Obsession (Year of Fire) (60 page)

At six in the evening, two doctors from the intensive care unit spoke to Matilde. Roy was suffering from multiple organ failure.
Now there’s no hope left
, Matilde thought. They urged her to go in. Al-Saud made as if to follow her, but she raised her hand and shook her head.

“Roy, it’s Matilde.” Because his lungs had stopped working, his skin had taken on a bluish color and he had been intubated. “Roy, can you hear me?”

His eyelids flickered weakly open and he stared at her. The grip of death was clearly upon him. Matilde also saw the desperation in his eyes. She coughed as though to get rid of whatever obstruction was preventing her from speaking.

“Yes, Roy, I know. You want me to forgive you.” He answered with a slow blink. “I forgive you, with all my heart, I forgive you. Do you forgive me for not being able to give you the love you deserved?” Blahetter showed that he did with another blink. “Don’t suffer anymore, dear, not anymore. I’m going to remember you with affection. There’ll be no bitterness, I promise. Don’t suffer anymore.”

Matilde moved aside to make room for Roy’s parents. Minutes later, even though Mrs. Blahetter’s sobs drowned everything else out, she could hear the long, continuous beep from the heart rate monitor that announced the death of the man who had humiliated her and made her suffer. She ran outside and fell into Juana’s arms, bursting into bitter tears. Al-Saud came toward her and stopped a step away. He could feel Matilde rejecting him as though she had put up a physical wall between them. She didn’t want him there at that moment. He picked up his jacket and sunglasses and left. As soon as he crossed the hospital’s threshold, he called Diana and ordered her to report to the fourth floor of the intensive care init. He put the Aston Martin in gear as soon as he saw his employees enter the Hospital Européen Georges Pompidou.

Just after eleven that night, Matilde burst into the kitchen in the house on Avenue Elisée Reclus and anxiously asked Leila in French, “Where’s Eliah?”

“In the music room.”

She crossed the space almost at a run, ignoring the stupefied expressions of the three people she left behind. Diana, Sándor and Juana looked extremely funny with their mouths open and eyes popping out of their heads. They stared at Leila as if she had grown a third eye.

“Good evening, Leila,” Sándor said in Bosnian, almost in fear, and Leila smiled and hugged him without making a sound.

As she climbed the stairs, Matilde stripped off her shika, gloves, scarf and coat. She would have liked to be completely naked to feel the warm air of Eliah’s house on her skin. It was freezing outside. Outside, Roy was dead and his family was grieving for him. Outside, Aldo with his cold courtesy and distant treatment, had deepened her pain and guilt, draining her strength. Inside, in this warm, dreamlike refuge, was Eliah.
Why did you leave? Why did you leave me alone with them?
After emerging from Juana’s arms, almost blinded by tears and swollen eyes, she turned her head frantically from side to side searching for his tall, dark presence. “He left,” Juana told her. “When you came out, he stared at you for a second while you were crying, got his things and left. Maybe he thought you wanted to be alone.”

As she went toward the music room, the waves of sound pulsed in her chest, and her heartbeat accelerated along with her steps. All of a sudden she didn’t feel tired anymore. Standing in front of the closed door to the music room, Matilde put her hand against the wood. It wasn’t pulsing anymore; the silence was devastating. Her eyes began to prick and she felt a pain in her throat. When the music started again, the tears began to flow, mixed with a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a giggle; there was still life behind this door. She had no doubt that she needed the energy of the chords to confront him. She stood still, with her forehead and hand on the door, absorbing the vibrations. She knew this piece, it was one of Al-Saud’s favorites:
Revolutions
, by Jean-Michel Jarre. The overture had just begun. It reminded her of the day she first heard it, in Eliah’s Aston Martin, while he was taking her to Berthillon to drink tea.

Why was she afraid to go inside? Because she knew that she had meant to push him away at the hospital, as a form of punishment after she found out that he had threatened Roy with his gun. She didn’t like how easily he resorted to his weapon.

“What did you expect him to do? He did what any man with balls would have done,” Juana had defended him. “Mat,” she said, speaking to her like a child. “You always see men your way. But you don’t get the real picture. Men are different from us. They resolve their differences with their fists and make friends afterward. We may not fight but we’re a lot more insincere, don’t you think?”

