Authors: Antonio Hill
“Papa, Papa …”
Shit.
The television screen covered in gray snow. His son’s voice. The pain
in his neck from having fallen asleep in the worst possible position. The dream had been so real on
Reyes
night.
“You were shouting.”
Shit. When your own son wakes you out of a nightmare the moment has come to resign as a father, thought Héctor as he sat up on the sofa, sore and in bad humor.
“I fell asleep here. And what are you doing awake at this time of night?” he counterattacked.
Guillermo shrugged his shoulders without saying anything. As Ruth would have done. As Ruth had done so many times. In an automatic gesture, Héctor searched for a cigarette and lit it. Cigarette butts were spilling out of the ashtray.
“Don’t worry, I won’t fall asleep here again. Go to bed. And don’t forget we’re going out early tomorrow.”
His son nodded. As he watched him walk barefoot toward his room, he thought how hard it was to act as a father without Ruth. Guillermo wasn’t yet fifteen, but at times, looking at his face, you would say he was much older. There was a premature seriousness in his features that pained Héctor more than he cared to admit. He took a long drag on his cigarette and, without knowing why, pressed the button on the remote. He couldn’t even remember what he’d put on that night. With the first few images, that still black-and-white photo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, he recognized it and remembered.
Breathless
. Ruth’s favorite film. He didn’t feel up to watching it again.
Approximately ten hours earlier, Héctor had been contemplating the white walls of the psychologist’s practice, a space he knew well, a tad uncomfortable. As usual, the “kid” was taking his time before beginning the session and Héctor still hadn’t worked out if those minutes of silence served to gauge his state of mind or if the guy was simply a slow starter. In any case, this morning, six months after his first visit, Inspector Salgado wasn’t in the mood to wait. He cleared his throat, crossed
and uncrossed his legs, then finally leaned forward and said, “Would you mind if we started?”
“Of course.” And the psychologist raised his eyes from his papers, although he added nothing further.
He remained silent, interrogating the inspector with his gaze. He had an absentminded air that, combined with his youthful features, made you think of one of those child prodigies who solve complex equations at the age of six but at the same time are incapable of kicking a football without falling over. A false impression, Héctor knew. The kid took few shots, certainly; however, when he fired, he was on target. In fact, the therapy sessions, which had begun as a work requirement, had become a routine, weekly at first then fortnightly, that Héctor had followed of his own volition. So that morning he took a deep breath, as he’d learned, before answering.
“Really sorry. The day didn’t start off well.” He leaned back and fixed his eyes on a corner of the office. “And I don’t think it will end any better.”
“Difficulties at home?”
“You don’t have teenagers, do you?” It was an absurd question, given that his listener would have to have been a father at fifteen to have offspring of Guillermo’s age. He remained quiet for a moment to reflect, then, in a tired voice, he went on, “But it’s not that. Guillermo is a good boy. I think the problem is that he was never a problem.”
It was true. And although many fathers would be satisfied by this apparent obedience, Héctor was worried by what he didn’t know; what was going on in his son’s head was a mystery. He never complained, his marks were normal, never excellent but never bad either, and his seriousness could be an example to madder, more irresponsible kids. However, Héctor noticed—or rather he sensed—that there was something sad behind this absolute normality. Guillermo had always been a happy child and now, in mid-adolescence, he’d become an introverted boy whose life, when he wasn’t at school, basically passed by within the four walls
of his bedroom. He spoke very little. He didn’t have many friends. All in all, thought Héctor, he’s not so different from me.
“And you, Inspector? How are you? Still not sleeping?”
Héctor hesitated before admitting it. It was a subject on which they couldn’t agree. After months of insomnia, the psychologist had recommended some gentle sleeping pills, which Héctor refused to take. Partly because he didn’t want to become accustomed to them; partly because it was in the early hours that his mind worked at full capacity and he didn’t want to dispense with his most productive hours; partly because sleeping plunged him onto uncertain and not always pleasant ground.
The kid deduced the reasons for his silence.
