All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel Page A

although she may have seemed very refined, the señora wasn’t above singling out some refugee or other for her personal consumption. That Tito Gorostiza, for example, with his flowing hair and his black leather shoulder bag—“an Andean hippie,” Berens called him. And that Peruvian—I can’t remember what he was called—who ended up living for a time in the cottage Quita had rented near Cáceres. Listen—I’m not accusing her of anything, all right? I think it’s good for a woman to enjoy herself while she can.
    But Alejandro was all mine. I told her that, right at the start, and Quita laughed and said of course, go for it. First we got him settled into Gorostiza’s flat. Because Quita had put the flat in her boyfriend’s name—a neat way of using the other tenants’ rent to keep him, since selling trinkets on Calle Goya never appealed much to our Tito.
    Alejandro, on the other hand, never complained about his lot. On the contrary, I would almost say that getting up every morning, gathering up his bracelets and rings, walking to his usual spot, and spreading his wares out on the pavement gave him a certain security, I don’t know—a fixed point in that nomadic life. After all, Alejandro was rather conservative. He liked good bed, good board, all that which can be savored and stroked—indulgences that are hard to come by with your butt in the saddle. Ideally, he would have liked his mornings to follow a routine and his nights to be more adventurous. He would have made a good politician, my Alejandro.
    But, what can I say, I’m nothing if not ambitious. To his other qualities I wanted him to add that of “artist.” He may not have been keen to admit it, but Alejandro was so obviously a man of letters. I have a solid knowledge of South American writing—I don’t know if you knew that. Ever since I was little, while my mother was devouring books by Gironella and Casona (come to think of it, Carmen Laforet’s
Nada
was on her bedside table, too), I sought out authors from the other side of the Atlantic, whose books were sold under the counter by a few dedicated booksellers. Now, I wanted Alejandro to be one of them; I imagined him, undisputed and acclaimed, under one of those pastel-colored covers with daring black letters which were produced at that time in Buenos Aires, standing alphabetically proud between Mario Benedetti and Julio Cortázar.
    You know what? I wanted to be a part of that transformation which was slowly beginning to make itself felt throughout Spain, like a change of season, like the end of a long illness. Each one of us, I mean in my generation, experienced it in a different way, at different times. I can tell you that, for me, it was one day at school, at the end of class. I was about to leave the room when the headmistress, a very strict, formal woman, came in and told me to help her. She took one of the gray plastic wastepaper baskets that were in every classroom, and placed it in my hands. Then she lifted a chair onto the platform, pushed it over to the blackboard, unhooked the crucifix that had been hanging on the wall, and put it into the wastepaper basket. We filled two baskets this way. Then we left them in a corner of the school chapel, under the astonished gaze of one of the priests who taught religious education. Sitting at my desk the next day, I felt for the first time freer, less stifled.
    I wanted Alejandro to be a part of that wind of change, to be a dazzling new voice, a new discovery. Yes, yes, my Terradillos, I know what you’re thinking: those
fotonovelas
of his were hardly literature. We had a laugh when he showed me three or four that he had discovered in a pile of old magazines in the Rastro flea market. Worse than soap operas—don’t think I didn’t realize that. I’m not stupid. But Alejandro knew the art of spinning stories. There was something about his tongue (I can