When I Was Mortal (17 page)

“Victor!” I heard Ruibérriz’s voice calling to me quietly from the other side of the gate. I hadn’t heard him arrive, or his car.

With my head turned towards the house – sometimes it’s hard to make yourself look away – I went to meet him as daintily as I had come, I took him by the sleeve and dragged him over to the other pavement.

“So,” I said, “what did you find out?”

“The usual, it’s a whorehouse, open all hours, they advertise in the newspapers, superchicks, European, Latin American and Asian, they say, amongst other things. I warn you there’ll be hardly a soul in there. In the phone book it’s listed under the name of Calzada Fernández, Monica. So the man will be the one to leave, if he hasn’t already.”

“He must be about ready to, they’ve finished and he’s getting dressed. A couple of punters with pretensions to being literary types have just left, they probably fancy themselves as real Renaissance men,” I said. “We’ll have to skedaddle in a minute, but I’m going in there as soon as he comes out.”

“What, have you gone mad? You’re going to follow in the
footsteps of that hick? What is it with you and that woman?”

I again tugged him by the sleeve and dragged him further off, beneath the trees, where we would be invisible to anyone coming out. A lazy neighbourhood dog barked and immediately fell silent. Only then did I answer Ruibérriz.

“It’s not at all what you’re thinking, but I have to get a look at her breasts tonight, that’s all that matters. And if she is a whore then all the better, I’ll pay her, I’ll have a good look at them, we might talk for a bit, and then I’ll leave.”

“You might talk for a bit and then leave? You can’t be serious. She’s nothing very special it’s true, but she’s worth more than just a look. What’s with her breasts?”

“Nothing, I’ll tell you tomorrow because there may well be nothing to tell anyway. If you want to follow the guy in the car when he leaves, fine, although I don’t think you need bother. If not, thanks for the research and now please go, I’ll be all right on my own. Is there nothing you can’t find out?”

Ruibérriz looked at me impatiently despite that final bit of flattery. But he usually puts up with me, he’s a friend. Until the day he ceases to be.

“I don’t give a damn about the guy, or her for that matter. If you’re OK, then stay, you can tell me about it tomorrow. But be careful, you’re not used to these places.”

Ruibérriz left and this time I did hear his car in the distance while the door of the house opened (maybe the woman again said “Come back and see us again sometime”, I couldn’t hear from where I was). I saw that the coarse man was outside the house now, I heard the noisy gate. He walked wearily in the opposite direction – his night of pretence and effort over – I could approach now behind him while he disappeared off amongst the black foliage in search of his car. I felt intensely impatient, and yet I waited a few moments longer, smoking another cigarette
before pushing open the gate. There was still a light on in the bedroom where the encounter had taken place, the same lamp, the blind still lowered, but with the slats open, they didn’t air the rooms immediately.

I rang the bell, it was an old-fashioned bell, not chimes. I waited. I waited and a large woman opened the door to me, I’d seen her on the third floor, she was like one of our aunts when we were little, Dorta’s aunts or my aunts, fresh from the 1960s even down to her platinum blonde, flying-saucer hairstyle or her make-up, courtesy of eyebrow pencil, powder and even tweezers.

“Good evening,” she said interrogatively.

“I’d like to see Estela.”

“She’s having a shower,” she said quite naturally, and added guilelessly, displaying an excellent memory: “You haven’t been here before.”

“No, a friend of mine told me about her. I’m just passing through Madrid and a friend of mine spoke well of her.”

“Ah,” she said, drawing out the vowel, she had a Galician accent, “I’ll see what we can do. You’ll have to wait a moment, though. Come in.”

