silent again. “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be nothing, darling. You know how doctors love to scare us over nothing!”

         She hates to be confronted with signs of weakness, especially from me. I couldn’t tell you why, and I may never find out, but my mother finds my vulnerability intolerable.

         “Look at the Echeverry girl, their youngest, Cristina. I ran into her just the other day on Príncipe. I won’t tell you all the hardships she’s been through. It was in her lungs too. But you wouldn’t think that to look at her now,” she chirps. “Married with two children, happy, completely cured and unbothered.”

         A flash of relief brightens her face. In her concern over this stranger, the Echeverry’s youngest daughter, I pick up on hints of the consolation and care that I wish she would give to me. She finishes with a cordial smile:

         “You would hardly believe she’d been sick to begin with.”

         That’s all. I hear the rough thrusts of the brush through her hair again, though farther off, as she re-enters the bathroom. But just as I toss my purse onto an armchair and make an effort to wipe the worry from my face, my mother spins around on her high heels at the end of the hall and says:

         “Paula, dear…”

         “What?”

         “It would be best if you didn’t mention anything to Thomas. He’s in the middle of his final exams and has enough trouble focusing as it is. You know what he’s like, everything affects him.”

         “I’ll figure something out.”

         I make my way to the kitchen and heat up some coffee in the microwave. The mug has a blue and pink illustration of the Eiffel Tower and a cursive message: Paris, je t’aime. Who loves who? I stand there with the red-hot porcelain in my hands. Would it be so hard for Gloria to love me the way she loves my son Thomas? With that fear, that urgency? That warmth?

         Sitting on the living room couch, I hear the noise of the traffic down below, the exasperated honks of the drivers trying to call attention to a green light. An ambulance clears a path up Gran Vía, towards the Hospital Xeral. It could have been me in there, hooked up to a monitor, but instead I’m lying here mired in my thoughts, saying my goodbyes. Like the main character in those American TV movies, where they’re in the middle of moving out of their homes and fall into profound reflections on their lives as they contemplate an empty room, until a mover asks them some ridiculous or inopportune question, like, “What do you want us to do with this credenza, ma’am?” instantly breaking the dramatic tension of the moment.

         I hear another, deeper note, the horn of an ocean liner in the port announcing that it will lift anchor later this hour. And my mother’s short steps torturing the parquet. Clack-clack-clack-clack…I’m the only one who places symbolic value on the archeological imprints that Gloria Beckmann has engraved into the wood floor over all these years. Each crater she pounds into the floor with her heels—like the stonemasons who built this city and carved inscriptions into its granite blocks—represents a warrant of possession, a boundary, a map of her territory in Gran Vía n˚2. I’m sure that a methodical researcher could, with enough time, examine these petroglyphs and uncover definitive clues about the traditions, rites, and soul of our tribe.

Out of nowhere, the moment I feel enough time has passed and I can let go of the pressure in my chest—this darker region, this small spot, do you see it?—a third assault takes me by surprise. My mother catches me drooping in the corner of the ring, choked up, exhausted…She raps her knuckles on the beveled glass of the door and sticks in her professional-boxer-head:

         “Paula, dear, I’m on my way out. I asked Yalenis to make an escabeche with the leftover sardines in the refrigerator. I had to tell her how to make it. She also seems to have insisted on bringing arepas,” my mother gripes. “Everything is in the oven, in case Álvaro or Thomas want dinner when they get home.”

         Without waiting for a reply, Gloria grants one last smile to the hallway mirror—a hand-painted, gold-foil sun mirror from 1954—and exits the scene of the crime, cloaked in her perfume.

III

In a way, the woman parading through the apartment is the flesh-and-blood, full-color copy of the specter I thought I’d seen at the tram stop this afternoon. None of it exists anymore: not the coastal train, not the Nova Olimpia, not the wafer vendor, and certainly not the mother I can reconstruct only through black-and-white photos. Photos in which, to my astonishment, there’s always a smile on her face. She’s in thrall to these snapshots, captured over forty years ago by a family friend or a street photographer. Optimism fossilized in a photograph—there’s the abyss. For example, this one of my mother and father on the terrace at Hotel Universal, in the shadow of a palm tree and sitting opposite a marble pedestal. She’s wearing a handsome sun hat and a floral dress. On the table is a cigarette packet, two glasses of vermouth, and a soda siphon. There are other people seated around them, a perfect frame for the happy couple. She’s leaning on his burly arm, and although he’s listening to other people’s conversations, it’s as if the other half of his face has broken off to smile at her. I’m with them but I’m with you. And my mother, Gloria—who is with him and him alone, who has no greater yearning than the moment when they stand up from their chairs and stroll home together along the tree-lined canopy of Rúa Urzaiz—celebrates that deference with an absolute, lover’s devotion, her hand on the sleeve of his jacket, glued to the person she loves most, to the only person she loves.

         Ramón Costa is the common element in all of these pictures: his powerful frame, his dark complexion, the gray hair along his forehead, turning thick and dark on his chest, and the moody green of his eyes, a color only on display in photos from a later era, in the saturated tones of Polaroids dated 1959 and 1960. Not counting the government-issued family book, one of those photos from 1960, the year everything officially ended for us, also happens to be the only photo of my father and me together.

