Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Until one morning, when she opened her eyes and saw Óscar Lobato sitting there, the reporter from the Cádiz paper who was a friend of Santiago’s. And beside the door, standing, leaning against the wall, another man whose face was vaguely familiar. It was then, while that second man listened without saying a word—at first she took him for a cop—that she heard from Lobato’s lips what on some level she already knew, or guessed. That night the Phantom had crashed at fifty knots into the rock, shattering into a million pieces, and Santiago had died instantly. Teresa had lived only because she had somehow been thrown out of the speedboat. But her right arm had broken when she hit the surface of the water, and she had sunk fifteen feet to the bottom.

  “How did I make it?” she wanted to know. And her voice sounded strange, no longer her own. Lobato smiled in a way that softened the hard features of his face, the marks of time around his eyes, and his tone lightened. He gestured toward the man leaning on the wall, not saying a word, looking at Teresa with curiosity and a hint of shyness, as though not daring to come any closer.

  “He pulled you out,” Lobato said.

  Then he told her what had happened after she was knocked unconscious—that after the impact she floated for a minute before she sank, with the helicopter spotlight illuminating her. The pilot had passed the controls to his copilot and jumped into the water from ten feet above, and in the water he had taken off his helmet and self-inflating life jacket and dived to the bottom, where she was drowning. He brought her to the surface, in the midst of the spray raised by the chopper’s blades, and from there swam with her in to the beach. While the HJ was looking for the remains of Santiago Fisterra—the largest pieces of the Phantom were no more than eight or ten inches across—the lights of an ambulance approached along the highway. And while Lobato was recounting all this, Teresa was looking at the face of the man leaning against the wall, the man who was still not saying a word or nodding or anything, as though what the reporter was describing had happened to somebody else. And finally she recognized the man as one of the Customs officers she’d seen in Kuki’s that night, the night the smugglers from Gibraltar had been celebrating that guy’s birthday.

  “He wanted to come with me to see your face,” Lobato explained. And she looked at the other man’s face, too, the Customs helicopter pilot who’d killed Santiago and saved her. Thinking: I need to remember this man later, so when I’m all right again I can decide whether to kill him, if I can—or say, Peace, brother, cabrón, shrug and let it go.

  She finally asked about Santiago, where his body was, and the man leaning against the wall looked away, and Lobato frowned a bit, in grief, when he told her that the casket was on its way to O Grove, the Galician town where he’d been born. “A good guy,” he added, his face solemn, and it struck Teresa that he may have been sincere, that the two men had spent time together, and that maybe Lobato had really liked him. That was when she started to cry, quietly, because now, now she was thinking about Santiago dead, and she could see his motionless face with his eyes closed, like when she’d slept with her head on his shoulder. And she thought: What am I going to do now with that fucking model sailboat that’s sitting on the table at the house in Palmones, half done, with nobody to finish it. And she realized that she was alone for the second time, and in a certain way forever.

  It was O’Farrell who really changed her life,” María Tejeda repeated. She had spent the last forty-five minutes telling me how and why. When she finished, she went to the kitchen, came back with two glasses of herbal tea, and sipped at one while I went over my notes and digested the story. The former prison social worker at El Puerto de Santa María was a chubby, vivacious woman with long, dark hair streaked with gray, kindly eyes, and a firm set to her mouth. She wore round gold-rimmed glasses and gold rings on several fingers—at least ten of them, I counted. I figured her for somewhere around sixty. For thirty-five of those years she had worked for Corrections in the provinces of Cádiz and Málaga. It had not been easy to find her, since she had recently retired, but once again, Óscar Lobato had come to my aid and tracked her down.

  “I remember them both very well,” she said when I phoned. “Come to Granada and we’ll talk.”

