He handed Don Alfonzo a form.
“Here’s a copy of our preliminary report. For your insurance. You’d better start trying to see if anything’s missing.”
When the police had gone, we could see that Doña Carmen and her two cohorts were itching to get started on putting the señor’s house back into shape. Don Alfonzo fetched a beer and a cola from the fridge and headed towards the terrace.
“I’d rather have a beer,” I said.
He glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. Instead he put the red and white can back in the fridge and took out another beer.
We sat under the parasol. I was sweating in the oppressive heat, but Don Alfonzo in his white, short-sleeved polo shirt and light, summer trousers was his usual serene and cool self, appearing untroubled by the heat. The weak, pale-green, cold Aguila beer tasted bitter and refreshing and surprisingly different. It was my first beer for eight years and the taste was more singular than actually pleasant, like it had been when I first drank beer at a young age. I had got used to the sugary taste of cola. I downed half the bottle in one go and could feel the effect almost immediately. I liked it, yet at the same time I despised myself for my weakness. I pushed my thoughts from my mind and told Don Alfonzo about the last few days. I left nothing out, admitting that I didn’t know what I had told the three heavies, but it was obvious that I had mentioned his name and told them about the suitcase.
“Where on earth could they have heard about the existence of the suitcase, anyway?” I concluded.
He emptied the last of his beer and fetched two more.
“Who knows about it?” he asked.
“You, Oscar, Gloria …” I said and stopped short at the thought.
But he carried on regardless, in his subdued voice that made me keep my wits about me.
“You’re fooling yourself, Pedro. I’ve known of its existence for years. Even before you asked me to look after it.”
“Impossible,” I said.
His eyes held mine.
“Drunks have few secrets,” he said.
I felt myself blush, like an adolescent boy caught looking at the schoolmistress’s breasts. He was right. I could recall boisterous conversations in the small hours, me bragging about my well-hidden suitcase, my life insurance. What I had never told anyone was that it was my private diary, that I considered it to be a Pandora’s box, that once I opened it, it could never be closed again, and all its secrets would escape. That it was part of my superstition, my atheist’s shrine, which couldn’t be explained rationally. It was my mystical fifth dimension in a godless world. A talisman which worked like a rabbit’s foot in my pocket.
I remembered that Gloria had seemed astonished when she heard that I had hidden some of my photographs. So she couldn’t have known of its existence earlier, could she? Had Oscar? Oscar and I had spent so much time together that it would stand to reason I had talked to him about it at some point when drunk. But sitting there in the scented, scorching garden it struck me that I hadn’t done that at all. I had bragged to strangers, especially women I wanted to get into bed, but I had never bragged to Gloria and Oscar. We knew each other too well. We couldn’t pretend. We wouldn’t pretend. We didn’t have any secrets from one another, or so we thought, and therefore they were the very people from whom I had kept a secret. But not from Don Alfonzo – unless he had heard about it somewhere else. Unless it was because I had been under surveillance.
“Was I kept under surveillance in the old days?” I asked.
He looked at me with his wise, melancholy eyes. He hated disclosing secrets, even today.
“We kept all potential risks under surveillance.”
“Was I one?”
“You were left-wing and mixed with left-wing elements.”
“Elements?”
“Elements is a better word than others that were used.”
It suddenly dawned on me.
“You checked me out when Amelia and I got serious?”
“I did what any responsible father would do with regard to his only child.”
“And that was?”
“To take a thorough look at my future son-in-law.”
“Not a very pretty sight at the time.”
He smiled again and surprised me by placing his dry, delicate hand on top of mine.
“Pedro. Sometimes in my greenhouse I see an orchid that looks like a straggly weed, but underneath I can see the beginnings of a flower, perhaps not of extravagant beauty, but still with a strength which I, with love and care, can nurture.”
“Yes, yes, that’s all very well, father-in-law,” I said. I never used the term.
“You turned out to be a good son-in-law.”
