Papa was a Rolling Stone
Until I was five years old I lived in Xinzo de Limia and after for a year in Ourense before coming to Madrid, to the quarter of Usera. I have very vivid remembrances of the time I spent in the village, especially of situations very intense I have always kept in my memory. The most far of my remembrances I have of my father is when being I a child a car scared me and my father caught me up in time before the car pulled down. I suppose my knowledge of the house in Xinzo de Limia had a normal course, although I never came in to see all the rooms. I keep in mind my going with a walker in the terrace, at the third floor, that my parents and brothers occupied. But it was in the kitchen, which was in front of my bedroom, where I was seated at one extreme of the table by the door’s side when my father said something to a man and to my mother while he put in a pistol in both my hands and the pistols shot at once wounding to death the man standing at the table’s other extreme. The man fell down on the floor and my mother began to scream: Luis, what have you done! Luis, what have you done!
I think I got scared, but at once I felt fascinated on coming into my parents’ bedroom, they were lying on the bed. I asked them: Is in here where you live? Well, Poldo, you live here as well. Of course, my bedroom was very small and my parents’ was big. My mother was laughing and I thought of the man in the kitchen. Go to the wardrobe, Poldo, said to me my father. What wardrobe? I asked. Look at your back, he said. I looked at my back and I understood what I had before me was a wardrobe. Open it up, he said. I do not know, I said. Push the sheet to the right with your hand. The sheet cabinet slided with the pushing of my hand until it was discovered inside four bodies in uniform hold up in the air I do not know how. The four of them had agony countenances. Who are they? I asked. They are fascist officers, said my father. I remained staring at their contorted faces and heard my father saying: Look what I do. Immediately I saw in the four bodies an indent of horizontal crossing that no doubt destroyed their hearts, and the wounds bled. I remember I was perplexed. Have you seen how I have done it? asked my father. I have not, I said to him not being able to look at other of the amazement on seeing dead the four of them. From the bed, said my father.
My mother too did hers so that I have always present one day she took my friend Alfonso and me to a lorry and we three got on in the cabin and with a pistol my mother put in my hand and later pointed against the forehead of the man seated at the steering wheel and we shot up. Immediately in time I felt fascinated by what my father said to me in my room, that there was a dead woman under my bed. And he let me alone. I couldn’t sleep that night, even when I had looked several times under the bed during the night. I remember a much known song sounding aloud since very soon in the morning while I leant on the window looking at the stairs and the mysterious hall: And that bull in love with the moon that leaves alone by nights the cattle... Immediately in time also my father took me to his car and seated me on his lap. The car was a Vauxhall and I remember my father told me my brother Miguel would kill a girl whose name would be Ana and I would be the president. He put my hands on the steering wheel, his with driving gloves, and he told me: Drive on yourself. And he started on the car.
Of the time I spent after in Xinzo de Limia I remember the car I had being a child and driving it on the terrace. In the sitting-room beside the terrace I met up my aunt Monsa, my mother’s elder sister who lived in A Coruña. One day I found out I do not how there was a door at the second floor, that in our side had a stance of sumptuous and of almost improbable appearance, and I say this, clear it is, not for the chess floor but for the frosted glass cabins there were in the wall in curve which seemed not to have sense, and above all I say it for what was beyond the door that intrigued me.
I came out from my bedroom after being a good while looking from the window the stairs that leaded to the cabins and black and white floor stance. The kitchen was in front and to the left the stairs. I knew that room existed, always I could I went to see if I may come in. To my brothers and cousins Raquel and María Elena I told them that in that stance there was a door. They said there was not, but I knew there was and the mystery occupied all my time. At last, that day I saw my father had left the mysterious door in the stance opened when I came down once again and listened to my father from inside: Come in, Poldo. I came in and was impacted by what I saw. The first impression takes in two gigantic flat screens placed symmetric and the figures of a little girl older than me, a man who was her father, and my father, from left to right, seated facing some surfaces with controls and lights. Hadn’t you ever been in here? asked me my father. I think I have but hadn’t seen all this. Are you Leopoldo? asked me the little girl. Yes, I am, I said to her. What’s your name? I asked her. My name is Margaret, she said. On her screen Margaret had a view of the space I know now from a satellite and with controls she destroyed space rubbish. My father on his screen put on the image of the Apollo space rocket in ignition. He said to me: I introduce you to Werner von Braun, the wisest man in the world after you. I was in the point of asking my father another question. How do you know? I finally asked him. Because it is true , Leopoldo, nice to meet you, said Werner to me stretching my hand. So, said to me my father, you don’t know Werner sent the spacecraft Apollo to heaven. And where is this? I don’t know. It is the Moon, Poldo. Hadn’t you ever seen the Moon? I hadn’t, papa. And who is there? It is you, papa. And where I am? You are on the Moon, papa. And how can you see me on the Moon if I am here? I don’t know, papa. For I’ve been to the Moon, Poldo. Look what I do, and from the screen I don’t know how he made it, but a white outline that corresponded to him was transported from the Moon in the screen down into the room to my father’s body.
