When I Was Mortal (16 page)
“There’s a woman over there whom I find absolutely fascinating. I know it’s a lot to ask, but don’t turn round until I tell you. More than that, I must warn you that if she and the man she’s having supper with get up, I’m going to shoot off after them, and if not, I’ll wait however long it takes for them to finish and then do the same. If you want you can come with me, otherwise, you stay and we’ll settle up later.”
Ruibérriz de Torres smoothed his hair flirtatiously. He had only to discover that there was an interesting woman in the vicinity for him to start oozing virility and getting terribly full of himself. Even though she couldn’t see him nor he her; all a bit animalesque really, his chest swelled beneath his polo shirt.
“Is she that special?” he asked restlessly, dying to turn round. From then on it would be impossible to talk about anything else, and it was my fault, I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman.
“You might not think so,” I said. “But I think she might be special to me, very special indeed.”
Now I could see her companion in three-quarters profile, a man of about fifty who looked rich and rather coarse, if she was a prostitute, he was obviously inexperienced and didn’t know that you could get straight down to business, without the need for supper on a restaurant terrace. If she wasn’t, then it was justifiable, what would be less so was that the woman had agreed to go out with such an unattractive man, although I’ve always found the choices women make as regards their flirtations and their love affairs a complete mystery, sometimes, by my lights, a complete aberration. One thing was certain, they weren’t married or engaged or anything, I mean it was clear that they had not yet lain together, to use the old expression. The man was trying too hard to be pleasant and attentive: he was careful to keep filling her glass, he prattled on, recounting anecdotes or giving his opinions about things so as not to fall into the silence that discourages any contact, he lit cigarettes for her with a wind-proof fighter, like the ones you get in cars, Spanish men don’t go to all that trouble unless they want something, they don’t watch their manners.
As I continued to look at her, my initial confidence began to wane, as always happens: certainty is followed by doubt and uncertainty by ratification, usually only when it’s too late. I suppose that, as the minutes passed, the image of the living woman became superimposed on that of the dead woman, displacing or blurring it, thus allowing for less comparison, less similarity. She behaved like a woman of easy virtue, which didn’t mean that she was, as far as I was concerned, she couldn’t be, since, as far as I was concerned, she still lay beneath the desolation of the lights and the television left on all day and of the semen in her mouth – entirely unmerited – and the hole in her chest,
which she had merited even less. I looked at her, I looked at her breasts, I looked at them out of habit and also because they were the part of the murdered woman I was most familiar with, aside from her face, I tried to get some sense of recognition, but it was impossible, they were covered by her bra and her dress, although I could glimpse her cleavage beneath her neckline which was neither sober nor exaggerated. I was suddenly gripped by the indecent thought that I had to see what those breasts were like, I was sure I would recognize them if I saw them uncovered. It would be no easy task, especially not that night, when her companion would have exactly the same intentions and would not want to surrender his place to me.
Suddenly I smelled something, a sweet, cloying smell, an unmistakable aroma, I don’t know if it was a change in the direction of the wind that wafted it to me for the first time – the wind swinging round – or if it was the first clove-scented cigarette that had been smoked at the table next to ours, a different, better-quality cigarette to be smoked with the coffee or the liqueur, like someone treating themselves to a cigar. I glanced at the man’s hands, I saw his right hand, it was playing with the lighter. The woman had a cigarette in her left hand, and the man then raised his left arm in order to gesture to the waiter, asking for the bill, his hand was empty, therefore, at that moment, the exotic smell was coming from her, she was smoking an Indonesian Gudang Garam that crackles as it slowly burns down, I had had a packet myself two years before, Dorta’s final gift to me, and I had made it last, but not that long, a month after he’d given it to me it was finished, I smoked the last cigarette in his memory, well, each and every one of them really, I kept the empty red packet, “Smoking kills”, that’s what it says. How was it possible that she – if it was her – had made the cigarettes that my friend must also have given her that same night last so long.
Two years, those “kretek” cigarettes would be dry as sawdust now, an open packet, yet they still gave off a pungent perfume.
“Can you smell what I smell?” I asked Ruibérriz, who was beginning to get fed up.
“Can I look at her now?” he said.
“Can you smell it?” I insisted.
“Yes, is someone smoking incense or something?”
“It’s cloves,” I said. “Tobacco with cloves.”
