“Left to your own devices, you’d be capable of eating without bread.”
The daily loaf, the bread for the table, the basic component of every well-executed household. The daily loaf, the bread for the table, the dignity of living without feeling like an animal.
How old was I when I heard you say that for the first time? Twelve, thirteen? Had I already started my period? You would have said it, for sure, in response to one of my habits that drove you out of your mind, like not ventilating the bedroom after I’d opened the blinds in the morning, or laying freshly peeled fruit, dripping, onto the pages of a newspaper that was lying around. Like a reptile shut in a terrarium, I was comfortable breathing in my nocturnal scent, and if pears had ink stains, that was no reason not to eat them. You were so on edge around me.
But why bread, precisely? Why was it bread and not something to do with cleanliness, organisation, the kitchen? If it was about choosing a symbol with which to demonstrate my disinterest for anything related to household chores, which, at the time, only Mum took care of, there were more obvious and less primitive options. “You’re not at all curious . . . ?” No, no I wasn’t at all curious about any of that. Although, what does it matter now? Are those memories worthwhile? Is there still weight in those words, now, when I’m about to buy real, homemade bread?
When you were little, you, your family did not have bread to spare. The fourth of five, just one year older than the only girl, you lived off what your father uprooted from the earth with his country hands and off the animals that fit into the pen—chickens, a pig, a couple of cows. There was also the fig tree that provided milky figs in August, the pines that gifted pine nuts to be dried and stored in glass jars all year round, and the miniscule vineyard that produced homemade wine and grapes. All to be divided among seven mouths. Your older brothers and your sister left quickly. You stayed, preserving table manners that gave away the scarcity you came from: the habit of eating as soon as you’re served, because nothing is ever too hot; the absolute concentration, not lifting your face from the plate; the scraping of your spoon to collect up every trace of food before dessert arrives. Why such a rush, such urgency, if the piece of bread at the side of your plate is already only yours?
Your brothers and sister left, but you stayed, doing what they expected of you. Like your parents and like most of the people in your village, it seemed you were made up of only essential materials, farmer’s blood, iron. It seemed you accepted the conditions imposed on you by the care for your land. You accepted the uncertainty of the harvests. You accepted the persevering worry about irrigation and the climate. The burns and the chilblains, the axe and the plough. Many others, your siblings included, did not. Polished only by the most basic education, and without even a school-leaving certificate, they each preferred to find jobs in the cities as labourers, waiters, cleaners, or lorry drivers. At the start of the eighties your province was a territory frozen in pure subsistence. I imagine it much like the mid-century rural France about which, also in the eighties, Annie Ernaux started to write, one thousand miles away from you. The same roads scattered with potholes and covered in mud, the same wood eaten away at from the inside, the same old ladies dressed as widows bent down to pee in the orchards . . .
At the beginning of the eighties, whilst others I now read were already writing about class shame, you . . . what were you dreaming of? Where did you find the strength? From what expectations and pigsties did your blue overalls protect you? Did you aspire to anything more than bread?
In 1983 you met Mum and I’m not sure your love story could necessarily be considered a fairy tale. You bumped into each other in the nightclub in her town, bigger and richer, “fashionable”, dominated by brutish, ignorant lads, who were proud as cockerels and boasted of belonging to a more prosperous province. What happened that night and in the following dates, I don’t have a clue. You’ve never wanted to talk to me about what you call hogwash. That you found her, the future, promising, that you felt fortunate, at least at the start, I’m convinced of. Mum was pretty and she knew how to do things. She knew how to make stew and to sew. Hand-wash and iron clothes with skill. Occupy herself daily with getting bread on the table. Not like me; I don’t want to have anything to do with that stuff.
When you met each other, both of you still dedicated yourselves to your parents. You, to your parents’ crops, Mum to her parents’ tailor shop. Both in paternal service from the age of fourteen, morning and evening, no contract, no pay, without your own salaries. “That was what was done”, you often explained, and the family was pardoned once again. You each carried on like that for the nine years (nine years that way!) you were dating before getting married. I think that extensive wait, that primitive indecision, is the substratum in which the roots of your apathy are buried, an apathy that in my presence, you have always demonstrated for one another. But I could be mistaken, and that wait could mean absolutely nothing. However, not even in my earliest memories—when I paid so much attention to each of you that your sharpness, your clarity in them is incredible—do I see you kiss each other on the lips, or embrace, or talk to each other dearly. With such desperation then, I searched for proof of your love for each other. I obsessively begged you to show me the photo album from your wedding day, kept carelessly amongst kitchen cloths, crockery, and my puzzles, and you would only agree from time to time . . . You and Mum never hugged. Nor did you and I. And this morning, standing in this bakery specifically picked out for you by my boyfriend Guillermo, I almost can’t bear that thought.
