“In two nights’ time you will come to my tent. You will bring the woman and the girl, clean and well groomed. Irina will wear your coat. You will hand them over to me, and you’ll thank me for letting you live.”
That night, Elías took off toward the woods. Nobody in their right mind went there, not even the guards, unless it was in the light of day and with plenty of company. Packs of deranged deportees congregated there, wandering among the trees and the high brush, committing atrocities like a band of lunatics who’ve escaped the asylum to sow a reign of terror. Venturing into the forest was an act of suicide. But Elías had no choice. He’d been building a raft since the day of the massacre, and it was hidden in the scrub there. Besides, there was something he had to get back.
He found the man he wanted in a clearing. The full moon illuminated his squatting figure as he pushed and strained, guts gurgling in the darkness like a wild beast in the forest. The man was defecating, and using Irina’s book as toilet paper. He would read a page, tear it out and then wipe his ass. The man’s name was Evgueni and he was thirty years old, though he looked far older. In a previous life he’d been a member of the Academy of Writers and hailed from Inner Mongolia. His crime? Claiming that Gorky was a damned stooge and that Stalin knew as much about literature as he himself did about astrophysics. Evgueni’s braggadocio came to a swift halt the day Yagoda’s men burst into his tiny apartment and carted him off. Raving mad and friendless, he now rambled through the woods half naked at all hours, reciting poems from the Shin Konkinshu, an anthology of imperial Japanese poetry edited by Fujiwara Teika, who Evgueni claimed was the only poet worthy of that title. Irina had traded him her Mayakovsky for a few pieces of bluish meat of dubious origin, and the only reason Evgueni wanted it was that he missed the feel of toilet paper. The yellow pages struck him as the most sublime of pleasures.
Elías gave the man a swift kick in the head before he had time to shout and draw the attention of the other forest psychopaths. Evgueni fell flat on his face and then turned sideways; the last thing he saw was an enormous rock coming down on his head and one enraged eye sending him to hell where he could meet his beloved Teika.
Returning immediately to the barge, Elías woke Irina.
“Wake Anna, we’re leaving. Now.”
They took off before dawn. The rickety raft was barely solid enough to keep Anna—bundled in Elías’s coat—above the water’s surface. He and Irina would have to stay in the river, clinging to branches for stability. Elías had made a careful study of the currents and although it was impossible to swim through the whirlpools to the opposite shore, they could drift downriver. If they managed to stay afloat for a hundred meters, avoid the fallen trees and vortexes that sucked every passing thing into their swirling eddies, they’d come to a bend where the river turned sharply to the left with a deafening racket as the water rushed over rocks and small shoals. At that point, there was a meander where the current became gentler, and from there they’d have to swim, staying afloat by holding on to remnants of the raft, which would have shattered, and praying they had strength enough to reach a cluster of trees whose thick roots were submerged in the slimy mud on the other side of the river.
What came after that didn’t bear contemplating. Chances were, they’d never even make it to the other side of the river.
Before plunging into the water, Elías had presented Irina the book of poems. He’d wrapped it as carefully as he could to protect it. Irina looked at the book; pages had been torn out at random, thanks to Evgueni and his bowels. She gazed at him, sorrow pooling in her eyes.
Irina, too, took out a small carefully wrapped package she’d hidden in her tattered clothing. She handed it to Elías before stepping into the water, asking him to hold it for her until they reached the other side.
“If anything happens to me, give this to Anna, and tell her that her mother loves her very much, and that she did everything she could to give her a future.”
Elías didn’t argue. There was no point lying, claiming that everything would be fine, that Irina could keep whatever was in the package and give it to Anna herself, later. He tucked it away, frowned, and then tied a rope tightly around Anna, who was kicking and sobbing, terrified.
“Make her shut up or we’ll be discovered,” Elías said coldly. Irina kissed her daughter’s hands repeatedly, stepping fearfully into the frigid water.
“I’m right here, Annushka, Mamma’s not going to let you go.”
