Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  He tucked her hair back from her pale sweaty face and kissed her forehead.

  “It’s too late, Gloria.”

  * * *

  —

  He called to give Arthur the address where they should meet, but Arthur didn’t answer. So he left him a voicemail with directions and told him to be there in an hour’s time. He could picture the man’s face, guess what he was going to say, envision his nervous gestures, the way he’d hang on whatever Guzmán said or did. Guzmán was now genuinely intrigued to find Aroha, so that he could finally see her up close.

  The place wasn’t far. Just a twenty-minute drive outside of Madrid on National Highway Five, on the way to Badajoz. She’d been there the whole time, a stone’s throw away, almost close enough to reach out and touch. And yet an impossible distance to cover.

  “When I put her in the trunk, she was still breathing. She was very high and pretty banged up. But she was alive,” Ian had told him.

  To the right was a prefab unit inside a parking lot full of abandoned camper vans. They were old and rusty, with flat tires, their trailers and license plates all faded. Cats dozed beneath the trailers, and it was almost impossible to read the LOT FOR SALE sign buried in the tall grass. A chain-link fence surrounded the place, but it was full of holes and in several places had actually collapsed. Off to the right was a field full of thistles and a cement basketball court with faintly visible lines. It had only one hoop, nailed to a broken wooden panel that now served as a goldfinch nest. Further off in the distance was the crumbling roof of a windowless cabin that had once served as a changing room.

  The national highway was less than one hundred meters away. Cars had sped by at all hours of the day and night for four years, and no one suspected what the place concealed. Guzmán got out of the car, leaned on the hood and lit the last remaining cigarette of his favorite brand. Tossing the empty pack down on the ground, he tried to identify the place where Ian Mackenzie senior had taken Aroha out of the trunk.

  “I had no intention of hurting her,” he’d sworn. “I wanted to get her out of the place where Ian kept her drugged and locked up night and day. It was a noxious place, worse than anything you could possibly imagine. I didn’t want the police to find her in those conditions. That would have been the end for my son.”

  Guzmán had a pretty good imagination. And as far as noxious places went, he was pretty sure he knew them all. He should have taken Ian on a little tour of the DINA cells, or the basement of the Directorate General of Security right there in Spain not so long ago.

  He tried to picture the sequence of events. It must have been nighttime. Four years ago that place would still have been at least somewhat busy during the day, the sales office for the trailer lot was still in business and the sports complex would have been full of kids who came on a minibus from a nearby suburb to use the basketball court. Ian would have made sure there was nobody around before opening the trunk. Aroha was probably out of it from the drugs, but not so much so that she didn’t realize something was very wrong. No doubt she kicked and screamed, trying to escape the stranger who’d brought her there.

  And then Ian had hit her over the head with a shovel.

  “All I wanted to do was stun her, make her shut up so she wouldn’t attract attention.” He was lying. From the start he’d decided to kill her and bury the body someplace no one would find it. Ian’s only concern was to erase any sign that could tie his family to the film club. That was the only reason he’d brought Aroha to such an out-of-the-way place. To murder her.

  Guzmán checked the time on his watch. Arthur was late. Maybe it was better that way. Guzmán walked around the place, stepping over piles of dog shit, used condoms and human excrement, yellowed old scraps of newspaper smeared with shit, needles, the eyeless carcass of a dead cat, its smooth cranium and sharp teeth intact. The teeth are always the last thing to go. They’re too hard for worms. A flock of collared doves took off in a chaotic flurry, leaving a trail of feathers on the rotten roof of the building. From the outside, you could make out an old mattress in one corner, juice boxes and a supermarket cart full of stolen scrap metal. There were also remainders of leftover food, but no people. Perhaps whoever lived there had hidden when they heard him. Or maybe they only came back at night, to sleep.

  Then Guzmán heard the sound of an engine behind him. He turned thinking that Arthur had finally arrived, but the car that parked beside his was someone else’s. For a few seconds, the driver was hidden in shadow inside the vehicle, which sat with the engine running. Whoever was inside it was watching him.

  Ibrahim turned off the ignition and eyed warily the silhouette walking toward the hut.

