Obsession (Year of Fire) (86 page)

“Is that true, that your career is most important?”

Matilde’s eyes welled up as she affirmed, “He’s the most important thing, Eze. He’s the love of my life, my happiness, my savior, my everything. I’m never going to love another man like I love Eliah. But I could never tie him to me, or condemn him to a life with a woman who can’t give him children. I know that he wants them a lot.” She swept her hands over her eyes, dried her cheeks with the edge of her yellow shirt, cleared her throat and settled back, to the right, separated from Ezequiel. “Everything will be easier now, because although I love him more than life itself, I’m furious, I’m consumed by a rage I’ve never felt before. He told me that there was nothing between him and Celia. And it turns out that they’ve been lovers for years. The afternoon Eliah’s wife was killed in
a car accident—looking for him so she could tell him she was pregnant!—he was in bed with my sister.”

“We never knew about that relationship,” Ezequiel admitted. “They must have been very cautious because he was married. And she was always on the arm of some model or famous actor, so nobody noticed.”

“Eze, I think Celia really loves him.”

“Your sister is a snake who doesn’t love anyone.”

Al-Saud left the Aston Martin badly parked by the doors of the George V and jumped out to go back to the offices on the eighth floor. Matilde had vanished, alone, without a bodyguard, and he couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the apartment on Rue Toullier, she hadn’t gone back to the house on Elisée Reclus and he hadn’t seen her anywhere around there; he had just driven through all the neighboring streets. Juana was on the phone.

“Oh, Eze, finally! What the hell happened? Why aren’t you answering your cell phone?”

“I was consoling Mat.”

“She’s with you! Thank God!”

Relief flooded into Eliah’s body and made his legs and hands tremble. He approached the phone and tried to wrench it from Juana, but she stopped him, and with a gesture, told him to calm down.

“Give me to Mat, Ezequito.”

“She’s sleeping. It took a lot of effort to convince her to take a tranquilizer and lie down. She was very shaken up.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“She’s decided to live here until you guys go to the Congo. She doesn’t want to go back to Al-Saud’s house and she’s afraid to go to Enriqueta’s because of that guy following her. So she’ll stay here with me. And you’re coming here too.”

Juana hung up the call, and Al-Saud knew that if things had been bad, they were about to get worse.

“Did you speak to her?”

“No, she was sleeping. Ezequiel gave her a tranquilizer and sent her to bed. He says she’s doing really badly.”

“My God,” Al-Saud whispered. “Put on your coat and let’s go get her.”

“No, stud. Ezequiel said that Mat had decided to stay with him until we go to the Congo.”

“Absolutely not! She’s coming back to my house, it’s her home.”

“Stud, you know I’m always on your side, except for the mess you got yourself in with Celia, but I suppose that I don’t blame you. That one’s a spider who can trap anyone in her web. But it must have been so hard for Mat to hear that. You have to know that Celia hated Matilde ever since she was born, she was atrociously jealous of her. Matilde always felt as though she was to blame for Celia’s unhappiness, as if the fact that her father loved her more than her sisters was Mat’s fault. She suffered a lot from Aldo’s preference for her, and it ruined her relationship not just with her sisters but also with her mother. You know that she didn’t call on her birthday.”

Al-Saud’s heart was crying tears of blood. His sweet, tiny, pure, kindhearted Matilde had survived hatred, resentment and disdain from her own family, when in reality, they should have venerated her. He collapsed into a chair and put his head in his hands.

“Why didn’t she tell me she had suffered from cancer and can’t have children? Oh, just thinking about what she must have suffered…” Juana was moved to hear his voice crack.

“Yes, stud, she suffered a lot, did our Mat. But I already told you once, and you’ve seen that although she may look tiny and defenseless, she’s a lion inside.”

“I love her so much, Juana. I love her more than anything else in the world.”

“I know, stud, and she loves you, but what happened today devastated Mat, and if I know her at all, it will take a long time to fix what Celia broke. Take me to your house, please, so I can get some clothes for Mat and me. Spending a few days at Jean-Paul’s house will be the best thing for us.”

