Water-Blue Eyes

by Villar, Domingo

  DOMINGO VILLAR

  Water-blue Eyes

  Translated from the Spanish by Martin Schifino

  To Beatriz, my love, whose eyes bring me closer to the sea.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Dark

  Tuning

  Ambiguity

  Artist

  Find

  The Bar

  Cowering

  Poison

  Solvent

  Obstinacy

  Sweating

  The cortège

  Dip

  Out of Tune

  Bluntness

  Legend

  Sense

  Excuse

  Absence

  Encouragement

  Refuge

  Impression

  Trace

  Relationship

  Rain

  Twist

  Gap

  Motive

  In the Clear

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dark

  The line of lights on the coast, the glimmer of the city, the white spray where the waves broke… It made no difference that it was dark and the rain was lashing against the windows. Whoever was visiting his flat for the first time invariably mentioned the view, as if compelled.

  Luis Reigosa picked a CD from the shelf, put it on the hi-fi and poured the drinks into wide glasses, the rims of which he’d previously rubbed with lemon peel. He couldn’t have known they’d be the last he’d ever pour.

  They listened to the roar of the wind as they went into the bedroom with their arms around each other. From the living room, Billie Holliday reached out to them with ‘The man I love’:

  Some day he’ll come along

  The man I love

  And he’ll be big and strong

  The man I love

  Tuning

  ‘City police three, Leo nil.’

  Leo Caldas put down his uncomfortable headphones, lit up a cigarette and looked out of the window.

  Some children were chasing pigeons in the garden, under the attentive gazes both of their mothers, who were chatting in a circle, and of the birds waiting for them to get close before taking flight.

  He put his headphones back on when a call came in – a woman wanting to lodge a complaint against the pub beneath her house. The noise, she said, sometimes kept her up until dawn. She complained about the shouting, the music, the beeps of the horns, the parallel parking, the drunken singing, the brawls, the walls sprayed with urine, and the broken glass strewn on the pavement – which constituted a hazard for her child.

  Caldas let her get it off her chest, knowing he’d be unable to offer anything but comforting words. That kind of thing was not within the competence of his department, but of the city police.

  ‘I’ll send a memo to the city police asking them to gauge the decibels and to make sure closing times are being observed,’ he said, writing the address of the pub in his notebook.

  He wrote underneath: ‘City police four, Leo nil.’

  The theme tune of the show played out until Rebeca placed another sign scribbled with black letters against the glass. Leo Caldas took a quick drag on his cigarette and balanced it on the edge of the ashtray.

  ‘Good afternoon, Angel,’ Santiago Losada, the presenter, greeted the listener who was waiting on the other end of the line.

  ‘Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance,’ the man said, enunciating each word clearly.

  ‘Sorry?’ the presenter replied, as surprised as Caldas at the strange statement.

  ‘Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance,’ the man repeated, in the same slow voice as before.

  ‘Excuse me, Angel. You’re live on Patrol on the Air,’ Losada reminded him. ‘Do you have any questions for Inspector Caldas?’

  The man hung up, leaving the presenter without a reply and cursing under his breath.

  ‘People love to hear themselves on the radio,’ apologised Losada, as the ads came on.

  Leo Caldas smiled and thought that Losada deserved to be cut down to size every now and again.

  ‘Some more than others,’ he muttered.

  On another call, an elderly man living on the outskirts of the city complained that, at a set of traffic lights near his house, the green light didn’t stay on long enough for him to walk across the road.

  Leo took down the location of the traffic lights in his notebook. He would let the city police know.

  ‘Five-nil, without counting the crazy guy’s call.’

  The inspector’s mobile phone was on silent, but on the table its screen lit up, warning him that he had some missed calls.

  He saw there were three, all from his subordinate Estévez, and decided not to respond to them. He was tired and didn’t want to drag out the day more than strictly necessary. They’d meet later at the police station, or, with a little luck, the following morning.

  He took a long drag to finish his cigarette, stubbed it out into an ashtray and popped his headphones back on to listen to Eva, who told him that certain supernatural apparitions, indeed abominable spectres, unfailingly visited her house every night.

  Leo wondered whether Losada should contemplate creating a segment called Madness on the Air to accommodate all the visionaries who phoned in so often. When the presenter underlined the name and number of the woman in his diary, he thought Losada just might.

  A few calls later, programme number 108 of Patrol on the Air came to an end. Leo Caldas read the final score in his black-covered notebook: ‘City police nine, crazies two, Leo nil.’

  Ambiguity

  The inspector walked into the police station and proceeded down the aisle between two rows of desks. He had often felt, striding between the lined-up computers, that he was in a newsroom rather than in a police station.

  Estévez stood up when he saw him appear, and lugged his six-foot-five bulk right behind him.