  “Stay here,” he said to Andrea, opening the car door.

  “Who is it?” she asked, halfway through a yawn that turned quickly to a whimper.

  “Guzmán. The man your husband is using to find Aroha.” He should have used the past tense.

  Andrea bit her lip.

  “Then it’s true…she’s here.”

  Ibrahim was breathing heavily. He flexed and tensed his entire body. He still harbored the diminishing hope that it was not the case. The last time she was seen was here. She was alive, the Armenian had assured him. That meant that no one had seen her dead.

  “I don’t know. I’ll be right back.”

  He still hadn’t told her that the police had found her husband’s body in the mountains, horrifically mutilated. He didn’t know how to say it. Accepting the idea of death in theory, as something vague and faraway, was one thing; seeing the concrete real-life consequences of a decision made from a distance was something very different. Nor had he told Andrea that he’d hidden from the Armenian a piece of information that might have saved Arthur’s life: he had neglected to mention the photos Warden Ordóñez had shown them in the café that day, photos that proved Ian had kidnapped the girl and that, had it not been for Arthur running her over, she would probably have had the same fate as Aroha. As paradoxical as it might seem, her accidental death had likely saved the Armenian’s daughter a tremendous amount of suffering. Contemplating that was a form of deceit, he knew that. But the Armenian’s mind was a labyrinth in which logic and common sense were lost. That fact might have led him to show more clemency. Ibrahim had no idea whether Arthur had told him or not, whether he’d appealed to the man’s compassion as he was being flayed alive. Regardless, if he had, it hadn’t done him any good.

  Ibrahim was walking slowly toward Guzmán, aware that he was traversing a minefield. The hired gun might have already known what happened to Arthur, and probably didn’t care, but Ibrahim had no idea how loyal he might be, or what he was capable of. He’d only seen him a couple of times, but he knew a dangerous man when he saw one—and Guzmán was one for sure. So he tread cautiously, prepared to fight. It had rained and the ground beneath his feet squished, oozing dirty mud that stuck to the soles of his shoes. But sheer will forced him to take one step after the other.

  * * *

  —

  Guzmán’s face was red and he was unshaven. That would have been normal for anyone flying economy, prepared to deal with the turbulence at the back of the plane. But sitting in first class, right next to the cabin door, he was conspicuous.

  “Are you feeling all right, sir?” asked a pretty flight attendant with the poise of a model who’d failed just prior to achieving mega-fame on the catwalk. Nothing like the girls on low-cost carriers.

  What I need, you can’t give me, thought Guzmán, flashing a smile intended to send her on her way.

  “I’m fine thanks. Flying makes me a little nervous.”

  “Oh, you just relax, sir. We’ll take off in a few minutes, and this is going to be a very smooth flight, you’ll see.” When a pretty girl tries to console you, you’re more prone to believing her lies, he thought.

  He looked out the window. The ground crew was loading the last few suitcases onto a
conveyor belt leading into the cargo hold. You could hear the plane’s rotors revving up. It looked like a perfect day, clear and cloudless. He wondered where Ibrahim would go, what he and Andrea would do when the forensics experts confirmed that the remains they’d found did indeed belong—what a word, he thought—to Aroha. He looked down at his fingernails. They’d touched her, touched a yellowed femur there among the decomposing remains of matted clothes. That was the first time in his life he regretted touching a human bone.

  * * *

  —

  He had watched Ibrahim approach from the distance. He had a lightness about him, and yet he was solid. An old-school warrior, Guzmán thought, a man who can’t be owned. He tried to remember how many times he’d seen him close to Arthur, dancing in the wings like a restrained shadow. Two, maybe three times. They’d never exchanged more than a few monosyllabic words, greetings infused with mutual distrust. No, not distrust, more like caution. Two dogs with their tails raised, who sniffed each other’s arse and then chose to back away, each keeping to one side of the road, raising a leg to piss.

  “Did Arthur send you?”

