and still hope for, that synthesis of rhythm, continual forward movement, ideas and more ideas, humor, expressive transparency, something like the inescapable music of a deceitfully playful Mozart that we get hopelessly hooked on. A passion for my creations? Maybe. But here the protagonists are sketched out for the entire novel, their courtship, as recounted by Josefa, establishes the roots of Sabas, whose epic downfall you can already imagine, along with Josefa’s own unconditional surrender to Sabas’s impossible stubbornness. Which buttons do you have to press to yield something like this? I have no idea.
IN CONVERSATION WITH THE DEAD
Las ciegas hormigas wouldn’t have existed without Faulkner. Even the critics have said so. He taught me to put myself in another’s place, which is to say, in a character’s place. And in order to accomplish that you have to show them instead of simply telling about them. The divine law for a fiction writer is to show, not tell. García Márquez later taught me to be irreverent by using humor. To turn a story into pure musical rhythm. I wish I were still learning.
CODA
Does Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha serve as a model for your literary Getxo? Have you read a lot of American literature?
I spent my childhood and adolescence in Getxo, and those times were influenced by the coast, the sea, and the people who lived off the land, surviving by their own hands. I returned to that world when I wanted to novelize my epic conceptualization of the world. I found in the American writers what I hadn’t found in European writers, at least not in the ones that Franco allowed us to read. When the Casa Americana Library opened in Bilbao around 1955, sponsored by the United States, I imagine, it brought fresh air, literature that was powerful, social, epic, and above all, free. Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Santayana, Capote, Dos Passos . . . it was so unlike the generally placid European literature. It was a leap from one continent, with its obligations already met, to another that was at the height of expansion. Its literature breathed liberty. It was my new path.
A THOUSAND FORESTS
FROM LAS CIEGAS HORMIGAS
[A NOVEL]
CHAPTER 21: JOSEFA
I still remember it well. The priest said, “Sabas, do you take this woman as your lawfully wedded wife?” And then, without even turning to me: “Josefa, do you want this man to take you as his lawfully wedded wife?”
That’s what I heard, kneeling next to him, my hands and feet tied up without a rope, subjugated, defeated, and (why not?) devoted—perhaps not out of love, but controlled by some kind of irrational vertigo—furiously subdued, captured, and kidnapped while everyone watched impassively. No longer daring to rebel, even though I’d tried before, despite the fact that I’d known from the beginning it would all be useless, I contemplated what the priest had done, with his benevolent, distant face, loading the ship with cargo he wouldn’t travel with, muttering the words, unrelenting, without looking into my eyes, which were desperately asking him, “Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you ask me, like all the other women, ‘Josefa, do you take this man as your lawfully wedded husband?’”
He appeared one day in Berango, chewing on a piece of straw. Serious, skinny, calm, his hands in his pockets. All put together with his corduroy pants, white cotton socks, rubber-soled sandals, and checkered shirt. And an umbrella hanging on his arm.
It was a workday, a Monday, around twilight. I watched him from the garden plot my family had near the road. He was coming from Algorta, and his steps weren’t quick, but they were steady, insistent, active, each one promising another. By the time I noticed him, he was already looking at me. The distance between us wasn’t short, so he was able to stare at me for four or five minutes without appearing to, without even turning his head, chewing his piece of straw the whole time. When he reached a point where he had to turn his head, he stopped looking at me, walked past me, and continued down the road, and nobody would have said that he’d noticed me.
When I went back to hoeing, I realized who he was: Sabas Jáuregui, from the farm on the beach in Algorta, who’d lived alone ever since he found himself without a family. We all knew the story: a family of father, mother, and two sons, they were all very hardworking and had enough land to show it. Sabas’s brother died, and father, mother, and Sabas took on the work; not long afterward, the mother died, and the two men kept going as well as they could, preparing the meals themselves. When his father died, Sabas was already prepared for it, and he took onto his shoulders the work that used to leave four people exhausted. And he lived there, abandoned near the edge of the beach, completing all the chores every day before going to bed, when he’d no longer hear the undertow scraping the rocks, like before, when all his family members were still alive and he was able to rest a while before sleep would take him. Now he fell asleep before he even had time to lift his second foot off the floor.
I saw him on rare occasions, when I went to that beach with my family to gather coked coal and I’d find him with a scythe cutting grass for the cows, or carrying manure from the stable to the garden, or I’d simply see smoke coming from the chimney and figure he was frying something for dinner.
The following Sunday, six days after I saw him on the road, I discovered him among the couples who were dancing on the pelota court to the shrill music playing on the loudspeakers. He was wearing twill pants, a wrinkled brown jacket, and a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned (no tie, of course). He searched for me specifically, among the dancing couples, and finally spotted me and came over to my group of friends, rigid and deliberate, looking up, walking and moving naturally, pretending he wasn’t bothered by his shirt collar, which was stiff even though it wasn’t buttoned: he’d probably put too much starch on it when he ironed it.
He stopped in front of me and, without moving his lips, without appearing to speak, even though his words didn’t come out timid at all, but whole, determined, firm, said, “Would you like to dance with me?”
It would have been enough to say “would you like to dance?” or even simply “do you dance?” but he wanted to be very clear about the “with me,” and at that moment I had a vague feeling that I was starting to figure him out, finding out what he was like, what he was proposing, how he would make it happen, and even that he would win.
I said no, not because he seemed to be acting like a Don Juan (he could have been: he sort of looked like one, and he was svelte, strong, rather handsome compared to the rest of those rough peasants), but because he didn’t even entertain any hope that I would dance with him; I even suspected that he didn’t want me to; his only intention was to make me start burning through my supply of ammunition, knowing that one day it would run out and I would be defenseless; that I had a certain number of vulnerable “noes” in reserve (it didn’t matter how many: he had enough patience to wait and persevere). Because after that week, he started coming to Berango at least twice a week: once on Sunday, at the dance, for me; and another day during the workweek, to the milkman Benito’s farm, for the cow.
Soon the whole town knew what he was up to. The cow he wanted belonged to one of our neighbors: Benito, the milkman, who kept himself afloat with the seven he fed (and milked) in the stable on his farm. My late father and my mother used to say that it wasn’t fair: the man already had six cows, and on top of that, God gave him those inexhaustible udders that, to everyone’s astonishment, produced thirty liters of milk a day.
He wouldn’t sell it, he wouldn’t trade it, he wouldn’t rent it, he would hardly let anyone see it; he never had to say it for his neighbors and the inhabitants of nearby towns to know it; it was something you understood if you knew Benito (his whole
