The Invitation(52)

There are landmarks I remember from those trips: the House of the Seven Chimneys, the parlour my aunt once took us to for an ice cream, now boarded closed, the Metrópolis building on the Calle de Alcalá, with its winged seraph, the pet shop on Calle de Cervantes where Uncle Salvador once helped Tino pick a toy for Se?or Bombón: also shut. Actually, the sign has been painted over with an Anarchist slogan: I don’t think it has sold budgerigars in a long time. But in between these are scenes of frozen violence: metal ripped and twisted, stone pockmarked with holes, fa?ades that have been torn asunder, leaving interiors gaping like toothless mouths. As I pass an apartment block I can see straight through to the rooms inside. I understand this new Madrid, as I look upon it. I am like this city. At a first glance, perhaps, relatively intact. But I too have been shattered, warped. I will never be the same.

When I turn into the street, with its row of acacia trees, the elegant houses in shades of pistachio and umber, it is as though nothing has changed. I remember this from childhood, I remember coming here on a searingly hot day. But some twenty yards away is a new impossibility. The houses on both sides are torn down to their foundations. This new horror. This new unimaginable thing. Where their house once stood is a blank; a sad mess of mortar and brick. It is all too familiar. As I move closer I see furniture broken into matchsticks, I see dust-covered rags that once might have been curtains. A rug like a red wound, a piano sagging drunkenly in the middle, keys scattered on the floorboards. Closer still: broken china, glass. Closer still: a small object … a woman’s leather glove. And then I stop. I won’t continue, not this time. There is no need to get any nearer. No one could have survived this.

I sit on the stoop of one of the houses opposite, and shut my eyes. I am so tired, and very cold: Se?or Bombón is the one warm spot, curled on my lap.

When I next open them the light has changed. I must have fallen asleep: the stone is hard against my back. My feet are so cold I can no longer feel them. In the rubble that was the house there is sudden movement. It is an impossible sight in the midst of the destruction, like a resurrection. I watch as a woman emerges from the mess, her arms full: cans of food. She is young, but holds herself crouched over like an old woman, braced against the sky. Yet she moves like a cat, careful, light-footed. She doesn’t see me until she is very near and then she stops dead. ‘Why are you loitering there? Are you trying to get yourself killed?’

I don’t answer, but I do wonder if it is, in fact, what I am trying for.

‘It isn’t stealing,’ she says, clasping her bounty of cans to her chest. ‘They won’t need these where they’re gone.’

Still I don’t answer.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Do I have to carry you? I will leave you here.’

I sit up. And I realize, as I do, that my lap is no longer warm. Se?or Bombón is gone. I find my voice. ‘Have you seen a cat?’

She looks at me as though I am mad. ‘No, no cat.’

He was a hateful creature, really. He bit and scratched Papa and me. The only one he liked was Tino. And yet I discover that I am weeping.

‘Ah,’ she says, raising her eyebrows ‘?Qué lío!’ What a mess.

An underground station. A dark press of bodies: the occasional flicker of a lighter, bursts of laughter, talk, the wail of a baby. People are living here. They have come prepared, with blankets, with miniature stoves, with books and toys.

The woman – Maria is her name – persuades a group – a family, I think – to make space for two more. She has a blanket, which she unrolls carefully. She does not offer to share it: it is obvious that it would not be large enough for both of us. I have my father’s jacket, anyway. It begins quickly, inevitably: the drone of engines somewhere far above, then the terrible sounds that follow: that high scream. And then the impact, so near that at times the platform vibrates beneath my head, as if for an incoming train.

‘That house,’ Maria says. ‘Was it yours?’

‘It belonged to my aunt and uncle.’

She doesn’t ask me if they lived. Perhaps that part is obvious. She doesn’t apologize, either, for looting the remains. ‘You do what you have to do,’ she says, ‘sabes? To stay alive. You do … things you would never have dreamed of doing, in normal life.’

In the morning, Maria is gone. She has disappeared into the city. Perhaps she doesn’t stay in one place for too long; perhaps she has been killed. She might have saved my life, yesterday. I’m not sure whether to be grateful.

There is something shameful in it, this need to survive. It is beyond thought. Papa, Tino are gone – I have nothing left. Yet this will to live is as strong as an undertow, it sweeps me with it. When I hear the sirens I cower and run like any other. In the days, I venture into the city to find the things I need – food, mainly. I have no money. I would work, if I could, but there is nothing; the usual patterns of life disrupted. Shops open for only a couple of hours – if at all. The whole city has shut down by 8p.m.

I become shameless. I stand in line and then, when it comes to my turn, I put out my hands and beg. Often the grocer or one of the men or women in the queue will take pity on me, and I will walk away with something: a heel of bread, say, or chickpeas, which I will tip into my mouth straight from the tin. I have no qualms now about clambering into broken houses to relieve them of their contents. Usually, though, others have got there first. The thing is to get there first, the morning after the destruction.