The Outcast Son

by Jacobo Priegue

  “Thank you so much for calling,” he said.

  “Don’t get too excited. I just want to talk to you.” I tried to look cold and distant, but my voice appeared to be warmer than ever to his ears.

  “Of course, of course!” he said. “I’m just glad you called! I’ll make up everything for you, you’ll see.”

  “Oscar.”

  “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just that I had been waiting for this to happen for a long time.”

  “This?” I said. “Nothing is happening.”

  “Okay.” All his joy seemed to be fading away little by little. He was confused, and I started regretting having phoned him at all. “But you’ll come home, right?”

  “I’ll pop in and say hello and grab some stuff. I haven’t forgotten about what happened.”

  “That sounds good to me,” he said. “I mean, not what happened, of course. You popping in.”

  A voice inside me wouldn’t stop repeating This is bad idea once and again. This is a bad idea. But I wanted to see his face. I wanted to see whether he had changed with my own eyes. And I missed him. I missed his laugh and his caress and his eyes finding mine on our sofa in our living room. This is a bad idea.

  I knocked on the door. I wasn’t living there anymore, and it didn’t feel right to use my key. He opened in no time, as if he were waiting for me right there, behind the threshold.

  “You look great, Laura,” he said, his left hand holding the door and his right inside his back pocket.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Can I come in?”

  “Of course!” he said as he stepped aside to let me in. “I want to apologise once again,” he said as he closed the door behind me. “I’ve been a jerk, and I understand why you’re mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad,” I said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with anger.”

  “Then why did you go away?” he asked.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sorry, but I don’t quite understand,” he said.

  “See? That’s exactly the problem, you don’t understand.”

  “Did you come all the way here to argue with me?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. I now understand this was the precise moment when I should have left. He didn’t understand, and nothing I could say or do would change this.

  “I’ve apologised!” Oscar said, struggling to keep his voice low. “I’ve already told you I’m sorry! I’m sorry for having beaten your boss!”

  “I don’t give a damn about my boss, Oscar!”

  “What?” he said. “Then what’s the meaning of this?”

  “The meaning of this is you trying to control me! Screw my boss! Screw my job! I don’t care!”

  “Trying to control you?” he said. “Are you listening to yourself? You talk as if I were abusive!”

  “And how do you call getting upset when I go out with friends? How do you call coming after me and spying on me?”

  “I was worried!” he said, although he couldn’t hide that he was upset with me any longer.

  “Worried?” I asked. “You were jealous!”

  “So what?” he said. Now he was shouting. He had forgotten about a week of apologies and pleas. “I was right to be jealous! The guy wanted you in his bed! And he would’ve succeeded if I wasn’t there!”

  “What? What do you mean ‘he would have succeeded’?”

  “Come on, Laura!” he said. “I saw everything! I saw how you looked at him! You wanted him to fuck you!”

  “How dare you?!” I said. I couldn’t hold myself anymore. I slapped him as hard as I could, and the sound of my hand smacking his face reverberated through the apartment. It hurt. My hand hurt. His eyes became blood red, and hatred took over. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. Never. In his mind, he was right. In his mind, the only thing he had done wrong was beating my boss. And so he lost control.

  Before I could react or move to defend myself, I felt the back of his hand slapping my face. I felt at his mercy. I tasted the blood leaking from my lips and flooding my mouth. He had hit me. Badly. Making me tilt my head. But it wasn’t over yet. Instead of backing down before the sight of what he’d done, he grabbed my neck and threw me on to the floor and beat me. I feared for my life. He punched me and kicked me many times. I thought I counted six hits, but I was too busy trying to protect my face with my arms to pay attention to his fists and his feet and where they’d land next. All I could say was “Stop.” Shouting at first, whispering after the second blow, and then mumbling a faint thread of voice, already resigned to see the scene come to an end when he chose.

  “Bitch!” he said. Repeatedly. “I was ready to forgive you! I was ready to forget about your boss and how you looked at him!”

