If I Close My Eyes Now (24 page)

She opened her handbag, tossed in the mother-of-pearl cigarette holder and set off again. Ubiratan followed her.

‘A final gesture of friendship from Dom Tadeu to his old seminary colleague. I imagine you know they were at a seminary together, don’t you?’

Still not looking in his direction, she brought the veil down over her face.

‘Friendships formed in our youth are the most solid. They create long-lasting affection. The bonds remain throughout a lifetime, don’t they say?’

The silence between each of Ubiratan’s outbursts was broken only by the tick-tack of the woman in black’s heels on the pavement. The old man took a box of matches out of his coat pocket, and extracted one of his rolled-up cigarettes.

‘Do you have a light?’

Yet again Hanna Wizorek gave no reply; nor did she stop.
Ubiratan held the cigarette in his hand for a moment, then put it back in the box.

‘The dentist was a man of great religious faith. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but his house is full of images of male and female saints. I know he went to mass every morning. Seven times a week. He confessed and took communion each time. It’s hard to believe that a man of such faith could go against one of the most fundamental Catholic precepts and commit suicide. To repent of the crime he committed, yes. To have a crisis of conscience, yes. But to commit suicide …To hang yourself with a tie, in a prison cell … Possibly the bishop doesn’t believe either that he committed suicide.’

Hanna came to a halt.

‘Are you going to go on pursuing me?’ she asked, rolling the ‘r’s in the middle and end of her words. To Ubiratan’s unpractised ear, the accent sounded more French than Polish.

‘I only want to chat for a while,’ he replied, almost jovially.

‘Why don’t you go and chat with the other old men in your home?’ she suggested sarcastically. She walked on once more.

‘If you know I live in the St Simon home,’ he said, catching up with her again, ‘then you’ll know that the old men in there aren’t interested in talking about crimes or crises of conscience.’

Still striding along, Hanna opened her handbag, took out the cigarette case and holder, and repeated the same careful procedure, slightly more rapidly this time. In order to light the cigarette, she was obliged to come to a stop again. Ubiratan did the same.

‘It’s also hard to understand why a man of such profound
religious faith, someone as devout as the dentist, didn’t stay in the seminary, don’t you think?’

As soon as she had lit her cigarette, she set off again. Ubiratan pursued her.

‘Doesn’t it seem curious that such a pious man didn’t follow his religious vocation? Or do you think something happened in the seminary, something so irreparable it made him change his mind? That altered the course of his life, against his wishes and his vocation? Something that prevented him going on? Or perhaps abandoning the seminary was not his decision? Who knows whether an episode took place which led the seminary to advise him to give up the idea of becoming a priest? What could have led such an apparently mystical young man to abandon a religious calling? He definitely was not opposed to celibacy. Even outside the seminary, the dentist was never seen in female company. He never patronized the girls in the hotel you run. A bachelor. Until he was almost fifty. Then all of a sudden, he got married. To a fifteen-year-old girl. Young enough to be his granddaughter. An orphan.’

‘Has it occurred to you,’ said Hanna, without stopping or looking in his direction, ‘that the marriage might have been a charitable act?’

‘Yes, it did occur to me,’ Ubiratan admitted.

‘You yourself live on charity in the old people’s home.’

‘But I changed my mind after I saw a photo.’

She inhaled and exhaled the smoke hastily.

‘It appears the dentist liked taking photographs,’ Ubiratan said casually.

Hanna cast him a sidelong glance.

‘He even had a darkroom in his house. He liked to develop the photos he had taken on the spot.’

He could see Hanna was quickening her step. He did the same.

‘Photos of those who came to visit.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘The visits he liked to see Anita have.’

‘I’m not interested.’

‘Did you know he and his wife slept in separate rooms? Each in their own bedroom. A very odd couple.’

They were walking more and more rapidly now.

‘They received visitors late at night. The couple received male visitors. He liked to watch.’

Hanna snatched the cigarette from the holder and threw it into the street.

‘To watch and take photographs.’

The holder was stuffed back into her bag. She strode out even more forcefully. Ubiratan started to fall back.

‘The dentist liked to watch and photograph the visitors and what they did with his own wife, to watch and photograph everything they forced his wife to do with them, with the friends who visited, to photograph what they did to her, inside her, and which gave him pleasure, as if it was being done to him, as if they were inside him.’

By now she was almost running. Both of them were out of breath.

‘I’ve got one of those photographs, Madame Wizorek.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘What the photo shows is disgusting.’

‘I don’t want to know!’

‘Why? Are you scared?’

‘I’ve got nothing to do with that. Nothing!’

‘Scared of what? Of whom?’

‘You’re a crazy old man!’ Hanna exclaimed, breaking into a run.

He wasn’t willing to let this opportunity escape. He started to run as well. He was panting, speaking in short gasps.

‘You’re scared. Because those meetings happened in your hotel too. Isn’t that right? With several men. Many men. Together. Isn’t that so? And also with objects. The dentist was there. Taking photographs. The girl he took out of the orphanage. In that supposedly charitable act. That you spoke of. The girl. Changed into that. Into that plaything. Of all of them. Where every hole had to be … penetrated. With flesh. With rubber tubes. Bottles! Who was there? Who took part? Who were the others? Why did they have to kill her? Why? What for? Why did they kill her? Why did they have to do it? Why? Why?’

Hanna ran across the street to the far pavement, her body shaking in her mourning clothes.

Ubiratan couldn’t keep up any more. Fighting for breath, sweating, he leaned against the cemetery railings, befuddled with weariness and rage.

Geraldo Bastos strode angrily into the glassed-in office where
Ubiratan was standing waiting for him, his hand outstretched in a greeting the other man ignored. He was still carrying the clipboard where he had been noting observations about the performance of his new Belgian looms before he was interrupted with the news of this unannounced visit.

