Every April, as the anniversary of his death approaches, it comes to mind. Under this warm, tranquil night, with an aged indigo sky and stillness over the sea. Under this vast universe of mysteries and magical luminaries, which sometimes seems to crush us whilst other times, set us free. Under this light of a waxing moon. Imposing, rough, and evocative. White as death. And perhaps as life.
Looking back at those who came before us holds a duty: to try, at least, to reach the soles of their greatness.
The silence is broken by the murmur of the sea, where the current ceases to be, where water dissolves into sand. The air whistles black blues notes, subdued by the strong scent of low tide. Here I am. Standing by the shore. Like a reed stuck in the sand, waiting for the dance of the fishing line. A tiny appendage of flesh and verse. A feather, in the end, left under the stars, at the delicate mercy of the southern breeze that lights up the twilight.
I drift and rise, high up, to view with the eyes of imagination, and behold nothingness. The imperceptible reality I illustrate, from a few meters above. What I am in the midst of this firmament of galaxies, nebulae, and planets is less than a sigh. A faint memory already forgotten. Nothingness beneath everything.
I hear my breathing, the metronome of the orchestra of silence, dancing with the eternal retreat of the waves, turning to foam after breaking at the feet of the beach. And I hear the inner noise of life, my own. The hum of time. The heartbeat. The ticking of a weary, constant, relentless clock. Melancholy and happiness, the pleasure of gazing at this valley of waves, and the vertigo of an Everest, lurking treacherously in every ember of our plans. We carry such heavy baggage within, and our smallness is so immense, that every light path feels like a rugged mountain. And in the end, the things of life, spread out on the sand of this beach under the grandiose firmament, are nothing more than faded notches on an infinite board, troubling no one, mattering to nothing, even when swollen with pretense.
I look far off, where the horizon has lost its compass and is about to lose its reason in the darkness. I look out there and see myself, a couple of weeks ago, strolling through Madrid’s Barrio de las Letras. Mid-afternoon, with the heat sowing the spring with swelter. Among the sleepwalking shadows of literature’s greats, those who sketched life and customs, who painted these melancholies in poems, and sought truth on nights like this.
As I wander its streets, I imagine those authors with their gaze fixed before them, under a fine rain of ink, wit, and inspiration. Near the Cristo de Medinacelli, I picture three barred windows at ground level. I’d set out to find them, like someone checking the rearview mirror. On the other side hides the basement where my grandfather and his brother spent intense hours, working in the print shop of a friend from their village in far-off Galicia, in northwest Spain, in the mid-1930s. Dust, ink, prints, and books. So far from Galicia, from the sea port, from family tranquility, a civil war that wasn’t theirs erupted, and they had to hide amongst the few folds life left them, as did so many.
Tragic was the farewell embrace they shared at the Hospital de la Princesa in the center of Madrid, shortly after. My grandfather, a military medic corporal, had to leave, or the madness of war madness would kill him, as back then, the murderous left would kill you for stepping into a church or wearing a medal or crucifix. His brother was dying, battling fatal lung disease. Freshly operated, after July 18, 1936, the doctors fled, abandoning the sick to their fate.
Only the nuns remained, caring for the terminally ill. They were forced to choose, while the streets exploded with hate and gunpowder, between both dying in that lonely hospital or one trying to survive. My grandfather left in tears, still hoping to return someday, pushed toward the door by his brother, who died soon after in that bed. “I’m going to die. Save yourself, because Mom has already lost two sons and can’t lose two more.” He was 23. A story of pain and injustice, repeated a thousand times in every family drama of that fratricidal war. When life couldn’t be spelled out on social media and was often as brief as a tweet.
That’s why I went there that afternoon a few weeks ago. And to the boarding house at Atocha 95, where they were kicked out by even their friends, too afraid to shelter a soldier. And back to the old print shop, where they laughed, dreamed, and suffered. To look into the mirror of time and see myself as the result of countless contingencies, the same ones this enigmatic sky unfolds tonight, spitting answers to such haphazard lives in the tiny labyrinth of a family. A huge story, one that belongs to everyone, yet is nothing more than a brief brushstroke in the infinite that grows impatient before my eyes today, from this Atlantic beach.
The moon holds for us a grand lesson. Though it could be boastful, it’s merely a confidante to romantics, insomniacs, and mad philosophers. Always silent and discreet. Letting itself be infused with radiance by way of the sun’s grandeur. She knows her light isn’t her own, yet only by way of it can the world know her beauty. The same is true of us, our bodies always in slow decay, heading toward destruction from the moment we’re born, aware that another gives us life. And like the moon, without that light, we’re nothing but darkness.
The wind picks up now, from the northeast. This peaceful night has grown icy edges. The mild early morning didn’t last long. Lost in memories of my grandfather’s nobility. That dripping of the clock, chasing us with insolent hysteria.
And here, surrendered to the beauty of the starry vault, I find a breath of relief in the sad verses of Agustín de Foxá: “And to think that after I die / bright mornings will still rise / under a blue sky, spring / indifferent to my final resting place / will become flesh in the silk of roses.” Foxá meant to weave melancholy, but stumbled into certainty: the hope of perpetuity. The longing that makes us more than nothing. And more than night, an eternal dawn. Looking back at those who came before us holds a duty: to try, at least, to reach the soles of their greatness.
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