What We Become

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

“I was sixteen the first time I went with a woman,” he recalls slowly, in a hushed voice. “I was working as a bellhop at the Ritz in Barcelona at the time. . . . I was tall for my age, and she was one of the guests, a refined older woman. In the end, she contrived to get me into her room. . . . When I realized what she was after, I did the best I could. And when we’d finished, while I was getting dressed, she gave me a one-hundred-peseta note. Before leaving, I went over to her, naively, to give her a kiss, but she recoiled, irritated. . . . And later, when I bumped into her in the hotel, she didn’t even condescend to look at me.”

  He falls silent for a moment, searching for a nuance or detail that will enable him to place what he has just told her in a precise context.

  “In the space of five seconds,” Max says at last, “while that woman recoiled, I learned lessons I’ve never forgotten.”

  A long silence ensues. Mecha has been listening very quietly, her head on his shoulder. Finally, she stirs, coming closer still. On her skinny, almost frail body, her breasts feel small and skimpy through her blouse, not at all as he remembers them. For some strange reason, this affects him. It moves him.

  “I love you, Max.”

  “Still?”

  “Still.”

  Gently, instinctively they seek out each other’s mouths, almost wearily. A melancholy kiss. Tranquil. Afterward they remain motionless, in each other’s arms.

  “Have the last years really been that difficult?” she asks after a while.

  “They could’ve been better.”

  A succinct way of putting it, he thinks, having scarcely finished the sentence. Then, in a quiet, dispassionate voice, he launches into a sorrowful litany: physical decline, the competition from young blood adapted to the new world. And finally, to top it all, a spell in an Athens jail—the result of a series of mistakes and disasters. Not a lengthy one, but by the time he got out he was finished. His experience only enabled him to live off petty crimes and poorly paid work, or to hang around places where he could make a living out of swindling people. For a while Italy was a good place for that, but in the end even his looks went. The job with Dr. Hugentobler, comfortable and secure, had been a real stroke of good fortune. Now that was ruined forever.

  “What will become of you?” Mecha asks after a brief silence.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll find a way. I always have.”

  She stirs in his arms, as though about to protest.

  “I could . . .”

  “No.” He restrains her, clinging to her more tightly.

  She stops moving. Max’s eyes are open in the half-light and she is breathing slowly, quietly. For a while she seems to be asleep. Finally, she stirs again, just a little, and brushes his face with her lips.

  “Anyway, remember,” she whispers, “I owe you a coffee if you ever pass through Lausanne. To see me.”

  “Good. Perhaps I will pass through one day.”

  “Please remember.”

  “Yes . . . I will.”

  For a moment, Max—astonished by the coincidence—thinks he can hear the familiar strains of a tango. Possibly a radio in an adjacent room, he thinks. Or music coming from the terrace below. It takes a while for him to realize that he is humming it in his own head.

  “It hasn’t been a bad life,” he confesses in a hushed tone. “Most of the time I lived off other people’s money, without ever having to despise or fear them.”

  “That seems like quite a good outcome.”

  “And I met you.”

  She lifts her head off Max’s shoulder.

  “Oh, come on, you old fraud. You met a lot of women.”

  Her tone is good-humored. Knowing. He kisses her hair softly.

  “I don’t remember those women. Not one. But I remember you. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.” She rests her head on his shoulder once more. “Tonight I believe you. Perhaps you have loved me, too, all your life.”

  “Yes. And perhaps I love you now. . . . How can I tell?”

  “Of course . . . How are you to tell?”

  A ray of sunshine wakes up Max, and he opens his eyes to the light warming his face. A bright, narrow beam of sunlight is streaming through the curtains drawn across the windows. Max moves slowly, laboriously at first, lifting his head from the pillow with a painful effort, and he realizes he is alone. On the bedside table, a travel clock tells him it is ten-thirty in the morning. The room smells of tobacco. Next to the clock is a glass of water and an ashtray containing a dozen or so cigarette ends. She must have spent the rest of the night with him. Watching over him as she promised. Perhaps she had sat there, quietly smoking as she gazed at him asleep in the early dawn light.

  He gets up, dizzily, running his hands over his creased clothes. Unbuttoning his shirt he sees that his bruises have acquired an ugly, dark hue, as if half his blood had seeped between his flesh and his skin. He aches from his groin up to his neck, and each step he takes toward the bathroom, until his stiff limbs begin to warm up, is almost agonizingly painful. The image he discovers in the mirror doesn’t exactly correspond to that of his good days: an old man with bleary, bloodshot eyes stares back at him from the far side of the glass. Turning on the tap, Max puts his head under the stream of cold water. He leaves it running for a long while to wake up properly. Finally he lifts his head, and, before drying himself with a towel, he once again studies his aging features, the water trickling into the deep furrows that line his face. He walks slowly across the bedroom to the window, and when he draws back the curtains, the light outside bursts over the crumpled coverlet, the navy-blue blazer draped on the back of a chair, the suitcase by the door, Mecha’s belongings strewn about the room: clothes, a bag, books, a leather belt, a purse, magazines. Dazzled at first, Max’s eyes slowly become accustomed to the brightness, and he focuses now on the azure sky and sea fused together, the coastline and the dark cone of Vesuvius in misty blues and grays. A ferry, setting out with hesitant slowness toward Naples, sketches the brief white line of its wake across the cobalt blue of the bay. And three floors below on the terrace, at a table (the one next to the kneeling marble woman looking out to sea), Jorge Keller and his mentor Karapetian are playing a game of chess, while Irina watches them, sitting slightly apart from the table, bare feet on the edge of her chair, arms hugging her knees. On the margins, now, of the game and their lives.