  But in my head, I only heard my mum’s voice saying “Don’t let them hurt you.” I was left half-conscious. When Oscar decided I had had enough, I crawled to the kitchen, got up and grabbed a knife. Then he looked at me and smirked.

  “You are a disgrace. What do you want to do with that?”

  I was still tasting the iron flavour of my own blood dripping from my mouth. A taste which reminded me that I was alive, that I was a person and had the right to defend myself.

  “Don’t be stupid. You’d need a gun to even scratch me. Just drop it, and I’ll forget this. I promise.” But his eyes were telling me he was lying. If I dropped the knife, I’d be doomed. I’d be beaten again. Or worse. So I secured my grip.

  He moved towards me. I held the knife, threatening, but he wouldn’t back down. He was so close. Speaking to me. Saying he loved me. Saying everything was going to be as it was when we started. No more arguments. No more fights. All lies. When he was just three or four feet from me, he made a sudden move, trying to reach the hand holding the knife. I was scared. And faster than him. I thrust the blade into his chest, and the movement of his body towards me helped it sink deeper. He stopped moving. He crumpled. It was only then, standing in the kitchen, with the knife still in my hand, when I realised I had stabbed his heart, his blood spouting from the hole I had made and forming a pool around him.

  The police found me wrapped in bloody clothes and crying over his body. They shouted to me from the door: “Stay away from him!” I followed their instructions and put my hands up. I knew what the scene looked like. A knife on the floor, a dead body lying in the middle of the kitchen and a distressed girl moaning and grieving out of guilt. They handcuffed me. Tight. It was their way of saying to me they wouldn’t take any rubbish. A plate with the wastes of the chicken and chips Oscar had just had for lunch was still on the table, a horrible reminder of how futile and meaningless routine things are compared to the transcendence of life and death. I felt it. Violence taking over my heart. Everything else vanishing. There was only the obscure impulse, the erratic search for destruction and self-preservation controlling my mind and helping me realise my darkest potential.

  “What have you done, girl?” an afflicted officer asked me.

  “I just.” I was barely able to pronounce any words. “I didn’t…” I tried, but my speech was cut by blood and cold and a certain sense of relief. Would they believe me? Would they believe that I hadn’t had a choice, that I did what it took to stay alive, to stay safe?

  “You just killed a man, you psycho!” There was no sympathy for me after all. But I wasn’t expecting any. At least I was alive.

  “I didn’t mean to!” I shouted. “He had just beaten me! He tried to kill me!” I was saying these words, but I wasn’t listening to them. Was it true? Hadn’t I wished him dead? Had he actually tried to kill me? The only thing that mattered was that Oscar couldn’t hurt me, and the world would be a better place without him. He was scum. I know this much now. He was like a rat, a parasite, feeding on his host and draining my life and my energy. The police didn’t give a damn about what I had to say, so I’d just shut up. They came, judged me, despised me and carried on doing their duty. All very professional.

  I knew what lay ahead. There would be a trial. My family, my
friends, my neighbours, old university colleagues and everybody else in the world, in my world, would find out what I did. All of them a judge. All of them an executioner. I had to go to court and prove I was innocent. I was likely to appear on TV too, used by some insidious media to rant about how unfair the laws to protect women against sexist violence are, adding me to some sick, twisted statistic of women who mistreated their poor male partners. I was disgusted by the thought, and even more disgusted when it actually happened, although thankfully enough it didn’t have the repercussion I thought it would, and it was confined to some keyboard-superheroes and Twitter vigilantes.

  “Legitimate self-defence.” The words of justice. A single stab-wound. Injuries all over my body. Witnesses giving an account of how this individual treated me in public, starring Oliver and Maria. Some neighbours confirming the arguments were growing nasty and only Oscar’s voice could be heard throughout the building. The evidence was there, and it was clear to everybody that I feared for my life.

