The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

  Hector turned the page, and there was a picture of his sister, Inez, five years old, holding a doll in her arms. Hector smiled. Then another page. He lit up when he saw himself as a boy, standing in front of a tree, his arms by his sides, one front tooth missing. He pointed at the picture.

  “In the garden back home, I remember that picture being taken. I lost my tooth when I fell off my bike, and I told my friends I’d been in a fight.”

  He laughed and moved the album onto Sophie’s lap, leaned back, and took a cigarillo from his breast pocket, lit it, and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment before letting it out.

  “Things were better before, weren’t they?”

  Sophie went on looking through the album, more pictures of him as a little boy, a photograph of him sitting fishing with the evening sun on his face. She paused at that picture; he must have been about ten years old, but the expression on his face already suggested that he was a very determined individual. She compared the photograph with how he looked now, leaning back and smoking the cigarillo: they weren’t much different.

  She switched to the other album, and found more pictures of his mother, Pia. There was a picture of her washing her three children’s hair in a tin bath on a lawn somewhere. Pia looked like a happy mother. Sophie went on. A picture of a young, dark-haired Adalberto Guzman sitting and smoking a cigar on an old stone veranda with cypress trees and olive groves in the background. Pictures of the children playing, having parties. A few pictures of Adalberto and Pia in various locations with the celebrities of the day. Sophie recognized Jacques Brel, and possibly Monica Vitti. An artist whose name she couldn’t remember. Then a family trip to Tehran in the mid-’70s. Dinners with friends, happy memories. Adalberto, Pia, and the children. The pages that followed were full of a mix of family pictures, unknown friends and relations, happy pictures—Madrid, Rome, the French Riviera, Sweden and the archipelago. The album stopped in 1981, the rest of the pages were empty.

  “Why does it stop here?”

  Hector looked at the album.

  “That was the year my mother died. We stopped taking pictures after that.”

  “Why?”

  Hector thought for a moment.

  “I don’t know, maybe because we were no longer a family.”

  She waited for him to go on. He noticed.

  “Instead we became four people trying to manage on our own. My brother hid himself away beneath the sea in his diving suit, Inez disappeared into a life of partying in Madrid for several years. I followed my father into the family business. Maybe I was the one who dealt with Mom’s death worst, clinging to Dad like that.”

  He went on smoking and looked away from her. She kept trying to catch his eye, he felt it and turned toward her.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  Sophie went back through the album, looking at the pictures again.

  “Which one’s your favorite?”

  He leaned over and picked up the second album, then leafed through to a picture of him at age eight, standing bolt upright and staring into the camera with an alert look in his eyes. There was nothing special about the picture. He pointed with the cigarillo in the corner of his mouth.

  “Why that one?” she wondered.

  He looked at the photograph before replying.

  “There’s nothing a man likes more than the boy he once was.”

  “Really?” she said, smiling at his sudden arrogance.

  He nodded firmly. “Why are you out here in this boat with me, Sophie?”

  The question came out of the blue and she laughed, not because it was funny but because she didn’t know what else to do.

  “Because you invited me,” she managed to say.

  He was looking at her intently. She could feel the half smile still on her face after her laughter, and found an almost graceful way to let it fade.

  “You could have said no,” he said.

  She shrugged as if to say, Of course.

  “Why didn’t you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Hector.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes from him; there was something in there, something she was drawn to, something she tried to ignore, to avoid seeing. But it was impossible, it was there, right in front of her, just as it had been since the very first time she had met him. He was honest in that very unusual way, as if his personality didn’t have room for lies or games, as if he were incapable of that. She loved that part of him. Honest, open, and true, attributes she valued so highly. But he was also lethal. Open, honest, true, and lethal. She didn’t want that to be the case.

  “Are we friends?” he asked.

  His choice of words felt strange.

  “Yes, I hope so.”

  “We’re adults,” he said, like it was a declaration.

  She nodded. “Yes, we are.”

  “Adult friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not sure,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “One day you’re close. Then you’re suddenly distant, cold, holding me at arm’s length. As if you can’t decide. Are you looking for adventure? A way to pass the time, perhaps? Are you bored with your life, Sophie?”

  He was about to go on, ask more questions. But she didn’t want to lie, and absolutely didn’t want to tell the truth. She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips in the hope of getting him to stop. Hector returned the kiss softly, but instead of allowing himself to tumble into it, he leaned back and inspected her even more intently than before. This time as though he had seen through her attempt to trap him in a kiss, while at the same time trying to understand something involved and complicated.

  A motorboat passed by at high speed, Sophie watched it.

  “Shall we go home?” she asked quietly.

  He was still looking at her, he was still searching for whatever it was he hadn’t been able to understand just then. Then he scratched his chin and let out a murmur of agreement, stood up, and tossed the half-smoked cigarillo over the railing and pressed a button on the instrument panel, and the anchor pulled up. He put his finger on the Start button, hesitated, removed his finger, and turned toward her again.

