It was the first year you heard records on the beach played through speakers.
In the coffeehouses, no one talked politics, and all the men carried canes.
I can still see the red-fringed tablecloths before me.
After lunch, we had all fallen silent – you know those silences
that surge up in the midst of discussion, when the sun glints on the glasses.
Your mother was twenty-seven, and was chatting with Pilar about
how to mend some dress or other, because soon, the girl would
soon be starting school.
You don’t remember,
but people on the street looked different – not like later on –
those were the years of the Glacier and the bar in the Hotel Colón. There were society people
who have vanished: Rosa Trènor was one of them,
I met her – not her, of course, but the figure she played: Carmen Broto,
who, in those years when it was windy and dark and people used to go about in gabardines,
got killed in the vicinity of my grandparents’ home and dumped in a plot with shattered bottleglass,
Carmen, the blonde who used to pull up at the Liceu in her snazzy ship of a car – the years of the maquis,
shootouts on Paral.lel, venom-faced characters,
Sabater’s death on blurred display in El Caso,
mingled with untold others: those buried alive, the drunken assassins, housemaids deflowered – it’s nothing special, you see,
on the way from Hospitalet, they waited for him with pistols,
and him or the other one, the invert, and something about an Italian
anarchist, I don’t know which. I’ve mixed all that up:
in those days I didn’t read the papers, I was out looking for work,
I had to live, and you used to come with the leather satchel we bought you to carry your books,
and the pencil case with the coloured pencils, and the things your teachers said struck you as normal,
though all that talk about the war a bit less so,
and at home we weren’t about to fill you in: we had lived it, that was enough.
Anyway, there was no point. Look,
we were happy in ’34 and we’ve even become happy again since,
because people’s nature is to be happy: the custom’s fading now, but you must remember
how you had to close the rolling shutters as a child
to get to sleep on Saint John’s Eve, what with the fireworks and the people on the rooftops,
and the world seemed to be theirs, these were people who could drink and dance and act a fool on the streets in the morning – which we either couldn’t do
or didn’t know how to – but with the barges and the mussel nets and the scent of fish and petrol
your mother and me, like young people, even if we had to go home early for you, but: shall I tell you, we kissed
under a streetlamp, same as the couples at the fairgrounds
and in the bumper cars?
Everything is so distant to me now,
I no longer remember: nothing, the cup of milk on
the nightstand must have gone cold, I’ll have to warm it up
on the burner. This milk has cream in it,
and not the old kind, still, with this taste,
like chemicals, I don’t know; the houses aren’t the same
nor the records nor the people, not even you – nor the sky,
which turns softer now and pinkish at twilight,
tender and warm like the body of a woman, with muffled brilliance,
and how now, when you walk down the street, you never think
that these agonising lights or my gaze – and yet it is me, look
close, in the smoke-filled bars, in a red tie
I still remember it, the terraces with dovecotes,
it’s not true that we return to the longings of our youth: if it were, I would once more yearn
for Mercè, the girl with braids who played with me on the rooftop,
because of the view – nothing special, believe me, a city dusty and disgraced – and we rode red bikes
and there was something doing, who knows what, between my grandmother and aunt,
even if I never did long for Mercè; for me, women were
something strange, and girls of my age, especially perilous,
I don’t know, I was afraid of that world I knew nothing of,
backrooms, hide-and-seek, ironing boards, hallways, braids, modest necklines, not a hint of breast, and in the summer
those were the years when they still took me to my grandparents’ house for the village fair in Gràcia, with the carousels and stalls and shooting galleries,
but I couldn’t forget that women weren’t absent from all that, and it unsettled me a bit – it meant leaving my world of Ariosto and Salgari and entering the unknown,
which was, once I saw it, all-too known: Ariosto and Salgari both are full of the stuff –
and I liked that house of my grandparents’, with the curtains and the quality of silence and of things come to rest on the eve of the war,
my grandfather’s books in the office with the green portfolio – it was there that I first read Stendhal:
I learned nothing from him – the radio with its speaker
and the silence, the dominant impression is of silent afternoons, the house dormant,
my grandfather seated with a blanket over his legs,
raising his head to say that they always had to throw everything in his face
or to remark to me on a passage from Wuthering Heights,
and the kitchen with that special scent that excited me, I don’t know why,
that was my childhood until suddenly it foundered
and one afternoon, when they were taking me to the fair,
I burst into tears in my mother’s arms,
and never again did I return, except for visits: then, and in no other moment,
I believe my childhood ended.
and the years take everything away – this moment in the car windows with red lights on the radio recalling Sidney Bechet –
and if I told you how long – though unawares –
my apprenticeship has been
to grant some cohesion to my dreams,
stinging gold of flesh, nostalgia, memory enkindled,
we’ve been doomed to live out inexistent years
– what will they say about that? – never has life been so unreal,
everything seems to happen in the past, and is as far away as the past,
the force of endowing life with meaning: might that not be the
primordial function
of art? – those are verses from years ago – and: is the poetic work
an interpretation we propose for what is given? I mean: is it an effort at coherence?