  Caldas opened the frosted-glass door of his office and took a look at the papers stacked on his table. He prided himself on being able to locate anything among the apparent chaos of jottings and documents, though he knew this to be only a half-truth. He slumped into his black leather chair, exhausted after a long day’s work, and sighed; he barely knew where to begin.

  Rafael Estévez burst in, adding to his worries.

  ‘Inspector, Superintendent Soto called. He wants us to go to this address,’ he said, waving a piece of paper. ‘Some officers are already there.’

  ‘Between you and the superintendent I can barely sit down for a minute. Do we know what happened at all?’

  ‘No. I told him you were at the radio station with that Patrol on the Air idiot, and I offered to come over myself, but he wanted me to wait for you.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  Caldas read the address, crumpled the piece of paper and left it on the desk.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair.

  ‘Are we not going, chief?’

  Leo Caldas clicked his tongue.

  ‘Give me a minute, will you?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Estévez, who was still a bit unfamiliar with his superior’s manners.

  Rafael Estévez had only been in Galicia for a few months. A rumour at the station had it that his transfer had been a punishment administered in his native Zaragoza. The officer had accepted his job in the town of Vigo without any visible displeasure, but he was finding it difficult to adjust to some things here. One was the unpredictable, ever-changing nature of the weather; another the steepness of the streets. The third was ambiguity. To Rafael Estévez’s stern Aragonese mind, things were this way or that, got done or didn’t, so it was only with considerable effort that
he managed to decipher the ambiguous expressions of his new fellow citizens.

  He had first come into contact with the local ways three days after arriving, when Superintendent Soto asked him to take a statement from a teenager who had been caught selling marijuana to his schoolmates.

  ‘Name?’ Estévez had asked, trying to do it as quickly as possible.

  ‘My name?’ asked the boy.

  ‘Yes, lad, I wouldn’t be asking for mine, would I?’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ the young dealer conceded.

  ‘So tell me your name.’

  ‘Francisco.’

  Officer Estévez typed the boy’s name.

  ‘Francisco. And then?’

  ‘And then nothing.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a surname?’

  ‘Oh, Martín Fabeiro, Franciso Martín Fabeiro.’

  Rafael Estévez, sitting in front of his computer, entered the surname and moved the cursor to the next blank on the statement form.

  ‘Address.’

  ‘My address?’

  Rafael Estévez looked up. ‘Do you think I’d be asking for mine? You don’t think this is a game of charades, do you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well then, tell me your address.’

  Estévez paused, waiting for the boy’s answer, but the question seemed to have thrown him into deep thought.

  ‘Would that be where I normally live?’ he said eventually.

  ‘Do you actually sell the pot or smoke it? Of course that would be where you normally live. We need to be able to contact you.’

  ‘The thing is, it depends.’

  ‘How do you mean, it depends? You must have a house like everyone else. Unless you live in the streets, like a cat.’

  ‘No, no sir. I live with my parents.’

  ‘Tell me your address, then,’ roared Estévez.

  ‘My parents’ address?’

  ‘Look, matey, let’s be clear – I’m the one who asks the questions here. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, now you understand, you’re going to tell me where the fuck you and your family live, do you understand me?’ he warned him, visibly put out.

  The boy gazed at him, apparently without comprehending why this enormous police officer was getting so worked up.

  ‘I said, do you understand me?’ pressed Estévez.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy mumbled.

  ‘Well, let’s get this over with. I haven’t got all morning. Now, where the fuck do you live? And please tell me the address where you normally live, not that of the brothel where you father drops by on pay day.’

  After another pause, the boy dared to say:

  ‘Do you want the address in town or in the village?’

  ‘Now…’ said Estévez, struggling to control himself.

  ‘You see,’ the boy hastened to add, ‘we’re here in the city from Monday to Friday, but at weekends we load the car and go to our village. I can give you either address.’

  The boy finished the explanation and awaited new instructions. Estévez looked at him without even blinking.

  ‘Sir?’

  The officer pushed the computer aside and lifted the boy half a metre clean off the floor by the lapels. He then grabbed his regulation gun and pointed it at the horrified kid’s mouth.

  ‘Do you see this gun? Do you see it, you pathetic clown?’

  The boy, his feet hanging in the air and the barrel barely a centimetre from his mouth, nodded in alarm.

  ‘If you don’t fucking tell me where you live I’ll knock out all your teeth with it and shove them one by one up your arse. Is that clear?’

  The superintendent, who was observing from behind a two-way mirror how the newcomer deported himself during interrogations, walked in at that moment and stopped him carrying out his threat. However, he couldn’t prevent the episode from triggering all sorts of conjectures about Estévez’s fiery personality at the station, or gossip from spreading on the subject of why he had been transferred to Vigo.

