At Close Quarters (18 page)

‘That if you had rejected him, it might be motive for what everyone believes happened.'

‘Everyone?'

‘Marina too. She seems to have accepted that her father killed himself, but she doesn't understand why.'

‘Well, he didn't speak to me on that evening,' she repeated with a touch of defiance, rejecting the possible reproach in the detective's words. ‘Camilo didn't kill himself because of me. You can tell everybody.'

‘Would you have accepted?' asked Cupido in a calm voice.

‘To have my name engraved?'

‘And what something like that meant.'

‘I think I would have,' she replied.

‘From your knowledge of him, you don't seem to believe that he committed suicide.'

‘But I do. Didn't he himself write that word asking her forgiveness?'

‘Her forgiveness?'

‘His daughter's, Marina's. She'd be the worst hit. She's the one who has the right to forgive him. Who are the rest of us to say what anyone can do with his life?'

Her reply was pregnant with something that made Cupido insist:

‘Did you ever think he might do a thing like that?'

‘Yes,' she replied, and seeing his surprised face she added: ‘Is there anyone who hasn't thought of it at some point or another? Who hasn't, even for a few seconds, thought of disappearing, of ending everything? Haven't you?'

‘No, never,' replied Cupido.

‘Maybe because you've been happy,' she said, without malice or envy, but with a hard, rigid, resigned sadness, in a quiet voice, almost a whisper, as if seven months after the event she was still mourning her son's torn body. There she was, the mother of a dead child, the fiancée of a dead man, seemingly close to death herself.

Still, Cupido was disconcerted by her reply. Among the epithets that people who knew him might use to describe him, perhaps no one would have chosen the one Gabriela had just used. Lonely, compassionate, tenacious, loyal to a few friends, intelligent, odd at times, resigned most of them, tall, proud, yes, but happy? No, not
happy. You're not happy just because you haven't considered the possibility of killing yourself; you're happy when you're terrified that death might come looking for you, he thought.

He said goodbye and left the house where Gabriela spent her time staring at the pictures of Manuel. The more painful the present, the more one thinks of the past as a paradise lost, he told himself, overcome with a mixture of compassion and disquiet. Coming into contact with other people's misery always caused in him a hard, uncomfortable melancholy; for a long time he'd been able to manage it, but now it weighed down on him.

He wasn't in the mood to go back to his flat, so he took a walk along the seafront, without noticing much, until he realised he'd walked to the outskirts, where the town turned into industrial depots and dirty warehouses, many of them without a sign to indicate their activity.

At the end of the pavement were six boys of fifteen or sixteen, roughly Manuel's age if he had lived, sitting on the parapet that separated the street from the rocks of the beach. Two of them had their hands flat on the cement and two others held magnifying glasses a few centimetres away from them, so that the rays of the April sun concentrated on a part of their hands. The game was to see who could endure the heat for longer. The two contestants made faces, gnashed their teeth and studied their adversary's reactions, calculating their own pain threshold, while the other ones egged them on:

‘Hang in there!'

‘Don't give up, come on!'

Cupido stopped to watch them and found himself rubbing his hands together as he imagined the burning sensation. He stared at their frenzied buffoonery, their shouts, the way they communicated with insults, shoves and loud laughter. He too had played rough games at their age, but now they seemed distant, and he would have thought no one engaged in this kind of thing anymore.

Many seconds went by until one of them, his face dotted with pimples as if a rain of fire had fallen on it, brusquely moved away
his hand, spat on the burn and stepped off amidst mocking shouts and congratulations for the winner.

The detective walked back towards the town centre and, when he reached the beachfront, took off his shoes and proceeded along the almost depopulated sand. The weather was unpleasant, one of those April days that seem a leftover from winter and, like a trembling beggar dressed in rags, has come to crash the splendid party of spring. The sky was a mixture of blue patches and dirty-grey clouds of the kind that neither produce rain nor make the landscape attractive, but scud past, shapeless, frayed, unable to organise themselves into forms. Seagulls flitted about in the cold breeze. And above them, higher up, a bird of prey, an eagle or a hawk, tore across the grey mantle. A few rays of sunshine,
piercing
through the clouds, reached the waves and the sand where a few bathers awaited them. Most of these were foreigners visibly eager for sunshine – the women blonde, wide-shouldered, with long legs and narrow hips, the men Nordic types with light hair and pink skin, all fleeing the frozen-over, medieval winter of the Baltic.

