At Close Quarters (10 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Allow me to tell you something, then,’ he added, serene, dignified, yet almost vindictive. ‘I think Marina could think of a thousand better ways to spend her money than trying to find out what people were doing when her father shot himself in the heart.’

‘These smiley guys, I can’t stand them,’ murmured Alkalino as soon as they’d left the office. ‘Such readiness to smile at strangers, such friendliness, so much smiling, as if they needed to prove how happy they are! What’s with the chumminess? It’s not like he was trying to sell us something.’

Alkalino was shorter than the detective, and he was walking one metre ahead of him with quick, offended steps, almost bumping into passers-by when he turned his head.

‘Did you take a look at him?’ he went on. ‘One of those
muscular, good-looking, stupid players who cannot appreciate the worth of their victims, so full of themselves that any woman they call comes running after them. So fake and … and …’

Cupido was amused by the indignation in his friend’s dark face, and guessed what Alkalino didn’t dare utter: ‘And yet a magnet for gorgeous women who’ll never love us.’

‘Come on,’ he replied instead. ‘Women can always say no. They can always resist.’

‘Resist? As soon as a woman utters the word resist she is lost.’

‘Okay, okay,’ protested Cupido.

‘And those chairs! So much design in everything around him, so much modernity, so much gloss!’

‘The place was spotless.’

‘The poles are spotless too, and you’d die from the cold there. And also …’

‘What?’

‘That patronising manner, that scorn towards the countryside, as if we didn’t all come from there, as if our first job hadn’t been to attach a sharpened rock to a stick and chase any edible animal to smash its brains, as if the first time someone thought of settling somewhere and building a roof over his head it hadn’t been because he counted on the wheat he’d planted nearby. When you think that some people have been forced to spend centuries feeding and serving townies, and then a superficial guy like him comes and says that …’

‘Now, now,’ said Cupido.

‘As if our forefathers had not been shepherds and farmers …’

‘One of whom killed the other,’ he put in.

Alkalino suddenly stopped walking and stared at Cupido with a puzzled expression in his sharp dark face, which looked as if it were made of harder materials than flesh and bone, a bit like wood before it turned into charcoal.

‘You mean you believe him? You accept he spent that spring afternoon sitting in there, behind the blinds, doctoring the accounts and figuring out the best way to cheat the taxman?’

‘Not yet. I don’t like to assume anything. Not even that he was not telling the truth.’

Alkalino was soon walking by his side, calm and thoughtful, his short, harsh steps more leisurely, the tips of his feet slightly curved in. He advanced with his head lowered, lost in thought, oblivious to the noise of the doors and shutters of the shops that were closing; the passers-by on their way home planning some rest and a quiet dinner; the girls who’d been waiting for the warm weather to show off their bellies, their skins smooth and sweet, their navels like a delicate buttonhole; the doves that lived in the belfry of a church and, at that hour, were defending their territory from the swifts.

‘At least he was right about one thing,’ said Alkalino suddenly.

‘He who, Olmedo?’

‘His ex-son-in-law, whatever his name is.’

‘What was he right about?’

‘About the fact that most acts of bloodshed usually involve the family, or those strangers who become a part of it. He doesn’t like words like son-in-law, brother-in-law, stepmother, stepbrother and so on. Have you noticed how cruel the jokes about these relations are? What bad press the names have? Have you noticed? There’s something pejorative about them, a bit scornful, as if the relationship was conceded out of courtesy to one’s brother’s choice, but not out of one’s own free will. And it’s there, in that periphery, where hatred and bad blood usually arise. Remember all the family conflicts in the Bible, and in Greek tragedy, and between those two Russian brothers who were worse than wolves.’

He hadn’t slept well. Dreams came and went randomly, featuring phantom figures that stood at the foot of his bed and watched him sleep: Camilo, Marina, a naked woman whose face he couldn’t identify, the detective and that grouchy, dark-skinned assistant of his. It hadn’t been a nightmare that he could have banished by getting up to drink a glass of water, but a constant whirl of elusive images and isolated, shameless words that he couldn’t quite remember.

