Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  “That tape shows Ian and Arthur’s daughter together,” he went on, ignoring the fact that Arthur was standing there beside them, mad as hell.

  Gloria opened her mouth, gaping idiotically.

  “That’s absurd. My son and your daughter?” she said, looking at Arthur as if they were trying to convince her that the world was flat. “What kind of a ridiculous joke is this?”

  Arthur narrowed his eyes, trying to peer inside Gloria’s mind, then shot Guzmán an inquiring look out of the corner of his eye. Either she was a very good liar or Guzmán was wrong.

  “You’re perfectly aware of the fact that they knew each other. They were at the same clinic in Geneva together. This is no joke. I got a copy of the tape, too; I’ve seen it with my own eyes, dozens of times over the years. I can describe every detail to you, every sound and every image of what your son did to Aroha.”

  Gloria fluttered her hands fan-like before her and turned away. She couldn’t process what they were trying to tell her. She refused to accept it. It couldn’t be. Arthur took her by the arm. Her biceps and triceps felt soft, as though her strength had left her, and he pulled her toward him until her face was mere centimeters from his mouth. The rage he had felt was spiraling, mingling with sorrow and incomprehension.

  “For exactly thirty-five minutes and fifteen seconds, your son tortured my daughter, abused her, raped her, put an iron rod up her vagina, and demonstrated for Olsen and Dámaso the way to hurt her so that the images would be more dramatic.”

  Gloria stared into his wide-open eyes flashing with anger, accusing her, and she couldn’t understand. The monstrous words he was speaking were too heinous for her to digest.

  “You’re lying!!! First you kill my son and now you want to poison me with this filth,” she screamed, swatting Arthur’s hand violently away.

  Gloria’s shouting alarmed the nearby passengers on their way to the escalator. Some of them stared, looking panicked. Insanity terrifies people—they still seem to believe it’s contagious, like leprosy. And Gloria was acting like she was in need of a straitjacket. Her face was distraught, her mouth downturned, and she was wheezing like an asthmatic, batting her hands back and forth as though there were a disgusting bug coming at her. A bug only she could see.

  Arthur’s rage dissolved like sugar. Gloria’s reaction frightened him and surprised Guzmán, who looked on with his brow raised, like a scientist examining a white rat in a cage and noting in wonder that his experiment had yielded very different results from the ones he’d anticipated. But Arthur had seen the tape and had spoken with Ian personally. He remembered the boy’s cold, cynical reaction, the cockiness he’d displayed knowing that he was protected and nothing could happen to him. No. It was impossible for her not to know what kind of monster she’d given birth to.

  “I spoke to him. Before I ran him over,” he said quietly, almost whispering. She couldn’t believe it and shook her head slowly back and forth. “I just wanted him to tell me where Aroha was, what he’d done with her. That was all I was thinking. But he looked at me like I was crazy—worse, he looked at me like a clown who was there for his amusement. He was amused at my suffering, my impotence, my rage.”

  Gloria didn’t want to hear it. But Arthur wouldn’t stop.

  “It wasn’t an accident. Do you understand what I’m saying? I saw him waiting at a light, in a crowd of people. He was smiling; he looked like a good kid, like a boy who had his whole life ahead of him—his whole life to keep using that angelic face to hurt others. I started the car and aimed straight for that monster without thinking twice. And I killed him. But it’s like one of those insects you step on over and over that just keep wiggling their legs, mocking you.”

  The train to Zaragoza was ready to depart from platform two. The one from Barcelona was just arriving on platform five. The humidifiers from the botanical garden were misting the plants and turtles in the pond, as they tried in vain to escape the schoolboys’ mischief. The Romany musicians were taking their music elsewhere. And there beside the escalator, three people—two men and a woman—were trapped in their own silent bubble, two of them unaware of anything but their own suffering.

  “I’ll kill you for this! I swear to God I won’t rest until you’re dead,” Gloria said slowly, turning back to Arthur.

