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.
“But why?” I asked.
He stepped forward and pulled a pair
of surgical gloves onto his elegant slim hands and carefully turned Amelia’s damaged head. I felt sick, but there was nothing left in my stomach. Small bright dots danced before my eyes.
“Look at this, señor Lime,” he said. He pointed out two indentations. With an almost gentle gesture, his thin gloved forefinger followed them round her slender neck below her small, delicate ears. I was dizzy and had trouble focusing. The disfigured neck right in front of my eyes vanished and was replaced by pictures of Amelia’s tender white throat when she threw back her head and laughed at something I had said or at one of Maria Luisa’s quaint remarks.
“Can you see? I don’t understand, and my pathologist doesn’t understand, why your wife has these contusions. You can’t see what they are?” Rodriques continued.
I must have shaken my head because he continued in the same courteous neutral tone of voice.
“They resemble strangulation marks. As if your wife was choked. And we would like to know if it happened before or after the fire. Do you understand what I’m saying? Whether she was dead when the fire broke out or whether she incurred her injuries afterwards. Possibly got caught on a flex. Whether this is an accident or the murder of 13 people. If it is a case of arson leading to loss of life, then I don’t need to tell you that it’s a very serious matter indeed. Therefore, we would kindly request permission to perform a post-mortem. You can refuse, but then we will have to go to the courts.”
Time stood still. I turned to Gloria and Oscar.
“Sell the photographs,” I said and then everything went black.
PART TWO
TIME HEALS NO WOUNDS
The greatest grief on earth, I fear,
That is to lose the one you hold dear.
– Steen Steensen Blicher
6
The idea that time heals all wounds is a fallacy. Time heals no wounds, but time dulls the pain like a pill dulls a bad headache. The pain is still there, but it no longer jabs like sharp nails. Time blunts the spiked nails, and the pain that makes you want to scream your grief to the whole world is replaced by a constant, gnawing torment that won’t leave you alone, not even at night when sleep is impossible.
The period that followed the death of my family was chaotic and bewildering and, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t in control of what was happening to me. It was as if I was a child again and dependent on grown-ups’ care and supervision. Well-intentioned people took charge of my life and led me out of the tunnel of darkness to a pallid, sickly sunshine. Gloria and Oscar took care of the purely practical things with their usual efficiency. Insurance, the compensation claim against the authorities and the sale of the ten photographs which Oscar had removed from my flat and which went all round the globe and earned us a fortune. I didn’t want to be involved in rebuilding the block and sold out to the insurance company. The compensation payments were considerable, but money couldn’t make up for the loss of my negatives. The steel filing cabinets had been neither explosion-proof nor fireproof. Gloria took legal proceedings against the manufacturer and the insurance company. They had to compensate for the unquantifiable, artistic value of the negatives. The potential fortune which had built up over the years every time I had captured a split second of reality on film. My tragedy filled thousands of working hours for many zealous lawyers. I let Gloria and Oscar do as they pleased.
For the first few days after the disaster the media went crazy. Two factors intensified the hysteria which swept through the city. The photographs of the Minister. And the official statement that the fire was being investigated as a murder case. Amelia had been strangled before the blaze. Maria Luisa had been killed by smoke fumes and hadn’t burnt to death. The other fatalities were a direct consequence of the fire. Evidence of explosives had been found. The media speculated like mad about why someone would want to blow up my flat. They hinted cautiously at the Minister. He, of course, denied everything, but had to resign because of the erotic photographs. They made his position untenable in a government with family values as its core principle.
Detective Superintendent Rodriques called by now and then to keep me informed. He had nothing to go on. They had only one witness, who had seen two men leaving the flat shortly before the explosion blew out the windows. They were burly, had black hair like millions of Spanish people, and had disappeared down towards the Puerta del Sol. And that’s where the trail went cold. Rodriques wondered whether it was an ETA action that had targeted the wrong person. There was a woman with a false identity living in one of the flats, under the witness protection system. She was a Basque and had given evidence against ETA ten years earlier. As had so often been the case, rejection by a lover had made her go to the police and turn informer. One of the leaders had dropped her in favour of another woman. The banal tends to play a bigger role in life than novelists think. She had revealed the identity of one of the underground ETA units in Barcelona and had been given witness protection in return. A new identity and a new life in big city Madrid. Anyone could vanish there.
“Maybe they finally found her, señor Lime,” said Rodriques. “The past always catches up with us.”