“You’re wearing yourself out uselessly, Héctor. And, without wanting to, you’re wearing out the people around you.”
The inspector raised his head. He rarely addressed him so directly. The kid held his gaze without turning a hair.
“You know I’m right. When you started to come to the practice we were dealing with a very different subject. A subject that was put aside after what happened to your ex-wife.” He spoke in a firm voice, without hesitation. “I understand that the situation is difficult, but becoming obsessed won’t get you anywhere.”
“You think I’m obsessed?”
“Aren’t you?”
Héctor gave a faint, bitter smile.
“And what do you suggest? That I forget Ruth? That I accept that we’ll never know the truth?”
“You don’t need to accept it. Just live with it without rebelling against the world every day. Listen to me while I ask you as the police officer you are: how many cases remain unsolved for a time? How many are cleared up years later?”
“You don’t understand,” Héctor replied, and took a few seconds to continue speaking. “Sometimes … sometimes I manage to forget it all, for a few hours, while I work or when I go out running, then it comes
back. Suddenly. Like a ghost. Expectant. It’s not an unpleasant sensation, not accusing or asking, but it’s there. And it doesn’t go away easily.”
“What is it that’s there?” The question had been formulated in the same neutral tone that marked all the young therapist’s interjections, although Héctor noticed, or perhaps feared, that he was picking up a particular nuance.
“Relax.” He smiled. “It’s not that sometimes I see dead people. It’s just the feeling that …” He paused to find the words. “When you have lived with someone for a long time, there are times that you just know they’re at home. You wake up from a siesta and you sense that the other person is there, without needing to see them. You understand? That wasn’t happening to me anymore. I mean, it never happened during the time I was separated from Ruth. Only after her … disappearance.”
There was a pause. The psychologist scribbled something in that notebook to which Héctor had no visual access. At times he thought that those notes formed part of the theatrical ritual of a session: symbols which served only to make the interlocutor—that is, him—feel listened to. He was going to put forward his theory out loud when the other man began to speak; he spoke slowly, amiably, almost carefully.
“You know something, Inspector?” he asked. “This is the first time you have admitted, even in a roundabout way, that Ruth might be dead.”
“We Argentines are well aware what ‘disappeared’ can mean,” replied Héctor. “Don’t forget that.” He cleared his throat. “Even so, we have no objective proof that Ruth is dead. But—”
“But you believe it’s so, right?”
Héctor looked over his shoulder, as if he were afraid someone might hear. “That’s what fucks me over most.” He had lowered his voice, speaking more to himself. “You can’t even mourn her because you feel like a fucking traitor who threw in the towel too early.” He took a deep breath. “I beg your pardon. Christmas has never agreed with me. I thought I’d have come further with this, but … I had to give in. There’s nothing. I’ve found nothing. Damn it, it’s as if someone erased her from a drawing without a trace.”
“I thought the case was no longer in your hands.”
Héctor smiled.
“It’s in my head.”
“Do me a favor.” That was always the prelude to the end. “From now until the next session try to concentrate, at least for a while every day, on what you have. Good or bad, but what your life is made up of; not what’s missing.”
It was almost two in the morning, and Héctor knew he wouldn’t go back to sleep. He took his cigarette and cell phone and left the house to go up to the roof terrace. At least up there he wouldn’t wake Guillermo. The therapist was right in three things. One, he should start taking the damn sleeping pills, even if it annoyed him. Two, the case was no longer in his hands. And three, yes, deep down within him there was the conviction that Ruth was dead. Because of him.
It was a nice night. One of those nights that could reconcile you to the world if you let it. The coastline of the city extended before his eyes, and there was something in the bright twinkling lights of the buildings, in that dark but tranquil sea, that managed to chase off the demons Héctor carried within him. Standing there, surrounded by planters with dry plants, Inspector Salgado asked himself, with complete honesty, what he had.
