Still the Same Man

by Jon Bilbao

  The door to the cabin was open and swinging in the wind. The night and the storm were blasting in. The bed had fallen apart. The mattress was lying on the dirty floor. The bricks that had supported the corner of the frame had fallen over. The bucket where they’d made the fire was tipped on its head, and the cinders were scattered all around. The wind made glowing threads appear in the embers and whipped up the trash.

  Joanes moved toward the door. He found the woman lying with her legs on the inside of the cabin and the upper part of her body sprawled across the stoop. The professor was next to the car. The two bodies had each been carefully covered with several blankets. The wind was doing its best to carry away their shrouds. A brick lay in the mud, and the rain was washing away the blood on it.

  As he looked down at the soaking lump that was the professor’s body, Joanes didn’t feel any relief. His only thought was that now he wouldn’t have the chance to clear up their unfinished business. The disconcertion he felt at his own response would later transform into a kind of bitterness he’d have to consciously reflect on in order to properly define.

  He called the man, who came out of the bathroom leaning against the wall for support. On seeing him, Joanes stifled a cry of surprise. The man’s face was covered in scratches, as if he’d been attacked with a rake. One of the wounds cut across his eye. His torso was bare and his chest scored with more cuts.

  “I’ve done everything you asked me to.”

  When the man spoke, Joanes caught a glimpse of his teeth, which were covered in blood.

  “So the old man put up a fight,” Joanes said.

  “And her. She put up a fight, too. Will you give me Gagarin now? Can we go?”

  “First close the door.”

  “You’re going to leave those two out there, getting wet?”

  “I don’t think they mind.”

  The man closed and braced the door. In order to do so, he had to move the woman’s body to one side.

  “Where’s Gagarin?”

  “In the other room.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Perfectly fine.”

  “Can we go now?”

  “Soon,” said Joanes.

  Then he added, “It’s raining hard now.”

  “But—”

  “Sit, please.”

  The man obeyed.

  “Can I see my friend?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Joanes, then he lit the oil lamp and turned off the flashlight.

  “That’s better,” he said, taking a seat on the floor at a safe distance from the man. “What’s your name?”

  “Abraham.”

  “Do your friends call you Abe?”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Your acquaintances, then?”

  “Some.”

  “All right. I’ll call you Abraham.”

  And then he added, “Abraham, we should be clear about what’s just happened. You’ve just killed two people. You’ve taken their lives. Let’s not forget that. And I’m telling you this is case you should have any intention of going to the police.”

  Abraham didn’t say a word.

  “If you told anyone I forced you to do it, nobody would believe you. And if it came to that, I could show them how you attacked me, which would make your story even harder to believe,” said Joanes, holding up his maimed hand.

  Now Abraham lowered his head and began to cry.

  “Who were they?” he asked after a while.

  “That doesn’t matter. They weren’t anybody to you. You don’t need to know what they were called or who they were. It’s enough for me to know. You, Abraham, are not really responsible for what happened tonight. You didn’t have any choice but to act as you did, because you had to protect Gagarin. And you love him as if he were a son, isn’t that right?”

  Abraham nodded.

  “He’s the only friend I have.”

  “Of course he is, Abraham. You had to defend him. You did well. You fulfilled your duty.”

  And with that, Abraham burst into tears again. Joanes stretched out his legs in an effort to get comfortable. He was trying not to think about the pain in his hand and nose.

  “Why not tell me a bit about yourself,” he said, “while the storm blows over.”

  Abraham looked at him, uncomprehending, his eyes full of tears.

  “I want to know all about you, Abraham.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now, Abraham, you are someone very important to me.”

  And he repeated, “Very important.”

  A moment later, Abraham began to talk.

  “Louder. I can’t hear you.”

  Abraham began again.

  Above them, the hurricane continued its northward course, transforming the thermal energy it had drained from the Caribbean Sea into kinetic energy, consuming itself in the process. It pressed on anxiously toward the Gulf of Mexico, into which it would flow hours later, gaining even more force, puffing up like a magnificent male in mating season.

  The air was still unsettled in the morning. The clouds looked like they were resting on top of the trees. It was raining and windy, though not like the night before. At around noon, a jeep came by, careening down the track that led to the cabin. It stopped when it reached the building, and all four doors of the vehicle opened at once. The owner of the English Residence got out, escorted by three relatives, and looked at the place, frowning.

  They couldn’t see Joanes’s car anywhere. The door to the cabin was wide open. They went in. Inside, the place was wet and covered in dead leaves and trash. They saw a bed frame with one leg missing, a soaking mattress, and the remains of a fire. In the middle of the main room, a load of boards were heaped one on top of another. When o n e of the relatives asked about them, the owner of the English Residence said that they used to shield the windows, and that some son of a bitch had ripped them off. The wind and rain had breezed in and swept the cabin clean.

  The hotel owner said that nobody would spend the night in a place like that, least of all on a night like the one they’d just seen. His relatives agreed. They all took it as a given that the Spaniards, on seeing the state of the place, would have moved right on, looking for a better option.

