I next called Morel and asked him to come over and see it.
That was the day Morel identified the two men who’d participated in the filming – along with Coutinho and Sottomayor – as Gilles Laplage and Sebastian Forester. After he’d watched the first twelve minutes of the film, he refused to see more, but I insisted he take a look at minute seventeen.
Morel agreed to my plan after seeing 17:43, but made me promise never to tell Susana about the existence of the film. Since he spoke almost no Portuguese, I dictated a note for him to hand to the prosecutors, explaining how he’d found the DVD in Coutinho’s library and a summary of what was on it. Knowing that Coutinho must have kept his pornography hidden inside classical music CDs in his locked cabinet, I also had him write that we’d found the DVD in question in Pascal Rogé’s recording of Debussy’s preludes, since Ana owned that CD and had agreed to donate the cover and liner notes to our cause. Morel drove Susana’s car to the Prosecutor’s Office.
I was sure that anyone who read the text I dictated would believe Morel’s story; no one would suspect I’d found the DVD and given it to him. My family and I would be safe from reprisals.
Morel and I spoke that evening. He’d given the film and our note to Bruno Cerveira, the government prosecutor assigned to the case.
Two days passed without word from Cerveira, but I was mostly over the flu and feeling confident, as though G and I had struck an important blow in a war that most people didn’t even know was being fought. And as though I’d returned from a trip that took me so away from myself that I’d needed Gabriel’s help to return.
On my third day of waiting for a reply from Cerveira, a physical therapist assigned to me by the Judicial Police came to my apartment for our first session. His name was Pavlo and he looked to be about thirty. He was from Kiev and had lived in Portugal since 2004. His thick black hair, parted in the middle, formed wings over his ears, giving him the slightly comic but highly romantic look of a Hollywood heartthrob in a silent movie. From the way Jorge stared at him, open-mouthed, squirming as though he needed to pee, I became convinced that my son had been pierced by Cupid’s arrow for the first time. He dashed off awkwardly to his bedroom, tripping over himself, which gave me the idea that he might even have sprouted an erection.
I surprised myself by not being the least bit upset. Instead, I was filled with amused admiration for the little demon.
Under Pavlo’s guidance, I was soon able to get around on my crutches much better. He became more concerned about my shoulder than my leg because the muscles had stiffened badly, and I could no longer lift my arm over my head. He went over a series of stretching exercises with me that I was to do twice a day.
It cheered me up to be given orders by a young man who seemed to regard me as a worthy human being simply because I was older and more experienced than him.
That night in bed, when Ana and I got to talking about Pavlo, I found myself telling her that I thought that Jorge might be gay. The dramatic tone I blundered into – fearing that she might be disappointed in our son or upset – made her snort. ‘You can’t really think that what Jorge might do in bed would bother me,’ she said.
‘I thought that his being our son might make it different.’
She kissed my brow as if I were her third child – and the one most needing her guidance at the moment. ‘You love him so much that you worry too much. He’s going to be okay.’
‘He might not have it easy,’ I insisted. ‘There’s still a lot of prejudice.’
‘He’s stronger than people think. He’s a tough little guy.’
‘How long have you suspected?’
‘For a couple of years.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Who’d have thought he’d go for Rudolph Valentino?’
‘So you noticed, too?’
She pointed her index finger straight up and gave me a cagey look. ‘I’d appreciate it if you told him what a hard-on is for, when you have a chance.’
‘Why me? You know what it’s for at least as well as I do,’ I shot back, which made her wrestle me onto my back.
‘There’s one other thing,’ I said, looking up at her, pleased to have a wife who liked to take charge now and again.
‘What?’
‘Ernie told me that he’s slept with men. So I guess that makes him gay.’ I left out that he’d gone to bed with prostitutes.
‘Big news,’ she said, pretending to yawn.
After the lights were off, the pressure to tell her even more made me put her hand over my eyes like a blindfold.
