Ahmed has walked slightly less than a mile from the place where his friend Rachid dropped him off that morning. Two prostitutes, standing at the top of the path to the marsh, eye him suspiciously, or at least so he thinks. He’s never sure if people really do look at him suspiciously because he’s an Arab or if he’s simply getting paranoid and convinced that everyone looks at him like that. He’ll have lunch with Rachid in the field next to the lagoon, the field he’s walking through now. Before leaving home, he had some tea, bread and oil, a tomato and a can of sardines, and had prepared himself a lunch of two boiled eggs, a few beans and a couple of lamb chops, but, unfortunately, he’d left the lunchbox in the trunk of his friend’s car. I don’t know why you bring anything, you could save what you bring for lunch and have it for supper, I’ll get something from the kitchen, it’s good food, Rachid tells him every day. The restaurant where he works appears in all the guidebooks, it’s one of the best in Misent, but Ahmed is slightly disgusted by the thought of that meat slaughtered any old way, he likes to buy his meat from the halal butcher’s and cook it himself at home, he likes what he calls
beldi
food, which is why he takes his own lunch with him every day, even though he usually ends up eating whatever Rachid has brought too. He’s been missing his lunchbox for some time now. He’s hungry. He glances at his watch. Rachid, as he does every day, will bring a couple of Tupperware containers, filled with some sort of stew, which is absolutely fine, but not deemed good enough to serve to the customers, as well as some fruit and vegetables that he’s either stolen or which have been given to him because they’re not quite perfect. The light is beginning to thin, the fragile winter light gilds everything it touches. It’s a mild afternoon: the surface of the water, the reeds, the palm trees far off, the buildings he can see in the distance, are all gradually turning to gold; even the sea, visible if he climbs up one of the dunes, even the sea is no longer its usual intense blue, but has taken on a faintly iridescent sheen. He lights a cigarette to assuage his hunger. He decides to make the most of the time he has until his friend arrives, and when he finishes his cigarette, he goes back to the spot where he left his fishing rod firmly anchored between some large stones, casts the net he’s been wearing tied around his waist and studies the mirror-like surface of the lagoon on which insects are tracing geometrical designs with their slender legs. In his basket he has two medium-sized mullets and a rather smaller tench. Not a bad day. Tonight’s supper.
When he leans forward to cast his net again, he suddenly hears a lot of barking and growling: a few yards off, two dogs are quarrelling over some scrap of meat and barking at each other. Ahmed picks up a stone and brandishes it threateningly, at the same time showing them the stick he always brings with him to the lagoon. The dogs don’t even look at him, too busy growling and baring their teeth. He throws the stone. It bounces off the back of the larger dog, an Alsatian with matted fur, which turns its head, revealing a collar: one of those dogs abandoned by tourists at the end of the season which then wander about, lost, for months, until they’re picked up by the local animal protection league. When the stone hits, the dog lets out a yelp and limps off, at which point the other dog grabs whatever it is they were fighting over and disappears into the bushes. The stone hit the Alsatian on the back, but that isn’t why the dog is limping. One of its back legs is so mutilated and covered in scabs that the dog can’t put any weight on it. Ahmed assumes it must have been run over at some point or that it got caught in a trap or entangled in some barbed wire. It runs awkwardly and fearfully. As it moves off, it glances back a couple of times, as if to make sure the man isn’t coming after it to inflict further punishment. A lame, frightened dog and possibly vengeful too, for Ahmed fears that the dog is trying to retain his image, as the dog’s aggressor, in the bloodshot mirror of its eyes. But servility cancels out aggression: the dog lowers its head as it trots gracelessly away. Its attitude indicates fear and submission—a creature beaten and made to suffer. Ahmed shudders, with a feeling that combines both sadness and distaste for the murky reality revealed by the dog’s wounds. Disgust provoked by the sordid, but also by a dread of cruelty, the cruelty of a vengeful dog and the cruelty of the man or men who beat it. There are open wounds on the dog’s skin, bloody welts, the remains of what could be either old and infected wounds or the symptoms of some skin disease. The other dog, smaller and fiercer-looking, has glossy black fur. Surprised by the Alsatian’s reaction on being hit by the stone, the smaller dog at first drops the piece of rotten meat as it flees into the bushes, only to immediately snatch it up again. The dog lies down, its body half-hidden among the reeds, only occasionally looking up, eyes bright and watchful. The meat hangs from its mouth. Ahmed has been looking with some curiosity at the piece of meat the two dogs were fighting over, and now he begins to look at it with growing horror, because he realizes that the blackish lump is taking on a recognizable shape: despite its dark, putrescent appearance, despite the places where it has been gnawed clean, it is clearly a human hand. Curiosity makes him keep looking, overcoming the feelings of repugnance and horror urging him to look away, to both see and not see; just as he wants to know and not know. He waves his stick at the black dog, forcing it to retreat a few paces. The animal growls, and although it does withdraw