This is part of a series of one-sided dialogues, for the reader to make sense of “between the lines.” Read another “the bathtub” about American history, parenthood, & lost innocence down below.1
I know. Trust me.
I know, okay? Everyone always says that. It doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Because of the way you just reacted.
No. You said “truism.” It means the same thing.
But what if it’s a cliché because it has to be?
What I mean is, what if we make fun of clichés because it’s easier to scoff at them than accept their wisdom?
What do you mean, stick to the image?
The grass is always greener ... you don’t know what you have until it’s gone … the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Maybe we call these things truisms to avoid their truth.
Yes. It always goes back to family—isn’t that what your kind is always on about?
Let’s just say the men in my family have a long history of unrequited love. Or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves—what I tell myself, I mean.
What’s the name of that disease where when you cut yourself, you don’t stop bleeding?
Yeah, that’s it. Hemophilia. That’s what it feels like whenever I start falling for someone.
No, now it’s your turn to stick to the image. It means the love of bleeding. Like a bruise I want to press on. Like a scab I want to rip. Like poking at an open wound with a needle.
A compulsion? Not exactly. It’s more like a reprieve. For whatever reason, sabotaging relationships has always been the easiest way for me to feel safe in this world.
It starts with a nervousness in my stomach, like how I used to feel before my swim meets. To this day, I get queasy whenever I smell the chlorine of a public pool. And it’s usually around the third date when I start to fall …
Yes, obviously. Whenever I start to fall in love.
Initially, I’m as cool as a cucumber—that’s not a cliché, is it? Cucumbers are mostly water, you know, just like us. But as soon as I start developing feelings for him, whoever he is, that’s when I start thinking about hemophilia and how the wound’s already been opened and the bleeding won’t stop.
It’s so much fear as a sense of dread. Fear is about the possibility of what might happen; dread is the certainty that something bad is coming.
I usually make up something about needing a little more time, and then I ghost him. But it’s a funny phrase, isn’t it? To ghost someone?
Because ghosting someone doesn’t mean I’m finished with them. You could argue it’s just the opposite. People think being ghosted has to do with being ignored, but whenever I ghost someone, they become a constant presence in my life. Did you know there are entire neighborhoods I won’t walk through anymore because I’m afraid I might run into him?
Who?
Him. Whoever he is. There’s been a lot of hims, you know.
Exactly. Ghosts are proof of the uncanny—of what remains unresolved. That’s why I’m back here talking to you.
We all have problems with intimacy. My father wasn’t the only one.
He was an Old-World kind of guy—taciturn and dutiful, except when it came to doing anything around the house, respecting my mother, or showing emotion.
We moved to the States when I was seven, but I still have memories of Spain. He was one of those cigar-smoking types who stay seated at the dinner table after being served a lavish meal, snapping their fingers at their wife, sister, or daughter to bring them a whiskey.
He definitely romanticized the past, especially the Spanish Empire. He collected statues and portraits of old Spanish generals and the like.
He owned a small hardware store just outside of Madrid. Whenever I go back there, I still get the sense that our entire family is clinging to this idea of what used to be.
Well, for starters, there’s still a King and a Queen of Spain—I mean, who still believes in the sanctity of bloodlines?
You could call it chauvinism. They’d probably call it patriotism. Anyway, my father was always obsessed with carrying on the family legacy, whatever that meant. That’s why he called my eldest brother, Moncho, the prince.
No. I was only ever called garbonzito.
I don’t think so. There’s nothing regal about being called the Little Chick Pea.
Moncho was twelve years older than me. We were born in Pozuelo, just outside of Madrid. The town name means a little well or a shallow hell—I mean hole.
Ha. Sure. Call it a Freudian slip. Anyway, Pozuelo was a one-horse kind of town. White buildings and arid summers and brown, cracked land. Lots of olive trees and cicadas, though, and wild bulls, too. I swear, there are some places in that country you forget which century you’re living in.
Yes. Ahistorical is an excellent way to put it. You can pinpoint every sound resonating across the landscape: a bee buzzing, a dog barking, flocks of those small birds that never seem to be singing but constantly chirping; distant lawnmowers, and other far-off sounds muffled by the heat.
In the summer, my father would always keep the shutters shut. I hated it. I found the darkness depressing.
Because we’d spend all day inside, eating and drinking at the long table surrounded by family members who would’ve been better off estranged. I mean, who can possibly get to know that many cousins?
At least twenty. And all the matriarchs would sit there gossiping about which family member wasn’t there, and all the patriarchs would smoke cigars and watch TV and talk about politics or whatever.
Yes, exactly. There’s a weight to existence over there, you know? Gravid. My dad used to love that word, gravid, and it’s true: the place feels pregnant with the past, with the burden of history. You can see it in the elders’ faces—they’re literally sagging from the weight of it. They look so disappointed, you know?
Is that really our destiny? I know some older folks who barely talk about that past at all. But we forget that Spain didn’t stop being fascist because it decided to—Franco died, that’s all. It was the Kingdom of Spain until 1931, and a few years after that, boom, you’ve got the Spanish Civil War. Which nobody talks about, by the way.
My grandfather allegedly escaped Franco’s death squads by a hair’s breadth—el se escapo por los pelos, my dad used to say. That’s part of why my father used to love model trains. Until we left Spain, he spent more time playing with them than with me.
What is it with you and sticking to the image? Aren’t we getting a little off-topic?
Fine. A train is the promise of adventure, a portal to the future, and a connection to the past. A line between two points. A place of limbo between two worlds.
