When I had finished arranging my things, Juana came in with a cup of coffee and a plate with two pills.
“Take these now, Consul. I’ll be back in half an hour to make lunch. Rest. There are lots of books here, and music, too.”
I wanted to ask her about the apartment, but held back. I remembered our days in Delhi. There, too, I’d waited to hear her story, and after a while, without my asking anything, she’d started to talk. And once she’d started there was no stopping her. I don’t know if anyone had ever again talked to me in that way, with so much force, so much knowledge of life.
At lunch time Manuelito arrived—to me he was Manuelito Sayeq, but she didn’t use his second name. A boy of about eleven, with black hair and very bright eyes. Hearing him speak was proof that they had been living in Madrid.
“Mother told me that you and she are old friends.”
“That’s right,” I said, “and I knew you when you were only just starting to walk.”
My bandages and wounds didn’t upset him, or at least he didn’t mention it. I assumed that Juana had lectured him about that beforehand.
“And that you’re going to live with us for a while.”
“For a few days anyway, while I finish recovering from all this.”
“Well, I’m pleased, Consul. Welcome.”
They both kept calling me “Consul,” but now didn’t seem the moment to change the rules and tell them I wasn’t a consul anymore. Juana knew that anyway.
And that’s how we spent the following four days, in an atmosphere filled with silences and questions. Nothing disturbed the routine. I devoted myself to helping Manuelito with his homework and talking to him about the great adventures of mankind. I promised him we’d go buy books by Jules Verne and albums of Tintin. I told him about the journey to the center of the earth, which you reached through a crack in the surface that connected with a descending tunnel. I told him about the Nautilus, that underwater home in which a man had decided to shut himself away, far from the world, with a submerged library. I told him the story of the five weeks in a balloon and the battles between savage tribes seen from the sky, in a dirigible, and of course about the longest and most difficult journey: the journey to the Moon.
We also talked about his history homework: about the Mayas, their calendar and their maize, the close relationship between the two in the cycle of harvests, and how they made pyramids to see the sky more closely and to look above the trees. We drew mandalas, we made simple mathematical calculations, we studied the wars of the Cid, and what in Spanish schools is still called the reconquest, which is none other than the expulsion of the Spanish Muslims by the Spanish Catholics from the land they had shared.
Juana came in and out. In those first days I learned that she was working as a volunteer in a refugee center in Lavapiés, and had contacts with a number of NGOs. She was as active as ever. I never asked her why she’d taken so long to come to the Hotel de las Letras to keep the appointment she herself had given me.
Being in her company, I remembered Teresa, the Mexican diplomat who had helped us so much in Bangkok. I found her e-mail address and sent her a message just to tell her that I’d met Juana and her son again in Madrid, and to ask her where she was. In Mexico, I assumed.
There was a TV in my room, so I was able to follow the Irish embassy siege, which, after the terrible Kindelan killing, had calmed down again, although nobody felt really calm.
Another piece of news had started to share the front pages: the new wave of immigrants that was arriving in Europe, and its connection with the health emergency.
Because there was another human group in the middle of this tornado of fugitives, perhaps the most desperate of all: those who landed by night and early in the morning from barges, dinghies, and small ships on deserted beaches in the very same Southern Europe from which others were already starting to escape. The vast majority arrived in Italy or Spain. Exiles from Syria, Libya, and Egypt, abandoned to their fate. Fugitives from Nigeria or Mauritania, Niger or Mali. From the civil wars in Liberia and Chad, which sowed the land with hands severed by machetes. Families of immigrants from the blackest Africa ready to die to realize their dream: the dream of survival. To get to paradise alive, or what for them was still paradise. The one they saw on old TV shows, where the population had food and health and hygiene and, my God, education!
Here again, the pundits appeared on the current affairs programs, analyzing and giving their opinions.
Just with the food thrown away in the restaurants of Europe, you could feed seventy million people a year! The fugitives don’t know that. They don’t know the FAO malnutrition figures, of course, nor have they read Hunger by Martín Caparrós. But they sense it, they feel it in their guts. In fact, they can’t stop thinking about it. A strange paradox: a percentage of these fugitives from hunger end up transformed into feed for the fish of the sea, or in the bellies of Mediterranean sharks. Their boats capsize, catch fire, drift. Sometimes the traffickers throw them in the water to reduce the weight. Bodies that float ashore, carried by the tide. Men, women, children, old people. The saddest drowning victims in the world. And then there’s the health emergency.
Because many of those who arrive are sick and don’t yet know it. They carry Ebola somewhere on their bodies. Sometimes in the pupils, in the brain, the groin. And Ebola passes from person to person, and eventually to whoever has dealings with them.
This was another source of anxiety in apocalyptic Europe: Ebola. To be black in Italy or Spain, countries less accustomed to dark skins, became a synonym of carrier, pariah. The Italian Right proposed a law that authorized the army to machine-gun those boats from the air. On political talk shows they were called “plague ships” or “Nosferatu ships,” and were referred to as floating germ farms. For many people, practically speaking, this was a biological war! Nothing more, nothing less. An attack on Europe, which was why the continent’s coasts had to be militarized.
