Authors: Leif Davidsen
“My condolences. Here are your release papers. And your belongings. No further action will be taken. You have the right to seek compensation for wrongful arrest and detention from the State of Spain. I will leave you the use of my office so that you can confer with your friends in peace and quiet. Again, my deepest sympathy. Please sign the receipt before you leave.”
He edged out from behind the desk and slid out of the room.
“What’s happened?” I asked again. I sat quietly and listened to the story. There were no tears. I was empty and silent inside. Gloria did the talking. Matter-of-fact and precise, like a lawyer quoting a police report, she put cold words to my life’s tragedy.
At 1.30 a.m. there had been an explosion in our flat. It had been so forceful that the windows had blown out. The explosion was followed by an intense blaze, which had spread through the whole building. It was gutted. The roof had collapsed. All the flats were burnt out. Only a couple of hours earlier the fire brigade had got the blaze sufficiently under control to be able to send in firefighters equipped with breathing apparatus. Thirteen bodies had been recovered so far, eleven people were injured. The two families on the ground floor had managed to get out, along with the families on the second and third floors. The bodies had been taken to the central
institute of forensic medicine. The police had opened an inquiry. Their preliminary theory was that there had been a gas explosion caused by a leaking pipe in the kitchen or bathroom of our flat or the flat below.
She might as well have been a newspaper reporter, and later it appeared just like that in the broadsheets, while the tabloids spread it on thicker, writing about a tragic blaze and following up with leaders about the antiquated, hazardous gas fittings still to be found in Madrid’s oldest neighbourhood. Plus all the gossip, of course.
“Are you sure they were home?” I asked.
“Absolutely, Peter,” said Gloria. “I’m afraid they’re already quite sure.”
“I want to see them,” I said.
“Of course,” said Gloria.
“We can go there right away,” said Oscar, “But it won’t be pleasant.”
“It can’t get any worse,” I said.
Oscar wasn’t good at expressing emotions, but he coped very well. He was visibly shaken, white as a sheet and stooping, as if someone had put a huge boulder on his shoulders. He dragged his feet as he walked across to me, lit a cigarette and stuck it in my mouth. He put his arm round me and there we sat, not saying a word, his strong heavy arm on my shoulders and Gloria’s hand in mine, and I smoked my cigarette and tried to comprehend that Amelia and Maria Luisa had been taken from me. I couldn’t bring myself to think the word: dead. It didn’t seem right. It was too detached and almost normal. People die at some time or other, but my two had been taken from me. Stolen and carried off. I can’t describe the sense of emptiness, grief and irrational anger at their having deserted me. I was also filled with guilt at not having long ago had the gas fittings removed and electric heating installed. But gas water heaters still hissed and reeked in thousands of kitchens and bathrooms in the old parts of Madrid.
I had been sad when first my father and later my mother died. But they were both nearly 80. They had lived long lives. It was only natural that they had passed away and left the stage to my older brother and me. They had both died after long illnesses, so we had the impression that they were tired and had enjoyed their fill of life. Maria Luisa and Amelia had been snatched away. It was so damned unjust.
Oscar’s big Mercedes 600 was parked in the yard and he helped me into the back seat next to Gloria. The police sentry in his ungainly bulletproof vest lifted the barrier and we drove into what could have been freedom, but freedom for what? To be unhappy? To take my own life? To go back to the bottle? Two television crews and a small group of photographers and reporters were waiting. Cameras were hoisted onto shoulders the moment the mascot on the bonnet of the black Mercedes came into view.
“What is it, Oscar?” I said, when he braked hard so as not to drive into the waiting pack.
“You know what it’s like. They get to know about these things instantly,” he said.
“How can they?”
“You’re part of the package. Of course the rumour spread that you’d been arrested as soon as we began ringing round. Damn it, they knew where you lived. They can put two and two together. There are rumours about the photographs. I had the feelers out, for God’s sake.”
His voice was hoarse and angry.
“Oscar. Give it a rest. Peter’s not a fool,” said Gloria.
