Without Blood

by Alessandro Baricco

  The preparation was called Botrin. The pharmacist was called Ricardo Uribe. At the time he worked in the capital. When the war was over he had had some trouble with the police. First they found his name on the list of sup-pliers for the hospital of the Hyena, then someone came forward and said he had seen him working there. But many also said that he was a good man. He presented himself to the investigators and explained everything, and when they let him go he took his things and went away to a small town buried in the countryside, in the south. He bought a pharmacy there, and resumed his profession.

  He lived alone with a small daughter he called Dulce. He said the mother had died many years earlier. Everyone believed him.

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  Thus he hid Nina, the surviving daughter of Manuel Roca.

  The man looked around without seeing anything. He was in his thoughts.

  The savagery of children, he was thinking.

  We have turned over the earth so violently that we have reawakened the savagery of children.

  He looked back at the woman. She was looking at him.

  He heard her voice saying:

  “Is it true that they called you Tito?”

  The man nodded yes.

  “Had you ever met my father before?”

  “ . . . ”

  “ . . . ”

  “I knew who he was.”

  “Is it true that you were the first to shoot him?”

  The man shook his head.

  “What difference does it make . . . ”

  “You were twenty. You were the youngest. You had been fighting for only a year. El Gurre treated you like a son.”

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  Then the woman asked if he remembered.

  The man stared at her. And only in that instant, finally, did he see again, in her face, the face of that child, lying there, impeccable and right, perfect. He saw those eyes in these, and that extraordinary strength in the calm of this tired beauty. The child: she had turned and looked at him. The child: now she was there. How dizzying time can be. Where am I? the man wondered. Here or there?

  Have I ever been in a moment that was not this one?

  The man said that he remembered. That he had done nothing else, for years, but remember everything.

  “For years I asked myself what I ought to do. But the truth is that I never was able to tell anyone. I never told anyone that you were there, that night. You may not believe it, but it’s so. At first, obviously, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. But time passed, and it became something else. No one thought about the war anymore. People wanted to look ahead, they no longer cared about what had happened. It all seemed to be buried forever. I began to think that it was better to forget everything. Let it go.

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  At a certain point, however, it emerged that Roca’s daughter was alive, she was hidden somewhere, in a village in the south. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed to me incredible that she had come out of that inferno alive, but with children you can never say. Finally someone saw the girl and swore that it was really her. So I realized that I would never be free of that night. Neither I nor the others. Naturally I began to ask myself what she might have seen and heard. And if she could remember my face.

  Who can know what happens in the mind of a child, con-fronted by something like that. Adults have a memory, and a sense of justice, and often they have a taste for revenge. But a child? For a while I convinced myself that nothing would happen. But then Salinas died. In that strange way.”

  The woman was listening to him, motionless.

  He asked if she wanted him to go on.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “It came out that Uribe had something to do with it.”

  The woman looked at him without expression. Her lips were half closed.

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  “It may have been a coincidence, but certainly it was odd. Little by little everyone was persuaded that the child knew something. It’s difficult to understand now, but those were strange times. The country was going forward, beyond the war, at an incredible speed, forgetting everything. But there was a whole world that had never emerged from the war, and was unable to fit in with that happy land. I was one of those. We all were. For us nothing had ended. And that child was a danger. We talked about it a lot. The fact is that the death of Salinas didn’t go down with anyone. So finally it was decided that some-how the child should be eliminated. I know it seems madness, but in reality it was all very logical: terrible, and logical. They decided to eliminate her and charged the Count of Torrelavid to do it.”

  The man paused. He looked at his hands. It was as if he were putting his memories in order.

  “He was a man who had been a double agent for the whole war. He worked for them, but he was one of us. He went to Uribe and asked him if he would rather spend his life in jail for the murder of Salinas or vanish into nothing 61

  and leave him the child. Uribe was a coward. He had only to stay quiet, and no court would have succeeded in con-victing him. But he was afraid, and he fled. He left the child to the Count and fled. He died ten years later, in some godforsaken village on the other side of the border.

  He left a note saying that he had done nothing and that God would follow his enemies to the gates of Hell.”

  The woman turned to look at a girl who was laughing loudly, leaning on the bar of the café. Then she picked up the shawl that she had hung on the back of the chair and put it over her shoulders.

  “Go on,” she said.

  The man went on.

  “Everyone expected that the Count would have her killed. But he didn’t. He kept her with him, at home.

  They made him understand that he was supposed to kill her. But he did nothing, and kept her hidden in his house.

  Finally he said: Don’t worry about the girl. And he married her. For months people spoke of nothing else, around there. But then people stopped thinking about it. The girl 62

  grew up and bore the Count three sons. No one ever saw her around. They called her Doña Sol, because it was the name the Count had given her. One strange thing was said about her. That she didn’t speak. From the time of Uribe, no one had ever heard her say a word. Perhaps it was an illness. Without knowing why, people were afraid of her.”