  Guzmán watched the two of them. He himself was not affected by the emotions dragging Arthur and Gloria into a battle neither could win. That wasn’t his job. He needed to know who had killed Olsen, Dámaso, and especially Olsen’s widow. She was so different from him, so far from his world, but that woman had reminded him at times of Candela. Maybe it was just that he’d seen in her the same stubborn and at times absurd determination to cling to life that the music teacher had shown. Maybe it was that her brown eyes, too, were flecked with green and when he looked into them it was like they were like an expanding universe. Or perhaps he simply thought that both Candela and Olsen’s widow had deserved better fates than the ones they got.

  His meter was running—and he knew that the reasonable thing to do was get paid and get out of there. The case had left him too exposed, his face was all over the papers and there were more and more witnesses who could now tie him to those deaths. He was the ideal scapegoat—many of the people he’d made uncomfortable by knocking on their doors would be only too happy to send him like a lamb to the slaughter. But there he was, in the biggest and most crowded train station in all of Spain, in plain sight of anyone who possessed even the most basic powers of observation and a modicum of curiosity. A squad car could pull up at any moment. With his past, no one was going to believe a word he said. And yet he was intent on finding the person who’d woven that tangled web, and on beating them at their own game.

  Maybe he was getting old. Maybe his cynicism was no longer thick enough to keep him from caring about the joys and sorrows of others. The moment of guilt and regret always arrives, even for us, Bosco used to say. And that’s when it’s time to quit, and spend the rest of your life with your nightmares. Maybe that moment had arrived for Guzmán.

  “There’s one thing that hasn’t been cleared up: if Olsen’s wife sent you the tape and you never received it, then who did?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Dolores, the housekeeper, was in the kitchen making brunch—bacon and fried eggs—and quietly grumbling under her breath, as though preparing food were some unforeseen obligation that had forced her to alter her daily routine.

  “The lady of the house isn’t in,” she said, sprinkling the yolks with a few grains of salt.

  Eduardo sat on a chair watching her bustle around, one end of the cardboard tube, containing the portrait, on the floor and the other between his knees. He’d brought it with him. If Gloria wasn’t there, he wondered, why had the housekeeper called, asking him to come?

  “There’s someone else who wants to see you—out back in the garden,” she said, pre-empting his question as she dried her hands on a dishtowel. She put the plate of food on a tray and then added some finishing touches. “I’ll take you there.”

  The sunlight in the backyard fell onto a wrought-iron gazebo at a slant. The garden was a mess. Clearly, no one was taking care of the flowerbeds, which were overrun with weeds and wild poppies. Sitting at a chipped, white wrought-iron table was a broad-backed man in shirtsleeves, frowning in distaste as he observed the fallen petals of a rosebush climbing a trellis, covered in insects. Hearing Eduardo and Dolores’ footsteps, he turned, and his look of displeasure morphed into one of cordial curiosity. With boyish energy that seemed at odds with his relaxed, middle-aged demeanor, he skipped down the two steps of the gazebo to take the tray from the housekeeper.

  “At least some things haven’t changed. Your brunches are amazing,” he said with a frank smile. The housekeeper smiled back, timidly. It was just bacon and fried eggs, and two tomato halves that shimmered with olive oil, she thought, wondering what kind of garbage they must eat in Aust
ralia.

  “This is Eduardo, sir. The artist you wanted to meet.”

  “Dolores, you’re never going to drop the ‘sir’ business, are you? Is it really so hard to just call me Ian? It would help me feel less like a Windsor when I ask you for something.” He turned to Eduardo and held out one hand, the tray of food balanced precariously in the other. “So, finally we meet. I’m Ian Mackenzie.”

  Eduardo had figured as much. Parents always leave some indelible trace on their children, making them recognizable anywhere. If Ian had reached his father’s age—forty? forty-five?—he’d probably have taken on that aristocratic-yet-carefree air, too, a blend of British gentleman and off-duty Californian actor.

  They sat in the speckled shade under the gazebo. Ian folded his hands over the tray, elbows on the table. For a second, Eduardo thought he was about to say a prayer. But he didn’t.

