He smoked a lot during his first days in Germany. He smoked whilst he created a network of other foreign workers like him. He made good friends there, who he would play cards with and would go to watch Real Madrid play. He learned bits of various languages between puffs and sent money home and saved his own. He returned home to do his year of military service, where he was so well liked that they assigned him to be the chauffeur for some officials, and there too, he smoked, played cards, and told jokes. He had become the coffee machine, exhaling smoke, and providing comfort and encouragement.
Clara Herrero Hernández
Fer was thirteen years old when he started smoking.
It was his first job. He was working in a factory making coffee machines. Fer liked it; his job that is, not smoking. The smoking would take longer for him to like. The tobacco tasted bad. It smelled bad. It didn’t feel good when you took that first drag, or any drag. But making coffee machines was nice. Not because of the factory. The factory was black, dirty and demanding, but because of what came after: Fer built instruments that people would gather round to chat, or in search of a hot drink, to get over a bad drink or to throw themselves into a long hard day ahead. The idea cheered Fer during the shifts that he spent with blackened fingers, stinging eyes and ears clogged by the thunderous noises around him.
He was also earning his own wage for the first time: he was building his mechanism of independence. When he couldn’t cope with adulthood, he would turn to this mechanism for support.
Smoking came later. It was a few months after he had started his job when they informed him of the transfer. He was congratulated for his work, first for problem solving abilities, for his ability to organise his colleagues (who were the same age as him), for his joking attitude and for showing another boy how things worked; then he was told that after three years of his work between his machines and his grease, if he kept it up, he would be transferred to Germany. It was huge news for a small-town boy like him, having the opportunity to go to a country with so much work and so much industry. Of course, it would no longer be a coffee pot factory, it would be a plastic pot factory; a new and much more in-demand market, undoubtedly on the way to enriching those involved in its manufacture, sale, and distribution.
That very same day, Fer started smoking. It was to celebrate his news. The boy who he had shown the ropes that had offered him this first cigarette.
The second time was when he told Claudia the news of his transfer. Claudia was the love of his life when they were both twelve years old and would be the love of his life for the rest of eternity.
But by the time he left, he had more than picked-up the habit.
He smoked a lot during his first days in Germany. He smoked whilst he created a network of other foreign workers like him. He made good friends there, who he would play cards with and would go to watch Real Madrid play. He learned bits of various languages between puffs and sent money home and saved his own. He returned home to do his year of military service, where he was so well liked that they assigned him to be the chauffeur for some officials, and there too, he smoked, played cards, and told jokes. He had become the coffee machine, exhaling smoke, and providing comfort and encouragement.
When he returned to Spain, he bought a house in Madrid and found work fixing coffee makers. He had been there for a handful of months when he decided to return to the town.
‘Fer, mate! You abandoned Claudia. Don’t you think you should go and see her? Did you get a girlfriend in Germany?’
‘Sorry?’
It didn’t even take Claudia ten seconds to open the front door. She was already smiling before Fer could even say hello. And, as calm as she had always been, it was her who threw herself on top of him and kissed him.
He stopped smoking.
Madrid belonged to them both, as did the house. A few years after they married, their daughter was born, who they named after the sea. Her name was Mar. She loved to hear Fer tell her about the cowboy books he read in his spare time.
Fer liked his life, despite having to leave early for work. It would often seem as though he was the one brings out the morning sun and coming back home in time to exchange it for the night’s moon.
Then, when Mar was only five, Claudia said a final goodbye to him and left. She did not go to Germany, or anywhere else where Fer could follow her. She left and Fer would never see her again; at least, not with those eyes. Not in Madrid, not reading in her bed, not over a checkerboard, not hugging Mar, not greeting the village dogs when they came back to visit.
He started smoking again.
He promised Claudia that he would not put Mar in a boarding school, and had every intention of keeping his promise, but within a year of Claudia’s death, he had to go into hospital. One of his lungs had stopped working. He supposed it was because he wanted to go with Claudia.
Mar was admitted to a boarding school, and he to an operating theatre.
By the time he was able to leave, although was still unable to take care of his daughter. He went to see her at the boarding school.
‘What would you like for your birthday, Mar?’
‘A mum.’
The hole where his lung had been got tighter, but he delivered: he exchanged tobacco for a mother for his daughter.
Fer was almost forty years old, and she was a teacher at Mar’s old school, an old friend of Claudia’s, skilled at both numbers and housework. They got on well.
During all those years growing up, Fer was like those coffee machines he loved making. He didn’t give off smoke, but he did bring people together and offer support. He took his daughter fishing in wetlands, bought a house on the beach, and put it in her name. He took his new wife out for walks, for meals and to go shopping. His new wife was always hurt that he couldn’t love her and who smoked more than he did, because he had already quit. He mediated every argument she started, smoothed her temper with smiles and took Mar out dancing. He would work, read his cowboy novels, and tell jokes and laugh at other peoples’. Paella on Saturdays, torrijas at Easter, board games with her nun friend (Bandido! Bandido! How to get over the worst, Bandido!). An abandoned kitten that the three of them could pour their love onto, a new car for their daughter, a red rose for her wedding day and a watch for the good man she was marrying. Plastic pots for trips to the countryside, for storing rice and torrijas and the kitty’s food.
Then, the cancer.
Fer was convinced that it had always been there, but Fer had been turning straw into gold and water into wine his whole life. He had been a happy, yet unlucky man.
The next time he exhaled smoke, it was from a cloud he had swallowed on his journey to heaven. Claudia laughed, because he had thrown it in her face.
This story was translated by Jack Caine and edited by Jasmin Griffiths.
Clara Herrero Hernández wanted to be a writer since she was five years old. Her first novel, Dioses Ingenuos, was longlisted for the Fundació Jordi Sierra i Fabra literary award. The prologue of another of her novels won a short story contest. Clara is currently studying at university whilst querying her second novel, Ángeles y Oscuridad, and finishing a third. You can find her on Instagram @clara.herreroh.
Jack Caine is a twenty-something freelance translator from the Lake District, England who translates documents from Spanish, German and Italian into English on topics such as literature, other cultures, travelling and more.
Jasmin Griffiths is a Plymouth University graduate with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing. She grew up in the south of Spain and after moving back to England decided to pursue her passion of writing. She has performed music and her poetry all over the country and also enjoys writing creative nonfiction and short stories.
This short story is part of a research project on speculative historical fiction in Ireland and Spain funded by the AHRC and the University of Plymouth.
Picture credits: Clément Chéné
THE WANDERING BARD 