“Do you know what it feels like? First a sharp blow, like a shot, then, after that shot, you’re aware of the body bursting, of terrified screams which you can’t cover with the horn, and which you can still hear even after the body has been destroyed. You feel the bones cracking under your feet.”
“But it’s not your responsibility.”
“Sometimes you see them quite a long time before, or you realize that the guy on the edge of the platform is going to jump when the train passes. You sound the horn, you apply the emergency brake, even though you know that that noise like a shot is coming and that sound of bones breaking under your cabin. Where does responsibility, or whether or not you did the right thing, come into that? Two years ago some skinny guy, about twenty years old, was standing in the middle of the tracks, on a stretch where the train moves at top speed. I saw him and managed to brake, I sounded the horn but he didn’t move. To start with I didn’t realize I had started shouting, I was screaming, ‘Get out of the way, idiot!’ For a second I saw his face. It was as though he were asking my forgiveness for what he was doing. He wasn’t afraid. He saw my terrified face. The last thing he saw was me, shouting desperately at him.”
“What do you do when there’s an accident like that?”
“Nothing. You’re aware of a few people screaming in the first compartment. People come, the police, railway workers, an ambulance. That particular time I got out of the train and before they took me away in the ambulance I saw the guy’s torn clothes and parts of his body all over the place.”
“That boy wanted to die. It was a suicide. He could have taken pills or jumped from the tenth floor, like you said. The train was an instrument.”
“Nothing personal.”
“Exactly.”
“You still feel that you’ve killed someone. Afterwards you’re always thinking that it could happen again on the next journey. And sometimes it does.”
They were close to Moreno now, and for a time neither of them spoke. Verónica decided to put her cards on the table.
“That’s what happened to Carranza, isn’t it?”
Lucio let go of the controls and turned his body to look at her straight on. He didn’t just look at her with his eyes, though, but with his whole body. Like the male of any species seconds before confronting an enemy. There was a challenging violence in his eyes. Verónica held his gaze, calmly, coldly.
“What do you know about Carranza?”
“That he killed himself because he could no longer live with the deaths on the tracks. That he was your friend. That he felt that you were his only friend.”
“Who told you that?”
“Carina, his sister.”
Lucio turned back to the cabin controls and looked into the distance.
“What do you know about Carranza’s accidents?” Verónica asked him.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I tried to get hold of videos of those accidents, but I couldn’t.”
“Why do you want to see the videos? The deaths are all the same.”
“I wanted to see what happened with the child Carranza went over.”
Lucio said nothing. He was concentrating on the tracks, which seemed to undulate in front of the train.
“Was there anybody else on the line?”
They had arrived at the last station. Lucio gently brought the train to a halt. Verónica watched the people getting off. The compartments emptied.
“Not all of them are suicides and not all of them are accidents. Some of them are playing,” Lucio said as they climbed down from the driver’s cabin, breaking the silence of the last few minutes.
“What do you mean?”
“When do you have to publish the article?”
“I don’t have a deadline. I can be flexible.”
“If you can wait a week, I’ll show you something you may find interesting.”
VII
Why had he done it? During the last year, every time he had to drive a night train on the first Thursday of the month, he knew that there would be a moment of hell. Much as he dreaded that day coming round he couldn’t ask to change shift, and neither could anyone else scheduled to drive that night, but everyone knew what was going to happen and accepted it as their fate. For that reason he had been very happy to learn that he was being transferred to the morning shift. And when he asked a co-worker to swap shifts so that he could drive the night train, nobody could bring himself to ask the reason why. Inviting Verónica to accompany him meant that, alongside the dread of that terrible moment, there was the excitement of seeing her again, a sensation he had never experienced before. Because that was definitely what he wanted: to be with her again. It was absurd, but there was no getting away from it. That week, instead of the nightmares filled with the sound of breaking bones, the insomnia was back. He thought about Verónica all the time. He had only seen her twice, she was only a journalist researching a piece, and yet she had insinuated herself into his life.
It was obvious that she was after a good story, that she wanted him to reveal all those things which he hid even from himself. Those fears that assaulted him in bed while he slept, or on the night train when he became seized by a conviction that the worst was about to happen. Six deaths: four men and two women. A vagrant he never even saw, perhaps because he was stretched out on the line. Two girls who were walking on the tracks on a December afternoon. He did see those ones from a long way off; he had sounded the horn and applied the emergency brakes. A guy who jumped from a railway crossing like someone plunging into a river. Another who had taken a slow, interminable step forward, as though he wanted to delay contact with the train for as long as possible but was nevertheless absolutely determined that this contact take place. And the skinny guy whose expression seemed to be one of apology for making Lucio end his life. Six deaths, six murders. Because didn’t the police treat them as though they were guilty? On three occasions they had taken him to a police station and kept him there all night. The company’s lawyer had even had to go and get him out. Then again, perhaps that was better than ending up in hospital in a state of shock. Or having to endure the attention of the company psychologist, who wanted to cure with aspirin the cancer that eats at a person’s very core. The cancer of having seen, of remembering images, sounds, and also the silence, the scene that disappears behind a white mantle, like the one blind people speak of seeing.