  She greeted me in a jogging suit and tennis shoes from the balcony of her apartment in the low-lying Albaicín section of the city, with all of new Granada and the plain of the Darro on one side, and the Alhambra, gold and ocher in the morning sun, perched among trees up on the hill, on the other. Her house was filled with light, and there were cats everywhere: on the couch, in the hall, on the balcony. At least half a dozen live cats—it smelled like hell, despite the open windows—and some twenty more in paintings, porcelain figurines, woodcarvings. There were rugs and pillows embroidered with cats, and among the things hung out to dry on the balcony was a towel with Sylvester on it. While I read over my notes and savored the mint tea, a tabby observed me from the top of a wardrobe closet, as though she’d known me somewhere before, and a fat gray cat slunk toward me over the carpet, as though my shoelaces were legal prey. The rest were lying or walking about the house in various postures and attitudes. I hate these creatures, which are much too quiet and intelligent for my taste—there is nothing like the stolid loyalty of a stupid dog—but I girded my loins and soldiered on. Work is work.

  “O’Farrell made her see things about herself,” my hostess was saying, “that she had never imagined existed. And she even started to educate her a little, you know . . . in her own way.”

  On the table she had stacked several notebooks, in which for years she had kept records of her interviews. “I was looking over these before you came,” she said. “To refresh my memory.” She showed me some pages written in a round, tight hand: individual entries, dates, visits, interviews. Some paragraphs were underlined. Follow-up, she explained. “It was my job to evaluate their rehabilitation, so to speak, help them to find something for afterward. On the inside, some women sit with their hands folded, while others prefer to stay busy. I made staying busy possible.

  “Teresa Mendoza Chávez and Patricia O’Farrell Meca,” she went on. “Classified as SFIs: special follow-up inmates. They gave people lots to talk about in their time, those two.”

  “They were lovers?”

  She closed the notebooks and gave me a long, evaluating look. No doubt considering whether that question stemmed from sick curiosity or professional interest.

  “I’m not certain,” she replied at last. “Among the girls there were rumors, of course. But there are always rumors like that. O’Farrell was bisexual. At least, no? . . . And the truth is, she had had relationships with some inmates before Mendoza came. But about those two specifically, I can’t say for sure.”

  After biting at my shoelaces, the fat gray cat was rubbing against my pants, covering them with cat hairs. I bit the end of my ballpoint stoically.

  “How long were they together?”

  “A year as cellmates, and then they got out a few months apart. . . . They were both clients of mine—that’s what we call them. Mendoza was soft-spoken and almost shy, very observant, very cautious in a way, with that Mexican accent that made her seem so prim and proper. . . . Who’d have known what was coming, no? . . . O’Farrell was just the opposite: amoral, uninhibited, always with an attitude—superior and frivolous at the same time. Worldly. A society girl who condescended to live in the real world. Irreproachable conduct, hers. Not a black mark in the three and a half years she spent on the inside, you know? Despite the fact that she purchased and consumed narcotics . . . I’ll tell you, she was too intelligent to get into trouble. She seemed to consider her stay in prison an unavoidable interruption in her life, and she was just waiting for it to pass—she wasn’t about to make trouble for herself or anybody else.”

  The cat that was rubbing up against my pants leg sank its claws into my sock, so I pushed it away with a discreet kick that earned me a brief censorious silence from my hostess.

  “Anyway,” she went on after the uncomfor
table pause, calling the cat up to her lap, “Come here, Anubis, precious thing—O’Farrell was a woman, not a child, with a personality, a character, you know? She was already formed, and the newcomer was very much influenced by her—the good family, the money, the name, the culture. . . . Thanks to her cellmate, Mendoza discovered the usefulness of an education. That was the positive part of the influence—it gave her the desire to better herself, to change. She read, studied. She discovered that you don’t have to depend on a man. She was good at figures, and she found the opportunity to get even better at them in the prison education program, which allowed inmates to get time off their sentences for taking classes. She took an elementary mathematics course and a course in Spanish, and her English improved tremendously as well. She became a voracious reader, and toward the end you might find her with an Agatha Christie novel or a book of travel writing or even something scientific. And it was O’Farrell, definitely, who inspired all that.

