“So he came to see his father?”
“I’ve told you so at least ten times. Why won’t you believe me?”
“No, I believe you, Miriam, but tell me just one thing, what’s your father-in-law’s mental state?”
She seemed surprised by the question that dragged her from the circle of denials and rejections behind which she had fenced herself.
“He’s been slightly mad ever since I’ve known him. And now he’s eighty-six I think he’s gone even crazier . . .”
“But he’s not ga-ga, is he?” he asked tightening the rope, and the rope twanged.
“He is as far as I’m concerned. The poor guy doesn’t know which planet he’s on . . .” she replied, after hesitating briefly, and the Count knew he’d hit the bull’s-eye. Smiling, the policeman seized his moment.
“You must forgive me, Miriam, but I have to ask you to stay here at Headquarters. Only for an hour or so. I’ll soon be back and we can continue our conversation. OK?”
“Do I have any choice in the matter?”
The Count’s smile broadened a little: he tried to appear charming, even relaxed and cheerful, as he told her: “I don’t think so,” and went out into the corridor before she could batter him with appeals to civil, consular and democratic rights that she’d no doubt take to the UN Security Council. Manolo, who’d followed him at a speed accelerated by his fear of being left alone with Miriam, asked him on tenterhooks. “But what are you going to do, Conde?”
“Head with you to the Forcade household. But first of all find two guys to stay and keep a watch on her. Tell them to put her in another office, not to leave her by herself and not to talk to her . . . And get a move on, because El Zorro rides again,” he said, taking out the avenging sword of the defender of the poor, and slicing through the air three times, zas, zas, zas, engraving there the indelible Z of the masked righter of wrongs.
Miguel’s mother welcomed them with a confused smile and the usual accumulation of magnesia at the corners of her mouth. She was perhaps glad to see them, as they might be bearers of the faintly good tidings of the capture of her son’s murderer. Nervously the aged lady asked them in and the Count took advantage of a possible confusion to touch on a matter he’d not yet broached.
“What beautiful lamps, señora,” and he walked over to the genuine Tiffanys and trailed his fingers over the lead veins on the standard lamp whose glass panes imitated a fruit tree till he found the authenticating signature: yes, it was. “I’d never seen one of these . . .”
She nodded proudly, and also walked over to the lamp.
“The fact is, that Tiffany is a rare object. They only made five of this model. Can you imagine? I know because we’ve had several visitors wanting to buy them. My husband knows all about it, but has always refused to sell anything without Miguel’s permission, because my son asked him to try to preserve everything . . .”
“Because it all belonged to Miguel, didn’t it?”
“Yes, he brought it all here.”
“I really don’t understand how he could give up so many beautiful pieces . . .” the Count let drop, in case the hare jumped.
The old lady rubbed her hands, perhaps wet with perspiration, and confessed: “I don’t either.”
The Count gazed on her as benignly as he could, and dived in at the deep end: “Caruca, we still don’t know what happened to your son. We have an inkling, and need a little help from you . . .”
“But in what way?”
“We need to speak to your husband right away.”
She rubbed her hands again, surprised by the kind of help sought. Her eyes had now moistened, as if irritated by an unexpected cloud of smoke.
“But he’s an invalid and hasn’t been out of the house for ages. He lives in his own world, what can he know . . .?”
“That doesn’t matter. I spoke to him yesterday and it’s clear his mind is in good working order, and we want to talk about things that happened some years ago. May we?”
“The fact is he was very influenced by Miguel’s . . .” she whispered, trying to erect a final parapet to protect her husband from the interminable shadow produced by her son’s death.
“Caruca, it can only be worse if he never knows who the savage was that killed Miguel, and worse still if they go unpunished. Tell Dr Forcade that my mind has exhausted all possibilities and my only option is to exchange opinions with him. Tell him in those words.”
The old lady hesitated a few seconds, but the Count knew her defences were vulnerable, like the digestive system that could return that white paste to her lips. The policeman was ready to reopen the wound, but she nodded.
“Wait a minute. I’ll get him in a fit state and tell him you want to see him, because your mind has exhausted all possibilities and your only option is to exchange opinions with him.”
She didn’t wait for a reply but headed for the stairs. She took short, visibly confident steps.
“Hey, Conde, what’s a lamp like that worth?” asked Manolo when the old lady had vanished from sight.
The policeman lit a cigarette and lamented, as always, that he couldn’t find an earthenware or metal ashtray. He only saw objects that should be on display in a museum: bone china, sculpted glass, rococo style pieces that ran the risk of dying at the clumsy hands of a Mario Conde.
“I don’t know, Manolo, but it could run to several thousand . . . What would you do with a lamp like that, you could sell for fifty thousand dollars?”
“Me . . .?” came the surprised response, and he smiled. “Well I’d sell it and and paint the town and nobody’d stop me – not even by tying me up. What about you?”
“I’m an artist, Manolo, remember . . . But I’d also sell up and they’d have to tie me up with you. I swear on the sliver of liver I’ve got left . . .”
The two policemen devoted almost ten minutes to improving or destroying their lives with the fifty thousand dollars they had earned so easily, until Caruca peered over the rail to the top floor to say: “You can come up now.”