         It’s unique for a variety of reasons. In the photo, it’s Palm Sunday and all of Gran Vía is deserted. The gate to the Cluny College is visible in the background. I’m wearing a short, pleated skirt, knitted socks, white sandals, and a little cap with a bow. The sun is in my face, and I have my left hand up to try to shield myself from it. In my right, I’m holding my father’s left hand. He has an olive branch in his other hand, and is swiveling his head around to tell my mother to hurry up, because the picture is about to be taken. Behind, in the background, are my mother’s stockings and skirt, and slightly farther back, my uncle Álvaro with his hands in the pockets of his crisp, light-striped polyester pants. The future, like a dormant virus lying in wait, is incubating in every single one of us. We’re the breeding ground for what’s to come, seasonal fruits that have yet to bloom. But looking at this photo, the first thing that strikes you is how all four of us shy away from the judgment of posterity. Not one of us is looking at the camera: not me, not my father, and certainly not my mother’s or my uncle’s trunkless limbs. Whoever took this photo managed to capture the freeze frame of a supreme fiction, a group of people fleeing their destinies, resisting death. We can’t be examined because we have no eyes, and that opacity makes us eternal, almost ethereal. It’s a paradox, but this outtake, this throwaway shot from a sunny Sunday afternoon in April, would have been irrefutable proof that our family didn’t exist. I know that’s not the case. Yet my father must have suspected it, because this picture was taken a few months before the Night of the Fall, when his black blood would coat the exact spot where we’re standing in the photo. I can’t speak to his intentions, but I can attest to the outcome: he confirmed our existence, and in the process, he gave the lie to our immortality.

IV

I’m sitting at my work desk. On it are piles of paper, folders, my laptop, a Galician and a French dictionary, a framed picture of Thomas, and an ornate Sargadelos vase with two white camellias in it. Light pours in through the same window Ramón jumped out of, but I’m not the same scared, sobbing child I was then. There’s no point crying anymore. I light a cigarette, take three drags, and open a new Word document (untitled), where I write: “This city is the muscle that moves my life.” That’s all. Only now, with the black shadow looming in my lungs, am I finally able to explain the significance that statement holds for me.

         When I returned to Vigo in 1989, it was after six years happily living abroad in a self-imposed exile. I moved first to France, where I taught Galician in the School of Letters at Université Paris VII. From there, I went to San Francisco, through an exchange program with the University of California at Berkeley, where I was able to renew my visa for an extra two years by staying on as part of an international research project.

         I don’t think I ever completely ruled out the idea of going back to Vigo, and that unconscious desire shaped the ways I inhabited the sites of my exile, if it makes sense to call them that. Even once I felt fully a part of these spaces—I remember a May afternoon gorging myself on cherries on a bench in the Square du Vert-Galant and tossing the pits into the roiling current of the Seine—I still couldn’t get past my cautious distances, my feeling that, in spite of it all, I belonged elsewhere. This estrangement found an outward expression in my god-awful French accent and my humdrum appearance; I never wore anything but sheer blouses and jeans. Paris wanted more from me than indulgent anonymity, but I never learned quite what. I didn’t know what the city was offering, what price I had to pay. I still don’t. Instead, like a rebellious, ungrateful child, I ignored the fate that had been set aside for me, and, like I did with my mother, I turned a deaf ear to its muttered reproaches.

         San Francisco was the same, except that the disjoint there was so obvious that I never felt a need to integrate. I stopped making an effort to fit in and gained access to a pan-European identity I’d never had before: I was Galician or Spanish, depending on how much a person knew about Spain or whether I was in the mood to explain the difference; Italian, Ms. Costa, to most of my neighbors and the other Americans I met; German, thanks to the Beckmann in my last name; Portuguese, when I deemed it necessary; and French at last, Madame Costa, because I was a professor who’d just come from a Paris university. It all brought me the sort of bemused satisfaction you might get from being handed an olive branch in a battle you’ve already taken for lost. Basically, I was whoever I wanted to be at any given moment.

         I worked as part of an international project researching the origins of Medieval European lyric poetry, and lived in a small apartment on Valparaiso Street, between North Beach and Russian Hill. Outside of my research duties, which included visits to the library, a weekly meeting with the study’s coordinators, and a thorough trimestral report, my life melted into a warm medley of festivals, bars, restaurants, literary evenings, bike rides, jazz concerts, and weekend visits to port towns along the bay.

         I began to bury my morriña, my homesickness, and to coexist with the fog that crept from the ocean up to the hills of my neighborhood, inhabited by the ghosts of Jack London, Tina Modotti, Kerouac, and Joe DiMaggio. Even the language ceased to be an obstacle; almost without realizing it, English began to roll off my tongue with astonishing ease. Vigo started to feel as far away as it truly was, and I gradually set aside my reservations, switched off my alarms, and lowered my guard. That was when Pedro appeared: Pedro the Desirable, Pedro the First, Pedro the Conqueror.

         We met through Lilianne, my landlord. After that brief first encounter, he invited me to see a movie. They were showing the restored version of Murnau’s Nosferatu at Victoria Theatre in Mission District, with a live string quartet performing the score. Vai gostar, you’ll like it, he told me in the dark auditorium, as the violinist furiously bowed the opening credits. His whispered Portuguese surged through my body like a promise of what awaited us after the movie, Vai gostar. His warm breath, his smooth, tough skin, our knees touching, our hands brushing against one another, the bulge in his beige Dockers.

