When I Was Mortal (13 page)

The woman was almost naked, wearing just a pair of knickers, there was no trace in the house of any other items of the clothing she must have arrived in, as if the spear-thrower had scrupulously gathered them up after the murders and taken them away with him, nobody walks down the street or travels in a taxi like that, however hot it is, I mean not naked like that. Perhaps that was a joke too: I’m going to leave you there naked, you whore, that way you can go on being screwed all the way to hell. An unnecessary hassle for a murderer in any case, everything that remains accuses, everything that remains on our hands. The woman was about thirty, judging by her appearance and by the forensic report, and, judging by her appearance alone, she could have been an immigrant, Cuban or Dominican or Guatemalan,
for example, she had bronzed skin, full, slightly cracked lips and prominent cheekbones, but there are a lot of Spanish women like that too, in the south and in the centre and even in the north, not to mention the islands, people are less easy to classify than we might think. She had her eyes closed and an expression of pain on her face, as if she hadn’t died immediately and had had time to make that involuntary gesture, the agony of the iron entering her flesh and having entered her flesh, her teeth instinctively clenching and her vision clouding, her nakedness experienced suddenly as a kind of extra defencelessness, it’s different if a sharp weapon first has to penetrate fabric, however fine, than if it pierces the skin directly, although the results are identical. That’s what I think anyway, not that I’ve ever been injured in that way, touch wood, fingers crossed. The woman was wounded beneath her left breast, both of which looked soft, as far as I could make out and given that I was looking at them for the first time in photos, hardly ideal. But you get used to imagining the texture and volume and feel of women the first time you see them, especially in these deceitful times, if she’d been rich she would have had silicon implants, especially at her age, a kind of consubstantial softness impervious to passing time. Her breasts were smeared with dried blood. She had long, tangled, curly hair, and part of her hair covered her right cheek in a rather unnatural fashion, as if she had had time to pull her hair over her face in an attempt to cover it, a final gesture of modesty or shame regarding her anonymous posterity. In a way, I felt sorry for her, I had the feeling that her death was secondary, that it wasn’t really to do with her or that she was only part of the decor. She had some semen in her mouth and, according to the report, the semen belonged to Dorta. It also said that some of her teeth were decayed, the teeth of a poor woman, or the victims of sweets. It also said that
substances were found in both organisms, that was the word, “substances”, what exactly it didn’t say, though I don’t find it particularly hard to imagine.

Both were in a seated position, or rather they weren’t lying down, but reclining, although in the case of my friend I was not spared one particularly unpleasant detail: the rusty spear had penetrated him with such force that the point, never honed or polished or even cleaned since it arrived from Kenya – but extremely sharp – had gone straight through his chest into the wall, leaving him pinned to the plaster like an insect. If someone had told Dorta about this, he would have shuddered to think of the plaster left inside the body when the spear was removed, someone had to take it out, it would undoubtedly have required more force than that used by the person who had impaled it in the two chests, one female, one male. The weapon had not been thrown from any distance, it had been thrust in from below, possibly at a run, possibly not, but if not, the person holding it must have been either very strong or accustomed to bayonetting. It was a large bedroom, there was enough space to take a run-up, the whole of Dorta’s apartment was very large, an old apartment that had been renovated, a legacy from his parents, he only bothered about two areas, the living room and the bedroom, the place was too big for him. He had just turned thirty-nine, he bemoaned the fact that his fortieth birthday was just around the corner, he lived alone, but often invited people round, one at a time.

“The worst thing about ages is that they always seem so alien,” he said to me the night of his death, during supper. His birthday had been a week before, but I hadn’t been able to celebrate it with him then because he’d been away in London that day. I hadn’t been able to make the traditional jokes, I was three months younger than him and, during those three
months, I used to call him “granddad”. Now I’m two years older than he will ever be, I’ve turned the corner. “A few days ago, I read a newspaper article about a man of thirty-seven, and, in fact, the association of that age and the word ‘man’ seemed quite appropriate, at least for that individual. For me, on the other hand, it wouldn’t. I still unconsciously expect people to refer to me as ‘a young man’, and, of course, I expect them to call me ‘tú’, yet I’m two years older than the man in the article. I think only other people should have birthdays. No, I’d go further, just as in the past the rich would pay a poor person to do their military service or to go to war instead of them, it should be possible to engage someone to have our birthdays for us. Every now and then, we would have one ourselves, this year is mine, I’m bored with being thirty-nine. Don’t you think that would be an excellent idea?”

