On Antonio Antonino II’s sixtieth birthday his father, still reasonably virile at the age of ninety-three, had shuffled to the vintage market during his daily recados and bought him a rabbit coat. The coat had whole, white hares stitched into its seams and dangling from its sides, and by itself weighed nearly ten kilograms. Antonio Antonino II’s brows had scrunched together when his father handed him the oddity. He had stared into his father’s face. It held nothing but wrinkles then, sags and determined eyes that left many of the obvious questions in the younger Antonio’s head unanswered. 

          “Perhaps,” he thought, “The old general has finally gone senile.” And he folded the coat, wrapped it in plastic and placed it, along with the question, in storage.

***

          The sliver of Andalucía that Antonio Antonino I, Antonio Antonino II, and some sixty-two other men and three women called home, Paraíso, had never felt the chill of snow nor even the breeze of the cool-breathed Atlantic. Winters ran warm and summers smothered, hitting fifty degrees Celsius at times. Climbing even higher on those occasions when the sun considered turning the inhabitants into smoke and melted fat. For pride’s sake they did not succumb even then, only adjusted their awnings and fanned their dripping faces during siesta.

          One particularly scorching summer the heat cowed them all into a prolonged silence. Antonio II recalled communicating with his father those days in a soundless language, one that relied on brow movements and gravid looks, a careful wrinkling of the nose or mouth. Hand gestures came into play on the days they had the energy to move whole limbs. Antonio II did not know if they would survive. But his father invented ways of reassuring him, even without words.

At the end of the season when it was cool enough for the butterflies to return, the younger Antonio asked if they could move north. Antonio I had scolded him, saying that they would not flee, even during another oppressive epoch like that. “And why should we?” he’d said. “The rest of Spain needs to know that we from Paraíso are the best-bred men in the country. That we are bulls.” For a few years, the younger Antonio believed this.

***

           The garment box had been stuffed into Antonio Antonino II’s already overfilled closet, and it would sag out at times, nudging open the door. On those occasions he would stare at it, sideways.

           He had as much of a need for the coat as any other resident of Paraíso did. Yet his father had carried it half a kilometer himself and held it out, shaking, to him. In that moment of offering Antonino I had such determination in his face that the young Antonio’s insides shook. He would have understood the intensity of the look even without his summer of training in the methods of soundless communication.

***

           When the war came their prime mode of communication switched from eye twitches and hand gestures to letters. The younger Antonio had been shipped off to live with his grandmother, Abuela Rubia, who had a white hacienda up in the chilled air of the mountains. Even Franco rarely disturbed her there.

           Every morning he had a breakfast of tostada and cafecito, and on good days the breakfast would include a letter from Antonio I on the state of the war.

           Antonino I wrote in true military style, with short sentences that started and stopped choppily and never conveyed much meaning. The young Antonino looked every time he passed the mailbox for these scribbled jabberings, well-knowing that his abuela did the same, and read them only after she had let him do so. When the sun went down he would slide open the cardboard box beneath his bed and undo the plastic wrapping he had worked around the paper in case of water damage. He would read the confused phrases of war-torn Antonino I until the confoundment they inspired allowed him some level of understanding.

***

           His father came back the day Abuela Rubia would not move from her spot on the kitchen floor. Antonino II still recalls his irritation that morning at the unfairness of his grandmother, who, in dropping dead, threw a somber pall over the celebrated return of his father. The tile had to be bleached, and the butterflies that had come to nest near his box of letters had to be shooed away, so they would not disturb the body. But the days stretched during that time of year, and he soon forgot the perceived avarice of his grandmother. And in forgetting that he was able to forget the cafecitos and the tostadas and the hands that prepared them.

           General Antonino I had not come back whole. On the trip to Belchite and back he had shed the big toe on his right foot and two fingers from each hand. “The price of war, my son,” he said, beaming, by way of explanation. Antonio II thought then of footage he had heard about, of men with nothing beneath their torsos. Whole limbs chewed off by shrapnel and trench-bitten feet he read about in uncensored textbooks.

***

           The general had gone senile, and worse. In the span of three days he had transformed from a shuffling, quiet old man to a rambling psychotic. Antonio II had strapped him into the passenger’s seat and driven him to the local hospital, where they did their tests and connected their IVs and told the younger Antonio that it would be best for him to get some rest and come again in the morning. He asked to go back, to see his papá. But the man in the bed spouted insanities about someone with milky skin named Genoveffa and some other woman named Alessia, who had hair cut to her chin. And neither of them were Ximena Olívar, or, as Antonio II called her, Mamá .