         First the nervous laughter, my arousal. A mere hour of film separating me from this Portuguese king, from our consecration as lovers, from my entanglement between his legs. Sitting there, side by side in the dark, was simply the preamble to a first kiss. On our way to a bar, under a neon light, I would talk to him about the affectation of the actors—They never blink— about their impulsive, unnatural movements. He would say something about the absence of eroticism in this recreation of the vampire myth. German rigor, you don’t know us, I would reply. And your fear of foreigners, of the Jewish Nosferatu, the bringer of the plague, right? I would turn serious for a moment, forcing him to apologize. Sorry, I didn’t mean to…And then I would lighten the mood to draw him in: Especially if that foreigner is as ugly as Count Orlok…And he would laugh again, whirling around in an imitation of Nosferatu, shoulders hunched, fingers gnarled, eyes rolled back in his head. Do you mean like this?…Then it would be my turn to laugh, followed by my innocent plea: You’re not going to bite me now, are you? And he would say: It’s no joke, you should tremble, Dracula bites like this. His glossy lips grazing my collarbone. And like this…farther up, moistening my mouth, digging his tongue into its roof, biting my lower lip till it bleeds, his hands stroking my hips, my ass, the sharp teeth of Pedro the Wolf, glistening and pointed, tracing beads of spit and pleasure across my face in the light of San Francisco’s tin moon…

         The lights of the theater came on, followed by a weak applause for the musicians. Pedro was lost in thought beside me, a far cry from the bloodthirsty beast in my imagination.

         “Look how sad all these people are,” he said, our conversation flowing without issue between his Portuguese and my Galician. “I have friends who…”

         He turned to face me, and I watched him cry with a sorrow that struck me as excessive, maybe even somewhat feigned.

         I looked at the crowd of silent spectators, the resigned expressions of the people filing languorously out of the aisle in the Victoria, mostly pairs of men, as well as young students and elegant women draped in gothic black attire, and suddenly the rats on the boat, the bloodsucking, the fear of infection, the terrifying Orlok…the entire film washed over me as a horribly accurate allegory for AIDS and its devastation on this bastion of love and freedom where we lived. Truthfully, as a woman in the late eighties, I’d been on the sidelines of the struggle. I didn’t even view myself as a potential victim. Back then, in Europe, it was still possible not to worry, at least for some. But not in San Francisco, not by that point. The stigma cast by the virus that was killing off our generation also trickled back to a past void of warnings or protection, before the illness had been named. Each lover, each bed, each sexual encounter was a book of panic yet to be opened. And the expression on Pedro’s face seemed to resonate with that fear.

         “Blood, the plague, you know?” he said. “I’ve already seen so many people die…”

         Outside the theater, I tried to correct the dramatic course our date had taken, but I could see from the distraught look on Pedro’s face that there would be no outlet for my arousal.

         We walked down 16th Street towards the train, while he read a text from the program about the places where the movie had been shot, in an effort to distract from my disappointed silence: The town called Wismar in the film was, in fact, a mix of several German cities like Wisborg, Rostock, and Lübeck…He hadn’t kissed me or torn off my clothes. But he had pronounced Lübeckcorrectly. I stared at him in astonishment, as if an emerald had just slid out of his wide, perfect mouth.

         “I could tell you a thing or two about Lübeck,” I said with a smile,” but we’d need more time for that.”

         “You can have all the time and space you want tomorrow, at my house. And I’ll be better.”

         I told myself that this better was a veiled offer of intimacy, and an apology. Anyway, it felt like justification enough to agree to a visit where my real intention was to steer the intimacy and seduction of our first two encounters into his bed. I showed up at his apartment the next day at dinnertime with a bottle of wine and a cheap edition of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which I’d bought at a second-hand bookshop in the Castro. I’d written a dedication on the first blank page—For Pedro, this boundless novel about a nameless city and the people who once inhabited it. Paula Costa—but he didn’t read it. He placed the book and the Chilean cabernet-sauvignon on the kitchen table and led me by the hand to his bedroom. We fucked for two days and nights, without condoms, ignoring all the precepts of safe sex. And then we said our goodbyes. No questions, no speeches. Which is why I never ended up telling him that the nameless city from Mann’s novel was Lübeck, or that the fruit of our recklessness was a child, my son, who I named Thomas.

V

Some words, some nicknames and placenames are a part of a family’s heritage and are unlikely to survive outside of that environment. It may not always seem this way, but these words will never grow to their full significance in the mouth of a stranger, they’re plants that can’t take root in any soil other than our own. To me, Lübeck was no more than a specter of my origins, of the family home demolished by Allied carpet-bombing one night in March 1942, during the R.A.F.’s first offensive against a German city in World War II. It was one piece of an inheritance which my mother, and by extension I, were prematurely dispossessed of.

         Before she was born, when the Beckmanns were fresh off the boat in Vigo, my grandfather Albert had rented out both floors of their proud home on Lübeck’s Baltic shores to a German salesman with Danish origins. The salesman, herr Skov, ran his business out of the first floor, selling furs, leather, and other goods from Bergen, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, which he would then send on to port cities like Liverpool, Saint-Nazaire, and A Coruña. He lived there with his two children, Ester and Otto, and the omnipresent ghost of his wife, Ilse (née Rosenbaum), who’d been born in Boryslav, Galitzia. Skov kept all her yellowing fabrics in a beech moneybox: lace, blouses, underskirts, dresses, and a linen coat. Atop this box, which would remain unopened until after Ilse’s death, he had placed a round tablet hand-engraved with an image of the Star of David, encircled in a labyrinthine pattern.

