Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

Federico

‘In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.’

—Federico Garcia Lorca

“You have visited me every year,” I whispered, “why?”

The autumn of 1952 in Andalusia was silent and resolute; having returned from their summer visits to nearby family, the residents of Alfacar walked a little slower. They sank back into the resentments they carried below pleasantries exchanged with neighbours, who only fifteen years ago had been enemies. Bordering this town were scattered olive trees that had once absorbed the blood of many of my friends. It was here that he would visit me. We’d sit in the shade and lean on the trunk; he would fix his eyes on the church spire and remain very still. Many days like this we had passed in silence, but not this day. In that moment, our unspoken words were ripe and ready for the picking, like the olives above us.

“I miss you,” he spoke with a defensive edge that he had picked up from his father. “I read your books every night you know, even after my wife falls asleep, I’ve read all the ones I can find, I will not stop until I find the rest.”

After a battle, the trees that survive regrow, slowly gaining strength, tenderly weaving new fibres over old wounds, letting branches extend in new directions, accepting the trenches in their trunks that will never fully heal. In time, despite it all, they thrive once more. Humans are not like that. Those that survive do everything to forget, they bury and suffocate, barely living, old anguish displacing hope like impure air.

“I remember Raquel well; she lived around the corner when we were children.” Raquel had always been kind to me, even when my friends were disappearing with increasing frequency, even when people spoke my name with heavy contempt. She was one of the few people between here and Granada who seemed to practice her faith and not just preach it. “Did you ever tell her about me?” I asked him.

We had been friends since childhood, I could read his expressions like a favourite book. Every inflection of the eyebrow, or tightening of the lips, spoke his words to me before he could.

“I could never bring myself to tell her the truth, she asks about you sometimes and I can’t bring myself to tell the full story. I don’t think she would understand.”

I was silent. I thought of the long afternoons when we would trade marbles and run races in the fields we grew up in, before eating under one roof the meals his mother would prepare. We’d spend hours tracing the lines of books with our fingers, reading aloud to each other, exchanging dreams and making plans, our laughter rising and blending. This was spring that lasted, a breeze that flew high over its jagged cliffs like a nimble deer that does not know it is being hunted. I remember when the first swallows flew in each year, their perfect formation announcing the end of a long winter. We would smile together at the thought of the days of sun that lay ahead; of all the time we would be able to spend together.

Our closeness too rose and fell like the seasons; long before it would fade into a bitter winter it had evolved reluctantly into the warmest of summers. We did not will it, God knows we tried to stifle it, at least in the beginning. To condemn us then would be to condemn all youthful innocence. We did not know this feeling by name, but we could not deny its nature. Hands brushing tentatively, tender words passed on delicately, eyes boldly locked, then fearfully torn away.

As we sat there together, my thoughts galloped like wild horses to these places I had always run from and took me with them, to the birthplace of all the emotions I have felt since. There, all my verses played out long before they appeared on paper. With impassioned curiosity I started writing then, or perhaps re-writing what had already been written for us. In these glowing stolen moments, we had discovered new, unfathomable depths of ourselves. We would be forced to navigate these depths for the rest of our lives, canoes on a stormy ocean where our oars would be futile, where prayers and violence would become his refuge, just as poetry became mine.

As if he was remembering too, he went on, “History will do what I cannot, Federico. Your writings are passed from hand to hand in blank covers that show no hint of the great works within, the same works they have banned, the same works I loathed for so long. But you and I know that concealed memory fights back harder than any soldier. Truth may be altered, and recollections warp but your spirit only lies dormant, dim but unquenchable. Martyrdom is the only real immortality we can know.”

“Old friend, if I may call you that, I did not want to be a martyr.” No one chooses to be a martyr. It is thrust upon us by circumstances bigger than ourselves. And if I had chosen, it would have been for causes much bigger than the thinly veiled hatred carried by all our leaders, re-tailored to their version of glory. Of those who read my words, how many of them really understand them? Is it my story they read, or the ones they write between the fading lines? Real lives are far too tainted to ever become symbols for any cause, they take what suits them and the rest will slowly disappear. “If even you do not know that, then what little of me is contained between book covers is a waste.”