‘What’s wrong now?’ she asked.
‘There’s something I never told you about me.’
‘You enjoy your close-ups of my pussy far too much to be gay, so don’t try any bullshit on me!’
‘No, but I had sex with boys when I was in my teens. In Colorado. And then in Évora.’
She turned around. Her breathing was warm against my face. ‘Very enterprising of you to have sex on two continents, Chief Inspector.’
‘I never told anyone till I told Ernie a couple of weeks ago. Aunt Olivia never knew.’
‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘She loved you to the end of the earth. She could never have been disappointed in you.’
‘My father would say I was an embarrassment.’
She sat up. ‘Oh, Hank, you can’t really care what he’d think!’
‘I might.’
‘Well, don’t!’ she ordered, and she bit the Thunderbird tattoo on my arm to make her point.
Easing back onto her side of the bed, she turned on her side with her icy feet nudging my good leg, which meant that she wanted me to spoon up behind her, so I did.
‘What about when Jorge figures out he’s gay – if that’s what he is?’ I asked.
‘What about it?’ she whispered.
‘Maybe he’ll get upset.’
She pulled my arm around her and said, ‘If he needs any pointers, he can ask Ernie.’
‘He may not be very knowledgeable on the subject.’
‘Well, then he can ask his father.’
‘I’m serious, Ana.’
‘Hank, you have an uncanny ability to worry about everything! Stop! Besides, if Jorge is already getting erections at the age of seven, he’s going to be very popular!’
The next afternoon – 2 August, nine days ago – Morel phoned. Cerveira had just called to tell him there was nothing on the DVD that he could use to prosecute any of the men involved.
‘How is that possible?’ I asked.
‘Because Sandi is dead. So she cannot testify against Sottomayor, of course.’
‘The DVD testifies against him!’ I hollered.
‘He says it’s not enough. He must be sure she does not agree to what happens to her.’
The rage inside my chest was a form of explosive madness.
‘Does it look like she’s happy about what’s happening?’ I demanded. ‘She was only fourteen years old, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Cerveira confirms that fourteen is the age of consent in Portugal.’
‘That’s only true if there’s no coercion involved! Did you hear a word I said the other day?’
‘Do not yell at me, Monroe! You cannot imagine what I am feeling at this moment.’
‘I’m sorry. But listen closely. If a man forces a girl to do something she doesn’t want to do, he can be charged with statutory rape. She can be fourteen or fifteen or any other age.’
‘Still, he tells me the DVD is not enough to get a conviction.’
‘Did he watch the entire film?’ I asked. ‘Did he see minute seventeen?’
‘Yes, he tells me he watches it all.’
‘Did you remind him that the blood Sandi got under her fingernails proves she fought her father?’
‘He says Sandi is dead and her father is dead and there is no case.’
‘If he saw the DVD, he knows that Sottomayor forced himself on her, too. And that son-of-a-bitch is very much alive! We need to show the DVD to another prosecut
or. I know others who—’
‘Cerveira tells me he speaks to two other prosecutors,’ Morel interrupted. ‘They all agree we have nothing.’
He excused himself to fetch his cigarettes. When he got back on the line, he said, ‘I need to explain something else, Monroe.’
He sounded glum. ‘What else has happened?’ I asked. ‘Is it Susana?’
‘Yes and no. Once, you and I speak of the mountains where you live when you are a boy. Do you remember?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘These last days . . . It is as if I am at the bottom of a high mountain – a mountain where I once live. I look up and I see the top, and I know I can never climb back up. I am too old and tired. I cannot fight any longer. When you are my age, you realize that life is always about fighting – fighting for what you want, fighting to be heard . . . It is a struggle from the first day to the last. But I cannot do this any longer. I am sixty-two. And the top of the mountain is very far . . . very high. And Susana – she is no longer there, in any case. She is down here with me.’
‘Which means exactly what?’ I asked.
