The years went on, but life did not. Their lives stopped. To begin with, Adela’s absence was unbearable for them. They didn’t admit this to one another. They had learned not to complain, to content themselves with whatever they were given.
Adela had begged her mother to stop pursuing Marvin, and told her about the shame she had felt for all those years when they had followed him around the world and he hadn’t even looked at them. But Catalina refused to promise anything, and that opened a rift between them which, in spite of the pain that it caused them, they were unable to heal. And so, what was initially going to be a few years studying journalism in Boston turned into a whole new life. When she finished her studies, Adela decided not to come back to Paris, but rather to look for work in New York. She couldn’t face going back to being part of her mother’s obsessions to make her father acknowledge her.
When she was a girl, she didn’t really care that this man might be her father. She didn’t even really want to meet him. But when she became a woman, she couldn’t stop asking herself why Marvin Brian had rejected her. The man the critics called the “Poet of Pain” had repudiated his daughter hundreds of times. Wasn’t he aware of the pain that his contempt might cause her?
On one of her rare and brief trips to Paris, she asked Fernando why Marvin ran from her mother and from her. He didn’t know what to say, so she only had one choice left to her: to try not to think about this father who refused to be one.
Fernando carried on working at two jobs: running the bookshop and editing poetry. Catalina carried on teaching at the Academy, giving lessons to children whose mothers wanted them to be great artists.
They didn’t have any friends, but sometimes accepted an invitation to supper from their landlords, Philippe and Doriane Dufort. The Duforts were convinced that Fernando and Catalina were a modern couple, like so many others, who preferred to live together without going through the business of marriage. Madame Dufort suspected that Catalina had been married before, and that because there was no divorce law in Spain, she had decided to run away with her lover, Fernando, and her child from the previous marriage.
Alain Fortier, Marvin’s professor friend from the Sorbonne who helped edit the books, also believed that Catalina and Fernando were a couple.
But they didn’t really speak to anyone outside their work. They avoided the Spaniards who lived in Paris, even though lots of them were Republicans, socialists or exiled communists.
Fernando preferred not to have to invent a story to explain why he lived in Paris, and Catalina didn’t want to run the risk of meeting someone who knew a member of her family and having the news get back to them.
And so they lived on the margins of the Spanish exile community. They didn’t take much interest in the events of May 1968 either, with the young people keen to stop the world so they could change it.
Fernando and Catalina both thought that the student revolution had nothing to do with them, or with their interests, or with their hopes. They weren’t indifferent, but they looked at the world around them as an object of curiosity rather than as something relevant to them. Catalina told Fernando that some of the students were worked up by the events of that May, thinking that the world would change, but neither she nor Fernando thought that at all.
And so they waited as the years went by, without hoping for anything, because who could be happy, after a war that had taken the lives they dreamed about away from them?
Catalina was surprised one morning to find several white hairs on her head, and couldn’t stop herself from calling to Fernando, who was just about to head off to the bookshop.
“Come and look!” she called.
He came into the bathroom worried: she had cried with such urgency.
“What is it?”
“You’ll think I’m silly, but I hadn’t realized I had so many white hairs. Do you know what this means?”
“Well, I’ve got some myself, I don’t know if you’ve seen. And you … well, I thought you’d seen them, but you’ve got more than one … it’s normal.”
“So … We’re growing old!”
“Hadn’t you noticed yet? We’re not children anymore. We left Spain at the end of 1941 and now it’s December 1973. Just count the years.”
“But … it’s not possible …”
“It is. It might seem like yesterday that we fled, but you can see that our lives are slipping away from us.”
“And what are we going to do about it?” she said, looking lost.
“Do? I don’t know what you mean … We can’t do anything … Well, I can’t do anything. I have to stay here, but you … you can go home, I’ve told you that many times. You’ve gone into an exile that isn’t really necessary. You know that Marvin is a lost cause and that you won’t get Adela back until you admit it,” Fernando said, looking severely at Catalina.
“Adela doesn’t understand that everything I’ve done and do is for her, because I don’t want her to lack a father she has a right to.”
“She’s told you in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t want Marvin as her father. Leave her alone. I’ve asked you to marry me and give her my name, and I’ve even said I’ll acknowledge her as a daughter if you don’t marry me,” he replied.
“Adela always wanted you to be her father,” Catalina admitted.
“And you denied her that possibility,” he said reproachfully.
“Let’s not argue, Fernando, I’m not going to give up, I’m going to carry on trying to get Marvin to acknowledge Adela.”
“Your mother is very old and needs you,” he reminded her.
“And your mother’s old too, and needs you,” she said angrily.
“There’s a difference between us! I can’t go back!”
“You could let her come and visit you!”
“Why won’t you let your mother come? Look, let’s not argue. I’m going to work and … well, as for your white hairs, just think for a second … you’re more than fifty years old.”
“Oh Lord, my life’s slipped through my fingers!”
Fernando heard these last words and thought that Catalina was right: they had lived without realizing that they were alive. He walked more quickly. He had to open the bookshop and he wanted to meet with Sara and Benjamin, who had arrived from Paris the day before.
The Wilsons didn’t normally say when they were coming, and on more than one occasion he had arrived at the bookshop to find the doors open and Sara looking at the shelves.
That December day it seemed that the couple were in a bad mood.
Sara was nervous. Fernando started to tell her about the sales figures for Marvin’s latest book.
