Eyes of Sea and Sky

Abstract

This story begins in a town in the Old World. If we dust our map of Spain and lay it out flat on our memory, pressing with our hands the most stubborn folds, we will see that Almerfa is located on the southern edge of the peninsula; on one side soars the Sierra Nevada, and on the other, passing Cabo de Gata, the very long coast of the Spanish Levant. The towns in Almerfa are white, like those of Tunisia, and I draw a white town with two or three streets where women dress in black and live cloistered in their houses. The sky is intensely blue and the air is scented; maybe it is the aroma of the oleanders which overflow the walled gardens, grateful for the painstaking attention their caretakers lavish on them; maybe it is the perfume of the sprigs of wild grass of Andalucia. The inhabitants of the small town will make a living from agriculture, probably from the cultivation of olives and cereals, and life will go by without serious mishaps, each day identical to the next. In this town time is an illusion; people are born, grow old and die without altering one bit the natural order of things: baptisms are always held at three in the afternoon and weddings are celebrated in June. Knowledge of other worlds is vague and imprecise: once in a while a young man will do his military service, and upon his return will talk about the big cities, the subterranean trains and the war ships in the port of Cartagena. But the town listens to him as they listen to the wind blow in winter and with time the young man grows old and dies and his story is told by old men sitting in the sun in front of their houses in the long summer afternoons. This is the town where Jose Antonio Fernandez is born and where he grows up going out with his father to till the soil as the sun rises, and returning to town with his father and brothers when the sun returns to the kingdom of shadows. When he turns twenty, he marries a woman with almond-shaped eyes and very black and abundant hair because she is beautiful, but against the will of his parents and relatives since she does not add arable lands to the family's patrimony. She is an orphan since childhood and has been raised by a charitable aunt who will die soon. Eleven months later and already pregnant-let's call her Maricarmen-Jose Antonio leaves her in the care of his mother-we will call her The Mother, and embarks on the adventure that boils in his blood: emigrating to America. He has heard tales of riches without end. A century ago there were indianos in the region; they came back rich and bought the best lands. They returned to their towns to die in the midst of admiration and envy. To be envied could very well be a life's goal: maybe Jose Antonio considered that model preferable to other alternatives. In any case, his departure did not constitute a challenge to the collective memory and the afternoon he boarded the train destined for Cadiz there began a wait with a centuries-old tradition rooted in the hard reality of the Reconquista.