by Don Boyd
She drained the glass and walked slowly back towards her studio. She was dreading the calls from the clients she had let down the afternoon before, along with the calls she was going to have to make. To cancel her one morning appointment, for example – an oversized Italian woman desperate to deal with her obesity. Anything to delay all this. She felt so vulnerable, trapped within the irony of knowing that the people she had secret confidential and intimate relationships with were an impossible refuge for her crisis. Trapped, knowing that she couldn’t talk to Archie. And trapped, because Xavier had wriggled himself so severely under her skin and into her mind. Elvira’s bar was of course one possible temporary haven. A last resort. What she really wanted, was to call the woman who had been her supervisor, her former mentor, Marie-Christine.
Apart from Archie, she was the only other person who had ever persuaded her to feel completely safe. At first, what began as purely a technical relationship, had blossomed into an intimate and profound friendship. Margot so desperately hoped that she would be well enough to talk to her. Her last conversation with Marie-Christine’s husband had been cautiously optimistic but he had discouraged any contact. This, however, was an emergency.
Margot guessed that Marie-Christine was probably still very ill but her need to talk to her transcended any guilty feelings of unnecessary selfishness about bothering an incapacitated woman. Could she call France to try to arrange a visit to see her at some stage very soon, even if it meant hunting her out by just pitching up? Or beg for an hour or so on the ‘phone, maybe? Marie-Christine had never really liked the telephone conversation as the means for any serious therapeutic interchange but maybe there was no alternative now? And of course, for all she knew, Marie-Christine might be dead, or in a coma. She had been through some very serious chemotherapy as part of her treatments, but Margot was desperate, and all of these factors were fracturing her usually crystal clear powers of deduction, or any sense of decorum. She decided to try to reach her at her home ‘phone and her husband on his cell phone. She dialled and listened to the sustained tone of the French telephone service. She pictured her friend’s wise face bulging out of her tiny frame. Hardly five foot tall, a tiny woman from the Languedoc, Marie-Christine looked like a very thin China doll. Before her illness, she had always planned to retire with her equally miniscule husband to their secluded villa in a converted Carthusian monastery in the Mid Pyrenees near Toulouse. They would grow organic vegetables and make organic wine. They had agreed on a modus operandi for sustaining their relationship if one or other of them should have to leave Barcelona for whatever reason – regular visits revolving around the changing seasons. Margot would pay for her ‘therapy’ by working the land. But Marie-Christine’s chronic breast cancer had scuppered these fail-safe plans earlier than they had both anticipated.
No reply to either number and no answering machine. Maybe they had moved. Or maybe she had died.
Chapter Nineteen
Investing trust in Elvira seemed to be Margot’s only, somewhat desperate, means of immediate mental sanctuary. When she arrived at the café, Elvira was arguing with a drunk, one of her morning regulars, who was trying to persuade her to give him another free early morning cognac.
“You can have an orange juice!” she scolded him. He eventually gave up and Elvira began to pull down the shutter of the front entrance. Margot sent a text to cancel her morning appointment.
“I am going to close now! We can talk here. I know you want to talk.”
Her intuition was comforting. Margot sat on a barstool. The noise of the coffee machine drowned out the barrage of drunken Catalan expletives which the disgruntled drunk hurled from the street. When the coffee arrived in front of Margot, the café was quiet, except for the faint hum of the slot machines.
“I need your help!”
“I know!” Elvira smiled and took Margot’s hands in hers. “I love you, Margot. You are my friend. But I am married to a very nosey policeman. Nosey? Is that the word in Americano?”
“English, Elvira. English!” Margot managed a laugh.
Elvira waited for her friend.
“Elvira, I know that you are a devout Catholic…”
“Practising,” Elvira interrupted, with a wink.
“I hope you can behave towards me like a mother confessor. Omerta is the Italian word. Whatever I tell you must be between us.”
“Carlos?”
Margot thought about the implications. A secret stops being a secret once it is announced as such.
“Okay, Carlos!”
“I tell him everything. Well, not everything. He is so jealous about my customers.”
“With reason, Elvira.” Margot allowed herself to laugh once more.
Another awkward silence.
“I want you to tell me whether you have ever felt so physically drawn towards a man that he quite literally takes you out of yourself. He takes you into a state of mind which is uncontrollable.”
“I feel like that when Carlos is making love to me.”
“Carlos. But he is your husband?”
“I love him. And in bed he is like a hero for me. But he is also like an animal. And he frightens me sometimes. But I love him.”
“He frightens you?”
“When he pushes my hands behind my head and clasps them together, like a pair of his police handcuffs, and his large body is inside me and on top of me, I have no power. He is powerful. He is like a rapist. I am his victim. But I want him there. That excites me and he gives me many, many orgasms like this. He never hurts me, he never hits me, he is so beautiful but I feel frightened. Weak. But it is very exciting. In that way I am ‘out of myself’, as you say. I never tell my priest about this.”