         One typical, rainy night, as they sat in silence at the table in the light of an oil lamp, while Skov reviewed the storehouse inventory and the little ones wrote in their schoolbooks, they heard the grumble of an engine in front of their house, followed by three sharp raps on the door. Should I open it, papa? I imagine Otto asking, while Skov, the terror knotted in his throat, caressed his beautiful Ilse’s sacred ark, the wooden box filled with the fabric of her absence. Quickly, children, run upstairs and hide under your beds…

         The two Gestapo agents in the doorway embodied Skov’s worst fears. This was the same grim visit they had paid to all his Jewish neighbors, along with those who were jüdisch versippt like him, in the fall of 1941 in Lübeck. A visit without formalities, china, or almond candies.

         Out of my way, rat. They searched the rooms, the closets, the desk, and turned his library upside down, throwing all his books onto the floor. Skov fell to his knees in front of the old volumes scattered before him. Please…One of the officers approached the table.

         “Good handwriting, I have to admit. And your children, where are you hiding them? What’s that? You live alone? Since when have rats lived alone? What do you think, Walter? I’ve always heard one vermin’s tracks will lead to another. The smell helps too. It’s an infestation, after all. Go upstairs and have a look, tell me what I want to hear…”

         Not five minutes later, Walter lurched down the stairs with Ester and Otto under the tails of his raincoat.

         “Found the little ones in their den, herr Konrad. They squealed like newborns.”

         “Do you know what I have a hard time believing, Walter?” says the official, as he approaches a painting on the wall and leans in to examine the artist’s signature. “That a beautiful woman like the one in this exquisite painting could have been a rat in disguise, ignorant of the supreme labor of every German woman: to perpetuate the glory of our race. It didn’t bother her that she was soiling us all, did it? But what’s even worse is that someone like this bastard here would court a vile creature like her and allow her blood to mix with his. Look at them, these children would almost seem German if it weren’t for…Well, it doesn’t matter now. That’s enough blathering. Let’s get moving.”

         Ester freed herself from the bat’s slippery wings, still drenched from the windy rain, and ran to the table. She grabbed one of the notebooks, the blue one, and pressed it tight against her floral dress.

         “Okay, now we’re ready,” she said.

         Skov and Otto were awestruck by the girl’s defiant gaze, her eyes inflamed with a rage and determination they’d never seen in her before. The officers grinned.

         “You won’t be needing your journal, little girl. Isn’t that right, Walter? I don’t think she’ll have much time to work on her handwriting over in Neuengamme, or wherever it is they’re going to take her. I’m afraid not. Anyway, I won’t be taking you with me just yet.”

         The agent handed his victim a sheath of papers without looking into her blazing eyes.

         “Here, take this. Can you read? For your good and your family’s, be sure to do as instructed. It’s all there: date, time, meeting place, luggage allowances…And stop crying like a child, it’s disgusting!” he shouted, already halfway out the door.

Some nightmares really do come to an end, Skov must have thought as he watched them leave, unable to fathom that this was just the beginning. The officers had left the door flung wide open, and the night wind juddered the pool of water left on the floor by their dripping coats. It was only when Skov saw his children’s reflections in that fear-infused puddle that he realized it had all been real, death had visited them, the lives of all three had begun to evaporate, just like the water in this bottomless well in the middle of his home.

VI

Thanks to Skov’s monthly deposits into a Hamburg bank, Albert Beckmann was able to lease a storefront on a quiet street in the center of Vigo. As soon as he’d secured a line of credit, “the German,” as the locals called him, bought an attic apartment nearby and informed my grandmother Ursula that the top floor of the building they could see from their marital suite at Hotel Continental was their new home.

         “We’re moving tomorrow. I’ll be at work all day, but it will be enough for me to know you have the home I promised you. No more being a guest—now you’ll be the lady of the house. And our love, like this city, will have more space to grow.”

         It was in that windowed storefront, on a street that had been sea only a few years earlier, until the tidelines were pushed back and contained, that Albert opened the first office of the Beckmann Transit and Commerce Agency. Beckmann Transit supplied insurance, transport permits, and mail authorizations for all goods entering or leaving Vigo by port, and they offered their services in processing consular credentials, transit and customs commissions, loading and unloading forfaits, and tickets to America on ocean liners. The company even acted as a go-between for ship owners and clients. With his intimate knowledge of the ins-and-outs of port traffic, the handsome, quick-minded Albert Beckmann vaulted himself into a position of privilege, which he further capitalized on with each and every business deal his company secured.

         The port had radically transformed since the nineteenth century. This small, hillside fishing village had grown with such speed and force that its old walls had to be knocked down. Canneries, shipyards, and auxiliary machine factories came to dominate Vigo’s waterfront; meanwhile the city began to receive massive steamboats, naval fleets, and ocean liners bound for the Americas, the land of so many people’s dreams. These fleets, with their cutting-edge combustion engines, shattered the silence of the Berbés Waterside, with the city watching in astonishment as its future was born.