Am I being too demanding? Why am I reluctant to accept your character, to simply consider it for what it is, the most logical response to the conditions in which you grew up? Look at me, at this age and still asking you for devotion, a bond, some sort of sign of affection . . .
After the wedding, as was only natural, you had to move to the big town where you shared a rented house with Mum. There was no discussion to be had. Your village was dying. You changed the fields for the quarry, the fragility of seeds for the resistance of stone, a booming business. That toughened you up even more. The labour of cutting and manipulating marble in those immense warehouses, or worse, in open air, froze bodies in a far crueller way than the cultivation of the earth. Castilian winters were very long. It must have been there, in the quarries, that you started to ask yourself what you had to do exactly, so that one day, eventually, the chill would leave your bones forever. One day. A long time before you found the answer, I arrived, nourished with the fruit—peaches, nectarines, apricots—that Mum ate during the summer before my arrival.
Sourdough loaf, German bread, stone-ground flour roll . . . My desire for bread has practically disappeared.
When I was little, for me, for us, there was still not bread to spare. The salary from the quarry, although much more stable than the one from farming, was not high, and your in-laws’ tailor shop had closed. On Sundays we went to eat lunch in the other village with your parents, where the bread was Grandpa’s private property—we received it only directly from his hands. Once he had divided out the first rations, he returned the loaf to the cloth bag from which it had come and rested it on a stool that was glued to his left side for the entire lunch. Afterwards, between plates, or whenever he fancied another piece, he would raise a serrated knife into the air and strike it against the loaf, as if it were a drum and he were about to launch into song. And no, he didn’t sing, but what our alert ears heard was a kind of melody, Grandpa announcing the magic words from the head of the table: “Bread, who wants it?”
And you always did.
In your new life, you fulfilled endless hours in the quarry on top of taking on the ever-increasing number of tasks that your parents could no longer deal with. You cut and stored logs that would see them through the winter; you harvested and crushed the grapes before bottling the wine; you sowed and then watered the crops; you maintained the little tractor, greased bicycles and pistons . . . All in silence. You took on this burden with patience, although you must have been exhausted. Even now, retired, you’re the same, silent, tough as a mule. You were not yet forty years old and the resistance your body demonstrated must have, to some extent, been a source of pride for you.
You took care of your parents every day, but they only took pity on your absent siblings, I heard them. One of them worked too many hours in the truck, his back was giving him problems. The middle children, what a shame, they didn’t last in any of the jobs they found. The youngest daughter still hadn’t been lucky enough to marry, how long was she going to be a cleaner for? You never participated in those lamentations, which we usually heard during the Sunday lunches as we sat in front of our rations of bread, recently served by Grandpa. You focused on the pitcher of wine or on the bowl of soup, you forged an uncomfortable silence—those lunches weren’t fun for anyone. Only once did I witness a direct protest. “Oh poor things, poor things, what poor little things,” you shouted, “and the rest of us, what about the rest of us!?” None of us, neither Grandma, nor Grandpa, nor Mum and I, responded, as the room and our lungs suddenly seemed to have been emptied of oxygen. For all these years since, the face you wore in that instant, a face of surprise, of rage and of relief, has remained in my memory. Something was already afoot, the desire to get away, an ever-increasing will to survive.
You took care of the stone and your parents every day, but when you were with your friends, a different person emerged from within you. For five or six days in a row in the middle of August, the verbena brought big, joyous nights. There, youth and revelry persisted. Cheap orchestras launched into encores. Music echoed through the town’s streets. A contagious electricity was generated by alcohol and rude chants, by the coloured lights and the firecrackers. In those five or six days you knew how to have fun once more and you and the other men moved as if you had caught fire. For once, there was nothing waiting to be done; everything had been finished, tied up. I was just a little girl, and the euphoria of it all exhausted me. I pretended to fall asleep early, in the square, in the middle of the crowd and the noise, so you would have to carry me in your arms to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I fell asleep in the double bed with Mum, and you returned to the party until breakfast the next day.