When Marina had asked him to stop, Cupido told himself that his meeting with Gabriela would be his last if no new
information
came to light. They hadn't, but instead he had another name, Violeta, the girl who had dated Manuel. He quickened his step, hesitating, fighting back his desire to find out the truth. ‘No one's paying you anymore,' he told himself. And yet, by the time he'd reached the town centre he'd decided he'd search for the girl and speak to her. After that, he would see.

He put his shoes on and walked to the home where his mother was staying. Although he'd talked to her on the phone, he hadn't been to see her since the beginning of the investigation. She would go back to Breda as soon as the summer season started and her present residence was turned into a hotel for holidaymakers.

When he went through the automatic doors he saw the doctor that supervised the patients' health, administered drugs, and often joked about how they were doing, saying he would like to
have half the energy and spirit of many of the pensioners there. Cupido's mother usually spoke highly of him. He remembered the man's name was Fuentes; perhaps because he never wore a coat or a badge, he didn't look like a doctor at all. With his shabby clothes, his stubble, his smudged glasses which he surely wiped with his shirt, he looked in fact like a rural schoolteacher or a vet. His body was thinner than his face suggested, he had a deeply receding
hairline
with a few eternal hairs hanging onto his scalp, and seemed to find it so difficult to talk to strangers that one imagined him with only a few faithful friends sliding into lonely old age, provided sudden death didn't find him earlier, without anyone near him to shut his eyes. He had about him, in short, an air of calm
acceptance
which seemed born of past sadness.

‘Good afternoon,' said Cupido.

‘Good afternoon,' replied the doctor. He looked at him for a few seconds and then added. ‘Your mother was on her way to her room. I passed her in the corridor.'

‘How is she today?'

‘Angry,' he replied with a mischievous smile.

‘Why?'

‘Because her time here is running out. She doesn't want to leave.'

‘Which proves she's well looked after.'

‘It's not us but the weather, the water, the leisure.'

Cupido couldn't help smiling about his mother's love of bathing ever since she'd started hydrotherapy after her hip accident.

‘I'll have to find her another spa,' he joked.

‘Let me warn you she's found it already.'

‘She hasn't mentioned it to me.'

‘On the internet,' the doctor added.

‘On the internet? But she's never touched a computer.'

‘Maybe she never had, until two weeks ago. As they have a lot of free time here, she signed up for a course and, well, she sits in front of the screen and doesn't let go of the mouse until her hour is up,' he said before shaking his hand and saying goodbye.

When Cupido went into her room, he was surprised to find her
lying on the bed, as it was only half past twelve. He always thought of his parents on their feet, could barely call up an image of them lying down. As a child, when he awoke they were already up, and when he went to bed, they were still awake. Now, seeing her sit up with effort, he thought of the tiredness accumulated over the years and also of the threat of illness.

‘Are you tired?'

‘A little. I didn't sleep well last night.'

‘Why?'

‘I couldn't get yesterday's accident out of my head.'

‘What happened?'

‘Luis, one of the guests, was taken to hospital with a ruptured stomach. He'd been disorientated in the past, but nothing serious. Until yesterday. At siesta time he left his room and went to urinate – in the cleaning closet. Then he drank some detergent thinking it was water.'

‘An accident,' said Cupido, as he thought of the inevitable mental decline, the misfiring connections in the brain which wipe out everything one has learned over a lifetime. ‘He'll recover.'

‘Yes, they got there in time.'

As the doctor had said, on top of the night table he saw several printouts from the internet on spas and thermal-water
programmes
, with lists of treatments, dates and prices. There was also an application form.

‘So,' he said to change the subject, ‘you're thinking of checking into a spa for a few days?'