  To keep the impetuous officer under close surveillance, Soto had entrusted him to Inspector Leo Caldas. And yet Estévez, in spite of the inspector’s calm influence, had remained in a constant state of alert. There was something inside him that brushed against the Galician people’s inability to call a spade a spade. He saw this attitude as bordering on a compulsion, and refused to believe it might be a mere local trait.

  Leo Caldas read the address on the piece of paper again: Duplex 17/18, North Wing, Toralla Towers.

  ‘Let’s go over before it gets dark,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’re going to enjoy the ride.’

  Artist

  Rafael Estévez got in the car whistling a tune he’d had in his head for several weeks. Leo Caldas sat back in his seat, rolled down the window a crack and closed his eyes.

  ‘I’ve got to go down to the beach, right, inspector?’ the officer asked. His knowledge of the complex local geography was improving, but he still didn’t feel entirely at ease among the dense traffic of the city.

  Caldas opened his eyes to show him the way.

  ‘Yes, it’s the island opposite Canido harbour, which is the first one right after the beaches. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘Oh, the island with the high-rise. I know where that is.’

  ‘Let’s go then,’ replied the inspector, closing his eyes again.

  Along the boulevard on the coast, they passed a modern fishing harbour on their right, which had been reclaimed from the sea by filling a narrow cove. Several boats were returning to their moorings with hundreds of seagulls hovering above them in search of a sardine for dinner.

  On the left, on the side facing the waterfront, they left behind the old Berbés harbour, where all the seafaring activities of the city had started at the end of the nineteenth century. Its granite arcades, under which the fish had been unloaded in former times, had retreated from the coast as a consequence of the constant expansion of the docks.

  The tide was low, and the strong smell of the sea wafted in through the window. Rafael Estévez liked this smell; it was almost new to him. He looked at the landscape, the intricate relief of fjord-like inlets known as rías, that had seduced him from the moment he’d seen it. The sea he’d always been familiar with, since the summer holidays of his childhood, was the Mediterranean, which extended as far as the eye could see. In Galicia, however, swaths of green land gave way here and there to rías of varying colours, shielded from the pounding of the Atlantic by streamlined, white-sand islands.

  Following the boulevard, they went past the shipyards where the armatures of future boats were in view, and then drove into the ring road – a misnomer, since it wasn’t a ring at all – until they reached the first beaches. After several rainy days, crowds of people had returned to Samil beach on this mild afternoon, and along its stone promenade joggers, dogs and bicycles went past each other once again. Over the sea, the sky had taken on a reddish colour that heralded nightfall.

  At the local sports centre, two teams of children were having a football match. They shouted to each other as they chased the ball, and their airborne voices were audible through the barely opened window. The car rounded the fence of the site and lunged into a sharp bend in the road, near the mouth of the Lagares River. The speed pushed Caldas over to the driver’s seat. He opened his eyes, readjusted himself, and watched the children for a few moments. At the next bend, as the orange team was nearing the blue team’s goal area, the inspector lost sight of them. Then the centrifugal force threw him against the door of the car.

  ‘For God’s sake, Rafael!’

  ‘What’s up, inspector?’

  ‘Why can’t you drive like a normal person?’

  Rafael slowed down. A few seconds later they heard the high-pitched ring of Caldas’s mobile.

  ‘That’s yours, boss,’ said Estévez, when he considered it had rung enough times.

  Caldas read the superintendent’s name on the screen and answered.r />
  ‘Leo, did you get the message?’ Superintendent Soto seemed as impatient as ever.

  ‘We’re on our way,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Is Estévez with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ ratified Caldas. ‘Shouldn’t he have come?’

  ‘He shouldn’t have been born,’ replied Soto and rang off.

  They continued along the winding road that skirted the coast. After leaving several built-up areas behind they reached Vao beach. The island came into view right across from it.

  Toralla was a small island. There were only a few mansions, beaches and tracts of wilderness on barely twenty hectares opposite the most exclusive residential area of the bay. But something unusual stood out in this small paradise, a twenty-floor high-rise that, at the height of urban brutalism, had been built with no regard for the harmony that the island had preserved until then. Caldas had always thought that if it had been constructed five centuries before, it would have been enough to scare Frances Drake away and send him and his buccaneers back to England.

  They left the main road and headed for the access bridge. Estévez stopped the car where it jutted out.

  ‘Do we have to drive across, inspector?’

  ‘Unless you’d rather swim,’ replied Caldas, without opening his eyes.

  Rafael Estévez, muttering to himself, drove along the two hundred metres of the bridge. To the west, the golden light shimmered on the sea, making it difficult to look at it face on. But to the east one could clearly see the shore, lit by a sun that was almost level with the water.

  They left behind the metal staircases descending on to the beach, which was the larger of the two in Toralla. The rocks of the breakwaters, now exposed by the low tide, were covered in green moss.

  A barrier and a sentry box controlled access to the island.

  ‘Isn’t this open to the public, inspector?’