Margot had listened as carefully and as analytically as she might have to a client, and realised that Elvira was describing a phenomenon which is common to most women who have good sexual relationships with men they trust and men whose sexuality they are happy to indulge and enjoy. There was nothing in her description of her relationship with Carlos which could be compared to what she had experienced with Xavier, of course. Was it familiar, as far as her sexual relationship with Archie was concerned? To a certain extent it was. Not quite as passionate and as Mediterranean in its characteristics, but familiar, all the same.
“You are a very lucky woman. Archie is not as strong as Carlos but I know what you are describing here.”
Elvira giggled. “Carlos is a very lucky man.”
They laughed and then Margot began to tell Elvira about her sexual experiences with Xavier.
“Why do you think this is so unusual? I have many friends who have secret lovers. Dangerous lovers. They play games like this, too…”
“But I have no control over him. He is like the devil. He is evil.”
“He is not like the devil! Of course you have control. You don’t have to see him again and if you must, you don’t let him take you too far.”
“I feel so guilty about Archie. I am sure that he knows.”
“You must never tell him. Men are weak. Archie is no different. You know that.”
“I have to tell him.”
“We must keep some secrets. You love him. He loves you. Why spoil this? It will ruin your marriage.”
“Elvira, what if I think my lover may be a killer, and that my husband may be involved?”
Elvira pitched her head back and laughed. Margot was quiet and calm.
“Your husband? Never!”
“Elvira, if he isn’t the murderer, I think that this man and Archie may know who killed Paolo and Domatilla.”
Painstakingly, she took her friend through all the elements in her relationship with Xavier which had led to this conclusion, including the fact that she had seen Archie with him. There were too many coincidences. The animal names. The secret abusive relationship with Paolo. His predilection for games involving sado-masochism and violence. His knowledge of digital filming technologies and finally, and most damningly, the cords on her wrist.
Elvira listened without saying a word. Finally, she asked a question.
“Why did you see him again if you suspected any of this?”
“Elvira, I had no choice. My mind and body… I cannot really describe to you how much I wanted him again, and still want him.”
“Carlos will say that he will need evidence. Proof.”
“I know.”
Margot began to cry and Elvira came around the bar and hugged her.
“You must talk to Archie.”
“I have tried so hard to find a way to explain to myself how this all happened. Why now, and to me, at this stage in my life?”
“It can happen to anybody.”
There was a loud knock on the door.
“Cerrada!” shouted Elvira. “Closed. Fermé! Chiusa!”
“We must leave for the funeral. I must change into my clothes. And then we can talk about what you must do.”
She walked up a very narrow spiral staircase. Margot went behind the bar and poured herself a large cognac.
Her mobile ‘phone rang. It was Archie.
“Good morning?” with a brilliantly executed interrogatory tone which gave nothing of her mood away. “I slept in the studio last night. Did you get my message? I am with Elvira… we are leaving in five minutes… walking – it’s a beautiful day. Elvira is changing into her nineteenth century finest.”
Archie told her that he was bringing the car so that they could go together to the wake afterwards. He hadn’t listened to his answering machine.
“I’m not sure that I am going to be up for that, Archie, but I’ll come with you if you really insist.” Margot deliberately disguised her decision. She was not going to be at the wake, she was determined to meet Laura.
He said they would discuss it at the cemetery.
What did I really know about Xavier? Is he a murderer? Most of my evidence is superficial. He knew Paolo. He knew Domatilla. He knew Archie (I wonder, why didn’t Archie tell me? Old wounds perhaps? No need). He knows about video art. I suppose I still need to give some harder, more concrete evidence. Obviously, his apartment had supplied some clues about his bizarre sexuality but then there are hordes of people who behave weirdly in private and are not murderers. Paolo had described his teacher’s behaviour when he taught at the school in Scotland, but very much from his own narrow perspective. Robert was very secretive about Xavier but I assumed that was because he wanted to tease me. His charisma, the sex and his taste in art gave something away but on the whole, like so many other acquaintances, we don’t know that much in detail about the people we meet casually. Was he ever married, were his parents alive, did he have siblings, how did he make a living? Simple, mundane, historical facts which make up the minutiae of our sociological DNA are rarely at the forefront of our conversation when we explore someone new in our lives. And yet for me, it is usually those facts which are vital in my ability to provide the psychological help my patients so desperately yearn for.
