Eduardo nodded, despite not being sure he understood what Gloria was trying to say. Between him and Elena, there had never been secrets.
‘What mattered was that my son was going to be born, was going to live a long life. That’s what I was praying for to the Virgen de los Remedios, the town’s patron saint, when Ian approached, his hair sweaty and dishevelled, his shirt unbuttoned. He was holding a plastic cup of cheap wine. Rarely had I seen him look so happy. He told me what a great idea it had been to come up to this remote village, said he was getting fantastic material, and he was convinced he could sell it to the BBC. Then suddenly he looked at me and realised something was wrong. “Are you feeling okay? You look tired.” I said yes, I was fine — I didn’t want to rain on his parade — but when I tried to smile, my face contorted.’
She had barely managed to reach out and grab the arm her frightened husband held out to her.
There was no time for ambulances or hospitals. Her labour was long, painful, agonising.
All the while, Ian waited on the other side of the door that separated the examination room from the rest of the clinic. When the nurse came out, Gloria could see him through the gap in the curtain. He was anxiously scratching the chair’s upholstery with his fingernail, attempting to tune out the screams coming from the other side of the curtain.
After over an hour the midwife came out, still dressed in her festival clothes, shirtsleeves rolled up above her elbows, an oilcloth bib splattered with dark droplets. Ian stood to one side, adopting a composed, serene appearance, aware of the woman’s accusatory, suspicious eyes.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked neutrally, as if asking what the weather would be like tomorrow.
The midwife shoved him aside brusquely, strode to a glass cabinet and pulled out a pack of sterile gauze. ‘Not well, it’s not going well,’ she said crossly, and then fell silent a moment, staring at the back of the room, measuring her words carefully in order to express precisely what she wanted to say. ‘Do you mind telling me what on earth you were thinking? Putting a woman in that state on a hellish road, full of curves and potholes. Can’t you see she’s about to give birth and here we are in the Godforsaken middle of nowhere?’
Ian blushed. The midwife lowered her head like a ram about to charge. She’d have loved to slap him around the head, the stupid jerk, not a drop of common sense.
She went back to the birthing room, but before walking in, she tilted her head at him. ‘The ambulance is on the way, but it will be another half an hour until it gets here. If her situation gets any more complicated, I don’t know how this is going to end. If you believe in miracles, start praying.’
Now, Gloria let out a cynical laugh.
‘Ian, pray? Impossible. A godless Anglican — a subject of Her Majesty the Queen with St George’s Cross; an arrogant, unpredictable man kneeling before Christ in a remote town in the mountains. That would never have happened. But neither of us died that morning. I suppose we were too excited about life, about finally meeting one another.’
When he was born, her son, also named Ian, barely weighed more than a sparrow, his little body fragile and discoloured. He hardly even cried. Seeing him close up, Gloria felt a crack in her throat.
‘I realised right away that something wasn’t right; the doctor took him from my arms immediately, alarmed. He was the colour of just-burned ash, with that light look around his neck and the back of his head. Later, when they ran tests on him in Madrid, they told me that I had held him in too long during labour, causing his blood supply to be cut off for a short time.’
Gloria interrupted herself and stared pointedly into Eduardo’s eyes. Her expression was impenetrable.
‘I cut off my own son’s blood supply, I got scared at the possibility of dying with him. In those brief moments of panic I’d have given his life for mine, I wanted to survive at all costs. And now I’d give my life just to have him here a little while longer. They told me that the trauma of that childbirth would affect my son, would result in consequences difficult to predict. Can you believe that? Consequences difficult to predict.’
Her voice trembled.
‘I loved my son beyond anything imaginable, loved him more than anything. But there’s one thing that horrifies me. I’m starting to forget what he really looked like, what he smelled like, what he felt like, his voice. That’s oblivion, don’t you think? That’s true death.’
It was a few seconds before she looked up. Her eyes pulled Eduardo in, peeking out from beneath tortoise-shell glasses that gave her the air of an intellectual — an intelligent, fiery woman. Eduardo couldn’t help but think that she looked beautiful with that expression on her face, like Michelangelo’s Madonna. That was the first time he got the irrepressible urge to kiss her, the first erotic desire he’d had in fourteen years for any woman other than Elena. He had never cheated on his wife, never even been tempted to, even though sometimes Elena would punish him for any little thing with the words ‘don’t touch me’. What about Elena? he wondered. Had she ever cheated on him? Had she felt the temptation, the desire to cheat? Did she fantasise about other men when she was with him?
Unaware of the swirling thoughts she had awakened in Eduardo — or perhaps simply feigning ignorance — Gloria walked to the desk and took out the paper she’d been reading when he walked in.
‘This is a letter from the man who killed my son. The mailman delivered it.’
Gloria (it’s stupid, but I don’t know how to address you, if I should put Señora before your name, or Dearest — though clearly not that — if I should keep my distance by addressing you formally, or use the informal tú …).