As we grew, the books we read became more different, our friends opposing, we shared fewer meals. Our enthusiasm parted like a river, its two halves carving out paths so different that they became incomparable. As I worked tirelessly to express what I saw and felt in my verses, he would be in a village he had never walked in, fighting fellow countrymen he called foes in the name of a nation that he claimed belonged to the people. What people? I have always wondered whether we thought similar thoughts deep in the evening, as I laid down my pen, as he hung his rag back on its bayonet, as we set aside the uniforms we had chosen for ourselves. Whether the stories he shared with comrades around campfires had the same tones and hues as those that I constructed delicately for the actors on my stages.

“I remember when you were an optimist.” His voice like melting ice, holding onto its coldness for protection.

My gaze and tone were firm, steadied by years of disappointment, “And I remember when you grimaced at the sound of gunshots. Before they punctuated your life. I wonder if you ever miss them now that they’re far away, whether you long for the purpose they brought you.”

I was still studying literature and the law when I heard from my sister Isabel that he had joined the army. I remember imagining him bright-eyed with a gun slung over his shoulder, his new boots leaving decisive imprints trailing the dirt paths that we had once chased each other on.

“I long for peace Fede, I always have, it’s not our fault that we become misguided. I look at my daughter and I fear for what she will have to endure, most of all I fear for the versions of herself she might become, for the lessons she will have to learn the hard way.”

Our quarrels as children would always end with our mothers making us face each other to apologise. He used to resent this insult to his pride, the dismissal of his certainty in what he believed to be right. I remember how soon after he would let this discontentment evaporate, returning to laughter and companionship. As if all our damage could be undone with a simple apology.

“If you wanted peace, you could have looked for it, created it, you could have nurtured it.” – I wanted to add ‘with me’ – “But what you fought for was never peace, it was its banishment. Fear disguised as faith stirred everybody into a fight which ended in no one’s victory. We watched it happen, even worse, we let it. Those symbols, stories and syndicates you fought so hard for, what did they become? Sorrowful art, broken families, hopes buried deep within mass graves. We count our dead like rosary beads while chanting that the past is the past.”

Is it harder to forget, or to forever remember?

“It’s too late to tell you all the things I felt when I saw the panic in your face. How sick I was of that war; how sick it still makes me.”

His troops had heard rumours of my return. They had heard about my ideals, about the company I kept. He had stayed silent when he heard the jokes and the cursing. He had stood and watched as they plucked my friends like wild daisies, one by one.

“Don’t talk too loudly, they might hear you.” I spoke resignedly, nodding towards the town below.

Despite all the love he had once claimed to have for me, he had solemnly obeyed each order. It was him who had frozen my step when he shouted my name on that afternoon amongst the olive trees.

“All I can hope now is that you have forgiven me, Federico. I hope that in heaven there is pen and paper for you to write your poems always. I hope that you know I’ll never forgive myself.”

Mine was not the only life he took. Mine was not the last life he took. He took so many he would forget the faces, the places, the pleas. He would lose count of the nights spent awake in trenches, innumerable as the stars that struggled to illuminate them. He would forget the names of his companions, their faces easily confused with those on the enemy line. He would even forget the letters he sent home, which became harder to write as his shame became heavier to carry.

But he would never forget the way my body lay in the shade of the olive grove as if asleep, as the bang from his rifle evaporated away. The silence that followed. He would remember the way they threw my body onto a cart and the tree he watched them bury me under. This tree that had seen more than most humans could bear. My blood runs in its veins, it stands in my place, it will outlive us all. Every year he comes back and settles in its shade. He is much older, his features deepened beyond their age by the time and regret.

I wonder if he knows that I hear every word he says, that I talk back, that I sit here with him. That when the villagers see a man in an old hat lay down his book and sit under the tree mumbling to himself, we are sitting side by side, whiling the autumn day away, just like we always did.

I turn to him now: “I know how sorry you are. I am too, but the power of apologies was overthrown with the first bullet wounds, with the first grenades that disrupted our peace. All I’m left with is little more than a half-lived life, and the image of your trembling hands, the hands that I once held so lovingly, wrapped around that gun. I remember the firmness in your brow betrayed by the terror in your eyes. And I remember the deep defeat I felt as I watched your finger tighten the trigger. I will never leave here, and neither will you. Let them read my poems, let them have their martyrs. As for us, let us just sit here, and enjoy these last days of sun.”