“And you gave me a going-over with a fine-tooth comb and heard about what I’d said, among other things, about my suitcase. You found that although I might be a drunk, I was neither communist nor poor.”
“I found that ultimately you were suitable for Amelia.”
“And if you hadn’t?”
Now he laughed out loud.
“Then my love-struck, headstrong daughter would have taken you anyway. Even then the old days were long over.”
“Yes. The old days are gone,” I said.
We sat in silence with our memories. There was nothing to say. We had said it a hundred times before. It all came rushing back.
“Did they get it? The suitcase?” I said instead.
“No. They didn’t get it.”
“Where is it? Where are my photographs?”
“We’ll get back to that,” he said.
The vacuum cleaners started up inside the house and we could hear rattling and splashing, clinking and clattering as the three women cleared up and threw out and put things away. Doña Carmen’s high-pitched voice barked orders at the two young girls and we could picture them jumping-to. Pleasant and yet nerve-jangling domesticity.
“It keeps coming back to the Minister,” I said. “It’s not the Basques. I’m convinced of that. So who is it? And why? The Minister? The photographs have been printed. The photographs of him and the Italian woman are in the hands of editors all over the world. So why is he still after me? And I’d reckoned on doing a deal with him. So why should he order a break-in at my home? And kill my wife and child? It doesn’t make sense, and yet …”
I stopped short. A shadow had passed over the old man’s face when I had mentioned his daughter and grandchild, and I felt the familiar, acute grief jabbing at my heart too. The deep sense of loss that was unbearable, more physically painful than all my bruises.
“Revenge, maybe,” said Don Alfonzo. “Maybe a case of good old revenge taken by a proud Latin man whose honour you have tarnished.”
I couldn’t help smiling at his old-fashioned words.
“Don Alfonzo. Spain is a modern nation. The old days are gone, you said so yourself. It’s not Sicily after all.”
“Pedro. There is still a great deal of the Sicilian or the Moor in the Spanish male’s psyche. And this man has the means. If they can send out clandestine groups to execute Basque terrorists, then they can also take revenge on a foreign photographer who has insulted a señor’s personal honour, wrecked his home life, damaged the government and degraded Spain.”
“Is that what it is? Is that what you’ve found out over the last couple of days?”
“No. That was my starting point. I’m an old man from a vanished era as you say, so to me it also made moral sense. I wanted to understand the incentive even though I condemn it. Perhaps I was a good investigator in the Caudillo’s days because I always tried to understand the offender’s incentive, his motives, and by thinking like them I often succeeded in thwarting plots against the security of the State.”
“So you don’t think it’s that?”
“I know it isn’t.”
“Then what is it?”
“The terrorist was right when he said that the answer is to be found in one of your photographs. Let me put it a different way. We have asked the wrong questions because
we have focused our attention on the present instead of the past. Because our shared distress is here in the present, we have assumed that the cause is to be found in life as it is now, but is that the case?”
“I’ve no idea what it’s about,” I said, and lit yet another cigarette.
“I don’t know either, but every investigation is a matter of elimination – in order, if one is lucky and resourceful, to reach the truth of the matter. You have eliminated the Basque terrorists. I have eliminated the government, the State.”
“Then we’re back to square one?” I asked despondently.
“On the contrary. We’ve come an incredibly long way in a very short time.”
“So what now?”
He got up and went into the house and came back with a blue ticket to the Las Ventas bullring for the following Sunday. He brought a cola for me and a soft drink for himself. I would rather have had a beer, but I had too much respect for him to say anything. Or perhaps it was because I saw Amelia reflected in his eyes. I looked at the ticket. It was an ordinary corrida. The names of the cuadrilla were unfamiliar. In my youthful infatuation with Hemingway and the dream of Spain, I had once been an aficionado and knew the bulls and the bullfighters but for many years now the game with death in the afternoon sun had left me cold. Amelia, like the majority of well-educated Spaniards, found the whole business archaic, repulsive and barbaric, but there were large sums of money involved and it was still mostly Spaniards who filled the arena during the season.