The four of us were pending of my father’s screen. There were sequences I don’t remember, because the image of a black people multitude, many women and children stack up in a big African warehouse from who we heard their lamentations, when suddenly a bomb went off plain on all them, a very cruel slaughter that made us cry the four of us profusely, occupies the almost total remembrances of that day. When we calmed down my father told me to seat by Margaret and to play with her. I remember I a little got angry because she knew how to handle the controls. And although I persisted much I didn’t find the door again and that after insisting to my brothers and cousins and looking for an interstice through which I might come in.
My father showed me a book with many illustrations. In one of them it could be seen a naked woman with a red flower covering her sex. I had the book and looked for the illustration of the naked woman. I saw my brother Arturo and went with him to the old stable and we seated on a low bench and I showed him the book and the illustration. He asked me who had showed me the book. I told him it had been papa. At that precise moment my father appeared in the stable with three men. One of them might be my uncle Manuel Tovar Bobillo, my aunt’s Raquel Barge Villarino husband, who lived on the second floor with their daughters and sons; another would be my uncle Benito Barge López, my grandfather’s and Benita López Suárez’s son; and the third I doubt now if he was my uncle Manuel Nogueira Pazo, my aunt Monsa’s husband, or he was an old my father’s civil guard friend of Verín whose surname was del Río.
My father took me to the cinema twice as far as I remember. The two times have been kept recorded in my memory. One of the films was about goddess Medusa, who turned her enemies into statues and of who I keep an impression that does not sleep. The other film was about the fusillade of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the cinema was full of people who began to sing Cara al Sol in the back seats. I saw the ones nearer to the screen didn’t raise their arms like the others and they felt intimidated. My father was beside me. I was watching the film too. And as I knew the cinema was my family’s I said to my father I didn’t want him to let come in to the ones who sang never more. And another day I remember especially too we were in the ground beside the house. We were a group and there was a little girl my age beside me. My father told the little girl and me we were going to be presidents. I remember no more, only I saw how a helicopter flied over away like putting an end to the scene.
There was a room with high windows overlooking the ground that had balconies, one of them without balcony and a tiny base. I was with my brothers in the room and I told them one of the high windows had no balcony and a tiny protruding base. We went to see, the high window was opened. We gazed at the bird’s jail, the pond, the stable. My eldest brother Luis told me some day I would face an enemy army and I would defeat them. I asked him why I would have enemies. You shall see for yourself, he said. You must understand, he said later, the enemy army is wicked and you shall have powers to kill your enemies because you incarnate goodness, you are good, very good, Poldo.
Before we moved to Ourense, where we lived for a year beside Jardín Del Posío before coming to Madrid, my father seated Alfonso Romero and me at a small wall of the Xinzo de Limia’s church and he told us we were cousins and someday I would be waiting for Alfonso to come to meet me up and that day Revolution would start. Already being children we felt spellbound and accomplices by what happened in the lorry with my mother, the pistol and the man seated at the steering wheel.
In Ourense I lived pending about the hockey roller skate that were played on Sundays at Jardín Del Posío. Irene Laso Losada came with us to Ourense. She was a Galician food expert and for me she had a congenial tenderness. I remember her at meals while we listened to the radio and heard trains passing by throughout the bridge now and then and I do also in the lounge crashing down a child against the floor with her hands, putting a big strength with her arms at each strike.
In 1963, the year in which Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy, president of the USA, well, yes, we had a TV that day and we were up on the news. I was vaccinated at a hospital at same time Alfonso was vaccinated too. My father came into the flat with a little white coffin. During years I remembered it but did not made comments about it because I imagined it was the coffin of my brother Fernando, who died a short time after he was born.
In 1964 we came to Madrid, to the quarter of Usera, an area in former times called Poblado Dirigido de Almendrales. The house is two storied and has a little front yard. My father had gone with the tale he had dilapidated the family’s fortune to an old school-mate at the Jesuits in Vigo, well situated in the regime’s nomenclature, and succeeded, and his old mate had gotten they awarded us the house. I was six; my brother Luis, nine, Arthur eight, Miguel three, Ignacio two, and my brother Jesus was born in Madrid in 1965. Well then, it turns out that very few had a TV by then, but in 1968, four years after our arrival in our new house in Almendrales, my father brought up one home. My father and I were alone in the sitting-room. We had to wait a little to watch an unusual happening, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, brother to John killed five years before, by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. We saw Sirhan shooting Robert by TV. Next day there was not TV. I asked my father and he told me he had tested it but we were not going to buy it.
