When I Was Mortal (18 page)

“They made a fine mess of you, didn’t they? Those great gobs of blood and everything.”

“Yes, they put tomato ketchup on my chest and waited for it to dry and then they took the photos later. It didn’t take long, it was hot, it soon dried, the young man did it. They gave me a few thousand pesetas and told me to keep my mouth shut.” She made a gesture with her thumb closing her mouth, as if with a zip. She went on talking, but she was less frightened now, she wouldn’t stop talking because of that, although she would have noticed that the expression or thought “poor thing” had passed through my mind, we all notice that, and that makes us feel easier. “It happened ages ago. If you talk, I’ll have you flogged and send you back to Cuba in a slave ship, he said, the inspector that is. And now what will happen, now what, they’ll send me back to Cuba.”

“The young man,” I said, and my voice sounded even odder, she might not yet be entirely safe from me, “What young man. What young man?”

“The boy who was there with him all the time, he was doing
his military service, he had to get back to the barracks, they talked about that.” And Gómez Alday, I thought, had had the nerve to say that the spear-thrower might be someone used to sticking bayonets in people, may your heart rot full of iron, even though we’re not at war, just another sack, a sack of flour sack of feathers sack of meat, kretek kretek. “That’s all I know, I arrived and left again in the evening, with my money and the cigarettes, I stole those from the house on my way out, when they weren’t looking, two cartons. I’ve still got three or four packets left, I smoke them slowly, it impresses people, they still smell really strong.”

Her motive for smoking them was not very different from Dorta’s, they had something in common, he and Estela. I sat down beside her on the low bed and I stroked her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The dead man was my friend and I saw those photos.”

Ruibérriz de Torres is right far too often, he knows us all too well. After all, every now and then, over a long period of time, I had seen that pained face and those still, dead, bloodstained breasts, and I was glad to see them moving and alive and newly showered, although my friend, on the other hand, was still dead and there had been so much deceit. It was also a way of paying her and recompensing the woman for the bad time I’d given her, although I could also have just given her the money anyway, in payment for the information. But then again, I wouldn’t be able to sleep until it was time for offices and police stations to open, although some police stations stay open all night.

I left money in the waiting room on my way out, perhaps too much, perhaps too little, Aunt Mónica would have gone to bed hours ago. When I left, the woman was sleeping. I don’t think they’ll be sending her back to Cuba, as she feared.

Gómez Alday looked even better than the last time I’d seen
him, nearly two years before. He had improved with time, they’d promoted him, he must have been feeling more at ease. Now that I knew that he did not share my foolish masculine pride, I realized that he looked after himself, those of us who do have that pride take rather less care of ourselves; I had neither the time nor was I in the mood for friendly questions. He didn’t refuse to see me, he didn’t get up from his revolving chair when I went into his office, he merely looked at me with his veiled eyes that showed no great surprise, only, perhaps, annoyance. He remembered me.

“So what’s new?” he said.

“What’s new is that I’ve spoken to Estela, your dead woman, and not through her photograph either. I’d like to know what you have to say to me now about your spear-thrower.”

The inspector passed one hand over his Roman head on which the hair seemed to be growing ever thicker, he obviously earned enough money to pay for his implants, I thought for a second, inopportune thoughts surface all the time. He picked up a pencil from his desk and drummed with it on the wood. He wasn’t smoking now.

“So she decided to talk, did she?” he replied. “When she arrived she was called Miriam, if, that is, you’re talking about the same Cuban whore.”

“What happened? You’re going to have to tell me. You didn’t want to go and question those poofters, why waste time? I don’t know how you had the nerve to call them that.”

Gómez Alday gave a faint smile, there was perhaps even the ghost of a blush. He seemed about as alarmed as a boy who’s been caught out lying. A white lie, something that will have no consequences beyond that telling off. Perhaps he knew that I wouldn’t go to anyone else with the story, perhaps he knew that even before I did. He took some time to reply, but not because he
wasn’t sure what to say: it was as if he were considering whether or not I deserved to hear his confession.

