If I Close My Eyes Now (27 page)

‘The big brute. Tell him to leave.’

Yet again, she was in two minds. Just in case, Ubiratan scuttled away from the bouncer, who was still standing there, waiting for the order to attack.

‘Now!’ demanded Paulo, waving the record in his right hand.

Hanna took a deep breath. She nodded her head, and Humberto understood. He left the room, and she stretched out her hands towards Paulo.

‘Give me that
Tosca
.’

Paulo still had his hand in the air.

‘Give me the record.’

Glancing over at Ubiratan, who was closing the door, Paulo did not move.

‘Make sure it’s locked, Ubiratan!’

‘That’s not necessary,’ replied Hanna. ‘The record,’ she said, pointing to it: ‘Give it me.’

Paulo grudgingly handed it to her. Hanna took it carefully by the edges, wiped it clean with the hem of her peignoir, and slipped it into its sleeve. She took the box set from Eduardo, opened it, put the record with the other three, then closed the lid.

‘Aren’t you going to interrogate her?’ asked Eduardo, turning towards Ubiratan.

‘
Comment ça?
What are you talking about?’

‘I’ll keep the door shut,’ Eduardo said hastily, jamming a chair under the doorknob exactly as he had seen it done in so many gangster films.

‘I’ve already told you, that’s not necessary!’ Hanna protested. She turned to Ubiratan. ‘What is it you want?’

‘To clear up some obscure points, Madame Wizorek.’

‘
Cette situation est ridicule.
Everything you were bleating about, everything you accused me of – it’s all nonsense.’

‘You were the one who killed Aparecida.’

‘Ah! …’ sighed Hanna disconsolately. ‘He really is off his head.
Alors!
So you’re the old man who likes boys that I was warned about.’

‘Being offensive,’ replied Ubiratan calmly, ‘will get you nowhere. The crime you committed might have been covered up for ever as a crime of passion or an insane attack by some anonymous maniac. But your jealousy meant you left your signature on the killing. A savage signature, one that only a woman could do to another: cutting the breast off. To get rid of the greatest proof of femininity.’

‘That’s right!’ Eduardo backed him up. ‘We know everything!’

Hanna picked up the cigarette box from the table beside the high-backed armchair, took out an unfiltered American cigarette and inserted it in her mother-of-pearl holder. With the gold lighter in her other hand, she faced all three of them.

‘A paedophile old man and two almost pretty boys …’

‘All we have to do is find the knife you used to kill her with,’ said Paulo.

‘Or the dagger,’ Eduardo cut in.

Hanna sat down. She inhaled deeply, lowering her head to her chest and waving the cigarette holder with all the exaggerated drama of a silent movie vamp.

‘Three little lunatics,’ she said, puffing out the smoke and smiling, ‘… playing at detectives.’

She was recovering her composure. She was in charge once more.

‘You have no idea what you’ve got involved with. Who you’ve got involved with.’

Hanna’s self-assurance disconcerted Ubiratan.

‘But you … you killed …’

‘I killed … ?’

‘You killed Aparecida.’

‘Her name was Anita. She stopped being Aparecida a long, long time ago. Are you going to stay standing up? Why don’t you sit down?’

She pointed to the sofa opposite her, letting the cigarette smoke trickle from her nostrils. Ubiratan sat down. Paulo and Eduardo went to stand on either side of him, as if mounting guard.

‘Do you really think this is the sort of conversation that children should hear?’

‘There are no children here,’ protested Paulo.

‘We’re helping with the investigation.’

She ignored them.

‘Would you like a cigarette?’ she said, offering him the box. ‘They’re imported.
Tabac blond
, from Virginia.’

Ubiratan took a butt out of the matchbox in his coat pocket. Hanna leaned forward and lit it. She placed a glass ashtray close to them both.

‘If we’re going to talk about Anita, if you want me to tell you what Anita’s life was like, I don’t think it’s a good idea to do so with these two children in my salon.’

‘I already told you, there are no children here!’ Paulo repeated, even more annoyed this time.

‘Don’t you think you should ask them to leave?’

‘I’m not leaving here!’ Eduardo said indignantly.

‘No way!’ added Paulo.

‘What I can tell you about Anita’s life, Mr … what is your name, by the way?’

‘Ubiratan.’