The man’s gesture to the waiter allowed me to make the same gesture of writing in the air to another waiter and so be ready when the couple got up. Only then did I give permission to Ruibérriz to turn round; he did so and decided to accompany me. We followed a few paces behind the couple, I saw the woman standing up for the first time – a short skirt, open-toed shoes, painted toenails – and as we took those steps, I also heard her name, the name that she had never had for me or for Gómez Alday nor perhaps for Dorta. “You’re a lovely mover, Estela,” said the coarse man, not so coarse that he wasn’t absolutely right in his remark, which was spoken more in admiration than by way of being an amorous compliment. Ruibérriz and I separated for a moment, he went over to the car in order to pick me up as soon as they got in theirs, they weren’t travelling by taxi. When they did so, I got into our car and we drove off after them, keeping a short distance behind, there wasn’t much traffic, but enough for them not to notice us. It was a brief journey, they drove to an area of suburban houses, the street was called Torpedero Tucumán, a comical address to send a letter to. They parked and went into one of the houses, a three-storey house, lights were lit on every storey, as if there were already plenty of people there, perhaps they were going to a party, supper followed by a party, that guy was really going to a lot of trouble.
Ruibérriz and I parked the car and stayed where we were for
the moment, from there we could see the lights but nothing else, most of the blinds were pulled halfway down and there were lace curtains that didn’t move in the wind, you’d have to go right up to one of the windows on the ground floor and peer through a crack, we might even end up doing that, I thought quickly. It immediately seemed to us, though, that it couldn’t be a party, because there was no music drifting out through open windows, no sounds of anarchic conversations or laughter. The blinds were only up on two windows on the third floor and you couldn’t see anyone in there, just a standard lamp, and walls without books or pictures.
“What do you think?” I asked Ruibérriz.
“I don’t think they’ll stay very long. There’s not much fun to be had in that house, apart from the intimate kind, and those two aren’t going to spend the night together, not there at least, whatever kind of place it is. Did you see who opened the door, did they have a key or did they knock?”
“I couldn’t see, but I don’t think they knocked.”
“It might be his house, and if it is, then she’ll be out again in a couple of hours, no longer than that. It might be her place, in which case, he’ll be the one to come out, much sooner too, say about an hour. It might be a massage parlour, that’s what they like to call them now, and then again he’ll be the one to leave, but give him about thirty or forty-five minutes. Lastly, there might be a few select poker games going on, but I don’t think so. Only then would they spend the night there, losing and recovering what they’d lost. No, I don’t think it’s likely to be her house. No, it can’t be.”
Ruibérriz knows all the different territories in the city, he has experience and a good eye. He doesn’t need to ask many questions and he can find out anything or locate anyone with a couple of phone calls and perhaps a couple more made by his contacts.
“Why don’t you find out for me whose house it is? I’ll wait here, in case one or other leaves unexpectedly. It wouldn’t take you long to find out, I’m sure.”
He sat there looking at me, his tanned arms resting on the steering wheel.
“What is it with this woman? What are you after? I didn’t get a very good look at her, but I don’t know that she’s worth all this fuss.”
“Not for you probably, as I said. Just let me see what happens tonight and I’ll tell you the whole story another day. I just need to know where she lives, where she hangs out or where she’s going to be sleeping tonight, when she does finally go to bed.”
“This isn’t the first time you’ve asked me to wait for a story, I don’t know if you realize that.”
“But it’ll probably be the last,” I said. If I told him straight out that I thought I might be seeing a dead woman, it was quite likely that he wouldn’t help me at all, things like that make him nervous, as they do me normally, we who hardly believe in anything.
I got out of the car and Ruibérriz drove off to make his enquiries. There were no shops or cinemas or bars in that area, a boring, tree-lined residential street, with barely any lighting, with nothing you could use as a pretext or to distract yourself while you were waiting. If a neighbour saw me, he would doubtless take me for a marauder, there was no reason why I should be there, alone, silent, smoking. I crossed to the other side of the street just in case I could see anything of the upper storey from there, the only one where the windows were unobstructed. I did see something, but only briefly, a large woman, who was not Estela, passing and disappearing and passing again in the opposite direction after a few seconds and then disappearing again, obscuring my view still more after she had gone, since, when she
left the room, she switched off the light: as if she had just gone in there for a moment to pick something up. I crossed the road again and approached the gate as stealthily as an old-fashioned thief; I pushed and it gave way, it was open, people leave it like that when there’s a party on or if a lot of people come and go. I continued to advance so carefully that had I been treading on sand there would have been no footprints, I moved slowly towards one of the windows on the ground floor, the one to the left of the front door from where I was standing. As with nearly all the windows, the blind was down but the slats were open to let in the warm breeze that had slackened now, that is, they weren’t tight shut. Behind the blinds there were motionless lace curtains, the room must be air-conditioned or perhaps it was a sauna. You often unwittingly take steps that you consider possible merely because they are possible and it has occurred to you to take them, and that is how so many acts and so many murders are committed, sometimes the idea leads to the act as if it could not live and sustain itself as long as it was a mere idea, as if there were a certain kind of possibility that grows frustrated and begins to fade if it is not instantly put into action, without our realizing that, in that way too, it has vanished and died, it will no longer be a possibility, but a past event. I found myself in the situation I had foreseen in the car, with my eyes glued to a crack at about eye level, looking, peering, trying to make out something through the tiny gap and through the transparent white cloth that made it even harder to see. That room too was only dimly lit, a large part of it lay in shadow, it was like trying to get to the bottom of a story from which the main elements have been deliberately omitted and about which we know only odd details, my vision blurred and with only a restricted view.