As they got closer to Avenue Charles Floquet, Al-Saud doubted his strength. He was afraid that he would break into Trégart’s house and drag Matilde out with him. Suzanne answered the door, and Al-Saud asked her to call Ezequiel. He had to wait on the sidewalk for a few minutes.

“What do you want?” Ezequiel asked sharply from the door of his building.

“How is she?”

“Bad. How do you think she is? Finding out that the man she loves is her sister’s lover…”

“Céline and I are not lovers. I haven’t touched another woman since I started my relationship with Matilde.”

Ezequiel shrugged. “What do you want?” he insisted.

“Listen to me carefully, Ezequiel. There’s someone out there that wants to hurt Matilde. He’s a very, very dangerous guy. She can’t leave the house without a bodyguard. The bodyguards I assigned to her will be here tomorrow morning. I’m asking you to convince her not to leave your house without them. I know you don’t like me and I understand, but this has nothing to do with our differences, only Matilde’s safety. Do I have your word of honor that you won’t let her go out without protection?”

“Yes, you have it. We don’t just have to protect her from that maniac, but also from Céline, who has a few screws loose, I can assure you.”

“Can I see her?”

“She’s sleeping. I don’t want to wake her up, because it was very hard for her to fall asleep. I had to give her a tranquilizer. She was destroyed.”

When he saw the pain in Al-Saud’s face, Ezequiel regretted having been so hard on him.

“I’ll come tomorrow to see her.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you. It’ll be a waste of time.”

Matilde woke up with a jolt. It took her a few seconds to identify the strange shadows around her. The memory of what she went through in the offices at the George V hit her. She was at Trégart’s place, Eliah and Celia were lovers, she would leave for the Congo and never see the love of her life again. But she had to admit that what anguished her the most was that Eliah knew that she wasn’t a woman in the true sense of the word and that she would never experience the magic of carrying a baby in her womb or giving birth or nursing. Tears slid down her temples and wet the pillow. What time was it? She sat up and fumbled around until she hit the button of the lamp on the deskside table. Three in the morning. She sat there, arm raised, looking at the Christian Dior watch Al-Saud had given
her. “But I don’t want you to waste your money on me, please.” “Who would I waste it on if not you?”
On Celia
, she answered. She didn’t want to imagine them together, she couldn’t tolerate the idea that Eliah and her sister had shared an intimacy similar to theirs. It was hopeless, the scenes cascaded over her and it didn’t matter how tightly she squeezed her eyes shut or tossed her head on the pillow, she still heard Celia’s moans and the grunts Al-Saud emitted when he ejaculated, and saw his hands on her breasts, on her long perfect legs, inside her. She sat up in bed and covered her face with her hands. It wouldn’t be hard for her to bury the love Al-Saud inspired in her if these painful visions flowed so freely. Rage and jealousy were doing a good job of it already.

Suzanne brought her breakfast on a tray at nine in the morning. Ezequiel walked behind the employee with a face that told her something bad was coming.

“Look, Mat,” he said, and tossed her a copy of the magazine
Paris Match
, which bounced off the duvet. “It was just published. Read page twenty-four. You’ll find it interesting.”

She recognized him immediately. The photograph of Eliah Al-Saud took up the whole page. They must have taken it on a very cold day, because he was wrapped in his camel hair coat, his hands jammed into his pockets; his head was leaning slightly forward. The frown that drew his thick, black eyebrows together gave him an ominous, threatening look. She passed her fingers along the image until the headline of the article caught her attention. “The Merchant of War.” She was afraid to read the body of the article, she didn’t want to know what she had wondered so many times in the house on Avenue Elisée Reclus. “These days they give themselves a patina of legitimacy by calling their enterprises ‘private military businesses.’ However, they’re nothing more than a company of mercenaries, expert soldiers, lethal weapons who sell their skills to the highest bidder.” Matilde read little snippets, and her heartbeat grew louder in her ears and in her neck, making her breath irregular and rapid.

“After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Western and Eastern societies started to call for disarmament and a decrease in defense budgets. Therefore, the market was suddenly flooded with highly qualified labor, above all from the former USSR. And so these ‘private military businesses’ were born. There are only a few on the market, they have a
turnover of billions of dollars a year and are gaining more power and influence in the political world every day. In the secretive world of mercenaries, it is said that one man tops the list: Eliah Al-Saud, the president of Mercure Inc.”

