At Close Quarters (26 page)

Having spoken more than was his habit, Samuel went quiet, but Marina pushed him to the sofa, lay on top of him and asked:

‘Tell me more about what it’s going to be like living together.’

He felt happy when he walked to Gabriela’s, and was surprised that his life had also changed in that respect: a few months before he just went from home to work and back, and now he was asked round a couple of nearby houses where he was always welcome.

Gabriela was out, but she had left her keys with Marina, so that he could come round in the afternoon to cure and fertilise some plants he’d given her, which looked a bit sickly.

He’d never been in the flat before and, when he opened the door, he was shocked by its darkness and stuffiness. It smelled slightly of rot in there, of a dry, mineral something: it was not so much an unpleasant as a disquieting smell – the smell of the habitat of moles, spiders, crocodiles perhaps. Unlike his place or Marina’s, where colours and furniture suggested light and open space, everything was baroque, dark, oppressive. All the important objects were inside, which was the opposite of what he liked: a house with a nice view that let in the natural light.

No wonder the plants were ill. The place was only suitable for fungi. He pulled up the blinds, which creaked with mould, as if they hadn’t been moved in a long time, and threw open the windows, marvelling at the fact that anyone – least of all a woman, given that feminine reflex of detecting stifling smells, of airing everything and chasing dust away – could live there without asphyxiating. Though it was light and air that was needed, at least Gabriela had taken care of watering the plants lest they dry up completely. The two pots in the laundry room had resisted better, and with a bit of pruning and some pesticide and fertiliser they would revive in no time. But the ones on the balcony looked bad, as well as the rubber plant by the door, with its long leaves drooping, covered in dust, dry at the tips.

He had given her a pot for the rubber plant with a water deposit and a gauge that indicated when it needed refilling. He bent down and checked it: not a drop of water left. He poured in three jars until it was full, and, after tearing off the dead bits, turned the pot a hundred and eighty degrees to correct the inclination of the tropism.

It was then that he saw a yellowish piece of paper stuck between the wall and the plant. It was a delivery notice – not a very old one, but judging from the layer of dust it must have been there several days, perhaps weeks. The deliveryman must have slipped it under the door when no one was in. A handwritten note read: ‘You were out’ and the times at which he had twice called. No doubt when Gabriela had opened the door the piece of paper had been pushed behind the pot.

He blew the dust from it and placed it on the coffee table, beside a framed picture of the dead child, where Gabriela would not miss it. Then, as if the notice had given him an idea, he tore a piece of paper from the notebook by the phone and scribbled a message: ‘I’ve taken care of the plants, but don’t forget to water them now and again. Samuel.’

He left the keys and note next to the delivery notice and, before getting the spray gun from the laundry room, stopped and went
back to the coffee table, realising what it was he’d seen without understanding. He bent over the small yellowish piece of paper written by an unknown deliveryman and, without touching it, read the date and the two times he had called, the exact hour and minutes, while understanding gave way to surprise and surprise to suspicion because of what that might mean, not only for Gabriela, for also for himself. For himself and Marina, he concluded with a shudder. At that point suspicion turned to fear.

‘It can’t be!’ he moaned, and reread the date and times he knew so well. And there they were, clearly written and perfectly legible although it was only a copy, with no margin for error.

He took his hands to the back of his head, his thoughts racing, resisting the impulse to run out of the house and leave the windows open so that the stuffiness would disappear and perhaps a gust of wind would take the notice far into the sea, as if it had never existed and he’d never seen it. ‘I don’t want to think about it,’ he told himself. ‘I don’t want to imagine what I’m imagining, don’t want to think that …’

He picked up the piece of paper and put it in the pocket of his shirt. Now it was he who needed darkness and silence; it was as if, with the notice in his pocket, he had to hide from the city that had seen him and Marina a few hours before, holding each other at the window. He quickly lowered the blinds and, before leaving, took a look around and made sure that everything – except the plants, watered, treated and cleared of parasites and dead leaves – was exactly the way he’d found it, the same isolation, the same darkness and the same clutter of photographs and mementos. He was too impatient to wait for the lift and so he ran down the stairs, two steps at a time, making no noise, like a thief in flight. The notice burned like a live coal in his pocket, but he checked he still had it every minute.