  “So, you’re the portrait artist Gloria hired. Kind of crazy. I bet you’ve never had a commission like that before. I don’t know what she was thinking when she called you, or what her intentions were. In fact I’ve never really known what she is thinking. Gloria is a unique woman—I imagine you’ve realized that by now.”

  Eduardo didn’t like the self-assured way he spoke about Gloria. He’d only met the guy five minutes ago and already Ian spoke with no inhibitions whatsoever. Or maybe Eduardo was just irked by the brazen way he occupied all the space, or by his familiarity with the housekeeper and the disingenuous praise he lavished on her without having even tasted her food, oblivious to the flies landing on his egg yolks. He was annoyed by Ian’s suntanned face, his just-for-show smile, his poise. It bothered him to picture Gloria in bed with him, the man’s hairy fingers touching the same skin he’d savored only once, knowing even then that it was out of pity. And he knew his feelings were absurd.

  “I thought you were divorced,” he said as casually as he could, waving away a sticky fly hovering over the tray.

  “Oh, we are. But that doesn’t mean we’re unable to come to an arrangement. I live in Australia; I moved there permanently shortly after Ian’s death, but I like to come back every once in a while for a little break—I did pay for this house, after all. It belongs to me and I belong to it,” he said, although he spoke the words hesitantly, eyeing the abandoned-looking surroundings, the overgrown lawn, the dying flowers. If that place had once been his dream house, it had ended up a sad parody.

  After glancing around, his eyes came back to rest on Eduardo.

  “We could have been very happy here, the three of us. On occasion I think we were. But things never turn out the way you think. It’s not like in the movies; you can’t pick the perfect setting or direct the actors or control their entrances and exits; you can’t choose the lighting or the sound. You can’t cut-and-paste like in editing, so you end up with exactly what you had in mind.”

  Ian had taken a seat and was perched sideways, one leg crossed over the other. He took out a box of Australian cigarettes and placed it on the table without opening it. For a few seconds he toyed with it between his fingers.

  “So did you sleep with her?” he asked impassively. He might have asked if his tooth hurt for as much as his expression changed. “I bet you did. Gloria can be irresistible when she puts her mind to it.”

  Eduardo felt his ears burning. He coughed timidly, ill-at-ease and annoyed at Ian’s snide expression.

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Because she wouldn’t tell me. And the fact is, I don’t really care.”

  “Then why ask me?”

  “Because you’ve been wanting to tell me since the moment we met. I’m guessing she didn’t speak very well of me, and the fact that you made love to her makes you see me as an intruder. Gloria is very good at that, too—getting people to believe what she wants them to believe. She’s both adorable and manipulative. Or at least she was, until Ian junior died.”

  He spoke about her as if the whole thing were so distant and yet he couldn’t let go. A story that excluded Eduardo. And he wanted him to know it.

  “I’d like to see your portrait of that guy, if you don’t mind. I’m curious.”

  Eduardo didn’t say no. He unscrewed the lid of the tube and pushed the tray of cold food to one side so he could spread out the portrait of Arthur.

  He’d picked it up that morning from Olga’s apartment. Eduardo wondered what had happened to her. He’d tried to get Mr. Who to promise that he wouldn’t hurt her, but the young man would grant him no more than an ambiguous gesture that could have meant anything. Eduardo had handed her over with no concern for her wellbeing, but he hadn’t been able to shake the bittersweet feeling of guilt since.

  Ian stared at the portrait for several minutes, bent over it like a field marshal poring over a battle plan. He swept his gaze carefully up and down, left and right. His eyes were shining, but Eduardo didn’t know if it was in admiration of his artistic skill, or the emotion of seeing so closely the face of the man who’d killed his son and ruined his marriage. When he finished examining it he tut-tutted with a tinge of disappointment.

  “An ordinary man who just explodes into your world like a ball of fire and blows it all to pieces.”

  “I can assure you that Arthur is not an ordinary man, in any way.”