But I thought I saw them and I did, both of them, Estela and the coarse man one on top of the other, outside the beam
of the light, the niceties were over, on a bed or perhaps it was a mattress or the floor, at first I couldn’t even make out who was who, two dark, intertwined masses of flesh, someone was naked in there, I said to myself, the woman would have uncovered those breasts that I so needed to see, or perhaps not, perhaps not, she might still have her bra on. There was movement or was it struggle, but hardly any sound emerged, no grunts or cries or groans of pleasure or laughter, like a scene from a silent movie that would never have been shown in decent cinemas, a grim, muffled effort of bodies doubtless entering upon what was just another stage in the proceedings – the fuck – rather than a surrender to genuine desire, his body felt no more desire than hers did, but it was difficult to say where the one began and the other ended or which was which, given the darkness and the veil of the curtain, they were just a grotesque shape, how could I possibly not be able to distinguish the body of a young woman from that of a coarse man? Suddenly a torso and a head with a hat on loomed into view, they entered the beam of light for a moment before plunging down again, the man had donned a cowboy hat in order to have a fuck, good grief, I thought, what a jerk. So he was the one who was on top or above, when he rose up, I thought I also saw his hairy, swarthy, unpleasant torso, broad and undelineated, not exactly athletic. I looked through the slat below to see if I could catch a glimpse of the woman and her breasts, but I couldn’t see anything and so returned to the slat above, hoping that the man might grow tired and want to rest underneath, it was odd not knowing if it was a bed or a mattress or the floor, and even odder how muffled the sound was, a silence like a gag. Then I noticed a new singlemindness about the sweating, two-headed beast into which they had been momentarily transformed, they’re going to change position, I thought, they’re going to change places in order to prolong this
stage of the proceedings, which is just that, another stage, since the participants remain the same.
I heard the bolt on the door and scuttled off to the left, just managing to disappear round the corner of the house before I heard a woman’s voice saying goodbye to some people who were leaving (“Bye then, come back and see us again sometime,” as if she were an American): a literary critic I know by sight, with a pure primate face and wearing red trousers and hiking boots, another jerk, if that
was
a whorehouse it didn’t surprise me in the least that he should visit it, he always has to pay, like his friend, a fat guy with a greying crewcut, a head like an inverted egg and a reptilian mouth, wearing glasses and a tie. They swaggered out and ostentatiously slammed the gate shut, no one would see them, the street was empty and dark, the second guy sounded as if he came from the Canaries, another jerk to judge by his appearance and his behaviour, a bit of a flash harry. When I could no longer hear their footsteps, I returned to my post, a couple of minutes or three or four had passed and now the man and Estela were no longer intertwined, they had not changed position, but they had stopped, the end or a pause. The man was standing up, or kneeling on the mattress, the beam of light illuminated him more than it did her, reclining or sitting, I could see the back of her head, the coarse man grabbed her head with his two hands and made her turn it a little, now I could see both their faces and his erect body with its proliferating hair and his ridiculous hat, it seemed to me he was starting to squeeze Estela’s face with his two thumbs, how strong two thumbs can be, it was as if he were caressing her, but hurting her too, as if he were digging into her high cheekbones or giving her a cruel massage that went ever deeper, becoming more and more intense, he was pushing into her cheekbones as if he wanted to crush them. I felt alarmed, I thought for a moment that he was going to kill her
and he couldn’t kill her because she was already dead and because I had to see her breasts and talk to her about something, ask her about the spear or the wound – the weapon wasn’t left impaled in her, someone had pulled it out – and about my friend Dorta who had received her blood on that spear. The man eased the pressure, let her go, he squeezed his knuckles and cracked them, muttered a few words, then moved away, perhaps it was nothing, perhaps it was just the reminder some men like to give women that they could hurt them if they wanted to. He took off his hat, threw it on the floor as if he no longer needed it, and picked up his clothes from a chair, he would be the one to leave. She lay back, absolutely still, she didn’t appear to be hurt, or perhaps she was used to being treated violently.