  “I’ve got a son.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “I’ve got a son. I’m not allowed to see him. I want to, but his mother won’t allow it. I haven’t seen him for ten years.”

  Sophie just stared at him.

  “What’s his name?” were the only words that emerged.

  “His name’s Lothar Manuel Tiedemann, his mother’s surname, he’s sixteen years old and he lives in Berlin.”

  A few small waves were making the boat rock gently.

  “Now you know all about me, Sophie,” he said quietly.

  They looked at each other. She tried to make sense of it all. He was on the point of saying something else but decided against it. Instead he started the engine and steered out of the inlet.

  Gunilla was walking down the narrow park that ran down the center of Karlavägen, designed for pedestrians and dog walkers. It was hot in the sun, the breeze was warm. She crossed over Karlavägen at Artillerigatan. There were people sitting at the little tables outside the Tösse café. She stopped and waited, eavesdropping on the disillusioned housewives revealing in their involved and subconscious way that they didn’t feel loved. And on men scattering their speech with English phrases. And on youngsters laughing at things she didn’t understand. She did that sometimes, stopping in the middle of somewhere and just listening.

  After a few minutes Sophie came walking up from Karlaplan. Gunilla waited until she reached her, then joined up with her and walked off toward Sturegatan with her.

  After a while Gunilla began asking questions. As usual, they were all about the people around Hector, their names and roles, what they might be imagined to do or not do. Sophie answered as best she could. When the questions slid toward Hector himself, who he was, what sort of person, she gave Gunilla
very little, as if she didn’t know Hector, as if she didn’t want to break a silent confidence she had just been entrusted with by him.

  Some schoolchildren came toward them on the pavement and Sophie moved to let them pass.

  “I’ve met Hector Guzman’s type many times in the course of my work. Easygoing, charming, and then they suddenly switch and become the exact opposite. And ruin other people’s lives.…”

  Sophie said nothing, just kept walking next to Gunilla.

  “Don’t let yourself be taken in, Sophie.”

  9

  He felt like shit. He had a constant feeling that he was doing the wrong thing. Gunilla never got in touch, treating him as if he wasn’t there after that last meeting. He felt that he had made a complete fool of himself and had been planning to take it all back, apologize, try to repair the damage. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that a move like that would only make the situation worse. The confrontation had started something inside him. He twisted and turned in bed at night: sweat, unresolved thoughts, and the streetlight through the window all kept him awake. His emotions swung between anger and shame, rage and an angst the cause of which he was unaware.

  He had gone to the doctor’s that morning. Lars had told him that he worked the evening shift, wasn’t getting enough sleep and had a bad back and headaches. The doctor, a man with warm, dry hands, had been helpful and explained that Lars was overworked, and had something called “fatigue symptoms.” The doctor examined his eyes with a little flashlight, felt the glands in his neck, and shoved a finger up his backside. Then he prescribed Citodon for his back and the headaches, and oxazepam for the thing that Lars couldn’t put into words.

  Lars asked to see his medical notes.

  “What for?” the doctor wondered.

  “Because I want to.”

  That was evidently enough. The doctor turned the computer screen. Lars skimmed through it, nothing about what he had got up to in the past.

  “Happy?”

  Lars didn’t answer.

  “I’ll book you in for a follow-up in six weeks’ time,” the doctor muttered.

  Lars picked the prescription up from the pharmacy, then headed through the city in the Volvo.

  As a child he had always had trouble sleeping. Rosie used to let him use her sleeping pills. He was eleven years old, and developed an early resistance to them. His mom, Rosie, who was already peddling pills, and was good friends with a doctor she used to sleep with when his dad, Lennart, wasn’t home, gave him some anonymous white tablets that knocked Lars out at half past seven every evening. He couldn’t remember any dreams and felt an incredible emptiness throughout the latter stages of elementary school, all the way through middle school and into high school.

  A school nurse found out about his consumption of pills. She instigated an investigation, tried to conceal her concern by speaking very slowly and clearly, telling Lars that the tablets he had been taking were terribly addictive, terribly strong. That because he had taken so many of these powerful, addictive drugs during puberty, Lars would have to be extremely careful with tablets and other mind-altering substances in the future, and that his system had developed a dependency that could only be held at bay by total abstinence. Lars had nodded without understanding a word she was saying. He always nodded when people spoke to him.

  He stopped taking the white pills when he was seventeen years old, and suffered disrupted sleep, mood swings, terrible anxiety, and bestial, black nightmares whenever he did manage to get any sleep. The addiction made itself felt day and night alike. He would twist and turn in his soaking-wet sheets, full of worry, anxieties, and torments.

  After a few years the abstinence settled down into a general feeling of emptiness. The longing faded, and the trembling and mood swings gradually disappeared. But the angst was still there, as well as the disturbed sleep. They became part of the daily routine, part of his reality.

  He parked the car outside the bowling alley: it was licensed to sell beer and wine.

  Lars found a table with a view of the lanes. There were gangs of elderly people bowling. Lars looked down at the palm of his hand, six pills, three from each bottle.