Antonino II drove back home, but instead of resting he pulled the rabbit coat out of storage and laid it flat on his bed. The carcasses hanging from its sides had been bleached, brushed white and soft. But Antonio II thought of how hares probably dangled the same way from hunter’s strings.

***

            Many years following the death of the illustrious Abuela Rubia, the younger Antonino would drive three hours down to Paraiso then back up to his city, to take his father to the see the special Picasso exhibit in Granada. He had scrounged together the money for tickets after months of saving up from his accountant’s salary, and had felt butterflies in his stomach and flitting through his hair the whole ride down.

            The two of them stood before the black and white chaos of “Guernica” for a handful of minutes before the younger Antonio mustered up the courage to ask, “Is this how it was for you, Papa?” And when he received no answer he turned to see his father, eyes closed and head drooped in a tired trance. By then, even the butterflies had fled from Antonio II’s hair. 

            Later, on the drive back, he would ask Antonio I what he thought of the display. He would get the answer “You know, Son, how art is. Not me.” And as the old man looked around at Granada, at the college boys sporting shirts with many buttons open and salmon-colored shorts, he would snort and say, “How can you live in a place like this?”

***

            The test results had returned. The general had a new IV running into his arm and white penicillin pills on the table near his bed. Antonio II sat with his father for five days, as summer approached Paraíso. He tried not to think of the season. Instead, he thought of rabbits and of letters wrapped neatly in plastic.

***

            On Antonio II’s twenty-fourth birthday his father took him to see the corridas of Córdoba. The younger Antonio averted his eyes as the matador pulled back for the final blow. They left after that first match, the older Antonio patting his spine hard. “Once you get your nerve back,” he’d said, “We’ll run in and catch the finale—El Cordobés the Second. He’ll be the best round, anyway.” But the younger Antonio walked soundlessly all the way to Guadalquivir, his father following behind like a stray. The young man threw rocks into that river, and many of the stones left burns on his palm from the summer heat.

            Every few minutes Antonio I would catch his son’s attention, and the old man’s eyes would be brilliant, like the kind he wore all through that season of deathly sun, or when he returned from Belchite. But each time, the younger Antonio would shake his head until, some hours later, his papá stopped trying.

            That night, when they returned to his father’s house after a silent drive, the younger Antonio finally asked the question that had been plaguing him since birth: “Why are we living here?”

            But he must have said it like an accusation, or his father must have heard it as an accusation, because Antonio I responded with a sad gesture that let his son know it was time for him to leave.

***

            After the fifth day of waiting, Antonio II woke to see his father, sitting up rigid in the paste-white bed. Eyes of the same determined look they had worn on the younger Antonio’s sixtieth birthday. Antonio I motioned for his son to come closer. He was still whispering then, still rattling questions around in his brain in a language no one else knew. Antonio II took a seat next to his father, and the old man reached up to him like a child, squeezing his collar without any force.

            “You...” his father whispered.

            “Yes, Dad?” Antonio II leaned in. To him, the general looked all at once like a peacock that had lost its feathers. The old man opened and closed his lips, as if gasping for air, a great catfish stranded on the bank of some river. It was as if the man had forgotten how to communicate without words.

            “You,” he said, “Are not Antonio.”

            His fingers loosened their grip and slid from Antonio Antonino II’s shirt, and when Antonio II watched them come to rest on the hospital bed, he realized they had all the lines and furrows of Abuela Rubia’s.

            Antonio II left without speaking.

***

            When night fell in the summertime in Paraíso, the dry heat transformed into a thick sludge. The young Antonino would lie naked in his room those nights, contemplating the heat that sat on his chest and pushed down with the pressure of one hundred Madrilene suns. He would whisper to himself, “I am a bull, I am a bull,” waiting for something to shift inside his organs. The shift did not come. But he survived the choking air of that summer and those that preceded and followed. 

Winters were warm, and he and his father took the bus to vineyards and mountains and gypsy campgrounds.

***

            The general had died a day later, had been displayed at the wake two days later, and his funeral that came on the third day had been attended by all sixty-six residents of Paraíso, just as summer began. Many years later his son would think on this and on the last words his father had given him.

            He had taken out the rabbit coat only once since then, clawed away the plastic and shaken it until the stitching on the heaviest hares looked like it would rip. No answers came fluttering out, but a flurry of butterflies did. They filtered into the air lazily, circling the loose rabbit fur that had drifted to the carpet like snow. “Perhaps,” Antonio thought as he watched, “They are actually moths.” He had folded the gift then and placed it, without plastic, in its cardboard garment box.