More and more terrified citizens agreed with this idea. Many clung to religion and prayed on their knees: what have we done, o Lord? How many plagues are there still to come?
There are ten, a voice seemed to respond.
Ten, and we’re barely on the fourth.
When at last I regained my independence and was able to go out on the street, I found that the world was still unsettled. People in Madrid were still anxious about the Boko Haram siege, although they were starting to get used to it, to see it as a macabre part of the scenery. There were even a few jokes, one particularly ironic one about “Irish vacations,” which to be honest I don’t dare reproduce.
I went to the post office with my ticket and paid the fine for “disturbing the peace,” which came to the mysterious figure of 2,386 euros and 67 cents. I paid and, with my ticket stamped, went and collected my passport from police headquarters, where, naturally, I found a tense, nervous atmosphere that perfectly reflected what was happening in the city and the country.
On getting back to Calle de San Cosme y San Damián, I remembered Manuela Beltrán and decided to call her. Where had I left her card? It took me a while to find it, it was in my medical folder.
She was pleased to hear from me.
“How’s your recovery coming along?”
“Very well,” I told her, “I’ve just taken my first walk. How’s your friend?”
“He’s still in the hospital, though he’s much better,” and then she added, “I called you at the Hotel de las Letras and they told me you’d left, are you still in Madrid?”
“Yes, at the home of a friend, in Antón Martín.”
“I’d like to see you, I still have things to tell you.”
“Yes, of course. How about today?”
Juana had to work late and Manuelito had a music class until seven, so I arranged to meet with Manuela at the cafeteria of the Reina Sofía Museum. When she saw me, her face expressed a certain
relief.
“Yes, you do look better, I’m really pleased; you don’t have any more bruises,” Manuela said.
She talked to me about the Complutense and we exchanged anecdotes about teachers who, twenty-five years later, were still there. Some of them, incredibly, with the same courses and the same reading lists as during my time there. I told her about my years as a left-wing striker, a fanatical reader of the Latin American boom, and an aspiring writer. When I asked her about Colombia, she was a little evasive. She said that she was an orphan. She was in Spain on a scholarship that the dean of literature at the Javeriana had helped her to obtain, and again I felt moved, Cristo? I remembered his incredible classes on Rulfo, and his “yellow breakfasts.”
When I got home, I told Juana about my meeting with Manuela.
“Is she the girlfriend of the guy you had a fight with?”
“Well, student and lover.”
“I know that combination, Consul: the teacher always on the lookout for willing female students and the nerdish girl who feels she’s on cloud nine because she’s sleeping with her wise teacher and getting one up on her classmates. It was a classic at the National, and I assume in every university in the world. Invite her to dinner tomorrow. I’d like to meet her.”
The next day, Manuela came to San Cosme y San Damián after nine at night, bringing a bottle of Matarromera. Juana was surprised.
“You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble, it’s very expensive wine!”
We sat in the living room while Manuelito played on his mother’s tablet, putting together fantastic houses and forests in a game that fascinated him and that he’d tried to teach me.
Juana put some drinks on the table. After my long convalescence, I had a strong desire to have a drink. I’d practically given up alcohol for a couple of years, but that night struck me as a good moment to start again, so I poured myself a generous gin with ice, lemon, and tonic water.
Manuela had a scholarship from the Institute of Latin American Cooperation, just as I’d had, which is why listening to her again reminded me of my student life in Spain. I noticed that, like Juana, she was very cautious about what she chose to reveal. Of her time in Cali and Bogotá she said almost nothing. Just a few very vague hints. As if her life had started when she arrived in Spain.
Then Juana asked her about Reading.
“I met Paco at the university, I took his course on the Latin American novel written in English, a course that Hispanic philology shares with English. We read Hispanic writers from the United States. I liked his teaching style. A terrific guy, relaxed with his students, and with a really cool attitude to literature. One Friday we left his class a little later than usual and walked back to Moncloa through the University City. Someone suggested going for a drink. Paco said that in the United States if a teacher went for a drink with his pupils he’d get into trouble, but they told him that in Spain it was the opposite: those who didn’t go out with their pupils were considered arrogant, so we went to a little bar and then to another and another, until the whole thing turned into a binge; from there we went to a place in Malasaña that served mezcal, and by five in the morning we were all drunk, including Paco. When we got taxis, I ended up in his, and we were the last two left by the time we got to my place. I asked him if he wanted to come up and that’s when everything started.”
Saying this, Manuela poured herself another tequila. A Don Julio reposado, no less, since Juana’s bar was as well-stocked as that of a good hotel. Who did this very swish apartment belong to? I listened to Manuela talking and watched Juana out of the corner of my eye. Would she dare to say anything about her recent life? I really wanted Manuela to ask her about her life, just to see what she said, but she clearly felt intimidated.
We’d need to spend more time together before Manuela felt comfortable and started to trust us.