“Well, you have to put up a front, don’t you?” he said at last, and paused, he was still not sure. Then he went on: “I don’t know if you’re familiar with those boys, your friend probably told you something about them. If they’re very young, they have no sense at all of loyalty or propriety, they’re anyone’s for a night, they can be seduced with a few flattering remarks, never mind if it’s someone famous or they’re promised a tour of a few expensive places. They hang around, they have nothing else to do, they hang around waiting to be seduced. They’re much vainer than women, you know.” Gómez Alday stopped, he was talking as if none of what he was saying had the least importance, as if it belonged to the remote past, and it’s true that the past becomes more remote more quickly all the time. “Well, going back to the one I was with at the time. Your friend picked him up one night, in the street, I was on duty. I don’t want to speak ill of him, he was your friend, but he went too far with the boy, that wretched spear, and the boy got frightened, your friend’s little games got him rattled, you said as much, I remember, it happens sometimes, there are things people wish they’d never started, they can wish that for all kinds of reasons, and they get frightened by anything unexpected. He lost his nerve and bashed your friend on the head, and then he speared him, as if he was sticking a bayonet in him. He wasn’t a bad boy, really he wasn’t, he was doing his military service, I haven’t heard from him for some time, they come and go, they’re not in the least bit sentimental, not like pimps or husbands. He phoned me, he was terrified, we had to set something up to avoid suspicion falling on him.” Gómez Alday seemed momentarily vulnerable and weak, the past becomes suddenly remote when the person who constitutes our present disappears from our life, the thread of continuity is broken and
suddenly yesterday seems a long way away. “What can I say, what could I do but help him out, what would be gained by ruining two lives instead of just one, especially if one of those lives was over and done.”

I sat looking at his rather corpulent body, he seemed tall even when sitting down. He had no difficulty holding my gaze, his somnolent eyes would never have blinked or looked away, those misty eyes would have stared me down into hell itself. There was no longer any sign of weakness in that face, it was gone in a moment.

“Who put his glasses on him?” I said at last. “Whose idea was it to put them on?”

The inspector made an impatient gesture, as if my question made him think that I hadn’t, after all, deserved either the explanation or the story.

“Who cares?” he said. “Don’t talk to me about pranks in the middle of a homicide case. Just ask the questions that matter.”

I did as he said. “Didn’t anyone want to see the body of that unusually lively dead woman? The judge, the pathologist.”

He shrugged.

“Don’t be so naive. Here and in the morgue we do as we like. We investigate what we want to and nobody asks any awkward questions. We had a long apprenticeship, forty years doing exactly as we pleased without ever having to answer to anyone, we can’t just throw that away. I mean under Franco, perhaps you don’t remember. Although it’s much the same anywhere, there’s no shortage of learning opportunities.”

Gómez Alday wasn’t entirely lacking in humour. He wasn’t the kind of person you should ask such a question, but I did:

“Why did you go to such lengths for that boy? You were taking a hell of a risk even so.”

There was a brief flash in those sleepy eyes, then he did what
he had done once before: he spun round in his seat and turned his back on me, as if bringing to a close his sporadic dealings with me. I stared at the broad nape of his neck as he said:

“I risked everything.” He fell silent for a moment and then added casually: “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

I turned and opened the door to leave. I didn’t reply, but I seemed to recall that I had.

I
SAW HIM
twice in the flesh and the first time was both the happiest and the most unfortunate, although it was only unfortunate retrospectively, that is, it is now but it wasn’t then, so really I shouldn’t say that it was. It was in the Joy discotheque, very late at night, especially for him, you imagine that a footballer should go to bed really early, always thinking about the next game, or just training and sleeping, watching videos of other teams or their own, watching themselves, their successes and failures and the missed opportunities that go on being missed for all eternity in those films, sleeping and training and eating, living the life of married babies, it’s good if they have a wife who can be a mother to them and supervise their timetable. Most take no notice, they hate sleeping and hate training, and the really great players only think about the game when they actually run out onto the pitch and realize that they had better win because there are a hundred thousand people who
have
spent the whole week thinking about the confrontation or wanting vengeance against their hated rivals. For great players those rivals only exist for ninety minutes and for one reason only: they are there to stop them getting what they want, that’s all. Later they would happily
go out for a drink with those same adversaries, if it wasn’t frowned upon. Resentment is for the mediocre players.