He could tear it into pieces and get rid of it anywhere in the city. He could burn it or throw it down a drain or sink it under the tons of paper his company sent to the cellulose plant, so that no one would ever be able to tell that it had reached Gabriela’s flat. Of
course, an original still existed, but no one, not even the detective that Marina had first hired and then fired, would ever think of asking at the offices of a certain delivery company whether they had left a notice at such and such address.

He walked fast, fleeing the house, until he reached the
waterfront
promenade, and sat on the parapet to think. A day or two after Olmedo’s death Gabriela had called him to ask for what she’d termed a small favour. She asked him where he’d been at the time Camilo had died, and when he said that he’d been at home on his own, and that he hadn’t talked to anyone, she put the question to him:

‘If they ask about me, could you say you had a coffee with me for about an hour? Not that it matters, and if you’d rather not do it, and anyone comes looking for that information, I’ll tell the truth, that I was alone at home and no on can confirm it. But then they’ll want to check it and they’ll want to know more about my relationship with Camilo. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t think I could take any unpleasant questions about my private life. I’ve suffered enough. And Camilo would not have liked me to talk about our private life – you knew him.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he’d told her. ‘I’ll say I was with you.’

‘That way they’ll also leave you in peace,’ she added.

‘Don’t worry.’

Because Olmedo had committed suicide. Later, when Marina began having doubts, it was impossible to imagine that Gabriela might have harmed the person who had loved her. Fragile, sweet, wounded Gabriela, whom tragedy had marked on the brow with the initial of her dead son’s name. She and Marina were the victims in all this, and it was impossible to imagine that someone might be both victim and executioner.

But then, why lie? What was she hiding? Until he’d found the notice, nothing had seemed particularly ominous in her request. In the last few months, Gabriela had been a constant presence in Camilo’s life, and therefore in Marina’s. In fact, the day he died both women had been to Samuel’s place to pick up some cuttings and plants he’d put aside for them. Marina had keys and both had
taken their time. He imagined them taking a look around the rooms, tidying this or that, turning off lights and appliances that he might have left on, gently mocking the absent-mindedness, clumsiness and inability of men to run a house. Marina had even taken down his clothes from the line and ironed some shirts. Did something happen to changes things a few hours later?

There was a loose detail knocking about at the back of his mind, a fuzzy fragment, out of place in the pleasant texture of that day, which he wasn’t able to bring into focus. In his mind he tried to put everything into chronological order: left for work at nine; Marina called him an hour later, saying they were going to his house now, while he was driving one of his vans collecting paper containers following a list … a list … a list … What was so peculiar about that list? The route? No … The fact that he’d had to print it quickly that morning at home before leaving, because the printer at work kept jamming. What with the rush, he’d left the computer on, but on coming back he’d found it off. What?

‘No, no,’ he moaned again, as he stood up with such violence that he almost knocked down an old man who happened by.

Blinded by urgency, he started walking home as he repeated:

‘No! I don’t want to think what I’m thinking! Because if that’s the case, I’m to blame too, not from the moment I gave her that false alibi, but from earlier, from that morning when she must have checked my computer and seen those pictures. No! Not even from then, but from a lot earlier, from the moment I decided to keep the file instead of deleting it.’

Never had the computer seemed so slow to start up. He clicked on ‘Pictures’ and then on the file he shouldn’t have kept, ‘Dog’. Although he hadn’t opened it again, the statistics revealed that it had been last modified on Monday, 16th April, the same day they had been at his house. But he knew it wasn’t Marina who had opened it, not only because she barely knew how to use her own computer, but because she would have told him. No doubt she would have seen the file with her name and she would have said something about the fact that he had spied on her.