The television cameras and camera lenses approached the tinted windows as if they were going to nuzzle them. Or penetrate them. Rape the people sitting inside. I could hear the reflectors in the equipment working and heard the journalists shout out, asking how I was feeling, if I had a comment, say something Pedro. It was strange to be sitting on the other side in my grief, when I really ought to have been
alone and private. It was strange to be on the other side of the lens. As a young man, one of the waiting wolves outside the restaurants used by the famous and royal in Kensington in London, I had elbowed my way forward to reveal and unmask a human face in all its vulnerable nakedness. Had my face been just as distorted, my mouth open like a fish gasping for air, my eyes the same blend of schadenfreude and excitement? How many times had I seen the victim trying to shield their face even though there may have been nothing to hide? As if an infringement of privacy was both painful and, in itself, created a sense of guilt. I was too desolate to be angry. I just felt so heart-broken.
“Drive me up to Santa Ana, Oscar,” I said.
“The whole pack’s there, Peter,” he said.
“Just do what Peter says,” said Gloria.
“OK.”
Using the horn, he edged his way through the pack of reporters which parted like water in front of the sharp bows of a large ship. The most persistent ran behind the car for a short distance. When he was clear of them, he accelerated and turned up a side street and drove across the Puerta del Sol and the short stretch up past the office for the bullfights, and negotiated the half kilometre to Plaza Santa Ana via the back streets.
The square was cordoned off. We were stopped, but when Oscar told the policeman who I was we were allowed through. He parked the car on the pavement and we got out. There were four large fire engines in front of my building.
Bomberos
was written on the side of them, a Spanish word which I had always had difficulty connecting with the emergency services. The blue flashing lights were like the twinkling of fireworks in the greyish-white morning. I noticed that it was overcast and a little chilly. There were several parked patrol cars and the flagstones in the plaza were running with soot and water. Firefighters were still hosing the neighbouring building with water. And, like
shadows in hell, several firefighters were working in what had been my home just a few hours before. I had covered blazes too. I had stood as a cool observer, thinking only about light, aperture, distance, angles, long shots, close-ups, the story. As a professional you can only live with disaster if you keep it at arm’s length.
They were putting out the last flames. The air was thick with soot and smoke and an indefinable stench of death. There was clanking and hissing, crackling radios and the murmuring chorus of voices which you always hear at the scene of a disaster, when people are first silent and then elated at the realisation that they are alive, while others have lost their lives. It could have been me, they think. But I’ve been spared this time. A tragedy always reminds people that they are only here on borrowed time and that death awaits us all.
I walked towards my burnt-out home. The reporters caught sight of me. Even though I never signed my photographs, I knew most of them from Madrid’s Press Club. They started running towards me as I walked in their direction. They pushed and elbowed to reach me first, following that mysterious, all important commandment: you must be first and must not let your competitors get past you. They came to a halt. The lenses pointing at me felt like loaded bazookas, but I kept walking straight ahead and, for a moment, it was as if they felt sorry for me and I managed to squeeze through and reach a cordon from where I could see inside the gutted building.
The stench and the heat hit me in the face, making it burn, and I knew that the photographers got their shots as tears began running down my cheeks. They were tears of grief and despair – perhaps. Or was it just the smoke scorching my eyes?
Everything had collapsed and was drenched with water and giving off little wisps of smoke. There was nothing recognisable. Everything was jumbled together and tangled up. Sooty, white-singed beams lay criss-crossed in all directions. The bathtub was no longer white, but
streaked with black. The bathtub was actually the worst thing I could see, because it was recognisable. It was as if a bomb had blown the guts of my house to smithereens. I could hear voices around me. Asking questions and wanting a comment. I couldn’t make out one from the other. But they were idiotic questions. How was I feeling? What was I feeling? What would I do? What was I feeling? Repeated in a never-ending stream. As if my feelings could be expressed in words. As if this abyss of emptiness inside me could be described in sentences.
Then Felipe Pujol came right up to me. He stepped in front of me, squeezing himself between two television cameras. I knew who he was. He was a small thickset Catalan, the crime reporter on
El Mundo
.
“Pedro? How are you? Why were you arrested?”
