Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  “What are you saying to each other?” she asked Ibrahim.

  “Nothing that hasn’t been said before. It’s a game our teachers had us play when we were in school, outside by the mosque. It was a way to encourage us to learn, a war of words. We quote each other verses. Andrea gives me Rimbaud and I reply in Berber with a Kabyle poem. She throws out Verlaine and I come back with Nouara. She tries to trip me up with Baudelaire and I retaliate with Farid Ferragui. It’s fun.”

  Ibrahim had brought Andrea a small gift. It was a little leather bag. In it was a small book with a cowhide cover that contained the verses of over fifty Kabyle poems.

  “My father wrote them when he was young. He was a great poet, in that way some men living desperate lives are.”

  If he was expecting a warm, enthusiastic response, he was not going to get it. Andrea gazed at the book of poetry timidly.

  “I’ve almost forgotten how to read Kabyle; I hardly even remember my classical Arabic.”

  Ibrahim gave her a wide smile, abysmal teeth on full display.

  “So you’ll dig out your old childhood songs. Poetry is what allows us to preserve serenity, and it’s also what gives us hope that one day the child who once lived inside can still come back to life.”

  Andrea stared at Ibrahim in shock, moved by his candid voice, his peaceful look, so out of sync with his strong body and disfigured face. The scar across Ibrahim’s face was a source of strength, but she didn’t dare ask him when or how he’d gotten it.

  “My daughter always refused to learn the language her mother and father spoke when they fell in love. She wanted nothing to do with Algeria, with the past, with history. Sometimes I imagine that when she’s back in my arms and I’m holding her tight, she’ll ask me to teach her those old Kabyle songs, to tell her about the streets of Kabylia, the smells. But then I open my eyes and here I am, and I know I’ll never be able to teach her anything because I’ve forgotten it all myself.”

  Ibrahim stroked her hair, almost not daring to touch her. Such tenderness from a hand like his was breathtaking.

  “Children always learn the lessons their mothers try to teach them too late. She’ll come back to you, and you’ll remember everything about your childhood, every step you took, and you’ll relive it for her.”

  It was hard not to believe him. Listening to Ibrahim, her conviction that sooner rather than later her daughter would be by her side grew stronger every day. Through Ibrahim’s hope, she gradually returned to an almost lively state of mind. The progress she made was not a straight course, nor was it easy; at night, when he went home and darkness descended, filling everything, she became taciturn, sordid, sad. And in those bleak moments of desperation she tried to fool herself, tell herself that all she wanted was a little peace, a little certainty. She didn’t want to believe that her daughter was dead. The fact that her daughter’s body had not been found in four years had taken her to the brink of madness. And if she had not yet succumbed, if she was still hanging on to sanity by the skin of her teeth, it was because ignorance allowed her to keep that fiction going—the belief that, somewhere, her daughter was still alive.

  “I promise you, one way or another we’re going to find her,” Ibrahim assured her.

  And she held his hand tight and said she believed him. The faith of a mother pining for her daughter.

  “Life is like a gambler, it doesn’t play fair,” she said. “It lays it all out within reach, makes you believe happiness is attainable, and then when you naively decide to lay your bets, it snatches everything away and leaves you unable to get up from the table, forcing you to sit there playing the same hand even after you know you can never win.”

  Ibrahim looked upset. He glanced down, unable to meet Andrea’s gaze.

  “My life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would either,” he confessed with a sudden honesty the depths of which she could not fathom.

  “Who were you, before you became…this?”

  Before I became this scar? he asked with his eyes.

  He gazed at her tenderly.

  This scar is you, was his wordless reply.

  He’d walked a long and painful road before ending up in a place he hadn’t expected. But he knew it was here, and no place else, where he belonged. Beside her.

  “I need to ask you a question, Andrea. I need to ask, because a lot of things depend on your answer.”

  Andrea gave him an anxious look, full of fear.

  “Do you still love Arthur?”