She held her breath as the overture reached the climax that had moved her that afternoon in the car, an explosion of saxophones that revived the heat behind her eyes. She turned the doorknob. She stopped. Could he have locked it? She kept going. The door inched open and she could see Eliah’s shadow through the crack. He was sitting in his Barcelona chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, head in his hands. He seemed overwhelmed, defeated. She went all the way in and closed the door behind her. The volume of the music should have made it impossible for him to hear the tiny click of the door and yet his head still shot up and his eyes froze on her. She couldn’t bear to see him looking at her like that. His emerald eyes could be so hard! His brow could be so dark when it frowned! His mouth was so thin! She saw him stand up slowly, like someone preparing to deliver a more lenient reprimand than the situation deserved. He had showered, his wet hair was combed back the way she liked, and he was covered in a silk robe. He was so handsome!

His masculine perfection made her feel ashamed. After twenty-four hours without sleep and crying for fifteen minutes, dirty, with her hair all disheveled and clothes wrinkled, she must have looked like a cockroach. She began to feel tremors of anxiety. Small at first, they took hold of her throat before spreading massively throughout her body, stripping away what was left of her resistance. She dropped her shika, gloves, scarf and coat at her feet, and burst into tears with her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth gaping open. Her sobs sounded more like screams.

Al-Saud covered the space between them and took her into a protective embrace. He felt her cold fingers climbing up the silk of his robe with the frenzy of someone trying to stop herself from falling into an abyss, and sensed a change in the way she was crying. It had grown quieter but more intense. Finally, the flow was reduced to shudders and sniffles. Like a newborn puppy looking for its mother’s teat, Matilde, on tiptoe, guided by her nose, snuffled around until she found Eliah’s cologne at the base
of his neck; he usually put some on right after a shower. The familiarity of A*Men soothed her.
I’m home
, she said to herself, and held him tighter. No one could comfort her like Eliah, not Aldo, with his new stance of offended dignity, or Juana with her pragmatism and frivolity.
My God!
She worried.
When the time comes, I’m not going to have the strength to leave him.
She pulled her face away from Al-Saud and dared to look at him. He brushed the hair away from her forehead and dried her tears with the backs of his fingers.

“Why did you leave me alone? Why did you leave?”

“I thought that you wanted to be alone, that you needed your space. You came out of the intensive care unit and looked for Juana to console you,” he reminded her, but there was no reproach in his voice.

“I couldn’t grieve for him in your arms.”

“You can do anything in my arms, Matilde.
Anything.
It wouldn’t have bothered me to console you over his death.”

“Yes, I know. I know how generous you are. But I felt soiled and devastated by guilt. He died because he followed me here, because I had driven him crazy. He was obsessed with me. If he hadn’t come to Paris…”

“Matilde.” Al-Saud grabbed her by the shoulders, almost shaking her. “I want you to get that idea out of your head. Blahetter came to Paris for another reason. He was involved in something very shady. We may never find out what it was now that he’s dead. But he
didn’t
die because of you. Rather, he almost got you and Juana killed, don’t forget that.”

“I can’t stand smelling of the hospital. I’ve been used to it for years, but right now it’s unbearable. I need to take a bath and get out of these clothes.”

Though he had already showered, Al-Saud got into the Jacuzzi with Matilde and bathed her just as he had the night of the attack outside the institute, even washing her hair. Neither of them said a word. He stroked her back and arms over and over with a sponge to release the tension weighing her down.

“Why did you get back so late?” He whispered, so as not to break the sense of peace that had descended.

He saw how her back arched and her ribs expanded. She sighed before answering him.

“All I wanted to do was come home,” she said, and he smiled triumphantly at hearing her describe his house as
home
. “But everything got complicated. Roy’s mother fell apart, her blood pressure hit the roof, and they hospitalized her. Then there was the paperwork. Since he didn’t die from natural causes, the doctors called the police. They took away his body to do an autopsy. Don Guillermo, Roy’s grandfather, called the consul, who appeared immediately, and spent two hours going through all the steps we needed to take. I wanted to leave, I couldn’t stand being there anymore, but I felt obligated because…” she stopped.