         The postcards my grandparents sent back to Germany in the 1920s described bright, tree-lined avenues straddled by magnificent buildings, theaters, and cinemas. Industrialists, merchants, and journalists debated international politics in the shade of the striped awnings outside cafés; meanwhile the tram chugged up steep stone streets alongside automobiles, buggies, and horse-drawn carts loaded with stone from southern quarries—the fuel of Vigo’s faith in the future.

         The Beckmanns, two foreigners with neither money nor influence in the city, having come from a country devastated by the Great War, had been astoundingly quick to latch onto the spirit of prosperity and enthusiasm spurred by the local press and its triumphal chronicles of the victories and achievements of Vigo’s denizens. These seemingly mundane stories—the authorization of a public building, the registration of a patent, the visit of an ambassador, a sporting event, the premiere of an opera—were forged into the emblem of the increasingly ambitious collective will that turned the gears of Vigo’s expansion.

         People traveled to this promised land from all over to take in the miraculous sight of the bay, a safe port of call for fishermen from the farthest reaches of the continent. In spite of being leagues behind and lacking adequate port infrastructure, they rapidly constructed giant structures on top of the sand and the algae at the same pace as European capitals. Two telegraph cables were installed—the British and the German—submarine arteries which pumped world news, the booming stock market, and Greenwich mean time into the city. The cable workers gathered at social clubs that organized elegant balls where the new sounds of jazz were heard, and they attended horse races, boxing matches, and footballmatches against local teams. They drank beer and Port wine, and even the occasional cocktail.

         On the streets, you were as likely to hear English or German as you were French, Italian, and Russian from the ship crews docked in the bay. Masters of that maritime patois, sailors and soldiers taught the prostitutes in the Ferrería and Areal neighborhoods expressions for love—more passionate the more peculiar they sounded on the lips of a stranger. They pocketed these phrases and later repeated them, somewhat mechanically, to other foreigners in need of affection. Dis moi je t’aime, they pleaded, or Fuck me, bastard, or Ich liebe dich, or Dime así, dime cogéme bien cogida, hijo de puta. An empty glass of gin rolling under the bed and over the furrows in the wood floor, the metallic melody of a player piano, a moonshine-drenched cuplé, the creaking of a bed in another room, laughter, bottles clinking, glasses breaking…Then dawn would creep in and the sun would shine on the groggy, hungover faces of men who woke up nestled in a woman’s bosom for the first time in months. The caw of the seagulls and the lingering stench of fish was probably all it took to remind them that this city, this Vigo bursting with consulates and flags, was not really their home, it was merely a stop on their voyage, but maybe, just maybe, it was a place worth staying.

         The fish came in on wicker baskets atop the heads of hundreds of women, whose exhausted bodies were reflected in storefront windows: shirtmakers, shoemakers, hatmakers, tailors, lingerie stores, jewelry stores, and fashion stores with clothing imported from London and Paris. This was my grandmother Ursula’s universe, the world of comfort. But not them; that world didn’t pertain to the fishwives, milkmaids, street merchants, netmakers, seamstresses, shellfish catchers, cannery girls, oyster harvesters, or maids. It belonged to none of these women, nor their husbands, that other troop of railwaymen, ropemakers, blacksmiths, boilermakers, metalworkers, typographers, carpenters, bullfighters’ assistants, and bakers. On their way out of the bars, some of these workers would softly whistle the Internationale as they tracked sawdust on cobblestones baptized by Ribeiro wine and compacted by the soles of their workboots. Boots and clogs, hats and rags, chafed hands raised, jobs with no hours, the mirage of a mutating, volatile urban center: all of it the slippery muse of Manoel Antonio, the young, avant-garde poet aboard his packet boat.

         The yearning for solid land also darkened the dreams of thousands of emigrants for whom Vigo was no more than a place of farewell, a populous, bustling precipice, somewhere to dig their feet in front of the ocean before they set off on their voyage, to look back or make promises. Cardboard suitcase in hand, they wandered the streets with a ticket processed by Beckmann Transit in their pockets. This for the ticket, this for a new suit, and what’s left for when I get there. This procession of miserable souls, spending their solitary nights at inns and cheap hotels in Carral and García Olloqui, put most of the money they had to their names into my grandfather’s hands: what they’d gotten for their land, their cows, their share of an inheritance…And it was these offerings that turned the Beckmanns into the masters and mediators of purgatory, of Vigo, the waiting room for wealth or misfortune—always impossible to know which—on the other side of the ocean.

The ship would set off one morning with three blows of its horn. The passengers would lean over the railings as they contemplated the foggy visage of the backs of the Cíes Islands, the city’s final wall, a verdant, craggy, seagull-infested slope, a terrain as foreign and wild as the continent awaiting them. Abovedeck, the third-class passengers wept under their breath until their despondent eyes lost sight of the mouth of the bay and the ship entered definitively into the horizon.

VII

It was in this city left in the distance, this Vigo illuminated by the incandescent blue of sardines, that my grandparents decided to start a family, to have children. Gloria, my mother, was born in 1929, and Álvaro, my uncle, in 1934. My grandmother also gave birth to a boy in between them, but he died in January 1932, from a fever that she blamed for the rest of her life on the throngs of people who took to Vigo’s streets in April 1931, to celebrate the inauguration of the Second Republic.