‘I'll apply for it, but I don't think I'll get lucky. There isn't room for everyone. Can't you see the world is filling up with old people?'

‘Then they won't take you,' he said with mock seriousness.

‘No? Why?'

‘Because you're not old yet.'

She smiled and waved her hand to indicate how long ago her youth had passed. Then she started talking about what she'd read on the internet about the benefits of thermal waters.

‘It's not just the water but the heat, the iodine, the minerals and
also the mud. I'm sure your father, who was such a good swimmer, would have loved it.'

He stayed a while with her, chatting about the spa, her fellow guests, Fuentes and the coming of summer, but his thoughts kept returning to the unsolved investigation.

‘I think I'll stay for a few days,' he said.

‘You do your job. I'll be fine at home. There are always people there.'

On his way out, Cupido looked about for the doctor to thank him, but Fuentes was nowhere to be seen. Cupido walked back home quickly and once there, tired and famished, he wolfed down a dish of rice and chicken that Alkalino had had delivered to the flat. Alkalino had already eaten half of it and was lying down on the sofa, reading Schopenhauer.

‘I'll need your help once again,' said Cupido.

‘You're still at it?'

‘Yes.'

‘I knew it. I knew you wouldn't give up, leave a job unfinished, even if they fired you. What should I do?'

‘Seek out a girl. I only have a name.'

‘Seek out a girl?' he asked, echoing Cupido's words as he always did when he found them strange or disconcerting. He shut the book and sat up on the sofa.

‘She's sixteen.'

‘Seek out a sixteen-year-old girl? Me? A guy who looks like a child molester?!' he exclaimed rubbing his thick stubble, which pierced through his skin and blackened his face as soon as he'd finished shaving.

‘Indeed.'

‘A guy that even women twice his age flee from?'

‘That's what I'm asking. It's something you know how to do better than me.'

Alkalino breathed in, held it for a few seconds, and breathed out slowly through his half closed lips.

‘Who is she?'

‘The girlfriend, if that is the word, of Gabriela's son.'

‘The dead lad's?'

‘Yes.'

‘Anything to do with Olmedo?'

‘That's what I'd like to rule out.'

‘What do you know about her?'

‘Very little, almost nothing, as I say. Her name's Violeta. She's sixteen. She lives in this city.'

‘Great,' he joked, standing up, ‘the perfect job for me.'

It was a consolation to think that she could end it at any time, that no one could take away from her that privilege. The decision was hers to make, and no one would be hurt if one day she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills or disappeared in a violent way leaving behind no ashes or bones or dust, without releasing the nauseating smell that, in the course of a few days, infuses the flats of those who die alone. Everyone she’d loved had died, and she didn’t care about the rest of the world. True, she was fond of a few friends, and of Marina, who was charming, and of Samuel, who was always in a good mood and said thank you to any kind gesture. She was sure they would be saddened by her death, but also that they would forget her before long. And so she could say that the world was as indifferent to her as she was to it.

She’d been defeated. Ever since her son’s death, she had lost her strength, her will, her beauty. Her height, which she had always been proud of, seemed to have decreased a few centimetres, so often did she slouch and hang her head. Tragedy had tarnished the beautiful expressiveness of her face. Whenever she looked in the mirror now she saw, under that deep M engraved between her eyebrows, a pair of empty, watery eyes, a gaze that was vacant and contained nothing, not even the bitterness that might have given her the necessary will to live. During the first few days she couldn’t quite understand what was happening to her, dazed by pain and the drugs she took to deaden it. She didn’t remember, but they told her that, when they let her see the body, after they had disguised
the damage done by the pit bull, she’d exclaimed: ‘He’s asleep! He looks so handsome!’, unable to admit what had happened. She’d taken a few days to accept his death, like the small child who, when he falls and hurts himself, takes a few seconds to wonder what is that unknown sensation and, only on seeing blood, acknowledges the pain and bursts into inconsolable tears.