When he was by her side, the Count asked quietly: “How is he today?”
“I don’t know, quite tired, but he says it’s fine, he wants to speak to you.”
Thank you, Caruca, you’ll see how important it is,” the Count reassured her before going into the bedroom.
The Count found the weary old man seated on a wood and willow armchair, looking more brittle and vulnerable now he was away from his plants. Behind him the Count contemplated an altar built into the wall, where he saw the central dominating image of a crowned Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, flanked by a bleeding St Lazarus escorted by his dogs and a jet-black Virgin from Regla. That altar, the Count recalled, immediately cursing his memory, was almost a replica of the one that had always been in his parents’ house, on the wall where they placed the cradle of the newly born. A Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre like theirs, wearing a blue robe and golden crown, floating on a choppy sea from which three small men in a boat were praying to her, could well be the first image the eyes of the Count and his sister had retained, the same sister who, in order to accede to her red Communist Youth card, persuaded her mother it would be better to dismantle the altar that had always been there, on the finest wall in that room where they were conceived and received their first notions of love. The Count felt his anger rise and took another look at the Virgen de la Caridad before returning alarmed to real time; old Forcade must have spoken to his wife in the ten minutes she’d taken to come back, because the old man’s face, almost always motionless, was now wet with tears streaming from his bright-red bloodshot eyes, as if his weary skin were hurrying them on their way. The pyjamas he wore, elegant and buttoned to the neck, helped emphasize that image of an end as desired as it was nigh, and completely accepted.
“Good day, Dr Forcade,” said the Count, daring yet again to grip one of the old man’s withered hands.
“A bad day and a bad year,” replied the old man, his tears disappearing down the bloody well of
his eyes.
“I’m sorry to bother you again, but you know as well as I do how important it is we chat a little more.”
“Was every path really blocked?”
The Count let go of the defeated hand.
“You know they were always closed off. And you, who must know what I’m thinking, won’t deny me the opportunity to confirm my belief that you alone hold that key.”
“Not even if I were St Peter . . . But let’s assume that I do hold it. Why should you suppose I’m going to help you?”
“That is easier to explain: because you want us to find the person who killed your son. And I’m even surer now, after your wife told me that in all these years you didn’t sell a single piece of what he left when he went. I can imagine at some point you needed . . .”
“That’s true, more than once. And you’re also right in what you assume I must be thinking: I certainly want you to find who did this to Miguel. Do you know something I never told you yesterday? I am a Christian, as you can see, though in my work I’m considered to be a scientist and many people say that science and religion are irreconcilable. But it’s not true: I spent almost seventy years studying plants and I think one can only understand the spirituality of those beings if one assumes them to be creatures created by God, because in many ways they are more perfect than humans . . . In many ways. And as a Christian I should believe in forgiveness rather than earthly punishment, but as a man of this world I also think there is guilt people should begin to pay for down here. Don’t you agree? And then let God forgive those he chooses to forgive . . .”
The Count shook his head and went to grip the worn-out skin and brittle bones of the hands the old man placed on the arms of his chair. For a second time awareness that death might be a step too near was moving him, he thought, as he looked at the old man who so reminded him of his grandfather Rufino, when Caruca walked over to her husband and put an arm round his shoulders.
“You feeling ill, Alfonso?”
The man looked up, eyes redder than ever, and smiled. When his lips returned to their usual place and he recovered his speech, he said: “What does it matter any more, Caruca?”
“Don’t talk like that, dear,” she reproached him, caressing his neck, in a gesture that could only express the deepest, truest love.
“And what do you want me to tell you?” the old man asked, in a voice now as clear as a bell, looking at the two policemen.
The Count couldn’t stop himself and looked back at the Virgen de la Caridad, while thinking that his question was surely going to be cruel, and he weighed up cruelty against truth. Persuaded of his lack of options, he decided to throw out a question only that oracle, endowed with the gift of speaking to plants and entering the compartments of a policeman’s mind, could answer: “Doctor, if you know, tell me and be done with it. What did your son come in search of after so many years?”
