At Close Quarters (22 page)

He grabbed the bag, locked the car and made for the gym. He pushed the door open with the familiarity of regular customers, passed the electronic card over the turnstile and went in to look for Galayo. He wasn’t in his office or in the second room, so Bramante returned and asked one of the trainers if he’d seen him.

‘He should’ve been back by now. He said he was running an errand and would be back in half an hour. But with the boss you never know!’ he added in a complicit tone.

Bramante was impatient to learn what the detective and his companion had been doing in there, whether they had asked about him and what had been said, but he didn’t want the employee to notice his concern. After a few seconds he said:

‘On the way in I crossed two guys I’d never seen before. New customers?’

‘Those two? God, no,’ he replied without concealing his scorn. ‘They wanted to speak to the manager.’

‘With Galayo?’

‘They asked for the manager. They didn’t know his name.’

‘So, they’re coming back?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Not after the mess they made.’

‘What did they do?’

The trainer pointed to the back wall.

‘Can’t you tell?’

Bramante didn’t like it when someone answered a question with a question, but he looked where he was pointing and, although he noticed something different, he couldn’t say what. The customers carried on with their regular exercises.

‘No.’

‘The mirror that used to be on the wall.’

Bramante realised it was missing. A few times he too had looked in it as he exercised.

‘He shattered it,’ explained the trainer.

‘The detective,’ he was about to ask, but caught himself on time, the words almost formed in his mouth, when he realised that there was no reason for the employee to guess he knew Cupido. So he said:

‘The tall guy?’

‘No, the small one. He said he was trying to lift a bar with two ten-kilo weights and it slipped from his hands.’

‘Galayo won’t like it.’

‘He won’t, but at least I made them pay before they left.’

‘Made
them
pay? So the other one was there too when it broke?’

‘No, just the small one. Now that you mention it, I couldn’t see the tall one anywhere when the mirror broke. But it was he who took out his wallet and paid without complaint.’

Bramante looked at the office door, which Galayo never locked. It wasn’t difficult to imagine where the detective was while his assistant created a diversion by noisily breaking a mirror. He must have slipped into the office and checked the attendance register. If Galayo had done as he’d asked him, the detective couldn’t have found anything. But he needed to make sure. He took two steps, opened the door with the confidence of those customers who were friends of the owner and told the employee:

‘I’ll wait for Galayo in here. I need a word with him.’

He turned the lights on and sat at the desk flicking through a magazine. A couple of minutes later he heard someone call the trainer from the second room. He stood up and pressed a key on Galayo’s computer, which he always kept on. He checked the 16th. His name was there and alongside it the empty box showing he hadn’t been in the gym. He heard the mouse creak between his fingers and released it on realising he was about to break it. Forgetting or ignoring his request, Galayo had not taken the trouble to fill it in. True, he had asked for it in a casual way, giving an excuse about being on duty at the base and without even
mentioning
Olmedo’s death. But he had trusted his diligence.

It had been so easy for him to check that he had no doubts the detective had done the same.

He moved the cursor over to the box and filled it with an X, as he’d seen Galayo do when the automatic system failed. He looked up his own personal sheet and marked it too. Then he sat down again and went back to leafing through the magazine. Apart from the detective, no one could prove now that he hadn’t been there.

He went out of the office and into the changing room. Ever since he had started weightlifting, he had noticed the resemblances between military instruction and physical exercise. The gym was a sort of civil instruction. In both you needed to repeat a series of movements until you gained full control of the instrument you worked with – pistol or bars, weights or rifle – and perfectly coordinated strength and motion. And then the physical discipline that both activities demanded was a branch of mental discipline – which was the capacity to make sacrifices and efforts and feel personal satisfaction, no matter what the actual reward was. He’d come to think that there was hardly any difference between being a good athlete and being a good soldier.

He himself set the pace, intensity and duration of the routines. He sat on an exercise bike and started pedalling energetically, hoping to relax with the effort and forget the anxiety caused by the reappearance of the detective. There was nothing like putting
up a fight against the exercise machines to make tension go away, purging one’s glands of the acid of stress by sweating, and making every muscle expel the detritus with which sedentary concerns tarnish the anatomy.

The problem of attendance solved, he had no reason to be anxious, he told himself. All evidence against him had disappeared and perhaps not even Galayo, after a couple of weeks, would remember his absence. And yet he couldn’t be calm. He’d like to be far away, travelling in an armour-plated vehicle down a road in the Afghan mountains.