He got in the shower and stayed a long time with the water washing over his head, eyes closed and hands hanging by the sides of his body, before picking up the soap and shampoo. Later he threw the towel on the bed and looked at himself naked in the wardrobe mirror. He didn’t yet dislike what he saw. In a few years his pectoral muscles, now firm, would climb down the ladder of his ribcage, his waist would thicken, and the hairs on his legs would become greyer and scarcer. Wrinkles, liver spots and stretch marks would show. But for now he was in great shape: he hadn’t yet reached that age when a man only looks elegant in a jacket. He was thirty-four, and had no intention of wasting the good years he had left.

For breakfast he had tea, two pieces of thinly buttered toast, and orange juice. That day two employees would clean the glass façade of an office tower. He and a third guy would install the clasps needed to hold the new drainpipes in a refurbished block of flats. It was a quick and energetic task, unlike the monotonous jobs of
cleaning or painting. He put on his work clothes, a chequered shirt, a pair of sailcloth trousers with lots of pockets, and hard boots. Mediterráneo Vertical – a small competitive company, dynamic and efficient, devoted to work at heights, which had required little investment in infrastructure, and of which he hoped to open a branch in Valencia – was doing well, in no small part, because he took an active role in the work and always kept an eye on how his workers were getting on.

When he reached the premises, his employees had loaded all they needed into the vans and were waiting for him. He himself drove one of the vans to the block of flats. He rang the number he’d been given, flat eight, and a woman asked them to come in. She was the president of the neighbours’ association. Once upstairs she offered them coffee, and he accepted a cup while his employee climbed onto the terrace to secure the ropes from which they would hang.

‘A coffee is always good to gather one’s strength,’ said the woman with a smile as she carried a tray in from the kitchen. She sat in front of him to pour him a cup and Jaime looked at her: a woman in her early forties, married to the man with a moustache and glasses, a photo of whom – he had a startled, mistrustful look, as if even at the moment it had been taken he knew what was coming – rested on a bookshelf against another picture frame with the portraits of two girls, aged eight or ten. The woman’s chest was abundant, her hips and arms a bit heavy-set, and her fingers slightly thicker than the kind of fingers that would make a beautiful hand; her armpits were stained by sweat. She was an attractive mature woman, without a job outside the house, a little bored and perhaps a little unhappy, but kind or canny enough to hide it.

‘Mind you, it hasn’t been easy to reach a consensus among all the neighbours in the community,’ she was now saying. ‘I’m sure you’ve come across such cases. Imagine, forty-eight landlords who all have to agree with one another without anyone feeling they’re the worst hit. And some of them! The ones that don’t pay their membership fees and yet do nothing but complain and make
demands! Those who want to raise the fees to carry out
improvements
! They come to the meetings and don’t contribute anything at all! Well, you can’t count on people. I’m very tired of being the president, always trying to appease everybody. Thank God that, in a few months …’ she said, trying to draw his attention to her
capacity
for self-sacrifice and her contribution to universal concord. ‘You know, the world is full of spiteful people. And it would be so easy to have an exchange of ideas, be kind to one another, love each other! Right?’ she asked, as if she’d suddenly realised she was doing all the talking, in fact talking too much.

‘Of course!’ he replied with a smile, almost touched by how naively she tried to gain him for her cause – her desire for fraternity.

That was what he liked best: to please. It happened often enough that, at a bar, or a shop, or on the beach, a woman would cast him a kind smile. If circumstances were favourable, he soon approached her, was courteous and funny but also made it clear he was up for anything, was ready to put into practice all that he’d learned in twenty years of loving women. And why the hell not, since it was so easy and enjoyable? Why not make those mature women happy for a few hours, given that they felt they were as capable of seducing him and arousing his desire now as they had been fifteen or twenty years before? They would embrace him, clasp him with both hands, kiss him with passionate, open mouths while he
distilled
into their ears the lie that real beauty is eternal, love never dies and time does not pass.