  “Mendoza’s lawyer was a Gibraltar fellow who dropped her just after she came to the prison, and so far as I could see he also kept the money, which may have been a little or a lot, I really couldn’t say. In El Puerto de Santa María she never had any male visitors, no ‘conjugal visits’—some of the inmates managed to get false marriage certificates so men could visit them—or any other kind of visitor, for that matter. She was completely alone. So O’Farrell did all the paperwork for her parole hearing.

  “Had it been anyone else, all of that would have probably led to real rehabilitation. When she got out, Mendoza could have found a decent job: she was a quick study, you know, she had good instincts, a cool head and an IQ”—the social worker had consulted her notes again—“in the high one thirties. Unfortunately, her friend O’Farrell was too far gone. Certain tastes, certain friends, you know . . .” She looked at me as though she doubted that I really did know. “Certain vices. Among women,” she went on, “some influences or relationships are stronger than among men. And then there was the matter of the lost cocaine that everyone has talked about. . . . Although in the prison”—Anubis was purring as she ran her hand over his neck and back—“there are hundreds of such stories. So no one actually believed that this one was true. . . . Absolutely no one,” she insisted after a thoughtful silence, still petting the cat. Even now, years later and despite everything that had been published about it, the social worker was still convinced that the story of the cocaine had been a myth.

  “But you see how things are. First it was O’Farrell who changed the Mexican girl, and then the Mexican girl completely took over O’Farrell’s life. . . . You never know about those quiet kind of girls. . . .”

  As for myself, I can still see the young soldier with his pale skin and black eyes. When the angel of death comes down to take me, I am certain I shall recognize Selim. . . .

  The day she turned twenty-five—they had taken the cast off her arm a week earlier—Teresa paused and put a bookmark on page 740 of the novel that held her in its spell. Never before, she reflected, had she thought that a person could project herself, as she had, so intensely, into what she was reading, so that reader and protagonist became one. And O’Farrell was right: More than the movies or TV, novels let you live so many things you’d never otherwise be able to live—more than you could ever fit into a single life. That was the strange magic that kept her glued to that volume whose pages were so old they were coming unsewn. But Patty had insisted it be repaired, because, as she said, “It’s not a question of just reading books, Mexicana, it’s also the physical pleasure and inner peace you get from holding them in your hands.” To intensify that pleasure and inner peace, Patty went with the book to the inmates’ bookbinding shop, and she had the book taken apart and carefully resewn and then rebound with stiff covers, good paste, Florentine paper for the endpapers, and a lovely cover of brown leather with gold letters on the spine: Alejandro Dumas, El conde de Monte Cristo. And under it all, with smaller gold letters, the initials TMC, for Teresa Mendoza Chávez. So after five days of impatient waiting, with Teresa’s reading interrupted at Chapter XXXVII—“The Catacombs of Saint Sebastian”—Patty presented it to her once again, all new.

  “It’s my birthday present for you.”

  It was the hour for breakfast, just after the day’s first head count. The book was very nicely wrapped, and when she held the book again, Teresa felt that special pleasure her companion had spoken about. It was heavy and soft, with the new cover and those gold letters. And Patty looked at her, elbows on the table, a cup of chicory in one hand and a cigarette in the other, enjoying her happiness. “Happy birthday,” she repeated, and the other girls also congratulated Teresa. “To the next one on the street,” one of them said. “With a stud to wake you up in the morning,” another added, “and me there to watch!”

