And then one day a man showed up at her house—a short, sickly, decrepit man. He had a rubber-banded manila folder under one arm, clippings and photos spilling out the sides. He smoked like a chimney and spoke so softly she could hardly understand what he said. The guy was cagey, acting like he was convinced he was being watched everywhere he went, and was unable to sit still. He had tics and tremors, and his right eyelid twitched compulsively. While explaining things, he lost the thread at times, but when the man got to the contents of that folder, which he protected like a priceless treasure, what he said was astonishing. That downcast little man was the ex-officer who’d first been assigned Eduardo’s case. And just like Gloria, he was obsessed with Arthur Fernández.
* * *
—
Maybe the police had thought that the case was solved, and unprosecutable—but not him. He told her he felt there had been some sort of conspiracy to get him taken off Eduardo’s case. He swore to Gloria that the investigation had cost him his job on the force and six years in a Guadalajara prison, and that it had all been engineered after he disobeyed repeated orders to stop “fucking around,” as he phrased it. He’d appealed numerous times but no one had paid any attention. The proof against him was compelling, and in the end he had descended—definitively—into the deep pit of anonymity and desperation of someone who’d been chewed up and spat out by the forces of power. When he got out of jail, he managed to scrape together a living as a two-bit private investigator. That was how he’d heard Gloria had been going around asking questions about Arthur Fernández.
Brimming with emotion, he showed her the result of his years of effort, years when he’d never stopped searching for clues and evidence against the man who was now a thousand times richer and more powerful than he’d been fourteen years ago, while the ex-officer himself was a thousand times more insignificant.
“But the tiniest germs are the ones that bring down the giants. I’m like a simple cold that turns into deadly pneumonia,” he said, laughing like a madman.
Then he showed Gloria invoices from Arthur’s firm, signed by someone in the Chicago office, paying off distant relations of the officers who had been involved in the investigation back in the early days. He also managed to find out that a few months after Eduardo was locked up, Arthur’s car—a black SUV—was repaired at a body shop in Pau, a small city on the French side of the Basque Country. The repairs consisted of an alignment, the kind performed after a rear-ending, and the replacing of the entire front right panel. Then the car was painted another color and sold by the firm. The little man showed Gloria receipts proving that the vehicle’s export documentation had been falsified.
“Eduardo fucked up,” he said, scratching his head as though he had lice. And maybe he did. “He killed the wrong man. Arthur is one son of a bitch.”
Gloria later verified everything that man had said. She even went to the place Arthur had supposedly spent the night with someone, though the hotel no longer existed. She managed to find the gas station, where she filled up and spoke to the cafeteria owner, who corroborated what the ex-police officer had said: late that night, someone matching Arthur’s description had been there and had spoken to somebody on the phone.
When she got back to Madrid, she tried to contact the ex-officer, but he seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. Though she never learned this, the little man’s name was Alberto Antequera. He was forty-six years old and hailed from a place called Villafranca de los Barros, in the province of Badajoz. At the time he was discharged from the force and sentenced to six years in prison, he was in his twentieth year of service and had a spotless record. He had two children: Alberto, who was eight years old, and Fátima, who was five. His wife, Rosa, managed to hold things together while he was in prison, but she couldn’t handle his subsequent mental breakdown. She ended up leaving him and had a judge issue a restraining order. He never saw them again.
In the slums where he lived after being released from jail, they called him “San Vito”—after Vitus the patron saint of epileptics—because he was always trembling. A few people held him in high regard and gave him token odd jobs, as a reminder of the good times, but most of them either scorned or ignored him. Two weeks after contacting Gloria, he was found stabbed to death in Puente de Vallecas. A month later, the presumed perps were arrested: two minors who were up to their eyeballs on coke and had tried to steal his watch.
Thanks to Alberto—who Gloria never found out anything about—she did manage to find out about the existence of someone named Eduardo Quintana.
She was able to get in contact with him through his agent, Olga. She’d already found out that he’d just gotten out of a psychiatric ward and was doing high-volume portraits for shopping malls, that he lived in Lavapiés, and that every morning he went to El Retiro park, where he had a date with his past near the Crystal Palace. For days, she followed him and watched him sketch in a notebook and drink heavily in nearby bars. She wanted to be sure he was as broken as she was, be sure that when she proposed the job, he’d accept. And maybe, deep down, she was also hoping to find a kindred spirit. Together they’d summon the courage to do what Eduardo had done fourteen years ago. But this time, to the right man. The man who had ruined their lives.
* * *
—
I an gave Eduardo a look of pity.
“You knew that. You had to know it somehow. Nothing in life is pure chance, but sometimes we opt to feign ignorance of certain things.”
Eduardo thought about each of the times he’d met with Gloria. A little voice inside him had told him that she was messing with him, that Eduardo was nothing but a pawn on the first line of attack, the one who struck first, driving a wedge into the enemy’s defenses only to be sacrificed. Ian was right. He’d known all along, but he’d denied it, even to himself, clinging to her in order to keep from suffocating, in order to keep breathing a little longer. Just a little while longer.