‘What I can tell you about Anita’s life, Mr Ubiratan, if you’re at all concerned about the upbringing of these two almost good-looking children, is not the kind of thing that impressionable minds should hear. I imagine you realize that. From the photos that I know you saw, you must have some idea of what our conversation will entail.’

‘What photos is she talking about?’ Paulo wanted to know.

‘You never told us about any photos.’

‘What’s in those photos that we’re not supposed to know about?’

‘Don’t you think, Mr Ubiratan, that it’s rather too soon to initiate
ces deux enfants
into these kinds of special tastes?’

‘What is she talking about, Ubiratan?’

‘Whatever it is, I’m not leaving here,’ said Eduardo.

‘We started this investigation together, and we’ve reached this point together. If one stays, we all stay. If one leaves, we all leave.’

‘You’re the one who has to choose,’ she said, before inhaling again, falling silent and waiting for his decision.

In the silence that came over the salon, the strains of a bolero could be heard from somewhere within the brothel.

Precious little woman
In the calm of night
No one owns your body,
Your lips are full of venom,
I know you want me to suffer …

Ubiratan lowered his head. When he raised it again, he turned towards the boys behind him. He gave an awkward smile that was at the same time a polite request and a demand they could not refuse.

‘Oh, Ubiratan!’ moaned Eduardo dejectedly.

‘No, not that!’ Paulo exclaimed, punching the sofa.

‘Please, Paulo. Please, Eduardo. It’s necessary.’

They trudged out slowly, in angry silence. Paulo gave Ubiratan one last infuriated look before slamming the door.

‘Good …’ Hanna inhaled, then blew out the smoke from her cigarette. ‘Let’s continue our game. The detective and the murderer.’

‘A murder isn’t a game.’

‘No, it isn’t. Depending on who dies. Anita, poor thing, is nothing more than a corpse of no importance.’

Stubbing out the cigarette, she removed it from the holder and tossed it into the ashtray. She crossed her legs with their thick ankles. She was wearing dark nylon stockings to hide the countless varicose veins.

‘
Qu’est-ce que vous voulez de moi?
’

‘Don’t you feel any remorse for what you did to Aparecida?’

‘Monsieur, what Anita lived through in eight years happened to me in little more than three months. From the
night when I left my village in Poland, to the evening when I set sail for Brazil from the port of Marseilles, I went with more men than most women do in their entire lives. Slovaks, Lithuanians, Poles. Hungarians, Germans, Turks, Australians, Congolese, Tunisians, Greeks, French, Canadians, Americans, English, Irish, Russians, Moroccans, Spaniards, Senegalese, Italians, Yugoslavs, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Palestinians, and even an Oriental whose nationality I never knew. I wanted to eat, and I wanted a passport for America. Anywhere in the Americas. That was why it didn’t matter to me what I did with my body. What they did with it. I was certain that when I reached America I would be clean again, and would go back to being the young girl I had been in Jedwabne.’

‘In Jeb—?’

‘Jedwabne. My village.’

Taking another cigarette, she placed it in the holder, lit it and inhaled deeply once more.

‘But when you reached Brazil you found compassion and support. Aparecida was surrounded by indifference.’

‘When I arrived at the docks in Rio de Janeiro, that protection society you spoke of took me straight to a brothel in a street behind Praça Onze. The square no longer exists. It was demolished. So was the brothel. In it there were other girls like me. Europeans as well. Girls who had fled the hunger of war, like me. Pure melodrama, monsieur. But why am I telling you all this boring soap opera?’

‘You were going to tell me why you killed Anita.’

She gave a long, high-pitched, theatrical guffaw.

‘
Vous êtes vraiment fou
. To think,
quelle folie
, that Anita was
going to run away from here, to try to start another life far from here. How naïve! How simple-minded you are! Anita starting again from nothing! And taking with her secrets that couldn’t be revealed! What a farce. Do you really think it makes any difference to women like Anita or me if we go somewhere else?’

‘She was young. She could have started over.’

‘Started over what?’

‘Everything. Life. A new life.’

‘A new life? With what skills? Washing clothes, ironing, embroidering, sewing and opening her legs?’

‘Everything is possible when you’re twenty-four.’

‘Only an old man could believe that. I can assure you that there was no way that Anita could start over at the age of twenty-four. Just as there wasn’t for me at seventeen, when I embarked in Marseilles. The difference was I didn’t know it.’