A little after this the Football World Championship took place and my father and I wanted to watch the Spanish team playing. My father asked a friend of his, whose sons and daughter were friends of mine too, if we could go him and me to his house to watch the Spanish team match. Finally, we went to our friends’ house and sit down in facing the TV. I sat down beside Mari Carmen and I said to her we had had TV. My father said we hadn’t had. I let some seconds pass and then I said to Mari Carmen: My father says we had not but we had at least for one day, because I remember we saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
From the village we brought some furniture; the coal’s kitchen, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a too big lounge’s lamp and a piece of furniture which was both radio a record player. We only had my parents’ records and the brothers began to collect 33, 45 and 78 rpm records. This piece of furniture was in the small hall and we made a room for ourselves as much as we could and listened to the music or the radio. In Spain we lived under the dictatorship of cruel Franco and the measures this had taken forbade the protestations, which were carried out in spite of the prison’s sentences or the death by fascist henchmen hands. We, everybody who may did it, tuned in radio stations that relayed from other countries to condemn Franco’s regime. We were a big core of the population who knew more than what the government’s official media wanted us to know.
It hadn’t been a long time since we came to Madrid when my father took me to a demonstration in Marcelo Usera Street. We saw riot gear in grey uniforms heavily equipped and groups of people that would join up in an uproar some time later and would shout claiming Justice and Freedom. My father and I were on the sidewalk at one side of the street and at the opposite several policemen were shot down. We went away from there. Next day newspapers told in Marcelo Usera Street a policeman had been killed and another two were badly injured.
One day my father took me to Gran Vía. We went up the stairs to the attic of a building and at the door he took out a key and opened the door. The truth is the moment couldn’t be better chosen, because my father did shot at least once with a rifle from the window during the fight of demonstrators against the police. We went away from there. In the newspapers they said that a policeman had been killed, when nearly always was the contrary, it was the demonstrators who died or were injured or sent to prison.
In 1966 they fired out a communist member. I don’t know how we got there, but my father and I went to Cristo Rey Square in Madrid where Franco and a gang of officers of his army were celebrating the fusillade. Suddenly I saw myself driven by a very powerful strength and went to them running, at the same time shouting up to them we have had killed their parents and cheering up Cristo Rey. Franco and all army members in uniform that were with him got scared and disappeared in an instant as though they didn’t have a gibberish time before I got there. The case is I had run a good stretch and had shouted with all my might and made a halt on seeing them running away and I began to weep. Poldo! Come here! I looked in all directions. Down the street was my father seated at the steering wheel of the Vauxhall he had in the village and I went towards him. On seeing me weeping he told me to calm down and to get on the car through the other door. I got on and he started the engine. I asked him if he had taken back the car and he responded only for that day.
My brother Jesús used orthotics to be capable to walk when he was a child. My mother took him every day to La Paz hospital’s swimming pool. He was born in that hospital on the 20 November 1965. He needed to swim a good while every day. Therefore they had to go along all throughout the central artery of the city, from extreme to extreme. One day they had phoned up my parents to tell them not to take the child next day. The fact is we went all throughout Paseo de las Delicias, Paseo del Prado, Paseo de Recoletos and all the way along Paseo de la Castellana, which ended by then to be precise where the hospital was, my father, Jesús and I. In getting to the hospital I don’t know how but my father did it, he first cleared our way hurriedly through the corridors, my brother with the orthotics, and not caring much he imperiously inflicted a policeman who tried to detain us a wound crossing horizontal through at his heart level, which bled immediately. We took the lift and came up to the swimming pool at the top floor. The assistants looked at us scared on seeing us coming in. My father told them his son had to swim like every day. One of them said to him only eight patients may be swimming in the pool at the same time. I started to count them up aloud. There were eight in the water. A girl who defended herself very well in the water and was talking to an employee of hers in uniform sitting very near to her, said what I had had thought myself. If you need to distinguish yourself having company of misses in uniform and you guess what I had had thought myself, you are the elected to distinguish yourself coming out from the pool. Hear, hear, said to me some of the assistants, if the girl has to come out it depend on us. Didn’t you hear? I asked her. I told you to come out from the pool. I’m not going to come out because you say it or the assistants say it. Listen, listen, pretty... that depends on us, the assistants said. Come on, out! I shouted. Right now! She realised she had put in the leg and came nearer to the border to come out. You can stay a little longer, said the servant in uniform unexpectedly. Come on, out! I shouted again. She remained not knowing what to do. If you don’t come out right now your nursemaid headfirst will take you out. Then the assistants laughed and the posh girl came out scared. At once my father put Jesús into the water and Jesús started to move and I to encourage him. In the news at three and at nine they said a policeman had been killed in the hospital with a cutting object which had caused him a horizontal wound at his heart level that nobody knew how could have been done. My father had used the same technique he used with the four in uniform inside the wardrobe in Xinzo de Limia.