         “You had to see them! The women from Ferrería were dancing to a charanga in the Puerta del Sol. The poor can be so spirited!”

         In the very same place, when the naval officers read the coup d’état proclamation amid the sounds of gunfire in 1936, my grandmother Ursula felt that the justice effected by Franco’s men had re-established the order of things and avenged Gunter’s death. The lack of hygiene, crowded masses, sweat, marches, dances, newspapers passed from hand to hand, political speeches, strikes, cabarets, irreverent artists, kissing in broad daylight, extramarital sex… all that which was dirty and contagious, all that which was unpredictable, the intolerable solidarity that had ruptured the peace of her home and robbed her of her little boy, was nothing but a bad dream, a nightmare her dear Germany had finally woken up from with the ascent of the Third Reich. The rays of that European dawn shone on the lives of the Beckmann family, a recompense for their years of toil. But the satisfaction was hollow, because it didn’t bring back Gunter, their first male son and the legal heir to their business, the embodiment of their love.

         At this point, my grandmother took her adherence to the regime to new heights. She clung to an authority that promised a peaceful future and a return to balance. In her capacity as Beckmann’s wife, she joined the local Francoist crusade and capitalized on any display of Nazi sympathy and support that she saw in the city, which had by then become a discreet, though highly efficient delegation of Hitler’s forces and attachés in the neutral south.

         Gunter also symbolized the Beckmanns’ definitive bond with Vigo. He was the first to enter the family mausoleum in the Pereiró Cemetery. But that wasn’t all. Ursula Beckmann decided that the family would follow her baby boy’s fate and purchased six niches in a sunny part of the graveyard. She commissioned stonemasons to inscribe four of these slots with the names and birthdates of her husband, herself, their stolen angel, and their little Gloria.

         “Much as it pains me, it will be death that brings us all together and settles our accounts,” she said.

         In the first niche, on the top left, is Gunter. Gunter Beckmann 1931-1932. Beside it is my grandmother, Ursula Beckmann 1901-1956, and beneath it are my grandfather, Albert Beckmann 1897-1956, and my mother, Gloria Beckmann 1929-. Farthest down is my uncle Álvaro, the last to arrive, Álvaro Beckmann 1934-, and beside him is an unoccupied, uninscribed gravestone. It wasn’t meant for my father, whose remains were interred in a cemetery in Bouzas alongside his kin, as soon as a judicial agent had certified that his suicide had in fact been a tragic accident. No, according to the original framework, it falls to me to complete this morbid composition, to move my piece and end the game once and for all.

         For as long as I can remember, the existence of this unfinished rectangle in Pereiró has left a sour taste on my happiness, and I’m sure that it embittered my mother’s and my uncle Álvaro’s lives too, as if the three of us are shrouded by the same veil. It’s not heavy, but it has never ceased to weigh us down and deprive us of air and light. There’s something horribly unsettling about realizing that your place in the great beyond has been set aside for you with such care and consideration.

At the same time, the certainty of death represented by that cold, unmarked slot, hungry for its last four digits, has made us all more conscious of what it means to live, more self-centered, and probably more cynical and heedless too. I’m speaking in plural, but this doesn’t apply to Thomas. Toto isn’t like us; he doesn’t fit into this mosaic. No matter what happens, he’ll remain outside of the rectangle, he won’t have to play what my uncle likes to call the Game of Death.

         “Your grandmother Ursula,” Álvaro once told me, with a pained smile on his face—his typical expression in a moment of confession—“was a real bitch. From the very beginning, she forced us all into a Game of Death. It’s the only game you can’t refuse to take part in. You play, you have to; you have no choice.”

VIII

Álvaro likes to compare this home to an amber specimen. He says we’re like reeds, lichen, or young flowers trapped inside that ancestral resin, suspended in time, immobile. We exist thanks to this space, thanks to the oxygen bubble encasing us. The bubble is everything we keep quiet, what we won’t risk speaking aloud, the littlest actions, the grand gestures, the lies, the promises, the kisses, and the love of our everyday lives. The apartment, like a piece of amber, immortalizes what’s inside it and turns it transparent. Housed within: an insect suffering in eternal agony. That’s where I am now, and I’m afraid I’ll never make it out again. I feel smaller, more fragile and vulnerable, than I ever have before.

         I gaze at Thomas, my son, now seventeen years old. He’s just come back from the conservatory, from his piano lesson. He gives me a kiss on the cheek and I say:

         “Leave that here and come to the kitchen.”

         He drops a libretto of Scarlatti sonatas on the dresser in the entryway. He chats with Uncle Álvaro, who spent his afternoon at the dilapidated sauna on Camiño Ropeiro he likes to visit, coming back with his hair damp and a glimmer in his eyes. They make dinner—the little sardines in escabeche and the arepas for them; a French omelet for me, along with wine and Coca-Cola Light. If it weren’t for the fifty years separating them, I’d say that time has brought them so close that they’ve become classmates, teenagers: my two-headed, one-hearted son, the repository of all my hopes and fears.