  The woman smiled. She pushed back her hair with a girlish gesture.

  Since it had grown late, the waiter came and asked if they wanted to eat. In one corner of the café three men had set themselves up and begun to play music. It was dance music. The man said he wasn’t hungry.

  “I invite you,” the woman said, smiling.

  To the man it all seemed absurd. But the woman insisted. She said they could have a dessert.

  “Would you like a dessert?”

  The man nodded yes.

  “All right, then, a dessert. We’ll have a dessert.”

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  The waiter said it was a good idea. Then he added that they could stay as long as they wanted. They shouldn’t worry about it. He was a young man, and spoke with a strange accent. They saw him turn to the bar and shout the order to someone invisible.

  “Do you come here often?” the woman asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s a nice place.”

  The man looked around. He said that it was.

  “Did your friends tell you all those stories?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe them?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman said something in a low voice. Then she asked the man to tell her the rest.

  “What’s the point?”

  “Do it, please.”

  “It’s not my story, it’s yours. You know it better than I do.”

  “Not necessarily.”

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  The man shook his head.

  He looked again at his hands.

  “One day I took the train and went to Belsito. Many years had passed. I was able to sleep at night and around me were people who didn’t call me Tito. I thought I had done i
t, that the war was really over and there was only one thing left to do. I took the train and went to Belsito, to tell the Count the story of the trapdoor, and the child, and everything. He knew who I was. He was very kind, he took me into the library, offered me something to drink, and asked me what I wanted. I said:

  “ ‘Do you remember that night, at the farmhouse of Manuel Roca?’

  “And he said: ‘No.’

  “ ‘The night when Manuel Roca—’

  “ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  “He said it with great tranquillity, even sweetness. He was sure of himself. He had no doubts.

  “I understood. We spoke a little about work and even politics, then I got up and left. He had a young boy take 65

  me to the station. I remember because the boy couldn’t have been more than fourteen, yet they let him drive the car.”

  “Carlos,” said the woman.

  “I don’t remember his name.”

  “My oldest son. Carlos.”

  The man was about to say something, but the waiter had come with the dessert. He brought another bottle of wine, too. He said that if they wanted a taste it was a good wine to drink with sweets. Then he said something witty about the owner. The woman smiled, and did it with a movement of her head from which, years earlier, it would have been impossible to defend oneself. But the man barely noticed, because he was following the track of his memories. When the waiter left, he began to speak again.

  “Before leaving Belsito that day, as I was walking down the long hallway, with all those closed doors, I thought that somewhere, in the house, you were there. I would have liked to see you. I would have had nothing to say to you, but I would have liked to see your face again, after so 66

  many years, and for the last time. I was thinking of that as I was walking down the hallway. And an odd thing happened. At some point one of those doors opened. For a second I was absolutely certain that you would come out of there, and would pass by me, without saying a word.”

  The man shook his head slightly.

  “But nothing happened, because life is never complete—there is always a piece missing.”

  The woman, with the spoon in her hand, was staring at the dessert sitting on the plate, as if she were trying to see how to unlock it.

  Every so often someone brushed by the table and glanced at the two of them. They were an odd couple. They didn’t have the gestures of people who knew each other. But they were speaking intimately. She looked as if she had dressed to please him. Neither of them wore a ring. You would have said they were lovers, but perhaps many years before. Or sister and brother, who could say.

  “What else do you know about me?” the woman asked.

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  The man thought of asking her the same question.

  But he had begun to tell a story, and he realized that it pleased him to tell it, perhaps he had been waiting years for that moment, to tell it, once and for all, in the shad-owy light of a café, with three musicians in a corner, playing the three-four rhythm of dance music learned by heart.

  “Some ten years later the Count died in a car accident.

  You were left with three children, Belsito, and everything else. But the relatives didn’t like it. They said you were mad and couldn’t be left alone with the three boys. Finally they brought the case to court and the judge concluded that they were right. So they took you away from Belsito and handed you over to the doctors, in a sanatorium in Santander. Is that right?”

  “Go on.”

  “It seems that your sons testified against you.”

  The woman played with her spoon. She made it ring against the edge of the plate. The man continued.

  “A couple of years later you escaped, and disappeared.

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  Someone said it was your friends who had helped you flee, and that now they kept you hidden somewhere. But those who had known you said, simply, that you had no friends.

  They looked for you for a while. Then they stopped. No one spoke of it anymore. Many were convinced that you were dead. Plenty of crazy people disappear.”

  The woman raised her eyes from the plate.

  “Do you have children?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  The man answered that one had to have faith in the world to have children.