a little, it continues to glare at him and refuses to give up its prey, which—and Ahmed has no doubts about this now—is all that remains of a human hand. At the same time, his gaze slides away, again, deliberately and not deliberately, toward certain shapes lying sunk in the mud a few yards further off, to the right of the place where the dogs had been a moment before. He identifies that spot as the source of the pestilential odor he has been aware of for a while and which suddenly grows more intense. Two of the half-buried, mud-coated shapes in the water are clearly human forms. The remains of the third mangled shape could belong to a man who has been mutilated or to a body largely submerged in mud, it could also be the corpse of an animal, a dog, a sheep, a pig. As soon as he realizes that these are human remains, Ahmed knows that he must leave at once. Just having seen them makes him an accomplice to something, impregnates him with guilt. His first impulse is to run, but that would make him look still more suspicious: he starts walking quickly, brushing aside the leaves of the reeds that strike his face. He keeps glancing to right and left to see if anyone could have spotted him, but he sees no one. He’s unlikely to meet one of those English or German retirees who walk briskly along the side of the road convinced that, as they breathe in the exhaust fumes from cars and trucks, they are, in fact, engaged in healthy exercise; or else one of those excessively thin individuals, more drug-addicts than sportsmen, who go jogging along by the irrigation ditches and along the edges of the orange groves: no, none of the fauna prowling the orchards and engaged in various forms of exercise regimes ever comes to that particular piece of marshland.
He moves off as fast as he can, although he can’t resist the temptation to turn round a couple of times and look back at that piece of putrid meat, at the tendons and bones with which the black dog is busily playing, beneath the gaze of the Alsatian, which has returned from its brief absence and is again watching from a couple of yards away. Ahmed looks, above all, at the dark shapes half-buried in the mud. Despite his haste, he still has time to see, behind one of the dunes and hidden in the undergrowth, the burnt-out carcass of a car, whose presence only increases the sinister air the place has suddenly taken on. He stops breathing. He can’t breathe, he can feel a rapid pulse beating in his chest, his temples, his wrists, a buzzing in his head. Esteban told him once that criminals used to throw incriminating weapons into the thick waters of the lagoon. He keeps walking and keeps looking, but can’t seem to control the movements of his eyes, which appear to have acquired a life of their own and move at will: they shift from side to side, forcing him to turn his head. He doesn’t want to look, but can’t help himself, although now he’s less concerned about those shapes or about the dogs than about the shadows he thinks he can glimpse behind the reeds or around each bend in the path or in the dips and folds of the dunes. With each step he takes, he grows more confused by the shifting shadows and silhouettes, which take on seemingly human forms. He feels he’s being watched. He has a sense that people are observing him from the dunes, from the road, from the reedbeds on the far side of the lagoon, even from the slopes of the distant mountains. He suspects that this morning, as he was walking along by the main road, he became an object of interest to passing drivers, to the prostitutes who saw him setting off along the path to the marsh, to the children who were playing by the shacks he passed at the end of Avenida de La Marina, and at that moment, wishing he could erase himself from their memories, he remembers that, in his haste, he has left behind his fishing rod secured between two boulders, his net in the water and his basket on the shore, on the grass. He can’t just abandon his belongings there, it would be so easy for a detective to identify both rod and net; especially the fishing rod, which probably still bears the tag from the sports shop in Misent where he bought it seven or eight months ago when he first started coming with Esteban to go fishing, and so he runs back to the place he has just left (now he really is frightened, his whole body trembling), the reeds cut his face, his cheeks, his eyelids. When he pushes them aside, he feels their sharp edges cutting the palm of his hand. As soon as he has retrieved his fishing rod, he must return to the point on the road where he arranged to meet his friend, but it would be stupid to stay there sitting by the curb, waiting as he usually does where the path meets the road—he’d be leaving all kinds of clues, because that’s already the way his mind is working, as if he were one of the guilty parties. No, he can’t possibly wait there, but neither can he just leave and have his friend set off down the path looking for him, because when the inevitable investigations begin (no, no, calm down, he tells himself, months and months could pass before anyone else goes to that hidden corner) someone might recognize the car and identify Rachid’s clunker, that rusty fifteen-year-old Ford Mondeo, with its dented doors and its back bumper held on with wire. Besides, there’s that burnt-out car in the dunes, and someone is sure to report the disappearances; they’ll start dredging the lagoon, although who knows who those bodies might be. Probably immigrants like him, people just passing through, or maybe mafiosi fallen victim to some settling of scores: Moroccans, Colombians, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians. Perhaps a couple of prostitutes, their throats cut by their pimps, women nobody will take the trouble to look for.