* * *
—
I an paused the image. Without touching it, he caressed his son’s face. A boy of six or seven, his eyes deep, a little sad, disconcerted. He had a naive air about him, a freckled face and a haircut too childish for his age—side part, bangs plastered to his forehead. As if nothing could ever happen to him, as if Ian would always be right there to protect him.
That was over Christmas, one year at Ian senior’s parents’ house in Wales. There was a river there, high above the village, which dried out in the summer, leaving nothing but pebbles, garbage and rotting sticks in its course. Only in the springtime, and the first two weeks of summer if you were lucky, could you catch anything but dead rats in that water. And yet his son loved it there. He remembered that, ever since Ian junior was a little boy, with the good looks of a grown man, he’d walk along the trail of acacias lining the river as if searching for the signs of a past he’d yet to live.
In the late afternoon the weather would change suddenly. It was always drizzling in Wales, a fine curtain of mist that blew in in gusts, dampening the washing hung out to dry behind dirty gray houses the same color as the sky raining down on them. It was an ideal place for nostalgia. The perfect surroundings for a musician. But Ian junior didn’t want to be a musician. In fact, the only thing his son seemed to enjoy was walking along the bridge above the river and staring down at his feet, lost in thoughts that took him far from wherever he was. On occasion he’d glance up, surprised, as if not knowing how his steps had suddenly led him to his grandparents’ house, covered in spectacular vines, creepers full of uncertainties, full of tiny red berries and leaves that each seemed to hold a single raindrop.
Ian junior enjoyed being with Sir Matthew, his grandfather, despite the fact that their characters could not have been more different. The old man didn’t mind that his grandson was Jewish on his mother’s side. He was an extravagant old giant who claimed baselessly that he had Norman blood, or Moorish—or any other type, depending on how ine
briated he was. He was fun and foul-mouthed like his son, and although he loved his grandson and daughter-in-law, he found them overly taciturn. He used to say he didn’t want to understand life, he wanted to live it.
As a young man he’d played harp and loved being in a band that traveled throughout the valleys, going village-to-village during festival season. In Pembroke he met Mery, who was to be his wife for over fifty years. She was a large woman, built like a Romanesque church, and in the home movie she was seen leaning calmly over the balcony railing, in slippers and bathrobe, smoking. Mery was modern and strong-willed for her day and her environs. Her eyes gazed blankly at the fields that extended to the other side of the river, where from time to time there appeared a peasant’s back, bent over the rows.
Ian junior had inherited his grandmother’s melancholy nature, as well as her deep eyes and unsettling expression. Mery was always listening to music—a Chopin nocturne for violin and piano that Matthew hated. The old man complained that a melody that sad and dramatic made you think something terrible was about to happen. His grandson, on the other hand, felt his heart pound with joy whenever he approached the door knocker and held the wood in his hand, the moment before the doors opened and his grandmother appeared, smelling of flour and fresh vegetables, her mousy voice chastising him: What are you doing wandering around the river in this cold? Don’t you know the dead are out searching for a body to inhabit, silly boy? And then she’d sit him on her knees and hum to him—the same music over and over—and tell him dark tales by the waning fire, tales of mythical creatures of the forest, of witches and wizards, tales that the boy listened to with rapt attention.
That old house had lost its former glory many years ago. Time had taken its toll, and buried Mery right along with it. One night she turned up dead, lying atop the frozen river. It was snowing out and she lay face-up in a nightgown, barefoot, arms extended, eyes gazing up at the sky. No one ever found out how she got there, or what she was doing at the river at that time of night. Or why her face had that look of horror, her pupils frozen, her mouth grimacing in agony. Matthew lost all sense of joy, drowning his sorrows in brandy, and wouldn’t let a single thing be done to the house. He insisted on leaving it exactly as it had been when she died—until he too died a few years later, from cirrhosis of the liver. The remaining ruins smelled of mold and sorrow. But the river was still there, awaiting Ian each morning. As it had been for years.
It was around the time of his father’s death that their problems began. And Ian junior was always at the center of them. The arguments had turned vehement by then, and the recurring topic was the boy’s character. Ian was a troubled boy, Gloria agreed with her husband about that much. But Ian senior was exaggerating, in her opinion; she could control Ian junior’s mood swings, she understood his introverted, labyrinthine, overly sensitive character. It made sense, with a violinist for a mother and a film director for a father—they spent more time on planes than on solid ground. In his own way, the boy was just punishing them for their constant absence. That was all. Of course she would have liked for him to keep up with his music lessons, but he wasn’t interested in music, at least not interested enough to spend all the time and effort required to be a serious pianist. But film didn’t interest him either, much to his father’s chagrin.
Ian remembered the last time they were together at the river house. That afternoon, his son was running around the shore with a movie camera, filming anything and everything. He’d focus in on his father and ask him to say something, and Ian senior would glance sidelong at the camera, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
“Turn that off, show a little respect. This is where your grandmother died, carried off by the dead.”