And he too was happy embracing them, consoling their nostalgia for that which they would never be again, holding breasts that sagged a bit like ripe fruit, caressing stomachs slightly
cushioned
by age and thighs made smooth by firming creams. The only way not to offend a woman who asks you for an embrace, he’d tell himself, was by embracing her, even if that hurt another man. Faithfulness might be good for some people, but for him it was absurd, didn’t make any sense, not even with a woman like Marina. In spite of his numerous adventures, he had loved Marina, still loved her, and for her sake he would have cut down
on his escapades and restricted them to some faraway area where they wouldn’t upset her. All would have been fine, and they would still be together if it hadn’t been for Camilo’s meddling. From the beginning, his had not been a frontal opposition, but a constant campaign of resistance that, because of its very moderation, seemed never to exhaust itself. Oh, that sarcastic look in Camilo’s face, the way he never had a kind word for what Jaime did but, on the contrary, kept repeating that annoying line of his, ‘Feet on the ground!’, as though suggesting he had his head in the clouds. Needless to say, the old man didn’t mean his work, or not just his work. He must have heard rumours: a handsome guy who worked at the top of buildings and seduced women who stared at him with a frisson of excitement and fear and, when he came down, took him in their arms as they would a good and beautiful angel who needed rest and tenderness – kind, torn hostesses who’d tremble at the touch of his fire and later caress his shoulder blades as if they were the feathery wings of a bird … Well, of course, people talked. But Camilo only interfered when Marina found that message on his mobile, those affectionately obscene words sent by his latest conquest. At that point he did raise his voice to defend his daughter, and you would have thought the major was more hurt and offended than she was. In all his life Camilo had loved only one woman – the tall woman he’d been seeing these last weeks had not appeared yet – and couldn’t understand how Jaime could cheat on his daughter like that. Because, really, he had no reason to. Marina had always been cheerful, sweet, loyal to him, had never pressured him, never refused him anything. And so, Camilo came to tell him, if she is there for you, smiles at you and hugs you, how can you not love her? How could you look at others if she offered you everything you needed? Who do you think you are to hurt her like that?

He took one last sip of coffee and got up to go to the terrace. The woman accompanied him to the door.

‘Be very careful, please. Yours is a dangerous occupation. Twelve floors! I don’t think I’ll be able to watch. Vertigo, you know,’ she
explained. ‘My legs start to shake and I feel a kind of shiver when I climb onto high places.’

His assistant had everything ready. He had tied the ropes to the anchoring hooks and had set the plumb line. The smells of fresh coffee, gas burners, and laundry softeners wafted up the internal patio. Outside many windows were clotheslines, but the area where they had to secure the clasps was free of encumbrances.

He put on his helmet and tied his harness, passing the rope through the rings. With his cleat shoes on, and the power drill and clasps in his belt, he climbed onto the ledge and started descending slowly. Forty metres below was the hard cement of the ground floor. Although he had barely slept that night, he felt good up there, safe, almost weightless, while he swung slightly in the void.

He had to fix the clasps at every floor, so that all that was left for the plumbers was to screw on the drainpipes. The plumb line marked the vertical line near the row of windows.

Legs apart and feet firm on the wall, he started drilling. The bit went in with ease, into the plaster first and then into the brick. He secured the first set of clasps and, when he descended to the next floor, saw that many onlookers were by the windows, attracted by the noise of the drill: not only women and old men, but also young and middle-aged men. How come they were not at work that morning? he wondered. What were they doing at home? Some leaned out to look at him with curiosity, with apprehension, or simply amusement. Others disappeared all of a sudden and came back with another person in tow in pyjamas. A cleaning lady, feather duster in hand, rested against the window, waiting to watch the show. A teenager appeared with a mobile phone and took several pictures of him before walking off to make a call.