He decides to start walking along the main road, back to La Marina, and trust that Rachid will spot him from his car. Much as he would like to, he can’t stay still. He sets off toward Misent, then immediately retraces his steps, watching the passing cars, waiting anxiously for Rachid to appear, as if getting into his friend’s car would be like entering a refuge where he could disappear as soon as he sits down, arms hanging loose, breathing under control, head against the headrest, one cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window, relaxing and vanishing completely: the same psychological mechanism that allows children to believe they’re invisible when they cover their eyes with their hands: if you can’t see, then you can’t be seen. Sitting beside the driver of the Mondeo would be proof that he had nothing to do with that putrefying hand, with the stinking shapes buried in the mud, with that burnt-out car; once he has relaxed enough to disappear into the passenger seat of Rachid’s Mondeo, when they reach the intersection at the Avenida de La Marina a few miles further on, he will roll down the window and lean out to feel the cool evening air on his face, convincing himself that he saw nothing. He will be just another passenger among the thousands of others who travel along Route 332 every day, people filling that over-populated area for a few seconds and then lost again along the capillaries of the traffic heading for one of the small towns nearby or continuing on to some other part of Europe. At that point, his only thought is that he must tell no one what he’s seen (not even Rachid, who will know from his face that something has happened?
Why didn’t you wait for me by the roadside? You seem worried, has something happened?
), and yet he needs to tell someone as soon as possible, because he won’t be able to rest until he does; only by sharing the fear will he be able to detach it from himself. He approaches the junction and slows his pace to something approaching normal. He stops for a moment to open his basket and throw the fish into the gutter, the fish he caught and that now disgust him. He imagines the crows or the foxes biting greedily into them. He feels like throwing up. The lagoon, which was the color of cast steel when he arrived, is now smooth and delicate, like old gold, with coppery tints on the waves whipped up by the breeze.
II
External Locations
December
14, 2010
I’VE SAT
my father down in front of the TV to watch his morning Western, whichever one was on the pay-per-view that day. He sits there amazed at the galloping horses, the neighing, the Indians, and the noise of gunfire: I know he won’t move until I come back. After the Western, they’ll put on some movie about terrorists, with scowling Arabs speaking a guttural language, translated into subtitles too small to decipher on the TV screen; or one about policemen chasing drug-traffickers, Latinos or blacks, with lots of cars screeching round corners, crashing into each other and, finally, hurtling off a high metal bridge. He’ll stay there, eyes glued to the screen or, more likely, he’ll doze off, eyes closed—it comes to the same thing. In fact, he stares with equal interest at the bathroom wall when I’m washing him or at the ceiling when I put him to bed. The important thing is that he doesn’t try to get up and risk hurting himself. To avoid this, I put him in a big armchair that he couldn’t get out of even if he wanted to, because it’s too deep and too low—not, of course, that he’d have the strength to stand up anyway, but just to make sure he won’t fall out, I roll up a sheet, wrap it round his chest and tie it to the chair back, taking care not to tie it too tightly. I check that he can move his body back and forth. Is that all right, not too tight? I ask simply to say something, simply to ask something, because he hasn’t spoken for months now, and I can’t even tell if he can actually see. That is, he
can
see, because he closes his eyes if I shine a bright light in his face or if I make him turn his head toward a lightbulb, and his eyes follow my hand if I move it slowly from side to side in front of him; and he can hear too, although it isn’t clear whether he understands me or not; he jumps and looks frightened if I shout at him or if he hears a loud noise immediately behind him. He hasn’t spoken since they removed the tumor from his trachea. He doesn’t speak, but he could write and ask for things in writing, he could express himself through gestures, but he doesn’t—he doesn’t show the least interest in communicating. The doctors have run all kinds of tests and scans and tell me that since there’s no damage to his brain, they can’t understand what’s wrong with him. Age. He’s over ninety now. He’s become a shop-window mannequin. Not that I’m particularly interested in anything he might have to say, although now that Liliana doesn’t come any more and I’ve closed the workshop, I do spend more time observing him. I watch him, study him, learning useless lessons with no practical application. Human life is nature’s biggest waste of time and energy: just when it seems that you’re beginning to make the most of what you know, you die, and those who come after you have to start all over again from scratch. Helping a child learn how to walk, taking him to school and teaching him to tell a circle from a square, yellow from red, solid from liquid, hard from soft. That’s what he taught me. Life—a waste of time. Get used to it. He’s always been very bright, the old man, bright and a real bastard too. But that’s what he taught me and what I repeated to Liliana, perhaps simply because I wanted to make her feel sorry for me. I’m packing things away: it’s time to shut up shop, I told her. And she said: Well, it’s never too late to learn something new. One day, I’m going to cook you both a really good
