HILARIO BARRERO
TWO HUNDRED DOVES
_________________________________ CUADERNOS DE HUMO. DOS
Hilario Barrero (1946) was born in Spain and has been living in New York for the last 33 years. He holds a doctorate from CUNY and is a Professor at BMCC, CUNY. He is the author of Siete sonetos (1976), In tempore belli (1999), Las estaciones del día (2003), De amores y temores (2005), Días de Brooklyn (2007), Dirección Brooklyn (2009), Un cierto olor a azufre (2009) and Bruklin, Bruklin (2011). He has translated De otra manera (Pre-textos, 2007), Delicias y sombras (Pretextos, 2009) and El amante de Italia (Grand Tour, 2009).
TWO HUNDRED DOVES
HILARIO BARRERO
two hundred doves
CUADERNOS DE HUMO. DOS 2011
Primera edición, 7 de julio 2011 First edition, July 2011 © Hilario Barrero Dibujo cubierta: H.B. Diseño y compaginación: Jesús Nariño Cazadora de erratas: Dolores Beck Nihil Obstat (nothing stands in the way): Fay Rogg © Editorial Cuadernos de humo 34 Plaza St. 604 Brooklyn, NY 11238. USA cuadernosdehumo@yahoo.es Impreso en USA – Printed in USA
For my father and his two hundred doves. For my American teachers, especially the good ones. For E.P., always.
My friend says I was not a good son you understand I say yes I understand ‌ he says the last time I saw my father he was asking me about my life how I was making out and he went into the next room to get something to give me W. S. Merwin
Forty years ago he was a handsome man. My mother used to talk about my father and how tall he was, how beautiful his eyes were, his dark hair, his strong body and that air while smoking a cigar -between aggressive and indolent. My mother was always in love with him. She still loves him. She will love him forever, no matter how bad things are. Lately things have been very bad. He now lives at the farm. He lives alone, with only the company 1
of his four dogs, two hundred doves, two cats, a garden with twenty different trees (each one has its own name) and two guns. The farmhouse is a labyrinth. There you can find an intricate combination of paths, passages, stairs; it is difficult to find where you are or how to reach the exit. One room is square and the next, rectangular with three windows; there is another oval one, with no corners, no windows, always dark and empty. There are long corridors, patios, garages, and in the middle of the living room there is a well. The whole building is in state of confusion as the mind of the owner. You can find books resting near a gun, bottles of liquor by the dozen and a beautiful little tin full of silver coins. On a shelf a bough of faded roses. When my mother goes to visit him, she comes back sad and cries. From the window 2
-an immense framed glass that covers the whole facade- he can see the village, tiny brown houses, the church with the tower and the bells, the little humble plaza (in the middle a cross of marble and iron with old flowers), the small river hugging the city, and far, far away, like a shadow, the mountain: a mute witness that knows everything and knows everybody. Steady, firm, green in spring, gold in summer, salmon in autumn and white in winter, the mountain is there, controlling the lives of those people, including my father.
After many years of not seeing him, one day I knocked at his door. It was summer and the sun was scorching that afternoon. The little village was deserted; only two dogs were crossing the small square and a donkey slept, protected by the tower's shadow. 3
(Around it a flock of flies was buzzing. Once in a while the donkey by flicking its eyes closed tried to scare them with its long tail.) He was not awakened by the car noise. The sun, absolute king, was reigning over all of us. Getting out of the car, I recognized the barking of Siete, my favorite dog. He knew I was coming. When my father opened the heavy metallic doors, the first thing I saw was Siete's eyes, bright as two candles of joy and happiness. Siete jumped at me, and for a moment, I lost my equilibrium. He licked my face, and I kissed his wet snout. After that I looked at my father's face. He was there, with the sun over his head, smiling feebly, waiting to hug me. "Long time, no see," I said. "Long time...," he said. Calm, without rushing, we started walking to the porch. "Here we are going to be more comfortable than inside. Sit," he said. Siete was already lying near my 4
chair waiting for me. While we were talking I was looking at him and I was thinking how different he was. He was old, but alert. His hair almost gone, a thin moustache, and his movement slow. But he still was tall, keeping his body strong, and his eyes had a vivid brown light. "Well, so happy to see you," he said. The sun was setting. Far away, beyond the mountain, a dark line started to grow, like a flower of shadow and solitude. "It is getting dark," he said. "Let us light the lamp.� Siete was looking at me, his tongue out of his mouth. The light of the lamp projected an impressive and beautiful profile of my father. Forty years later he still was a handsome man. My mother was right. We are eight brothers and sisters. We always remember my father as a strong, authoritative person. When we were kids, he 5