It would never have occurred to either of us that, in his case, thirty-nine would be the fixed number with which he could bore himself until the end of time with absolutely no possibility of changing it. That was the kind of idea Dorta came up with when he was in good spirits and in a good mood, rather silly, mad ideas, a bit daft and invariably puerile, which was quite justified, at least with me, because we’d known each other since we were children and it’s hard not to continue to behave with a person the way you would have behaved when you first met: if you were a bit of a fusspot, then, from time to time, you should continue to be so; if you were cruel, if you were frivolous, if you were enigmatic, shifty, weak or beloved, we have a different repertoire for each person, the contents of which we are allowed to vary but not relinquish, if someone laughed once they will always have to laugh, otherwise, they will be rejected. And that is why I always called Dorta “Dorta” and that is how I remember him, at school you were known by
your surname until you reached adolescence. And just as when you stay in touch with someone, you continue to see superimposed on their adult face the face of the child with whom you once shared a desk, as if any later changes or any accentuation of certain features were a mask and a game intended to conceal the essence, so the achievements or failures of the various ages of the other person seem unreal or rather fictitious, like the plans or fantasies or imaginings or fears with which childhood is peopled, as if between those friends whatever happened still seemed to be and was still experienced as a hope – the primary childhood state of mind is not even desire – the present as well as the past and even the distant past. With such friends very little can be taken absolutely seriously because you’re used to everything being pretend, introduced explicitly by those formulae that you later abandon when you go out into the world, “Let’s play at …,” “Let’s pretend that …,” “I’m the leader now” (you only abandon them verbally, in reality it all goes on the same). That’s why I can talk of his death dispassionately, as if it were something that had not yet happened, but was part of the eternal waiting for all that is unlikely and impossible. “Imagine someone killed me with a spear.” A spear, in Madrid. But sometimes passion surfaces – or possibly rage – for just those reasons, because I can imagine the anguish and panic that night of a person I still see as a nervous, resigned child whom I often had to defend in the playground, and who would later apologize and give me a book or a comic because he’d forced me to get into a fight with the heavies when there was no need for me to do so – not that he ever asked for my help, he just let himself be punched or pushed around, that’s all; but I saw it – to waste my energies on someone who could never win in a physical fight and whose glasses ended up on the ground almost every day of every school year. It’s unforgivable that he should
have died a violent death, even though he never knew what happened. But that’s pure rhetoric, who doesn’t know when they’re dying? I wasn’t there to see him and to go into battle for him, although it was a near thing.

His stay in London had coincided with an auction at Sotheby’s of literary and historical items which some diplomatic friends had encouraged him to attend. They were selling all kinds of documents and objects that had belonged to writers and politicians. Letters, postcards, billets-doux, telegrams, whole manuscripts, rough drafts, files, photos, a lock of Byron’s hair, the long pipe that Peter Cushing smoked in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, Churchill’s cigar butts, engraved cigarette cases, over-elaborate walking sticks, tried and tested amulets. It wasn’t an unusual walking stick that had aroused his capricious buyer’s impulse during the bidding, but a ring that had belonged to Crowley, Aleister Crowley, he explained benevolently, a mediocre writer and a self-declared madman who called himself “The Great Beast” and “The wickedest man in the world”, all his private possessions had
666
engraved on them, the number of the Beast according to the Apocalypse, nowadays rock groups with demonic pretensions play around with the number, but it’s also to be found hidden in many computers, it’s the joker’s number, the living have no idea how old everything is, remarked Dorta, how hard it is to be new, what do young people know about Crowley, the orgiast and satanist, he’d probably be considered a harmless, naive conservative these days, a kindly man at heart who transformed his disciple Victor Neuburg into a zebra for making too many mistakes during an invocation of the Devil in the Sahara, so Dorta told me, and rode on his back all the way to Alexandria, where he sold him to a zoo which looked after the incompetent disciple or, rather, zebra for two years, until Crowley finally allowed him to resume
his human form, he was a compassionate man at heart. Neuburg later became a publisher.