         When Delfina lived with us, the kitchen was where her domain began and ours ended. She would prepare lunch and serve it to us on the living room table, in an imitation of an ancient ritual meant to keep my father’s memory alive and maintain the old outlines of his authority. We only crossed that threshold on special occasions, or when Delfina herself enlisted our help to stretch empanada dough, pour madeleine batter into molds, or place anise donut rings and coconut macaroons on a baking sheet. The entire house would fill with the smell of that dense, aromatic dough, a domestic perfume that tempered the coldness of the closed rooms in Gran Vía n˚2. The smell of corn flour, chocolate, and crème anglaise is bound up in my memory with the traces of bleach on Delfina’s hands, a tart, powerful smell I was surprised to re-encounter the first time a man spilled his semen on my face. I wiped it from my lips with a stirred expression, and when I brought it to my nose, I closed my eyes and could perfectly envision the blue bottle, mop bucket, rubber gloves, cleaning supply cabinet, and Delfina in her flower smock, on her knees, as she scrubbed the cold stone floor with her soft, swollen hands.

         “I have to tell you both something before Gloria brings it up and makes a big scene. I’m going in for some tests, a biopsy. It looks like there might be something in my lungs. They’re not sure exactly what, so they’re just trying to rule things out. Anyway, Quirós didn’t want to alarm me, and I don’t want to alarm you, but I thought it best you know.”

         Álvaro and Toto stare at me. Neither of them utters a word. They really are one and the same; they react identically, looking down at their plates and going silent for a few seconds. Then Toto takes my hand and says:

         “Don’t worry, Mom, and don’t drive yourself crazy over this.”

         “That’s right, Paula, don’t drive yourself crazy, everything’s going to be fine. We’ll do all the tests we have to and move on with our lives.”

         They make an effort to appear confident in front of me, and it brings me some of the comfort I’m unable to provide for myself. And they do it better than they probably realize, despite the fact that my words have just ripped the veil from a visage they never imagined themselves faced with, that of my death. Neither of them is prepared for that. Not even Álvaro.

         “Still, just in case…” I begin to explain when I hear my mother’s keys in the door and immediately go quiet.

         “Jesus, Mom, would you quit it?” Thomas snaps at me. “You’re perfectly fine, nothing’s going to happen.”

         “Happen with what, sweetheart?” Gloria says in the doorway to the kitchen. She notes the seriousness of the conversation, the concerned look on Álvaro’s face, on mine. “What’s wrong with all of you? Why the faces like you’re at a funeral?” she asks with theatrical bubbliness. “I’m going to pour us all a glass of port and we’ll raise those spirits.”

         “Always finding an excuse to drink, eh, Gloria?” Álvaro mutters, his wicked smile infecting me with its playfulness, and passing from me to Thomas, who is more than used to the constant crossfire in this war between my mother and uncle.

         She pretends she hasn’t heard and saunters to the bar, exclaiming loudly:

         “You’ll never guess who I ran into. Álvaro, do you remember Lugrís, the Refrey agent?” she calls from the front of the apartment. “I saw him walking into Corte Inglés. You’d hardly know him, he looks so old now! I suppose time really doesn’t affect us all the same way,” she clucks, reappearing in the kitchen with a bottle of Sandeman clutched to her chest and four wine tasters in between her fingers, glass extensions of her lacquered nails.

“Just take our little Toto. It seems impossible that he’s already seventeen,” she says as she places the glasses on the table and gives his hair an affectionate tousle. “I hope these two won’t make a fuss about you celebrating with us,” she whispers into his ear.

         Toto smiles and Gloria starts pouring a precise quantity of port into each glass.

         “I still remember the day your mother came back to this apartment. I can almost see her walking through the door now…Like a helpless little girl with her baby bump.”

         “Mom, no alcohol for Thomas, at least not in front of me. And please, enough with the fairy tales. I didn’t have a baby bump. I was eight months pregnant and came here to give birth. And you didn’t see me walk in. Don’t make me think back to that day, there’s nothing to be gained.”

         “Well, you did come back at a bad time, Paula,” Álvaro says. “It’s not every day the Berlin Wall comes down, is it? How could you expect your poor mother to notice your state or ask you what you were doing home after she hadn’t seen you for nearly a year?”

         “How many more times will you all make me apologize for that?” Gloria wails in affectation, pouring herself another glass. “I was absorbed, taken in…Is that so hard to understand? It was a historic day for my nation and it was happening live on television. And you’re being tremendously unfair, Paula, I only asked you to wait a minute. One minute,” she insists, her index finger raised, “because they were wrapping up the broadcast. See, sweetheart?” she says to Thomas, avoiding my gaze, “your mother still holds it against me after all these years.”

         “You don’t have to explain anything to me, Grandma. I was there for the whole thing,” my son says to her, and his humor calms me down.

         Álvaro, who has just processed Gloria’s words, raises his voice with the resignation of someone who knows that any dialogue with my mother is pointless:

         “Oh please, Gloria. Your country? Tell it to someone who doesn’t eat at the same table as you. You’ve been to Germany once in your life, and you were a little girl. Stop with the lies, won’t you? At the very least, stop lying to yourself.”

         “Can we move on already?” I cut in as Toto (“may I be excused…”) exits the battlefield, his placemat dirty with Cola Cao, breadcrumbs, and sticky purple drops of port wine.

         “It’s always the same with you, Álvaro. Why do you care? Why can’t I live my life? What harm is it for you to let me be whoever I want to be?” Gloria says, her eyes fiery, truly wounded now, as if an age-old score between them has come to the fore again.