A small room in near darkness with two sofas facing each other, you walked straight in there from the hallway, all you had to do was to keep walking. The walls were almost empty, not a book or a painting, just a blown-up photo stuck on a thick piece of board, like they used to have in airports and travel agencies. It was a photograph of white skyscrapers, the title left no room for doubt, Caracas, I’ve never been to Caracas. I immediately thought, perhaps Estela is Venezuelan, but Venezuelan women don’t have soft breasts, at least they don’t have that reputation. Perhaps Estela didn’t either, perhaps she wasn’t the dead woman and it was all just a mirage born of alcohol and the summer and the night, a lot of beer with a dash of lemon juice and too much heat,
if only it was, I thought, stories already absorbed by time should not subsequently change, if in their day, they’ve been filed away without explanation: the lack of any explanation ends up becoming the story itself, if the story has already been absorbed by time. I sat down, Aunt Mónica left me alone, “I’ll go and see how long she’ll be,” she said. I awaited her return, I knew that she would return before the person I wanted to see, the lady was her aide-decamp. And yet that isn’t what happened, the lady didn’t come back for ages, she didn’t come back at all, I felt like looking for the bathroom where the prostitute was having a shower and simply going in and seeing her without waiting any longer, but I’d only frighten her, and after I’d smoked two cigarettes, she was the one who came down the stairs with her hair uncombed and wet, wearing a bathrobe but still in her street shoes, open-toed, her nails painted, the buckles loose as the only sign that her feet were also at home, off duty. Her bathrobe was not yellow, but sky blue.

“Are you in much of a hurry?” she asked point-blank.

“Yes.” I didn’t mind what she understood by that, after a while, she would understand everything, and she would be the one obliged to give me an explanation. She looked at me with absolutely no curiosity, without really looking, not like Gómez Alday did, but like someone who, given her situation, expects no surprises. She was an imperfectly pretty woman, or, rather, she was pretty despite her imperfections, at least in the summer.

“Do you want me to get dressed or am I all right like this?” she said, immediately calling me ‘tú’, perhaps she felt she had the right to when she knew I was in a hurry. To get dressed in order to get undressed, I thought, just in case I wanted to see the second part.

“You’re fine as you are.”

She said nothing more, she gestured with her head towards one of the doors on the ground floor and walked towards it like
a clerk going to look for a file, she opened the door. I stood up and followed her at once, she must have noticed my evident impatience, it didn’t seem to frighten her, rather it made her feel superior to me, she was condescending in her manner, a big mistake if it really
was
her and she had to answer for a night that was now old and perhaps forgotten. We went in, it was the same room, still unaired, in which she had just been grappling with the coarse man, there was an acidic smell, but it was much more bearable than one might have supposed. A fan turned on the ceiling, through my slat I hadn’t been able to see it. There was the cowboy hat, thrown on the floor, perhaps for use by clients with complexes or with a head like an inverted egg, the hat was for hire too. There had been a cowboy element in Dorta’s last night too, he had spoken to me of some peculiar crocodile-skin cowboy boots.

She sat on the bed that was neither a mattress nor a bed, one of those low Japanese affairs that I can’t remember the name of, I believe they’re fashionable.

“Did she tell you how much it is?” she asked. The question was lacklustre, mechanical.

“No, but it doesn’t matter, we can discuss that later. There’ll be no problem.”

“With the lady,” said Estela. “You discuss it with the lady.” And she added: “Right, what do you want? Apart from it being quick.”

“Undo your bathrobe.”

She obeyed, she untied the belt allowing me to see something, but not enough. She seemed bored, even irritated, if before there had been no desire, now there was tacit rejection. Her accent was Central American or Caribbean, doubtless hardened by several years in Madrid.

“Open it more, right open, so that I can see you,” I said, and my voice must have sounded odd, because she looked at me properly for the first time, slightly apprehensively. But she undid
the bathrobe, so wide that she revealed even her shoulders, like an old-fashioned movie star at a gala performance, not much of a gala performance tonight, there they were, those breasts so familiar in black and white, I recognized them in colour too without a moment’s hesitation, despite the darkness, the provocative, shapely, but, nevertheless, soft breasts, they would give in the hand like bags of water, she was too poor to consider plastic surgery, for two years I had looked at them, all bloodstained, in a slowly fading photocopy, more often than I should have, more often than I had imagined I would when I made my extravagant, macabre request to Gómez Alday, he was an understanding man. On her breasts, where the skin was not quite as dark as elsewhere, there was no wound or cut or scar or gash, her skin was uniform and smooth, unmarked apart from her nipples, too dark for my taste, one gets used to knowing at a glance what one likes and what one doesn’t.