sancocho
, which is like a stew, except that we add vegetables you Spaniards hardly ever use or don’t even know about—vegetables like arracacha, corn cob, yucca, green plantain, and we season it with coriander, that herb I used to miss so much here until they started selling it in the Colombian shop and in the Muslim shops. A sort of fragrant parsley. We Latin Americans eat it and so do the Arabs. Because it’s on my way, I usually buy coriander in that Arab greengrocer’s next to the halal butcher. I would never buy meat from that butcher, of course. God knows where they get their lamb and their beef. I saw a TV program once that said Spain’s full of illegal slaughterhouses supplying Muslim shops. Apparently, they have to kill the animal while facing Mecca, well, we all have our little ways, I suppose. In the same program, they showed you how Chinese restaurants store ducks, dear God, apparently their fridges smell worse than a dead dog, it’s enough to make your hair stand on end, and you don’t even want to know what else they said they found there. But I was talking about coriander, which you don’t use here, or even know about, just as you don’t know about real fruit: mangos, papayas, soursops, guayabas, uchovías, passion fruit, custard apples, pitayas and ahuyama, which you call squash. You’re getting more familiar with some of those fruits now, because the supermarkets sell them, but as far as I know, you’ve only ever eaten tasteless things like bananas, apples, pears, oranges, and that’s about it, oh, and those awful pineapples that arrive from Costa Rica and taste of nothing at all and go rotten if you leave them in the fridge for a few days. No, don’t laugh, it’s true. I bet you’ve never eaten a decent pineapple in your life. A perfectly ripe pineapple, just picked, with that lovely sweet, honeyed flavor. Her voice, every evening, while I sit him down at the table laid with a plastic table cloth and on which I will place the larger plate with the vegetables and the smaller plate with the omelette, just as she used to do up until a few days ago. Even in his present helpless state, he’s still ruling my life, setting me tasks, imposing a timetable, more or less as he’s always done, yes, my diary is still dependent on him. Before, he achieved this by imposing his authority; now he does so through his silence and ineptitude. He is the powerless patient: he’s swapped authority for a demand for compassion; and I have become his servant, because I feel sorry for him. On the other hand, we have all been subject to his mood swings for as long as I can remember. His life, on the other hand, has been his property alone. He has behaved much as a king behaves—depending on the constitution—or a certain sort of artist—taking no responsibility for his actions: today I protest and complain, tomorrow I won’t utter a word, the day after that I’ll be an attention-seeker, the next I won’t even be able to bear anyone looking at me. Now that I think about it, he did have an artist’s mentality. In his youth, he wanted to be an artist. He loved to read novels, as well as books about history, art and politics. He would borrow them from the local library. On Friday afternoons, he’d get cleaned up, put on a white shirt and a jacket, and go and change his library books. On Sunday afternoons, in other people’s houses, when soccer matches were blaring out from radios, utter silence reigned in ours: my father would be sitting by the window, reading, taking advantage of the afternoon light; then he would lower the blind and turn on the standard lamp next to the only armchair in the house, and remain immersed in his book until supper time, after which he would return to the armchair and resume his reading. The soul of an artist. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor, which is what he wanted me to be as well, but the chaos of the civil war put an end to his ambitions. I managed to put an end to my own ambitions all by myself. I was never interested in the skill he’d chosen for me. I lasted only a few months at art school. He and my grandfather made some of the bits of furniture for the house, furniture decorated in a style that was old-fashioned even then, around the time of the Republic and in the years immediately preceding, because, by then, in the late 1920s and early 30s, people were choosing designs that were vaguely art deco, while they, those staunch revolutionaries, adopted a Renaissance style, with carving reminiscent of certain façades that tend to feature in TV documentaries about Salamanca: full of
grottesche
, medallions and acanthus leaves. Obsolete from the day they were born, but no one could deny their excellent quality. They lent a dignity to our house at a time when we had barely enough to eat. More a matter of professional pride than extravagance.