         “You?” Álvaro rages at her. “You’re going to talk to me about being who you want? You, my own sister, you and that…you were the ones who ruined my life, who taught me to be ashamed of myself. You were the first to point the finger at me. You of all people, Gloria, you loony, pretentious old bat, you’re going to sit here and make me out to be the villain?”

         “Oh fine, Álvaro, blame me for your unhappiness, for your lack of courage. Throw whatever you like in my face if it makes you feel better about yourself. I don’t care anymore,” she replies, taking a hearty swig from her glass.

         Then a long silence takes hold, in which the only sounds to be heard come from the TV in the other room: high-pitched cries, muffled applause.

         “Look,” I say to them, as composed as I can manage amidst this abundance of rancor. “I want to speak to you both now that Thomas isn’t here. You know what I’m talking about, what could happen. I have no idea if I’m healthy or not, but I’d like to settle some things sooner rather than later. I’m going to speak with the lawyer, Branca, I’m going to look over the deed to the apartment and the business papers, titles, and stocks from Beckmann, I’m going to check our bank accounts, and I’m going to make sure there’s enough to leave him and write my will. That’s my responsibility. I wish things would be different between you two, for everyone’s sake. I wish you’d stop re-hashing the same arguments over and over again. I wish you’d stop throwing mud in each other’s faces, but that’s not up to me. And neither of you has ever explained what it is you’re fighting over, why in god’s name you keep up this endless squabble. But I’d like for the three of us to be able to reconstruct our official version together, a joint story we can leave to Thomas. He might not need it right now, because he’s still so young, but at least this way, years down the line, he’ll have someone to tell it to and he’ll want to know where he comes from, who we were, why we were like that. There’s not much more he’ll get from us. That’s why I want you to take part. If nothing else, just talk to him, that’s all I ask.”

         Gloria looks at me in condescension, as if my desires and demands are, as ever, the product of a defect, the reflection of some incurable deficiency. It’s her way of pushing me away, of turning me into a child again. But a force more powerful than her indifference is surging through me now, something bigger and more definitive than the wounds she has inflicted on me. Pereiró, the cemetery. She picks up on my determination, my mixture of panic and liberation, and says:

         “Anyway, Paula, I think you’re being melodramatic. This official version, as you say, you’ve never had it, and neither have we. Isn’t that true, Álvaro? People never have official versions of anything, they live their lives as best they can and keep their heads up. That’s what we’ve always done in this house.”

         Álvaro shoots me a pitying, apologetic look. He won’t be taking my side this time.

         “In this case, Paula—though I don’t want it to be seen as a precedent—I think your mother is right. What happened here happened; what’s done is done. What good do you think it would do Toto to learn about our past? Do you think he’ll be proud to discover his family’s misfortunes? Thankfully,” relief washes over Álvaro’s eyes, “this is a different time. For better or worse, he can be what he wants to be, not what other people demand of him. The past is a dead weight. It was for us and it is for you. Let him spread his wings.”

“I hear you both, and I’m sorry, but if I didn’t see your mouths moving, I would almost say someone else is speaking for you. And to the ventriloquist talking in your place, I say: I’ve heard that story a thousand times. How it’s best not to stir up the past, how the wounds have closed up, how nowadays…Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that kind of cowardice.”

         “Paula, darling, I don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve,” Gloria says. “My conscience is quite clear, much as you insist that I’m a victim of something.”

         Álvaro goes gravely silent.

         “You are a victim, of course you are. So are you, Álvaro, I’m sorry to be so blunt. Do you know what it means to be a victim? It’s what happened to you: having no voice, being spoken for by others, not being able to get out of that situation. Think about the ventriloquist,” I say, the fingers on my right hand tapping against each other, emulating an invisible conversation, the silent discourse of a shadow play.

         “Still,” Gloria replies, “we’re all responsible for our own actions, you know that better than anyone. Do whatever you feel is best, but don’t force us to be a part of it.”

         I take aim at Álvaro with a severity I know he doesn’t deserve.

         “I’m not sure my uncle will agree. Do you? Do you think your life always went exactly the way you wanted it to?”

         I can hear my mother’s sullenness in my tone, her dry, affected cruelty.

         “Well, do you know what I think? If the responsibility for everything, and I mean everything, in your life is entirely yours, then I guess you decided to be pretty miserable, Uncle Álvaro. And you too, Mom, you’re no different. It’s exactly this, it’s lives like yours that I don’t want for Thomas, no matter what happens to me.”

         We go silent. The length of the pause takes on a profound, revelatory significance. Álvaro gets up from the table with his plate in hand, puts it in the sink, and goes to his room. My mother gets up too, though she first goes into the living room to give her grandson a kiss goodnight. Deep down, I know that, like it or not, Thomas will be subjected to this polyphonic silence. It’s a fact of his existence. But through that wall of silence, over the top of our countless unspoken agreements, I have this sense that his voice will be heard above it all, it has to be. Thomas, a Costa Beckmann like me, Toto: the entire orchestra goes quiet, and a solo, sostenuto, played by a trombone or a piano, by Thomas, spreads its wings and soars above our score, our history.

Text © Fran P. Lorenzo

Translation © Jacob Rogers