  “In those years I was still working in a factory. Up in the north. They told me that story about you, about the clinic and the fact that you had escaped. They said the most likely thing was that you were at the bottom of a river, or at the foot of a cliff, in a place where sooner or later a tramp would find you. They told me that it was all over. I thought nothing. It struck me, that business about your 69

  being mad, and I remember that I wondered what sort of madness it was: if you wandered around the house screaming, or if you were just silent, in a corner, counting the floorboards and holding a piece of string tight in your hand, or the head of a robin. The idea one has of crazy people is ludicrous, if one doesn’t know them.”

  Then he paused. At the end of the pause he said:

  “Four years later El Gurre died.”

  Again he was silent. It was as if it had suddenly become tremendously difficult to go on.

  “He was found with a bullet in his back, face down in the manure, in front of his stable.”

  He looked up at the woman.

  “In his pocket they found a note. On the note was written the name of a woman. Yours.”

  He made a light writing motion in the air.

  “Doña Sol.”

  He let his hand fall back to the table.

  “It was his handwriting. He had written the name.

  Doña Sol.”

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  The three musicians, at the back, struck up a kind of waltz, dragging the tempo and playing very softly.

  “From that day I began to expect you.”

  The woman had raised her head and was staring at him.

  “I knew that nothing could stop you, and that one day you would come to me as well. I never thought that you would shoot me in the back or send someone to kill me who didn’t even know me. I knew that you would come, and would look me in the face, and first you would talk to me. Because I was the one who had opened the trapdoor, that night, and then closed it. And you would not forget it.”

  The man hesitated a moment more, then said the only thing he still wanted to say.

  “I have carried this secret inside me for my whole life, like a disease. I deserved to be sitting here, with you.”

  Then the man was silent. He felt his heart beating rap-idly, in his fingertips and in his temples. He thought how he was sitting in a café across from an old woman who was 71

  mad and who, from one moment to the next, might get up and kill him. He knew that he would do nothing to stop her.

  The war is over, he thought.

  The woman looked around and every so often glanced at her empty plate. She said nothing. From the moment the man had stopped talking she had stopped looking at him.

  You would have said that she was sitting at the table alone, waiting for someone. The man had let himself fall back into the chair. Now he seemed smaller and tired. He observed, as if from a distance, the woman’s eyes wander about the café and over the table: resting everywhere except on him. He realized that he still had his overcoat on, and so he sank his hands in the pockets. He felt the collar pulling at his neck, as if he had put a stone in each pocket. He thought of the people around, and found it funny how no one, at that moment, could have any idea of what was happening. Seeing two old people at a table one would find it difficult to imagine that at that moment 72

  they were capable of anything. And yet it was so. Because she was a phantom and he a man whose life had ended a long time ago. If people knew it, he thought, he would be afraid.

  Then he saw that the woman’s eyes had become bright.

  Who could say where the thread of her thoughts was leading?


  Her face was without expression. Only, the eyes were at that point.

  Was it tears?

  He thought again that he wouldn’t like to die there, with all those people watching.

  Then the woman began to speak, and this was what they said to each other.

  “Uribe picked up the Count’s cards and let them slide slowly between his fingers, revealing them one by one. I don’t think he realized at that moment what he was losing. Certainly he realized what he was not winning. I didn’t count much for him. He got up and said goodbye to the company, politely. No one laughed, no one dared say a 73

  word. They had never seen a poker hand like that. Now, tell me: why should this story be any less true than the one you told?”

  “ . . . ”

  “ . . . ”

  “ . . . ”

  “My father was a wonderful father. Don’t you believe me? And why?—why should this story be less true than yours?”

  “ . . . ”

  “No matter how you try to live just one single life, others will see inside it a thousand more, and this is the reason that you cannot avoid getting hurt.”

  “ . . . ”

  “Do you know that I know everything about that night, and yet I remember almost nothing? I was there beneath the trapdoor, I couldn’t see, I heard something, and what I heard was so absurd, it was like a dream. It all vanished in that fire. Children have a special talent for forgetting. But then they told me, and so I knew everything. Did they lie 74

  to me? I don’t know. I was never able to ask. You came into the house, you fired at him, then Salinas shot him, and finally El Gurre stuck the barrel of the machine gun in his mouth and blew off his head with a short, dry volley.

  How do I know? He told me. He liked to tell about it. He was an animal. You were all animals. You men always are, in war. How will God forgive you?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Look at yourself, you seem to be a normal man, you have your worn overcoat, and when you take off your glasses you put them carefully in their gray case. The windows of your kiosk are clean, when you cross the street you look carefully to the right and the left, you are a normal man. And yet you saw my brother die for no reason, only a child with a gun in his hand, a burst of gunfire and he was gone, and you were there, and you did nothing. You were twenty, holy God, you weren’t a ruined old man, you were a boy of twenty and yet you did nothing. Please, explain how it is possible, do you have some way of explaining to me that something like that can happen, it’s not the 75