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Authors: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
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paternalistic. He would go to his employees’ weddings. Or when he saw that one of his workers was having a hard time with domestic problems, he would give him a couple of days off.’
‘Curious—a manager in a multinational company behaving like he was the boss of a family firm. Tell me, did you think highly of him?’
Nuñez laughed a controlled laugh.
‘I’ll show you a photograph of our year at university. In it you’ll see six students who were inseparable. I would say that, in some ways, we’ll always be dependent on each other for our identities. Each one of those other five holds a part of my identity, and I hold a part of theirs. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Between us we could do a reconstruction of what were the best years of our lives—if you leave aside the political persecution, the brutality that you laid yourself open to, and the darkness ruling the country. We could go for years without seeing each other, and then we could meet and just pick up where we’d left off. Not completely, obviously, but in relation to the past, yes.’
‘Were you the hero?’
‘The martyr. They idealized me during the period when I was in exile. They didn’t expect me to return in such a cynical frame of mind. They found it a bit of a disappointment, and reacted rather bitterly. But in the end they accepted me for what I was. Partly because I offered them the certainty that I would never take from them anything they had, and that I lead a modest life, with just one sweater, two pairs of jeans, and a couple of shirts. Perhaps they would have preferred me to have had more power. They have power—economic, political, cultural, moral, what have you. I have no power, though. No power at all.’
‘I’d be interested in seeing that photo, and who was in it. Maybe we could lunch together tomorrow. Where do you suggest?’
‘There’s a little French restaurant downtown, where you can eat something unique. A confit d’oie that the lady of the house brings in from Périgord.’
Carvalho was beginning to see Marcos Nuñez as a fellow human being.
During the drive up to his house at Vallvidrera, Carvalho was barely aware of being behind the wheel. Memories of his university days came flooding back, and in particular the memory of Marcos Nuñez’s influence on the generations of students that came after him. The story of Nuñez’s resistance to the Brigada Social, and how he had been the ‘first red student’ of the post-War period and the organizer of the first university cadres, went hand in hand with a reputation as an intellectual.
‘Malibran says that he has great powers of synthesis, which complement useful powers of analysis.’
Those were the days when Professor Malibran used to apportion powers of analysis and synthesis among his students as if he were Ceres sharing out the fruits of the earth. When his judgment descended on a student, it was as if the apostolic ball of fire had passed above him. He would hear the nasal voice of the professor thunder from the heavens: ‘This is my well-beloved student, in whom I have laid all my hopes in matters of analysis and/or synthesis.’ Marcos Nuñez was the principal point of reference in the martyrology of the student resistance, and his travels in France and Germany were followed from Spain as if they were the voyage of one of God’s apprentices to the source of definitive knowledge. By the time Carvalho came to be arrested, tried, and sentenced, the history of the resistance in the universities was still seen as having begun with Marcos Nuñez: ‘I was in the fourth year after Nuñez.’
Dozens of more or less adolescent faces loomed up from the past. Those evenings at Juliana’s. All of them with very little money, welcomed to a big house in the old part of Barcelona, with a portrait on the wall of Alfonso XIII standing next to a member of the family who had been a bishop, and antique furniture, and Bach and Shostakovich, and Montand singing:
C’est
‘Curious—a manager in a multinational company behaving like he was the boss of a family firm. Tell me, did you think highly of him?’
Nuñez laughed a controlled laugh.
‘I’ll show you a photograph of our year at university. In it you’ll see six students who were inseparable. I would say that, in some ways, we’ll always be dependent on each other for our identities. Each one of those other five holds a part of my identity, and I hold a part of theirs. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Between us we could do a reconstruction of what were the best years of our lives—if you leave aside the political persecution, the brutality that you laid yourself open to, and the darkness ruling the country. We could go for years without seeing each other, and then we could meet and just pick up where we’d left off. Not completely, obviously, but in relation to the past, yes.’
‘Were you the hero?’
‘The martyr. They idealized me during the period when I was in exile. They didn’t expect me to return in such a cynical frame of mind. They found it a bit of a disappointment, and reacted rather bitterly. But in the end they accepted me for what I was. Partly because I offered them the certainty that I would never take from them anything they had, and that I lead a modest life, with just one sweater, two pairs of jeans, and a couple of shirts. Perhaps they would have preferred me to have had more power. They have power—economic, political, cultural, moral, what have you. I have no power, though. No power at all.’
‘I’d be interested in seeing that photo, and who was in it. Maybe we could lunch together tomorrow. Where do you suggest?’
‘There’s a little French restaurant downtown, where you can eat something unique. A confit d’oie that the lady of the house brings in from Périgord.’
Carvalho was beginning to see Marcos Nuñez as a fellow human being.
During the drive up to his house at Vallvidrera, Carvalho was barely aware of being behind the wheel. Memories of his university days came flooding back, and in particular the memory of Marcos Nuñez’s influence on the generations of students that came after him. The story of Nuñez’s resistance to the Brigada Social, and how he had been the ‘first red student’ of the post-War period and the organizer of the first university cadres, went hand in hand with a reputation as an intellectual.
‘Malibran says that he has great powers of synthesis, which complement useful powers of analysis.’
Those were the days when Professor Malibran used to apportion powers of analysis and synthesis among his students as if he were Ceres sharing out the fruits of the earth. When his judgment descended on a student, it was as if the apostolic ball of fire had passed above him. He would hear the nasal voice of the professor thunder from the heavens: ‘This is my well-beloved student, in whom I have laid all my hopes in matters of analysis and/or synthesis.’ Marcos Nuñez was the principal point of reference in the martyrology of the student resistance, and his travels in France and Germany were followed from Spain as if they were the voyage of one of God’s apprentices to the source of definitive knowledge. By the time Carvalho came to be arrested, tried, and sentenced, the history of the resistance in the universities was still seen as having begun with Marcos Nuñez: ‘I was in the fourth year after Nuñez.’
Dozens of more or less adolescent faces loomed up from the past. Those evenings at Juliana’s. All of them with very little money, welcomed to a big house in the old part of Barcelona, with a portrait on the wall of Alfonso XIII standing next to a member of the family who had been a bishop, and antique furniture, and Bach and Shostakovich, and Montand singing:
C’est
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