By this time, you may know that the Council of Ministers has signed off on my pardon. These are my last few hours, the final minutes in this cell, and I’m spending them writing you this letter before the sun rises, as my cellmate snores in the bunk above me and the searchlight on the prison yard wall is all I can use to guide my lines on this paper. In the distance I can hear a dog barking, furious at something — maybe the huge moon, which looks full of holes — behind the wall. I can also hear coughing, the quiet murmuring of restless conversations; the walls of a cell are not nearly as thick as they lead you to believe. And I want to write to you here, now, while I’m having all the same feelings I’ve had these past three years, in the same place, because I am certain that the second I walk out the prison gate it will all start to be forgotten, as soon as I take my first step of freedom. Soon the imprint left by this experience will seem ephemeral, a black hole in my memory, one I’ll dredge back up over and over again until it has been completely deformed, until it becomes fictional — an anecdote to tell people who know nothing about what goes on here.
I know you hate me. It couldn’t be any other way. I understand that you fought to the end, first to have the harshest sentence possible imposed and then against my pardon. It’s the least you could do, the least I would have done so if I were you. So I accept the possibility that the minute you receive this letter you’ll see who it’s from and tear it up without reading it; but I trust that in the end your curiosity, the very revulsion and contempt you feel for me, will compel you to read these hasty lines. I would have liked to be able to tell you this face to face, but I gave up long ago on the hope that you would ever come visit me in prison, as I asked you to several times during my first year, and my lawyers have made very clear that I am absolutely forbidden from going anywhere near you or contacting you from the moment I gain my freedom, so this is my only recourse.
There are so many things I’d like to tell you, but words turn vicious when forced out by anger. And you have suffered enough; you’ll suffer for the rest of your life. As do I. I am sorry, Gloria, sorry for you, and for me, for us. I wanted you to know that in my freedom lies my penance. The bars that imprison me are not made of steel, and there is no jailer who can open this door for me. Perhaps that will console you.
Rimbaud wrote:
What do we care, my heart, for streaming sheets
of blood, hot coals, and countless murders, the long screams
Of rage, every weeping hell upsetting
All order; the north wind still scouring the debris
Erase me from your heart, Gloria — today, now, sooner rather than later, before my deadly venom poisons you.
Yours,
ARTHUR FERNÁNDEZ
Gloria slowly took the letter from Eduardo’s hands and then stared at it for a long time. She wasn’t reading it, just staring at it, as though trying to imagine Arthur leaning over the windowsill, writing by the light of the perimeter wall searchlight.
‘He’s being released … and this is all he has to say to me.’
Eduardo contemplated her expression for quite some time. It was empty, like a gigantic rock blocking out the light. And then calmly and serenely, Gloria tore the sheet of paper in two, and then again, and again, until it was nothing but tiny scraps she held in her fist. She raised it and opened her hand, and the pieces fluttered down chaotically.
What are words that go unheard? Anvils, sledgehammers that keep pain from ever dying.
Gloria was wrong. True death is not oblivion but constant memory, the inability to escape a fateful moment that, by sheer force of repetition, becomes unreal, invented, like a movie whose ending you know because you’ve seen it a hundred times and so add something each time, some new pinprick to help keep the suffering alive. Eduardo didn’t want to think of Elena’s lips as she spoke, didn’t want to think of her perfect teeth …
He couldn’t even forget her teeth. For a very long time, he’d kept her toothbrush in the holder, and he’d see it there each morning, its white bristles and ergonomic handle beside the mouthwash and the dental floss. He thought it would always be there, her toothbrush, a fallen swan in a glass cup, nestling his.
Death meant imprisoning the day your wife and daughter died in a red circle on the calendar; it was the agonising countdown, the minutes bringing you closer and closer to that moment, the tick-tock of the clock, as if counting time were the only thing you could do between one anniversary and the next. For fourteen years.
Summer, late August, 1991. They had made love in tangled sheets, slowly. Eduardo ejaculated onto Elena’s stomach and collapsed by her side, breathing fast. She gave him time to recover, they smoked a couple of cigarettes and then did it again, her way this time, passionately, almost violently, excessively, like a fight in which kissing vies with biting, tenderness with roughness; an animalistic game in which the seam that joined their souls tighter than any other bond was revealed through moaning and talking dirty.
‘We could just stay here like this, forever,’ Eduardo said afterwards, when they should have been getting dressed, because Tania would be back soon; and yet there they were, lying in bed, letting their stuck-together skin slowly pull away in its own unhurried time. Eduardo reached out a hand and placed it on the curve of Elena’s hip. His fingers dropped down over the valley of her belly and came to rest between her legs. And he left them there, almost motionless, his fingertips just barely grazing the lips of her vagina, feeling the heat it gave off.
‘Sure, why not?’ Elena giggled, biting one of his pink nipples.
They laughed together, complicit, and then fell silent, breathing in time, she with her head on his belly, he absently stroking her freckled shoulder. Lying there in bed, just looking at her, Eduardo could see everything about his wife’s nature, all in one glance. His eyes were the only thing capable of expressing what he felt for her; words could only distort it, ruin the totality of moments like those. That was the reason he loved to gaze at her as they made love — sometimes slowly, their rhythm quivering and contained, sometimes wildly, her fingernails clawing his hips. He needed to look at her so that he could penetrate her eyes, too; needed her to look at him with her eyes wide open, like they were both part of the same hallucination. He needed it in order to reach ecstasy, in order to stop thinking and disappear, and simply feel.