My father took me one day to Plaza de Legazpi, near to our house, where the main artery which crosses Madrid begins, in this case from the south. There were many lorries and lorry-drivers in the same square and it was a place where to contract lorries, lorry-drivers, goods and people to load and unload lorries. I don’t know why there weren’t many lorries that day and besides I guess It wasn’t time for big activity. The case my father took me along the lorries street and told me I would someday see him shooting up on a film.
I know my father took Alfonso and me in a car in Madrid and both seated in the back seat laughed a lot because my father was repeating constantly I would be president and I liked to share my happiness with Alfonso.
Another day Alfonso, Pablo, Jorge and I went for a drive throughout many Madrid zones. They told me they belonged to a gang called Black Eyes, that I would someday remember with details the drive in the car and what they would tell me that day. We went to Gran Vía flat where my father had already taken me to, and we were looking through the window; I don’t remember if there were shots or there was a demonstration on. Later Jorge was seated with me in the back seat and he told me when going by Isaac Peral Street I would someday see them three shooting up. On getting to Cristo Rey Square I told Jorge that I didn’t know if I had dreamt it but a young boy had frightened and obliged to run away Franco and a group of officers that were celebrating a fusillade. Jorge told me he had seen it.
I don’t know if it was the same day, but by night I saw them three in the place next to mine, beside the trees circle, and they told me someone had killed a pair of policemen or civil guards, I don’t remember which, and I said to them it had been them. They looked at me smiling and suddenly I could hear how the bullets whistled, almost follow their trajectory until they embe dded into the trees. The bullets whistled and seemed to come from them but they had no guns. You’ve done it, I said. What?, they asked. It’s been you who had shot. When? They asked. I’ve seen it just now. We haven’t been, you see, we have no guns. Perhaps it has been your father. What? I asked. There is the neighbour’s association building between my house and this place. Perhaps your father has powers and some way he performs the prodigy, they said.
My father worked and a little he didn’t attach for a period of leaving to me clear recalls of his clandestine activities. My brothers founded a political party, the P. R. F. S., Federal Socialist Republican Party, which had two headquarters, just opposite my house, in the place itself, and another at General Lacy Street with Ferrocarril Street. I seldom shared political activities with my brothers or the members of their political party, only once I went to each headquarters, and even when the one in my place was only twenty meters distance. That’s for sure, not for this I forgot my compromise with the struggle for revolution and working and studying at the same time I went to demonstrations against the dictator by myself, spontaneously or other with premeditated intentions, I mean accompanied and with stones in my hands and pockets. In one occasion, having I to cross of sidewalk in Gran Vía to avoid the police blows and standing I just in the middle of the street not knowing what to do I finally decided to cross to the other side walk where there were many policemen too. Things were getting bad and I was not too sure crossing out, there were policemen at the spot I was going to but less, when suddenly, as it was treating of an apparition, I saw my friend Jorge punching up several policemen to whom he let knocked down; after he punched up a man who glanced at him afraid and had stepped backwards. I didn’t know if he had seen me, but I saw him go later to face a PSOE’s leaflet’s hand sorter and he hit him full in the face that made his nose bleed abundantly and not to be capable of reaction. We then saw each other. I told him I had seen hitting with punches to all he had near and we laughed when I told him I was in the middle of the street doubting to cross or not and he had cleared me out the way.
How not it was Big Jorge too who took me to a basement where there was a wall with a void open on it and inside the room they had set a bomb. I asked Jorge why I couldn’t enter through the void and see the bomb, and like he said to me nobody may enter through the void and I mightn’t understand very well why, I said to him why then had he taken me there and he said to me something that lighted my curiosity. When I arrived to Almendrales I saw Quique at his block and I told him where I had been to. We laughed a lot, indeed we had a very good time. At home they had me a good while, because I was sleepy, I worked as bell-boy at a Marketing company and I had to wake up early in the morning, so I didn’t quite get to know well at all, I remember more clearly, of course I do, that the car would be going through Claudio Coello Street. Yes, I told them, the car to bomb, that Jorge had taken me to see the basement. My brothers told me Jorge hadn’t the faintest idea.