I was immediately assailed by far too many thoughts, the woman alive and therefore still alive, the look of pain in the photo, the screwed-up eyes and the gritted teeth, those closed eyes were not the eyes of a dead woman because the dead no longer struggle and everything ceases when they expire, even pain, why had it not occurred to me that her expression was of someone alive or of someone dying, but never of someone dead. And why the knickers, why was her corpse wearing knickers, why preserve one item of clothing when you’ve gone that far, only someone still alive keeps her knickers on. And if she was alive, my best friend might be alive too, Dorta the joker, Dorta the resigned, what kind of joke had he played on me making me believe in his murder and in his condemnation, what kind of joke was that if he were still alive?

“Where did you get those cigarettes from?” I asked.

“What cigarettes?” Estela was immediately on the alert, and to
gain time she said once more: “What cigarettes?”

“The ones you were smoking before, in the restaurant, the ones that smell of cloves. Let me see the packet.”

She instinctively closed her bathrobe, without tying the belt, as if to protect herself from discovery, this was a man who had watched her and followed her from La Ancha or perhaps before that, perhaps all night. My voice must have sounded rather nervous and angry, because she pointed to a handbag left on a chair, the chair that had borne the clothes of the coarse man.

“They’re in there. A friend gave them to me.”

I’d made her feel afraid, I saw that she was afraid of me and that she would therefore do whatever I asked her to. There was no more superiority or condescension, just fear of me and of my hands, or of a sharp weapon that might pierce or tear her. I picked up the bag, opened it and took out the slim red and gold and black packet, with its design of curved rails in relief and its message, “Smoking kills”. Kretek.

“What friend? The one who was with you? Who is he?”

“I don’t know who he is, he wanted to go out to supper tonight, I’ve only been with him once before.”

How I hate men who hurt women and now I hated myself – or I did afterwards – when I grabbed Estela’s arm and snatched open her bathrobe again, leaving her unprotected, and I ran my thumb between her breasts as if I wanted to draw something out of there, I did so several times, pressing hard and saying:

“Where’s the wound, eh? Where’s the spear, eh? Where’s all the blood, what happened to my friend, who killed him, you killed him. Who put his glasses on him, tell me, you did, whose idea was it, yours?”

I held her immobilized with her arm twisted, twisted up her back, and with my other hand, with my strong thumb, I was pressing against her sternum, up and down, crushing it, or rubbing
it, feeling on either side the actual touch of those breasts I had seen so often with my tactile eyes.

“I don’t know anything about what happened, they didn’t tell me,” she said, whimpering, “he was already dead when I got there. They just called me in to do the photos.”

“They? Who did? When?”

You never know what your thumbs might do, someone who might have been watching me through the slats in the blinds would have felt alarmed, other people’s thumbs seem unstoppable or uncontrollable and as if it will always be too late. But these were my thumbs. I realized that there was no need to frighten her any more or hurt her any more, I stopped, I let her go, I noticed that my thumbs were hot from the rubbing, as if momentarily on fire, she would feel that same burning sensation between her breasts like a warning and a reminder, she would tell me everything she knew. But before she spoke, before she recovered and spoke, the idea had already crossed my mind, why had they found him the following night, so late and after such a long delay, the two corpses that were only one, perhaps in order to plan and prepare it all and take the photos, and who took those photos that were never published, not even the one of her, not even her face half-covered by her hair, pulled forward by her own living hand, just pictures of my friend Dorta in better times, it was a set-up that hair slightly covering her face, the news just said what the police had said, there was no evidence from neighbours and I alone saw the photos, and only in Gómez Alday’s office, only a judge would have seen them otherwise.

“The police called me. The inspector called me, he said he needed me to pose with the body of a man who had died a violent death. You have to do all kinds of things sometimes, even lie down next to a dead man. The dead man was already dead, I promise you, I didn’t do anything with him.”

Dorta was dead. For a few moments he had returned to life in my suspicious mind, not so very strange really: habit and the accumulated past are enough for the feeling of presence never to fade, not seeing someone can be accidental, even insignificant, and there isn’t a day when I don’t remember my childhood friend with whom no woman ever did anything, either alive or dead, that worried Estela, the poor thing: “The dead man was already dead, I promise you”; and there was no mingling of blood, no semen, no anything, it had all been invented by Gómez Alday to tell me or any other interested party or busybody so that I would absorb it in time, newspapers soon tire and they didn’t give that many details, they said only that sex had taken place between the two corpses before they had become corpses.