  She sat very still. Then her eyes fluttered as if blinking away a speck of dust, and she pulled away from him.

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. What could possibly matter more?”

  Andrea’s nostrils flared as she exhaled.

  * * *

  —

  There was a time when Arthur meant so much to her that each of his slights cut her to the quick. But back then she put up with his infidelities, his mood swings and night terrors as if they were simply the price to be paid in exchange for his affections and his words, which could still evoke entire universes of immeasurable beauty. Andrea would feel his arms enfold her desperately, as if she were the one certain thing in his life, the one indestructible force. And it made her happy, made her feel unique and special. But she no longer felt that. She’d stopped feeling it a long time ago.

  Their marriage had inevitably slipped into a comfortable security, a precursor to the death of passion. Suddenly she realized that when they made love—less and less frequently and more and more bureaucratically—Arthur behaved like a stranger in a strange land. His expression was like that of another man, and his sweet nothings, his magic words, no longer rang true. They’d lost their power of enchantment. True love is something mystical, but his words had become rote memorization, like a priest saying mass.

  It was about that time, back before Aroha was born, that she had found out he was in love with a woman named Diana, who ran the Chicago branch of his company. He’d slept with other women before, and kept doing so later as well, but Diana was different: a beautiful black woman, ambitious and worldly. She changed Arthur forever, stripped him of his poetic aspirations and turned him into a man consumed by more immediate desires: cars, money, stocks, influence, power. And Andrea was left with the result of all that—the proxy who kept trying to make her believe he hadn’t changed, a body, but no longer a soul.

  One night Arthur had come home terribly upset. Andrea had been waiting up for him because she had something important to tell him, but he didn’t even see her when he walked in. His clothes were wet and his shoes splattered with mud. He went straight to the garage and returned a few minutes later with an industrial-sized garbage bag in one hand. When he saw Andrea there in the living room, he startled.

  “How long have you been standing there spying on me?” he asked, furious.

  Andrea stared at him, infuriated. Spying? Had he lost his mind? She’d been up all night waiting for him to come home—happy at first, then sad, and then livid, as the hours ticked by. And now he was making her feel like a stranger in her own home.

  “We have to talk,” she said, her eyes going to the bin bag Arthur held. He held the car keys in his other hand. “Are you planning to go back out?”

  “Now is not the time, Andrea,” he replied. He’d been drinking, she thought, and maybe even taken drugs. His pupils were dilated and he kept licking his lips. He smelled like a brothel.

  The smell offended Andrea deeply, as did the uncomprehending look he gave her when she said, “Aroha’s had a bad night. The colic kept her awake. We have to take her to the hospital.”

  “And you expect me to do that? She’s four months old, for God’s sake, it’s normal.”

  Something happened then, a confrontation between the person each of them had become at that very instant. Chaos exploded in the most unlikely of way
s. Andrea began shouting, insulting him senselessly, years of accumulated resentment and reproach streaming from her mouth like a torrent—everything from ridiculous offenses to deep emotional scars, pouring out with vitriol.

  “I can’t stand it anymore. I’ll take Aroha. We’re leaving.”

  Arthur glared at her, full of hatred—for himself, for her, for everything. A hatred she’d never before seen. Aroha’s crying could be heard coming from the bedroom upstairs.

  “Do whatever the hell you want,” he shouted. And then he left, slamming the door, and Andrea stood there in the middle of the living room, staring at the broken glass from a vase he’d hurled on his way out.

  Arthur returned early in the morning. Andrea heard him come into the bedroom, take off his clothes and put them on a hanger, sit down beside her on the bed and sigh. He was gazing at her, taking in her expression, but she pretended to be asleep. She let him pull her close, so close that their bodies merged, let him cry on her shoulder, let his tears slide down onto her arms and her nightgown. She listened to him beg forgiveness, explain what a terrible day he’d had, promise that he’d change, swear he’d become the same man he’d once been.

  She listened to him, and she accepted his words. But deep down, on that night fourteen years earlier, Andrea stopped loving Arthur.