“Have any of you heard of the Manila Galleon? Of course not, and I’m not surprised, because that boat is like a dream lost in the memories of historians, although for more than two centuries it made a crossing every year as daring as Christopher Columbus’s, the only difference being that this galleon was definitely looking for the East by sailing westwards . . . But the history of journeys by Spaniards to the Philippines doesn’t begin until after 1571, when Miguel López de Legazpi founded Manila, and naturally trade began with America, as it was easier to get there from Mexico or Panama than from Spain, by skirting Africa round the Cape of Good Hope. So, immediately lucrative trade from Mexico, Panama, Guatemala and Peru started from those islands, where they brought products from America and Europe, and these sold very well for silver, though the money rarely reached the treasurers of Seville’s monopoly on trade. That was why the Spanish crown decided to restrict that semiclandestine trade and authorization was given only for sailings to Manila from the port of Acapulco, in the Mexican Pacific. From 1590 two ships would leave there taking thirteen or fourteen months for the round trip, and then two more would set out to the same destination, in a constant, well-guarded plying of trade . . . Just imagine, this trade with the Philippines was one of the most profitable in an era when ships sailed with two hundred and fifty thousand pesos worth of goods and returned with more than half a million in silver, because long before the Spanish reached the Philippines those islands were a commercial centre attracting merchants from China, Japan and other Asian countries, and it was one of the richest places in the world . . . But as the Spanish kings didn’t like anybody else getting too wealthy, in the seventeenth century the two boats were reduced to a single vessel, with a greater tonnage, and under greater supervision, known from that time as the Manila Galleon: that solitary boat sailed from the Philippines in June, before the typhoon season began, and crossed the Pacific in three months, to return to Manila in December and to Acapulco in June, laden with even more wealth. Imagine that it must have been a roaring trade, for by the end of the seventeenth century the captainship of that vessel was the most coveted position of all those in the gift of the governor of Acapulco, and to get it one had to pay some forty thousand pesos, because whatever deal was done in Manila gave profits of one to two hundred per cent . . . Naturally, items the Western imagination found hard to conceive travelled in the hold of the Manila Galleon: jewels, gold, jade and porcelain and silver galore. Then the cargo unloaded in Acapulco crossed the Chapultepec isthmus on mule-back, and was kept in Veracruz, until the boats from the Spanish fleet in the Gulf arrived to transport it to Havana, just before the beginning of winter . . . What happened in that city between the months of December and March each year must have been something special: all the vessels in the royal fleet, from New Spain and from Southern Terra Firma, returning loaded with gold, silver, jewels, pearls, furs, and all the treasure they could steal, dropped anchor in Havana Bay and the sailors and functionaries of the crown lodged there, and the city was transformed into a veritable playground of luxury, lechery and reckless gambling, prompted by the converging of people of all kinds and rank, enriched in two days and ready to impoverish themselves in a single night. Remember that those men knew the next journey across the Atlantic might be their last, for the treasures they were taking to Europe were a prize target for lurking corsairs and pirates waiting for them to leave the Caribbean, because they knew the fleet only set out for Seville in spring. The treasures, as they waited for the boats to sail, were stored on land, with all appropriate security measures in place. Those in charge were the Overseer General, the Captain General of the Fleet and a person with the very appropriate name of the Royal Keeper, who was designated by none other than the King of Spain to look after his economic interests.
“But the truth of the matter is that the story I am about to tell, and that may be connected to my son’s death, did not begin in the time of those fleets, but long before. Because it all started with the T’ang dynasty, the royal household that governed southern China between the seventh and tenth centuries BC and was the great propagator of Buddhism in that region of Asia . . . You know, Buddhism was known in China from the time of the Han dynasty, and contemporary artists had begun to represent the image of Buddha, thanks to influences brought by monks and pilgrims arriving from the west, particularly from the lost city of Gandara, where a concrete image had been given to the creator of that religion for the first time. Because, although we might think it strange now, the image of the Buddha was initially a symbolic not a physical representation, in porcelain and sculptures nearly always made from stone. But with the T’ang dynasty, more than five centuries later, Buddhism reached a religious peak and art flourished in the country, and they say the capital of this southern empire, called Chang-an, became the most cultured metropolis in the world at the time, outstripping Rome or Byzantium, and enjoyed a truly cosmopolitan atmosphere: consequently there was a large number of Buddhist monasteries and all had images, paintings, murals, the most exquisite objects of worship and ornament, some of huge material value . . . But this magnificent display of Buddhi
st splendour in China begins to decline with the great persecutions of 843 to 845, when thousands of temples are destroyed and Buddhist artefacts are stolen. What happened in those years in Chang-an is still considered one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of human culture, and there has been no shortage of those . . . Temples were devastated, stone and wooden images destroyed and bronze or gold images of the Buddha were melted down and turned into coins and profane accoutrements . . .
“Many years later, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and via a route that remains unknown, the Spanish came into possession of a gold statue of the Buddha, created during the T’ang dynasty and which had somehow survived the catastrophe in the ninth century. Although the custom at the time was to melt down many works and only transport gold and silver to Spain, that item must have impressed its new owners so much that the governor of Manila decided to send it intact to the King of Spain, to swell his treasures in the most suitable way possible: either as mere metal or as the singular work of art it undoubtedly was, for, though that governor could never have known this, the style of that piece was undoubtedly from the T’ang period, and one of the few representations of the Buddha made in pure gold, because it was much more usual to use wood, stone and even bronze, not gold . . .
“Now, I will try to describe it, so you have some idea: it was a statue of a standing Buddha, wrapped in a cloak that fell in folds around him. The hands of the god were clasped in prayer, and his feet rested on a lotus leaf, as delicately as if he had descended from heaven to settle there. An oblong halo opened out behind him, furrowed by lines creating veritable labyrinths. The Buddha’s body was lean, as he was usually represented at the time, his face almost square, fully expressing his power. But he wore the hint of a small smile, which drew out his slightly oriental features. That extraordinary statue, created a thousand years ago by an artist whose name we shall never know, weighed thirty-one pounds in pure gold and stood seventeen inches high, in today’s measurements. Can you imagine . . .?
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