He, of course, was not a mediocre player and for some time it was thought that he would become a great player, once he was more mature and more focused, which never happened, or happened perhaps too late. He was Hungarian, like Rubala and Puskas and Kocsis and Czibor, but we found his surname much less easy to pronounce, it was written Szentkuthy and people ended up calling him “Kentucky”, which sounded more familiar and more Spanish, which is why people sometimes rather rudely referred to him as “Fried Chicken” (which didn’t tally at all with his athletic build), the bolder and more outspoken of the radio commentators allowed themselves to get carried away when he stepped on to the pitch: “For Barcelona tonight it looks like it could be out of the frying pan and into the fire.” Or else: “Kentucky is really cooking with gas tonight; he’s looking to give the other side a real roasting. This boy is pure boiling oil, he’s hot, he’s slippery and someone might just get their fingers burned!” Journalists got a lot of mileage out of him, but they have short memories.

When I bumped into him at the Joy discotheque, he had been in Madrid for a season and a half and already spoke good Spanish, very correct, though somewhat limited, with a pronounced but perfectly tolerable accent, it seems that people from Central Europe all have a facility for languages, we Spaniards are the least gifted when it comes to learning other languages or pronouncing them, that’s what the Roman historians said, a people incapable of pronouncing an initial S, as in Scipio or Schillaci or Szentkuthy: Spaniards say Escipión, Esquilache, Kentucky, linguistic tendencies have changed. Szentkuthy (I’ll call him by his real name, since I only have to write it not say it) had already had time to get over the novelty of a country that
was new, fun and luxurious compared to his previous harsh existence, but not yet long enough to take it as natural and inevitable. Perhaps he had reached the point that follows every important attainment, when what you have achieved no longer seems to you like a mere gift or a miracle (you recognize it as an achievement) and you begin to fear for its permanence or, rather, to look with horror on any possible return to a past to which you were once resigned and which you tend therefore to erase, I am not who I was, I am only now, I come from nowhere and I do not know myself.

We were brought together at the same table by mutual acquaintances, although he only came over from time to time in order to recover his glass for a second and take a sip between dances, a form of training, a tireless athlete, at least he would have the energy to keep going for ninety minutes and into extra time. He was not a good dancer, he danced too enthusiastically and with no sense of rhythm, he lacked the necessary talent to bring harmony to his movements, and some of the people at the table were laughing at him, in this country there’s an element of cruelty in every situation, even when there’s no reason for it, people take pleasure in hurting or thinking that they do. He dressed better than when he had first arrived, according to the photos I saw in the press, but not as well as his Spanish colleagues, who were keener students of fashion, that is, of fashion advertisements. He was one of those men who always gives the impression that he’s got his shirt hanging out of his trousers, even if he hasn’t, of course, on the pitch he wore his shirt outside when the referee allowed it. He did, at last, come and sit down and, laughing and gesturing, ordered everyone else onto the dance floor so that he could watch them while he was resting, now it was his turn to have some fun, though doubtless without malice or cruelty, perhaps merely hoping to learn other movements less
awkward than his own. I was the only one who did not obey him, I never dance, I just watch. He didn’t insist, not because he didn’t know who I was, we’d not been introduced – that didn’t seem to bother him, certain that everyone knew who
he
was – but because of the definite way I said no. I shook my head the way we city-dwellers do when we refuse alms to a beggar and pass by without even slackening our pace. The comparison isn’t mine, it was his:

“You look like someone refusing me alms,” he said when we were alone, the others were all out on the dance floor just to please him. He used the “usted” form like any good foreigner who still sticks to the rules, his vocabulary wasn’t bad, the word “alms” isn’t that common.