We were sitting at Hemingway’s table in the Cerveceria Alemana, drinking coffee. The old waiter, Felipe, watched over me as if I was a fragile piece of porcelain. I don’t know why I kept going back to the Alemana. It was just across from my former home, which was now an open sore in the row of houses, demolished, boarded up by a high fence painted green, waiting while applications for planning permission fought their way through the intricacies of the municipal government’s red tape. Apart from that, the plaza looked the same as usual in the late afternoon light. The old men and women sat talking or reading newspapers and the children would soon be coming home from school to begin playing their games. It hurt, but the Alemana was my first haunt in Madrid and, even though it grieved me to look across at what had been my house, the place was also a lifeline back to a past that I had started thinking about more and more. I didn’t want to forget Amelia and Maria Luisa. The memory of them was both joyful and painful, both melancholy and piercing, but it was all I had left.
“So that’s your theory?” I said.
“It’s the best there is. The terrorists are very active again. They never forget and they especially never forget an informer. Colleagues in counter-intelligence have heard that they had found out where she was and were going to eliminate her. The explosive used was Semtex from the former Czechoslovakia. There’s lots of the old stuff in circulation. Maybe they got it from the IRA, or from their old friends in the GDR. All the other lines of inquiry fizzle out.”
He threw out his arms in a gesture of regret.
“How could they get it so wrong?” I said.
“Carmen Arrese shared certain traits with your wife, señor Lime.”
Carmen had lived with her husband in the flat underneath ours. Married to a lawyer. Both perished along with their daughter who was the same age as Maria Luisa. The couple had been in their mid-30s.
“Carmen Arrese spoke with an Andalusian accent,” I said. “She didn’t sound Basque in the least.”
“Her parents came from Seville, even though she was born in Pamplona. We re-taught her the language of her childhood. It was one element of her new identity. Of her new story. Her new life. It’s not just a question of altering looks. We gave her a completely new life. Even her husband didn’t know.”
“She was ten years younger. How could they get it wrong?”
“Señor Lime. I can see from the photographs that your wife was a beautiful woman. May God protect her soul. She could easily pass as being ten years younger. Carmen looked older. And actually she was older. We made her younger. Maybe the terrorists made a mistake. Went into the wrong flat. Strangled the wrong woman before they planted the explosives.”
“Why blow up the house?”
“We think they planted too much. We think they were inexperienced. ETA has problems recruiting the best today. Maybe a gas leak had something to do wit
h it as well. But we think that your family was killed by mistake. It wasn’t aimed at you, but at the woman downstairs. I’m sorry.”
“But why explosives?”
“Why spread terror? Anxiety, fear is at the very core of terrorism. Not rationality.”
“So the case has been shelved,” I said.
He straightened up in his chair.
“By no means. But other, more qualified agencies will be involved. The State uses huge resources in the fight against terrorists, as you know. The work will be stepped up. My job is to expose murderers. To find killers who commit murder from quite obvious human motives such as sex, greed, jealousy, drunkenness. I have more than enough to do in this city alone. Other people will have to take care of national security.”
He looked at me apologetically. He didn’t really have anything to apologise for. It wasn’t his fault that we had lived in the wrong place. But I was angry anyway, because they had placed a ticking bomb in our immediate vicinity without telling us. Somewhere along the line it was the fault of the State authorities, but my anger was still directed at the unknown assassins who now seemed more real.
Rodriques stood up, shook my hand, thanked me for my cooperation and expressed his condolences again. I stayed for a while and drank another coffee, watching the light outside on the plaza fading into blue. The Alemana slowly filled up with students from the various institutes in the neighbourhood, with their notebooks and their youth and optimistic belief in the endless opportunities the future held. I sat by myself next to the window, knowing that Felipe would make sure I could sit there in peace.
I had stayed with Oscar and Gloria for the first week. My father-in-law and I had arranged the funeral once the bodies had been released after the post-mortem. We had always been courteous and pleasant with one another, but had never shared confidences. It was as if grief brought us closer together without our having to talk about it. That wasn’t Don Alfonzo’s style. He had served the old Caudillo for 25 years as an officer in the Guardia Civil and commander in one of Franco’s numerous security services. He was over 70, a shrunken little man who now looked like Franco had when old. Like so many others, he had gone from serving the dictatorship to serving the transitional government and then democracy. If his hands were stained with the blood of torture victims he didn’t show it, and he had never been investigated. In the Spain of reconciliation following the Caudillo’s death, there were matters that were best left unmentioned.
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