Next day my father waited for me a bit more at the parking to take me to the office and he was a bit angry, it was my blame to have delayed and he started to drive away when I had not yet be seated properly and closed down the car’s door. That day I saw my father so angry I got scared, because I love him so much and I knew he loved me much too. Later I knew he had gifted me with a drivel during the journey so as to me not to forget he had ordered to bomb Carrero Blanco’s car. I got off like every day he did, in the crossing of General Mola Street (today Príncipe de Vergara Street) and Alcalá Street. When I came into the office my mate Vega told me they had killed the president. At that moment my mind had turned white and I said to him I didn’t know there was a president in Spain, that if it wasn’t Franco the president. Vega told me in Spain the president of the government was Carrero Blanco and that the bomb had made a lot of noise; that he had heard the explosion from the office, from down there, half an hour ago.
How couldn’t be it so, the deep commotion that were causing me the deeds in my mind, makes displace these from a day concrete, I mean, the same day, one before, or one after the revolutionary actions in which I got involved took place. Therefore it not rare that being I not sure, I think the visit to the basement of the bomb was two days before Carrero Blanco’s car flied aloof when the bomb went off, and I think it was the day before of the assassination when Alfonso killed to the man on the stool in Cobra disco.
The case is that two years after the Carrero Blanco’s attempt Franco ordered the fusillade of five members of ETA and of FRAP, and the assassinations carried out that same day by GRAPO members against army members were, and I understood instantly, been done by my friends Alfonso, Pablo and Jorge, for well indeed did Jorge the gesture meaning it was so when Alfonso showed me a signal with his finger over the lip so that I would keep it in my memory.
Except some mutual points of view, for both read the newspapers every day and the news on the newspapers and those on TV made us agree in our opinions, for a period we were not accomplices in executions of fascists or revolutionary actions, even though my father was an activist and me too all that period. My father worked in the evening too and I went to see him in his office when I wasn’t living at my parents.
There were periods I didn’t go to my parents in Usera. When I was living with them one day we, Maravillas and I, took a taxi at Paseo de la Castellana, I saw my father’s car in front of our taxi and my father accompanied by one of his two secretaries, Rosa her name. At a traffic-light I got off the taxi and went to him and told my father I was behind him in a taxi with Maravillas. My father said to me no and I came back to the taxi and we went our way while my father turned in Ríos Rosas Street.
I don’t know now how it was exactly, but the three of us finally spoke about it; that is, my father, my mother and I, And I kept the idea that my father had done it on purpose, and I know he made me remember what he had said to me the day he seated me on his lap in his car in the village when I was a child; namely, that my brother Miguel would kill a girl whose name would be Ana and that I would be president. Well, yes indeed, I laughed much when on the microfilm I saw my brothers Arturo and Miguel in the cabin of the lorry, Arturo at the steering wheel and Miguel shooting twice in her back of such Ana while he pushed her up forward, crashing her against the lorry's glass front.
And then, besides other hallucinations I have already detailed, I felt very happy when I saw my father on the microfilm, first in the stance with chess floor and frosted glass cabins; leaning on his car, the Vauxhall, standing up, and later coming into a room and shooting up repeatedly, like he had announced me in the lorries street in Legazpi.
Living in Jorge Juan Street I read Jorge Luis Borges. In a tale he speaks about a group of wise people that can communicate among them wherever they are. I knew, I already had many evidence, my parents, my brothers, my comrades and I had always communicated by telepathy. My father’s voices were congenial always and truly sympathetic, those of my friends Alfonso, Pablo and Jorge always glowing and enormously sympathetic too.
So I realised I had powers. Taking place a workers demonstration in Serrano Street I came out from Jorge Juan Street and went to the demonstration, I stood at José Ortega y Gasset Street (that we called Lista) and started to levitate to demonstrators, although I procured doing it with no euphoria. Then I walked up towards Serrano Street and when demonstrators had already attained their purpose and were going away to their places I walked near to the last in marching and I levitated them all again. One who walked forward with others said: Someone moves this.
I came back home ready for action. I told my father I had seen the microfilm. My father lied to me and told me he had not put on the microfilm to me in Ramsgate. I told him I knew Miguel had killed Ana. He asked me how I knew. Instead of responding to him because I had certainly seen the microfilm, I responded to him because I knew, I knew it had been so. My father made a movement with his left arm and opened up his clenched fist, like making still longer the period I should be waiting to be president. The truth is then I knew the period would be long, but not so much as to not to be able more, rather not letting the spark be off.