was a loyal Catholic, so we also had to be loyal Catholics. One day he stopped going to church and he never went back. Not even when my brothers and sisters got married. Nobody knows the reasons for such behavior. (I know he keeps a crucifix in his wallet.) Once he went to Rome, and he saw the Pope. When he came back from that trip, he brought medals and holy pictures and rosaries and an album of photographs with blue covers. I remember going through its soft pages almost every day. Such luxury! The big ocean liner, the city, those majestic columns, so many people together, the Vatican St. Peter's Square, the festive air, the crowds, and the last page, with a golden border, the picture of the Pope blessing my father. I used to ask him over and over again the same questions about that trip. I was fascinated. "One day," I said, "I will be there." (I was five years old, 6
but I still remember those moments very vividly.) My brothers and sisters and I went to Catholic schools and all our lives were surrounded by the Church. (My mother still goes to church daily and when she writes to me she tells me that she prays for me.)Very often I ask myself what my father’s image of God is. Is it a God of love or is it a God of Justice and terror? When he is alone, what are his memories of those years? The seeds he planted are producing an excellent harvest: his eleven grand-children are attending Catholic schools. I bet he is proud of that. At times I ask myself what happened to that blue album. Maybe it is old, and its pages full of dust and darkness, and its photographs yellow with time... Like my father's eyes.
7
It was not easy living with him. He was different, unique. He created a personal army in his own house, but most of his soldiers betrayed him. He spent part of his life fighting the rest of the world. He fought with his bosses; he fought with his wife and with his children. He is still fighting. He was and he is a kind of Don Quixote. He thought he was the only honest person on the globe. His friends (before he moved to the farm) believed he was crazy, and they stopped visiting him. That was a very bad period in our lives. He was alone living on the farm with his medals, his uniforms, his gun, but without his army, surrounded only by animals, trees, four long walls, the gardener and the housekeepers. He was Captain of the silence. Commander of the air. Chief of his territory. A soldier alone, so alone in his pain. 8
Where have his eight children gone? Does he recall the color of his mother's eyes? When watering the trees, does he remember his children? What feelings does he get when he listens to the sound of winter? I was not his favorite son. We were worlds apart. I found him full of
misconceptions, but
intelligent. He expected more from us than we could give him. In my case I knew I was different. That difference would be my own life, my personal fight. Years later I saw it very clearly when I discovered Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken": ‌Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
9
About seven in the morning -in summertime around six- the man who takes care of the garden opens the farm's gates. After getting rid of the dogs, he knocks on the door of my father's bedroom. "I already heard you. Do not worry about me. I am OK. Go do what you have to do and leave me alone," he says, “and do not forget to water the roses. Today is going to be a heavy day." The gardener, who knows my father better that anyone, says nothing and, nodding his head goes to the garden. Señor Pedro is a fragile old man with beautiful vivid blue eyes. Señor Pedro is married and he has ten children. Except for one, they are married and live in the capital. Señor Pedro's wife is still working, in spite of being almost seventy five years old. For fifty years she has helped the doctor's wife. She goes every day to visit them and she takes care of the house. The doctor is 10
old and retired and his wife is sick. Se単or Pedro refuses to move to the city. He wants to die where he was born, where he fell in love, where he buried his own family. "This is my country, I belong here," he said. I have known Se単or Pedro since I was a kid, and he knows me very well. He taught me to smoke; he told me the truth about how we are born; he opened my eyes to life. I remember him coming for Christmas to my house in the city, to get his present; his best shirt, the black corduroy jacket, heavy boots, the blue cap, and his eyes. "Your father is difficult; son, very difficult, but I know how to deal with him." "We know, Se単or Pedro, we know. But what can we do?" "Nothing," he said, "nothing; he will always be the same until..." Se単or Pedro grows the best tomatoes and green peppers in town. And the roses are the envy of all the neighbors. My mother loves 11
him. She says: "If he can live with your father he is a saint. Seùor Pedro is very old, but you have to see him when he bends over and touches the soil with his rough hands. He seems another person, and his eyes radiate a very special light. � Like two arrows of warm April rain.