  Even so, the hotel owner was hesitant to leave without at least checking for signs that they’d been there. He inspected each and every one of the rooms but came across no more than some sodden trash. Before climbing back into the jeep, he took a second to study the vegetation around the cabin. He didn’t see a thing, not a single clue, and he said a silent prayer in the hope that the man and those elderly folks were safe and well.

  From where he was, in the middle of the thick vegetation, Joanes couldn’t make out the sound of the jeep’s motor. Now both his hands hurt, the maimed one and the other, which was riddled with splinters from where he’d wrenched the boards from the windows.

  He was in a small clearing, leaning against a tree. His right hand was resting on the handle of the machete, which he was carrying in his belt. The chimpanzee was crouching on the ground at his side.

  In the middle of the clearing, spurred by the threat that if he tried anything, the monkey would die, Abraham had just finished digging a grave. The earth oozed moisture—a black, fragrant mulch that kept slipping back into the hole. Abraham was covered in dirt, as if he’d been rolling around in the mud. On his face, only his eyes and teeth were visible. He worked on his knees, his sole tool being a dented aluminum plate that he’d selected from among his odds and ends and was using as a shovel.

  They’d had to wait for sunrise before setting to work. By then, they’d already wrenched the boards from the windows. Earlier that morning, before doing anything else, they’d removed the dead bodies from sight, hiding them for the time being in the undergrowth.

  The next step now
was to move the car off the cabin track and stow it in some hidden corner on the road. Joanes had already guessed someone from the hotel would turn up in the morning. He put the woman’s wheelchair in the trunk. He also stored the elderly couple’s luggage and the things the owner of the English Residence had given them. He’d get rid of all that later on. Finally, he grabbed his own meager luggage.

  He told Abraham to wait for him in the cabin. He didn’t bother to tie him up, since the easiest way to stop him from running off was to keep ahold of the chimpanzee. And yet, driving and watching over the monkey at the same time would have been too tricky, and in any case the chimpanzee would have been too conspicuous if they’d come across anyone on the road. Once the cabin was out of sight, he tied the monkey’s chain to a tree and left him there.

  When he came back a while later, he had a little scare. The chimpanzee wasn’t moving. It was resting against the tree trunk with its head slumped to one side. Joanes thought it was dead. If that was the case, he would have no way of controlling Abraham. He nudged the chimpanzee with one end of the cane.

  “Come on, Gagarin. Don’t fail me now.”

  He nudged him again.

  The chimpanzee slowly stirred. The hood covering his head moved from one side to another. Joanes let out a big sigh of relief.

  When he was just a couple of paces from the cabin, Joanes stopped and called to Abraham. He ordered him to come out with his hands above his head.

  “You’re not going to give me any surprises, are you, Abraham?”

  Abraham shook his head.

  “That’s what I like to hear. Now walk here in front of me. Not too fast. Not too slow.”

  Together they went in search of an appropriate place to bury the professor and his wife. The monkey followed them, attached to Joanes by the chain and cane, tripping over the roots of the trees.

  Abraham stopped several times as he dug the grave, encumbered by great sobbing attacks. Once or twice he vomited a few gloopy threads of bile. He told Joanes that he couldn’t get the faces of the professor and his wife the moment they died out of his head, that he’d never forget them, and Joanes responded by saying that that was exactly what he had to do. He, Abraham, from then on, was a container for the memory of the last moments of those elderly people’s lives. Abraham was silent for a few seconds and then began to mumble about something the professor had done before dying. Joanes pointed the machete at him and ordered him to be quiet.

  “It’s enough for you to know and remember what happened,” he added.

  When the time came to lower the bodies down, Abraham got out of the hole and took a few steps back. Pushing them with one foot, Joanes rolled the professor and his wife into the grave. He enjoyed the slight resistance their bodies gave. He’d stripped them of their wallets, watches, and wedding rings beforehand. She wasn’t wearing any other jewelry. He told Abraham to cover them up.

  The pain in his hand observed a cruel, arcane logic. It came and went in waves. At its most intense, Joanes felt like he needed to run, to do anything that might distract him from the pain. Instead, he vented some of it by ordering Abraham to work faster. Abraham looked at him, his eyes red from exhaustion, tears, and the earth that had gotten in them, but barely changing his pace.

  Despite the pain and tiredness, Joanes felt tremendously lucid. The night before, he’d had time to plan what he had to do. As soon as they got rid of the bodies, he’d look for a doctor to fix him up and give him a rabies shot. He’d explain the injuries by saying that a vagrant dog had attacked him. He’d gotten lost looking for the evacuation hotel and hadn’t had any choice but to spend the night in his car. When he’d set off the following morning, he’d gone over a broken branch and gotten a flat tire. While he was changing it, the dog had attacked him, or rather several dogs, a pack. That’s what he’d tell whoever asked him. A simple, perfectly believable story, something that could easily happen to a careless tourist who didn’t know the area and didn’t have any experience with hurricanes. Then he’d go to Valladolid, back to his family.