“During the third bull the seat next to you will be taken by a man of your age. He’ll be carrying the El Pais Sunday supplement. Listen to what he has to say,” Don Alfonzo said.
“Who is he?”
“Let’s say that he works for the State. Let’s say that he was once my apprentice. Let’s say he has some information that only he can tell you. Let’s say that he can take us a step forward on the long path of elimination.”
“Why so furtive?”
“Because he is bound by his professional pledge of silence. He’s settling a debt that has been on the books accumulating interest for some years. He has access to the archives, but this particular archive doesn’t formally exist. The new democracy declared publicly that it should be shredded, but it wasn’t, it was just locked away from all but a select few. It’s an archive like your suitcase. It contains stories and photographs from the past, and there are many people who don’t want it opened because they fear what it would bring to light.”
“Why?”
“The past has a habit of catching up with people when it’s most unwelcome, when what has been and gone looks incomprehensible and meaningless in the modern world. Because what once made sense doesn’t necessarily make the same sense today. When we have enough distance from the last 50 years, there’s an archive that can shed light on Spain’s turbulent history. The secret agreements that Franco entered into with the USA in the name of anti-communism. He was guaranteed survival, whereas Hitler and Mussolini fell, and America got its military bases and a southern bulwark against Bolshevism. The dirty war against those people who would overthrow the state. The King’s role in the attempted coup of 1981. The military’s innermost thoughts when the Caudillo passed away. Portraits of people who have visited our country over the years and stayed here.”
He was a cryptic old man, but it was in his blood. All those years in the dark corridors of the secret service had destroyed his ability to be straightforward about anything. Information was like a pension. You must use the funds sparingly and not all at once, in case the good Lord should let you live on for years. It was not to be scattered freely, but piece by piece. Information was not for common ownership, but for an inner circle that survived by exchanging secrets. That was how he saw it and nothing would change his mind. He had spent too many years in a war on an invisible front where secrets existed for others to seek to uncover and then hide again.
“Where’s my suitcase?” was all I said.
“Come. Let’s go into the garden,” he said. “The sun is beginning to die off a little. It’s rather sad for an old man – that yet another day has drawn to a close and there won’t be many left to count.”
11
He had opened all the windows and ventilation slats in the greenhouse, creating a bit of a breeze, but even so the heat and humidity were more intense than the baking oven outside. The scent of the flowers was sweet, but also rather cloying when mixed with the heavy smell of soil and compost. The spacious greenhouse was stocked with a variety of flowers, all of which were unfamiliar to me, miniature lemon and orange trees which Don Alfonzo cultivated, and in the middle there was a long chest which he used as a potting bench with all the paraphernalia necessary for the meticulous gardener. Don Alfonzo removed buckets and watering cans, trowels, some string and scissors, and then he removed the whole table-top and stood aside. At the bottom, next to a couple of empty buckets and a broken spade, I saw my suitcase, pretty as a picture, its combination lock glinting in the light.
“You’re stronger and your arms are longer. So please help yourself,” said Don Alfonzo.
I reached down and tugged at the solid metal suitcase. It was heavier than I remembered, or else I was still weak after my beating. At any rate my ribs hurt as I pulled it out and carried it over to the veranda. Don Alfonzo asked if I would stay for supper. Doña Carmen and her cohorts would soon have the house back in shape and then she could cook us a meal, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to be alone with my secrets.
“I don’t like it being here any more,” I said instead. “I’ll take it to my bank.”
“As you choose,” he said.
“They might come back.”
“It’s up to you,” he said simply, but I think he was a little disappointed. I realised that he was probably lonely in his quiet, solitary life and perhaps I was the only person he had left. He seemed to be perfectly content on his own, but maybe cultivating beautiful flowers and searching for tangible fragments of memory in the crumbled, forgotten trenches around Madrid was a way of compensating for human company.