Rosa
and
Gregorio
are
the
housekeepers. Nobody knows exactly what they do, how much money my father pays them, or what the relationship is between them and my father. One of my sisters, Carmen, thinks that my father is in love with Rosa. It could be. Rosa is a healthy villager with a pair of piercing brown eyes and an easy smile. She always wears black. (They lost one of their children a few years ago. He went to Germany to work and drowned in the Rhine 12
River.) Gregorio only opens his mouth to say bad words and "yes, sir." He is not a friendly man. One day I saw him trying to kill Tosca -my other favorite dog- by drowning her in the pool. He thought he was alone, but when I approached him, without any excitement he said to me: "Damned dog, she is dirty and I was trying to clean her." Gregorio wears the same beret every day, and he is a chainsmoker. Rosa and Gregorio do not talk to anybody, and sometimes my father spends months without talking to them. When my father travels -he usually goes for a monththey become the owners of the farm, and SeĂąor Pedro is not allowed to go to work during my father's absence. (They take care of the garden.) I believe Rosa and Gregorio are expecting something from my father, since they are aware of the situation between my father and my family. My mother ignores 13
them. And she refers to them as "that peculiar pair of people who are living with your father." SeĂąor Pedro is always complaining about them, and "how mysterious they are." "SeĂąora," he says, "you better watch out for this pair of bad birds. They are no good, you know what I mean, no good." Something must be wrong with them, since Siete does not like them at all.
One day I received a letter from him. I am a runner and so is he. Usually he runs five miles every day, after Senor Pedro calls at his door at seven o'clock every morning. (In winter, when the roads are frozen he runs under the porch.) Once I ran with him, and I was so impressed by how strong he was, and how steady a pace he kept. On one of my visits I gave him a T-shirt from the New York 14
City Marathon, which he wore when we ran together. So, one day, I received a brief letter. "Dear son: I would like to know why you run. Sometimes I feel very good when I am going down to the river trail doing my five miles. It is a sensation of peace and beauty. I do not know. What are your feelings about it? Why do you run? Your father." I thought I had forgotten his handwriting, but when I saw the letter, part of my life, of my childhood, started to live again, and a flood of memories came to me. I wrote back to him the same day the following letter: "Dear Father: Enclosed you will find my answers to your questions. When I saw your handwriting I thought it was the end of the world. Your son.� These are my answers: “Some people perhaps do not understand why other people run, but you do, because you are a runner. I think one runs in the same way one loves, one lives and one 15
dies. One runs in order to live, and also in order to die. "Our lives are the rivers/ that flow to the sea, /which is death." Father, one runs in order to free the body of its rumblings and store the soul with memories, landscapes, autumn mornings, rain, the gradual greenery of summer, the embrace of spring... One runs, Father, in order to be closer to God, to find amid the joy of the trees His love, His wisdom, His protection. One runs to fill the well of solitude with more solitude, the loneliness of the long distance runner... Only silence, perhaps the sad look of a dog, a beat of the heart, someone sleeping on a bench, but always the road, my road. Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind 16
one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road-Only wakes upon the sea. Remember these verses? You taught them to me. (While I write all this, Sibelius -whom I know you dislike for being too "modern for my romantic taste"- is making my heart a prisoner of the sea, of memories, of music of another time. But one lives and one struggles and one runs; and one loves and one runs; and one dies and one runs.) I remember that a runner asked on his deathbed to be buried in his Boston Marathon T-shirt. The shirt was his shroud. But also one runs in order to live. As you and I do, father. Pablo and his wife, Maria, are the neighbors. The long fence, forming a big L, goes from North to South and then from East to West, cutting and limiting the land, as 17
a fortress. It is a heavy wall made of iron and stone. At the top of the fence, as a crown of power, sharp needles of iron proclaim the kind of person who lives there. When my paternal grandfather and Maria's grandfather were alive, the fences were made of bushes and nobody dared to cross them. Maria's grandfather was the mayor of the village, and my grandfather thought that he was a dummy. They were neither enemies nor friends, but both of them knew how to respect each other. It was my father (and this was the first symptom that showed us he was changing) who, after inheriting the farm, decided to build "a tall and heavy wall, to be isolated from the others." He even paid for it. Maria, Pablo's wife, is deaf and mute. Her family owns the farm and Pablo has been working there since he was a boy. They have known each other since they were children. They 18
have always been together, except for the years when Maria went to the capital to a school for the deaf. She taught him sign language. They are one of the happiest couples in many miles around. After fifteen years of marriage, Maria is expecting a baby. Pablo is ecstatic with the idea of being a father, and Maria feels fortunate, but she is also afraid: she fears the baby may be deaf and mute, like her. Pablo is a villager and he works the farm. He and Maria consider my father an outsider. They think that my father and his family never knew how hard it is to work a farm. Pablo is in his late thirties, tall, with short hair, full of life; his face looks like one of the apples that he grows, round, red and healthy. Pablo talks very little and very loud. He has a rare dignity and elegance; in the village they call him "the Duke," and all the girls are in love with him. But he is not a 19
Don Juan. He only has eyes for Maria. He is a real product of the village. He and Maria were born there, and are planning to die there also. Their roots belong to that soil. In spite of my father's temperament, they are very good neighbors. As my mother says, "because Pablo is another saint." And he must be. In the fifteen years that my father has lived there, they have never had a fight. My father moved to the farm the same summer that Pablo and Maria got married; a week after the wedding, Maria's father and grandfather were killed in an accident with the tractor: while they were plowing the land, one of the wheels fell off and they went down the rampart, and were crushed by the tractor. My father buys from them fresh eggs and milk, freshly picked vegetables, chickens, lambs... Pablo calls my father when he has something to sell. "Mister, today I have excellent lettuces. Send SeĂąor 20
Pedro around," he says over the phone. SeĂąor Pedro goes to the fences and opens a little window that they have to communicate with each other. Probably Pablo and Maria think, like Robert Frost, that "good fences make good neighbors."