It wasn’t just the model trains. He built entire villages—trees, townspeople. He even painted the figurines’ tiny faces and the small white chickens and the miniature bulls that roamed amongst the olive trees on the outskirts of the model town. He had this gold-plated magnifying glass attached to the wall. The basement was his sanctuary until Moncho died. I—
No, I’m fine. I just need a second.
Maybe just a glass of water. I’ve got that queasy feeling again.
I was six.
It was the first time my father ever took me to see a real-life train. Moncho had just been accepted to law school in Andalusia. The whole family accompanied him to say goodbye at the Atocha train station in Madrid. I’d never seen anything like it, such gargantuan machines spewing their steam. And the noise! The vaulted ceilings of weaved glass and iron amplified all of it. The roar of it all was deafening. It remains the most impressive space I’ve ever been in.
Well, just think about it: a six-year-old witnessing these iron behemoths roll into this industrial cathedral of sorts.
It was a religious experience, come to think of it. The station had these stained-glass windows framed by twisted iron, and the shadows the beams made on the platforms were like these ancient trees. And then there was the sound: the crash of steel being bashed with giant metallic hammers; swirls of steam coming from every direction; plumes of smoke billowing upwards, collecting in the vaulted ceiling; the shouts of rail workers reverberating off the glass and the metal as the loudspeaker announced arrivals and departures to places I’d only ever heard about in books. It was a colossal moment for me. Sublime, you could say. I can still see the miniature water towers they used to refill the steam engines. They’d wrangle these colossal rubber hoses into the tops of the trains. The hose writhed on the ground like some kind of industrial snake, lapping at the titanic steel wheels of the locomotive. Those wheels were just as tall as me, and I remember thinking the train would amputate me if I fell on the tracks.
Yes. In Pozuelo, there was a legend about a boy who lost his legs, as if the train decided to do it, you know? As if the train had sentience. And at that moment, I started to think that maybe all of these legends about skipping town were true.
No, I don’t think so. He would’ve gone to the river anyway.
Because my father was very strict—maybe too strict, in retrospect. My father had a way of making sure his prince wouldn’t fail. He didn’t know how to be gentle with Moncho—or with me, for that matter. He wanted Moncho to make something of himself. He wanted him to be revered. But we’re getting off-topic. I barely knew Moncho at all.
Well, because I was still just a child? I do remember this one night, though. Moncho was stressed because of his university entrance exams, and I remember hearing him talking to himself late at night in our father’s study. I tiptoed down the hall and peered through the crack in the door. Moncho was huddled over a massive textbook, pulling at his hair. And then I distinctly remember seeing him pull a small metallic tin from the desk drawer, placing three white pills on the table, and just staring at them for a while before swallowing.
Come to think of it, yes. That was just a few days before we took him to the train station.
The prince had made it. He’d lived up to his name. And all of that old Spanish glory came rushing back. The entire family was at Atocha to bid him farewell—brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins, and nieces, hugging and kissing Moncho, waving him goodbye. Meanwhile, little garbonzito—
Yes, fine—little old me standing on the platform in complete awe of the trains and the steam and the workers and the engines, totally unaware of the weight of this family moment because I was taken by the colossal beauty of it all. But then Moncho picked me up and asked me if I wanted to see the inside of the train, and all of a sudden, I was overcome with dread.
I started screaming and crying. Once inside the carriage, I grabbed onto Moncho’s legs, and my body went limp, and he couldn’t understand it. I think he might’ve even slapped me in the face to try and snap me out of it.
I had this terrible intuition that something bad was going to happen. For the first time in my life, I considered that sometimes, people leave home and never come back.
No, it wasn’t a conscious thing. It was just a feeling. I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually voiced that before. And as my father pulled me off the train, all of these other fears started to creep in: who were all those strangers on the train with Moncho? And did they even know him? And what if the train went in the wrong direction?
As the train rolled out of the station, we followed it along the platform like some procession. Moncho stuck his head out of the window and then tried to squeeze his shoulders through, and I remember being terrified that another train would come into the station and slice him in half.
I start to lose it again. I beg my father to stop the train just as Moncho cups his hands and yells to me, “Hey, Mario, hey, Mario, don’t cry! There’s no need to cry. I’m one of the ones who returns! I’m one of the ones who comes back!”
What do you mean, present tense?
Really? Whatever.
Yes. Two weeks later. Moncho drowned swimming in the Guadiana River. He was a great swimmer. He was the one who taught me how.
Most likely a heart attack. He was only eighteen years old. Those fucking little white pills. Goddamn amphetamines. My father had insisted Moncho take them for studying.
He never forgave himself. He destroyed his model trains and the model towns with the bulls and the white chickens.
Yes. They buried Moncho in Pozuelo.
He only brought me to the cemetery once. He didn’t bring anyone else, and I remember feeling honored, somehow, to be allowed to be there while he sat there by Moncho’s tomb and wept in silence.
He would rock his torso back and forth, over and over again, rubbing his hands on the debossed name on the cold stone—Moncho, El Principe—and I remember thinking at that moment—is this selfish?—I remember thinking I was lucky to be witnessing it, to be a part of my father’s sanctum. At that moment, I knew I was no longer garbonzito.
Because my father was always so stern and closed off in daily life, and for him to share himself so intimately with me, to bring me there to witness it, felt like some kind of profound gift.
We moved to Ohio a few months later. He never talked about Spain again.
You know, one of the last things my father ever said to me was saying goodbye invites the possibility of death.
What do you mean? It’s not really about my fear of saying goodbye, though. My problem has always been committing to him, whoever he might be.
What do you mean, the wound of the absent brother?
Your story makes me telescope in and out of my own life memories. I Love the story and the worlds you weave in it. I am so glad of all the threads you brought together... Thank you. Cheers: to brothers!