She fell silent. Crushed out her cigarette.

‘So why did you kill her?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s obvious I didn’t kill her. Why would I?’

‘Jealousy.’

‘Jealousy of what? Of the anguish of pretending to be a colour I wasn’t? Of being handed over to an effeminate old man? Of not being allowed to talk to any neighbours, to meet my relatives, to leave the house on my own? Jealous of being the female of all the men my husband would have liked to have, if his sense of sin had not prevented him?’

‘Jealousy of … of …’ Ubiratan did not know how to finish his sentence.

‘Jealousy of having my vagina, my mouth, my thighs regularly offered to my husband’s former colleagues from the seminary? Of being photographed with all kinds of objects stuck in my orifices? Of being pissed on, shat on, ejaculated on, of being tied up, gagged? Jealousy of that? Jealous of watching my husband masturbate while two men, sometimes four, five or six men took turns to penetrate me? Including my own brother?’

Ubiratan turned pale. His reaction appeared to take Hanna by surprise.

‘You knew that Anita and the mayor were brother and sister, didn’t you?’

‘I …’ He stuttered. ‘I suspected there might be some family connection between them. But …’

‘In fact, she was his half-sister. They had the same father.’

‘Senator …’

‘Diógenes. Senator Diógenes got a housemaid from the estate pregnant. I don’t know what she was called …’

‘Madalena …’

‘He liked young girls. To be the first man for the girls on the estate.
Le droit du seigneur
, if you follow me.’

‘Madalena was raped by the old man.’

‘In those days he wasn’t an old man. Or violent. Rough, yes. But he didn’t hit them or mistreat them. He had a great appetite for women, as we used to say at the time I met him. It was soon after I arrived in Brazil. He was a very attractive man. Thick lips, like an Indian. Big green eyes. Broad shoulders. Heavy. A bit brutal, yes. But extremely virile. A wild
animal. Especially with young girls. You’ve gone very pale: don’t you feel well?’

‘It will pass.’

‘Would you like a cigarette?’

‘No, no. No, thanks.’

‘When Adriano took Anita out of the orphanage …’

‘Adriano?’

‘The mayor. Adriano Marques Torres. When Adriano took Anita out of the orphanage and handed her over to Dr Andrade, the dentist, he thought she was nothing more than another unwanted child from their estate. Like others who were sent to that orphanage. He had no idea Anita was his niece.’

‘But you said she was his sister.’

‘Diógenes, Senator Diógenes … Do you know all that the senator has done for this city? Do you know it was him, or his family, who founded the orphanage, the health clinic, the—’

‘Yes,’ he said, interrupting her, ‘in this city there’s no way of not being aware of the Marques Torres family. But a short while ago, you told me that Aparecida and the mayor were brother and sister.’

‘Her half-brother. Anita was the daughter of a mixed-race woman.’

‘Elza. Who had her when she was twelve, I know.’

‘That girl Elza was the daughter of Senator Marques Torres with a maid who worked in the big estate house.’

‘Madalena.’

‘I don’t know her name. But she was the blood link between Anita and the mayor.’

‘So Aparecida was the mayor’s niece rather than his sister.’

‘According to what the senator told me, he was fifty-eight when he fell for a pretty mulatto girl on the estate. He had no idea who she was. She resisted him, and he raped her.’

Ubiratan could feel drops of cold sweat running down his scalp.

‘Nine months later, when that mulatto, that mixed-race girl, Elza, gave birth to a light-skinned baby, with green eyes like the senator, they took the child and placed her in the orphanage. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cigarette? A glass of water?’

‘A cigarette? Yes, I’ll take one.’

Hanna took two out of the box, put them in her mouth, and lit them both, with the feigned intimacy of a lover. She held out one, smeared with lipstick, to the old man. Ubiratan took it, but held it between his fingers, without smoking it.

‘Anita was the mayor’s sister and niece. The daughter and granddaughter of Senator Marques Torres. Wouldn’t you like a glass of water?
Un cognac? Un petit liqueur?
’

He waved his hand briefly to refuse her offer.

‘You seem to be growing paler by the minute.’

‘It’s nothing. Nothing. It’ll pass. So Elza’s children … so Anita … or rather, Aparecida. So Aparecida and Renato are the mayor’s brother and sister?’

‘No. Anita is the mayor’s sister. The boy isn’t his brother.’