He got off the bike when the sweat was dripping down his chin and moved over to the benches. Finally he started to relax by the second series of fifty sit-ups, his anxiety dissolving among the sweat and effort.

He greeted the tattooed Russians, but he declined their invitation to train with them. Then he sat on the machine for exercising the trapezius and pectoral muscles, and from there he saw Galayo arrive and go into his office. He wondered whether he should go and talk to him, but decided to leave things as they were. To bring the matter to his attention again would mean underlining its importance. He pushed hard on the bars until they both met in front of his eyes, feeling his pectorals tense up. Although he was beginning to get tired, he didn’t want to stop; he feared the anxiety would return. Those chatterboxes might ruin everything as in his worst
nightmares
: he’d be accused of murder and expelled from the army; he’d have to endure the degradation and humiliation of seeing a superior tear off his stripes and break his officer’s sword in half on his knee.

The shower almost burned his skin when he finally went under it, but he stayed there several minutes soaping up and cleaning off the sweat. Then he left for home quickly.

Carmen was lying on the sofa, watching TV and smoking a cigarette, wrapped up in that indolence that was neither boredom nor tiredness, but a form of contempt: the certainty that nothing around her was worth moving for. Bramante looked at the ashtray
full of cigarette butts. A few times he’d told himself that it didn’t seem very reasonable to stop loving a woman because she smokes, that feelings should disappear for better reasons, if at all, but he couldn’t deny that he’d thought about it and that that habit of hers intensely annoyed him. He walked over to the window and opened it to let some air into the room.

‘It’s really smoky in here! I don’t know how you can breathe.’

Carmen took two drags in quick succession before putting the cigarette out in the ashtray. She looked at the sports bag he was still carrying. Was it his imagination or was there a hint of a sarcastic smile in her face when she saw him come in from the gym, as if she mocked his efforts to stay in shape, while she remained sunk in that state of inertia that, in spite of the smoke and the boredom, seemed to be more pleasant than his training? During the months in which he’d taken Dianabol he’d hidden the pills he’d bought from Galayo in a tool cabinet in the basement, convinced that Carmen would never open it. But one morning when he was not home she went down to look for a nail and a hammer to put up a picture and saw the jar. She read the label and guessed what it was for. When he came back home, she waited for him to undress and told him:

‘I’ve seen those pills you take for your muscles.’

Then she looked at his forearms and biceps almost mockingly, as if implying they were fake and unnatural, implants alien to his nature.

Surprised, he tried to find an excuse.

‘They gave it to me at the gym, just to try it.’

‘Isn’t that kind of thing illegal?’

‘I don’t know,’ he lied.

Carmen looked at him, now without any sarcasm.

‘Are you sure it’s not bad for you?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

But since that day he’d never taken another pill.

He put down the bag on the floor and sat across from her, on the armchair on the other side of the coffee table.

‘I’ve asked for a new posting.’

Carmen turned down the volume and looked at him without any curiosity.

‘Well, you’ll get a new one even if you don’t ask for it. The base is closing down.’

‘No, not that. I’ve asked to go abroad.’

She sat up, suddenly alert to his words, she who hardly ever found anything he said interesting, who pretended to listen, nodding to everything, while she went on flicking through a magazine, or paying attention to the stupid, spiteful words on the TV.

‘Where?’

‘Afghanistan. Next month is the changing of troops.’

‘Is this confirmed?’

‘Yes. They accepted my application. I didn’t mention it before because I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t back down at the last moment. But now it’s confirmed,’ he repeated.

‘For how long?’

‘To begin with, five months, with the possibility of extending it to double that.’

He saw her get another cigarette and light it slowly, taking one long drag at it, her face concentrated on the burning tip, so he couldn’t know whether the news saddened or gladdened her.

‘It might be good for you,’ she said exhaling the grey, dense smoke. ‘Ten months fly by and no doubt would help you get that promotion you’ve been expecting for so long.’

Despite his limited grasp of subtleties, it didn’t escape him that she had automatically registered the longer period, and referred to ‘you’ rather than ‘we’ when speaking of his work prospects. Now she was taking a step back, as if everything concerning the army was his own business and she didn’t want anything to do with it. However, a posting in a difficult territory was a serious matter, and he was hurt by the indifference with which she took the news, as if she didn’t care that he was going away, that he was disappearing from her life for months. Perhaps, he suspected, she was glad to get some time on her own, to have the whole bed to herself, not to have to agree on mealtimes and work schedules, to smoke two
packs a day without being reproached for the smell, the smoke and the ash falling on the table. She didn’t even ask about the dangers involved in the mission: she’d been more interested, the year before, in what damage the Dianabol might cause him than now she was in the Taliban bombs.