Slowly their raft drifted toward the middle of the river and then, as Elías had predicted, began heeling to the right, requiring him to tug down forcefully to keep it from capsizing on top of Irina. As they drifted from shore, he saw a silhouette among the barges. It was Michael—Elías recognized his wide bowlegs and broad shoulders. He observed them calmly, hands in his pockets, looking almost amused. After a moment, he raised an arm as though to say Bon voyage, or perhaps See you soon. Then he turned and ambled off.
Elías knew they had a chance as soon as they’d made it a third of the way across. The current was not as strong as he’d foreseen, and though the water was painfully cold—it felt like teeth biting his extremities—he could take the pain of freezing. He tried to reassure Irina but could see her only when Anna, who was tied at the waist to the raft, was rocked to the side. Elías saw Irina’s purple fingers, desperately clinging to a tree trunk. When the current got stronger, her head would disappear under the water, and Elías would wait anxiously for her to pop back up—gasping for air, mouth open, hair plastered to her forehead. At one point she smiled at him. For the first time in weeks.
Yes, he thought, they could make it. It was too early, however, to be carried away by euphoria. By struggling continuously to stay afloat and keep the raft from flipping over—crushing Irina and drowning Anna—they had a chance. The river’s bend was in sight, muddy tree roots visible in the spume, and the rocks were like Good Samaritans ready to throw them a lifeline as soon as they were within reach. But the raft began drifting away from the meander, caught in a current that spun them like a top, faster and faster.
Elías cried out, desperate. They were so close! If they didn’t reach those trees, the river would toss them out like trash farther down, swollen like the rotten fish they’d eaten the day Claude died. He had to be fast and decisive; no way was he going to drown now. So he dove into the swirling water and hugged the bottom of the raft, crossing underneath until he made it to Irina’s side.
“We’ve got to turn!” he shouted. They would need to climb on top and push down as hard as possible. There was a chance they’d flip, but it was their only choice. Elías pulled Anna toward them for additional weight, and the raft tilted perilously.
“No! She’s going to fall off!” Irina shouted, seeing her daughter flung into the air like a rag doll. The raft’s rope had come loose, its branches were beginning to split apart. But Elías kept pushing, frenzied. They had to get out of the current, had to turn. Desperate, Irina began to hit and scratch him, convinced that her daughter was going to sink, that Elías was going to kill her. He didn’t feel her blows or hear her screams. All he cared about was reaching the shore.
And then the raft flew up into the air, shattering with a clean snap, as though the river had grown tired of playing with a paper boat. Elías was pulled toward the bottom as Irina tried franticly to climb over his body to the surface, where Anna was clinging to a trunk. Neither of them had enough air, neither could get to the surface. Irina was in a complete state of panic and Elías had no way to soothe her, to tell her to calm down or she’d end up drowning them both. She grasped his neck, scratching in desperation.
Elías felt like his lungs were going to explode and he couldn’t see; everything was dark, and he felt things colliding into him: branches, algae, rope, and Irina’s desperate hands. He rammed an elbow back, hard, and felt it make contact with her soft body. Again he swung his hands wildly, until he felt her letting up. Just before
she let go entirely, he reached out a hand and managed to grab her hair as it swished like a jellyfish. Closing a fist around it, he attempted to pull her toward him, but instead Irina sank toward the bottom of the river.
Desperate, Elías swam up for air.
He surfaced and was forced under, again and again, the current tossing him like a rag, until finally his body crashed into something solid. It was a broken tree root, sticking out from the bend like a muddy bridge leading to the shore. He’d made it to the trees; or, rather, the river had hurled him in their direction.
Holding tight to the trunk, he searched everywhere for a sign of Irina or Anna. A few arm’s lengths away, lodged between two rocks emerging from the water like burial mounds, Anna clung to the remains of the raft. Elías swam toward her and pulled the rope that was still tied to her waist. After twenty long minutes in which he was forced under again and again, and nearly drowned, he managed to pull her to shore.