  However, and in spite of having proved my innocence, my strolls around the city would never be the same. Oscar’s family lived there. His friends. His colleagues. People who cared about him and never believed my side of the story. I was just a bitch taking advantage of an unfair law to kill an innocent man and get away with it, and they found support. They started a campaign on social media to defame my already denigrated image. As soon as I put a foot on the street, I had to deal with people’s faces. I never knew whether a stranger was one of my new sworn enemies. I scrutinised every person’s face, looking for signs of disdain, too scared to live on.

  I didn’t feel safe anymore, so I decided to leave the city and have a fresh start in a new country.

  Chapter 14

  An Incan dream

  Jaime became unpredictable. He knew his origins now, and where he had been born, and somehow he thought he didn’t belong here, in Europe, with his mum and dad. School life didn’t help. His peers were frightened, and his teachers would neglect him. They treated him differently, and he was different, but he deserved to be looked after. He was pure and transparent, capable of the best things, and capable of terrible things too. He was both impulsive and sensible, tenacious and irresolute, resilient and delicate. He was like a hurricane. Neat nature. He was a child, and like every child, he was full of contradictions and struggled sometimes to discern between right and wrong. But he was good. Perhaps too young. Perhaps too human. But definitely good.

  We thought everything would go back to normal with time. Jaime would accept the reality. He was a beloved child raised in a loving family by two parents who cared about him. We wanted him to be happy. We wanted him to smile, to play, to run, to shout, to enjoy life like only a child his age can do. But we needed a break. The three of us. We deserved it. And Jaime needed to rediscover his roots.

  When we told him we would go on a trip to Peru and visit the place where we found him, an unknown flame sparked his eyes and lighted a fire nobody could possibly extinguish. He wouldn’t talk about anything else. He was still seven, and I didn’t know to what extent he understood, but I think that was the time I saw him the happiest. I could imagine the thread of thoughts in his head. There was an exciting journey ahead. A plane to take. An ocean to cross. He’d see mountains and valleys, deserts and jungles, rivers and beaches. He was picturing the wonders he’d discover and the legends he’d learn about and the landscapes he’d preserve as precious memories, as reminiscent moments of enclosed happiness. It was another country, another continent, a completely different corner of the planet he didn’t dare imagine. New people, new animals. Unexplored woods full of mysteries and dangers and adventures and amazement. But above all, there was something spurring him hard from his inner core. Something had started an engine too powerful to stop: his true motherland was calling.

  Mark and I were okay with it. He was our son, and we wanted him to feel his home was wherever we were, but we also agreed it was important for him to know his origins and the land that had given birth to him. It wouldn’t harm him more than it had already done. He knew the truth. It wasn’t a pretty one, but it was the truth: cruel and unfair and atrocious, but the only one we had for him. It didn’t make sense to pretend I hadn’t taken a newspaper clipping, that I hadn’t put it in my drawer and kept it to have a look and feel philanthropic whenever my mind, my heart and my guts were telling me otherwise. It didn’t make sense to pretend Jaime hadn’t entered my room, opened the drawer, held the clipping in his hand, stared at the picture for a while and read the text.

  The day of departure, the three of us were nervous. For me, it’d be the second time I’d cross the Atlantic Ocean. For Jaime, his opportunity to see the land where everything had begun. And for Mark, it was exciting as well, I suppose.

  We rushed to pack our stuff as if we were in a comedy. My bag was never too full until I had to sit on top of it and ask Jaime to zip it shut, only to realise I had forgotten my toothbrush. We had to repeat this procedure three more times, for my nightdress, my nail clippers and my slippers, in that order. It was pretty impressive we could fit all the new things after having thought the suitcase was fully loaded. It was so compressed that I was afraid some of the items could merge and create a singularity.

  Mark’s suitcase was monstrous. He could scarcely carry it, and I couldn’t even move it. He filled it up with the stupidest things he found at home, and he was running upstairs and downstairs as if he were training to complete an Iron Man. He couldn’t find anything, everything had magically disappeared, and of course, I was ultimately responsible. If a charger wasn’t in the drawer he thought it was, it was me moving it to another drawer. If the camera wasn’t on the table, it was me placing it where he wouldn’t notice it. Just for fun. Just to annoy him.