  On the off chance that anyone should ask him about the professor and his wife, he’d admit that he’d picked them up on the highway, and also that they’d stopped briefly at the English Residence, where they’d been asked to leave. On seeing the uninhabitable state of the cabin, they’d all decided to move on, until, totally lost, they’d had to stop. He would confirm that the last time he’d seen them was that same morning, when he left them safe and sound at the bus station in a nearby town.

  But he was pretty sure that nobody was going to probe his story further. He supposed there’d be other lost tourists, accidents, and that the hurricane would have left several victims in its wake, far more important things than someone having been attacked by a bunch of dogs. And he supposed that nobody ever set foot in that clearing. And he also supposed that the avid tropical soil would soon dissolve the bodies. All of these, to him, were completely plausible suppositions.

  “It’s done,” said Abraham.

  “Get up. Go over there by that tree and don’t move.”

  Joanes looked over the place.

  “You’ve done a nice job, Abraham.”

  “Can we go now?”

  “That’s what I promised you. But this,” said Joanes, gesturing at the machete, “and this,” pointing to the cane on the ground, “are staying with me. You can take your monkey.”

  Abraham got down on his knees next to Gagarin and with trembling hands unleashed him from the tree to which he’d been chained. He took off the makeshift handcuffs behind his back and, finally, removed the hood. The monkey blinked and looked from one side to the other. He let out a long moan. There were dry, bloody scabs on his head and on one of his ears, which had been bleeding from the inside.

  “Gagarin, Gagarin . . .” repeated his master, who burst into tears again. “My friend.”

  The chimpanzee leaned in toward him, and the two embraced. They stayed there like that for a long time, under the attentive eye of Joanes, who eventually said, “I’ll give you some cash. You can hold on to the flashlight, too; I’m sure it’ll come in handy. Although you’ll have to come to the car with me to find it.”

  Abraham didn’t answer. He was stroking Gagarin’s back.

  “If I can do anything else to help you . . .”

  At last, Abraham got to his feet. The only response he gave Joanes was a look of absolute and intense contempt. Then, swinging his backpack over his shoulder, he picked Gagarin up in his arms. The chimpanzee rested his head on his master’s shoulder and closed his eyes.

  “Goodbye, Abraham. Look after yourself.”

  Joanes watched as Abraham and the monkey walked off into the distance, gradually blending into the vegetation, and eventually disappearing altogether. Not long after, he thought he heard a sort of song, a lullaby, but he couldn’t be sure. All around him was the drip-drip of raindrops falling from every leaf of every tree.

  Hours later, once Joanes had erased all trace of himself as best he could and scattered a few branches over the stirred up soil, and once he’d given the place a last once-over and left for the car, leaving the clearing that had now returned to its normal calm, a magnificent specimen of a boa constrictor appeared there. It was an adult female, over six feet long, and it was looking for any baby chicks that had been pitched from their nests by the storm. It stopped in the middle of the clearing, lifted up its head, stuck out its black tongue, and writhed its body until it was half buried, as if it were trying to take a mud bath. Then it slithered toward a nearby tree, which it proceeded to scale. The track left in the mud by its powerful body looked like a sort of strange, sinuous signature. Curled up on a branch that stuck out over the clearing, it waited.

  In the end, after several hours spent trying to fall asleep, Joanes got out of bed. His wife groaned and changed position. He opened the sliding door that led out onto the balcony and went outside for
some air. It was a pleasant spring night. The window of the next-door room was lit up. His daughter must still be awake, probably still working away on her never-ending, nihilistic vampire novel. The manuscript consisted of a bundle of three thick notebooks tied together with elastic bands. Up to this point, she still hadn’t let her parents read any of it.

  He considered knocking on her door and telling her to go to sleep, but he couldn’t face an argument at that hour. His daughter seemed stranger and stranger to him, even though Joanes also accepted that this was normal, if perhaps it had happened a little sooner than he’d expected it to. He would later tell himself that this was also normal.

  He looked at his wife through the sliding door. She’d pulled off the sheets in her sleep. He couldn’t see her face, which was buried in the pillow. Looking in from there, under the orangey light of the streetlamps, the room looked different—bigger and more inviting. He felt the guilty pang of a voyeur.

  A short while after, the light in his daughter’s room went off. Joanes looked out at the street, which was lined with trees and stone-façaded houses. A few days earlier, he and his wife had given up on the idea of moving to a bigger place, a dream they’d been harboring for years. Better to forget about that till things were going better. At first it had really saddened Joanes, but now he didn’t care.

  He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with air that was itself full of the promise of summer. He felt good. If some messenger from the future had appeared before him and announced that from there on out, things would neither get any better nor any worse for him than they were right then at that moment, he wouldn’t have had too much trouble getting used to the idea.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jon Bilbao is a Spanish literary writer, translator and scriptwriter who lives in Bilbao. He has published the novels El hermano de las moscas, Padres, hijos y primates (Still the Same Man) and Shakespeare y la ballena blanca, as well as the short story collections Como una historia de terror and Bajo el influjo del cometa. He has won the Premio Asturias Joven de Narrativa, the Premio Ojo Crítico de Narrativa, the Premio Tigre Juan and the Premio Euskadi de Narrativa.