How little he meant to her! She wouldn’t suffer if he died, she wouldn’t miss him if a bomb hidden on the side of a dirty Afghan road went off when his vehicle went by, blowing off his head. She would shed a tear or two, surely, when his colleagues lowered the coffin off the plane – and that would be the only time she’d cry for him – but before long she would be back attending cocktails and official functions, smiling a little flirtatiously, a young widow, sexy, attractive and free, without the ties imposed by children. Retired generals would slobber over her and his own comrades-in-arms would bare their fangs.

Well then, he would leave for Afghanistan and forget all about Olmedo, the closure of the San Marcial base, the detective’s
irritating
curiosity and his wife’s indifference. Far away, on the fierce Asian plains, in a place where action trumped words, where it was possible for a soldier to become a hero, he would fulfil his duty as a first-rate army man, with pride, without looking back, without fleeing risk, so that there might be a chance to earn a decoration and return with a medal on his chest and another stripe on his shoulders. It was possible that all the circumstances that now conspired to make him leave would contribute, in the course of a year, to his promotion, to earning the respect of his colleagues and having his picture printed in the newspapers. Maybe that old cliché wasn’t true, he thought as he saw Carmen tip her cigarette over the full ashtray, but its opposite was: perhaps behind every great man there’s a woman with whom he never has a moment’s peace, from whom he escapes, compelled to do out in the world all the great things he cannot do at home. Bramante wondered whether it was not hurt, unhappy men who carried out heroic deeds, who drew from their malaise the necessary energy to take great leaps, who courted danger to ease their pain.

His father had spent all morning making noises. Every ten minutes he flushed the toilet and, between visits to the bathroom, managed to knock things onto the floor, shout to Evangelina, bang doors, and drag around the chair next to the map showing
terrorist
attacks. So Ucha had barely had any sleep, which he badly needed after a bout of migraine.

In any case, he preferred working the night shift, and although this favoured most of his colleagues, who preferred the day,
Castroviejo
didn’t always authorise it. When he did, Ucha had
breakfast
with his father on returning home and waited for Evangelina to arrive and take over. At eleven, without hurrying, not yet tired, he would go to bed after reading the paper and sleep for six or seven hours, until five or six in the afternoon. He would get up refreshed, do a few chores and keep his father company until half past ten, when it was time to return to the base.

Neither natural light nor the usual sounds of the day – the background noise of traffic, of the street, of Evangelina doing the household chores – bothered him or interrupted his sleep. But he was particularly sensitive to the noises his father made deliberately to awaken him for the slightest thing. His father didn’t like his working at night. He reproached Ucha that he did it on purpose not to see him or talk to him, to leave him on his own: at night he was at the base, his father would say, and for most of the day he slept in his room, so there was no time left to look after him.

It was six o’clock. He put on his bathrobe, got some clean clothes
and went into the bathroom to shower and shave. When he walked into the living room, his father was sitting in front of the map and seemed to be counting the number of tacks of different colours on it. No continent was tack-free: the Americas, Africa, Oceania and Asia were covered in circles, their size directly proportional to the number of deaths: New York, Beslan, Bali. But it was in Europe – Madrid and London – and the Middle East where the marks clustered together. In Iraq, Israel and Palestine there were so many yellow tacks that in some areas they overlapped to the point that they hid the place names underneath.

‘A car bomb has just gone off in Istanbul. At least eight people dead,’ his father informed him, before even greeting him.

Ucha shook his head and let out a grunt that could well mean resignation or anger, but which didn’t encourage his father to launch into a more detailed explanation.

‘When are you going to do something?’

‘I’ve told you a thousand times, Dad, that the war against terror is not the duty of the army, but of each country’s police.’

‘And you see the results! In my time it was the duty of the army, and these things didn’t happen.’

‘Times have changed,’ he replied patiently.

‘And will change again … back to the way it was. You’ll see. I’ll die soon, but you’ll live long enough and will see the old order again.’

Without warming it up, he ate a bit of what Evangelina had prepared, and drank a coffee filtered several hours earlier. He had nothing to do, so he decided to take the car to a garage to have it washed. And as he waited for it, he went for a stroll with his father.

On coming home, two hours later, his father seemed relaxed and grateful that he’d devoted some time to him, even though they hadn’t walked around a nice area. That night he’d sleep better, he told his son.