For an hour he waited anxiously. The river gives back what it takes, his father used to say. A man who liked fishing, he said that was why they had to release the small fry: One day they would come back as big fish.
But Irina never came back from the dark depths of those waters. The only sign of her that Elías saw were a few yellow pages of her book, floating gently on the surface, as though the verses of her poems were searching for her. Accusing him.
12
BARCELONA, AUGUST 2002
He’d been waiting patiently for an hour on the other side of the street, smoking one cigarette after another in the negligible shade of the only tree. This neighborhood was quiet in August—most of the businesses were shuttered, so it was relatively easy to find parking, and an aura of calm pervaded the air. Too peaceful for Alcázar’s taste. It had changed a lot since the last time he’d been here. The streets were paved now, and the Metro came all the way out. You still found spaced-out kids hanging around in concrete plazas, killing time in the midday sun, but they were no longer the hopped-up car thieves of his day. Now they were immigrants, a mix of Muslims, South Americans, and Africans who tacitly demarcated the boundaries of their spheres of influence without causing trouble. The Majestic had closed long ago, and when he asked around, wondering where the prostitutes had gone, a few kids looked at him like he was an alien.
“That was like a million years ago, man. The only prostitutes here now are Eastern European, and they make house calls,” a pimp told him, giggling and holding out a card for Paradise Massage Club. At least the names were still as pompous and absurd as ever, Alcázar thought wryly.
Cecilia had never been happy until she met him, in the mid-seventies. That’s what she always said, and not just to make him feel better. It really was true. She was a good girl, always had been, too good to make it in a whorehouse as sleazy as that one, despite being named the Majestic—which was clearly a joke when the lights came on revealing a stained carpet covered in burn marks, cheap curtains, molding glued to the furniture, and a row of doors where the women collected their fee. Cecilia was naïve enough to believe that men had a need to be listened to, that if shown love they fell in love, that justice transcended people’s actions and tended to be served sooner or later. It’s not that she was stupid, or even idealistic; she saw the world around her but decided to look at it through rose-tinted glasses. Maybe that was what had attracted him to her the first time, her optimism, her faith in mankind despite the fact that man screwed her every night and kind rarely came into the picture.
You have to open your eyes if you want to see, and what I see is the sadness behind the rage, the fear behind the violence. You’d be surprised to know how much a hug and a kind word can do. Try it sometime.
It was astonishing that she could say things like that, in a world where hookers kept condoms tucked into the elastic of their panties, where pimps hid extendable billy clubs in their socks, where winos vomited between the legs of women they were too drunk to go down on. It wasn’t love that had taken him to that filthy brothel the first time; it wasn’t mercy that placed Cecilia in his path. It was the urge to have a good time and get laid after a long day of work and regret, his knuckles still red and the prisoner’s screams still ringing in his ears. He’d wanted to get so drunk he passed out while a woman pinched his nipples, her head between his legs. And that woman turned out to be Cecilia, and dammit, it was a fucking miracle, something that pierced his soul: the certainty that her sad yet strong eyes had been waiting for him.
He didn’t rescue her. It was Cecilia who pulled him from the pits of hell. Who promised that they’d grow old together, that they’d have a slew of kids to take care of them when the time came, that they’d all get together every Christmas and see their grandchildren be born. But then she got cancer, the greatest con in the world, that fucker. A hustler, calling: Where’s the little ball, ladies and gentleman? Keep your eyes on the ball. And the ball is your happiness, and it’s never still, always mocking you, slipping from one shell to another, hidden by the con man’s hand. Ten years, that was how long he got to be with her. And the rest of his life to miss her.