Vietnam Notebook had consolidated his position even more as the Poet of Pain. Several thousand copies of the book had been sold in North America, but in Europe it had become an instant classic, a cry sent out against the war that was being unleashed in the jungles of the former Indochina. Ever since Vietnam Notebook had been published, Marvin had not written anything else; although Fernando didn’t particularly care about this, he was aware that Marvin was the one truly successful poet they published.
Benjamin Wilson listened distractedly. He seemed worried by other things. Five years had passed since the youth of Paris had taken to the streets, and Benjamin was sure that the world had changed, and all the certainties that had ruled his past were no longer present. You didn’t have to be too aware of how things were to see that. The fuse had been lit in Paris, and a change was going to come.
Marvin and Farida spent most of their time traveling, even though they had made New York their home. He found his inspiration in pain and grew as a poet in every one of his books.
Fernando and Marvin hadn’t seen each other again. His manuscripts would arrive via Sara and the two of them planned their editions together. Sara had given up on trying to bring Marvin and Fernando back together and they had agreed to allow their lives to be handled by this strange woman with short salt-andpepper hair.
It was she who told Fernando that she and Benjamin would go with Marvin to Israel.
“Farida asked us to go with them. It won’t be easy for her to make this journey,” she explained.
“Can Farida go to Israel? I thought that as she was an Egyptian she couldn’t … Nasser’s regime is an enemy of the Jews,” Fernando said.
“She has a British passport. The British used to be in charge in Egypt,” Benjamin said.
“Right …” Fernando said.
“It’s not going to be a pleasant trip for Farida or for me. I’m a Jew, but I’m an Egyptian Jew who has had to take all his business to London. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care if the Israelis and the Egyptians kill one another,” Benjamin admitted.
“It shouldn’t be like that … but who’s to blame? I can’t understand how stubborn the Arab leaders are in refusing to accept the resolution of the United Nations that recognizes the right of the Jews to their own country. It’s what’s causing all these wars,” Sara said.
Fernando realized that Sara and Benjamin had their own differences of opinion on this matter, and he didn’t care much about it wither way.
“I’m an Alexandrian, Sara, and I hate the fact that a lot of my friends have lost their lives fighting against Israel. I can’t help it, I think I’m an Egyptian,” Benjamin replied.
“Well, I was French. I didn’t think I was anything apart from Parisian, but one day many of the people who were our friends turned into enemies. Here, yes, right here in this marvelous and civilized city, lots of people had no qualms in turning their backs on the Jews, in pointing us out to the authorities, in remaining silent when they took our houses and businesses, in looking the other way when they deported us to the extermination camps. If anyone had told me that this might happen in Paris, I wouldn’t have believed them.”
“And Egypt took you in like one of their own,” Benjamin interrupted.
“Egypt? No, it wasn’t Egypt, it was you who welcomed me as your wife. And I won’t deny that I was happy in Alexandria and that I feel the suffering of our friends, but no more than that of the Jews who are fighting against being pushed into the sea. You remember that a few months ago the Syrians and the Egyptians attacked Israel again, taking advantage of it being Yom Kippur.” Sara looked straight at Benjamin.
“You’ve become a Zionist,” he said.
“Zionist? Of course. What else can one be as a Jew? Have we been left any other choice? Israel is a necessity for the Jews. Don’t kid yourself, Benjamin, the Jews are a nuisance for the rest of the world. We’re tolerated but little more. And so it’s time for us to stop being guests, guests who are only sometimes accepted in the countries we end up settling in. Israel is a piece of land that gives us the right to exist. That guarantees that right. I’m sorry, Benjamin, and I understand how you are suffering because your friends are losing their lives in this war, but this is a war they unleashed against Israel. The Arab leaders keep repeating that they won’t stop until they’ve driven the Jews into the sea. Well, we’re not going to stand by and let them treat us like animals. If they wage war against us, we’ll defend ourselves. Our very existence is at stake,” Sara said bitterly.
“Let’s not bore Fernando with our differences of opinion,” Benjamin said. “Anyway, we’re going to Israel with Farida and Marvin.”
“Marvin wants to write two books, one of them dedicated to the pain of the Jews, and the other to the pain of the Palestinians,” Sara said.
“Whose side is he on?” Fernando asked.
“Whose side? Well, Marvin is on no one’s side apart from his own, and Farida’s. Suffering is the match that lights his sensibility, that feeds his talent. The Poet of Pain … Yes, Marvin has made pain the fuel of his life.” Sara’s words sounded to Fernando like ice cracking.
“Is it safe to travel there? The Yom Kippur War was very recent, it’s only been three months, hasn’t it?”
“The Day of Atonement …” Sara said.
“Well, the situation seems under control, and if it weren’t then we wouldn’t go,” Benjamin said.
“Do you want to come with us?” Sara asked Fernando.
“No … of course not … My presence wouldn’t be any use,” Fernando said uncomfortably.
“What are you thinking, Sara? And who’ll run the store?”
“You’re right, it was just a passing thought. Oh, and please, do what you can to stop Catalina going to Israel. She’ll find out because Marvin has given a few interviews where he talks about his next trip,” Sara said, looking straight at Fernando.
“I’m sorry, Sara, but I’ll never deny Catalina her right to go wherever she wants, and much less will I stand between her and Marvin,” Fernando said in annoyance.
“It’s a pity that she … well, everyone does what he wants with his own life, but Sara is right that it would be very uncomfortable to find her there,” Benjamin said.
“If she finds out, she’ll do what she thinks fit,” Fernando said, bringing the conversation to an end.