  * * *

  —

  The reception was in full swing. Waiters glided from group to group, balancing trays of ham, salmon and cheese canapés. They were like tightrope walkers, skillfully dipping and sailing between the guests. The hotel had installed two bars out on the terrace, one by the pool and the other close to the balcony overlooking Madrid’s old quarter. The Secretary of State for Culture was giving a speech from a podium that had been set up in the center of the terrace. No one was paying any attention to him, but he didn’t seem to care. He smiled for the cameras like a mediocre, B-list actor.

  Arthur glanced up. Eduardo had appeared to his right. He looked awful.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Eduardo gave the drunken giggle of a man who knows how to hold his liquor. He downed a glass of wine in one gulp, to the horror of those watching—it was, after all, 300-euro-a-bottle wine. Immediately, he accosted a waiter to grab another.

  “I saw Ibrahim in the hotel lobby. I told him I had something urgent to discuss with you and he walked me to the elevators. His scar is like a VIP pass. The hostess couldn’t bear to deny me entry.”

  “You shouldn’t be here. Especially not in the state you’re in.”

  Eduardo glanced around with a bemused expression.

  “Why not? I’m the king’s official portrait artist. And this is your court, is it not? Judges, politicians, entrepreneurs, writers, actors, lawyers…Bet they all owe you something, some kind of favor. Maybe they’re afraid of you. I bet some of them even despise you. You’re not one of them, and yet you own them. They belong to you. Don’t you have the right to exhibit your serfs, your lackeys, the assortment of jesters who entertain you?”

  Eduardo’s voice was becoming loud enough to attract the attention of those nearby, without his intending it to. Arthur shot him a furious glance, discreetly took hold of his elbow and led him off to a corner.

  Red roof tiles shimmered in the dappled late-afternoon sunlight of the Austrias quarter, making it look as if it had just rained. Above the balcony, fairy lights hung twinkling from invisible strings, like at a tacky open-air dance. The bells from the Convent of the Order of St. Clare were ringing in the distance. If you closed your eyes, it could have been any small town in La Mancha. The speeches were over and Schubert was playing over the loudspeakers. The contrast was almost comical.

  “Have you lost your mind? Why are you making a scene?”

  With a transformative skill normally seen only in mimes, Eduardo’s face suddenly morphed, no longer that of a mouthy drunk. He leaned in close to Arthur to examine his face, like a shortsighted man who’s misplaced his glasses. Eduardo had spent so long trying to read that expression that he knew it as well as his own. And yet he now saw what Gloria meant when she rejected those first initial sketches he’d given her in Barcelona—he hadn’t captured the most essential thing, hadn’t captured Arthur’s true nature.

  “If I were to paint you again now, you’d look completely different.”

  Arthur held his gaze, unperturbed, aware of the dozens of guests who, albeit surreptitiously, were paying close attention. But beneath his artfully unflustered face there was latent rage, and scorn oozed from the corners of his mouth.

  “What do you want? You’ve got your portrait. Go ahead, give it to Gloria, tell her what kind of monster I am, feed her all the lines she wants to hear.”

  Eduardo grabbed another glass of wine and gulped it down.

  Arthur was a fraud, just like Gloria, just like Olga, like Eduardo himself—so caught up in his own memories that he couldn’t tell truth from fiction. Their lives were completely artificial. They obsessed over superficialities in order to cover up their emptiness. He saw women wearing expensive jewels to try to camouflage their mediocrity, though it was still blatantly obvious the moment they jammed a pinky into their mouths to free a bit of trapped food. He saw a senior official smile for the cameras, and then the second he was out of the spotlight grope the waitress’ breast while she stood there, resigned. He saw the guests’ phony laughter not echoed in their eyes, as they searched for someone more important to grovel to. It was all a lie full of holes nobody wanted to see. Because they were the holes. All of them.

  “I just found out that I killed an innocent man, fourteen years after the fact. I killed the wrong man.” The words weighed him down like stones, but he felt the need to vomit them forth. “I’m a fucking bastard, a bad joke.”