  Ibrahim stopped a few meters away. From up close, he was much more fearsome, Guzmán thought. He wondered how long it would have taken to break someone like him in the interrogation room. A tough nut to crack, Bosco would have said. The kind of guy who clenches his teeth while the electrical current is sparking against his balls, but lets out not even a groan—the kind who looks you in the eye and strips you bare with a look that says, you can’t fool me.

  “Arthur’s not coming. Not now or ever. He’s dead.”

  Guzmán took the news on board like the good fighter he was. Just a flicker of the eye and a slight tightening of the jaw. The news only partially surprised him. But at this stage, it didn’t matter much anymore. He had the money in the car, enough to be able to stop taking on these shitty jobs.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Ibrahim added, as though trying to tell him that this was their story, that it belonged to Ibrahim and the woman who—against his advice—had gotten out of the car and was watching them from behind the open door.

  Guzmán looked back at her.

  “Is that the wife? Did you tell her the girl is buried here?”

  Ibrahim turned his head back, concern etched on his face.

  “We don’t know for certain that she’s dead.”

  Guzmán shrugged. He stared at Ibrahim’s scar, the poorly sutured wound that had left him so tragically disfigured. He must have spent months unable to speak, barely able to eat solid food, before it scarred over.

  “We don’t know for certain that God doesn’t exist, or that my new penile implant doesn’t work. But you and I know that if there’s one thing for certain, here and now, it’s that writhing beneath our feet are millions of worms that devoured that girl’s dead body. The question is: is it really worth verifying? Do we need to dig her up and see with our own eyes what we already know? Or perhaps it would be better for you to go back to the car and tell the girl’s mother that you didn’t find anything, that her daughter isn’t here, and feed her hope that Aroha could be someplace else.”

  Ibrahim gazed at the dilapidated cabin and looked down at his feet as though the image of a million writhing worms were taking shape before him, just a few centimeters beneath the ground.

  “This is no longer any of your business. You got your money and the police are after you. I don’t understand what you’re still doing here. You need to leave.”

  Guzmán didn’t understand it either. It was starting to get dark and his plane was taking off first thing in the morning, with or without him. The smart thing to do would be to hide out in some roadside motel and just wait for morning to come. Get to the airport in just enough time, go through security and get on that plane without showing his face any more than necessary. But there he was, searching for something without knowing what it was.

  “I don’t like to leave things unfinished.” That might not have been what he was actually thinking, or what Ibrahim expected to hear. But that was what he said.

  Not understanding, Ibrahim examined his face, searching for some type of motivation he couldn’t see, fearing a trap. He knew guys like Guzmán. They were all over the world and they’d been around since the beginning of time. They spoke every language. Torturers were all alike, able to slash a little boy’s face with a machete. But he’d never imagined them willing to risk their own hides in order to find the buried body of a little girl.

  “I have a shovel in the car. I’ll go get it,” Guzmán added, reading his thoughts. “Let’s get this done with, once and for all.”

  * * *

  —

  Time has different magnitudes. That was what struck him as the plane finally began moving toward the runway. There he was, in a comfortable seat, his seatbelt fastened, watching the various structures of the airport go by—hangars, control tower, other planes parked on an angle as though at a shopping mall—and at the same time, he could still see the mound of overturned earth piling up on one side of the hole as it got deeper. And another part of him kept seeing the sky in the Atacama, searching for stars as his testicles melted under the heat of a blowtorch. He was sitting on a rock beside a puddle on a dirt road in Santiago de Chile, watching a kite land, wondering why he could never get it to go higher than the antennae and the clothes hung out to dry on people’s roofs. He was kissing the lips of a woman whose name meant little fire: Candela. He was both alive and dead. And all of it was happening there and then, at the same time.

  * * *

  —

  Who did that to your face?”

  They were taking turns digging. It was Ibrahim’s turn. He’d taken off his shirt and the sweat on his torso mixed in with the mud. He dug, concentrating on what he was doing.

  “Life,” Ibrahim replied, not letting go of the shovel.

  Andrea was just a few steps behind them. There had been no way to convince her to stay in the car. She wanted to be there, to see it with her own eyes. Ibrahim looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Through the sweat in his brows, Guzmán saw on the man’s face a look that he, too, had once possessed.