The dead had defeated her, and she often wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to turn into a handful of ashes with them than to stay like a shadow among the living. Groggy from
tranquilisers
, she closed her eyes and imagined Manuel welcoming her with a calming smile and, a few seconds later, with the characteristic fickleness of his age, telling her off for taking so long. Behind him, over his shoulder, she could make out Camilo’s face, ascetic, kind, compassionate, and he offered his hand while her son turned around to look at him in surprise, wondering who that man he’d never seen might be, perhaps the father he’d never had. In that place which was not Earth, which had neither corners nor rooms, but was not heaven either, everyone moved very slowly, gliding along and talking in low voices. Beside her, in silence,
motionless
, never touching each other, were shadows clearer and more compact than the bodies that generated them, alien to the drives, desires and dissatisfactions of the flesh.

She would then open her eyes and once again identify the
darkness
of the flat where she spent so much time on her own, bathing in the gazes of the photographs, their different expressions, while outside the clamour of the world seemed colder and more distant every day. Lost in remembrance, she went over memories, evoked her son at different ages, from the calculated moment of his
conception
with a passing man – she was not looking for love, or even pleasure, only his seed, that energetic, blind, untameable minute white fish – who never knew he’d been used for that purpose, until the moment of his death. After a while she returned to the present and discovered herself short of breath. Her mouth dry, she would stand to go get some water or a black coffee that she didn’t even bother to warm up. She barely ate, lived on pain. It seemed
pointless to spend two hours in the kitchen preparing a succulent dish that only she would taste. When she entered the bathroom, she passed with indifference the mirrors in which no one looked, and then returned to the living room, whiling away the hours of the Saturday and the Sunday until Monday rolled around with its routine, her job at the office offering a measure of solace and forgetting.

When she went back to work after her initial depression, they transferred her to a different department. At least she was no longer in customer services, did not strive to pretend she was alive when she was dead, that she had come through destruction unscathed when she was destroyed. Sitting in front of her computer screen, she confined herself to filling forms and updating files, pleased that it was others who gave information about laws, dealt with pleas or complaints and talked, thus allowing her to stay silent. Her new task was easy, but it required enough concentration for her not to have much time for other thoughts. Work finished at three and she went back home. It was as if she led two lives, one in the world, one outside; in one she didn’t wish to talk to anyone, in the other she didn’t have anyone to talk to; both were sad, but in the latter she found a certain voluptuousness in her sadness.

She got up from the armchair and turned on the light. The detective’s smell was still in the air, a hint of shaving lotion or deodorant – something masculine, no doubt, though different from the smell Camilo left in her bed when he went off to work. The detective’s questions had not made her ill at ease but, in a strange way, had calmed her, as if with his request for concrete answers he had made her come back to earth from her cloud of affliction. He had asked kindly, not nervously, as if he knew every one of them – Camilo, Marina, Samuel, herself – better than they knew themselves, and wished not so much to glean new information as to confirm the information he had. His calm, resolute manner reminded her of Olmedo, and now she wondered whether she shouldn’t pull herself together, get her life back on track and put the ghosts to rest in a place where she could visit them but not live with them. Camilo,
with his firmness and his conviction that life is always hard, but almost always endurable, had told her several times:

‘Put it to one side, Gabriela. It doesn’t mean that you’ll forget him. It means you need your own space to live. He’s always so present that I can feel him here between us. And that’s not good for me, Gabriela, and neither is it for you. Especially not for you.’

The small urn where she kept his ashes was very light. She’d instantly decided to cremate him. Although the idea of a tomb and a granite gravestone with the words “I HAVE DIED. I ONLY LIVED FIFTEEN YEARS. REMEMBER ME” crossed her mind, she soon discarded that possibility, terrified to imagine the decomposing body. She took the urn with her back to the living room, put it on the table and sat down to think, telling herself that her decision would have nothing to do with the word oblivion. But she had to do something with the ashes if she wanted to shake herself out of the somnolent, morbid and depressive state she was in.