‘Susana and I will stay where we are. We know we cannot win. And the worst has already happened, no?’
‘But what about Mariana? She may still be suffering somewhere.’
‘Cerveira says that maybe she is fourteen, too.’
‘No, no, no! She’s younger than Sandi – it’s obvious!’
‘Mon Dieu, you are impossible! The point is, we have no proof!’
‘You know what Cerveira is really telling us, don’t you? That nobody in the Prosecutor’s Office is going to pursue this case – no matter what!’
‘Yes, Monroe, I understand,’ he said wearily. ‘I think I understand it before you, in fact. I grow up in a country where this also happens. Egalité, fraternité . . . It looks very good on old coins, but I do business in France for forty years and I know that how things work in the real world is different.’
‘How do things work?’
‘Either Cerveira already knows he will not win, because the odds are too big against him, or he is on the side of those we wish to fight. It makes no difference which.’
‘It does – morally.’
‘Morally?’ he repeated, as if it were an absurd notion. And he had himself a brief laugh, though I also sensed he was near tears. ‘What do you think morals have to do with this?’ he demanded.
‘Everything.’
‘No, they have nothing to do with it, Monroe! This is a negotiation – a business deal. And the outcome is already decided.’
I wanted to shriek something at him that would shame him for giving up. More even than that, I wanted to shout that I would kill Sottomayor or frame him for Coutinho’s murder. But the silence I let go on too long made me understand that I’d never permit myself to take such a risk – not as a husband and father. The only option left to me was to locate Mariana, but that could take years. And even if I did find her, Sottomayor and his friends would undoubtedly keep her from testifying – with money or threats.
As my last hope, I suggested to Morel that we go to the press with the DVD.
‘No!’ he hollered. ‘Susana does not want the world to see what happens to her daughter! Do not forget your promise to me! And what about Sandi? You think she would like the world to see her with her father?’
We both knew that her suicide was proof that the answer was no. ‘But if we don’t give the DVD to the press, nothing will happen to the men who killed her,’ I said.
‘It was her father who killed her!’ Morel hollered at me.
‘We could at least ruin their reputations,’ I told him.
In a slow, beseeching voice, Morel replied, ‘We can ruin their reputations only by letting everyone see what happens to Sandi. Her face at minute seventeen will end up on the Internet. Millions will see it. And Susana will not survive such a thing. And neither will I. So the question becomes, Monroe, do you want to kill the two of us?’
On hanging up, I walked to my room and eased the door closed behind me because I didn’t want to draw attention to my decision to leave behind the kind of world where Sottomayor and his friends would never pay for their crimes. Shouldn’t we refuse to play the game if the rules always favoured the other side? Wasn’t it our moral duty to go on strike?
Once I was alone, I removed the bandages from my shoulder and stood naked in front of our wall mirror. Studying my railroad-track scars, which were deeper and uglier than I’d feared, I apologized to my mother, because she’d brought me into the world without a blemish and had nursed me at her breast, and I should’ve taken better care of everything that she had given me.
After closing the curtains, I sat in the dark, trying to understand how I had reached this impasse. Where would I be now if I’d died? A question that makes no sense at all, but I asked it anyway, over and over, as though calling into the darkness after someone who might soon vanish without a trace.
That evening, Ana made Leonardo da Vinci’s recipe for polenta with prunes to improve my mood, but I refused to leave my bed. Nati carried supper to me on a tray. Looking at the apprehension in his eyes, I remembered – with a violent shudder, as though a rocket were taking off through my head – that he’d been frantic over his project on bossa nova music. I asked him to forgive me for not helping him.
‘It’s okay – ancient history,’ he said.
‘Not so ancient,’ I told him. ‘Just a couple of weeks ago.’
‘It was before you were shot.’ He fought back tears.