Forty-eight hours. That was how long the psychologist gave him to rest before carrying out further observation. Sometimes he prescribed two more days off, but Lucio did everything possible to be sent back to work. He couldn’t stand to be alone in the house while his wife and children were at school (she teaching, the oldest in primary school and the youngest in kindergarten). No television or radio could drown out the noises in his head. So he would kill time in a bar. Drink a glass of wine mid-morning, read the sports pages of some newspaper. Talk about politics or soccer with inebriated strangers. Anything to take his mind away from the railway.
On more than one occasion they had offered to transfer him to a different section. To the warehouse, ticket inspection, maintenance, moves many of his colleagues had made since he began driving trains. Once somebody in management told him that, if he had been ten years older, he could have applied for early retirement. After all, railway workers retire at fifty-five. It qualified as “insalubrious work”, like working in a mine five hundred yards below ground.
In this case the insalubrious element was the burden of deaths borne by each of them. Borne by him. The deaths and the possible deaths. The fear that that very day somebody would decide to throw himself under the train or be idiotic enough not to realize that ten thousand tons of metal were about to roll over him. Six was the number darkly inscribed on his heart, but seven was the one that awakened his worst fears.
And yet he always went back to driving trains. More than a vocation, it was his fate, his doom. The best way for him to endure it was with silence, a conscious attempt to forget eve
rything. Then Verónica had turned up, confronting him with everything that had been locked up inside him. What other deeply buried feelings of which he himself was ignorant was she prepared to unearth?
VIII
A week. That was how long Verónica had to wait. What was it that Lucio was going to show her? What was he involved in? The week seemed endless and full of expectation; the days had no purpose other than to delay their meeting. Were these feelings a sign that she was reaching some crucial point in her investigation? She wasn’t naive enough to kid herself that that was the case. Lucio attracted her in a way that was not purely sexual but owed something to intrigue too. It was the kind of arousal that Oedipus must have felt in front of the Sphinx, knowing that if he could not answer her question he would die. When she had asked him about Carranza and Lucio had turned to face her, she had seen in his eyes a defiance that made her shiver inside. He gave off a violence that she found disturbing but also attractive. She had found it hard to hold her nerve.
What was it about Lucio that attracted her? Those shadows that covered him like a veil? The possibility of manipulating him, of extracting from him the information that she needed?
What was she willing to do? Or rather, what would she not do? What threshold would she not be prepared to cross with Lucio?
It was a week characterized by questions like these and by a desire that seemed to feed more on uncertainty than on anything that had happened so far. At the end of the day, Lucio was a source – nothing more. A reliable source who seemed honest, a little remiss when it came to giving her the information she needed but someone she felt she could manage: she could get what she needed from him. However, when she imagined herself getting to this point, the one at which Lucio would yield the information she needed for her article, she couldn’t help thinking that writing the piece was less important than drawing aside the veil to find out what those eyes charged with violence were hiding. Reveal the truth, or die trying.
During those days she had received emails and phone calls from the man her friends called the Bengali Sailor. Verónica neither answered nor returned the calls. He seemed as irrelevant to her now as the memory of a card game played on a Sunday afternoon. Something done to fend off boredom and forgotten as soon as it is over.
Verónica also said nothing during that week to Patricia Beltrán about her investigation into the trains. She went to the Nuestro Tiempo newsroom every afternoon and wrapped up some articles for that week’s deadline, but she kept quiet about what she was doing. She didn’t want Patricia to get involved. Or for her editor to outsmart her and prove that she was wrong. That she wasn’t behaving like the professional journalist she ought to be.
IX
She had been told to go straight to the first compartment of “Plate Number Six” – the train which left at 21.50 from platform 3 – and to wait for Lucio there. The fewer people who saw her with him the better, and the last trains of the day were not monitored by supervisors, nor were there any railway workers loitering on the platforms.
This time she had been the first to arrive and had sat in the seat closest to the driver’s cabin. She was wearing a black ski jacket, jeans and sneakers, clothes befitting someone who might at any moment have to make a quick getaway. Her outfit made her look younger, like someone of twenty-six or -seven.
“Are you going to tell me what to expect?” Verónica asked after Lucio had started the engine and the train had begun to snake out of the station and away from the Plaza Once station.
“You asked me about the terrible things that happen in this job. You’re going to see one.”
“When?”
“That I don’t know. It could be any time between here and Castelar, or on the return journey.”
They didn’t speak again until they reached Flores. For that first part of the route they had watched the rails illuminated by the train’s headlight, which pierced the dense darkness of the night as though it were advancing through a tunnel or under the ground.