  He swept the pills into his mouth and washed them down with some Bulgarian red wine. After a few minutes the pressure in his chest eased and his breathing became more relaxed. He leaned back in his chair and watched the people bowling, feeling delight when they missed and annoyance when they succeeded.

  “Hi.”

  Sara was standing next to him. He looked at her in surprise.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I followed you.”

  “Where from?”

  “The medical center.”

  Lars turned back to the bowlers and took a sip from his glass of wine. She sat down and tried to catch his eye.

  “How are you, Lars?”

  “Fine, why?”

  Sara sighed quietly. “Please, Lars. Can’t we talk?”

  Lars pretended not to understand, and let out a little laugh.

  “I thought we were.… Isn’t that what we’re doing now, talking? I mean, our mouths are moving!”

  He smiled strangely. Sara looked down at her hands.

  “I don’t want it to be like this,” she whispered.

  Lars watched bowling balls rolling down the lanes, pins being knocked over.

  “I don’t recognize you anymore, you’re so angry all the time, you won’t say what it is.… Is it something I’ve done?”

  He snorted.

  “I want to help you if I can, Lars.”

  She watched him to see if the words had sunk in.

  “You’ve been here before, Lars,” she whispered.

  He avoided her gaze.

  “When we met, before we decided to move in together, just after you started working in the Western District. You were like you are now.… It lasted a few weeks.… When you came out of it you told me about the medication you were given as a child.…”

  “You talk so much crap.…”

  Sara was struggling not to let herself be deterred by his attitude.

  “No, I don’t,” she said.

  A skinny old man had just hit a strike, and was doing his best to hide his proud grin when he turned back toward his friends.

  “We’ve done OK, Lars,” she said. “We’ve had a relationship without any arguments or misunderstandings. We’ve let each other be, but still been together.… We’ve had the same interests, the same values. We managed to find something.…”

  He drank some more wine, still avoiding her gaze.

  “What do you think’s happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s happened, you’re just paranoid … and ugly.”

  Sara tried not to show how hurt she felt.

  “In that case, I want us to split up.”

  His crooked smile was still in place.

  “I thought we already had.”

  Sara’s sadness switched to anger, and she stared at him, then got up quickly and walked away. Lars watched her go, sipping the wine, then looked on as a fat old woman rolled her ball into the gutter. The woman made an effort to look cheerful as she walked back toward her friends, as though the whole point wasn’t to win but to have a good time together. Yeah, right.

  When the bowling alley closed he found a bar, an Irish pub that was about as Irish as McDonald’s was Finnish. A widescreen television, electronic dart board, a miniature basketball basket with stupid miniature basketballs. And, as the icing on the cake, an Iranian barman who spoke bad English and called Lars “pal.” But what did he care? He was there to get hammered, and he succeeded. He drank himself stupid until the place closed, and woke up the next morning in his car, with the windows fogged up and his nose frozen. The world outside was already awake and moving.

  Lars sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, scratched hard at his flattened hair, and got rid of the dryness in his mouth with some flat beer.

  He drove out toward Dandery
d Hospital, somewhere between drunk and hungover. He sat there in his parked car all day, biting his nails, popping his pills, drinking his lunch, and waiting.

  When Lars saw Sophie leave the hospital that afternoon he was elated, and felt safe again.

  He stayed some distance behind her as she cycled home, then he drove past her and did what he always did, heading toward her house, choosing a spot for the night, then putting the headphones on and listening to her as she lived her life.

  This was on the point of becoming his life now, nothing else really mattered. He listened to everything she did, to her steps as she passed one of the microphones, to the dinner she ate alone, to her conversations with Albert.

  At eleven o’clock Lars switched to the microphone in the bedroom and listened as she pulled the duvet from the bed and lay down. He had worked out that she slept without covers, he never heard her pull the duvet back over herself again. He visualized her lying there on the white sheet with her hair resting on the pillow, taking soft breaths, maybe dreaming of him. His body was shrieking with longing for her, he didn’t understand it, couldn’t control it. Lars had another top-up, the pills went down. Everything became natural, even his longing.

  When things had been silent for three hours, when Sophie and Albert were sound asleep in their beds, Lars got out of the car and crept slowly into Sophie’s garden. The summer night was still and mild. He was feeling calm and harmonious as he stopped by the veranda at the back of the house, then glanced around before going silently up the steps, picking the lock, and carefully opening the door. The hinges made a small squeaking sound. He stepped soundlessly into the living room, listening intently.

  She was lying up there asleep, the feeling of being so close to her was intoxicating. Lars crept into the kitchen. Very carefully he opened the fridge and looked inside, letting his imagination run wild, thinking of himself as the man of the house, the man who had gotten out of bed and come downstairs to the kitchen to get something to eat.

  Lars got out some bread, butter, and fillings for himself, sat down at the kitchen table, and ate a sandwich. He smiled toward his son as he came downstairs, then got up and kissed Sophie when she came down a little later, showing her that he had prepared breakfast, and she smiled and kissed him again. He said something witty, and Sophie and their son laughed.