Jaime liked to create a buzz of expectancy, to be the centre of attention in front of men who would silently consider his job and compare it to their own; of trembling women who would stare at him with a bejewelled hand to their mouths, and then look at the ropes he was hanging from as if they feared they might snap at any moment; of children who screamed in excitement while
pointing their fingers at him. He had the feeling that up there he expanded, became larger, but also that he was lighter and more powerful, because he saw others from a point of view inaccessible to themselves. Through the windows he could see bedrooms with unmade beds, or even with someone asleep in them, too tired or lazy to respond to the alarm of the noise, and the chaotic, higgledy-piggledy lairs of adolescents, and the tidy offices of
technicians
or professors, and the humble secrets strewn in bathrooms or hung out on clothes-racks.

Once again he bored into the brick with firm, precise
movements
, his legs resting on the wall as if he was holding it up, his hands on the drill, and a screw between his teeth. On the eighth floor he saw the woman leaning out of the window near to him, and once more she said something about his courage, and vertigo and danger, showing her concern and responsibility in front of her neighbours; then she looked at the tense rope that held him, cast an anxious glance downwards, and withdrew from the window with her eyes closed, as if the glare from the bottom of the patio had dazzled her.

As he proceeded downwards, the number of spectators dwindled. His work became less interesting the nearer the
ground
he was, as if, deep down, everybody expected him to fall into the void. Little by little people disappeared from the windows, some to reappear a short while later to check on his progress or to make sure that he hadn’t fallen. The woman too had leaned out again and was staring at him from above.

When at last he finished and treaded on the patio there was barely anyone left at the windows. He went back to the rooftop, where his employee was putting away the equipment.

‘Take everything in the car,’ he said. ‘I’ll follow you later.’

‘Later, eh?’ repeated the employee with a slimy, complicit smile that he refused to acknowledge.

‘Yes, wait for me at the warehouse, while you tidy things up. I’ll get the invoice signed and collect the cheque.’

He took the lift to the eighth floor. When the woman opened
the door, he noticed her strong, almost aggressive, perfume, which she had not been wearing earlier, and a new hairdo with every lock in place. She had also changed into a dress that was too elegant for that time of the morning, one of those flimsy numbers that always made him think that, the more you pay for them, the easier they are to take off.

‘Please sit down. You must be tired after all that work, and the rope looked like it wouldn’t hold! You must have been scared up there.’

‘Scared, well,’ he said, ‘who isn’t? But everything worth doing is kind of risky, isn’t it?’

‘Would you like anything to drink? A beer?’

‘Thanks. Perhaps a Coke?’

‘Right away.’

He saw her leave and return with the drink and a bowl of almonds, which she seemed to have prepared beforehand. He took a long sip, not rushing things, took the invoice out of his shirt pocket and slid it across the table towards the woman.

‘It’s what we agreed. You can sign the copy.’

‘Right,’ she said, barely looking at the amount. ‘You’ve done a good job. And a dangerous one.’ Anxious, nervous, she got up to get a pen, and opened a big drawer in the cupboard, under the photograph of the man with the moustache and glasses. She rummaged through it and finally came back and sat down beside him on the sofa.

‘One must sign,’ she said, and wrote her name in round, uneven letters because her hands were shaking, as she added: ‘It’s what I always say at meetings. If we want the association to run smoothly and the work to get done, we all need to pay on time. You cannot imagine the problems we have with debtors … Let me get the cheque.’ She stood up again and went towards the corridor connecting the living room with the bedrooms.

‘Do you mind if I wash?’ he said, showing her his dirty hands.

‘Not at all. Come with me.’

He followed her down the corridor, and she opened the door
to a bathroom. The wall tiles were decorated with flowers of such lurid pinks and greens that her perfume seemed to issue from them. He turned on the tap, filled his palms with water, and buried his face in them, rubbing energetically. While he towelled off, he saw the woman in the opposite room, the bedroom, sitting on one side of the bed. She took her chequebook out of a drawer in her night table, wrote one out, tore it off carefully, put back the chequebook in its place and, without getting up, left the cheque there on the quilt. That piece of official paper on the bed suddenly turned her into a different woman, without children, husband, home, community – just the eternal feminine flesh asserting its right to exist over and above modesty and social rules.