The Faint-hearted Bolshevik (11 page)

Shortly after leaving the vacant lot I found myself on the motorway to La Coruña. Due to the state of shock I was in, I had taken the road for La Coruña instead of the one to Madrid. I remembered that I’d got my money and cards back and so I didn’t turn around.

I drove all night. I stopped to refuel in the middle of the Castilian tableland, I couldn’t say exactly where. I drove the rest of the way to La Coruña without stopping, and since it was still very early in the morning when I got there I took the road to Cape Finisterre. Dawn found me on the cliffs, leaning against the car, waiting at the mercy of the breeze.

Whenever I’ve driven somewhere, once I’ve covered sufficient distance to feel far away from home, I’ve always enjoyed getting out of the car, leaning on it and looking at the countryside, the sea or whatever’s there in front of me. There’s something comforting in the solitude you experience, your own and that of the car that is subject to your will, with no option but to go and take you wherever you drive it, even if you accelerate just for the sake of accelerating, with no fixed destination in mind.

That morning, facing the end of the earth over which I had driven all night, the solitude was so great and my disorientation so absolute that I forgot the time. I was there for hours, and before I left something happened that I can’t help pointing out. My eyes suddenly filled with tears and a shiver went down my spine. It was then that I realized, as perhaps I hadn’t realized for the last ten years, that I was alive, and in the middle of the catastrophe I gave thanks for being alive, and not lying dead in the middle of a vacant lot like Rosana. Nobody would take my side, I could already imagine how even I would torture myself, and on noticing what was running through my head I considered myself as much a son of a bitch as anyone reading this now will. In spite of this, I gave thanks, and accepted that I was indebted to Rosana for my good luck and her misfortune.

From that morning on, I had the task of bringing something of her into all the mornings she would never see again. For this reason, although my lawyer says it won’t support my presumption of innocence, I cut out all the photographs of Rosana that have been published in the press and I’ve built a sort of little altar before which I meditate for ten minutes every morning while listening to the first movement of
Der Tod und das Mädchen
. When the string quartet reaches the highest point of this divine melody that the world owes to Franz Schubert, I remember how she used to laugh, how she used to walk and also, why not, how stunning she looked in that pink bikini.

It took them almost two weeks to turn up at my apartment to arrest me. The investigation was thorough rather than lengthy. The obscene or simply bizarre phone calls to the López-Díaz household were immediately linked with Rosana’s sad end, plainly a maniac’s doing. The police found my stupid conversation with Rosana’s mother on the eve of the event particularly illuminating. The girl’s presence at a swimming pool on the afternoon of the crime with a man in his thirties was also quickly established. Barely a couple of days later, it was confirmed, thanks to Izaskun and the other girls, that a man in his thirties had been prowling around the school. With a bit more effort, various witnesses of our meetings in the Retiro park appeared. Naturally I’m dispensing with all the false leads, from those who’d seen Rosana dancing with a legionnaire in a Torremolinos disco the night before to the person who swore they’d seen her being forced to sell herself at road-side dive near Cuenca. The strange thing about this false lead, and the reason I remember it, is that the young girl who had caused the misunderstanding was freed by the police afterwards and it turned out that she was a Russian named Olga Nikolayevna who’d been illegally trafficked from her country.

Since I had no criminal record, the investigation came up against the stumbling block that none of the witnesses recognised me among the maniacs they had on file. But a competent female inspector interviewed the family extensively until Sonsoles remembered she’d been involved in a road accident the day the unexplained calls started. They got my name from the insurance company and then the pictures and all the witnesses started pointing the finger of blame at me and from that point I could consider myself screwed.

The day they nabbed me, while they were handcuffing me and reading me my rights, the inspector responsible for my arrest looked at me with such hatred and satisfaction that I had to reconsider the strange fact that Evil can also nestle in the generous bosom of the Good. And in the car the inspector put her feelings into words, “I know that seat has a a lot to tell, but I doubt it’s ever had a piece of shit like you sitting on it.”