Matilde dropped the magazine as though it had burned her and raised her eyes, looking for Ezequiel’s consolation. Implacable, he plucked it off the bed and read the article out loud from beginning to end. Matilde heard phrases such as like “arms trafficker,” “tax evader,” “violator of UN regulations,” but she didn’t completely grasp the meaning of what Ezequiel was reading. There were references to his time as a pilot for the French air force and his participation in the Gulf War. “He’s an excellent pilot and can fly any machine that flies, from a Mirage 2000 to a helicopter. His participation in the Gulf War won him many honors. Why, then, did he ask to be discharged from the air force, where a promising future beckoned? Some speculate that it was because of the prominent role he played in the bombing of a bunker in Baghdad, in the suburb of Amiriyah, in which he shot missiles guided by GBU-27 lasers that slipped in through the mouths of the ventilation system, reducing four hundred and eight women, children and adolescents to ashes.”

“No!” Matilde exclaimed. “He didn’t know that there were women and children there! I know that he didn’t!”

Matilde didn’t pay attention to any more of what Ezequiel read until a few paragraphs later. She didn’t hear his voice, but rather the conversation she and Eliah had had after making love the night of Francesca’s birthday. “Were you in any wars?” “Yes, I was in the war. But I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t have good memories of it.” She also remembered that hours before, in the room where she was playing with Shariar’s children, he had asked her to be the mother of his children…

“And while he was selling weapons to the Tamil Tigers, he was training the Sri Lankan army to destroy them. He devastated the guerrillas in Papua New Guinea and guards the perimeters of diamond mines in Sierra Leone, while his clients sack the natural resources of a country using child labor.”

“Enough, Ezequiel! I don’t want to hear any more!”

“Fine, calm down. I wanted you to read it to convince you that you got rid of an unscrupulous son of a bitch.”

Matilde buried her face in the pillow and burst into tears. Juana came into the bedroom yawning, in pajamas.

“What’s going on, Matita?” she said, lying down next to her friend.

“This is what’s going on,” Ezequiel intervened and handed her the
Paris Match
.

After reading the article, Juana concluded that what had been broken the previous afternoon had been ground to dust by this article.
There’s no more hope for the stud. Who wrote this shit?
She looked for the journalist’s name.
Whoever you are, you can go to hell, Lars Meijer!

He stayed in the Aston Martin until he saw her leave the institute, cross the sidewalk very quickly and get into Jean-Paul’s Audi, which was driven by his chauffeur. For the stretch between the Lycée des Langues Vivantes and the Audi, Matilde was flanked by Diana and Markov, whom she greeted with a timid smile. Ezequiel went to pick them up twice, and Matilde let him put his arm around her shoulders and lead her to the Porsche 911. Matilde never looked up at the Aston Martin parked a few feet away, although she knew he was there, watching her, yearning for her, loving her, and that he didn’t approach her because he didn’t want to bother her. That was what Juana had advised him.

What would he have done without Juana, his great ally? Thanks to her he had daily news of Matilde, because though Diana and Markov saw her and followed her in their car, they couldn’t say too much to him. From Juana he knew that she was subdued like a wet cat, that she wasn’t eating much—this drove him mad with worry—that she caught her crying alone and she tried to hide it. He wasn’t in a much better state. He slept badly without her in his bed and he had lost pleasure in everything. The house was missing something essential, as if the roof had flown away. In what had been close to a month and half of cohabitation, Matilde had completely taken over him and his house, which, before her, he had kept from every other woman because it had been his refuge. Now he understood that Matilde was his refuge and that without her, his life became gray and empty of meaning.

On Friday, March 27, a week after the encounter with Céline at the George V, Juana and he had lunch in the same restaurant on the Champs-Élysées where Matilde had given him the little jar of dulce de leche. Juana saw that he had rings under his eyes and looked haggard.

“Oh, stud. You don’t know how sorry I am about this whole mess.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Everything happened at once. That idiot Celia’s little number and then the article in
Paris Match
.”