So it was that I learned that my son’s short life already had a before-time and an after-time, just like mine. Silly of me not to have understood his depth of feeling. When I hugged him, his slender chest trembling against mine made me realize for the first time that there was a great deal of my own past already in him, transmitted in ways that had been under my radar. That realization was enough to make me return – briefly, hoping to feel as little as possible – to my own small version of hell: I told him – in fitful stops and starts – about the first time my father had tested me and Ernie.
I gripped Nati’s hand while I spoke, and he didn’t resist me. He must have sensed I could not do this alone. Maybe, too, he already understood that touching was a great comfort to me at my worst times. When I was done, he asked, ‘Did your father ever test you again?’
‘He sure did. And sometimes I didn’t find Ernie in time, so Dad would hurt him. He hurt your uncle very badly on a few occasions.’
‘So there was no rototiller?’
‘We had a rototiller, but that wasn’t how Ernie got his half-an-ear.
‘You should have run away!’ my son exclaimed, as though my brother and I still had a chance to make an escape; the unforgiving border between the past and present had proved impossible for me to accept at his age as well.
I explained that Ernie and I realized while on our way to Crawford that Dad might teach Mom a final lesson if we ran away, and we’d be responsible. He nodded as if he understood exactly what had been at stake for us, but I could see he hadn’t a clue what I was really talking about. Which was probably a good thing.
‘You and your brother – you aren’t . . . aren’t like other people,’ he said, shrugging with frustration, because he’d been unable to find the words he wanted.
‘Maybe kids who grow up the way we did can overcome the borders that keep them separate from each other. Their identities aren’t so protected. Under certain circumstances, they might even merge into each other a bit. I think your uncle and I were almost like the same person for a while.’
Nati nodded to acknowledge that he understood my meaning. ‘Listen, Dad,’ he said, as though he were about to say something I wouldn’t like, ‘I don’t want you going back to work. Not ever.’
Before I could reply, he burst into tears. Ana came running. After we’d calmed the boy down and they returned to the living room, I realized I’d do what my son had asked me. I didn’t see I had any other choice, in fac
t.
At bedtime, on slipping under the covers with me, Ana asked if I was still on strike.
‘I think so.’
‘So having sex with me is out of the question?’
‘I might make an exception just this once. At least, if we can figure out a way I don’t have to use my bad shoulder.’
‘I’ll be creative.’
‘I need to say something first.’
‘What?’
‘Would you be upset if I didn’t go back to work?’
‘Hank, is this because of Nati?’
From her tone, I guessed she was going to tell me that our son would soon get used to my work again. And everything would get back to normal. But I didn’t want things to return to normal. That would be an affront to what I’d seen at 17:43.
‘No, it’s because of me,’ I said. I told her about the men in the tower and said I’d no longer work for them – that I hadn’t figured out yet how I was going to fight them, but I would.
‘Maybe I’ll find out where Sottomayor likes to eat dinner and pay someone in the kitchen to slip cyanide into his food,’ I said. ‘Maybe his end will come when he’s least expecting it.’
Ana gave a little laugh. She thought I was joking.
While embracing her, it seemed possible that I’d gone on strike not so much as a protest against the unfairness of the world but really to keep myself from taking violent revenge on Sottomayor.
I imagine now that a lot of what I said to Ana that day seemed like lunacy or paranoia. Maybe she thought I’d taken too many painkillers over the past weeks. And probably, I had. Still, she listened to me without interrupting, and she kissed me on my eyes and nose and lips when I was done. A few minutes later, she climbed on top and drew me into her, but I turned the tables on her nearly right away and got her under me, needing, I think, to know again what it felt like to be in control, even if it was just for a few minutes.
I had my first therapy session five days ago. My psychologist, Lena Carvalho, has thick, shoulder-length brown hair and ever-curious green eyes that – happily for me – often seem to sense when they are asking too insistently for my thoughts and turn away to give me back my right not to tell her too much about myself. She must be about forty years old.
The Night Watchman Page 40