They watched the news on TV – the images of the Istanbul attack that had already claimed eleven victims – dined on a reheated dish, and he waited until ten to leave for the base. He
was going to be early, but he preferred this to staying at home with nothing to do.

The corporal on guard duty lifted the barrier to let him through and saluted him. He parked in front of the central pavilion and, when he got out of the car, saw that the lights were on in the colonel’s office. What was the old man doing in there so late? He locked the door and went in to say hello to him. There might be good news.

The Colombian orderly – or was he Argentinian, or Ecuadorian? he couldn’t remember – was sitting on a chair in the
corridor
, and stood to attention when he saw Ucha approach.

‘Is the colonel inside?’

‘Yes, captain.’

He knocked on the door and waited for a reply before trying the handle.

‘May I, colonel?’

‘Come in, Ucha, come in.’

The orderly closed the door at his back and Ucha walked along the long carpet that led to the desk. He thought that in the last two weeks Castroviejo had shrunk, not because his flesh was disappearing and ossifying as in so many older people, but rather because he seemed to have begun a retreat into extinction. Something in his attitude put Ucha in mind of a widower who had just lost his wife and has not yet come to terms with her absence and doesn’t know how to organise his life.

‘I wasn’t expecting to find you still here. Is there anything you’d like me to do?’

‘No thanks. There’s nothing in particular that needs doing. I was just tidying some things,’ he said, pointing to some piles of documents and folders on the desk, which was usually clear. ‘Have you heard?’

‘No, I haven’t spoken with anyone today,’ he replied, though he could guess what he meant.

‘This morning we received official confirmation of the closure.’

‘Is there a date?’

‘Not yet. They’ll tell us in due course, but I don’t think it’ll take long. Better be prepared. Have a seat, will you?’ He pointed to the chair in front of the desk. ‘Have you decided what to do?’

‘I think I’ll ask for early retirement.’

The colonel looked at him gravely. Ucha knew he didn’t share that decision. He often heard the colonel speak badly of army men who hurried into retirement when they turned fifty.

‘If I stayed on active service, I’d have to change houses and cities. And I don’t think my father would welcome those changes,’ he said, feeling the obligation to explain.

‘I understand,’ the colonel said in a calm, tired tone. ‘The closure of San Marcial has upset our lives more than we can bear. Have you heard what Bramante has decided to do?’

‘No.’

‘He’s going abroad, to Afghanistan. I myself submitted his application. Putting in a good word,’ he added.

‘This,’ said Ucha, pointing at the office but also at the large windows behind which all was dark, ‘will come to nothing.’

‘Empty,’ added the colonel. ‘It’s astonishing how quickly everything can empty out. To think of all the years it took to fill up!’ he exclaimed in a low voice, without looking at him, as if he needed no interlocutor.

‘We’ll all miss it.’

‘All? No, just a few of us. Make no mistake, Ucha, make no mistake. There’s a world outside that doesn’t even know we exist … or that regards us as a hindrance to the urban development of the city, as parasites with stale habits and ancient codes that no longer hold any value, as a group of fanatics. They think we’d be happy to die from a shot in the heart after planting the flag on a rock we’d just conquered. Would you believe it, in these last few days I’ve come to understand Olmedo?’

‘Olmedo? Can’t say that I have. I think he’s mostly responsible for all that’s happening to us.’

‘No, captain. Without him the closure might have been put back, but it would have happened all the same. Olmedo was
cleverer than us, he understood it first. Deep down, he may have done us a favour.’

‘How?’

‘By saving us from prolonging an agony that, like any agony, would have been painful.’

‘That’s called euthanasia, colonel. Professional euthanasia,’ he dared to add.

Castroviejo looked fixedly at him, his blue eyes, slightly milky, filled with reproach, surprised at his comment.

‘Well, we can only confront it with pride, captain, seeing that it’s inevitable.’

‘With pride?’

‘The greater the failure, the greater the pride one must confront it with, whether one is a soldier or not,’ he added fidgeting in his armchair.

Ucha smelled the mild aroma, at once sweet and foetid, of a fruit he couldn’t identify. The colonel’s voice sounded indomitable once again, disproportionate to his small body, as if it had been emitted by a younger self: the voice of someone who had done nothing but give orders and seen them carried out for two thirds of his life. But that was what was expected of him: he wouldn’t leave his post with a fake smile, hanging his head, but would do it with his chin up and with as much pride as the defeated general – defeated, perhaps, but not conquered – who surrenders the keys to the city only when the gates are about to be pulled down.

‘I’ll bear it in mind, colonel. I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said before asking permission to leave to start his shift.