“Paco didn’t tell me he was married,” Manuela continued, “but I guessed it very soon, you know these things. I didn’t ask myself any questions either, I liked him a lot; the fact that he was so mature and so intelligent made me feel protected.”
“That’s the advantage of older men,” Juana said.
At about ten at night I took Manuelito to bed. He liked to read stories aloud and comment on the plot. Now he was reading a book of Norse stories with winged gods, nymphs, and dragons on the cover. That’s why he asked me such strange questions.
“Is it true that an elf can’t beat a small dinosaur, Consul? It’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s impossible,” I replied, not too sure what we were talking about.
When I got back to the living room, I noticed that Manuela and Juana had changed chairs to be closer, and they looked, from the corridor, like two old friends confessing things to each other. Seeing them, I lingered in the corridor. It was odd for three strangers and a child to be sharing a space about which I knew nothing.
Suddenly I was sure that Manuela had asked Juana about me. I could imagine the question, because Juana was shaking her head. Then they both started laughing slyly. Maybe I was imagining things. I already had three gins in me. In the end, I went back into the living room, breaking the bubble they were both in.
“Did he get to sleep?” Juana asked.
“Yes, I turned out the light.”
We continued drinking and chatting. Inevitably the subject of the Irish embassy came up. Manuela said that the police should intervene, since the siege was turning into a kind of Olympic village for journalists. That day the press had identified one of the Spanish attackers as a young woman from Vallecas, the girlfriend of an African boy. Manuela had seen her Facebook page on TV, filled with images of Boko Haram, Islamic State, and the Rayo Vallecano soccer team. The news that there were Spaniards among the attackers had caused a great stir in Spain.
“I hope they don’t kill them,” Juana said. “I hope they can go back to Africa or wherever they came from. Nothing would be gained from killing them, and when it comes down to it they’re all victims of something.”
When I looked at my watch it was three in the morning and I realized why I was so tired. I excused myself and went to bed. The two women kept on chatting in the living room (I watched them for a while from the corridor), again with that same closeness as before.
The next day I woke early and a troublesome headache—the gins!—drilled into my temples. Luckily, I had dozens of painkillers, so I took one and went back to bed. What time was it? Nearly eight.
Later, I went to the kitchen to boil a little water, and to my surprise, there were the two of them, Juana and Manuela, chatting animatedly. Both in pajamas and eating cereal for breakfast.
“Good morning, Consul,” Juana said, “let me make you coffee, would you like some eggs?”
I thanked her, I could make them myself.
“Let her look after you, Consul,” Manuela said. “Why do they call you Consul?”
“It’s a long story.”
I didn’t mind her adopting it, too. Some of my favorite novels had consuls as characters, and I admired them.
“Manuela stayed over and slept on the couch,” Juana said. “We were thinking about going to the Retiro Park today. We’ll go as soon as Manuelito gets up, would you like to come?”
I preferred to stay behind and be alone.
I read the papers calmly, in a café. Around noon, I went to the Cuesta de Moyano book market to have a look around, which may be what I most enjoy in Madrid. But it saddened me to see that they were selling books for one euro. The booksellers seemed forlorn, as if left over from another time. Three of them were gathered in one of the central kiosks, and were talking in total desperation. One asked the other:
“How do you keep count, by number of sales or by money?”
And the other replied:
“By sales. Today I’ve sold eighteen.”
“Hell, and how much have
you made?”
“Eighteen euros, of course.”
I bought a French edition of a Malraux book about art, The Metamorphoses of God. I walked back by way of the Botanical Gardens, the Prado, and the old Palace Hotel.
They returned as it was getting dark, still together. Juana was holding a notebook, which she took to her room. I got the impression it was something very valuable. Manuela sat down beside me.
“Consul, I haven’t dared tell you that I read a couple of your books. Maybe one day I’ll tell you my story.”
Three days later, Juana came to my room with Manuela’s notebook and said:
“You should read this, it’s Manuela’s life up until the day she came to Spain. She wrote it for her psychologist. I asked her if I could show it to you and she said yes.”
I had a strong coffee and started reading. It was midafternoon by the time I got to the end. I closed the notebook, breathing hard, my heart racing. Could it be the same person? From Manuela’s first mention of Freddy Otálora, that violent man who’d become part of her household, who’d raped her and killed her mother, something had clicked in my mind. I went and checked my notes about the priest Ferdinand Palacios, and there he was, the one they called the man from Cali. It was the same name.
Manuela came back to the apartment on San Cosme y San Damián just before dinnertime. I told her that I’d read her story and had been moved by it.
“Now you know who I am, Consul.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not to tell her about Freddy, but it was impossible for me to talk about anything else or even to look at her knowing what it meant to her. Better make an excuse, and go out for a walk. Now that she was rebuilding her life, was it right for her to know where that man was and what he had done? Wasn’t that tantamount to plunging her back into her terrible past?
That day passed, and the following one. Manuela continued coming to the apartment daily. Seeing her, my doubts and contradictions increased.
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