She had often wondered where she might scatter them, but had never found a place worthy of her son. One afternoon, she went out for a walk to the lighthouse at the end of the pier, where fishermen gathered with their rods. She looked at the horizon for a while and, when she was about to go back, saw a hundred or so people at the end of the pier walking in her direction. The sun had just set and the people, all dressed in dark clothes, were silhouetted against the yellowish glow of the twilight. With the water on both sides, they looked motionless for a minute or so, even though their feet moved towards the lighthouse. When they finally arrived, the fishermen, who had understood before she did, as if it wasn’t the first time a thing like that had happened, reeled in their fishing lines, respectfully lowered their rods and laid them down on the huge rocks of the pier, in complete silence, as in one of those military parades in which soldiers surrender their spears as a general walks down the corridor they form. On stopping by the lighthouse, a woman separated herself from the cortège – some were crying and many had flowers in their hands – and walked to the edge of the last rock carrying a small blue ceramic urn.

‘His sister,’ whispered one of the fishermen.

She realised it was the funeral of the boy who had drowned nearby a few days before. The sister lifted the lid of the urn, tipped it forwards and, very slowly, poured its contents into the sea. The ashes floated for a few seconds. Then, as they began to sink, people threw flowers, whose intense reds, yellows and whites bobbed up and down in the waves while handkerchiefs wiped away tears.

A short silence was observed for anyone who so wished to say a prayer. Then the sister blew a kiss towards the water. She turned around and the cortège parted to let her through and return home. All left at the same time the way they’d come, putting away their wet handkerchiefs, comforted by one another’s company, and with expressions on their faces that seemed to indicate they intended to be happy, reasonably happy, as if the ashes and the flowers slowly carried away by the tide reminded them how fragile life is.

She stayed by the lighthouse until everyone disappeared and then, only a few minutes later, saw the fishermen bait their hooks, raise their fishing rods and throw the lines into the water. She may have been wrong, but she had the impression that more fish started to bite then. And when, right beside her, a man pulled out a gilthead, the mineral sheen of its body lashing in the air, it occurred to her that they were catching fish which minutes before had eaten the ashes, and which in turn would be eaten by the fishermen’s families. She thought of her son and, shuddering, walked away quickly.

No, she didn’t have anywhere to scatter the ashes, neither a piece of land that was her own, nor a special spot that Manuel would have liked, nor a clear, fast flowing river where he had bathed. The whole earth was too rough, too bloody to take in his remains. If she could, she would send his ashes into space for them to float in the void like star dust, until at some point far in the future they came across a comet that swallowed them and carried them even further away, burning them in a luminous tail before they disappeared for ever.

When she lifted the lid, a slight smell of burning wafted up.
Very slowly, she took her ring off, held it for a few seconds in the air, and then dropped it in. It sank without a noise into the ashes, leaving a round mark bigger than itself. Now the two people who had loved her the most were together. If she was going to
disappear
, she would not leave behind their traces, would not allow anyone to throw the ashes into a bin with a face of disgust, and no woman would wear that ring.

Again she though of a place to hide them and, all of a sudden, the combination of metal and dust called up an old tungsten mine near her parents’ town, where she had gone on holidays until she was sixteen. It was a deep shaft, with an entrance four or five metres in diameter, fenced off with crude planks and a sign saying ‘danger’, even then almost illegible, with which the owners of that dry, deserted piece of land exempted themselves from all
responsibility
if an animal should fall in, or, even worse, one of those trekkers who, in the spring, walked about in search of truffles or wild asparagus. Death was certain. As a child, she had gone near it many times with her band of friends. From a distance, they would fling a stone into the shaft and listen in silence as it went down knocking about the rocks, reverberating with a deep, fearsome echo, before plopping into a bed of subterranean water. That was the ideal place to hide them; no one would profane them there. One of these weekends, she would go back to that town she’d never revisited.

Suddenly she noticed a tiny mark on the back of the hand resting on the urn. Surprised, she looked at the tear that stopped for a moment, as if it were hesitating, before sliding down her skin and falling into the ashes. Only then did she realise that she was crying. It had been so long since she had pitied herself. In the solitude of the house, she abandoned herself to the sobs which shook her whole body and in which she found, for the first time in seven months, a strange kind of consolation.