I was just a little girl then, yes, but I still noticed that you didn’t like spending much time with me. I quickly got used to entertaining myself, alone, which is exactly how you preferred to be. In the bar with the game kicking off; in the patio, fiddling with some piece of junk; in the pine wood, collecting mushrooms. I loved being at your side; I was a discreet spectator and would rush to the door as soon as I heard the jangle of your keys in the door. I can still see you, crouched over, placing the sports bag on the floor; I can still see myself taking the boots and the grey overalls out of that bag, everything covered in dust from the stone. You were nice. “Hello, sweetie”, you would say. You didn’t scold me, you smiled upon seeing me: aspects of fatherhood that you could carry out from a distance. But you never allowed me close contact with your body, you were even incapable of giving me a smack when I deserved one. A little, unperceivable tap on the bum, a half kiss on the cheek before going to bed, that’s as far as you got with me. Your fatherly love was expressed in a covert manner, as if excesses in that realm were something to be embarrassed about. For tenderness there was already my other Grandpa, your father-in-law, the tailor. You watched him grab my cheeks with two hands and smother me in kisses. Whenever we ate at his table, you watched him save the end of the loaf, the crust, just for me—it was my favourite part of the bread. You watched him loving me and seemed indifferent.
Standing before these shelves packed with bread, a quote I underlined in a Leonard Michaels book comes to me, “Canterbury, rigid once more, seemed like a man against the wind.” “Like a man against the wind.” Yes, exactly, that’s the face, the posture that you have always offered me.
The baker has stopped speaking to the other customers and slyly looks at me with quite a serious expression on her face.
“Left to your own devices, you’d be capable of eating without bread.” What do you know?!
In the middle of the nineties, you heard they needed more operators in an automobile factory in the north, and there was no room for hesitation. You understood in time that it was this opportunity and not the next, that there wouldn’t be another, and you decidedly abandoned the unhappy rural world that those who have never lived in the countryside always embellish with so much joy. At the beginning you went alone. After a few months you’d passed the probation period and we followed, your contract was now permanent. It turned out that rural blood was not so different from factory blood, that a body that was valid for fields and marble was equally as apt for production lines and morning, afternoon, or evening shifts. The salary from the factory was double the one from the quarry.
Those first years in the city now seem to me the best, when you were just starting out afresh in your new conditions. With this radical change of place, you also radically changed your customs, including those that had to do with me. Two out of every three weeks you were free in the afternoons, you had more time, more space, and more possibilities. It was the largest accumulation of such elements, previously unknown, that you had ever laid witness to in your life. You were experiencing liberation upon finding yourself at a seemingly infinite distance from the village. It was a new bread, with a new texture, a different bake, and a different taste. With an unexpected energy—unexpected for me—you took up the habit of walking and taking me along with you, every day, as soon as I came out of school. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we had hours of conversations as we kept our gazes ahead, on our surroundings: unknown shops, cars, and people. We never used a map, we never stopped, we were simply guided by the continuous movement of our feet. Of those hurried strolls I haven’t retained sounds or images, because at the time my mind was already overflowing with thoughts. None of them were about the work that Mum, whilst we were walking, was doing back at the apartment, tasks which I tried my best not to get close to. I was far more interested in the outside, this new place where you now walked more upright. You, now I know, have always been patient. You believed that with the years Mum would naturally end up becoming my role model.
This somewhat forced complicity, unspoken of until now, lasted as long as you wanted it to. Or perhaps it lasted until my age made it unsustainable, if I were to opt for a more generous interpretation. But here, in Guillermo’s favourite bakery, they are asking for urgency, not generosity.
At twelve or thirteen years old I started to irritate you, not constantly, but with ever growing frequency and intensity: us city adolescents had serious defects for which there was no possible forgiveness. We laughed too much. We fell in love. We didn’t turn off the lights. We didn’t close the living room door in winter. We splashed water all over the floor when we washed the dishes. We wore tight shorts that showed off our bums; our school agendas were covered in obscene inscriptions. We didn’t eat enough bread. We cried for no reason.