  “Life,” he murmured, repeating Ibrahim’s words as he stroked the useless skin of his atrophied hand. Life, he’d said, by which he meant Andrea. “Here, I’ll take over for now,” he said, replacing Ibrahim in the ditch.

  * * *

  —

  Up in the sky there are no plans. Everything is suspended. Clouds, superimposed with varying degrees of density, nurture the absurd feeling that anything is possible and nothing matters. Guzmán felt that even the most burdensome of things lost their weight when he was cloud surfing. Far from the ground, away from the moist earth and the worms bisected by a shovel. It was hard to find a femur when you were up in the clouds at ten thousand meters.

  The pretty flight attendant had just told them they’d reached their cruising altitude and velocity. He thanked her, but still felt like asking them to go higher, and faster.

  * * *

  —

  The shovel hit something solid, something stuck firmly in the ground. Guzmán knelt down and dug carefully with his fingers, like a sapper, or a paleontologist on the verge of discovering an ancient fossil. He swept aside layer after layer of dirt with his bare hands, until he uncovered the solid yellow chunk of bone. Guzmán knew something about anatomy—a basic understanding he’d picked up through experience. The femur is the longest and strongest bone in the human body, and in women its angle is more pronounced than in men in order to adapt better to the female pelvis.

  Ibrahim lowered the shovel and starting digging with his hands too. Little by little the remains of what had once been Aroha Fernández began to emerge. Inevitably, as they uncovered the hardened remnants of her clothes, Guzmán thought of the cat skeleton he’d come upon a few meters away. The ribcage with just a few ribs, the metac
arpals, a tibia, the cranium with its lower jaw detached and full of black earth. People are nothing without the stuff that makes them. Organs. Thoughts. Emotions. The rest is just a gruesome costume. The silent vestige of something that once was, but was no longer. He’d always found odd the human need to venerate bones—graves, tombs, cemeteries, religions—when all of those things in fact constituted the overwhelming proof of the one and only truth he’d ever read in the Bible. Dust you are. Unto dust you shall return. Maybe that was why he never went to visit his dead. Because they weren’t really there.

  “We’d better not touch anything else. The medical examiner is going to need to identify the body,” Ibrahim said, wiping the muddy sweat from his face.

  Guzmán contemplated the dark cavities of the eye sockets. Where once there had been eyes there were now clumps of dirt. How much identifying did they need? Who else could it be but Aroha? Regardless, his mission was accomplished. He’d found her.

  “What now?” he asked the air, gazing up at a flock of birds—what were they, swallows?—flapping wildly, feasting on insects in the dusk.

  Ibrahim shrugged, gazing down at the remnants of Aroha’s dress.

  “The police will want to know how we found the body. They’ll ask questions and inevitably your name will come up. You should leave, now. I’ll lie to them to buy you a few hours. But they’ll be after you.”

  Andrea had approached the edge of the ditch. She gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed back at her, both forms of darkness engaged in a mutual silent dialogue. The two men got up and left her alone, in the intimacy of her own expression, fading wordlessly away with her daughter’s remains.

  * * *

  —

  He pictured Aroha’s remains, meticulously cleaned, no dirt or remnants of fabric stuck to them, laid out in the form of a skeleton on the shiny metallic surface of the examiner’s table at the morgue. A puzzle, methodically pieced back together by the examiners—a patella here, a phalanx there. The clothing and jewelry she was wearing when she was buried—gold earrings with a little pearl, an olivine bead necklace, a silver ring—would be stored in an evidence bag. When they were finished, they’d give those belongings back to Andrea, and she could keep them or bury them with the remains that carbon testing and DNA had shown to have a ninety-six percent chance of belonging to Aroha Fernández. The report would never say that it was Aroha; they at least recognized that the bones were not the girl, they had simply belonged to her. They were something she’d had since birth, something beneath her skin that had grown year after year and should have kept growing for a number of years to come. Bones, indeed, are something that belong to us. Something that not even the worms born inside us, born of our own putrefaction, can rob us of. They remain, witness to our struggles for hundreds and thousands of years.