“Because to all of them you were his wife, even though you never really were.”

“Yes, and because I’m an idiot and I always do what I feel I should and not what I want.” Matilde let her eyes fall closed when she felt Eliah’s lips on her back. “I always want to please everyone.”

“Well, you’ve achieved that with me. You please me a lot.” He heard her laugh sadly. “And at first you tried to be
very
unpleasant.” Matilde laughed again. “What did the consul tell you?”

“Oof! I’m dizzy from everything he said. The fact that the police were involved complicated everything, as you would imagine. My father-in-law suggested that they cremate him once the body was returned so they could go home with the ashes. But Don Guillermo told him to shut up and shouted that they would take the body back with them.” Matilde turned to Eliah, drawing her legs up near her chin. “Eliah, I don’t want to go to Argentina for the burial. I don’t want to,” she insisted, and put her forehead in the valley formed by her knees and cried quietly. “I want this horrible experience to be over.”

“Don’t go back.” Though he had said it calmly, Matilde perceived the anxiety in his voice. “Stay with me.”

She lifted her head and stared at him. It actually began to upset her that nothing seemed to matter to her except for the man with whom she was sharing the Jacuzzi. She wasn’t thinking about Roy or his funeral, or her new position as a widow; nothing mattered except that the prospect of being separated from Eliah frightened her.

“Don’t feel guilty,” Al-Saud encouraged her. “Do what you want to do. What do you want to do, Matilde?”

I want to be yours forever, but that wouldn’t be fair to you.

“I want to stay in Paris.”

“End of discussion. Matilde will stay in Paris and I’ll have words with whoever dares to contradict my love’s wishes.”

She laughed at his declaration, but suddenly went silent.
Would you draw your gun on anyone who tried to take me away to Argentina?

“What’s wrong?”

“I was very angry when I found out you had threatened Roy with your gun.”

“I realized you were angry. You were very cold to me.”

“I was very angry,” she repeated. “Very. I can’t stand violence.”

“
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
”

“I don’t know Latin, or whatever that is.”

“You were right, it’s Latin. It means, ‘If you wish for peace, prepare for war.’ It’s a quote attributed to the Roman writer Vegetius. That’s why they call nine-millimeter cartridges Parabellums.”

“I didn’t know that nine-millimeter cartridges were called Parabellums. All I know is the violence engenders violence.”

“Not if you finish your enemy. Matilde,” he said, “if a criminal was about to kill someone you loved and you had a gun in your hand, what would you do?”

“I suppose I would use it, but I don’t know. I don’t know how I would react.”

“I do know how I would react. And I showed you on Monday outside the institute. It was the same thing with Blahetter. He hurt you profoundly and I needed to warn him that you weren’t on your own anymore. Is that so hard to understand? And I regret not having been tougher. I was too…how do you say it?” he asked impatiently. “
Bienveillant.
”

“I understand. You were benevolent.” Since she didn’t want to argue about it anymore, Matilde changed the subject. “Eliah?”

“Mmm?”

“Do you think that Roy was poisoned?”

“We’ll know for sure when we get the results of the autopsy.”

“It’s hard to believe that Roy’s not around any more. He was so young and healthy and full of life. He was brilliant. Ezequiel told me once that he
had a very high IQ, extraordinarily high. He finished high school when he was very young. Though he was very secretive about his work and never talked about it, he once told me that he was building something that would make us rich and revolutionize the world of atomic energy. Maybe he said it so that I would stay.”

Al-Saud’s face was impassive, but his alarm bells were ringing.

“He never told you what kind of work?”

“No. As I said, he was very secretive. He didn’t use a computer because he was afraid a hacker would steal his work. He would say to me, ‘I work old school, the way Einstein would have done it.’ According to him, it took longer but it was safer. Oh, my God!” she said suddenly. “Could they have killed him because of his work?”

“Don’t torture yourself. Let’s try not to think about this hellish day. It’s time to get out, your skin and fingers are getting wrinkled. I want you to eat something, Matilde. You haven’t had a bite to eat since breakfast.”