It wasn’t just physical attraction, wasn’t just a primitive, visceral desire that Elena aroused in him. It was much more than that. After being married so many years, nothing, in essence, had really changed. If anything, the rough edges of their madness had softened, the sharp corners had been filed down and now rested on a more stable plane; the wild exploration of his first few years, his desire to conquer her territory by hacking his way with a machete, had been replaced by a conscientious study of the lay of the land, a methodology of maps, valleys and rivers that he analysed, taking notes in his mind like a topographer. Surprises were no longer abrupt and disconcerting but a gentle discovery of different things, like the tiny streams of water that sometimes gurgle up from underground when the earth’s surface has been mined. He no longer had to force his way; he walked calmly and the way was revealed to him. And Elena was his way.
‘We could stay like this forever,’ she said, repeating Eduardo’s words, her body folded over his legs. Her violet dress was floating in the window, hung out on the line with two pegs. The wind played with the dress, fluttering it up and dropping it down, fluttering up, dropping down, briefly revealing glimpses of the harsh landscape, the rocks, the beach, the little boats in their slips, staked to the shore. Time and space were marvellously ungraspable, the sounds drifting in from outside bathed in a soft, beautiful afternoon light.
Eduardo sat up to reach for a glass of water on the nightstand. He took a long sip and sighed, staring at the ceiling. A fan spun lazily, its long blades revolving slowly, circulating the hot air in the room.
‘We should really take a shower and get dressed. Tania must be about to walk in. By the way, I haven’t seen her all day.’
‘She must be in town with her friends. There’s a going-away party today. Let her enjoy her last few hours on vacation.’
Eduardo frowned. To him, Tania was still that tiny body he had to crouch down to if he wanted to say something, and he took refuge in his own vague obliviousness, in opting not to know too much when his daughter reacted to something in a way that told him she was slipping through his fingers and he couldn’t do a thing about it. For Elena, though, their daughter had become a compendium of dilemmas large and small, which had to be dealt with ad hoc. Sometimes it was an irritating, gruelling job, and other times her relationship with her daughter was full of secret satisfactions, confessions, shared fears; it was a means of returning to the crossroads of her own adolescence.
‘She’s almost fourteen; believe me, she knows more than her sweet little face lets on.’
By the time Tania got back it was late at night, but that wasn’t what really infuriated Eduardo, who was just finishing packing his books into a travel bag as Elena put the kitchen chairs on top of the table.
‘You reek of booze and cigarettes. Do you mind telling me what kind of parties your friends throw?’
Tania’s character was too bossy for her father’s liking. Sassy and foul-mouthed, she didn’t shy from conflict, using any excuse to test the waters, unconsciously measuring her strength, seeing the world as but a stage on which to act out her desires. But that night she misjudged her father’s reaction. The transition from the festive air of the party — her friends, music, a joint or two, a little gin — to the paternal domicile had been too brusque, and she hadn’t had enough time to adjust, to adapt her expression, put on the proper disguise.
‘Leave me alone! I’m not a little girl anymore, I don’t have to put up with sermons from a boring old fart.’
‘Don’t talk to me that way! I want an explanation.’
‘Well, how do you expect me to talk to you? In sign language? Because you’re acting like a deaf-mute.’
The slap came out of nowhere, slicing through the air like a whistle, taking her off-guard as it landed across her mouth. Tania took two steps back, more out of shock than the force of the blow. A sorrowful
silence descended on all three of them, as though nobody — least of all Eduardo — had expected that to happen. He looked down at his hand like a foreign body that had suddenly, for a fraction of a second, possessed its own free will. Elena stood in silence, her jaw set, tense, and Tania sobbed something her father didn’t want to hear, but which was perfectly clear: ‘You son of a bitch,’ and then she ran to her room and slammed the door so hard the house shook.
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ Eduardo murmured, looking to Elena.
It was the first time he’d ever laid a finger on his daughter. And yet the worst thing was not that he’d done it, or whether or not she deserved it, or his instantaneous regret. If he could turn the clock back one minute, there was no doubt he’d undo what he’d done. But what he wasn’t willing to confess, not even to himself, was that as he slapped his daughter’s face, he’d felt a complete and total sense of release.
Elena simply stared at him, something hanging there on her lips, words struggling to come out that she tried to hold back with her teeth.
‘Don’t you ever touch my daughter again,’ she finally uttered coldly, cuttingly, without the slightest hint of compassion.
Eduardo felt that the perfect circle they had formed was now distorted, its poles flattened and shamed, felt that their loyalties were not as absolute as he’d thought.
They had left Cadaqués early, before dawn. The first hour was tense, Eduardo at the wheel, brooding, seemingly concentrating on the traffic, but really immersed in a tangled swirl of feelings he would have liked to put voice to. Elena stared out the window, her forehead to the glass, her expression revealing nothing about what she was thinking. In the back seat, Tania dozed fitfully, on and off, from time to time waking fully to shoot daggers at her father in the rearview mirror.
The Heart Tastes Bitter Page 10