Guillermo. His work as an inspector in Catalonia’s police force, the
Mossos
, simultaneously intense and frustrating. A brain that seemed to function correctly and lungs that must be half black by now. Carmen, his neighbor, his landlady; his Barcelona mother, as she said. This roof terrace from which he could see the sea. An annoying therapist who made him think about bullshit at three in the morning. Few friends, but good ones. An immense collection of films. A body capable of running six kilometers three times a week (despite lungs worn out by the damned tobacco). What else did he have? Nightmares. Memories with Ruth. The void without Ruth. Not knowing what had happened to her was a
betrayal of everything that mattered to him: his promises from another time, his son, even his work. This rented apartment where they had both lived, loved and fought; the apartment she had left to begin a new life in which he was only a supporting actor. Even so, she loved him. They continued loving each other, but in another way. He was learning to live with all this when Ruth disappeared, vanished, leaving him alone with the feelings of guilt against which he rebelled every minute.
Enough, he told himself. I’m like the protagonist of a French film: fortysomething, self-pitying. Mediocre. One of those that spends ten minutes looking at the sea from a cliff, plagued by existential questions, only then to fall in love like an idiot with an adolescent ankle. And just after this reflection he remembered the last chat, more accurately an argument, he’d had with his colleague, Sergeant Martina Andreu, just before Christmas. The reason for the dispute was incredibly petty, but neither of the two seemed capable of putting an end to it. Until she looked at him with that insulting frankness and, without a second thought, fired point-blank: “Héctor, really, how long has it been since you had a fuck?”
Before his pathetic response could reverberate in his head, his cell phone rang.
Plaça Urquinaona was bathed in the blue light of the patrol cars, to the surprise of the four beggars, pickled with alcohol, who usually used the wooden benches as mattresses and couldn’t sleep that night.
Héctor identified himself and descended the metro stairs, feeling apprehensive. Suicides who chose this method to carry out their angel’s leap were more numerous than the ones covered in the media, more than were accounted for in the statistics, although not as many as urban legend suggested. Some cited the existence of “black stations,” platforms from which the number of people who decided to end their lives was disproportionately higher than normal. In any case, and to avoid what was known as the “copycat effect,” these deaths were kept from the public. Héctor had always thought, with no proof other than intuition, that these suicides were more the result of a moment of desperation than a plan laid out beforehand. In any case, the police procedure was characterized by prompt action: remove the body as soon as possible and reestablish service, although in this case, given the hour, they had more time; hide the occurrence under the alibi of an incident or breakdown during the time in which the traffic was necessarily suspended. Because of that he thought it strange that Agent Roger Fort, who was on shift that night, had bothered to call him at home in the middle of the night to inform him of what had happened.
The same Roger Fort who at this moment was looking with a hesitant expression at Inspector Salgado as he descended the second flight of steps that led to the platform.
“Inspector. I’m glad to see you. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
There was something about this boy, a respectful formality that Héctor appreciated yet distrusted at the same time. In any case, Fort was the most improbable replacement for the young, determined and shameless Leire Castro. Héctor was convinced that the last thing that would have occurred to Agent Castro in these circumstances was to call a superior: without a doubt she would have felt herself qualified to deal with it on her own. That was the only objection Héctor had about her work: Leire was incapable of waiting for others to reach their conclusions; she went ahead and acted of her own accord without asking permission. This was a trait that wasn’t always looked on favorably in a job where order and discipline were still considered synonymous with efficiency.
But, much to his regret, Castro was on maternity leave and Superintendent Savall had put this agent, recently arrived from Lleida, on the team. Dark, with a permanent five o’clock shadow that persisted despite shaving, average height and with a rugby player’s complexion; his surname, Catalan for “strong,” seemed to fit him perfectly. Like Leire, he was not yet thirty. Both belonged to the new crop of investigative agents filling the
Mossos d’Esquadra
with guys who seemed to Salgado too young. Maybe because at forty-three he sometimes felt like an old man of seventy.
“You didn’t wake me. But I’m not sure if I’m happy you called.”
Fort, somewhat disconcerted by this answer, flushed. “The corpse is already covered and it’s being taken away, as ordered …”