  Ian held up his hands as though trying to deflect a self-evident truth.

  “Maybe it’s just my own little fantasy. No matter how far I am, there hasn’t been a single day when I haven’t thought about that man, tried to figure out what he was thinking, if he had feelings anything like mine.” He paused and walked to the trellis, observing the aphids making their way up a rose stem. “Or the way you feel. It must have been really hard to spend so much time painting the man who killed your family.”

  Eduardo had been rolling up the portrait carefully. Suddenly his hands froze.

  “What you talking about? That’s ridiculous.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Ian traced a finger across a leaf of the rosebush, covering his fingertip with a sticky substance. He wiped it against his thumb, but all that did was give him two sticky fingers. He thought the plant needed to be pruned quite severely, but doubted even that could save it. Whatever disease it had had already spread too far. It would be better to just pull it up from the roots and plant a new shoot.

  If only it were that easy with people.

  He walked over to a leaky tap and washed his hand, then sniffed his fingers.

  “Arthur Fernandez was the man who killed your wife and daughter. It wasn’t the first time he’d been involved in a fatal accident. That was the real reason Gloria hired you. Let me put it this way: Arthur is the bridge between our two shores.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “I most certainly am not. This portrait is the link between your tragedy and ours. Gloria knew that from the beginning. She’d thoroughly investigated you before she commissioned you.”

  * * *

  —

  Perhaps the police could have pressed charges against Arthur Fernández. After the accident, the police officer who came to see Eduardo in the hospital went to a lot of trouble, despite his slothful docility. The same man was removed from service on expulsion orders a few months later, over a murky case in which the officer was charged with a crime he swore he hadn’t committed. Prior to his dismissal he’d found clues pointing to Arthur. Details which, when viewed alone, might seem unconnected, but which made perfect sense—later fitting together like pieces of a puzzle for the ex-officer of the law who spent hours of his free time investigating further: receipts from a small hotel on the Toledo highway the night before the accident; a receipt for gas from a service station in the middle of nowhere—the owner recalled having seen someone very worked up on the phone, someone whose description matched Arthur’s.

  But shortly thereafter, Eduardo killed T
eodoro on the streets of Madrid, just as that poor dogged officer had other, unrelated charges brought against him and was taken off the investigation. Inside Eduardo’s apartment, the police found Teodoro’s license plate number jotted down on a piece of paper and verified that he’d gotten it by consulting the Directorate General of Traffic archives. Teo’s vehicle was the same make and model as the one involved in the hit-and-run. There was even a report issued by an expert that indicated that the SUV had a dent in the bumper that had been recently repaired. As far as the new investigators on the case were concerned, it was clear from the beginning: although Eduardo never confessed his motives for attacking Teo and his family, they were certain Teo was the man who’d caused the accident and that Eduardo had taken justice into his own hands. Case closed.

  They forgot all about Arthur Fernández. And about Eduardo Quintana, too. The roads were full of scumbags who committed hit-and-runs. Sometimes they got caught; sometimes they didn’t. The sentences for manslaughter and failure to provide assistance weren’t worth the expenditure of long-term investigations. But a murder in the center of Madrid in broad daylight—now, that caused the sort of pandemonium on the streets that the State could not and would not accept. So they locked him up for thirteen years and threw away the key.

  But the investigation hadn’t ended for Gloria. A few months after Ian died, she began looking into Arthur’s life. She wasn’t simply searching for incriminating evidence—the police, after all, had caught him at the scene; there was no way he could claim innocence. But it was much more than that. She wanted to find out everything she could about his past, his family—anything. It turned into an obsession. Over those four years she’d spent a good part of her wealth paying private investigators, many of whom were unscrupulous, cheating and deceiving her, wheedling money out of her. She’d also ruined her marriage. Ian had tried to convince her that what she was doing was insane, pointless. But she didn’t listen, not to him or anyone. She’d even auctioned off the most important part of her past—her violin. Though she’d concealed her true motivation for selling it, she had actually auctioned it off to the Ministry of Culture simply because she needed the money.