I rang for a taxi, threw the suitcase onto the back seat along with a bag of spare clothes and then I got in next to my worldly goods and asked the driver to take me to Madrid. He was a local minicab owner who had driven me before, a stocky little Catalan who smoked black cigarettes as he switched between sports channels on the radio. There was a supermercado on the outskirts of the village, where we had often done the shopping for Don Alfonzo. I asked the driver to stop and I bought a bottle of vodka and six colas. I got in again, opened a cola, drank half and poured vodka into the can. The driver looked in the mirror, but he made no comment. What could he say? He knew that I always paid and tipped well, so if I wanted to mix cola and vodka in his taxi it was my own business. I rang the office on my mobile and asked for Oscar, but his secretary told me that he was playing golf, and should have finished with his 18 holes any minute. His club was virtually on the way, so I asked the driver to take me there first. He was rather pleased. It would be a good long trip. The fare meter ticked over merrily while I drank vodka and cola and felt it working on me, and I was disgusted with myself and at the same time didn’t give a damn.
Golf had become a very popular sport over the last ten years and there were courses everywhere. A new one seemed to be laid out every day. Oscar had elbowed his way into one of the more prestigious clubs in the area, not the very grandest, but near enough, as I had gathered from his boasting. The clubhouse, with restaurant and bar, was an old château attached to a vineyard at the end of an avenue of erect cypress trees. It was almost unbearably white in the late, low sun that threw the first shafts of red across the tawny-coloured tiles on the sloping roof. It had bay windows and spires and was built from greyish-white stone. The outside terrace was crowded with people sitting on yellow wicker chairs at white tables under multicoloured parasols. They were drinking aperitifs after their 18 holes, still wearing their polo shirts, caps and strange, checked trousers, while th
ey discussed bogey, birdie, par and handicap just as they had once discussed share prices and love affairs.
I asked the taxi to wait. My suitcase and bag were safe with him. He had his afternoon newspaper, his radio and cigarettes and promised not to leave the car. Every click of the meter made him happy. I looked for Oscar on the terrace, but couldn’t see him. His mobile was switched off. I remembered him telling me that it was a breach of etiquette to have your phone switched on while playing, so I knew he must still be out on the course, but darkness would fall soon, suddenly and quickly. I asked a waiter where the last holes were and he pointed across the vineyard’s old garden, having first sized up my battered face and inappropriate attire. I drained the cola can and threw it into a rubbish bin. Beyond the far end of the garden there was an impressive view across the course, which was pretty and undulating and strangely verdant in the parched landscape. Its heavily irrigated green made it look fake, as if the lush golf course was an alien construction in central Spain’s arid countryside where the sun scorched everything white. It was a big playground for adults who, in their modern pursuit of thrills, ignored the fact that they were playing on a course that used the water consumption of a largish village simply to keep the grass succulent.
The flag marking the 18th hole was straight ahead. The first hint of an evening breeze stirred the pennant gently. Oscar came walking along with two other men. They were wearing checked trousers which came down to just below their knees, expensive plain-coloured polo shirts and baseball caps, and each pulled a trolley with a bag of clubs. Oscar refused to use a golf buggy. I liked that. I could see two white golf balls on the closely mown grass of the green, but Oscar stopped and I spotted his ball 20 metres or so out on the fairway.
Oscar took an iron from his bag, went over to the ball and took a couple of practise swings. I had been caddie for him on several occasions when we had been on work trips. I didn’t play, but golf courses are attractive and it was a good way of spending a couple of hours together, so I was familiar with the game and its rules and jargon. Oscar was an aggressive player who attacked the ball with woods and irons as though he were killing a menacing snake with a machete. I didn’t really understand why he was so fascinated by the game, he so often got furious with himself when he sliced the ball and it flew across the grass like a startled hare. He grumbled for days after I had compared him to a destroyer escorting a convoy across the Atlantic during the Second World War, zigzagging back and forth to avoid German submarines.
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