That night they saw him from the bedroom window, walking toward the river under a star-filled sky, completely naked despite the sub-zero temperatures. It had been snowing until late and his footsteps left deep imprints along the path. Ian senior raced down the stairs and out of the house and found his son facedown on the riverbed, lying from the waist up across the frozen surface. The ice made a sizzling sound, cracking like an old man’s face. In the blink of an eye, Ian senior leaped, fearful that it would give way, and fought to pull his son off its surface.
“Have you lost your mind? What are you trying to do? Drown yourself?”
His son had looked up at him as though he were a blind fool.
“I just wanted to look, to look until I could see,” he replied—he’d been gazing into the depths of the river, which had been reflected in his eyes. Or was it his eyes that were reflected in the ice? His face had the same cold look that his grandmother had had. The same frozen expression.
They didn’t return to the house in Wales until two years after Ian’s death, in Madrid. Gloria and Ian were about to be divorced. The last image he had had of the place was that of his father, Sir Matthew, putting out a cigarette on the bridge’s railing, and then walking along the damp planks as though the sorrow enshrouding his soulless body were the best defense he had. Mist coiled around the reeds and oaks and swept along the smooth surface of the slimy river, concealing the bottom of the bridge’s columns. Above the scaffolding loomed the outline of the house, the second story reflecting daylight.
* * *
—
Promise me you’ll always take care of her. That you’ll protect her from herself, and from the demons that haunt her.”
At the time, Ian wasn’t yet thirty. And the man with bushy eyebrows and a perfectly trimmed white beard who was speaking to him was intimidating. Ian had just gotten married a few days earlier and was not yet used to the feel of his wedding band. He never thought he’d marry so suddenly, and here he was already expecting a child.
He was drinking lukewarm coffee with his father-in-law, and this was the first time they’d spoken alone. In fact, it was the first time they’d spoken. And he felt the weight of the man’s deep, inquisitive expression.
He promised. Despite not understanding what the old man was asking of him.
Ian thought back to his father-in-law’s words now. And he understood. Now he understood.
He had gotten married thinking he knew all he needed to know—that he loved his wife, that she was as independent a spirit as he was, that she was passionate in bed and affectionate outside of it, that she’d never get used to the Welsh climate and that his father would never like her (as for his mother, he had his doubts), but that she’d still be willing to spend time at the river house by the bridge, and put on a brave face when her drunken father-in-law started going on about his ancestry and telling stories about the family clan. He got married knowing that the child they were awaiting was going to bring them together, meld them into one, make them unbreakable, like steel. No matter what. He knew there would never be another woman in his life, knew his dalliances with aspiring actresses were over, as were his drunken nights out with friends from the set—underwear on top of the fridge, rubbish bin not being taken out, wrinkled shirts and soccer matches. He rejected everything his life before her had been; it all seemed ridiculous. And he was convinced. Happy.
But that wasn’t enough. Not to keep them together forever. At the time he didn’t know about the Taggers’ past, about the photo of Great-grandfather Ulrico in his Prussian uniform, the inherited guilt of a pro-Nazi Jew that always hovered over the table at dinners and get-togethers with her family. Ian didn’t understand why she insisted on keeping the portrait in the bedroom of a man they all hated, or why he sometimes found her gazing at it with an almost mystical look, stroking it as though it were a much-missed lover. And then, conversely, she’d privately become incredibly cross whenever people said that her son, Ian, was the spitting image of his great-grandfather.
But he was, despite how hard she tried to find signs of the Mackenzies in her son—as though that might save him. The truth was, that little boy was a Tagger, through and through. She didn’t want to see it, and he couldn’t prevent it
. But he kept the promise he’d made to his father-in-law.
He’d protect Gloria at all costs. Even from herself.
TWENTY-THREE
As if able to sense the dark presence that had just entered the room, Ian paused the video.
“What are you doing here?”
Gloria’s voice lashed out at him. She wasn’t surprised. She wasn’t happy to see him. He got up from the armchair and raised his glass of whiskey by way of greeting.
“I had a few things to take care of and thought I’d stop by and see how everything was going. It’s not that strange. This is still my house.” And you are still my unfulfilled promise, he thought. “I was just reminiscing about old times, thinking about when we got El Español back. What a shame your father never got to see that.” A bittersweet smile accompanied his comment, but he hid it by taking a swig of whiskey. “I’m going back to Sydney in the morning,” he added, as though to pacify her—as a warning not to waste the few hours they had together on arguments and reproaches. But the devil that all Welshmen have inside suddenly went off-script. “Though it would seem you’re managing not to miss me.” He pointed with his glass to the portrait, now framed, leaning up against a column over by the window. “I met your little portrait artist today. It appears that his services include a few extras in addition to the paint. Watch it, the poor man is in love with you, and that’s like having a scorpion in your bed. You have to know how to handle it so it doesn’t poison you with its kiss.”
Breathing Through the Wound Page 45