In one way I agreed with her. However, I took her to task for being so vicious: “‘For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.’ Gospel of Matthew, chapter seven, verse two.”

“I couldn’t give a fuck. I’m an atheist.”

“Not a very prudent religious option, but I respect it. What do you give a fuck about, if you don’t mind my asking?”

According to my lawyer, who seems to be a pretty meticulous young lady, it would have been better to keep that question to myself.

One afternoon when I was halfway through the notebook, I began to think about how the story would end. These are some of the possible endings: offer up some cautionary moral message for those youngsters still on the straight and narrow; beg for clemency; describe Fredi and Urko in great detail in case they were caught committing some other violent crime one day; say to hell with it all and give a raw account of my most pornographic fantasy about Rosana. After carefully weighing up all the options, I decided I would write something contrary to my convictions.

Convictions are highly valued today, I suspect due to the general guilty conscience that there are so few of them and they are so basic. However, you can never be sure what good any conviction might do, nor where it came from. Now is the time for me to declare that convictions usually have dubious origins and absurd intentions, and that a lot of effort is wasted as a result of them, and cruel suffering inflicted on innocent people. For that reason it’s a good idea from time to time to try maintaining the opposite to what you believe and to find out whether it can be even more convincing than your own belief. Then you can go back to your starting point, because the important thing is not to be right, but to feel good. In the same vein, if the opposite stance to your conviction makes you feel more at ease, whether or not it’s more persuasive than your conviction, there’s no sensible option but to change your position. Growing bitter due to a chance loyalty is a sign of immaturity.

My nature is not well disposed to conviction. Almost everything I’ve seen has taught me to be quite sceptical. However, it’s undeniable that even an unbeliever finds certain bastard forms of conviction in that same unbelief. In the course of these pages I’ve gradually revealed a few, but there’s a specific one that I would now like to refute as I say my farewells: that you should ignore your fellow men and that devotion to another person brings about the self-destruction of whoever practices it.

The facts are that, soon after discovering her, while rummaging freely in her sister’s life, I allowed myself to get close to a beautiful young girl I didn’t know, and I did so in a state of blind rapture. It is also true that as a direct consequence of that action, more than any unpredictable misfortune, my life has been ruined, probably forever. I’ve lost my job, my good name, my freedom and all my credit cards. They’ve also seized my car and I’ve experienced various new and extreme forms of pain. In short, the facts seem to uphold my original conviction. What could go against that?

I’ve come here tonight to say goodbye and to maintain that a man is no more than the pieces of himself he’s given up in sacrifice for others. Everything he suffers on his own account is shit that falls in the barren desert. What one suffers for another human being, on the other hand, is the seed from which springs the tree of memory. And that tree protects man from the threat of the desert sand and shit, from oblivion and death.

Before my downfall took on the specific shape of Rosana, I was nothing, I was a nobody. The days used to wash over me like waves on a deserted beach. Trapped between my sarcasm and my mood swings, I fought my way through life without enjoyment or surprise. And the fact is that, almost by definition, a person can’t do anything decisive for themself (I include the word
decisive
to exclude trivial self-serving things that don’t have anything to do with this: brushing one’s teeth, cutting one’s nails, feeding oneself, switching the television off). It’s also true that you can’t do anything decisive for other people and that other people can’t do anything decisive for you. What I learned thanks to Rosana was that only when you think about someone else, and only in this way, can you really accomplish something decisive for yourself.

One summer afternoon I abandoned everything to make Rosana the main purpose of my existence. Maybe at times my intentions have been frivolous, this deserves the reproach it deserves, but it doesn’t erase the fact that she became the axis around which everything began to orbit. Then, almost immediately, she disappeared and I was left with just her memory and a sense of longing, and ever since the sense of longing and her memory are, more or less, the only things that concern me since then. I’ve stopped worrying about what might become of me, what I am, was or could have been. I no longer feel sorry for myself, because I have no sadness left after using it all up on her absence. Since I met her, and most of all ever since she left, there’s been no room for anything else but her in either my soul or brain.