  The man inhabiting Arthur’s body took his leave at precisely that moment. He left, went far away, to a place were Eduardo’s eyes couldn’t trap him.

  “Nobody is innocent, Eduardo. I would have thought you’d have realized that by now.”

  “Exactly,” Eduardo slurred. “Nobody’s innocent. Which leads me to a terrible conclusion—whoever killed my family is still out there, mocking me.”

  Arthur sliced clean through him like a knife.

  “What does that matter now? Would you kill again? Take revenge? We’ve all done plenty of stupid things in our lives.”

  Eduardo looked away. Arthur was probably right.

  “If only I could be sure that his life didn’t turn out better than mine…”

  Arthur looked at him with pity. All Eduardo’s expression told him was that it made no sense to find things out, if you can’t do anything about them.

  * * *

  —

  The little hotel on the outskirts of town was no longer there. The entire landscape had changed dramatically, and the change in terrain was echoed in more profound, more personal changes, too. Arthur hadn’t been back in fourteen years, and as he got out of the car, he was hit by the inevitable transformation that awaits us all in the last stage of life.

  It was hard even to make out the ruins of the building, which was now overrun by scrub so tall it covered the old stone wall that once surrounded the property. Part of the gabled roof had collapsed—it looked as if a bomb had fallen on it, and the beautiful Arabic tiles had lost their lacquered sheen and were now covered in scum. Most of the windows were bricked over and the walls had become a mural of graffiti. In one corner a rusty sign proclaimed the property was for sale, although the real estate agent’s phone number was so faded it was nearly illegible. The highway had been rerouted behind the hotel, so the aggravating roar of heavy trucks was constant, and they’d put in a gas station with a minimart.

  That place had once been their paradise, a respite from their daily lives, a place they came every weekend, for years. There were rustic curtains—very discreet—and fresh-cut flowers on the shelves; a huge Toledan bed with dark wood
headboard; baskets of fresh fruit; and an adorable dining room with a half-dozen or so other couples—often the same ones, cuddling secretively, complicit—greeting one another wordlessly, wearing expressions of suppressed joy, taking part in the same half-guilty, half-effervescent clandestine adventure.

  “I bet there’s no place like this in Chicago,” he’d say to Diana, boldly taking her hand, hidden behind topiary bushes pruned into bizarre animal and plant shapes, enjoying the silence broken only by birds whose nests were so high in the trees that they were hard to identify. And Diana, dressed casually in jeans and a tank top, tennis shoes in place of high heels, no jewelry, let herself be swept away by that fairy tale. She smiled at him, wrapped her arms around him fearlessly, rested her head on his chest and kissed his neck, leaving a moist, warm trail across his skin.

  They went every weekend—forty-eight hours of stolen time that Arthur managed by weaving a tangled web of excuses for Andrea. He’d become an expert liar, very convincing. Or so he thought. And the few hours he spent with Diana were just enough to be able to pretend that what they had was special and different, untainted by the vulgarity of everyday existence.

  But the time lovers struggle to procure for one another ends up making them greedy. The perfect fiction stops being enough. And there comes a time when stolen time no longer suffices. One of the two always wants to give up their slice of heaven, to take a bite of the forbidden apple with the promise of something more real, albeit imperfect. In their case, it was Diana who wanted more—more time, more days, more intensity. She wanted the legitimacy of the light of day, wanted to experience the everyday travails of an average couple, the exhaustion of cohabitation, of the compromises couples make, which are in fact a struggle in which each tries to impose their desires on the other. She wanted to savor the slow defeat of permanent coupledom personally. Arthur’s mawkish fairy tale was no longer enough.

  “I want to be with you when you’re sick, and weak, and insecure. I want to see you absent, angry, distracted; I want to see your selfishness and your childish whims; I want to see you cry. I want to be there, by your side. I’m tired of loving a fairytale. I want to love the real you, flesh and blood.”