  Mecha Inzunza sits alone, farther away, next to a bougainvillea, near the balustrade surrounding the terrace. She is wearing her dark skirt, and her beige cardigan is draped over her shoulders. There is a coffee set and some newspapers open on the table, but she isn’t looking at them. As motionless as the stone woman behind her, she appears to be contemplating the view of the bay. As Max watches, forehead pressed against the cold windowpane, Max sees her move only once, lifting her hand to touch her hair, and tilting her head to the side with a pensive air before sitting upright once more and continuing to gaze out to sea.

  Max turns his back to the window and walks over to the chair to pick up his jacket. While he is putting it on, his gaze lingers upon the objects on the chest of drawers. And there, where he couldn’t help but see it, placed deliberately on top of a long, white woman’s glove, he discovers the pearl necklace, glowing softly in the intense brightness filling the room.

  Standing there facing the glove and the necklace, the old man, who moments ago was contemplating his reflection in the bathroom mirror, feels memories, images, and previous lives float to the surface, his mind ordering them with astonishing clarity. His own and others’ lives suddenly join together in a smile that is at once a painful grimace. Although perhaps it is the pain of lost or impossible things that is behind this sad smile. And so, once more, a small boy with grubby knees walks, arms outstretched, along the rotten boards of a boat abandoned in the mud of La Boca; a young soldier climbs a hill strewn with corpses; a door closes on the image of a sleeping
woman, enveloped in moonlight as hazy as regret. Then, in the weary smile of the man looking back over his life, there appears a whole succession of trains, hotels, casinos, starched bib fronts, naked backs, and jewelry glinting beneath crystal chandeliers, while a handsome young couple, impelled by passions as urgent as life itself, gaze into one another’s eyes while they dance an unwritten tango, in a silent, empty room on an ocean liner steaming through the dark night. Unknowingly, as they circle in their embrace, the pattern of an unreal world whose weary lights are about to be snuffed out forever.

  But that isn’t all. As the old man stares at the glove and the necklace, in his mind’s eye he sees palm trees, their fronds bowed beneath the rain, and a wet dog on a misty, gray beach, opposite a hotel room where the most beautiful woman in the world is waiting, on disheveled sheets that smell of moist intimacy and a serenity that is oblivious to time and to life, for the man at the window to turn toward her to plunge once more into her warm, perfect flesh, the only place in the universe where its strange rules can be forgotten. After that, on the green baize, three ivory balls click gently while Max stares intently at a young man in whom, astonishingly, he recognizes his own smile. He also sees up close two dazzling eyes, like liquid honey, looking at him as no woman has ever looked at him before. And he feels a moist, warm breath tickle his lips, while a voice whispers old words that sound like new and pour a soothing balm on his old wounds, absolving all the lies, the doubts and disasters, rooms in boardinghouses and squalid dwellings, fake passports, police stations, prison cells, the humiliation of recent years, loneliness and failure, the dim light of endless bleak dawns that erased the shadow that the boy on the banks of the Riachuelo, the soldier climbing the hill beneath the sun, the handsome youth who danced with beautiful women on luxury liners and in grand hotels, had firmly attached to his feet.

  And so, the vestiges of a smile still playing on his lips, lulled by the distant echo of all those lives that have been his, Max moves the pearl necklace to one side and picks up the woman’s glove beneath it. Deftly, with a touch of elegant whimsy, he arranges it in his top jacket pocket, the fingers protruding like the ends of a handkerchief or the petals of a flower in a buttonhole. Glancing around the room to make sure everything is in order, he gazes one last time at the necklace lying on the chest of drawers and nods briefly toward the window, as though taking leave of an invisible audience clapping their hands in imaginary applause. Such an occasion, he thinks while buttoning his jacket and smoothing it down, might call for the accompaniment of the Old School Tango as he bows out with appropriate nonchalance. But that would be too obvious, he decides. Too predictable. And so he opens the door, picks up his suitcase, and strides down the corridor, into the void, whistling “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”

  Madrid, January 1990

  Sorrento, June 2012

  About the Author

  Photograph by Victoria Iglesias

  Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the #1 internationally bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels, including The Club Dumas, The Queen of the South, and The Siege, which won the International Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association. A retired war journalist, he lives in Madrid and is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy. His books have been translated into more than forty languages and have been adapted to the big screen.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  English translation copyright © 2015 by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García Originally published in Spain in 2012 by Santillana Ediciones Generales, S. L. as El tango de la Guardia Vieja

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  Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Jacket illustration from poster advertising the Cunard Line (Colour Litho), English School (20th Century)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

  Lettering by David Wu

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, author. | Caistor, Nick, translator. | Garcia, Lorenza, translator.

  Title: What we become / Arturo Pérez-Reverte ; translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia.

  Other titles: Tango de la guardia vieja. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2016. | “Originally published in Spain in 2012 by Santillana Ediciones Generales, S. L. as El tango de la Guardia Vieja”—Verso title page.

  Subjects: LCSH: Male dancers—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Romance / Historical. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Suspense.

  Classification: LCC PQ6666.E765 T3613 2016 | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037715

  ISBN 978-1-4767-5198-6

  ISBN 978-1-4767-5200-6 (ebook)