Now the rabble insults me, mothers use my name to threaten little girls who won’t eat their food, and if I were in Arkansas my lawyer would be appealing, without much hope, for me to be spared the electric chair. And it’s now, only now, that for the first time in my life I have the impression of having been something. Before, if God had asked me what I’d done with the time he’d allotted me, I would only have been able to offer him a miserable inventory list of my entire history. Today it would be different. If he came today to call me to account, I would first confess that I have sinned, often and grievously. Then I would unroll the parchment of my memory and say, “I have not been impious. I have longed for the light of your angels, I managed to brush against it and in the end I ruined it. I was guilty, although it wasn’t intentional. I have spent the rest of my life as follows: before then, waiting for her; afterwards, paying for it.”

Apart from Thomas Aquinas, who had the arrogance to demonstrate Him several times and in different ways, nobody has a concrete idea of who God is or what he’s like. Personally, something I’ve always suspected, and it’s a wager like any other, is that He is a fan of symmetry and an enemy of the incomplete. That is why I maintain a timid belief that when I show him my wares, He will condescend to offer me reasonable reward.

I beg anyone who may be in a position to exercise any influence to intercede in favor of this to grant me one humble request: the next time I meet Rosana, may we both be fifteen, may I not be a Bolshevik (whether or not she’s a Grand Duchess is neither here nor there) and may someone keep that son of a bitch Fredi and the rest of his ilk out of the story.

Madrid-Getafe-Dublin

27 March-11 July 1995

Lorenzo Silva is one of the leading writers of his generation, best known for his five detective novels
El lejano país de los estanques
(The Far Away Pond Land),
El alquimista impaciente
(The Impatient Alchemist),
La niebla y la doncella
(The Mist and the Maiden),
La reina sin espejo
(The Queen Without a Mirror), and
La estrategia del agua
(Water’s Stategy), all published by Destino, and all featuring the detective Rubén Bevilacqua and his young assistant Virginia Chamorro, who together represent the new face of Spain’s Guardia Civil—a very different animal from its infamous predecessors. While already brilliant in themselves, Silva’s stories are enhanced by the subplots the author weaves into the relationship between Bevilacqua and Chamorro, which become as riveting as the main plot, and the snappy dialogue adds to the sheer delight of reading these novels. Silva is a sensitive and intelligent voice for our time, whose other works include
The Faint-hearted Bolshevik
,
El nombre de los nuestros
(The Name of our People),
La sustancia interior
(The Inner Substance),
El blog del inquisidor
(The Inquisitor’s Blog),
Carta Blanca
(Carte Blanche) and
Niños feroces
(Fierce Children), as well as books for young adults and children. He has won the Ojo Crítico Award (1998), the Nadal Award (2000) and the Primavera Award (2004) and his latest novel,
La marca del meridiano
, won the Planeta Award in 2012, one of the best known Spanish literary prizes.

www.lorenzo-silva.com

N
ICK
C
AISTOR
is an English translator of fiction from Spanish, French, and Portuguese. He worked for many years as a BBC Latin American analyst, and has translated more than 35 books from Latin America and Spain, including authors such as Juan Carlos Onetti, Alan Pauls, Andrés Neuman, and Eduardo Mendoza, Juan Marsé and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. He has twice been awarded the Valle-Inclán prize for translations from Spanish.

I
SABELLE
K
AUFELER
studied Spanish and Italian at Cambridge University and has a Masters in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, where she was on the editorial team for the
Norwich Papers
translation journal. She has also attended Spanish and Italian translation summer school workshops and reads for New Spanish Books. Previous projects include co-translations from Spanish with Nick Caistor and Michele Giuttari’s
The Dark Heart of Florence
with Howard Curtis. She is currently translating a Spanish crime fiction novel.