In front of the house and separated from the rest of the farm by a wall made of geometric figures of red bricks, there is the pool, a little garden with roses, two very old olive trees, colorful geraniums, basil, rosemary, and "flowers for the dead," as SeĂąor Pedro says. The pool's water is old and it is used only to water the garden and wash the dogs. Its surface has a green patina like a liquid grass where
flies
and
mosquitoes
dance
an
interminable waltz of abandonment and decadence. The road starts at the main 21
entrance and cuts the farm from North to South. A line of cypresses grows parallel to the road. The cypresses tall and serious, give an air of sobriety to that area. On the right side stands the house, on the left the trees, the greenery and the orchard. The road finishes in an immense white wall. In summertime, the sun uses its whiteness as a mirror, where it crashes its eyes of fire. In the deep nights of winter, the moon, silver and ice, steals from the lime its white pure color. At the end of the road and framed by the cypress there is the house for the two hundred doves; a square tower with four tiny windows in the middle of each wall. While my grandfather was alive the tower was empty and it stood more as a symbol of power. It was for a very long time the tallest building around until last year when an American company built a residential complex. The tower was a point of reference 22
in the village, and it is mentioned in the book titled "Famosos edificios provinciales." "On top of Mount Chartrea (a Roman name) we found a tower, built around the beginning of the century ...which breaks the monotony of Castile’s horizontality." The red roof ends in an iron weathervane with the four cardinal points, and a cock painted in blue color. My father believes that blue is the color for doves and pigeons and he has a very personal theory about how and why these birds leave from and return to the dovecote every day at the same time. He swears that the two hundred doves know him. Inside of the tower's base, there is a heavy rope pending. It comes from the dovecote. "One day," my father says, "if I want to have two hundred doves prisoners, the only and simple thing I have to do is pull down the rope and automatically the tiny windows
will
close." 23
One
of
his
grandchildren, Carlitos, who is very close to him, after hearing my father's theory, asked him: "Grandpa, why do you want to have two hundred between responded:
doves’
prisoners?"
paternal
and
"Power,
my
My
father,
authoritative, son,
power.
Something you will learn..."
Inside his wallet the Guardia Civil found a crucifix. The local newspaper published the news of the accident calling my father an older man. One of my sisters went mad when she read the news. “An older man died in a traffic accident in the National IV highway when his Mercedes crashed against a truck. The old man seemed to have fallen asleep.” Two of my brothers and one sister arrived at the morgue at sundown. One of my brothers started to cry when he saw my 24
father’s corpse. The dead body arrived in Toledo the next day accompanied by three of his children. I took a plane and arrived at the same time that my father was carried into the Funeral Home. I refused to see him dead. My mother and my sisters went to see him. My mother kissed him on the cheek. My sister and I volunteered to stay there until midnight. At ten, when most of the friends and family had left, we saw a woman entering the room, she came close to the glass that separated my father from us, knelt in front of him and wept. She stayed almost half an hour. Later she entered the room where the coffin lay and embraced the body of my father, kissing him on the cheek just as my mother has.
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This printing of 40 copies of TWO HUNDRED DOVES, celebrates two important dates in the lives of two people: 1971-2011.
ď Ą This copy is number_________
TÍTULOS PUBLICADOS 1.- AGUA Y HUMO. Siete dibujos de Pelayo Ortega. Poemas de Hilario Barrero 2.- TWO HUNDRED DOVES Hilario Barrero