So it could only have been Gabriela who’d seen how the dog tore apart her son in those horrible images she didn’t even suspect existed. Was there anything in them that had made her channel her pain in Olmedo’s direction?

His hands were shaking so much that he could barely place the pointer over the pictures. He opened them one by one, in order, studying first the street with the children and their mothers, Marina appearing, the school bus arriving and leaving, everything accurately timed, one take every sixty seconds, until he came to the last ones, where the boys appeared kicking the ball around, in baggy clothes two sizes too big, taunting the dog that was poking its head over the fence, with ferocious teeth and furious eyes that proved that dogs and men are alike in that they defend their own territory much more ardently than they attack someone else’s. And then the leap and the boy being bitten while his two friends ran off, not knowing what to do but horrified, along with other passers-by who flee, like the man who, at the back, with a hesitant look, glances at the scene … What was that? Why did he look so familiar? He enlarged the picture expecting the detail to contradict what the whole suggested. He shook his head, incapable of admitting that chance or fate might have used him as their plaything. Because that was Olmedo’s face, unwittingly photographed by Samuel before he knew him, captured as he fled, turning his head slightly backward. Samuel sank into his chair, still refusing to accept it, but now with a logical sequence in his mind in which everything fitted. Everyone knew that Camilo always carried a gun, even when wearing civilian clothes, because his name had appeared on a terrorist organisation’s list. If Gabriela had concluded that at that moment he was carrying a gun and didn’t use it …

No, it couldn’t be that simple, yet also that complex and painful. He took out the notice left by the delivery company and once again read the date and time, checking that Gabriela’s absence corresponded with the day the file had been last modified, only a few hours later. Everything fitted, and even Olmedo’s last words
acquired a fuller meaning. Desolate, he closed every window and turned off the computer, whispering:

‘If you had asked me I would have helped you. I don’t know how, but I would have found a way for you not to …’

He went into the bedroom and slumped on the bed. With his eyes shut, he understood that horror occurs when one’s fears are fully realised, as his now were. A few seconds later he got up and lowered the blinds for darkness to flood his house like it did at Gabriela’s and cut himself off from the outside world. He went back to bed, once again closed his eyes and searched in vain for an honourable way out. There wasn’t any. Disconcertingly, his confusion was born of knowledge, his doubts of lucidity. Two hours earlier, before he had read the notice, he was happy because Marina had agreed to move in with him; now everything was on the brink of collapsing.

‘Unless …’ he told himself, in such a state of excitement that he didn’t at first realise he was speaking out loud.

Unless he tore the notice into pieces and never said a word, even if that meant breaking the rules he’d followed all his life, abandoning the conviction that there are ethical codes one has to comply with even if they are not written in the penal code. If he didn’t talk, he would be committing a crime of omission, but everything would stay the same: Marina would stay with him, Gabriela would stay free and the detective would end up forgetting all about the enigma or, at least, accepting there was no chance of solving it. On the other hand, if he spoke … if he spoke it was likely that Marina would leave him, because he had triggered the chaos by spying on her. She would reproach him for the fact that everything, from the time he approached her to give her the bracelet, had been a lie, that their relationship was based on deceit.

He opened his eyes in the dark and decided that he wouldn’t do anything. Just dispose of the notice and keep quiet. He tore the piece of paper slowly, down the middle, afraid of making too much noise, while he told himself that, from then on, he’d only need to be vigilant for the rest of his life, second after second, so
that whenever he met Gabriela nothing would make her suspect that he knew her secret; so that when looking at Marina he didn’t shake for fear of saying the wrong word; so that when he held her he didn’t get restless at the idea that by laying her head on his chest she might hear the echo of the imposture beating within.

Because that was exactly it, being able to live with someone you’re deceiving and look her in the eyes without blinking – without your voice shaking or your pulse quickening. Or not being able to, because decency, or dignity, courage, integrity, whatever one wanted to call it, stops you not so much from lying as from living a lie, firmly uttering the words you need to sound convincing.