  With all the chaos, we left home almost an hour later than planned, although we had luckily planned to leave an hour earlier than necessary, so there wasn’t anything we should worry about. Our baggage wouldn’t fit in the porter. “Why?” I shouted and cursed and pushed our bags and kicked them and sat on them. In the end, and thanks to our impressive teamwork, we could close the door and get ready for the road trip. No surprises. All smooth. All in time. Regular silly songs. Regular car games. Regular car arguments. So far, so boring.

  Our monotonous expedition got a little more interesting when we reached Peru. We arrived at Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima. It was a busy place, crowded with people from all over the world, mainly tourists who came to visit one of the most exciting and mysterious countries in the world. It didn’t look very different from Heathrow or Stansted. Jammed, cosmopolitan, voices speaking different languages, discussing different issues and having different problems.

  Patrick, a British man in his thirties, was supposed to meet us at the gates. We were expecting him as we left the passageway connecting the passport control with the waiting area, but it didn’t happen. Instead, we saw several people who seemed to know each other, most likely taxi drivers, holding tablets and pieces of paper with their customers’ names on display: María Jiménez, one of the notices read. Javier Vasques was written on another. I only remember those two because they were the first passengers to show up, but the list went on and on, and a tide of a dozen notes made it hard for us to see the people behind. I hadn’t met Patrick before, but Mark had, so the only thing I could do was stare at the mob and try to detect anyone looking or waving or smiling at us.

  “He’s not here,” Mark said.

  But when we discarded all the people waiting by the door, we widened our search and looked beyond the wall of taxi drivers and families and friends and passengers who had just arrived and were blocking the way.

  Mark couldn’t see Patrick. But I did see somebody pointing at us in the distance. It felt uncomfortable at the beginning. Then awkward. Then weird. It was a group of four people. One of them was a teenager, probably in the range of 14, wearing a baseball cap and having an ice cream. He was ridiculously skinny, and his jeans were held way
past his waist, too large for his height. He wore a black T-shirt with the letters 2pac printed in green, and the size of it was equally disproportionate.

  The second person, a woman in her forties (his mother, most likely), had her left leg slightly shorter than the right one, and she stood with the help of a walking stick. She had a troubled look about her. Severe eyes. Dirty hair. Poorly looked after clothes. Kind of the opposite to the boy, who was obviously very worried about his physical appearance. This lady was holding hands with a tall, pale man. His skin was so white that it felt unnatural. His face almost gleamed under the grim light which barely reached the corner where they were standing. He had a strange expression, smiling sardonically at us.

  The last member of the party was a middle-aged man, bald like a boiled egg. He struck me as a shy character, avoiding my eyes constantly, looking down as if he were scared of the airport itself. His clothes were similar to those of the teenager, but they weren’t so exaggeratedly long.

  Mark wouldn’t stop looking at them, at me and at Jaime, rapidly moving his eyes and unable to stand still. I frowned and protected my son with my hand instinctively, even though they couldn’t be a threat from that distance. They creeped me out. I was very sure I hadn’t seen those four before. Neither at the market nor at the hospital in Cusco when I first travelled there. I would’ve remembered them. They were not the likes you see at Jaime’s slum, and they would’ve caught my eye if I’d seen them at the hospital. Mark wanted to approach them.

  “Are you crazy?” I told him.

  “What?” he answered. “They’re being rude, and they’re scaring Jaime.”

  “We don’t know them! Who knows what they’re up to!”

  “They’re up to nothing! They’re just rude!”

  But I wasn’t very convinced by Mark’s response. They were too sinister. They would be material for a nineteenth century novel if it weren’t for the hip-hop-style clothes. I couldn’t find any single good reason why we should do anything but ignore them. They were just freaks. Or maybe not. But they were freaking me out, and I didn’t want anything to do with them. Not even a word. Not even an apology. Nothing.