When I begin my probe into their minds, I make a point of asking the simplest of questions. Where were you born? What does your mother look like? What does your father do for a living? Do you like your brother? How old is your sister? Who was your best friend when you were at kindergarten? What clothes did you wear when you were a teenager? Did you enjoy your school holidays? What were your favourite television programmes? All are easy to answer and subsequently give so much vital information in building a picture of their personalities. The facts alone are useful but equally useful is the way those facts are trotted out and what observations they are the catalyst for. Normally, I am quick to use this process, oh-so-innocently, when I meet someone new socially. They never seem like the sort of questions I might be asking in the context of therapy, they are disguised as chit-chat but they often disarm a new acquaintance at first because they are forced to refresh their memories. Oddly enough, despite the need for an awkward dip into the past, most people quite enjoy the process and are oblivious to the degree I can glean information about them while they answer. Sneaky? I suppose so. But because of the apparent simplicity and innocence of each interchange, an immediate and intimate rapport is set up which is economic and often very entertaining. Anecdotes. Character analysis. Nostalgia. Genealogical history. Family strife. Rites of passage.
Why did I fail to go through this process with Xavier? The power of his sexual charisma had disarmed me on such a monumental scale that my usual faculties of curiosity, my usual need to bring my analytical talent into my personal life, had been abandoned. And so I know so little about him in that context. Does it matter? Perhaps not? On the other hand, my ignorance about him added a frisson to his mysterious aura which he must have enjoyed exploiting. In that sense, he was displaying some of the classic traits of a dominant, but he did not ally these with any form of the familiar consistent dominant characteristics. Even the traditional sado-masochistic paraphernalia was somewhat idiosyncratic, to say the least, and the way he tutored me in his games deviated from traditional role-playing techniques. It was quirkier. It hadn’t been formulaic.
Of course, I could piece together a superficial portrait of him based on his behaviour but I suspect that the usual simply-gathered information that I would have gleaned from anybody else within minutes of knowing them should, in his case, have provided some vital context.
Is he a psychopath? Is he mad? He certainly isn’t schizophrenic in the clinical definition of that word. Sexually perverse, certainly. Does this control him and his need to control others with it? And if this is the case, does the perversity tip over into psychopathy? If so, he is a very dangerous man and poses a serious threat to me and anybody else he controls. Clearly the Jungian theories about animus and anima come to mind – this is a man who trades in sexual ambiguity and enjoys playing with both sides of his lovers’ sexuality. Paolo, Tilly and I can attest to that in spades. Obsessive? For sure, the bizarre nature of his apartment, the paraphernalia, the thoroughness of his collection in surgical instruments, for example, indicate obsessive and pedantic leanings. But the same could be said of a philatelist or a lepidopterist. Xavier is certainly unique – a frog-loving opera buff, who uses surgical instruments as sex toys and has a predilection for perverted performance art. Nina Simone.
Maybe that is at the root of my fascination for him. I cannot pigeonhole him as I can with my clients, and equally I cannot pigeonhole my own responses in any rational way. Smell, taste, looks, brain, touch, sounds. All of it. Was I frightened? No more or less than Elvira was of Carlos, or any other woman who was at the mercy of her sexual desires with a man who was taking advantage of them for his own pleasure.
But a paedophile! How do I come to terms with that appalling fact? Had this monster stolen Paolo’s life? And Tilly’s? And if Archie knows him, why did he hide that from me?
Elvira’s high heels finally clicked their way slowly down the spiral staircase. She looked magnificent. Not a trace of any make-up. A simple veil. Sleek silk black dress. The only splash of colour came from the third finger on her right hand where she wore a large, aquamarine ring.
“What a beautiful ring!”
“Paolo and Tilly gave it to me on my birthday last year.”
They slipped under the slatted iron protective door at the front of the café and walked across Las Ramblas into the Raval. The Raval was busy and the narrow streets were full of the hustle bustle of its predominantly Arab quarter. Elvira and Margot knew every alleyway, all the short cuts. They walked quickly and Elvira talked without drawing breath. They walked along Carrer de l’Arc del Teatro, across the Parallel and climbed the Poeta Cabanes, the steep cobbled street with a beautiful name, which also housed one of Barcelona’s oldest family owned tapas bars called Quimet e Quimet. The proprietor, who knew the women well, looked aghast as they snubbed his jolly greeting. They waved by way of apology, but only just. This street led past some ancient villas, including Margot’s apartment block, and up to a set of steps on the banks of the Montjuic. The Montjuic had been the
site of a Roman shrine to their god Jupiter, the God of Light and the protector of the state and its laws. A favourite dinner party quip used by Archie to explain their decision to live on it.
“Why on earth did Archie want to take the car today?”
They swept past the ancient castell and up to the wide avenues built for the Anella Olympica and the magnificent swimming pool Margot used at weekends. Both of them knew each of the magnificent views over the old Arsenal and the Port from here. Normally they would have stopped and enjoyed them – Margot had a favourite spot where there is a solitary bench; she had spent hours thinking about her clients in that very spot. Today, she didn’t even notice it. As if inspired by Jupiter’s status as a lawmaker, Elvira’s advice was brutal on that count. She took Margot through a smattering of Carlos’ unsolved cases and a few of the solved murders. They all led to one conclusion: if there was one man on earth she should trust, it was Carlos, and he would be sensitive to her predicaments. If there was any chance that her instincts about Xavier were right, she had no alternative.