Ubiratan let his hand drop, untroubled.

‘May I sit down?’

The industrialist made a vague, unfriendly gesture in the direction of a chair opposite his desk.

‘I’ve been walking the whole morning,’ said Ubiratan, still on his feet. ‘I went to the cemetery. I was at the burial of Dona Anita’s husband. Then I went for a stroll with that Madame Wizorek, that Polish lady who runs the brothel. You know her, don’t you?’

No reply. Ubiratan said nothing for a while, waiting for some reaction from Bastos. Then he sat down.

‘Before I came here, I passed by the bishop’s residence. Unfortunately, I was unable to talk to him. I was received by the good-looking young man who acts as his secretary and chauffeur. Do you know him perhaps?’

Geraldo Bastos closed the door. The rhythmic clacking of the looms disappeared. The soundproofed office, built up on this mezzanine only two years earlier, became a silent glass cage hanging over the vast floor of the Union & Progress textile factory.

‘It seems the monsignor has a very full agenda. He couldn’t see me today, or tomorrow, or any time next week. Not even next month. That is what I was told by that boy, that young man … what’s he called, that friend of this city’s bishop?’

The factory owner stared at him without a word. Ubiratan slowly lifted his hand to his coat pocket, reached for the box of matches, and then took out one of his rolled-up cigarettes. He waited again. Bastos did not move.

‘Do you have a light?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

Ubiratan waved the unlit cigarette.

‘Do you mind if I do?’

Bastos put the clipboard on the desk and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his starched coat. Ubiratan lit his cigarette.

Without a word, Bastos went over to a fan on a stand, pointed it in Ubiratan’s direction and switched it on. Walking over to the other side of the room, he did the same with a second identical fan.

The noisy draughts of air enveloped the old man. He lifted the lapels of his coat to protect his neck. He felt slightly ridiculous.

Geraldo Bastos went back to the desk, picked up the clipboard again and rested it on his arm.

‘You know I have no time to waste, that I’m a very busy man.’

‘No doubt. I just thought I ought to come and see you, because—’

‘I have to check how the new machinery I imported is performing. They’re extremely expensive looms, paid for in dollars. I can’t leave that responsibility to anyone else. I don’t wish to. Therefore—’

‘Since it was not possible for me to meet the bishop, I thought that—’

‘What you’ve been doing during the day is not of the slightest interest to me. And how Dom Tadeu conducts his private life is none of my business. I interrupted my work because I was told that the lawyer of Dona Anita’s family wanted …’ he corrected himself, ‘needed to talk to me. About some photographs.’

‘Precisely.’

‘You are not the lawyer of Dona Anita’s family. You are a retired cook, who used to work at a school in Recife. You’re on the police files as a Communist agitator.’

‘Yes, I did come here to talk about photographs. I’ve just left one with the monsignor. A contact sheet with lots of images. To remind him of the happy days in the seminary, where he and the dentist met and became such good friends. They were very close, so devoted to one another.’

‘That doesn’t interest me.’

‘But photography does. The photographs do. There are several images on this contact sheet. And there are lots more sheets. A trunk full of photos and negatives. I think they will interest you. Although it was of recent photos and contained new members of the group, the sheet I left for the monsignor shows the continuity of that intense—’

‘We’re wasting time,’ Bastos interrupted him.

‘Perhaps not. Do you know what photographs I’m referring to?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘The ones the dentist used to like to take. Of his wife with—’

‘I know the photos you mean.’

‘What you possibly don’t know is that the police took them from the dentist’s house and that they’ve now vanished.’

‘No, they didn’t vanish.’

‘I saw with my own eyes when the jeep—’

‘I have them.’

Ubiratan’s self-confidence evaporated.

‘The negatives as well,’ Bastos added.

‘So then …’

‘I’ve got everything.’

Not knowing where to go from here, Ubiratan tried to play for time. Taking the cigarette from his mouth, he glanced over to the desk looking for an ashtray to stub it out in. When he saw there wasn’t one, he crushed it on the sole of his shoe. Some of the ash fell to the floor and the air from the fan blew it all over the office.

‘Those photos …’ he began, not knowing how to continue. ‘They …’

Geraldo Bastos walked over to the door and opened it.

‘Is that all you had to say to me?’

Ubiratan put one hand on the glass desktop, and stood up, unconsciously obeying this order to leave.

‘I didn’t think that you took part in those …’

The memory of the muddy photograph flashed through his mind. Like hyenas devouring their inert prey. A pack of animals, tearing at an open belly.

‘Was that all?’ Bastos insisted.

The old man felt stupid. Yet again a feeling of nausea rose from the pit of his stomach, making him shiver.

‘I never thought you would be in those photos.’

‘I’m not.’

‘So why then … ?’

‘I’m not an exhibitionist, and I don’t like being photographed.’

‘Why then?’ he said, straightening up with difficulty. ‘Why then … ?’

‘As you yourself said, some … acquaintances of mine … possibly led on by their lack of shame and Dona Anita’s erotic arts, allowed Dr Andrade to take photographs of their moments of lust with his own wife. They were less careful than me. That’s why I thought it best to keep the photos. In the hands of an unscrupulous person they could damage the private lives and the careers of people I appreciate. I could never permit that.’

Ubiratan took a deep breath. He looked for any sign of cynicism in Geraldo Bastos’s face, but could not detect any. All he could see were the bland, impersonal features of a man who had been well fed for generations. There was no hint of irony either. He was dealing with someone who sincerely and honestly believed he was morally superior.

‘So you’re going to destroy them,’ said Ubiratan, heading for the door.

‘Yes, I ought to.’