Tears for trivial things were something you absolutely did not tolerate. What with overtime, Saturdays at the factory and managerial visits to your parents’ house, you were once again buried in tasks. Your policy of care, or attention, or compassion was limited to physical ailments or what you considered to be true misfortune, all the rest was “hogwash”. You hated any kind of scene and on the occasion one arose, you would ignore me or speak to me in a particular tone, reprimanding though barely audible. “Hogwash! Hogwash!” In telling me what displeased you, you started to speak to me in the plural. “You lot have no idea.” “You lot don’t lift a finger.” It was as if at twelve or thirteen years old one lost their individuality. In front of you, I no longer felt like me but like us. You could be very expressive when you wanted to be.
Our strolls and the meagre demonstration of friendliness had disappeared. Of course, I talked back to you and thought bad things about you. To even begin to understand where this paternal severity had come from was an impossible task. I was never capable of telling myself: “He’s a man of his time, good where it matters. In his world, no one has ever valued anything other than resistance and insensitivity.” Nothing that took place between us at the time had a name or a plausible explanation. I’m not sure what I felt, but strangely, I was never sad. And I’m still not.
One Saturday night I had told you and Mum that I would be back home early. Before midnight, of course. But it was past midnight, and I was still on the street, drinking, and with a boy. You called me, and I almost didn’t understand you behind the roar, “Get back here, right now!”
The next day you woke me up at eight and told Mum to make me iron all morning. Ironing was the thing I most hated.
And a little afterwards, now I finally remember, it was then that you said it for the first time. “Left to your own devices, you’d be capable of eating without bread.”
Your universal catchphrase for any act of clumsiness or absent-mindedness, a catchy and timeless refrain.
“Give me whatever bread you like, your most popular,” I tell the baker. Enough insignificant questions. Enough of going around and around in circles. What use is it? Fifteen years have passed. If I’ve come to this new, expensive, luxurious bakery it’s only because Guillermo loves it, because given the occasion he had insisted. He thinks that, as he is my boyfriend, as he is a man, he can give me the key to impressing you.
Sourdough, malt, active charcoal . . . hogwash! None of this means anything to you!
I’m home. I put the key in the lock. I don’t open it, and for a moment I think about never doing so.
Mum is in the kitchen and you’re still in bed, submerged in a deep and resounding sleep. I can hear you snoring. It seems that the guest bed, yesterday inadequate for this, that and the other, has finally managed to provide you with the rest you deserve. You are incorrigible. Stubborn. This new apartment, the big city I live in now, the indefinite contract at the clinic, none of these things have protected me from the same complaints as always: complaints about what is not in the fridge, about the quality of the furniture, the dust, about earning a miserable salary despite having studied at university. From one visit to the next I try to forget the way your eyes sweep over my house as you enter. I convince myself that we’re making progress.
I open your bedroom door.
“Dad, I’m heading to work.”
At dinner last night, the last, we held off our goodbyes until this morning.
“I bought bread.”
“Okay . . . Until next time.”
I stay standing there for a few seconds, listening to the chance noises that come in through the open windows that are ventilating my bedroom and the living room, smelling the air charged with the dark space in which you breathe. I thought you were at least going to get up and give me a hug. But from last night to this morning, I must have lost that right.
You’ve done things like this a couple of times before. I’m used to telling Guillermo about them. In doing so, I gesticulate and exaggerate, and our relationship plays out like a series of comic disagreements that don’t really mean anything truly bad. If I show myself to be too angry, Guillermo remains silent after listening to me. And I regret having ever spoken.
I close the door.
I take the bread to the table that Mum has prepared for breakfast. Now outside the bakery, squashed and half covered by the paper bag, cruelly illuminated by the white halogen bulbs, this bread doesn’t look marvellous or expensive. It looks like what it is, a rudimentary food with a warm range of pure, brown colours. There it is, ready to be cut into slices, still warm.
I go back out onto the street with empty hands and only one hope: that you enjoy the bread.
Who knows, perhaps you’ll like it, even praise it, and maybe, even though it would already be time to get your things together and head down to the car, you will go in for seconds, eat more. Or it could be that you eat only the amount required, and you eat that small amount as you comment on the fact you’ve tried far superior breads. Although, come to think of it, I don’t think you’ll say anything. The most certain outcome is that there will be silence; one doesn’t talk when one eats. It’s okay. I’ll settle for what makes you happy.