  That night, after the fifth head count, instead of going down to the dining hall for dinner—the usual disgusting breaded halibut and overripe fruit—Patty had made arrangements with the guards for a little private party in the rack. They played cassettes of old torch songs by Vicente Fernández, Chavela Vargas, and Paquita la del Barrio, and after closing the door Patty pulled out a bottle of tequila she’d gotten god knows how—an authentic Don Julio some prison officer had probably smuggled in, after payment of a sum five times its price—and they put it away delightedly, enjoying how great it was. Some other girls joined the party, sitting on the bunks and in the chair and on the toilet in the case of Carmela, a big, older Gypsy, a shoplifter by profession, who cleaned for Patty and washed her sheets—Teresa’s clothes, too, while her arm was in a cast—in exchange for Lieutenant O’Farrell’s depositing a small sum of money into her account each month. Rabbit, the lye-pouring librarian, was there, as was Charito, who was in for picking pockets at the Rocío and Abril fairs (not to mention a hundred or so others). And also Pepa Trueno, aka Blackleg, who’d killed her husband with a knife they used for slicing ham in the bar they ran on National Highway 4, and who bragged that her divorce had cost her twenty years and a day, but not a penny.

  Teresa put the silver semanario on her right wrist, to inaugurate her new arm, she said, and the bangles clinked happily with every drink. The party lasted until the eleven-o’clock head count. There was parcheesi, which was the slammer game par excellence, and tinned meat, and “perk-up-your-cunt” pills, as Carmela called them, and basucos made with thick rolls of hashish, and jokes, and laughter. Here we are in Spain, Teresa thought, in big-deal Europe for god’s sake, with its rules and its history and the way these people look down their noses at corrupt Mexicans, and look at us. Pills and chocolate and a bottle once in a while—nobody goes without if they find the right guard and have the money to pay for it.

  And Patty O’Farrell had money. She presided over the celebration, sitting off to one side, watching Teresa through a cloud of smoke the whole time, with a smile on her face and in her eyes. With her rich-girl attitude, it was as though she was just looking on, not really part of any of this—like some mommy who takes her little girl to a birthday party with hamburgers and clowns.

  Meanwhile Vicente Fernández was singing about women and cheating, Chavela’s breaking voice reeked of alcohol as she sang of bullets and cantinas, and Paquita la del Barrio belted out that song about a dog, loyal and unquestioning, lying always at your feet, all day and all evening, and in your bed at night. Teresa felt the embrace of the nostalgia, the music, and the accents of her homeland—the only thing lacking were chirrines strolling down the prison corridors making music, and a case of long-necked Pacíficos—although she was a bit befuddled by the hashish burning between her fingers. “Don’t bogart that joint, there, Mexicanita.” “I’ve smoked worse, girl—’cause you go down to the Moors to score, you are definitely going to smoke some nasty shit.” “To your twenty-fifth, my darling,” toasted Carmela the Gypsy. And when Paquita started singing that old one about Three times I cheated, and she came to the chorus, all of them, now gloriously buzzed, joined in: The first time out of anger, the second
just because, and the third for pure damn pleasure—“Three times I cheated, you motherfucker,” shouted Pepa Trueno, no doubt in honor of her dearly departed.

  They went on like that until one of the guards came around in a foul mood to tell them the party was over, but the party went on, in the same vein, later, when the cells were closed and the iron doors clanged shut all over the prison. Patty and Teresa were alone now in the rack, almost in darkness, the gooseneck lamp on the floor next to the washbasin, the shadowy magazine clippings—movie stars, singers, landscapes, a tourist map of Mexico—decorating the green-painted wall, the window with its lace curtains made by Charito the pickpocket, who had good hands. It was then that Patty took a second bottle of tequila and a little bag out from under her bunk and said, “This is just for us, Mexicana—I mean, giving is better than receiving, but you do need to keep something back for yourself!”

  And with Vicente Fernández singing “Mujeres Divinas” for the umpteenth time, and Chavela, slurring her words, warning, Don’t threaten me, don’t threaten me, they passed the bottle back and forth and made little white lines on the cover of a book called The Leopard. And later, Teresa, powder on her nose from the last sniff, said, “It’s awesome. Thank you for this birthday, Lieutenant, never in my life . . .”