The changing of the guard took place a little early, and he went out into the esplanade. He looked up and saw the windows of the office: the lights were off now, Castroviejo must have left. A very thin crescent, tilted like a bowl pouring light into the darkness, hung in the sky. It was a mild dark night. He looked at his watch until the hand of the seconds marked exactly eleven o’clock. Then the clear, melancholy notes of the bugle punctually tore through
the air, ordering absolute silence. As the last note froze, a distant cat meowed plangently.

Ucha walked towards the depopulated barracks. He liked the hours between sunset and sunrise, his night-time walks during which he watched over the place as everyone else slept. It seemed to him that, in those moments of freedom and deep silence, only altered by the gurgling of the city’s entrails, he could hear the very breathing of the earth, the panting caused by its incessant spinning while carrying on its shoulder the increasingly heavy load of humanity.

He stopped and looked up at the sky, where the bowl of the moon did not cast enough light to dim the glow of the stars higher up – so far away, so immune to man’s destructive impulses. They were an example for man; he’d always regarded them as more
disciplined
than the best elite corps: punctual, sleepless, hard, clean, always in the same harmonious and balanced position, always alert, always in their place, like tacks fixed in a place beyond the sky, holding up the dark, distressing cloth of the shadows, to stop it falling on the world and smothering it under its weight.

He was approaching one of the sentry boxes at the back when he discovered the shiny tip of a cigarette. He stopped for a couple of seconds, and continued in silence in order to catch the smoker unawares. When he got to the top of the high ladder he saw that the soldier had left his Cetme leaning on the wall of the sentry box, behind him, and was smoking with his back turned to it, blowing the smoke out of the window, in the direction of the headlights of the cars that went past on the distant road. He took a step in complete silence, raised his gun and pointed to the soldier’s back. Only then did he say, in a threatening yet sarcastic whisper:

‘One dead soldier.’

He gave the boy such a fright that he dropped the cigarette, which fell at his feet, the tip shining like incriminating evidence. The boy stood to attention, and Ucha waited for the cigarette to die out, without replying to the clumsy, stammered salute – ‘At your service, captain’ – which the boy barely managed to utter.
Only when the cigarette was extinguished did he say, without lowering his Cetme:

‘If I were a terrorist, you would be dead, with a bullet in your chest. Don’t you know that a guard must never abandon his weapon?’

‘Yes, captain.’

‘Don’t you know that a soldier on guard duty mustn’t smoke?’

‘Yes, captain.’

‘Don’t you know that a soldier on guard duty mustn’t get distracted?’

‘Yes, captain.’

‘Don’t you know that a soldier on guard duty is the one who ensures their fellow soldiers’ safety.’

‘Yes, captain.’

Now he realised that the boy was only a child and that the fear of punishment had made his voice fainter with every reply. He slowly lowered the Cetme so that the barrel pointed to the floor, and for a moment wondered whether he should now give him a break. But he still added:

‘Don’t you know that a soldier on guard duty should never break down when he’s surprised at fault.’

The boy was slow to reply, as he didn’t seem to understand why, in spite of having lowered his gun, the captain was still angry. His voice sounded firmer when he said again:

‘Yes, captain.’

‘Then pick up your rifle,’ ordered Ucha pointing at the Cetme, ‘open your eyes, don’t smoke, and be alert.’

‘Yes, captain.’

‘Return to you position. I’ll talk to you later.’

‘Yes, captain.’

He turned his back to him and went down the ladder without looking back. He decided not to punish the soldier, but he’d leave him to fear punishment all night. The San Marcial base was
emptying
, and a sort of abandon was contaminating all levels of the hierarchy, from the colonel down to the rank and file: that boy
was behaving like a child who doesn’t look after that which he’s seen adults treat badly. He evidently thought that no one would be interested in entering there, a building about to be sold. Ucha thought at that moment of the detective and imagined him jumping over the wall in an area of darkness, out of the apathetic sentinels’ sight, and slipping into the main building in order to break into Olmedo’s office in search of some evidence that might prove there had been foul play.

The detective had found it strange that, even though no one believed it was suicide, nobody lifted a finger to disprove it. But why should it? Death by suicide simplified everything, suited
everyone
, no one would try to overturn it. Olmedo, who in life had been proud, fortunate, brilliant and successful, had had a painful, miserable death; no one could fix that. May he take with him to his grave his arrogance, his medals, his promotions, his prestige. May he rot with them, like the ancient dead who reserved their best jewellery for their last abode. And may he leave the living in peace.