At Flores, he asked her if she had been a journalist for a long time. Verónica told him that she had started more than ten years ago. That she had been writing for Nuestro Tiempo for three of these years. Lucio wanted to know how old she was. Thirty. He felt confident asking these questions, while she seemed very nervous. Lucio no longer saw her as a journalist leading the conversation, but as a girl who was being taken on a train towards something which she must imagine to be very sinister and all the more alarming because it was unknown. He asked her if she was married. She said that she wasn’t. If she had a boyfriend. Again, no. Regaining the role of questioner, Verónica wanted to know what being a father of two meant to him. Obligations, he replied. Obligations and a great love, very different from the love you might feel for a partner or for your parents; a sense of never being alone. How long had he been married? Eight years: he had married at her age. ‘Perhaps you’ll get married this year too,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Verónica.
They reached Castelar without incident and, as they began the journey back to Plaza Once, the demeanour of both had changed. Lucio had become more tense because he knew that what was about to happen was coming ever closer. Verónica could not conceal a slight irritation, as if she had been deceived, brought this far just to be interrogated about her private life, an unfamiliar experience for her and rather annoying. Then Lucio remembered something that they had talked about last time, a half answer he had given which he now wanted to complete.
“When you see someone walk onto the tracks, you can’t take your eyes off them. I always tell myself that the next time I’ll close my eyes, because I don’t want to see the moment of impact, but I can’t. The suicidal person locks onto your eyes and won’t let go.”
They travelled on in silence until, with not far to go until they arrived at Caballito, Lucio said, more to himself than for her benefit:
“There they are.”
X
In an instant Lucio applied the emergency brake and sounded a continuous blast on the horn. At first, she saw nothing. The train’s light did not extend as far as whatever it was Lucio was seeing or thought he saw. Then suddenly, as though materializing out of the dark, two boys appeared, about ten or twelve years old. They were standing on the line looking right at the train. Everything that happened next took a couple of seconds – perhaps less. Verónica realized that they were about to run into these two small boys, that they were going to crush them even though the brake had been applied. The train continued implacably towards them. She wanted to close her eyes, but terror prevented her. The image of those two boys grew until it covered the night. One boy seemed to lose his nerve then and threw himself to one side of the track. Immediately the other boy did the same, towards the other side. The train came to a stop a few yards later.
“Bastards,” said Lucio, a visceral hatred in his voice. There was some shouting from the compartments in response to the emergency stop. In a little more than a minute Lucio had the train moving again.
“What just happened?” asked Verónica, in a voice that seemed to belong to someone else.
“The same thing that happens on the first Thursday of every month. They’re boys from the shanty town, from some slum or I don’t know what shithole. Someone I work with ran over one of these kids a year ago.”
Verónica was dumbstruck. She couldn’t move. What she had seen had turned her into a pillar of salt. Lucio – who in all this time had not lifted his gaze from the tracks – turned to look at her and asked if she was all right. She said that she was, but she had started to shake and couldn’t help crying.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off them either,” she said, in a barely audible voice.
He took her hand and she squeezed his. She felt her own nails digging into the palm of Lucio’s hand. The train stopped in the station at Caballito and, before pulling away, with the compartment doors still open, Lucio left the controls, turned to Verónica and kissed her. It was a clumsy kiss to which her first response was to
bite his lips while desperately seeking his mouth. As if she wanted to get right inside him, take refuge in his mouth. Verónica was a frightened animal looking for shelter. She felt fragile against his solid body, which was pushing her against the wall of the cabin. Lucio’s hands under her sweater were not caressing but squeezing her. They kissed until there was an aftertaste of blood. Then Lucio let her go and started up the train again.
4 El Peque versus Cholito
I
El Peque had completely recovered from the dog’s attack by the first time they went to Spring Breezes. They had to walk about fifteen blocks to get there. Dientes had said that he knew the way, but more than once they got lost and had to ask for directions.
Spring Breezes was a neighbourhood club like any other: its name emblazoned on a peeling facade, a function room with tables where a handful of pensioners played dominoes, a concrete five-a-side soccer pitch, an office, changing rooms and not much else.
There were some boys kicking a ball around. And there was Rivero. He was wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit. When he saw El Peque, he beckoned to him to come over. Dientes went with him.
“Have you come with your parents?”
“My old man doesn’t live with us, and my mum works until late.”
El Peque had decided to tell the truth. At worst he would have to persuade his mother to go and talk to Rivero sometime, like when she had to go and meet the teacher.
“And who are you?” Rivero asked Dientes.
“I look after him.”
“Ah, OK. You were there playing in the park the other day, right?”
Rivero was bald, or almost. He had a few strands of hair which he combed across his head in an effort to conceal the bald patch. His hands were hairy, like a monkey’s. A bald monkey. He wasn’t fat, but not thin either. He was the world’s thinnest fat man, or vice versa. His eyes shone as though they were wet. His expression, however, was as dry as a cardboard box left out in the sun.
“I remember, you were playing on the right wing.”
The Fragility of Bodies Page 7