I didn’t reply. I looked over his head into the grimy hell that mirrored the hell in which I found myself.
“Pedro? We’re old friends. Why were you arrested? Give me a comment.”
“Piss off, Felipe,” said Oscar behind me. He hadn’t got through the press corps as easily as I had. He stood behind me and I sensed, rather than saw, that we were encircled by reporters, by police, by onlookers who had been attracted to the scene of the disaster like flies to a dog turd on a hot summer day.
“Shut up, Oscar,” said Felipe. He stepped right up to me, so he was practically standing on my feet, tipped back his head and looked me in the eyes. I could smell him. He had drunk a brandy this morning along with his coffee.
“I hear you’ve dumped on a Minister. And that’s the reason. I hear you’ve got naughty pictures. And that’s the reason. Come on, Pedro. Damn it. You know the score. Give me your story. It could help you. Is it true that you’ve taken a series of photographs?
El Mundo
would be happy to pay for the exclusive rights.”
I rammed my knee into his balls and he collapsed in front of me without a sound, just an agonised, flabbergasted expression on his face. I couldn’t have cared less. I turned on my heel and, with Oscar leading the way, pushed through the clamouring pack of photographers, reporters and television cameras. One of them was from morning television. They were undoubtedly transmitting live. They lived off disasters, gossip, scandals, recipes and traffic bulletins. Oscar was big and ploughed straight through and I walked behind him as if in a stupor, as if it was all a dream, blurred and milky white, from which I would wake up in a moment and reach out my hand, grasp Amelia’s hand and she would turn and nestle her soft buttocks into my crotch and we would slowly wake together in the snug darkness of the bedroom.
The police finally got their act together and formed a ring round us and steered us over to the car where Gloria was behind the wheel. Oscar sat in the back next to me and the uniformed officers cleared a passage so we could get out of the plaza. It helped when they pulled their truncheons half out of their holsters to indicate that now their patience had run out.
“Damned vultures,” said Oscar.
“We’re part of the pack ourselves, my dear,” said Gloria tonelessly.
What happened next is a bit hazy. As if the nightmare continued. As if it wasn’t really happening. I can remember only one exchange of words on the way to see the remains of my beloved ones.
“I want a drink,” I said.
“OK,” said Oscar.
“No,” said Gloria.
Then I was standing in front of two covered bodies in a sterile tiled room. The doctor or policeman pulled the sheet down only a little way. Their hair was covered with something that looked like a bathing cap. But there wasn’t any hair left. I could barely recognise Amelia. Her
face was charred, but Maria Luisa was hardly burnt at all, as if she had suddenly fallen through the ceiling and had been covered with some kind of protective material. Her eyes were closed. She was a bit sooty and there was a blister on her tiny delicate cheek, but it was the missing eyelashes that made me weep silently. The tears ran down my cheeks. I felt both guilty and ashamed.
“Are they your wife and daughter?” asked the man wearing a white overall.
“Yes.”
“I would like your permission to perform a post-mortem.”
“Why?”
“It is at my request, señor Lime.”
The voice belonged to a middle-aged man wearing a tailored suit. He was standing in the corner of the room, but I hadn’t been aware of him. Gloria and Oscar were standing just inside the door, pale as death. Gloria had aged visibly and Oscar was crushing his hands together. Gloria must have had a spare top in the car because she was wearing a simple blue sweatshirt. I hadn’t noticed her pull it on, but she was so beside herself that she hadn’t fixed her hair afterwards. It swirled around her head as if she had just got up.
“Rodriques, criminal investigation department,” he said and held out his identity card. He had slim brown hands and was wearing both a little diamond ring and a wedding ring. Gloria stepped forward to protect me, but I raised my hand and stopped her in her tracks.
“I can’t make a decision about that right now,” I said.
“You have to,” he said. “Your family must be laid to rest.”
That was true, of course. In Spain people are buried very quickly. They don’t wait up to a week like in Denmark. Perhaps it’s a custom which dates back to the old days when bodies couldn’t be left for very long in the sweltering heat. Perhaps it has something to do with
Catholics not attaching as much importance to the flesh as we do, but more to the soul.