More and more, memories were not something he evoked voluntarily; they just appeared, playing like a movie in which his past was enviable and ideal (he never remembered their terrible fights, when Cecilia would get furious and break anything she could get her hands on), untouchable and alien. That, he thought, could mean only one thing: He was getting old, and he felt terribly lonely. He pulled the travel brochure from his pocket and read it for the hundredth time. The Florida Keys—tropical climate, beaches, mangroves, raging storms, and humidity so intense it melted even your brain. Palm trees and old cars, men wearing Panama hats and women in bikinis so skimpy the only thing they covered up was a date of birth. Cecilia always wanted to buy a little house there, with a motorboat so they could go fishing in the late afternoon when the sky was blazing hot, a little porch—with a green swing, in her dream—to sit on, drinking low-alcohol beer.
Who knew why a girl from Valdepeñas de Jaén, in southern Spain, a girl who’d crossed not a single body of water aside from Besòs River when she moved to the stinking shores of Barcelona, was so obsessed with Florida. Perhaps it was the 1950s American movies she liked to watch at the Saturday matinee, or an overdose of Miami Vice, with that loudmouth Don Johnson. Alcázar swore he’d take her there on vacation at least once, but he didn’t keep his promise. And now he was the one skulking around all day, fantasizing about giving it all up and buying a little house and a fishing rod, learning to speak English with a Cuban accent. Yes, he felt the need to adopt Cecilia’s dreams in order to face his old age with a little presence of mind. Why not? It all started with the spark of possibility; the rest would come naturally, and all he’d have to do was let himself be whisked away. But first he had to tie up a few loose ends. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in paradise looking over his shoulder in fear.
His wait paid off. Alcázar looked up and saw the old lady emerge. Was it fair to think of her as an old lady? Only if he thought of himself as an old man, recently retired. He put the brochure away and began to tail her, keeping to his side of the street. Alcázar had to admit she looked good—one of those women who accepted the passage of time with dignity, no resentment or drama, and time seemed to repay them by granting a very gradual, regal descent. She was quite the lady, and in that neighborhood stood out in stark contrast to her surroundings. Just as Cecilia had. Once he was sure, he crossed the street and caught up to her. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye but didn’t behave like your standard old lady, clutching her purse in fear whenever a stranger got close. Instead she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, squinting against the sun or perhaps just examining him in curiosity.
“Hello, Anna,” said the ex–chief inspector. “It’s been a long time.”
And in fact, it had.
It took everything Gonzalo had to get out of bed, but the nurse refused to help him. He had to do it
on his own, she said gently, like a mother watching her offspring’s first steps, arms at the ready in case of a tumble. Gonzalo felt the compression bandage squeezing his chest, sighed deeply, and took a step toward the window, dragging one slipper and then the other, back and forth across what seemed an impossible distance, grabbing onto the door handle.
The bodyguard Alcázar had hired to protect him was leaning on a counter down the hall, chatting amiably with a nurse, not seeming overly concerned about his job. If Atxaga put in an appearance at the hospital, he’d have no trouble slipping into the room and smothering him with a pillow before anyone realized. The burly guy, who looked more like a bouncer than a retired cop, straightened up when he saw Gonzalo appear, followed closely by the nurse. He made as if to assist him, but Gonzalo waved him off.
At the end of the hall was a small waiting room with vending machines and a sliding glass door that opened out onto an enclosed patio. It was a rectangle hardly more than ten square meters and offered a panoramic view of the hospital wing. The transparent domed ceiling allowed sunlight to filter in between the ferns and palm fronds planted in the middle. It was nice and cool there, and the damp greenhouse air was pleasant. The nurse helped Gonzalo sit down on the only stone bench.
“That was pretty good. Now you rest here and catch your breath, and I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
Gonzalo touched his side and nodded. Ten minutes outside of his room felt like an amazing privilege, the sort granted to a prisoner in solitary who’s finally allowed into the high-walled prison yard.
He thought about what Javier had said the day before. He’d shown up unannounced, without Lola. Gonzalo was in the bathroom, clenching his teeth in order to heed nature’s call without screaming in pain. When he opened the door, sweaty and out of sorts, he found his son staring out the window looking worried. He’d left a bag with clean pajamas on the bed and brought a few magazines.
A Million Drops Page 24