“A magic ring, that’s how it was described in the catalogue, with a precious oval emerald set in platinum with the inscription ‘Iaspar Balthazar Melcior’, I wasn’t sure the ring would fit, but even so I bid like a mad thing, way above my limit.” Dorta had told me all this while his good mood lasted, when he was happy he would talk endlessly, then he would grow quiet and ask about me and my life, he would let me be the one to do the talking, two consecutive monologues rather than a real dialogue. “The other bidders gradually fell away apart from one guy with a Germanic face and one of those noses that always looks as if it must have a dewdrop hanging from it, it made me feel like passing him a handkerchief and banishing him to a corner, a tapir’s nose, a guy with irritating features, he was well dressed, but he was wearing crocodile-skin cowboy boots, you can imagine the effect, the mere sight of them was enough to enrage you. I bid higher and he bid higher, steadily and without moving a muscle, merely lifting his nose as if he were a mechanical toy, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye each time I increased my bid and saw the apparently bedewdropped nose rising up like the little flag on ancient traffic lights, or was it taxis that used to have those? anyway, he blocked my way each time, forcing me to make rapid mental conversions from sterling into pesetas only to realize that I was offering a sum of money that I didn’t actually possess.”

“Really? The magic ring couldn’t have been that expensive, Dorta,” I said mockingly. He didn’t have much money, but he pretended he did, he behaved like a spendthrift and he rarely deprived himself of anything he fancied, at least not with witnesses present, meanness was a blight. Of course, the things he fancied were never excessive, they didn’t require a large outlay, as people
used to say, or so I thought, I don’t know how much everything cost. Anyway, he had enough to pay for his vital pleasures.

“Well, yes, I could have gone a bit higher, but that would have meant making small sacrifices later on, which are the kind I hate most, it’s the small sacrifices that make you feel really miserable. And it’s so much harder to give things up in the summer. Anyway, the other man kept raising his nose again and again, like some malfunctioning level crossing, until one of my companions grabbed me by the elbow and stopped me putting my hand up. ‘You can’t afford it, Eugenio, you’ll regret it,’ he whispered, and I really don’t know why he whispered, no one there understood Spanish. But he was right and I didn’t pull away and I felt wretched, I immediately fell into a great depression, I’m still in it, and I had to put up with seeing that dripping nose lift once more and look at me defiantly, as if saying: ‘I beat you, what did you expect?’ He left at once, clattering out in his crocodile-skin cowboy boots, he didn’t stay for the rest of the auction, although he may have come back later for other lots, I don’t know, because I too left after a couple more bids. It was a terrible humiliation, Victor, and it happened abroad of all places.”

He called me Victor, not by my surname, Francés, as he usually did. He only called me Victor when he was feeling under the weather or he felt alone. I never called him Eugenio, ever. Dorta still had a lot of Dorta the little boy in him, but also a great deal of his mother and his aunts whom I had often seen on the way out of school or in their various homes, invited there by their son or nephew. From time to time, he came out with some phrase that doubtless belonged to those innocent, antiquated ladies who had so dominated his world. He just came out with them, he didn’t avoid them, indeed, he probably enjoyed perpetuating those ladies like that, verbally, through their lost turns-of-phrase: “and it happened abroad of all places”.

“What the hell did you want the ring for anyway?” I asked. “You haven’t started believing in magic I hope. Or was there someone you wanted to transform into a giraffe?”

“No, don’t worry. It just took my fancy, it amused me, it was unusual and it had a history behind it, if I’d worn it here lots of people would have asked me about it, it’s all grist to the mill when you’re trying to chat someone up in a bar. The only magic I believe in is other people’s, not my own, of course; I’ve never been touched by magic once in my entire life, as you well know.” And he added smiling: “In fact, when I lost the ring, I regretted not having bid for the previous lot on your behalf, it wasn’t that expensive. ‘Crowley’s magic talisman for sexual potency and power over women,’ was how it was described in the catalogue, what do you think, a nice silver medallion with the inevitable
666
engraved on it. The German or whatever he was made off with that too, only he wasn’t competing with me for that one, perhaps that’s why it was less expensive. At least I have the consolation of knowing that I forced him to pay far too much money for the ring. What do you think: ‘power over women’? It was engraved with the initials AC as well as the number. You might have found it useful.”